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Bob Dylan: Song as poetry
the-tls.co.uk
I think he could stand pretty well on his ballads alone, and ballads, since Burns and Scott (and, even earlier, the anonymous "makers" collected by Percy and Child) are indisputably part of English-language poetry. Where does any anthology of English verse begin? Chaucer? No, with "Barbara Allen" and "Sir Patrick Spens." The ballad continues to hold its own in popular music, primarily in country and folk, and it also holds its own with contemporary poets. Most of the major English Romantics wrote them, and after them there are great examples from the Victorians and early moderns--Swinburne, Kipling, Yeats, Hardy, Noyes, Auden, et al. Two other contemporary balladeers who haven't been mentioned here are Lightfoot and Prine, both of whom I've taught in poetry classes. I could probably mention Mitchell, but she's more of a high modernist who toys with the ballad form. A lot of us came to poetry from listening to and performing song lyrics. Their words mean a lot more to us then than the "Great Poems" we were given that we couldn't understand, then. And those of us who rhyme can appreciate the brilliant rhymes in some songs; for me, the best (other than Gilbert) is Lorenz Hart. Tell a good story with a catchy melody and you've got "Knoxville Girl," "Lucille," "El Paso," "A Boy Named Sue," "Coat of Many Colors," and "Coal Miner's Daughter," just to mention a few. And you don't get tired of hearing them.

I don't have anything intelligent to say. I just want to mention the gorgeous song Diamonds and Rust, which Joan Baez wrote about Bob Dylan.

(Off-rhyme can be very powerful stuff.)

Julie, that's a great album. It also contains Baez's version of John Prine's "Hello in There." I rate Prine pretty high as a songwriter.

I seem to be stuck with a lot of Dylan groupies. I don't think it is churlish to suggest there is another view, that he is (as well as a talented songster) a self-regarding luvvie of a type that is all too common. There is no need to be rude if I put forward this view as strongly as I can. Lots of people hate Larkin and/or Auden, personal gods of mine, butI keep my temper. May I suggest a little proportion here. Dylan is not Shakespeare.

Why is the view that Cole Porter is better untenable? You're getting to be like a load of remoaners when we talk about Brexit. Surely yo are better than that.

Michael is allowed to be rude. At least he's rude to everybody.

Love you all. Buy my book.

Hi John,

I hope I didn't write anything rude in the response that I addressed to you, I don't think I did. Or anything that suggested I was 'losing my temper'. I also didn't say that holding the view that Cole Porter is better was 'untenable', just that they were writing in very different styles.

Dylan groupies can get annoying though, I'll give you that.

Can we make up over our shared love of the great Larkin? I'm not so much of a Dylan fan that I don't always smile at Larkin's gentle dismissal of the song 'Desolation Row' in his newspaper Jazz review column: "an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words"

Cheers.

If the literary value of songwriting is primarily in the lyrics, the best book I know about that is Stephen Sondheim's Finishing the Hat, the first volume of his collected lyrics, which I cherish not so much for the lyrics--most of which are in my head--but for his evaluation of previous generations of show-tune writers. He also includes, in both volumes, notes to many of his songs, giving enlightening accounts of how and why he wrote them as he did.

John,

Umm....It's a good thing there is not a single "self-regarding luvvie" among non-songwriter poets, right?

Also, I agree with you that "Dylan is not Shakespeare." But do you think maybe he has done the current-day equivalent of what Shakespeare did in his own time?

Then again, all this has probably been covered already, so I don't want to belabor it.

Claudia

No, Claudia, I don't think Dylan is doing the equivalent of what Shakespeare did. There are plenty of singer/songwrters like Dylan. I, for instance, think Bert Jansch's 'Needle of Death' is better than anything Dylan did in that line.

But Shakespeare was not just like Marlowe and Jonson and Webster. In one play, say MacBeth which every Scottish boy has studied he produced more poetry than they managed in all their works put together.

