Daniel Wolff's Blog
December 16, 2021
Asbury Park reissued!
"4th of July/Asbury Park," which the New York Times picked as an editor's choice and called "Wonderfully evocative ... a grand, sad story....," has been revised, expanded, and re-issued.
Rutgers University Press brought out the new edition, and if you go there through January, you can get it half-price!
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.or...
Happy to discuss, especially the new chapter that covers the last 20 years, condos and all.
Rutgers University Press brought out the new edition, and if you go there through January, you can get it half-price!
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.or...
Happy to discuss, especially the new chapter that covers the last 20 years, condos and all.
January 14, 2020
Best poetry 2019
AYITI chosen by CounterPunch newsletter as one of the best poetry books of 2019.
See here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/...
To purchase: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/pr...
Or there's Amazon, with a recent review by Danny Alexander: https://www.amazon.com/AYITI-Daniel-W...
AYITI
See here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/...
To purchase: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/pr...
Or there's Amazon, with a recent review by Danny Alexander: https://www.amazon.com/AYITI-Daniel-W...
AYITI
April 22, 2019
AYITI
Hey, a new collection of poetry coming out.
AYITI, a chap book (30 some pages; poetry and prose) is now available for pre-order at Finishing Line Press.
I like what Haitian musician Richard Morse said about it:
"Haiti is a complex jigsaw puzzle where the pieces constantly change shape. Daniel Wolff changes the shape of his narrative from page to page to give us, the readers, a glimpse into a place we are taught not to see, not to smell, not to understand. If we did see, if we did smell, if we did understand the civil war that is Haiti, we would demand answers."
Order here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/pr...
AYITI, a chap book (30 some pages; poetry and prose) is now available for pre-order at Finishing Line Press.
I like what Haitian musician Richard Morse said about it:
"Haiti is a complex jigsaw puzzle where the pieces constantly change shape. Daniel Wolff changes the shape of his narrative from page to page to give us, the readers, a glimpse into a place we are taught not to see, not to smell, not to understand. If we did see, if we did smell, if we did understand the civil war that is Haiti, we would demand answers."
Order here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/pr...
October 22, 2018
ANGER goes north
The third of GROWN-UP ANGER that isn't about Dyland and Guthrie is about the 1913 massacre in Calumet, Michigan. Singer/songwriter Chris Buhalis and I went there last week. As well as a teaching stint at Michigan Tech, we did a presentation at the Calumet library with a generous reception from those intimately involved with that long-ago tragedy. Here's a write-up from the local paper:Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913
http://www.mininggazette.com/news/fea...
http://www.mininggazette.com/news/fea...
October 30, 2017
Longreads ANGER
The Longreads website has published a chunk of GROWN-UP ANGER that it says will take you 19 minutes to read. That's if you don't dawdle too long on the sweet videos of Woody, Paul Robeson, the Weavers, Mr. Seeger and B Dylan.
Enjoy.
https://longreads.com/tag/daniel-wolff/
Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913
Enjoy.
https://longreads.com/tag/daniel-wolff/
Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913
October 17, 2017
Philosophical Anger
from the blog of the American Philosophical Association, interview with James South, Professor of Philosophy, Associate Dean for Faculty in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette University, and Director of its Center for the Advancement of Humanities)
What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it?
"I just finished Daniel Wolff’s Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913. I would recommend it very highly. I learned more about American labor movement, the violence perpetrated on American Indians, the failure of organized labor in the U.S. and the pernicious tentacles of corporations than I could have expected. It is a book that any philosopher could read for insight into the present circumstances in the U.S. from which philosophy needs to proceed."Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913
What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it?
"I just finished Daniel Wolff’s Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913. I would recommend it very highly. I learned more about American labor movement, the violence perpetrated on American Indians, the failure of organized labor in the U.S. and the pernicious tentacles of corporations than I could have expected. It is a book that any philosopher could read for insight into the present circumstances in the U.S. from which philosophy needs to proceed."Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913
August 1, 2017
WSJ on GROWN-UP ANGER
https://www.wsj.com/articles/raging-a...
