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Jack Foley
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Username: Foley
Post Number: 59
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 09, 2010 - 08:40 am: | 
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A friend asked me for my opinion of Bob Dylan’s effect on American poetry. This was my answer:
The Dylan that meant most to me was the Dylan of the 1960s.
I think of him more as a songwriter--a very, very good songwriter--than as a poet, though of course song lyrics are a mode of poetry. (Think of Robert Burns.) Bob Dylan certainly had/has a gift for resonant, memorable phrases. And the fact that his immense verbal energy was able to touch so many people--was so popular--was definitely invigorating and cheering. I think it is important that the songs he wrote during the 60s had revolution as their central theme. I don't think that's true of his work anymore--that theme has dropped out--but it was definitely a factor in his popularity at that time of highly self-conscious, “revolutionary” "change." He seemed, along with a few others, to be the very voice of the 1960s. He obviously drew energy from Beat writing, but I'm not sure that his work had any effect on poetry as such--though certainly many American poets envied his capacity to interest millions in his work. If rock stars gained a kind of respectability by being called "poets," many people who were called poets longed for both the vast audiences and the immediacy of response that rock stars were able to achieve. Dylan seemed, then, an embodiment of freedom and hope. And he was young, as everybody was young in the 1960s. He was one of the people to whom Diane di Prima dedicated her book, Revolutionary Letters.
Dylan's impact on poetry probably had less to do with the quality or techniques of his work than it did with the fact that his work was performed. He was certainly a factor in the rise of "spoken word" or "performance poetry." The wonderful Alabama poet Jake Berry--whose work is highly experimental and contains many "performative" elements--sees Dylan as one of the people whose inspiration he most cherishes. Indeed, Berry is a songwriter/performer as well as a poet and sees no disconnect between songwriting and writing poetry. Berry's songs, like Dylan's, are rooted in folk music and the blues--though he has listened carefully to people like Miles Davis and has experimented with alternative tunings and various other things in his music. Neo Formalist poets--at the opposite pole from Berry--also often cite Dylan in their attempts to defend rhyme in poetry, though their actual work does not resemble Dylan's and, as far as I know, they don’t write songs.
Here are a few thoughts, written about a year ago, about Dylan’s effect on rhyme in songwriting:
Something happened to rhyming in popular songs in the late 1950s and 1960s. Lyricists like Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, etc. have their roots in "light" verse, which itself goes back to the 17th century. Sir John Suckling, for example. Such verse is an elegant, rather aristocratic form. It insists on, among other things, an exactness of rhyme. It has often been observed that rock n roll put "everybody" (Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, etc.) out of business. The roots of rock n roll are folk song and the blues--forms in which exact rhyming is rarely observed and which appear to be far more demotic than the extremely interesting, often complex but implicitly aristocratic lyrics of Gershwin and Hart. One of Porter's most famous lines is "Flying too high with some guy in the sky is my i- / dea...of nothing to do." The build-up of five rhymes and then the sudden drop. That kind of effect would have little place in a rock and roll song. Bob Dylan's lyrics are nothing like that--which was one of the reasons people decided to call them "poetry." Dylan's brilliant work is rooted in folk songs, blues, a kind of "light" surrealism, and of course Beat poetry. But there is another influence there as well. Dylan talks about it in his memoir, Chronicles, Volume 1. He used to go to the Theatre de Lys to see the then current production of Threepenny Opera. The translation of Brecht's lyrics by Mark Blitzstein was in the folk song tradition--not in the tradition of Porter, Hart. Dylan tells of his fascination with Brecht's "Pirate Jenny" song as it was sung by Lotte Lenya. A sense of apocalypse and implied revolution is very strong in that song. Obviously, for Brecht, Jenny's fantasy suggests an uprising of the proletariat. Dylan took the sense of apocalypse and implied revolution from "Pirate Jenny," but he left behind the notion of the proletariat: that is, he changed the political focus of the song while keeping much of its energy. His 60s songs are all about imminent apocalypse and revolution ("You know that something's happening but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?"), but they are not about the proletariat.