Consider just one speech:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life' but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is herd no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Sgnifying nothing.

No-one else can do anything like that.

Which previous laureates for Literature were Shakespeare?

I wonder if there are physicists who object to the Physics prize being given to anyone who isn't as great as Newton?

I don't follow you, Roger. I was responding to something Claudia said.

America's greatest poets of the 20th Century, Frost and Stevens, remain unhonoured. That seems to me a scandalous thing. Don't you think so?

Incidentally, it appears Tagore was a singer/songwriter, though I don't know anything else about him, so Dylan is not the first in that line to get the gong. O hell, old Zimmerman's OK. Like everybody else in the 1960s I used to have the LP and Mr Tambourine Man is jolly good.

After the 60s and the break-up of the Beatles, I rather lost interest in that sort of thing. I mean you can have 3 minutes of Mozart, that trio from Cosi Fan Tutte, for the same money.

This is the key paragraph from Rob Sheffield's Rolling Stone piece, to which I linked up-thread, in which he uses Emerson to argue that Dylan IS a sort-of latter-day Shakespeare, not in quality, necessarily, but in cultural terms:



The best argument for Dylan's Nobel Prize comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, even though he died a century before Shot of Love. His 1850 essay "Shakespeare; or the Poet," from the book Representative Men, works as a cheat sheet to Dylan. For Emerson, Shakespeare's greatness was to exploit the freedoms of a disreputable format, the theater: "Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads."

John--I'm definitely a Dylan fan, but I deny having been rude to anyone in this thread. On Frost, Stevens, et al, isn't the Nobel a prize for a living writer (maybe I'm mistaken)? If we're going to include the dead, then, yeah, Shakespeare and company would have to get in line behind Sappho and the Tragedy Boys. Frost and Stevens can wait their turn.

With Dylan, I'm reminded of a cat outside sitting on the windowsill. I need an interpreter to understand what he is singing. I don't say this as a criticism, I say it because I never did LSD or tripped on mushrooms to understand what he said. I like a good bit of his lyrics. I like them sung by nearly anyone else but him. Some of his poetry is pretty darn good. If Obama can be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for doing absolutely nothing, I suppose Dylan deserves at least a Nobel for doing something. I'd like to see someone like Geoffrey Brock win it.

Oh, Charlie. I think everybody agrees that Obama got his Nobel for NOT being GWB. You're just blowing off political steam there; it's not relevant to the question. The same goes for the old jokes about Dylan's singing voice and druggy adventures--although on the former point it's interesting that he divides people, Marmite-like, into love and hate camps. For everyone in your yowling cat brigade, there's somebody who says he's a "great" singer, if not a pretty one. I've been trying (and failing) to find for this thread a quote from Graham Nash (himself well known for pretty singin') to the effect that Dylan is the very greatest singer he's ever heard. I know I read it somewhere...

Dylan gave a speech last year in which he quoted Sam Cooke:The quickest answer I can give about why I love Dylan's voice is that it convinces me he is telling the truth. It's remarkably expressive in its range of tones and phrasing, from tender to petulant to angry to sardonic to funny, and I believe there is a musicality and sense of rhythm that is intricate and sophisticated.

There are lots of great singers who didn't have a pretty voice, at least according to some. Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin. Great, great singers (better than Dylan, admittedly). And the coffee houses are filled with nothing-special singers who hit every note and are as pleasant as Muzak.

Several months ago we had a similar comparison of the rawness of Billie Holiday's vocals, in comparison with the elegant finesse of Ella Fitzgerald.

Who was the "better" singer, technically speaking? Ella was, no question.

But I can't deny the visceral force of Billie's voice sometimes, precisely because it's stripped so bare of artifice, apparent skill, etc. I get the impression that I'm in the presence of naked, honest emotion.

Although I'm not a big fan of his work, the same applies to Dylan, sometimes, for me.

Others' mileage may vary.

