Has it already been 7 years since Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, of all things?

The award if you recall felt out of left-field not only because, you know, Bob Dylan was a recording artist, not an author per se, but because it came only 8 years after the Nobel Lit. committee announced that there were no plans to award an American in the near future, considering out literature to be too “provincial”. The pull of Boomer nostalgia crosses national partisanship, I suppose (heaven knows that award wasn’t intended to try and get young people interested in literature…)

Perhaps the most predominant response I saw on social media to Bob Dylan’s Nobel for Lit. were (generally unfavorable) comparisons to John Ashbery, of all people, e.g. “Look, Dylan’s fine, but he’s no Ashbery” or “So when does Ashbery win a Grammy?” and etc. Implicit in these responses is the argument that Dylan, as a song-writer, is not a poet, that he writes in a completely different genre. (Certainly it seemed to do a disservice to all the actual poets out there fighting for sheer survival in a severely desiccated and fractured publishing hell-scape).

However, though I was largely sympathetic to the plight of the modern writer, these jokes about Ashberry and Dylan were complicated by the fact that Ashbery himself blurs the lines between genres; for example, his 1972 work “Three Poems” is a collection of extended, book-length prose meditations–“prose-poems” we now call ’em, but usually folks just call them essays. In fact, I’m willing to bet a number of critics would still dispute whether they should be called “Poems,” so much do they resemble straight-prose. 

 But that’s exactly the nomenclature that Ashbery is questioning with the title “Three Poems”: can any text be read as a poem as long we label it as such? How does genre influence our engagement with a text? Why can’t song-lyrics be read as straight poetry? Was not ancient epic poetry sung? Was not Beowulf? How do we even define “poetry” nowadays, anyways? We are a long, long way out from meters and rhyme-schemes.

Heck, our own theology complicates these questions! Are not the Psalms (which were just songs, after all) treated as prophetic scripture by the New Testament Apostles, after all–in a manner they were never treated in the original Torah? Is not the “song of the righteous is a prayer unto me” per D&C 25:12–and do we not consider prayers a conduit to revelation? Does not our own Alma 5:26 ask if you can “sing the song of redeeming love,” as though a song were a bona fide spiritual manifestation? We sometimes call 2 Nephi 5 “the Psalm of Nephi,” or the repetition of “O ye fair ones!” in the Lament of Mormon, but seriously, have we ever seriously asked how much of the Book of Mormon (arising, we claim, from the same ancient Milieu that produced the Psalms and the Torah) is actually supposed to be sung?

Don’t get me wrong, I still think Bob Dylan’s Nobel was kinda silly: the man certainly doesn’t lack for recognition, and I generally prefer the Nobel goes to folks who do (e.g. as happened with Samuel Beckett and William Faulkner). Nevertheless, John Ashbery–not to mention the Book of Mormon–deeply complicates these questions, not clarifies them.