But Dylan was far from being the only one. The aristocratic tradition of elegant, carefully-honed lyrics of Gershwin, Hart and company was swept aside as mainstream music looked not towards "light verse" but towards the kinds of words that people like Alan Lomax and Carl Sandburg had carefully unearthed in their presentations of “folk music.” Porter's attempt to "co-opt" rock n roll, "The Ritz Roll and Rock," is, alas, rather pathetic and thoroughly unsuccessful, though it is danced by as great an artist as Fred Astaire—an old Fred Astaire (Silk Stockings, 1957). By allying itself to folk song, rock n roll shifted from being a music for teenagers to being a new and extremely interesting music for adults. But when that happened, the notion of what constituted "rhyme" in a popular song was drastically changed. |
Jake Berry
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Username: Jakeberry
Post Number: 2
Registered: 02-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 - 12:06 am: |
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My sense of Dylan is that of a fellow who grew up in nowhere midwest, saw living out his life there as hopeless, heard early rock and roll, then the folk "revival", loved both so he moved to the one place he could tap into both - NYC. The folk singers loved him because he was young, charismatic, absorbed music and all other information like a sponge and brought rock and roll energy to the folk movement. Bang! He was in. He had an audience so he played to it with those long folk songs that related modern versions of age old folk music themes. His energy was contagious, his guitar strumming was percussive and his voice soared and cut like a knife.
There was a problem however. Dylan did not come to New York to settle into a long life as a folk minstrel. He loved rock and roll and he loved poetry - especially Rimbaud, the Modernists, the Surrealists and the Beats, along with a dose of the Bible and various other ancient to middle ages writing. Had he not loved music so much he probably would have been a poet in the sense that most people understand poets - they write poems in books and sometimes read their poetry in public. But he loved music, especially the blues, rock and roll and country music. When he put all this stuff together and let it pour out spontaneously he changed popular music. The folk singers hated him, but the rock audience and rock musicians loved him. By merely following his interests and responding he was the catalyst for a shift in a popular music that had been entertainment for the kids, but had now become an art form.
Is Dylan a poet? I saw him interviewed in the 80s on one of the network news programs. They put the question to him. He shook his head in the affirmative and said, "Yeah. I don't know how Keats or Eliot or any of those guys would feel about it, but yeah." That, along with his work, is fair testimony.
Dylan came along during a revolutionary moment. His work reflected and responded to that moment. He wasn't trying to be a revolutionary. He was simply doing what he enjoyed. Once he got the label and the publicity that came with it he ran for the hills. He tried different kinds of music and even attempted to retire on numerous occasions, but finally decided that since he enjoyed what he did he might as well keep doing it and the press and everyone else could make whatever they wanted to make of it. And so they have and still do. And he continues to write and record and play and reflect his times (with now a wistful eye on the past as well). These are no longer revolutionary times, so he no longer sounds like a revolutionary.
Perhaps the age of revolution is over. This is not an entirely bad thing. Revolutions, it turns out, are more likely to produce reigns of terror than flourishing, prosperous democracies. But it is important to keep the fire of revolution alive, to keep things moving. It there is anything worse than a reign of terror it is the hegemony of a powerful few that lasts for centuries. We usually refer to those as dark ages.
I'm honored to be included in any article about Dylan. He was one of the places I learned about song writing, as well as picked up names of people I'd later read and love, like Rimbaud, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Eliot and Pound. I tell people I went to the school of Dylan, then I graduated. I also attended numerous other schools and graduated. To name a few: Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Jimmy Rogers, The Carter Family, Doc Watson, the Bible, Edgar Allan Poe, Homer, Dante, Shelly, Keats, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Robert Johnson, Son House, Stein, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, Pound, Gregorian chant and the Notre Dame school of composers, Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok, Cage, Feldman, Harrison, Riley, Reich, Eno, Springsteen, Neil Young, Van Morrison, The Doors, Jackson Browne, The Who, Elvis Costello, The Clash, Captain Beefheart, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, Albert Ayler, Wes Montgomery, Marcel Duchamp, James Brown, Tom Waits, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, The Temptations, Sylvia Plath, C.G.Jung, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, The Zohar, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, all the sciences, especially archeology, physics and astronomy and so on. These are all schools I have attended, graduated from and return to from time to time to refresh my education and I am always finding new schools to attend.
I have also had the great good fortune to study with living masters of their arts including Jack Foley, Michael McClure, Wayne Sides, Ivan Argüelles, Neeli Cherkovski and others with whom I still study because I have the honor to know them and continue to be in touch with them and learn from their work and their lives.
All of this goes into anything I do, along with what I learn by living.
Dylan is an important figure in late 20th and early 21st century culture. Any poet or songwriter that ignores him is willfully ignorant of an essential element of the arts in that period. But I would say the same thing about all the others listed above for their time.
