Dan then pulled Helen Ferris’s Favorite Poems Old and New off his shelf and scanned the index of titles. There was the anonymous ballad, and as he read, another chord was struck, and he picked up The Catcher in the Rye and flipped through until he found that Holden had to know that “Lord Randall my son” crap to pass English at the Whooton School. He moved back to the Ferris, studying the style. You have to have two great opening lines, lines that swing the door open. A ballad is just like the blues. The song was almost done again. Rewind and replay. He leapt back to the Shelton.

Lines etched in acid paint the ruins of war. A panorama of Spanish battle scenes comes to my mind, out of García Lorca’s poetry, Picasso’s tortured “Guernica.”

There were no Lorca poems in the Ferris, but Dan found Guernica in his mother’s copy of E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. His focus darted from the cruel electric light to the nostrils of the horse to the horns of the bull, absorbing all the contortions, the soundless screams, the terrible misplaced eyes, the hard rain falling. Back to Shelton . . .

A thrust of imagery that owes a debt to García Lorca and Rimbaud . . . A landmark in topical, folk-based songwriting, here blooms the promised fruit of the 1950s poetry-jazz fusion of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Rexroth.

Dan turned to his journal and wrote down the names cited. The fallout from the song became a reading list. I need to go to the library. The tape for Freewheelin’ stopped and popped. Dan looked at all the books now open and facing down on his bed. He had a lot of work to do, but there was a flow to it.

This is hard shit, but it’s what you wanted. You wanted to be a Norwegian rat, he reminded himself. Don’t be afraid. Be open. Cut through your crap and write to the marrow. And read more. Read everything. Read and write all the time. Talent is bullshit. Being an alternative poser is bullshit. Being some antic Irish Catholic kid from New York, Texas, wherever, is bullshit—they don’t get you, because there’s nothing to get.

I have to earn this, he chided himself, but it felt good, like an ascetic scourging his will into mastery. The only path for the Norwegian rat is suffering. And one of these keys—the song, the poems, the biography, the painting—is going to spring the lock on my ideas.