That's a great post, AZ--alternately persuasive (on the value of oral literature), informative (Vysotsky), inscrutable (the orgy eunuch), and inflammatory (I'll bite: why is Toni Morrison preposterous?).
I thought I'd said my bit here, but I think it worth pointing out what is implicit in your post: this is a Literature prize, not a poetry one. In this sense, the Slate article that Max linked us to was enjoyable but unpersuasive. Maybe the Wilbur looks better on the page than the Dylan, but so what? Beckett and Pinter got their prizes for plays, and they would fail this test, too--just as Wilbur would lose the comparison if it were held on a stage (plus his 80s albums had a shit drum sound). And the 2015 winner was a journalist/oral historian! Once you decide to give a best fruit of the year award, you're going to be comparing apples and oranges. To do so fairly, you can't punish the oranges for being neither red nor green.
So, again, I think the most relevant questions are whether song-poems are literature (and, like AZ, the Greeks, and others, I think they are) and whether Dylan's song-poems are worthy of such an honor (for me, yup).
There's also the prize's stated idealistic goal...
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