First hearing the story of it—Robert Johnson’s
midnight-crossroads-hoodoo deal with the Devil—
no way I would have mortgaged my soul to burn
my Blues redder & hotter than any since or before.
I was a boy, back then, who cared about my rep.
And my rep hinged on acting good, no matter,
like adults said, who was around. Consorting with him
of horns & pitchfork wouldn’t have been good,
size of the prize be damned. Now, I side
with that queen gone wandering crazy: Hell
is murky. Sure, most times there’s no silt in the river:
I’ve done good that I knew was good & bad
knowing it was bad. But then, I’ve done bad trying
to do good & strangest of all, good when I set out
to do bad. Now, I can’t see a way to salvation
from this cross stitch of lonely, dust-licked country
junctions but the Devil. That old goat doles out more mercy
in an hour than God since He first flicked on the lights.
Now, I’d shake on that bargain in the beat of a blue bottle’s
wings, would trade my soul & my good name & my rep
for talent without sending the fine print to my lawyer
or hemming & hawing over the non-refundable nature
of the ticket. And I’d settle on that sulfurous offer
with no illusion that talent is happiness, knowing
I’d be trading that maze of good & bad for a labyrinth
of jealous husbands with every chamber of their .38s
loaded up. Of women I two-timed bubbling &
troubling strychnine into my whiskey glass. Of hot grits
blistering my back. Of razorblades under the tongues
of rivals. Of friends easily bought but gone
when trouble calls. Of starless nights of self-doubt
ending in the scalding light of hangover. Of a lifetime
of cash-stuffed envelopes not saving children
from the sting of my absence. I know this, and still
I’d cut my palm and sign that cloven-footed pact
in blood. If up is down, and left is right, and I can’t
be good the way my boy-self wanted, why be
common & untalented too? Why not trade this street
of unlocked doors & rhododendron, this refrigerator
humming to save my abundance unspoiled,
this family like a Christmas card’s gloss of family,
why not trade all this to have the myth of me
handed down father to son, father to son?
Since I can’t be good in this world, why not ink
my autograph to the Devil’s dotted line and be great?
Click here to read Iain Haley Pollock on the origin of the poem.
Image: photo by Carlos Urrutia on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
Iain Haley Pollock:
My father dug the Blues, and as much as I grew up with the music, I grew up with the mythic stories of Blues singers and players too. A keystone in the canon of that lore is guitarist Robert Johnson’s Deal with the Devil. The (tall)tale as it came down to me goes something like this: Johnson was a middling guitar player in the Mississippi Delta, birthplace and hotbed of the Blues. At some point, Johnson disappeared, and no one saw him or heard him play for months. When Johnson returned to the scene, his playing gave off exponentially more heat and smoke. He was the greatest Blues guitarist anyone had ever heard. To this day, he enjoys that reputation, thanks to the few haunting recordings he made in his life. By way of explaining this uncanny improvement, Johnson floated or at least encouraged a story that he had made a devil’s bargain. One night at a lonesome country crossroad, the Devil approached Johnson, saying he’d make Robert the greatest guitarist who ever lived in return for his everlasting soul. Johnson jumped at the pact.
I read this narrative metaphorically now: the Devil is music, is art. To become great, artists must submit to their art, must dedicate themselves totally to it, must give themselves, body and soul, over to it. I imagine that in his “disappeared” time Johnson was woodshedding—took refuge somewhere alone, forwent all human relationships, and played and played and played until he found the sound that has awed listeners ever since. When I first heard this tale as a boy, I didn’t understand the story in this way. Back then, I was prone to rule-following, and the idea of having truck with the Devil, with immorality itself, mortified me. What’s more, the proximity to evil and an eternity in Hell seemed prices too steep to pay for greatness, artistic or otherwise. Now that I’m a poet though, I get it. Get why a body would make this exchange. Get why someone in my circumstances would give up all the trappings of a good middle-class life, would eat and breathe art to the detriment of all else for a little taste of greatest and timelessness.
I know, I know: ideas of greatness and timelessness are fraught because subjective and culturally defined. Is Robert Johnson greater than Son House or Skip James or Muddy Waters or Albert King? Depends who you ask. And when you ask them. But this poem indulges that prideful part of me, floating somewhere in my Id, that is fritters away time worrying about greatness. The poem also shakes its head at my younger self’s reaction to the Johnson Deal with the Devil myth as a means of countering the simplistic moral views to which I’m still prone and of reminding myself about the murkiness of right and wrong that I encounter more often than not in this human life.
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books, 2018), and the forthcoming All the Possible Bodies (Alice James, September 2025). He has received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He serves as Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY.
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