General-Zod wrote:

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

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> 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
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> 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
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> , 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
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> 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
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> 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.”

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> 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
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> 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
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> ess of the language, and the relevance of the words in different contexts.[16]

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> George Woodcock, for example, maintained in 1970 that Cohen had become something of an instant Keats, combining the romanticism with the fame that Keats did not enjoy until a half century after his death. Woodcock held that Cohen’s poetry had virtues that would keep it alive as “good minor poetry.” Combining pop singing with poetry, however, was barely compatible, and the former had had a deleterious affect on Cohen’s poetic development. Woodcock cites an interview with Cohen in Saturday Night in which he says that he no longer thinks about the words, because in themselves they are completely empty and any emotion can be poured into them. Woodcock argues that Cohen’s popular songs have ceased to be poetry because they are merely forms of words that receive life and meaning in the performance of the singer.[17]

> Acknowledged poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, and Federico García Lorca had sought to restore poetry’s place among the lived experiences of the everyday life of a community. The Beat poets emulated them in this aspiration. Kenneth Rexroth declared that intellectuals, that is, college professors, had hijacked poetry, taking it out of the hands of the people. Poetry in the oral traditions of Homer and Beowulf were show business, and the Beat poets aspired to reestablish the connection. Lawrence Ferlinghetti complained that the voice of poetry was being drowned by the competition of the mass media, traceable to Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press.[18] None succeeded in achieving the aim of reconnecting poetry with the masses, but the irony is that, Rimbaud, Pound, Lorca, and Ferlinghetti, through their influence on Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, came to the attention of a much wider reading public than was traditionally associated with poetic appreciation. Although Ferlinghetti acknowledged Dylan’s achievement, he was nevertheless resentful of Dylan’s success. Once, after attending a Dylan concert in Berkeley, California, with Ginsberg and Ken Kesey, Ferlinghetti wa
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> embittered, ranting about a stringy kid with an electric guitar drawing a bigger audience than a major poet such as himself.[19] In an interview with Robert Shelton, Ferlinghetti acknowledged that Dylan has a poet’s imagination, but added, “I still think he needs that guitar.”[20] In the March 1966 issue of Ramparts, Ralph J. Gleason praised Dylan for doing the impossible: for taking poetry out of the classroom and bringing it to the jukebox, from reaching a small circle of friends to having a worldwide audience. The importance of intruding art into popular culture was affirmed by Cohen in acknowledging that what Dylan had done was to put “the word back into the jukebox, which is really where you have to have it, or at least where I like to have it.”[21]

> What is undoubtedly the case, whether one confirms or denies Dylan’s and Cohen’s claims to be poets, is that they achieved what their mentors 6failed to accomplish. They introduced a new audience to the world of poetry, an audience whose horizons were broadened and who contributed to a significant increase in the sales of poetry books. Rexroth acknowledged that “the importance of Dylan is that he is imitated right and left. It is a very important phenomenon that in the new-leisure society of barefoot boys and girls, poetry is dissolving into the community.”[22]

> The 1999 National Poetry Day, October 7, had as one of its principal themes the relation between poetry and song lyrics. Andrew Motion chose as his favorite lyric of all time the opening lines from Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna”: “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet.” (Incidentally, it is also Bono’s favorite line from a Dylan song.[23]) The Poetry Society of Great Britain commissioned Roddy Lumsden to explore the relation between pop lyrics and poetry and between their respective “industries.” The project drew upon the musings of a disparate crowd of commentators, including Motion, who commented on Bob Dylan’s work. The general consensus was that pop lyrics have their own integrity within the much broader texture of music, image, performance, and “attitude.” There are exceptions to the rule, and occasionally a successful lyricist produces words capable of being read and divorced from their texture. In Motion’s view, Bob Dylan is one such exception who does not need to lean on the crutch of his guitar. Despite this, Dylan worked hard at the texture, consciously crafting musical forms to coincide with his obs
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> sion with change.

> Very early in Dylan’s career Robert Shelton, the folk music critic of the New York Times, described him as “one of the musical-poetic geniuses of our time.”[24] The literary critic Frank Kermode caused a stir in the 1960s when he compared Dylan with Keats and Wordsworth.[25] Paul Williams described Dylan’s work as “great art.”[26] Leonard Cohen suggested in 1985 that Dylan “is the Picasso of song,” and in 1988 in an interview in the Musician Magazine, he again likened Dylan to Picasso in his “exuberance, range and assimilation of the whole history of music.”[27]