I was so pleased this award was given to Dylan. He spoke for my generation with wonderful lyricism. Sometimes his lyrics were, as Larkin said, half-baked, but at his best he was sublime. As Roger said elsewhere, Tambourine Man alone is enough to justify the Nobel.
There are other songwriters who have written fine poems, eg this one from The Eagles:

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses
You been out ridin' fences for so long now
Oh, you're a hard one
I know that you got your reasons
These things that are pleasin' you
Can hurt you somehow

Don't you draw the Queen of Diamonds, boy
She'll beat you if she's able
You know the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet

Now, it seems to me some fine things
Have been laid upon your table,
But you only want the ones that you can't get

Desperado, oh, you ain't gettin' no younger
Your pain and your hunger, they're drivin' you home

And freedom, oh freedom, well that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone

Don't your feet get cold in the winter time?
The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine
It's hard to tell the night time from the day
You're losin' all your highs and lows;
Ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
Come down from your fences; open the gate
It may be rainin', but there's a rainbow above you
You better let somebody love you, before it's too late

It's interesting that formalists have been greatly in agreement with this award; free-versers less so.

Of course Frost can't get it NOW. He should have got it THEN. Any comparison of Dylan with Shakespeare is ludicrous.

What is this stuff about telling the truth? What has poetry got to do with telling the truth, as Philip Sidney said. MacBeth isn't TRUE. .

The Nobel people needed to up their profile. Well, they've certainly done that. And who do they give it to, next year, eh?

When I considered pop songs a form of literature, Dylan was foremost among the artists I knew I should listen to more closely if I ever got to edit the Norton anthology; his reputation suggested I should like his songs better.

I value pop music less now--and the Swedish Academy says I'm wrong again.

John, my own point about truth had to do with the vocal performance, not the poetry itself.

I'm sure we've all endured performances of Shakespeare's plays that were not to our personal taste--in part because we weren't convinced that the words and situations were being brought to life in an authentic way. (Emotionally authentic, that is--I'm able to swallow some modernized versions hook, line, and sinker, even though the actors are dressed as Nazis or whatever, while still spouting Elizabethan dialogue.)

But whether or not I enjoy Dylan's voice shouldn't be a reflection on his lyrics' merit as poetry, just as the number of really horribly over-acted "To be or not to be" recitations I've heard should have no bearing on whether that should be judged a great soliloquy.

I didn't say he or any artist tells the truth. I said that they sound like they're telling the truth. I meant it in the sense that there's a genuine quality to what they are saying and how they are saying it. Poetry has a lot to do with people coming off as genuine. The gardens are imaginary, but the toads in them are real, as Marianne Moore put it.

Great quote, Roger.

Nemo

gardens and toads
 

As a dear friend and fine poet told me decades ago, Marianne Moore has it backwards. The gardens are real, though the toads are imaginary.

She, too, disliked it, and dispensed with the whole gardens and toads thing in that final revision.

I don't believe that only the lyrics (the literature) of his artistic career were gone by for making the judgement. They are good, but not THAT good. They are, in their full form, songs/music therefore surely the very non-literary dimension of performance-aspects and what it sounds like to the ear influenced the judgement that was supposed to be about literature. This is why I don't think it is right. A novelist will be judged by only the literary dimension, not by a musical/performance-dimension. When you include a musician into the same category you are inevitably including a bias based on the strong non-literary dimension, which the literary dimension partakes in and strongly depends on to be delivered as what it is fully intended to be.

If they wanted to honour him, they should have honoured him as a musician. But they don't have that category, so instead of creating it, they stuffed him into "literature"

.

Kevin--

your position makes coherent sense. What do you make of the playwrights who have won this prize or of the Belarusian journalist who won it last year? Do their texts not have an extra-literary component, a specifically performance-oriented component in the former case? Whether or not one thinks it should include a songwriter, "literature" is a pretty broad category...

