Robert Allen Zimmerman - Poetry Appreciation Bookclub
October 2020
For our October meeting, Col Henry prepared notes and selected poems by Robert Allen Zimmerman; YES Bob Dylan b.1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. Dylan’s record albums sold tens of millions, he wrote more than 500 songs, which have been recorded by thousands of artists and performed all over the world. His last visit to sing in Wollongong (2018) was reviewed in the Illawarra Mercury.
But what about Dylan the poet? After all, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, which was and probably still is quite controversial. Our group took The Times They Are A Changing, Blowin' in the Wind, Like a Rolling Stone, Visions Of Johanna and Lay Lady Lay as representative of his work. Our group’s rough consensus was that Dylan’s works when performed as songs do function well as universal anthems, protest works and so on but neither the music nor the lyrics are outstanding on their own.
Ron Pretty reflected thus on a collection of Martin Johnson's poems called Beautiful Objects: In its introduction, Nadia Wheatley quotes Johnson as saying he was not interested in "committed poetry, or poetry of explicit statement, or particularly in communication." Somewhat different from Dylan's approach. Johnson goes on to say that he was "interested in making things with words...I tend to think of poetry...substantially in terms of beautiful but useless objects." But there are other issues too. Poetry originally was sung (hence the term "lyric"), but how viable today is Dylan's poetry cold on the page without the music? We hold concrete poetry and sound poetry to different standards from page poetry; should we do the same for song lyrics? And does that signal an inferior form, or just a different one? Is it substantially different from performance poetry or rap?
Col reflected that at times it has seemed a line in the sand with zealots on each side claiming ascendency for their cause. Some poetry has stood the test of centuries and is still revered but there is little fame or money in poetry. Songs, particularly pop songs can make a fortune overnight. Although they rely on rhyme it would be stretch to call rap artists poets. However, there have been, and still are artists that stand astride that line in the sand … artists such as Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson. To hear their songs is moving and inspiring but to sit down and read Dylan's words on a page is arguably less so. In particular, Kathleen's rapid and toneless reading of Lay Lady Lay drove the point home to me ... lyrics are only part of a hit song and certainly without the music and his timing, Dylan's poetry was lacking.
Kathleen reckoned Dylan showed no tendency towards feminism and the group conceded that Dylan’s lyrics were sometimes chauvinistic/misogynistic.
Studying Dylan had us discussing the definition of poetry. Col concluded, poetry is a form of literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and often with rhythmic qualities such as phonoaesthetics, sound symbolism, imagery and meter evoking meanings plain or obscure in place of prosaic, ostensible meaning perhaps otherwise too complex or abstract to describe directly.
Col Henry and Jack Oats