Rock and roll artists, or those that came out of that tradition, can be poets. As an example to close this long winded, excessive response I'll quote Van Morrison - the opening verse and chorus of his song/poem "Astral Weeks:"
If I ventured in the slipstream
in the viaducts of your dreams
where the mobile steel rims clack
and the ditch in the back road stops
would you find me
would you kiss my eyes
and lay me down
in the silence easy to be born again
Reading it as poetry, he moves from rhymed couplet to blank verse to free verse. This would be frowned upon in most poetry classes. It would be bad form. One should either chose one form and maintain it throughout the poem or use abrupt juxtaposition so that the reader is aware of the change. Yet when we listen to Astral Weeks we don't even notice the changes. It all flows out beautifully as Morrison sings atop a mystical blend of folk, blues, jazz and pop. That is what the rock and pop that began in the 50s and flowered in the 60s did for poetry. It removed the constraints that Dada, Modernism and many others had struggled against. And it did it in front of a vast audience. Most of that audience, it must be admitted, missed the significance of the moment. But for young artists, songwriters and poets it made one thing abundantly clear: there is no single way of practicing your art. You can create in any way you choose. You can combine any form in any way that seems to work to you and you can always change your mind, change direction, or do all of these things at the same time. |
Jack Foley
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Username: Foley
Post Number: 61
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 - 05:28 am: |
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Thanks for this, Jake.
I didn't mean to bring up the question of whether Dylan was or wasn't a poet--only his effect on lyrics. My feeling is that the songs are best understood as what they are: as songs. During the sixties, people were calling Dylan a poet because they were deeply moved by the songs--and because they wished to differentiate him from people like Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin, whom they didn't want to call poets. But all three are very good lyricists, and writing lyrics is writing a form of poetry. Dylan certainly expanded the content of popular songs. I don't think it's true that the folk contingent disliked him. He was Woody Guthrie redivivus until he "turned electric." He'll be part tonight of an event staged by President Obama and will sing "The Times They Are A-Changin." Following that, evidently, he will shake the president's hand. One wonders about "changin" and the current president. Roger Cohen wrote of Obama: "I see him caught in a kind of halfway house. His gut tells him the world has changed and demands new policies but Washington politics keep him stuck in the conventional. His first year on the world stage has offered innovative speeches but largely unoriginal policy": "in the silence easy to be born again." |
Staff Sherry OKeefe
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Username: Staff_sherry_okeefe
Post Number: 243
Registered: 12-2009
| | Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 - 05:28 am: |
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i enjoyed reading this thread.
this is good to remember:
there is no single way of practicing your art. You can create in any way you choose. You can combine any form in any way that seems to work to you and you can always change your mind, change direction, or do all of these things at the same time.
thanks jack and jake,
sherry
Sherry O'Keefe
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Staff John Riley
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Username: Staff_john_riley
Post Number: 47
Registered: 12-2009
| | Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 - 04:28 pm: |
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I read once that his son's band--The Wallflowers--hit album--the name slips me--sold more than all of Dylan's albums combined. I think it's easy to exaggerate the size of Dylan's audience in the 1960s.
Implicit in the argument "IS DYLAN A POET," which is always going on somewhere, is the suggestion you have to a poet to be a GREAT. That misses a point. High quality recording of music is a relatively recent development in historical terms. It's more than possible this "new" genre will take its place among plays, novels, poetry, and film.
Maybe it's best to say Dylan is a multi-media artist and leave it at that?
What I found most intriguing about Chronicles was his remembrances of spending hours in the NYC Public Library reading about the American West and the Civil War or whatever else struck his fancy. His art is often sourced from outside the often too-narrow thought-bank of so many of our teacher/translator/poets, which could make him a refreshing exception to many of the late-20th, early 21st century poets.
Best,
John |
Jack Foley
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Username: Foley
Post Number: 62
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 - 06:47 pm: |
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Thanks for these reminders, John.
I think the juxtaposition of the word "great" and the word "poet" should be banned for at least the next hundred years. It's almost impossible to praise any poet without calling her/him "great." If s/he isn't "great," s/he isn't any good at all. Enough awreddy. Dylan is a lyricist, and he's a very fine lyricist, full of inventive turns and unexpected juxtapositions. And a lyricist is a kind of poet--so he's a poet. But when people decided to call him a poet, they meant it as a praise word--meant that he was better than other lyricists. He wasn't "just" a lyricist or a songwriter; he was "a poet."
About narrowness: a poet like Charles Olson is clearly "sourced from outside the often too-narrow thought-bank of so many"--and far more outside it than Bob Dylan. The problem with writing popular songs--even very good popular songs--is that you have to stay within the confines of certain subjects, and while these confines can be stretched to a degree, they can't really be breached. You can write only about certain things if you expect your work to sell. And you can write only in certain ways. Do you think Charles Ives' magnificent songs--which range far more widely than Dylan's--will ever be "popular"? In addition, Dylan made some efforts that failed. When he tried being "born again" in his songs, he didn't do so well. |
Jake Berry
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Username: Jakeberry
Post Number: 3
Registered: 02-2010
| | Posted on Friday, February 12, 2010 - 12:43 am: |
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As with most of the essays you post Jack and the responses they inspire they leave me with so much to say that I cannot possibly say it all. My original response was excessive, but I do want to clarify a few things.
