“80 moons & sleeping midgets” is a line from Bob Dylan’s experimental poetry prose book called “Tarantula“.
(Tarantula By Bob Dylan, London: Macmillan, 1971, Al Aaraaf & the Forcing Committee, P. 137) source
It doesn’t has any conventional poem.
It is just some wacky writings.
Anything that came to his mind at that time, and Dylan just typed it down.
80 Moons & Sleeping Midgets
They call it stream of consciousness writing.
Something similar to literary iconoclast Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Beat Generation poet-writer Allen Ginsberg’s style of writings.
It is a narrative mode that depicts the myriad thoughts and feelings which appear in the mind of the writer.
Many of you will find it gibberish or even drivel.
The writing is incoherent and you may even complain that there is no substance at all.
Just some aimless and meaningless ramblings.
Here is a just a teeny-weeny snippet of this book:
aretha-known in gallup as number 69-in wheeling as the cat’s in heat-in Pittsburgh as number 5-in brownsville as the left road, the lonesome sound-in atlanta as dont dance, listen-in bowling green as oh no, no, not again-she’s known as horse chick up in cheyenne-in new york city she’s known as just plain aretha… i shall play her as my trump card
See what I mean?
Tarantula was written and edited by Bob Dylan in 1966.
It started off as a type-written book by an underground press in San Francisco in the middle of 1965.
Somehow this mishmash literary work by poet laureate Bob Dylan got popular.
As a result, there were even bootleg versions selling in the black market through the 1971, as mentioned in Wikipedia.
Later, Tarantula was re-released in English and translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian and Czech.
By the way, you don’t have to buy this book.
You can read this book “Tarantula” by Bob Dylan for free over here.