Playwrights are OK, Belarusian journalists, well, I wouldn't know. Shaw won it. Playwright and journalist (he also wrote a bum novel).

I see Dylan hasn't accepted it yet.It's a bit of an Establishment thing, isn't it? Go on.Bob, tell them to stuff it where the sun don't shine.

What about the Beachboys? Is the guy still standing? My daughters think Dylan is for oldies. He doesn't interest them.

A Chaucerian English professor friend of mine reports that her fellow medievalists generally liked the decision--bardic, troubadourian stuff and all that, while her eighteenth-century scholar friends thought it was terrible. That captures something important. While scholars debate how and when it happened, not only did poetry gradually disaggregate itself from song and live performance (though the latter is reversing), but a greater distinction between "high art" and "low art" came into play. We, as poets, and as the specific types of poets who frequent Eratosphere, probably fall on the "high art" end of things, at least where poetry is concerned. The analogue in music is, well, "art music" (Classical music, essentially), with maybe certain academy-approved varieties of jazz as a sort of funkier relation. Hence rumblings in certain quarters (mostly Lewis Turco's Facebook page, to be fair) when Sam Gwynn booked Iris DeMent for West Chester (which I thought was brilliant--her song "Our Town" had a negligible effect on my poetry but helped erode my adolescent anti-country music stance). Hence the tendency toward drawing-room atmospheres whenever any money gets thrown at a reading. A crowd of drunks belching into a microphone turns into a "salon" or some such nonsense. Some of the objections to Dylan are because "he's a musician," but I imagine that there's an element that objects that Dylan is a pop musician, too.

I must say, the attitude of some non-musicians toward musicians' fame and fortune in Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" keeps running through my head as I read people saying "That ain't poetry."

That ain't workin'. That's the way you do it,
Get your money for nothin' and your chicks for free.

Yes, Bob Dylan already enjoyed far more fame and fortune as a pop musician than writers in other genres do. But sour grapes, much?

Something else keeps running through my head, too.

Why do so many of us apparently give a committee of five people we've never heard of so much power to make us happy or unhappy?

I think a lot of us suffer from Tiara Syndrome, and treasure the notion that if someone is a good little girl (or boy), quietly doing good work in a humble and virtuous fashion, a Fairy Godmother will eventually notice and will reward that good little girl (or boy) with fame and fortune and appreciation. I think we want the Nobel Committee to reinforce our fantasy that the universe operates according to principles of justice. This seems the best explanation of why so many of us get indignant--not just disappointed, indignant--when someone we deem unworthy (for whatever reason) receives a Nobel Prize.

But why do we put so much stock in prizes like this--whether those we like win or lose--when we have seen on countless previous occasions that such prizes sometimes get awarded for reasons other than literary merit?

The level of delight when someone whose work we admire wins, and the level of outrage when someone we deem unworthy (for whatever reason) wins, both strike me as a bit ridiculous.

Life's unfair sometimes. Sometimes five people you've never heard of are given the power to award a big prizes to someone in your field, whether or not you happen to think the recipient is deserving. Much as you might like them to be, prize committees never have been, and never will be, the instrument of Universal Justice. Get over it.

Your comment, Julie, reminded me of this 2011 article by Tim Parks, which I came across yesterday. (There's another one by Parks, clickable next to this one, about Dylan's winning.)

One thing about the prize going to Dylan: with or without it, his best songs and lyrics were going to be remembered for a long time to come anyway. It's pretty hard to argue with posterity. Quite a few writers who have won the Nobel have been more or less forgotten a half-century later. Bob Dylan won't be.

Nothing Happens?

Poetry makes nothing happen.

There is nothing and the poem happens.

There was nothing and then something.

Poetry made Bob Dylan happen.

I can't help wishing that if they were going to give the award to a songwriter, they had picked a real poet like Leonard Cohen.

What Julie said.

Nemo

How many Dylan songs do you know by heart?

