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Dark Sarcasm In The Classroom
Bob Dylan. American bard, universal influence. After 40 years, his lyrics will now be taught in secondary schools throughout Britain. As always, there are voices of dissent.
Is Bob Dylan poet enough? Is he deep enough? Naked enough? His lyrics; are they actually songs or are they poetry? What is a poem? Who is a Poet? Who decides?
Ask William Wordsworth. Sorry he died sometime back. Andrew Motion says Dylan is a poet. However, Motion’s endorsement is not enough. Just one drunken poetic slur from an English pub. Please do not ask William Shakespeare. You know he did not really write all his plays. He stole them from Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson. Ask Marlowe, sorry he vanished on the twelfth night after writing Romeo and Juliet. Scottish Poet John Burnside agrees that Dylan is a poet. One more endorsement. Let’s ask Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud. Knocking on the family vault at Charleville in France produces an answer in flowing free verse that no one can decipher. Something about having one leg and typhoid. Makes no sense. Is Bob Dylan a poet? One last shot, one for the road. Greenwich Village in Manhattan. Dylan Thomas and a hunchback are drinking whiskey sour on the rocks. Dylan’s too dead and too drunk to comment. The hunchback, just stupid. And on and on it goes, gently into the night.
Fact is, you don’t need Rimbaud, Wordsworth, Dylan or the proverbial genius presently trying to write the sequel to ‘Dude Where’s My Car?’You just need yourself.
And Bob Dylan.
“Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.”
Or
“The flowers of the city Though breathlike, get deathlike at times
And there’s no use in tryin’
to deal with the dyin’
Though I cannot explain that in lines”
There are a million more lines. Read Bob Dylan. Forget the tunes. Reach out for an elusive image; catch a story, ride a rainbow. Why? Because no one tells it like Bob Dylan does and because the times they are a changin’
When will Bob Dylan be introduced to schools in America?
The question is purely academic. The answer lies somewhere in a back alley on desolation row where our crumbling public school system is buried.
Like Bob Dylan once said, “it’s blowing in the wind.”
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