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Shortly before he died, Johnny Cash scrawled down eight short lines in a shaky hand, mortality clearly on his mind.
You tell me that I must perish.
Like the flowers that I cherish.
He considered the hell of ‘‘nothing remaining of my name,’’ before concluding with an affirmation of his own legacy:
But the trees that I planted
Still are young
The songs I sang
Will still be sung
That poem, ‘‘Forever,’’ is part of the collection ‘‘Forever Words: The Unknown Poems’’ (Blue Rider Press), released on Tuesday.
The book — edited by Paul Muldoon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Princeton University professor — includes 41 works from throughout Cash’s life that were among the papers left behind when Cash died in September 2003. He wrote the earliest piece, ‘‘The Things We’re Frightened At,’’ when he was 12.
In some ways, the poems mirror Cash’s songwriting, with terse ballads of outsiders in love and parables drawn from the Bible; Cash’s version of Job is a wealthy cattleman who ‘‘cried out in agony/When he lost his children and his property.’’
And, for Cash, who in his last years drew a new audience with a set of stark and fragile recordings, the poems present yet another look at a legend of American music.
‘‘I want people to have a deeper understanding of my father than just the iconic, cool man in black,’’ said John Carter Cash, his son. ‘‘I think this book will help provide that.’’
Some poems in ‘‘Forever Words’’ are unmistakably personal.
‘‘You Never Knew My Mind,’’ from 1967, captures Cash’s bitterness as he was going through his divorce from Vivian Liberto. (He married June Carter the next year.) ‘‘Don’t Make a Movie About Me’’ rejects the Hollywood machine but then slyly gives advice on a film treatment. ‘‘Going, Going, Gone,’’ from 1990, is a painfully detailed catalog of the ravages of drug abuse: ‘‘Liquid, tablet, capsule, powder/Fumes and smoke and vapor/The payoff is the same in the end.’’
At other times, Cash seems to tinker with his own body of work.
‘‘Don’t Take Your Gun to Town,’’ from the 1980s, rewrites his classic 1958 song ‘‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,’’ in which a headstrong young cowboy dies when he ignores his mother’s advice. In the new version, a jaded man plans a ‘‘Taxi Driver"-like rampage against ‘‘people/Who need silencing,’’ but this time he listens.
‘‘I believe he wanted to make a statement,’’ the younger Cash said. ‘‘He owned guns. But he definitely believed that you do not need to carry a gun in your pocket to town.’’
Even so, Cash kept that version private, although, along with a handful of the poems in the collection, the manuscript for ‘‘Don’t Take Your Gun’’ was sold at auction.
In his introduction, Muldoon places Cash in a poetic tradition that comes out of Scotch ballads. He also raises a point that was hotly debated after Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature last month: Are song lyrics really the same as poetry? Do lyrics lose something when removed from their musical context?
Like Cash’s lyrics, the poems in ‘‘Forever Words’’ are written in plain language, usually with a clear rhyming meter. There are strikingly evocative images (‘‘The dogs are in the woods/And the huntin’s lookin’ good’’), as well as some well-worn phrases about soaring eagles and hell’s fury that might pass unnoticed in a song but jump out on the page.
In an interview, Muldoon put Cash alongside Leonard Cohen, who died recently, and Paul Simon as examples of songwriters whose words hold up on their own. Even so, he said, the ‘‘pressure per square inch’’ on lyrics ‘‘can be a wee bit lower than in a conventional poem.’’
‘‘But that’s not necessarily a bad thing,’’ he continued. "There are occasions when the simple, direct phrase is the one that works.’’
Taken together, Muldoon said, Cash’s poems have a broad sweep.
‘‘You still see the same scenes — love, death, loss, joy, sadness,’’ Muldoon said. ‘‘The great themes of popular songs, and, indeed, poetry, which we welcome hearing about and making sense of as we go through our lives.’’
The poems in ‘‘Forever Words’’ were chosen from about 200 pieces left by Cash in varying states of completion. Some may have been intended as lyrics, his son said, but it was not always clear. His father’s papers, Cash said, included biblical studies and even a dog-eared copy of Gibbon’s ‘‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’’
During the past year, the Cash estate has brought on a new management and marketing team and the album is one of many new projects. Also planned are a Broadway show and a Johnny Cash slot machine, and the trust recently registered trademarks for phrases like ‘‘What would Johnny Cash do?’’ to place on clothing memorabilia.
When asked about these plans, Cash said that he and the managers of the trust — of which he is a beneficiary — strove to avoid crass commercialization, and also wanted to follow his father’s wishes.
The goal of ‘‘Forever Words,’’ John Carter Cash said, is to establish his father as a major poet and a ‘‘cultural American literary figure.’’
