https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/dylan-and-cohen-poets-of-rock-and-roll/introduction

*******************

Poets of a Generation
What remains true is that, if Dylan is, sui generis, the greatest song-writer of the age, Leonard Cohen is still the only name that can seriously he mentioned in the same breath.

Poetry is an evaluative descriptive word. It is descriptive in that it signifies an art form that, while being readily identifiable, retains a sufficient degree of ambiguity to have its meaning contested. To claim that something is poetry may often be to claim that it is authentic, that the voice of poetry has a greater claim to be heard than the nonpoetic. Paul Garon has made the emphatic and stipulative pronouncement that all blues is self-evidently poetry and that those who think otherwise must be mentally defective.[2] He argues that poetic art necessarily contains within itself elements of revolutionary ferment manifested as the struggle for freedom. Poetry liberates the mind from ideological structures and repressive constraints, projecting a vision of the possible beyond the actual. Surrealism, in Garon’s view, has facilitated this liberation by connecting the imagination to the blind spots of reality through stimulating and irritating nascent and latent faculties of thought by means of fantasy. Garon’s argument is stipulative and tautological. In defining poetry in this way, by definition those modes of expression that conform to the definition are more poetic than tho
se that do not. Garon is contemptuously dismissive of those who do not agree with the surrealist position and completely hostile to academics in the formal sense, suggesting that the real business of thinking has to go on outside of the constraints of academia. Not only does Garon wish to compel us to accept that the blues is poetry, but that 2it is better poetry than that produced by T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, or Allen Ginsberg.[3]

One way to address the dilemma of resolving what is and what is not poetry is to subscribe to what Cohen says: poetry is a verdict rather than an intention, meaning that it is others who bestow the title of poetry on the poet or poem. If this is to be a criterion, it is undeniable that numerous critics do describe both Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen as lyric poets. To get a definitive answer to the question What makes Dylan Thomas’s “Vision and Prayer,” in which the words are shaped into a triangle, poetry? is just as elusive as getting agreement on whether Damien Hirst’s dismembered animals suspended in formaldehyde constitute art.

It is nevertheless the case that the concepts of poetry and art carry with them favorable evaluative connotations. They are what philosopher Maurice Cranston called “hooray words.” To call something poetic, or artistic, is deliberately to invoke this positive sense of approval. The positive is not, of course, universal, and for some, poetry, and the label poetry, may be tainted by unpleasant associations with school and the “high” culture of the establishment. Jonzi D., for example, found the term uncool and performance poetry too anal.[4] In an age when we all too readily manipulate evaluative descriptive terms in order to bask in their appraisive glory, profiteers in the music industry have not been reticent to extend the descriptive referent of poetry in order to capitalize on the evaluative element. A song lyric that might plausibly stand without its music is at risk of being packaged and sold as poetry. This dubious honor has been bestowed upon, among others, Joni Mitchell, Blixa Bargeld, Nick Cave, Marc Almond, and Shane MacGowan. In France, for example, there is a very strong tradition of the poet-singer, with Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, Brasse
, and Hugues Aufray. Brel, for example, strongly influenced Rod McKuen. This French tradition found in the songwriting circles of Montreal and Quebec was quickly identified as the milieu of Cohen’s artistry: “Intense, dark-haired Leonard Cohen, acclaimed by some as Canada’s leading poet, ends his poetry readings with guitar in hand, singing in the style of the French-Canadian chansonnier.”[5]

Poets themselves have not been averse to cross over into song. Homer, for example, was chanted, and so were the Scandinavian epics. Frank Davey argues that poetry and music have historically been closely allied. The heroic poetry of Anglo-Saxons is very likely to have been chanted to the accompaniment of a harpist.[6] Shakespeare liberally punctuated his plays with song. Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, are sustained by intermittent interludes of song. William Blake’s Poetical Sketches includes eight poems with song in the title, with two of his most famous 3collections being Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The San Francisco Beat poets fused jazz and poetry, and in his early career Cohen tried to emulate their style. One of the pioneers in the United States was Kenneth Rexroth, who had experimented in Chicago during the 1930s. He was one of the prime movers of the San Francisco Cellar jazz poetry scene. He was ecstatic about the potential that Dylan had to advance the movement. Fusing music and poetry in the way that Dylan had was not new, Rexroth conceded. In France and Germany it had been traditional since the time of Charlemagne. It was
Dylan’s influence on the younger generation and their imitation of him that was the important factor.[7][8] Allen Ginsberg, a great admirer of Blake, sang “The Tiger” to harmonium accompaniment and recited some of his own poems, such as “Father Death,” to music. Much of the force of Ginsberg’s poetry is in the performance, and without the mantric intonation and musical accompaniment, the words often appear dead on the page. Inspired by Dylan and Happy Traum, a leading figure in the folk revival movement in the United States, Ginsberg wrote songs that folk music anthologist and fellow Beat artist and poet Harry Smith recorded him singing in the Chelsea Hotel around 1971. The album eventually appeared in 1981 as Allen Ginsberg: First Blues, Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs (Folkways FSS 37560). The Liverpool poets Roger McGough and Adrian Henry both sang their poetry when they were members of Scaffold and the Liverpool scene, respectively.

