For inspiration I listen to Dylan while reconstructing fossils.Playwright Sam Shepard has pondered Dylan’s original gifts from time to time:
Nick Longrich, Discover December 2010
Watch the transformational energy which he carries... the kind that brings courage and hope and above all brings life pounding to the foreground... it’s no wonder he can rock the nation.
Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook
What is this strange, haunted environment he creates on stage, on record, on film, on everything he touches? What world is he drawing from and drawing us all on as a result? It is right here in front of us but no one can touch it.Dylan’s contribution to poetry, music and the muse within us all garners critical acclaim merged with urgent gratitude.
Sam Shepard, No Direction Home
Dylan reminds me of an American Brecht, the Brecht whose poems were meant to be sung. There is the same cold humor, the same ironic warmth, the same violent and splintered imagery, the same urgent idiomatic involvement in the way things actually are.... Dylan returned poetry to song.
John Clellon Holmes, Books 1965
By leaving things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him. His song becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we listen, if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most democratic form of creation.Dylan’s instinctive distinction between polity and poetry has fed the sensibilities of many a fan. A distant poet forebear of the bard understood this well.
Pete Hamill, Blood on the Tracks liner notes 1974
Yes, Art is independent of Morals and politics, Philosophy and Science.... The end of Poetry is beauty, Beauty alone, pure Beauty, with no alloy of Usefulness, Truth or Justice.Dylan, world class icon, has reminded us to be thankful for pleasure large and small:
Paul Verlaine in his 1865 study of Charles Baudelaire
People don’t value their obscurity. They don’t know what it’s like to have it taken away.He respects the demands on his dueling spheres of expertise:
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home
The writing part is a very lonely experience, but there’s strength in that loneliness. But I’m a performer too, and that’s an outward thing. One is the opposite of the other, and it makes me crazy sometimes because I can’t write with the energy I perform with. I can’t perform with the energy I write with. There just has to be time for both.Today let us eat, drink and appreciate the appreciators of beauty, unpretentious and unabashed.
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home
Happy Thanksgiving.
Photo of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg by Elsa Dorlman, GNU Free Documentation License
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