Raging Against the Machine
The labor disaster that inspired classic protest songs by Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Randall Fuller reviews ‘Grown-Up Anger’ by Daniel Wolff.
By
Randall Fuller
July 28, 2017 3:02 p.m. ET
More than a decade before Joe Strummer of The Clash declared “anger can be power,” Bob Dylan channeled the smoldering fury of generational revolt in his seminal 1965 hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.” “How does it feel?” Mr. Dylan sneered, his nasal twang sounding to many listeners like a battle cry against bourgeois conformity. “How does it feel, to be on your own?”
In “Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913,” author and songwriter Daniel Wolff blasts through layers of American history to uncover the rage animating Mr. Dylan’s classic song, tracing its origins back through the life and music of Woody Guthrie and, even further, to a violent confrontation in Michigan decades before. Mr. Wolff’s claim is that the death of dozens of striking copper miners and their children reverberates, like an earthquake’s aftershocks, half a century later in Mr. Dylan’s music. “Follow that darkish vein back to find . . . what?” he writes. “The history of anger. Hope. The truth.”
“Grown-Up Anger” is an associative—rather than a chronological—history, its narrative pieced together from seemingly disparate events and personalities. Tying together the book’s various strands is another Dylan tune, “Song to Woody,” written several weeks after the aspiring songwriter arrived in New York in 1961 and visited Guthrie, who was confined to a New Jersey psychiatric hospital. He had been admitted with Huntington’s chorea after his family could no longer take care of him. As Mr. Dylan later recalled: “It was one of them freezing days . . . a February Sunday night. . . . And I just thought about Woody, I wondered about him, thought harder and wondered harder. I wrote this song in five minutes.”
In classic folk-singer tradition, Mr. Dylan borrowed the melody for “Song to Woody” from one of Guthrie’s own songs, “1913 Massacre,” a haunting ballad about the death of dozens of Polish and Italian copper miners and their children in Calumet, Mich. Guthrie learned about the tragedy from Mother Bloor, a longtime labor activist and Communist Party member, who said that the massacre occurred at the newly built Italian Hall during a Christmas party when someone falsely shouted “fire.” The panicked crowd tried to flee, and 60 children and 13 adults were crushed to death. Guthrie’s song, one of the saddest he ever wrote, begins with an invitation—“Take a trip with me in 1913”—but quickly adopts the voice of the grieving community: “We carried our children back up to their [Christmas] tree.”
What the song doesn’t say outright is that the copper miners in Italian Hall were on strike and that whoever was responsible for yelling “fire” was almost certainly affiliated with the mining company. In the process of recounting this episode, “Grown-Up Anger” excavates America’s long and often bloody history of labor strikes and union organization, implicitly arguing that these sporadic conflicts better capture the nation’s democratic soul than the more familiar and triumphant accounts of upward mobility and material success. Along the way, we learn of the accidental discovery of copper in Michigan, its prompt seizure and exploitation by New England financiers, and the birth of the labor movement at various coal and copper mines throughout the country.
Mr. Wolff populates his story with activists from early in the 20th century, including Joe Hill, the Swedish immigrant who became a popular cartoonist and songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobblies) and who was executed in 1915 after being falsely accused of murder in Utah. Also making appearances are the song collector Alan Lomax and folk icon Pete Seeger, both of whom aligned themselves with Popular Front radicals and worked on behalf of Depression-era unions.
These juxtapositions prove remarkably fruitful. For instance, Mr. Wolff traces Mr. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” to Joe Hill’s rhyming last will and testament: “My will is easy to decide / For there is nothing to divide / My kin don’t need to fuss and moan / ‘Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.’ ” And he is especially good at recapturing the radical fervor that characterized much late 19th- and early 20th-century labor history—a period when it seemed genuinely unclear whether capitalism or some brand of socialism would prevail as the American way of life.
