It has been so long since I first started writing poetry, that I had almost forgotten why I started to write it. It certainly had everything to do with listening to Bob Dylan, and aspiring to do what he did with words but in a non-musical context. Because I couldn’t write songs, I used to write poems to song melodies and rhyme schemes. This was my way of "being musical", as I regarded myself more a frustrated songwriter than a poet. Writing poetry was for me merely a way to be able to say that I was doing something creatively similar to Dylan. I never saw my early poems as anything other than different lyrics to his melodies.
Looking back, I realise that this was my only enjoyable period in poetry. After I started to write poems “seriously”, and tried to get them published, and performed them at local readings, all the enjoyment began to fade. Like most pleasures, once you start to see it as a “business” then all its charm diminishes.
I was quite content to write such poetry and not have it seen by anyone, which is what I did for a while. But after having read some 19th century poetry by Browning, Tennyson, Coleridge etc., as well as some contemporary mainstream poetry, I was surprised to find that none of it was as rich in interpretive possibilities as Dylan’s lyrics were.
This led to my appreciating even more the genius of Dylan. The only poets who matched Dylan for me were Blake, Dickinson and Eliot. I also read Rimbaud, to see if he was as good (seeing as Dylan liked him) but apart from a few phrases here and there, he wasn’t. I also read Ginsberg and Kerouac, again because Dylan liked them. Of the two, I found Kerouac’s poetry more similar to Dylan than Ginsberg’s was—apart from Ginsberg’s Howl, which is very Kerouac in parts.
Finding out that nearly all the poetry I’d read wasn’t as good as Dylan’s lyrics, was a major revelation to me, and motivated me to find out why this was the case. So I read as much about poetry and its history as I could, but still could not come up with a sufficiently plausible answer. Eventually, I decided to go to university and do a degree in English Literature, thinking that this more rigorous and advanced study might reveal some answers. It did, and these answers led me to embark on a PhD course, and later to start The Argotist Online.
I eventually found that there was poetry out there that was as good as Dylan regarding his use of ambiguity and multi-textuality, but what it had of those elements, it lacked in emotional resonance. Such poetry was often associated with various postmodernist styles of writing, and as such tended to prioritise formal dexterity and novelty above emotion. This avoidance of emotion, particularly regarding the themes of love and loss, appears rooted in a theoretical understanding, that sees emotional expression as theoretically contentious and "unsophisticated".
Though I have borrowed a lot from postmodernism in my own poetry, I have never followed it down the “no emotion” road. Maybe other poets have done and are doing the same. I welcome that, if it is the case.