I like the comparison of popular music before and after the advent or rock and roll and the other popular forms associated with it. The change is so abrupt that someone listening to the radio between 1940 and 1965, having nothing but the music to work with, would wonder what had happened to cause such an enormous shift. The lyrics and melodies of popular music before rock and roll are for the most part beautifully rendered. I'm thinking of the Gerswhins, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Charmichael and so on. In terms of word play, lyrical precision and melody there isn't much in the rock era that can match it. This is why so many artists that became famous as rock or folk musicians have returned to that earlier music. They want to experience performing in that way with those wonderful tunes.
Personally I enjoy listening to and learning from both forms of popular music. They offer very different approaches to music. One more cosmopolitan, sophisticated and refined, the other more aggressive, urgent and earthy.
I wholeheartedly second the notion of separating the word great from poet for at least a century. It might do us all good to even go so far as to avoid calling anything literature, especially great literature, until after the author has been dead for 100 years. It takes a while for these things to settle out in the culture or for us to begin to have any kind of perspective on the work.
I should have been more specific about the point at which the folk artists began to turn against Dylan. It was precisely when he brought the group that would become The Band onstage to perform with him at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Odd when you consider that one of the albums he released in 1964, Bringing It All Back Home, is one side acoustic and one side electric. Pete Seegar has said that the first time he heard Dylan play "Mr. Tambourine Man" he noticed the lyrics were different from what Dylan had been writing up to that point, but he was able to take it in stride. It was the electricity that, so the story goes, sent him running with an ax to hack the cables. Fortunately someone stopped him. It might have silenced Bob for one show, but it might have killed Pete.
I mentioned so many schools and influences to make the point that Dylan was one of many, but I left out so many. The worst omission was Joni Mitchell, who is poet/songwriter, musician and painter. For all the attention and awards she has received she is still underrated in my opinion.
Olson is another one I left out. Vitally important.
And yes, popular song is very confining. It can be fun to write, but the reason Joni Mitchell began playing with jazz musicians was because the pop song form and the musicians that play it were too confining. She wanted to write whatever she liked and felt liberated playing with musicians that could play with less restrictions. I have had the same problem. The more you write songs as poetry and without regard for the popular form the more you realize the weight of those restrictions.
Dylan's CHRONICLES sounds like an interesting book. I read a short excerpt, but I didn't realize it covered so much ground. I need to read that one.
I didn't watch Dylan performing at the White House. I suppose it will be available online. Dylan was probably asked to play "The Times They Are A-Changin." He probably would have played "Desolation Row" if they'd asked for that. At this point this kind of thing must seem like just another gig to him. |
Jack Foley
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Username: Foley
Post Number: 63
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Friday, February 12, 2010 - 06:16 am: |
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Sadly it seems that The Times They Aren't A-Changin.
But poetry and music give us good times in bad times.
Didn't Dylan do "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" at Newport? One of his most beautiful songs! I played its changes when you, wearing a bluesman's hat, performed BRAMBU DREZI at The University of Alabama way back in 1997. Good times! |
Jake Berry
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Username: Jakeberry
Post Number: 4
Registered: 02-2010
| | Posted on Sunday, February 14, 2010 - 11:12 pm: |
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Good times, indeed! I still run into people that remember that night. And though I wasn't aware of it at the time, there was so much happening at once, I did hear you playing "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" when I saw the video. I'm not sure if Dylan played that at Newport in 1965 or not. All I've ever seen of the footage is him bringing out the band and playing "Maggie's Farm" while everyone booed.
Poetry and music can sustain us during hard times, as it did for so many in the years leading up to and through the civil rights movement. A great deal of music and poetry comes out of bad times. It seems that regardless of the consequences the arts have always been with us - an intrinsic part of being human.
I went to the PBS website and watched Dylan's performance at the White House. "The Times They Are A-Changin'" had an erie effect. The event was obviously cast looking back at a moment of change, a shift in the culture, recalling those songs. Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" was one of the most powerful songs of the period. But those songs, heard now, with an African-American president, in the current circumstances, felt like feedback or the sword cutting back, reminding us that so much is left undone. There is a very loud and obstinate movement afoot that would love to see the times change back to the way things were before the civil rights movement.
