Wazhashk Poetry

Sarah Gibbs’ The Hundred Year Circus and the Importance of Reading Difficult Books

I should begin this review with a the fact that I’m drawn both to the hybridity of forms and the long music catalog of Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan. Add in an eschatological evaluation of the ending of the American Century and Empire and I’m fully sold on reading any book looking to focus on these subjects. Sarah Gibb’s The Hundred-Year Circus (Frontenac House, 2024) is just this sort of poetry book. Book is an apt name in this case because rather than a collection of individual poems, this book is a complete poetic act, a cohesive work that transcends the notion of a poetry book as collection of shorter pieces and into something more focused and engaged and deep. And that act is both a harkening back to atavistic poetic forms often overlooked by mainstream readership and capturing a strong sense of Bob Dylan as a mercurial, trickster like figure in our time.

The Hundred-Year Circus is hybrid work of lyric poetry, playwriting, allegory, and narrative history. I think immediately of two notable works when I come to Gibbs work. The first and most obvious is Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen and the other is Stan Dragland’s The Difficult. Spenser’s work is a literary classic, a cornerstone of English-language poetry originating in the 1590s England. For those not fortunate enough to have encountered Spenser’s work, it is dense, lyric, and strange in terms of narrative structure and metaphor and both fundamentally about a specific individual at the centre of a given culture. This fits the Bob Dylan aspect of the book. And the darkness of the images in the text clearly echo those found in Spenser’s work. Although, one would be a fool to not see a touch of Richard Brautigan, Hunter Thompson, and the gloom of some of the Beats. But the work itself reads much less narrative than one would expect of a contemporary book. The book unfurls in allegory, heavy at times and dense like Spenser’s infamous text.

This is as much to say that this is no Bob Dylan biography. Allegory is the rule of the day with the book resting on the symbolism in the literary sense, with the work of Dylan and his creative spirit providing a touchstone to create a text that openly engages with both mythology and history. This is not a light summer read. Gibb’s book is a dense lyric mechanism, one that does require time and effort to work their way through. And this is its strength rather than weakness, as is often the case with literary books. Approachability is not a measure of artistic success. The familiar order of our world breaks down in texts of this caliber. For example, act II of the book speaks a great deal to the dust bowl, the American West of Dylan’s work, and the sort of pre-history of where the book intends to take us. When get sections like this in “Boxcar” in which mythology and time out of mind are vividly at work.

"In the corner, a rat, man-sized
                black nails tapping against the boards
                shreds of a Yankees jersey
                mouth a red shock
A street sweeper in Manhattan
'til he swept only bodies -
broken bankers
from the twenty-ninth floor.
The market -
raised it, bought a leach, thought it wasn't wild anymore
                                                                                        turned your back." 
                                                                                                        (Gibbs, 72)

Here we witness a whiplash narrative, drawing the reader from a railroad boxcar blasting through the open spaces of America to a street sweeper in Manhattan. The scene is quite ethereal, moving between ghosts of a dead American past populated by the impossible and the remembered. This is not the realm of reality, rather a world of constructed allegory, stating truths about our past and present (or that of the US) through the vision of the poetic lens. And the focal lens of the book moves between chorus, prophet, the Man in the Mask, the Jokerman, and a couple of others. Which makes clear sense if one knows much about the mercurial nature of Bob Dylan himself.

I often consider poetry to be a mix between the lyric and narrative forms. An overly lyric work places deeply within the consciousness of speaker/poet. An ether-adjacent space that is often hard to find footing. An overly narrative work tends to focus on story and timeline and unfolds more akin to those classic epic poetic works like Beowulf, Táin Bó Cúailnge, or Dante’s Inferno. Stories are universal. Psyches are personal. Poets balance this in their work and that balance is often a defining aspect of their style. Gibbs style is well suited to the material, at times much less approachable than much of what is popular in the world of poetry, and finds a solid lyric and narrative mix to land the reader in world that can only be created by a skilled poet. And her approach to telling this story of Bob Dylan and America is clearly on display through her own words. Gibbs calls for a complication of biography, history telling, and the crafting of her own arc of this book

"Don't write about me, after. I don't like biography. A like story is presumption, impossibility. All of us, at most, a few anecdotes, and best seen from the corner of an eye." (Gibbs, 34)

And this isn’t to say The Hundred-Year Circus is nothing more than a collection of anecdotes and allegorical glimmers. They might make up the meat of the book, but taken as cohesive whole these glimmers produce a strong image, sentiments, and narrative. One that takes some work to unfurl, one that has guideposts throughout, and one that transcends the tedium of so many similar sounding and constructed poetry books today.

And this degree of difficulty is not a disqualifier for me when it comes to poetry. With Dragland’s The Difficult in mind, I think of Gibbs work as one of those difficult texts pointed out by the late great Canadian essayist. Obviously, not by name as Gibbs’ book is several years after the publication of Dragland’s book. The overarching call of Dragland’s essay is to not fear or dismiss difficult work to understand. There is little in Gibbs work that I would call fashionably difficult, meaning that any difficulty regarding consuming the text as reader, comes as central to the book and not added adornment. In this book, the meandering nature of time and changing focus on speakers and narrative lens comes from and contributes to the expansive wanderings of higher level writing. So many popular books today are simple enough to understand. Framed social media posts, slam poetry transcribed, the simply low-hanging fruit of issue poetry. Reading Gibbs’ book is an undertaking, one that takes effort and some time to fully grasp. One that provides rewards beyond simpler more approachable texts.

There is a large degree that the tone and the images used in Gibbs book strongly reflect the aesthetics of Dylan’s 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Review. And many would consider that mid-decade point of the 1970s, around America’s highwater point. There is a myth-oriented circus-like show behind the work here and the tone shows forth in river baptisms, classical allusions, and high literary references. Which are all apt given who Dylan is, how is work appears, and the course of the work’s relationship with contemporary American history. Watching some of Dylan’s work from the era as well as listening along would help readers that generally don’t have a large depth of knowledge about his work and how it relates to Gibb’s book.

Is Gibbs The Hundred-Year Circus worth the read? There has been a great deal of writing about Dylan and his work (Admittedly, my first published poem was based on Dylan’s Nashville Skyline). And much it has been amateurish at best and the majority is generally uninteresting. But this is not the case with Gibb’s book. Because of its difficulty in terms of depth and loose narrative structure, it is easy to see the Gibbs is breaking from that familiar tired methods of approaching Dylan and his work. And she does well with that work. Crafting poems and a book about the life of Bob Dylan clearly opens up the interest of the work in general and placing the book well within the facts surrounding the faltering American Empire makes this a book worth study and deeper level analysis. Highly useful for classroom functions regarding cultural studies, writing craft, and literature. But this isn’t a simple and familiar issue-based poetry collection that feel to be all the rage in the awards circuits. Most poets and readers agree Gibbs work is one that is designed to say something meaningful, play with interesting structures and symbols, and outlast more mundane and celebrated works.