Bob Dylan

Listen to me, laureate poets

move only among plants

with rarely used names: boxwood, privet or acanthus.

As for me, I love roads that lead to grassy

ditches where in half-dried

puddles boys catch

a stray eel or two

(Eugenio Montale, from "I limoni")

There were locusts, that day. Their song in the distance was sweeter than any praise.

In June 1970, Princeton University awarded an honorary degree ad honorem to Bob Dylan. It was only the first of the academic honors that would punctuate the American songwriter's career. And perhaps precisely for this reason Dylan felt the need to recount that day in a song. He called it "Day Of The Locusts": a scorching-hot nightmare in which the only way out seems to be flight.

"When my turn came to accept the diploma, the speaker introducing me said more or less that I had distinguished myself in carminibus canendis," Dylan recalls in the first volume of his autobiography, "Chronicles". Then the speaker added that Dylan continued to be "the authentic voice of the disturbed and engaged conscience of Young America". "I almost jumped. A shiver ran through me, but I kept a straight face. The disturbed conscience of Young America! I couldn't believe it. I'd been had again. He could have said any number of things, he could have at least made some mention of my music."

Almost fifty years have passed since then, and Dylan has by now received every kind of award. Grammys, an Oscar, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, even the Pulitzer. And now, the Nobel Prize in Literature. Who knows whether he still hears the song of the locusts. Who knows whether he still thinks they could have at least mentioned his music. On the day of the announcement, Dylan walked on stage in Las Vegas and, as he does every night, opened with "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35". Of the Nobel, needless to say, not a word. The Swedish Academy reported that it had been unable to get in touch with the winner. Dylan is always Dylan.

Not that awards mean nothing to him. He has never turned one down, including the Princeton diploma: "I needed it. However you looked at it, touched it or smelled it, it conveyed respectability and held some trace of the spirit of the universe." In 2012, in a lengthy interview with Rolling Stone, Mikal Gilmore asked him who he accepted all his honors for: "I accept them for myself, and only for myself. I don't see them in any other light, and I don't spend much time thinking about them."

There's a good deal of vanity and a sense of vindication in receiving the academic world's stamp of approval: things the Dylanian ego has always had a soft spot for. Which doesn't necessarily mean, however, that he's genuinely interested in them. Not as much as in music, anyway.

Within minutes of the news of the Nobel award, controversy immediately flooded the web. What does Bob Dylan have to do with the Nobel Prize in Literature? Barack Obama versus Jonathan Franzen, Alessandro Baricco versus Francesco De Gregori. In other words, yet another rehashing of the old dispute: is Bob Dylan a poet or not? It's hard to believe such a question could still seem topical: as Alessandro Carrera wrote in his "La voce di Bob Dylan", "the question itself induces a sense of boredom, gives off a whiff of the mid-1960s, conjures up a lost world of ill-informed journalists and contemptuous commentators". The perfect raw material, in short, to keep social media busy with some endless dispute.

The fact is that this risks missing the point entirely. Do we really need to say that Dylan's songs are poetry in order to grant artistic dignity to popular music? Isn't there, deep down, an unspoken sense of inferiority even in the proclamations of those who staunchly defend the literary value of Dylanesque verse? The prizes are welcome, if they serve to reaffirm that a songwriter is not a mere entertainer. After all, this isn't the first time the Nobel Prize for Literature has revealed its blurred boundaries (nor is it immune to the temptations of media spectacle). But if awarding the Nobel to Dylan is meant to imply that song can only be considered art insofar as it resolves into literature, then it would end up being less an achievement than an abdication.

Dylan himself, for his part, has never truly considered himself a poet. "My poems are written in a rhythm of unpoetic distortion," he wrote in the liner notes to "Bringing It All Back Home." "A poem is a naked person (…) some people say that I am a poet." "Wordsworth and Shelley are poets. Ginsberg is a poet. I'm not a poet," he added even more explicitly around the release of "Time Out Of Mind." And in one of the famous 1965 interviews, answering directly the fateful question ("Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or a poet?"), he unveiled one of his typical riddle-like revelations: "I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man." Once again, we come back to the same question: what if, in reality, the Dylan-as-poet equation (or the song-as-literature equation) were nothing more than the easiest possible reduction?

