10.13.16

I was going to post last Wednesday about it being national poetry day, but now that there is a national day of every damn thing, it seems to have lost its appeal. The one day a year knit bloggers and mommy bloggers et al pay homage by posting a "deep" poem they learned in high school. Sorry, I'm salty today. Deal with it.

I don't feel particularly like a writer anymore, and no real call to keep writing about writing, since that seems like an order of magnitude more writing than I am doing anymore. I'm not writing and not blogging and I find it hard to care about either, except when people decide that Bob Dylan gets the Nobel Prize for literature. Apparently that gets me fighting mad.

Don't get me wrong, I love the guy's music and think he's made a hell of a contribution to our culture. But song lyrics aren't poetry, which is the most apt comparison to literature that could be made. A lot of arguments I'm hearing saying that they are the same or might as well be the same really disappoint me. Poetry really has no modern qualifications in terms of a definition. The former, "sound and sense" type gateposts are mostly considered prescriptive now, and you can write basically anything sonically, structurally, etc and have it be a poem. Songs still have the strong qualification that, to be successful, they have to sound good. This means there is a much stronger metric and rhythmic component that is needed. Also, there is nearly always a medium-to-strong presence of rhyme. These things make sense, they sound good to the human ear. Note, I said to be successful. I am sure there are plenty of really cruddy songs that are more closely related to the do-anything structures of poetry. For instance, many songs from the "emo" trend tended to have long, drawn-out lines that had difficult meters without necessarily any parallelism to other lines, and rhymes that were not as pleasant to the ear. (Of course I can't think of any examples, I wasn't a huge fan of the genre for a reason, so not a ton of it has stuck in my head).

Another thing I hear here is "what about poetry set to music?" which is a dumb question, because in asking if you've defined it as poetry set to music which is clearly defining two different things. This is not to say that there are not awesome performance poets who use various sonic and vocal elements for their performances, which are many and diverse, but which are not songs. The article I referenced above basically confirms "Mr. Dylan’s songs do get more mileage, and more shades of meaning, with every inflection he brings to them onstage on his never-ending tour. He can sharpen their barbs, tease out their mixed emotions and infuse them with passion or irony, constantly rescuing them from their own familiarity — constantly recharging his reputation, as if he hadn’t already earned it all".  Something better when sung? Must be a song. 

Another main criticism I have of that article and many of them out there championing this decision is that their argument seems to be that his work is good and does all the things good music should...therefore it is literature somehow. 

But there’s no question that Mr. Dylan has created a great American songbook of his own: an e pluribus unum of high-flown and down-home, narrative and imagistic, erudite and earthy, romantic and cutting, devout and iconoclastic, finger-pointing and oracular, personal and universal, compassionate and pitiless. His example has taught writers of all sorts — not merely poets and novelists — about strategies of both pinpoint clarity and anyone’s-guess free association, of telegraphic brevity and ambiguous, kaleidoscopic moods.

This is a great blurb, and his music does all these things, and they make it great. But they do not make it literature. This description could inform criticism about any art form, from the novella to surface design; that which is a combination of the best of its genre, tattles on the establishment, and inspires others to create and to create well.


Here's another blurb I have a few problems with:

As much as any academically beloved poet — say, Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot — Mr. Dylan has always placed himself on a literary continuum where allusions focus and amplify meaning. But half a century ago, when guardians of culture were diligently policing boundaries between the purportedly high and low, Mr. Dylan drew his allusions not only from Western literature but also from the blues and the news, gleefully knocking their heads together; in “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” he put Shakespeare in the alley.

It posits that Dylan himself put his work alongside that of poets to be judged as poets are, but I think that is quite a stretch. It also suggests that folk music doesn't or can't use allusion or other literary techniques without being considered on the same plane. I'm not going to go search and post lyrics, but anyone who appreciates music, folk and otherwise, can give you examples of the use of such techniques that usually are considered "high" on the continuum like chiasmus, parallelism, assonance, historical and cultural references, etc. The point is, that good music does this. Not just good literature. Doing something like this doesn't make it necessarily literary, but does make it excellent.

I have talked about this before, and it is interesting to think that music is ubiquitous in our culture, but poetry is basically hidden. You hear music in your car, from all of your devices, on tv and in movies, in stores, being played in public, etc. When does anyone in our culture consume poetry? Rarely, and usually in private or in small gatherings would be my guess. So its disappointing to me that a musician, who has world-renown would jump the ladder over other writers who maybe are as deserving, but not as well-known (or just as well-known, who knows). I know many novelists are somewhat famous, but can they reach the stature of a rock icon? And the wealth, for that matter?

What troubles me about his being awarded a literary prize is, why would it not go to a poet? There are scads of interesting, unique, socially-forward, gleam-in-your-eye poets of all stripes just in the USA right now, and I'm sure all over the world. I'm a little sad that they were passed over this time for someone who deserves accolades, but hardly publicity.

All this could be solved by making a Nobel Prize for music and calling it good. Tl;dr version: Bob Dylan is deserving of many awards, just not this one.