The book The Message: Crossing the Tracks between Poetry and Pop, which celebrated the theme of the 1999 National Poetry Day, spearheaded by the Poetry Society of Great Britain, explored the relation between pop lyrics and poetry, and the contributors, with varying degrees of equivocation, conclude that there is none. Lyrics are distinctive in their way, often gaining their particular force in the performance, the combination of intonation and notation, betraying a dependency on the music that is integral to their appeal. The banality of the lone lyric is atoned in the musical accompaniment, and the romantic death of the author may be positively redemptive. It is the event of the romanticized deaths of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Marc Bolan at the height of their fame, for example, rather than the memory of any particular lyric, other than for their sheer banality, that made them enduring icons, whereas with Keats, the beauty of the poetry made his untimely death a tragedy. Stephen Troussé, for instance, suggests that the “splendid banality” of Marc Bolan’s lines “I drive a Rolls-Royce / Cos it’s good for my voice” is a more profound gift to the hist
ory of pop than the contributions of all of the sad-eyed singer-songwriters of the 1970s.[9] He calls it “the aesthetic of the artful artlessness.”

4
Indeed, there may be a great deal of mileage in Simon Reynold’s view that popular music gains its power not from the depth and meaning of its lyrics, but from its sheer noise.[10] The critics who analyze it import criteria from the higher culture in which they have been educated and impose rationality, aesthetic value, and depth of meaning on a form of expression devoid of all such things. Instead, it is the extralinguistic elements that refuse to succumb to content analysis that constitute the pop song—a driving bass line, earthy guitar, haunting Hammond organ, wistful wailing slide guitar, and rasping delivery of the lyrics. There has been what Troussé calls a critical shift from text to texture.[11] It would be a mistake to divorce Dylan and Cohen from such a characterization. Instead of making a category distinction in which the so-called poets of rock and roll are different in kind from other performers, they may be seen on a continuum representing the end at which text and texture are mutually supportive and inseparable. As Stephen Scobie points out, in themselves some of Dylan’s lyrics may appear awkward or even banal printed on the page, but the music and the phrasi
ng give character and effect: “The music provides a rhythm, a beat, an emotional ambience.”[12] The arrangements of songs change, of course, and the mood conveyed, the images projected, and the context invoked take on different nuances, but Dylan is notorious for setting his lyrics to completely different accompaniments, transforming the effect, if not the content, of the words.

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen have both been hailed as great poets of their generation. Donald Henahan, commenting on Cohen, asserts that “on the alienation scale, he rates somewhere between [Arthur] Schopenhauer and Bob Dylan, two other prominent poets of pessimism.”[13] Playboy described Cohen as both the minstrel and the poet laureate of his generation.[14] Harry Rasky, the filmmaker, who produced the film The Song of Leonard Cohen, bestowed on him the dubious honor of being “the first great, vaginal poet.”[15] Both Dylan and Cohen precipitated heated discussions among academics and practicing poets about whether their lyric poetry was truly poetry at all, let alone good poetry. Neil Corcoran argues that Dylan’s lyrics rarely stand alone as poetry. Lyric poetry is meant to be composed and thought of rhythmically. The centrality of music in Dylan’s songs means that they cannot be viewed unreservedly as poetry. Corcoran equivocates on Dylan’s claim to be a poet and rather evasively suggests that although Dylan is not a conventional poet, he has the same artistry of mind as would a great poet in the clarity of expressions, the forcefulness of the imagery, the gracefuln
ess of the language, and the relevance of the words in different contexts.[16]

General-Zod wrote:

> https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/dylan-and-cohen-poets-of-rock-and-roll/introduction

> *******************

> Poets of a Generation
> What remains true is that, if Dylan is, sui generis, the greatest song-writer of the age, Leonard Cohen is still the only name that can seriously he mentioned in the same breath.

