The Bob Dylan controversy, in some ways, seems to revolve around the question of the role twentieth-century small-ensemble guitar-and-vocal music (I'm deliberately phrasing this to collapse distinctions between country, folk, blues, rock, funk, etc.). There are questions of influence, of representation, even of seriousness. And that's fine. But here's where I come from. (Okay, white, American, male, forty, and moving right along....) I am a poet because of small-ensemble guitar music. Not so much direct influence, though it is a frequent source of allusion, but more actually turning me on to things. It wasn't always pretty (thanks for the Khalil Gibran phase when I was fourteen, assholes!), but I discovered the Surrealists, say, through goth rock. Much of what I know about French Symbolist poetry started with rock music as well. And I sure wasn't going to pick up the capacity of rhyme to intensify a point, strikingly make a surprising connection, make a dirty joke funnier, or just hold a stanza together through sheer rhetorical force from the trickle of contemporary poetry that reached a teenager in central Oklahoma in the 1990s and mostly bored me silly. Just as one can work backwards from Jimmy Page and find Robert Johnson, so too can one work backwards from the Cure and find Arthur Rimbaud. I liked the poetry the musicians were reading better than the poetry the poets seemed to like.
Also, as my colleague Fernando Velasquez Pomar pointed out yesterday, similar objections have been raised to playwrights getting the Nobel because, you know, you have to see it performed to get the whole effect. I suppose this sort of thing is a problem if one limits literature to that which is meant to be read silently. Preferably in a drawing room.
And to quote another colleague, isn't every year Joyce Carol Oates doesn't win a victory of sorts?
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