But “Grown-Up Anger” is at its best when discussing Guthrie and Mr. Dylan, especially the way in which each invited history to seep into his finest work. Both song writers were middle-class kids from the heart of the country. Both fashioned musical personae—and voices—that allowed them to distance themselves from their upbringings while identifying with America’s poor and oppressed, whether African-American sharecroppers, immigrant copper miners, Okies or bums. As Guthrie told Lomax in a letter: “Music is some kind of electricity that makes a radio out of a man.”
In telling their story, Mr. Wolff hopes to effect something similar—to encourage his readers to reimagine American history as a continuing struggle to live up to its promise of equality of opportunity. What is not addressed in “Grown-Up Anger” is whether anger at social injustice is more effectively mobilized as political action or articulated by singular poets. Is the bracing outrage of “Like a Rolling Stone” all that is left of the 20th century’s various labor movements? Are popular songs capable of reawakening the struggle for workers’ rights at a time when those rights are out of favor in the country?
For Guthrie, the Calumet Massacre was one of countless injustices that fueled his vast corpus—a body of work he hoped would chronicle “the struggle of working people in bringing to light their fight for a place in the America that they envisioned.” For Mr. Dylan, anger would become detached from political movements by 1965, evolving into a deeply individual fury that lashed out with equal force against racism, war, the smug pieties of the folk movement and the betrayals of unnamed women.
“Like a Rolling Stone” is now as remote from our time as the Calumet Massacre was from Mr. Dylan’s when he wrote the anthem. Mr. Wolff’s gripping account reminds us of an important, if submerged, reality of American life—that the rich and powerful have often exploited labor in the name of economic freedom, upward mobility and (that most sacred word in the national lexicon) democracy. The story of the Calumet Massacre as it was passed along from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan is also a record of the gradual erosion and burying of hope for labor equality.Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913
Raging Against the Machine
The labor disaster that inspired classic protest songs by Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Randall Fuller reviews ‘Grown-Up Anger’ by Daniel Wolff.
By
Randall Fuller
July 28, 2017 3:02 p.m. ET
More than a decade before Joe Strummer of The Clash declared “anger can be power,” Bob Dylan channeled the smoldering fury of generational revolt in his seminal 1965 hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.” “How does it feel?” Mr. Dylan sneered, his nasal twang sounding to many listeners like a battle cry against bourgeois conformity. “How does it feel, to be on your own?”
In “Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913,” author and songwriter Daniel Wolff blasts through layers of American history to uncover the rage animating Mr. Dylan’s classic song, tracing its origins back through the life and music of Woody Guthrie and, even further, to a violent confrontation in Michigan decades before. Mr. Wolff’s claim is that the death of dozens of striking copper miners and their children reverberates, like an earthquake’s aftershocks, half a century later in Mr. Dylan’s music. “Follow that darkish vein back to find . . . what?” he writes. “The history of anger. Hope. The truth.”
“Grown-Up Anger” is an associative—rather than a chronological—history, its narrative pieced together from seemingly disparate events and personalities. Tying together the book’s various strands is another Dylan tune, “Song to Woody,” written several weeks after the aspiring songwriter arrived in New York in 1961 and visited Guthrie, who was confined to a New Jersey psychiatric hospital. He had been admitted with Huntington’s chorea after his family could no longer take care of him. As Mr. Dylan later recalled: “It was one of them freezing days . . . a February Sunday night. . . . And I just thought about Woody, I wondered about him, thought harder and wondered harder. I wrote this song in five minutes.”
In classic folk-singer tradition, Mr. Dylan borrowed the melody for “Song to Woody” from one of Guthrie’s own songs, “1913 Massacre,” a haunting ballad about the death of dozens of Polish and Italian copper miners and their children in Calumet, Mich. Guthrie learned about the tragedy from Mother Bloor, a longtime labor activist and Communist Party member, who said that the massacre occurred at the newly built Italian Hall during a Christmas party when someone falsely shouted “fire.” The panicked crowd tried to flee, and 60 children and 13 adults were crushed to death. Guthrie’s song, one of the saddest he ever wrote, begins with an invitation—“Take a trip with me in 1913”—but quickly adopts the voice of the grieving community: “We carried our children back up to their [Christmas] tree.”