> Poetry is an evaluative descriptive word. It is descriptive in that it signifies an art form that, while being readily identifiable, retains a sufficient degree of ambiguity to have its meaning contested. To claim that something is poetry may often be to claim that it is authentic, that the voice of poetry has a greater claim to be heard than the nonpoetic. Paul Garon has made the emphatic and stipulative pronouncement that all blues is self-evidently poetry and that those who think otherwise must be mentally defective.[2] He argues that poetic art necessarily contains within itself elements of revolutionary ferment manifested as the struggle for freedom. Poetry liberates the mind from ideological structures and repressive constraints, projecting a vision of the possible beyond the actual. Surrealism, in Garon’s view, has facilitated this liberation by connecting the imagination to the blind spots of reality through stimulating and irritating nascent and latent faculties of thought by means of fantasy. Garon’s argument is stipulative and tautological. In defining poetry in this way, by definition those modes of expression that conform to the definition are more poetic than t
ho
> se that do not. Garon is contemptuously dismissive of those who do not agree with the surrealist position and completely hostile to academics in the formal sense, suggesting that the real business of thinking has to go on outside of the constraints of academia. Not only does Garon wish to compel us to accept that the blues is poetry, but that 2it is better poetry than that produced by T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, or Allen Ginsberg.[3]

> One way to address the dilemma of resolving what is and what is not poetry is to subscribe to what Cohen says: poetry is a verdict rather than an intention, meaning that it is others who bestow the title of poetry on the poet or poem. If this is to be a criterion, it is undeniable that numerous critics do describe both Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen as lyric poets. To get a definitive answer to the question What makes Dylan Thomas’s “Vision and Prayer,” in which the words are shaped into a triangle, poetry? is just as elusive as getting agreement on whether Damien Hirst’s dismembered animals suspended in formaldehyde constitute art.

> It is nevertheless the case that the concepts of poetry and art carry with them favorable evaluative connotations. They are what philosopher Maurice Cranston called “hooray words.” To call something poetic, or artistic, is deliberately to invoke this positive sense of approval. The positive is not, of course, universal, and for some, poetry, and the label poetry, may be tainted by unpleasant associations with school and the “high” culture of the establishment. Jonzi D., for example, found the term uncool and performance poetry too anal.[4] In an age when we all too readily manipulate evaluative descriptive terms in order to bask in their appraisive glory, profiteers in the music industry have not been reticent to extend the descriptive referent of poetry in order to capitalize on the evaluative element. A song lyric that might plausibly stand without its music is at risk of being packaged and sold as poetry. This dubious honor has been bestowed upon, among others, Joni Mitchell, Blixa Bargeld, Nick Cave, Marc Almond, and Shane MacGowan. In France, for example, there is a very strong tradition of the poet-singer, with Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, Bras
se
> , and Hugues Aufray. Brel, for example, strongly influenced Rod McKuen. This French tradition found in the songwriting circles of Montreal and Quebec was quickly identified as the milieu of Cohen’s artistry: “Intense, dark-haired Leonard Cohen, acclaimed by some as Canada’s leading poet, ends his poetry readings with guitar in hand, singing in the style of the French-Canadian chansonnier.”[5]

> Poets themselves have not been averse to cross over into song. Homer, for example, was chanted, and so were the Scandinavian epics. Frank Davey argues that poetry and music have historically been closely allied. The heroic poetry of Anglo-Saxons is very likely to have been chanted to the accompaniment of a harpist.[6] Shakespeare liberally punctuated his plays with song. Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, are sustained by intermittent interludes of song. William Blake’s Poetical Sketches includes eight poems with song in the title, with two of his most famous 3collections being Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The San Francisco Beat poets fused jazz and poetry, and in his early career Cohen tried to emulate their style. One of the pioneers in the United States was Kenneth Rexroth, who had experimented in Chicago during the 1930s. He was one of the prime movers of the San Francisco Cellar jazz poetry scene. He was ecstatic about the potential that Dylan had to advance the movement. Fusing music and poetry in the way that Dylan had was not new, Rexroth conceded. In France and Germany it had been traditional since the time of Charlemagne. It wa
s
> Dylan’s influence on the younger generation and their imitation of him that was the important factor.[7][8] Allen Ginsberg, a great admirer of Blake, sang “The Tiger” to harmonium accompaniment and recited some of his own poems, such as “Father Death,” to music. Much of the force of Ginsberg’s poetry is in the performance, and without the mantric intonation and musical accompaniment, the words often appear dead on the page. Inspired by Dylan and Happy Traum, a leading figure in the folk revival movement in the United States, Ginsberg wrote songs that folk music anthologist and fellow Beat artist and poet Harry Smith recorded him singing in the Chelsea Hotel around 1971. The album eventually appeared in 1981 as Allen Ginsberg: First Blues, Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs (Folkways FSS 37560). The Liverpool poets Roger McGough and Adrian Henry both sang their poetry when they were members of Scaffold and the Liverpool scene, respectively.