If Dylan is a poet, he is strictly a self-taught one. To borrow Montale's words, he stands on the side of the puddles, not the acanthus flowers: however many prizes he may be awarded, the label of poet laureate will never suit him. His is a writing made of "love and theft," of passionate, brazen appropriation, whether drawing on folk ballads or the verses of Rimbaud. On "Love And Theft" he drew liberally on Junichi Saga's "Confessions of a Yakuza," and on "Modern Times" on the poems of Henry Timrod. But what academics call plagiarism is, for him, simply the method around which the entire folk tradition has always revolved: "Anybody can do it but me," he snapped in 2012, again speaking to Rolling Stone. "Who's ever heard of Henry Timrod? Who's read him lately? Who's brought him to anyone's attention? If you think you can just take a line from him and it's plagiarism, then good luck to you..."

The heart of the matter had already been identified, well before it became a fashionable topic, by Alessandro Carrera, in the interview he gave to OndaRock on the occasion of Dylan's seventieth birthday: "I'd have nothing against seeing the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Dylan, but why exactly should he receive it? If there were a Nobel Prize for gesture, for voice, for stage presence, for the fusion of voice, text and music — in short, for the art of performance — then welcome Fo and Dylan, or perhaps even Caetano Veloso, but literature is another matter entirely. (…) Giving Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature would deny what is his main and absolutely unique characteristic, that is, his profound orality, the fact that everything Dylan does is a voice, comes from the voice and returns to the voice. (…) A literature prize would reduce him to being a poet not even much better than other poets, overshadowing what is truly his contribution: having created an art that is often built on an outright revolt against writing."

It's no coincidence, then, that Sara Danius, announcing on behalf of the Swedish Academy that the Nobel Prize for Literature had gone to Dylan, cited Homer and the Greek lyric poets, "who wrote texts that were meant to be performed, often together with instruments." Dylan belongs to the lineage of the bards, the rhapsodes, the troubadours. His is the realm of oral tradition: the poetry of the voice, before it is ever the poetry of the written word. These are forms of expression that, without even needing to invoke Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic studies, simply cannot be superimposed on one another. Because orality is made not only of words, but also of breath, intonation, rhythm, physical presence. All components inseparable — every bit as much as the music — from that most peculiar of art forms: the song.

Dylan has always been more aware of this than many of his interpreters: "I work within my art form," he stated plainly. "I work within the rules and limitations of that form. It's the art of songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then the words fill in the rest. Once that happens, everything becomes your own." An art that Dylan learned from the folk tradition, where song is built from formulas, archetypes, repetitions: the typical ingredients of orality.

As Tom Waits said, commenting on the Nobel news, "before poems and epics were written down they migrated on the winds of the human voice, and no voice is greater than Dylan's." "Some people they tell me/ I got the blood of the land in my voice," Dylan might reply, quoting the lyrics to his own "I Feel A Change Comin' On." A voice that precedes the word, a voice made of dust and soot, of shadows carrying within them the memory of an entire mythic universe. Does anyone truly care whether it's worth more or less than literature?

In the end, it's not a matter of hierarchy, but only of calling: "We all have a calling, don't we? Some are called to something grand, some to something humble. My calling is no different from anyone else's. Some are called to be good sailors, others to be good farmers, others to be good friends. What matters is giving your best at whatever you're called to do, whatever it is you have to do."

