Don't think twice, it's all right: Bob Dylan wins Nobel literature prize
Fans of the legendary troubadour Bob Dylan are celebrating after the news that their hero has been awarded the Nobel prize in literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Dylan had been chosen because he was "a great poet in the English-speaking tradition". He is the first songwriter to win the award.
The former UK poet laureate, Sir Andrew Motion, quoted in the Guardian, said: “This is a wonderful acknowledgement of Dylan’s genius: for 50 and some years he has bent, coaxed, teased and persuaded words into lyric and narrative shapes that are at once extraordinary and inevitable.” US president Barack Obama said on Twitter that the honour was well deserved: "Congratulations to one of my favourite poets."
Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, adopted the name of Bob Dylan when he started playing in New York folk clubs at the beginning of his career, and later said he had been influenced by the poetry of Dylan Thomas. As his fame grew he often resisted accolades, and once insisted that Tamla Motown star Smokey Robinson was “America's greatest living poet”.
He was friends with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who toured with Dylan in the 1970s. In 1985 Dylan was quoted as saying: “I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected. It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti … I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.”
In 1997, in New Brunswick, Canada, Dylan dedicated a concert performance of his song Desolation Row – which includes the lines “Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, fighting in the captain’s tower” - ” to Ginsberg, on the evening after Ginsberg died. In 2011 an anthology to mark Dylan’s 70th birthday, The Captain’s Tower, containing tributes from 70 poets, including Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Paul Muldoon, was published.
Previous winners of the Nobel prize in literature have included Tomas Tranströmer (2011), Seamus Heaney (1995), Derek Walcott (1992), Pablo Neruda (1971), TS Eliot (1948), WB Yeats (1923), and Rudyard Kipling (1907).
M.C. Newberry
Sat 15th Oct 2016 17:19
Pete Seeger's Wikipedia entry explains much, mentioning
the circumstances of the Bob Dylan/electric guitar saga
and his own part...wanting the words to be heard but
being told by the sound engineer that it was what was
wanted there. His social equality activities and songs
laid the ground for what was to come and he kept these
going right up to and including his 9th decade. A man
who was unafraid to confront the Macarthy hearings and
challenge their right to override the Constitution in their
demands of those who appeared before them. In so
many ways, a remarkable man who led the way that
others followed.
"Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" still resonates in my
own mind as strongly as "Blowing in the Wind".