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Hi, Tim,
I think when you suggest that the support for Dylan on the list is minimal, you're rather downplaying the position of someone like me who feels that Dylan is indeed a major artist and deserves recognition as such. And further, that his work, whatever we call it, is better than (at least) 99% of whatever is found on the page and called a poem today.
But given that this opinion is shared by even such an academically respectable figure as Christopher Ricks, and on the music side by Wilfred Mellors, I hardly think he's under-recognised by whatever we chose to call the establishment.
That said, I feel that the words of his songs alone, read on the page, aren't, to say the least, as powerful as the same words sung by Dylan, and probably neither is as effective as the experience (which I haven't had) of watching Dylan perform live on a stage.
If you want to call what Dylan does, guitar, harmonica, voice, and all, a poem, then all I can say is we're using the word in different senses.
That's no big deal, simply a terminological disagreement over how we slice and dice the Imaginative Experience Cake.
What bothers me much more is, and I may be misreading you here, is an apparent assertion that the words alone are Wholly Admirable. This seems to me to both misconceive what Dylan does, and to diminish him as an artist. Sure, individual lines stand out, and many can stand on their own, but to rip them out of the whole -- it's like taking a soliloquy from a Shakespeare play and holding it up for admiration, while ignoring the rest of the five acts. It can be been done, Choice Flowers From Shakespeare, but the end result ain't particularly satisfying.
Hey, did you notice that in the Telegraph interview today, where he bemusedly wondered what the hell the fuss was about -- or those may have been the words of the other figure in the dialogue -- he referenced "Willie McTell" as one of maybe five of what he thought were his best pieces?
WTG!
Robin
On 29 October 2016 at 12:59 Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I was out all day yesterday and I couldn't believe the number of posts I've just gone through on this.
Anyway, I've said what I think and tried to say why. It's interesting though, because I am not actually all that bothered by the original problem of the poem/song lyric thing. I think it's quite funny. For me its not a problem that Dylan was given the Nobel, it's completely understandable to me, but it's also completely understandable to me why some people, knowing their views on stuff, should disagree. It's funny because both these views point to bigger and wider problems about literature and value. I disagree quite intensely for example with Jamie's saying that Dylan's lyrics are mostly bad poetry when compared to what he considers good poetry, but again this points to much bigger issues with regard to poetry that lie outside the area of lyric and poem comparison that have formed the subject matter of most posts.
I find it slightly disappointing that on a list such as this it only appears to be only David, Jeff, Mark and myself who have come down on the Dylan side, the lack of comment from experimental (or whatever) poets who are engaged with cross-genre practice is noticeable - maybe it's a generation thing.
Cheers
Tim
On 28 Oct 2016, at 12:59, Jeffrey Side wrote:
> I’ve been reading the song and poetry discussion here with great interest. Many of its themes have engaged me for many years, and so it’s good to see such a discussion (perhaps long overdue) appearing here.
>
> From what I’ve been able to glean from it, there seems to be two camps of opinion: One camp has Jamie and Peter arguing that song lyrics differ from written poetry in that they don’t consist of the various prosodic and metric formulations that are classically associated with written poetry. The other camp has David and Tim arguing that this might be true but it doesn’t “devalue” the emotional and aesthetic appreciation of a song lyric—even when separated from the music—because prosody no longer matters in evaluating the worth or not of a poetic text. Have I summarised these positions faithfully?
>
> Regarding the Jamie/Peter camp. I agree that written poetry has historically (at least up until High Modernism) stressed the importance of prosody and metre (though there are some exceptions, such as the poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, and possibly others I’m unaware of) but I don’t think that song lyrics necessarily can be devoid of these aspects. Song lyrics by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen do, indeed, have some prosodic elements (I think Christopher Ricks has looked at this in the case of Dylan), and they also have other poetical elements, such as rhyme, alliteration, allusion, etc. It might be true, as far as I can tell, that song lyrics by these writers don’t contain any strictly formal poetical metre, but neither does the majority of contemporary written poetry that is highly regarded in some quarters. Does this, then, suggest that such prosody-lacking written poetry should be evaluated as being more similar to song lyrics than to written poetry, if the lack of prosody in song lyrics is seen (at least by Jamie and Peter—as I understand their position to be) as distinguishing it from written poetry. In other words, is written poetry that does not contain any prosodic elements or metrics really more like a song lyric than written poetry that uses these elements. If so, that would be a very controversial proposition, as it would be dismissing nearly all of the poetry written since High Modernism—including experimental poetry. Of course, I might have misunderstood Jamie's and Peter’s position on this, and so am open to correction.
>
> Regarding the David/Tim camp position, I admit, I do have sympathy with it, if only because the Jamie/Peter camp position (if I’ve represented it faithfully) re-categorises nearly all written poetry that has no prosody, as being distinct from written poetry that does have it. This jettisons much of what has come to be regarded as poetry.
>
> Again, I admit I might have misunderstood both side’s positions. The discussion hasn’t been that easy to make sense of to be truthful.