What the song doesn’t say outright is that the copper miners in Italian Hall were on strike and that whoever was responsible for yelling “fire” was almost certainly affiliated with the mining company. In the process of recounting this episode, “Grown-Up Anger” excavates America’s long and often bloody history of labor strikes and union organization, implicitly arguing that these sporadic conflicts better capture the nation’s democratic soul than the more familiar and triumphant accounts of upward mobility and material success. Along the way, we learn of the accidental discovery of copper in Michigan, its prompt seizure and exploitation by New England financiers, and the birth of the labor movement at various coal and copper mines throughout the country.
Mr. Wolff populates his story with activists from early in the 20th century, including Joe Hill, the Swedish immigrant who became a popular cartoonist and songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobblies) and who was executed in 1915 after being falsely accused of murder in Utah. Also making appearances are the song collector Alan Lomax and folk icon Pete Seeger, both of whom aligned themselves with Popular Front radicals and worked on behalf of Depression-era unions.
These juxtapositions prove remarkably fruitful. For instance, Mr. Wolff traces Mr. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” to Joe Hill’s rhyming last will and testament: “My will is easy to decide / For there is nothing to divide / My kin don’t need to fuss and moan / ‘Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.’ ” And he is especially good at recapturing the radical fervor that characterized much late 19th- and early 20th-century labor history—a period when it seemed genuinely unclear whether capitalism or some brand of socialism would prevail as the American way of life.
But “Grown-Up Anger” is at its best when discussing Guthrie and Mr. Dylan, especially the way in which each invited history to seep into his finest work. Both song writers were middle-class kids from the heart of the country. Both fashioned musical personae—and voices—that allowed them to distance themselves from their upbringings while identifying with America’s poor and oppressed, whether African-American sharecroppers, immigrant copper miners, Okies or bums. As Guthrie told Lomax in a letter: “Music is some kind of electricity that makes a radio out of a man.”
In telling their story, Mr. Wolff hopes to effect something similar—to encourage his readers to reimagine American history as a continuing struggle to live up to its promise of equality of opportunity. What is not addressed in “Grown-Up Anger” is whether anger at social injustice is more effectively mobilized as political action or articulated by singular poets. Is the bracing outrage of “Like a Rolling Stone” all that is left of the 20th century’s various labor movements? Are popular songs capable of reawakening the struggle for workers’ rights at a time when those rights are out of favor in the country?
For Guthrie, the Calumet Massacre was one of countless injustices that fueled his vast corpus—a body of work he hoped would chronicle “the struggle of working people in bringing to light their fight for a place in the America that they envisioned.” For Mr. Dylan, anger would become detached from political movements by 1965, evolving into a deeply individual fury that lashed out with equal force against racism, war, the smug pieties of the folk movement and the betrayals of unnamed women.
“Like a Rolling Stone” is now as remote from our time as the Calumet Massacre was from Mr. Dylan’s when he wrote the anthem. Mr. Wolff’s gripping account reminds us of an important, if submerged, reality of American life—that the rich and powerful have often exploited labor in the name of economic freedom, upward mobility and (that most sacred word in the national lexicon) democracy. The story of the Calumet Massacre as it was passed along from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan is also a record of the gradual erosion and burying of hope for labor equality.Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913
July 25, 2017
July 23, 2017
Woody Fest
Back from a visit to Okemah and the WoodyFest. Great festival with wonderful music, 95 degree days, and heat lightening nights. One result of trip is GROWN-UP ANGER now available on Woody's website (if you want to get it at the source):
Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913
https://store.woodyguthrie.org/produc...
Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913
https://store.woodyguthrie.org/produc...