> The claim that Dylan was a great poet of his generation precipitated a heated debate to which critics and academics contributed. Many academics were disdainful of the claim, suggesting that Dylan was a self-conscious second-rate imitator of Jack Kerouac, who appealed to the feebleminded who knew nothing of poetry. Whatever the merits of the counterclaims, it cannot be denied that Dylan made poetry popular, elevated from its secluded shade in a corner of academia, into the horizon of a new and inquisitive audience, hitherto not renowned for its cultural and artistic discernment. Henrietta Yurchenco argued in 1966 that “if Dylan has done nothing else, he is responsible for the present widespread interest in 7poetry.” She went on to say: “He has given poetry a significance and stature which it has never had in American life. Furthermore, he is a bard—a singing poet in an ancient but thoroughly neglected tradition.”[28] Adrian Rawlings, commenting on Dylan’s 1966 Australian tour, proclaimed that he had rescued poetry from obscurity “in a way that neither Eliot nor Pound nor the American poetry and jazz movement ever could.”[29]

> At about the same time that Bob Dylan was listening to American folk and blues he started reading Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Frank O’Hara. Dylan had come to lyric poetry through Woody Guthrie, who Billy Bragg has suggested is the best American lyric poet since Walt Whitman. In 1960, a friend in Minneapolis, Dave Whitaker, who is credited with having brought about Dylan’s first great transformation, from the reluctant university fraternity boy on the margins of the in crowd to one of the coolest men in town, is most likely to have introduced him to Kerouac and the Beat poets, particularly Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. It was at this time that Dylan read Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, the effect of which was to metamorphose him into a seasoned traveler with an Oklahoma accent, as well as a new past.

> In Greenwich Village the poetic influences were extended. Folk musician Dave Van Ronk stimulated Dylan’s interest in the work of the French symbolists. He particularly liked Rimbaud. Rimbaud was a rebel who wanted to reach a wider popular audience with his poetry, in which he questioned all types of establishment authority, including church and state. Like Woody Guthrie, he almost lived the life of a vagrant and drank very heavily. In addition, Rimbaud indulged heavily in marijuana and opium. He claimed that, in order to transform the poet into a seer or visionary, the senses must become disordered or disturbed by a prolonged process of disorientation. Blake, whom both Ginsberg and Dylan admired, expressed similar sentiments in more restrained terms: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (from Proverbs of Hell). Dylan’s own well-documented drunkenness and excessive abuse of drugs coincide with the development of his abstract, almost surreal, poetic phase, or what he described himself as “hallucination . . . atery” songs. Van Ronk also got him interested in Villiers and Bertholt Brecht. Suze Rotolo, who appears on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
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> n a pose almost identical to that in a photograph of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas on the same New York street, was involved with a group of actors who staged Brecht plays at the Circle in the Square Theatre in Greenwich Village. She helped out by painting the scenery for a production of Brecht on Brecht, and Dylan would go down and watch the six performers rehearsing the poems and the songs Brecht wrote with Kurt Weill. Rotolo has commented that Dylan was most affected by Lotte 8Lenya’s signature song, “Pirate Jenny.”[30] On the album The Times They Are A-Changin’, which includes the beautiful “Boots of Spanish Leather,” a lament on Suze’s lost love, her presence is also indirect: her connection to Brecht is felt in the structure and verse pattern of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” which is based on Brecht’s The Black Freighter.[31]

> Rotolo was widely read and introduced Dylan to such poets as François Villon, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Robert Graves, whom he met in London when the BBC flew Dylan over to appear in Madhouse on Castle Street. Graves wasn’t really interested in a pushy, scruffy little American trying to thrust his poetry under his nose. Dylan was deeply offended and went back to New York, describing Graves as an “old bastard.” Graves, in fact, had been very rude by turning to four musicians and starting a conversation while Dylan was singing “Hollis Brown.”[32]

> Dylan consciously tried to go beyond the rhyming of words that was typical of most song forms. He once said in an interview that he wrote his songs so that they could be read or recited even without the beat or melody.[33] As early as 1963 he found the song form restrictive, a medium through which he felt that he was no longer fully able to express his thoughts and feelings, or in which he could draw upon the wealth of influences to which he had now become exposed. Initially his response was to turn away from song, particularly the finger-pointing genre that was coming to stereotype him. Throughout 1963, but with more intensity during the last two months, which partially coincides with his first meeting with Ginsberg in December of that year, and in early 1964, he increasingly expressed himself in free form verse and prose, rarely revising it, and some of which he published not only on the back of his own albums, such as the “Eleven Outlined Epitaphs” on the sleeve cover of The Times They Are A-Changin’, but also on albums by Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. One of his tributes to poet Dave “Tony” Glover was printed in the program for the 1963 Newport Folk Festival
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> Much of the early work is loosely autobiographical, including his “Life in a Stolen Moment,” printed on the Town Hall concert program, and “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” which he recited as an encore to the concert and culminates in print in his 1966 book Tarantula. In the dust jacket notes by Michael Gray the book is described as “surrealism on speed, a phantasmagoric trip through America.” Scattered throughout are the more readable prose poems in the form of letters, as well as an epitaph, once again to Bob Dylan, starting with “Here lies bob dylan / murdered.”

> Dylan even experimented with writing plays at the end of 1963, as a letter from him to Broadside magazine testifies, and what appears to be a fragment of the utterly unmemorable play he refers to was discovered....

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Good find.