The tracks that follow are nothing more than this: testimony to the calling of a voice that comes from the blood of the earth. Not with the more or less idle intent of proving whether Bob Dylan truly deserves the Nobel, but in an attempt to find (even among the less overexposed pages of his vast songbook) traces of that certain quid the Swedish academics wished to honor: the ability to create "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

Gates Of Eden

In the beginning there was the folk song. But to bring great art into a jukebox, to borrow Allen Ginsberg's words, it took the earthquake that was "Bringing It All Back Home." An earthquake made not only of electricity, but of an entirely new language for popular music. "Gates Of Eden" is pure beat poetry, with all its excesses and all its visionary force. Aladdin and William Blake, cowboy angels and golden calves, in a gallery that anticipates the even more torrential one found in "Desolation Row." In search of some beyond capable of unveiling the key to the mystery of reality: because there are no truths outside the gates of Eden.

The kingdoms of Experience

In the precious wind they rot

While paupers change possessions

Each one wishing for what the other has got

And the princess and the prince

Discuss what’s real and what is not

It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden

 Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)

Arthur Rimbaud, the poet who made himself a seer, is the guardian spirit par excellence of "Blonde On Blonde." Dylan's verse, though, has always been steeped in Symbolist suggestions. Especially on "Street Legal," one of those controversial chapters from the Seventies that only belatedly found critical reappraisal. "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)," the album's closing track, is a gallop that draws more or less directly on Rimbaud's "Illuminations" (and in particular on the structure of "Enfance"), stringing together neon reflections, dark prophecies and paths leading straight to the stars.

The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure

To live it you have to explode

In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed

Sacrifice was the code of the road

 Brownsville Girl

What will remain of Dylan's dylanian Eighties? The albums of the "Christian trilogy," certainly (with "Every Grain Of Sand" as its peak), but also a string of unexpected treasures scattered across otherwise mediocre albums like "Knocked Out Loaded". Such is the case of "Brownsville Girl" ("New Danville Girl" in its first draft, with an explicit nod to the ballad also performed by Woody Guthrie). A song that fuses the temporal deconstruction explored in "Tangled Up In Blue" with the narrative cut of a film script (unsurprisingly, the fruit of a collaboration with playwright Sam Shepard). The result is an enigmatic, meta-cinematic spiral, revolving around an old Gregory Peck film, "The Gunfighter", like a kind of long, fable-spinning western.

Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head

But I can't remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play

All I remember about it was Gregory Peck and the way people moved

And a lot of them seemed to be lookin’ my way

 Highlands

"Time Out Of Mind" marked another decisive turning point in the metamorphosis of Dylan's songwriting. His writing increasingly centers on the juxtaposition of short epigrams, each with a life of its own: "gnomic poetry," as American critic David Mikics called it, verses made of "fragments of mysterious wisdom," echoes of a style "portentous and dark." But the more than sixteen minutes of frayed blues that make up "Highlands" are something more: an interior monologue, a dreamlike stream of consciousness that erases time and space, in which the verses of Scottish poet Robert Burns become the allegory of another place. A place where one no longer feels like a "prisoner in a world of mystery".

Well my heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam

That’s where I’ll be when I get called home

The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme

Well my heart’s in the Highlands

I can only get there one step at a time

 Ain't Talkin'

The Bible is everywhere in Dylan's songs. In the sermons of "John Wesley Harding" and the hallucinations of "Highway 61 Revisited", in the apocalyptic visions of "Infidels" and the timeless chronicles of "Tempest". "Ain't Talkin'", placed as the closing seal of "Modern Times", is a pilgrimage through a mystic garden that has more to do with the thorns of Gethsemane than the fruits of Eden. On the threshold of the end of the world, there seems to be no trace of the gardener in the desolate garden. Has God abandoned man, as T.S. Eliot might ask, or has man abandoned God? Dylan answers by silently resuming his walk through the mysterious sabbath of time in which human existence is fulfilled. This is what pilgrims have always done.

Ain't talkin', just walkin'

Through the world mysterious and vague

Heart burnin', still yearnin'

Walking through the cities of the plague

Ride the wave of great music

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