Poetry and Music

WEEK 6

Bob Dylan, the Beats and the secret of nothing

Exhibition of ‘Invisible Art’ at the Hayward Gallery, London, 2012.

The exhibition included Andy Warhol's ‘Invisible Sculpture’ (1985) which consists of an empty plinth on which he had once briefly stepped, an exploration of the nature of celebrity. ‘1,000 Hours of Staring’, is a blank piece of paper at which artist Tom Friedman has stared repeatedly over five years. The same artist produced ‘Untitled (A Curse)’, an empty space which has been cursed by a witch.

Archibald MacLeish (1892 – 1982)Writing poetry is “knocking on silence for an answering sound.”

Bob Dylan waves to Allen Ginsberg, Woodstock, N. Y., 1964

Arthur Rimbaud, by Jean-Louis Forain (1872)

“I came across one of his letters called ‘Je est un autre,’ which translates into ‘I is someone else.’ When I read those words the bells went off. It made

perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier.”— Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol. One (2004)

Jack Kerouac (‘the hobos’ prophet’), Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Allen GinsbergThe 4 horseman of the bop apocalypse, extract from the Sunday People, 1960

Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969)

Woody Guthrie, 1912 - 1967

Bob Dylan, early 1960s

Jack Kerouac listens to himself on the radio. Photographed by John Cohen in 1959.

(Cf. Howl: “…listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox”

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, 1964

Dylan and Ginsberg visit Kerouac’s grave, Lowell Massachusetts, 1979. Ginsberg recited poetryfrom Mexico City Blues invoking specters, fatigue, mortality, Mexico, and John Steinbeck’s boxcar America. Dylan told him “someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959, it blew my mind.”

“…traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn’t need to be protected. Nobody’s going to get hurt. In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. But like anything else in great demand, people try to own it. It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy.”

— from Nat Hentoff interview with Bob Dylan, Playboy magazine, 1966

Bob Dylan and the Band, gate-fold sleeve of ‘The Basement Tapes’

The Castafiore Emerald — the twenty-first of The Adventures of Tintin.Conceived by Hergé as a narrative exercise, the cartoonist wanted to see if hecould maintain suspense throughout sixty-two pages of story with no villains,locations, guns or danger, and with a clearly deceptive solution. Consequentlyit is a story rich in comic setpieces, red herrings, mistaken interpretations,false tracks, pseudo-disappearances, and colourful characters.

Lenny Bruce (1925 – 1966)