Timbaland - Bounce
Several years back I was involved in a conversation on the poetry of Bob Dylan with two other men, one a lesser-known professor of comparative literature and the other a Ford Foundation Poetry Grant recipient with a drinking problem and a bad case of writer’s block (but fantastic penmanship—truly stunning; the best I’ve ever seen). Precocious though I may have been I was thoroughly unqualified to be serving any substantive role in this discussion, but was nonetheless waived through the velvet ropes of academic credentialism either because a.) we were sharing stools at the same bar, a site of customary conversational amiability, or b.) both of these men were middle-aged and gay and could be said to have situated their respective objets petit a in the locus of my middle regions (one would regularly offer to take me shoe shopping, his treat; the other inquired on more than one occasion if I had any interest in meeting at his apartment to speak at greater length over scotch about the perceived homosexual undercurrents in the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick, likely hoping we might reenact the closing paragraph of chapter 12). We were speaking in particular about the recent publication of Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Vision of Sin, and weighing the historical implications of such a renowned literary critic tackling Dylan’s oeuvre just as he might Auden’s. The poet cited Dylan’s obsession with Rimbaud, denied the exclusivity of poetry and pop music, noted the singed nature of Homeric verse, and suggested Dylan was probably more Heideggerian than any of us knew. The professor, who had a vested career interest in promoting the nominative supremacy of the Ivory Tower, suggested that even the finest art would be forgotten if a critic never wrote about it. Either way, everyone was in agreement that Dylan was rightly being recognized for his poetry.
I’d like to float the idea that “like your ass had the hiccups/ like we was riding in my pickup” might be the finest poetry since “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness/ Thou foster-child of silence and slow time”.
(langer)
