Overview

Through short essays, leading poetry critics and Bob Dylan experts analyze songs from a range of perspectives to illuminate the songs’ poetic and literary character. An innovative resource for Bob Dylan fans and scholars alike, these thirty essays by leading scholars of poetry, music, and literature illustrate how and why the work of the 2016 Nobel Literature Laureate is in fact so literary. Examining how Dylan’s lyrics shape or get shaped by vocalization, performance, instrumentation, film, recording technologies, and the forces of history unfolding around him, this collection models a range of ways to understand the songs as poetical phenomena by answering questions like: How can we read and understand Dylan’s lyrics as poetry? How do those lyrics build on, dialogue with, and expand the poetic tradition? How does Dylan’s style change over time while both pushing and responding to changes in the world of popular music? Collecting archival research, close reading, musical analysis, and various modes of cultural criticism under one cover, The Poetry of Bob Dylan: Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs stakes a claim to Dylan’s central place in the history of American poetry.

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9798765124185

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Reviews

In The Poetry of Bob Dylan, editor Mike Chasar has gathered thirty virtuosic readings of individual Dylan songs by leading scholars in the fields of poetry and poetics, sound studies, and popular culture. In illuminating what the Nobel prize committee calls Dylan’s “poetic expressions,” these smart and engaging analytical essays move beyond the fantasy of poetry as a detached page-bound relic. Instead, they provide us with a guide to the multiple ways we listen to, store, playback—and play with—literary objects. Appropriate for both long-time researchers and readers new to these fields, this book is a key entry in the study of Bob Dylan’s work and a powerful introduction to the expanded literary field of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. * John Melillo, Associate Professor of English, University of Arizona, USA * The Poetry of Bob Dylan constitutes a much-needed literary reckoning with specific important works from across Dylan’s working life as a writer. These thirty brief essays, carefully composed by thirty different literary scholars concerning thirty distinct songs, speak not only to a new generation of Dylan students and listeners but also to the future—a future that will relate to these songs as the artistic creations of a great poet. * Robert Boschman, Professor of American Literature, Mount Royal University, Canada *

Author Information

Mike Chasar is Professor of English at Willamette University, USA. He is the author of Poetry Unbound: Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram (2020) and Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (2012).

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