> The book The Message: Crossing the Tracks between Poetry and Pop, which celebrated the theme of the 1999 National Poetry Day, spearheaded by the Poetry Society of Great Britain, explored the relation between pop lyrics and poetry, and the contributors, with varying degrees of equivocation, conclude that there is none. Lyrics are distinctive in their way, often gaining their particular force in the performance, the combination of intonation and notation, betraying a dependency on the music that is integral to their appeal. The banality of the lone lyric is atoned in the musical accompaniment, and the romantic death of the author may be positively redemptive. It is the event of the romanticized deaths of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Marc Bolan at the height of their fame, for example, rather than the memory of any particular lyric, other than for their sheer banality, that made them enduring icons, whereas with Keats, the beauty of the poetry made his untimely death a tragedy. Stephen Troussé, for instance, suggests that the “splendid banality” of Marc Bolan’s lines “I drive a Rolls-Royce / Cos it’s good for my voice” is a more profound gift to the hi
st
> ory of pop than the contributions of all of the sad-eyed singer-songwriters of the 1970s.[9] He calls it “the aesthetic of the artful artlessness.”

> 4
> Indeed, there may be a great deal of mileage in Simon Reynold’s view that popular music gains its power not from the depth and meaning of its lyrics, but from its sheer noise.[10] The critics who analyze it import criteria from the higher culture in which they have been educated and impose rationality, aesthetic value, and depth of meaning on a form of expression devoid of all such things. Instead, it is the extralinguistic elements that refuse to succumb to content analysis that constitute the pop song—a driving bass line, earthy guitar, haunting Hammond organ, wistful wailing slide guitar, and rasping delivery of the lyrics. There has been what Troussé calls a critical shift from text to texture.[11] It would be a mistake to divorce Dylan and Cohen from such a characterization. Instead of making a category distinction in which the so-called poets of rock and roll are different in kind from other performers, they may be seen on a continuum representing the end at which text and texture are mutually supportive and inseparable. As Stephen Scobie points out, in themselves some of Dylan’s lyrics may appear awkward or even banal printed on the page, but the music and the phra
si
> ng give character and effect: “The music provides a rhythm, a beat, an emotional ambience.”[12] The arrangements of songs change, of course, and the mood conveyed, the images projected, and the context invoked take on different nuances, but Dylan is notorious for setting his lyrics to completely different accompaniments, transforming the effect, if not the content, of the words.

> Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen have both been hailed as great poets of their generation. Donald Henahan, commenting on Cohen, asserts that “on the alienation scale, he rates somewhere between [Arthur] Schopenhauer and Bob Dylan, two other prominent poets of pessimism.”[13] Playboy described Cohen as both the minstrel and the poet laureate of his generation.[14] Harry Rasky, the filmmaker, who produced the film The Song of Leonard Cohen, bestowed on him the dubious honor of being “the first great, vaginal poet.”[15] Both Dylan and Cohen precipitated heated discussions among academics and practicing poets about whether their lyric poetry was truly poetry at all, let alone good poetry. Neil Corcoran argues that Dylan’s lyrics rarely stand alone as poetry. Lyric poetry is meant to be composed and thought of rhythmically. The centrality of music in Dylan’s songs means that they cannot be viewed unreservedly as poetry. Corcoran equivocates on Dylan’s claim to be a poet and rather evasively suggests that although Dylan is not a conventional poet, he has the same artistry of mind as would a great poet in the clarity of expressions, the forcefulness of the imagery, the gracefu
ln
> ess of the language, and the relevance of the words in different contexts.[16]