Last night, Super Bowl XLIII was interrupted by a twelve-minute segment devoted exclusively to the work of an important American poet. After taking the stage at halftime in front of thousands of screaming football fans and billions of television viewers, the poet threw his electric guitar in the direction of a stage-hand, then slid crotch-first into a TV camera. Not very poet-like behavior, you might say (although that would depend a lot on your personal notion of poetics), but this gleeful outburst was certainly not surprising given the man behind the lyrics. We don’t call him the Bard; we call him the Boss.
Before you cut me off and tell me the adenoidal Jersey Boy is not a notable American literary figure, allow me to refer to Walker Percy. The LA Times recently posted some fascinating glimpses of a three-way correspondence between Percy, Springsteen and, later, Percy’s widow. It turns out that Percy wrote a letter to Springsteen in the ’80s because he felt drawn to the characters in Springsteen’s songs—men and women searching for salvation in an often unforgiving America divided by precipitous class boundaries—and because he wanted to exchange thoughts on the Catholic religion. Also revealed here is Bruce Springsteen’s longstanding admiration for Flannery O’Connor, which I never would’ve guessed. I should have, though. Can’t you see the Springer writing a ballad from the perspective of the tattooed man in the incandescent story “Parker’s Back”?
Lately life has been both exhilarating and a little embarrassing for the Boss. He was out front for Obama at the end of the presidential campaign, performing and raising money, lending his blue-collar poetic gravitas to the then-candidate. On January 18, at the pre-inauguration concert in DC, Springsteen wore mostly rock-star black, singing alongside Pete Seeger and serenading the nation. (For me, this moment beat Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for most inspiringly Whitmanesque interlude of the inaugural festivities.) Just after that pluralistic pinnacle, though, Springsteen was chastising himself and his handlers for giving Wal Mart an exclusive deal to market and sell a collection of his greatest hits. And now, I’d guess, he’s all over YouTube, where the aforementioned groin-to-camera kiss is probably being replayed over and over and over.
In this era of abrasive uncertainty about the fate of the book, I feel ambivalent referring to the Super Bowl halftime show as a literary event. And of course Springsteen, an unapologetic showman, shelved his more challenging material last night, appealing to the Super Bowl groundlings as he sprinted through abbreviated versions of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Born to Run,” “Workin’ on a Dream” and “Glory Days” (with football lyrics subbed in for the original baseball lines). Still, it’s worth thinking about the place Springsteen occupies in the line of American musical art that extends back through Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie all the way to the early gothic of ballads like “Stagger Lee.” At the Super Bowl, at the inauguration, even in his Golden Globe-winning contribution to the movie “The Wrestler,” Bruce is singing two different songs at once—the song of himself, a charismatic, stadium-shaking rock star, and the song of ourselves, citizens who shuffle through the confetti when the game’s over, returning to our fractured dreams of love and work.