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

A lot, Mary! And Gail I love Leonard Cohen too, but Dylan's seam is richer and more varied.

I don't know if this one works particularly well on the page, but to me it is striking for the refrain. For one thing, the repeated line comes in the penultimate line of each verse/stanza instead of being the last line. (Is there a term for that? Are there poems that do this as well?). For another, it's a song in which Dylan's unique singing brings so much to the table, since on the album he phrases the refrain somewhat differently each time he comes to it, bringing a different attitude, from sadness to indignation, whenever he says it. One of Dylan's many strengths is his ability to use refrains in ways that build and change throughout the song, not just as a musical bridge or pure repetition.

Standing In The Doorway

I’m walking through the summer nights
Jukebox playing low
Yesterday everything was going too fast
Today, it’s moving too slow
....I got no place left to turn
....I got nothing left to burn
Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you
It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow
You left me standing in the doorway, crying
I got nothing to go back to now

The light in this place is so bad
Making me sick in the head
All the laughter is just making me sad
The stars have turned cherry red
....I’m strumming on my gay guitar
....Smoking a cheap cigar
The ghost of our old love has not gone away
Don’t look like it will anytime soon
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Under the midnight moon

Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’t
But not tonight and it won’t be here
There are things I could say but I don’t
I know the mercy of God must be near
.... I’ve been riding the midnight train
....Got ice water in my veins
I would be crazy if I took you back
It would go up against every rule
You left me standing in the doorway, crying
Suffering like a fool

When the last rays of daylight go down
Buddy, you’ll roll no more
I can hear the church bells ringing in the yard
I wonder who they’re ringing for
.... I know I can’t win
....But my heart just won’t give in
Last night I danced with a stranger
But she just reminded me you were the one
You left me standing in the doorway crying
In the dark land of the sun

I’ll eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m dry
And live my life on the square
And even if the flesh falls off of my face
I know someone will be there to care
....It always means so much
....Even the softest touch
I see nothing to be gained by any explanation
There are no words that need to be said
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Blues wrapped around my head

And to further demonstrate his range, this lovely and simple song:

IF NOT FOR YOU

If not for you
Babe, I couldn’t find the door
Couldn’t even see the floor
I’d be sad and blue
If not for you

If not for you
Babe, I’d lay awake all night
Wait for the mornin’ light
To shine in through
But it would not be new
If not for you

If not for you
My sky would fall
Rain would gather too
Without your love I’d be nowhere at all
I’d be lost if not for you
And you know it’s true

If not for you
My sky would fall
Rain would gather too
Without your love I’d be nowhere at all
Oh! what would I do
If not for you

If not for you
Winter would have no spring
Couldn’t hear the robin sing
I just wouldn’t have a clue
Anyway it wouldn’t ring true
If not for you

Hey Roger,

You've mentioned a few times on this thread about Dylan's voice, and I keep meaning to add my agreement. I too love the quality of his new 'old' voice, since Time Out of Mind I suppose. I can't listen to him sing:

I been to sugar town/I shook the sugar down

or

I was thinkin' about the things that Rosie said/I was dreamin' I was sleeping in Rosie's bed

without welling up a little bit. And if I've had a little glass of something, well...I'm ready for the broom as the man once said.

Edit: and New Morning is such a lovely underrated album. Winterlude never fails to cheer me up!

That Sugar Town line bowled me over the first time I heard it, though it didn't really fade after that. The whole song is pretty amazing, one of the more genuinely moving songs he has written.

PS--
I generally prefer Dylan's versions to the covers, but here's a cover that I might prefer to Dylan's, and it's in a more standard and smooth voice.

Leonard Bernstein was ahead of the curve in suggesting that pop music was art. This documentary includes about 15 minutes of music criticism (starting about 5 minutes in) arguing for the seriousness of late-sixties pop. Dylan gets a couple mentions, for the melody of "Mr. Tambourine Man" and for his lyrics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afU76JJcquI