Perhaps Dylan should have played "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," "Desolation Row" or "Masters of War." That last song would have been perfectly suited for the previous administration. During the series of concerts for change before the 2004 election Pearl Jam performed "Masters of War." Unfortunately the masters of war had no intention of changing anything and now seem to have only shifted emphasis from one war to another. That is what candidate Obama said he would do. It doesn't seem to occur to anyone in power to ask how we got here. What would generate popular support in the middle east and around the world for terrorists attacks on the scale of 9/11? Is it possible bad policy over the past 70 years or more has lead to this moment and now we defend bad policy with war? The times are in desperate need of changing. |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 64
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Monday, February 15, 2010 - 06:52 am: |
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Thanks, Jake.
Today's headlines talk of civilians killed in Afghanistan.
What did they used to say? "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs."
Tell that to the eggs. |
Bob Schechter
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Username: Bob
Post Number: 14
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Monday, February 15, 2010 - 12:15 pm: |
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John, I've heard that about the Wallflowers too, but it's just an urban myth. From what I can tell, the top Wallflowers album sold about 6 million copies, but Bob has sold over 100 million records in his career. Of course, that does not include all the times his songs have been covered, part of movie soundtracks, etc., and sales alone do not indicate the cultural influence and reach of an artist.
There's an excellent chapter or two on Dylan's rhyme in the Christopher Ricks book, "Dylan's Visions of Sin," which book perhaps proves Dylan's status as a "poet" by subjecting his work to the same sort of literary criticism one would expect for a poet.
I hate arguing who is a poet and who isn't. He's a genius with words that often employ literary, metrical techniques, rhyme, and just about any other literary device you can identify that poets use. Is he disqualified because he enhances the whole shebang with music, something non-musician poets don't get to do? Fine, if you say so.
I just think he's beyond great. Not an unusual opinion, but sincerely held. |
Jake Berry
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Username: Jakeberry
Post Number: 5
Registered: 02-2010
| | Posted on Monday, February 15, 2010 - 11:03 pm: |
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Yes, Jack. It appears that with the war on terrorism we have our war without end. The kind the Romans, English (pick any empire) fought on the edges of the empire to maintain the flow of resources and keep the world at bay, keep the citizens comfortable and complacent.
Bob, right. The Wallflowers have done very well and their best selling album, which I believe was BRINGING DOWN THE HORSE, might have sold more copies than any individual Bob Dylan album. It's a good record, too. Obviously Jakob has some of his father's talent and seems to have learned a few things from people like The Clash and Springsteen. The slide guitar on that album reminds me of George Harrison. So there's Beatles influence as well. Still, Jakob was quick to point out when everyone was raving about the success of his work and comparing him to Bob, that by the time his dad was 25 he had released seven albums, including, in less than two years, BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME, HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED, and BLONDE ON BLONDE.
Dylan's songwriting is poetry. All songwriting is poetry. It's just that with Dylan, his songs are obviously connected to the established idea of poetry that we were taught in school. Most songwriting, especially in the rock era, isn't very good poetry. The words are really there to serve the music, the beat. There are exceptions of course - rap/hip-hop is all about words, and there are plenty of excellent poets whose primary medium of presentation is music: Leonard Cohen (a book poet before he wrote songs), Joni Mitchell, Richard Thompson, and Bruce Cockburn, just to name a few.
There have always been many kinds of poetry. There always will be. The shame is that more people don't enjoy ALL of it. |
Mary-Marcia Casoly
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Username: Casoly
Post Number: 5
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Friday, February 19, 2010 - 01:57 pm: |
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I came to Dylan late. After the Beatles, after many people had sung his songs folk style. Once I did begin to take an interest in Bob Dylan, what I noticed was the complexity of words, stories and phrases that seemed to be taken right off the street, the innuendo, saying one thing and meaning another, the wit of his words,the bite. And perhaps most of all I noticed there was a particular styling in the way that he sang the word, leaned on, slurred or whined -- drawing out the voice, coming down hard on the consonant. The sound of his singing voice meant as much to me as the music though many said that isn’t singing! He’s terrible. An accustomed taste?
I was influenced by the way Dylan emphasized certain words, by what he dropped into a song, the crazy “On the Road Again” and because of him primarily I started to find out for myself about the Beat poets and started listening to many stand up comedian routines, many dating from the 1950 to early 60’s because of my brother. I heard something of their edge in Dylan’s work too. All the windows were open and all sorts of music flowed loudly to my backyard, Dylan, Beatles and Beethoven and other music I’d never heard before. What an explosion. |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 67
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Friday, February 19, 2010 - 02:30 pm: |
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Good times, Mary-Marcia, good times! |
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