Poetry and Music

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Poetry and Music WEEK 6 Bob Dylan, the Beats
and the secret of nothing
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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.
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Archibald MacLeish (1892
1982) Writing poetry is knocking on silence for
an answering sound.
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Bob Dylan waves to Allen Ginsberg, Woodstock, N.
Y., 1964
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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)
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Jack Kerouac (the hobos prophet), Gregory
Corso, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg The 4
horseman of the bop apocalypse, extract from the
Sunday People, 1960
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Jack Kerouac (1922 1969)
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Woody Guthrie, 1912 - 1967
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Bob Dylan, early 1960s
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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
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Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, 1964
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Dylan and Ginsberg visit Kerouacs grave, Lowell
Massachusetts, 1979. Ginsberg recited poetry from
Mexico City Blues invoking specters, fatigue,
mortality, Mexico, and John Steinbecks boxcar
America. Dylan told him someone handed
me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959, it blew
my mind.
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traditional music is too unreal to die. It
doesnt need to be protected. Nobodys 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
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Bob Dylan and the Band, gate-fold sleeve of The
Basement Tapes
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The Castafiore Emerald the twenty-first of The
Adventures of Tintin. Conceived by Hergé as a
narrative exercise, the cartoonist wanted to see
if he could maintain suspense throughout
sixty-two pages of story with no
villains, locations, guns or danger, and with a
clearly deceptive solution. Consequently it is a
story rich in comic setpieces, red herrings,
mistaken interpretations, false tracks,
pseudo-disappearances, and colourful characters.
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Lenny Bruce (1925 1966)