[Buddha-l] On Dylan and Poetry (was "Greetings from Oviedo")

[Franz Metcalf]

Gang,

Great good wishes and re-bienvenidos to Benito!

But, speaking of differences with the moderator of buddha-l....

Richard wrote,

> When Dylan was reminding Americans of how they had failed to live up 
> to the dreams of some of the founders of the country, he was 
> unsurpassed as a lyricist. No one could dispute that. Unfortunately, 
> he eventually forgot all about drawing our attention to the tragedy of 
> post-war (and here I mean the American Revolution) America and 
> wandered into a kind of solepsistic logorrhea that failed entirely to 
> speak to the conditions of the world.

Oh, really?

When, during the first Gulf War, and Dylan played live at the Oscars or 
Emmys (or some show in front of tens of millions of Americans), and he 
sang "Masters of War," was he out of touch with conditions, or was it 
the first President Bush? Let me help out by quoting just one stanza of 
that song:

> You that fasten all the triggers for the others to fire
> Then you sit back and watch while the death count gets higher
> You hide in your mansions while the young people's blood
> Flows out of their bodies and gets buried in the mud.

It may be I am hopelessly (or hopefully) naive, but I am quite certain 
Dylan would enjoy singing the same song before an audience of millions, 
right now, as we endure the second Gulf War and the second President 
Bush.

Perhaps, Richard, you missed "Neighborhood Bully." I reckon Dan 
Lusthaus knows that one. It may be that most folks don't get the 
layered irony of "Most of the Time." I believe the Buddha would have, 
and would have enjoyed it--as Dylan surely intended--as an index of the 
anicca of relationships. I could go on, but I hope you reconsider 
having written off Mr. Zimmerman in 1967. It's been some time since 
then and he's grown a stitch or two. Hey, I don't like "Blonde on 
Blonde," either, but that doesn't mean I don't see some real wisdom in 
what came after. "Blood on the Tracks," "Infidels," and "Time Out of 
Mind," to name just three of many albums, lay out the reality of the 
good ol' USA and we who live in it in some deeply moving music--or so 
it seems to me. Have we not all published a clunker, at least once? Did 
you give up on the poor fellow after one bad album? (One which, I 
should add, for the record, though I strongly disagree, many critics 
call brilliant.)

We all seem to agree that Dylan is a poet. We don't, I think, all agree 
on what poetry is or does. Richard wrote,

> The vast majority of poets have no idea what they are saying. If even 
> they cannot understand their words, how can anyone else? And why waste 
> the time trying to make sense of nonsense?

I trust Richard is intentionally provoking us, here, and knows It is 
not the job of a poet to know exactly what he or she is saying. It is 
the job of a poet to make powerful utterances that shape language into 
beauty. Great poets manage also to know what they are saying and to say 
what they know as they accomplish their primary task, but, in my view, 
this ability is secondary. W.H. Auden (who could do all the above) once 
wrote (in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"),

    For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
    In the valley of its making where executives
    Would never want to tamper...

Richard's logocentric rhetorical questions suggest that Auden is right 
that executives of logic would not and perhaps should not want to 
tamper with poetry. A person who seriously asks of poetry, "why waste 
the time trying to make sense" of it, makes a kind of category error, 
treating poetry as argument. Poetry is seldom argument but by 
happenstance. Sure, for example, Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" 
has an argument, but the power of that argument comes from its art. The 
argument is simple, even hackneyed; yet that argument has moved 
millions because of its sound, its imagery, and its form. And that is 
the exception, in my reading. The rule is that poetry evokes rather 
than defines, moves rather than convinces.

But I belabor the obvious. We all know all this, Richard included. We 
agree that Dylan was a smart social observer; some of us think he 
continues to be. But to listen to Dylan to keep up on the cutting edge 
of political critique is a misuse of our valuable time. It always was. 
Listen to Dylan because he moves you musically, or don't listen at all.

Cheers,

Franz Metcalf