A SIGNIFICANT poetry body with a network of members across the US is hoping that America’s foremost singer-songwriter will accept an invitation to be inducted into its organisation.
The National Beat Poetry Foundation, based in Connecticut, is striving to enrol Bob Dylan as one of its Lifetime Beat Poet Laureates, recognising that the artist has not only exhibited a decades-long interest in the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti but is seen himself as a writer of important verse framed within his vast collection of acclaimed lyrics.
The foundation is hardly the first to draw attention to Dylan’s skill as a wordsmith. He was, of course, presented with a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, joining a remarkable gallery of novelists, poets and dramatists from Eliot to Hemingway, Steinbeck to Sartre, Camus to Lessing, Beckett to Pinter.
But Dylan’s embrace of Beat poetry from Mexico City Blues to ‘Howl’ and A Coney Island of the Mind as a young man in Minneapolis and then New York City became a guiding artistic beacon as he moved from fêted folksinger to political commentator and on to a more abstract and psychologically complex form of musical expression in the mid-1960s.
The NBPF, established in 2016, is keen to celebrate both Beat originals and new generations of writers and creatives who have tapped into the artistic legacy. Recent inductees have included poets Anne Waldman and Ron Whitehead, actor Johnny Depp, musician David Amram and Neal Cassady’s daughter Jami Cassady Ratto.
The registered charity promotes its cause and its representatives by ‘fostering joint partnerships for Beat-themed poetry readings, workshops, plays, radio shows and much more, locally, across the United States and worldwide.’
Deborah Tosun Kilday, the Founder and Chief Executive of the poetry group, has now set in motion a personal invitation to Dylan himself. She had hoped to secure an impromptu meeting with the singer to share the proposal when he appeared at the Palace Theater, Waterbury, CT, at the weekend.
She even intended to hand on a brass plaque celebrating the connection in advance, but she will now forward the membership engraving to Dylan’s office in the hope this idea can be considered and advanced in the coming weeks.
Pictured above: Dylan’s NBPF membership plaque…but awaiting confirmation
Deborah Tosun Kilday, speaking exclusively to Rock and the Beat Generation, said that she had long-held ambitions to bring Dylan into the Beat Laureate fold. The artist’s live appearance at a nearby venue prompted her to pursue the possibility of face-to-face encounter.
She was able to secure seats very close to the stage, explaining: ‘Once the concert started, I took the award out and held it under my chin. I then proceeded to, ever so gently, moving back in full so the brass plate would catch the light. As soon as I did that I got Bob Dylan’s attention. He kept staring my way and he smiled.’
‘When the concert was almost over, I then stood I myself, held up the plaque and pointed to him and then to the award. He noticed. A little later, I spoke to one of the stage managers who confirmed that Dylan was curious.’ But a post-show backstage conversation proved impossible to secure.
She now hopes that that Dylan will have sight of the NBPF membership plaque via his office and further discussions might ensue to confirm his official induction into the organisation.
An organization striving for "beat' prestige by attempting to add Dylan ...there's something fundamentally indecent about that... considering that the spirit of rebellion , anarchy,
and anti-institutionalism animated the Beats and early Dylan there's an absurdity and a wrong-headedness about the whole project of anointing beat"laureates" that somehow violates the existential purity of what Ginsberg et al.did back then.One driving force behind Dylan's shape shifting is the recognition that fame, honors,official recognitions ,and especially labels are a trap that can interfere and inhibit the artist/creator. Give the founder points for honesty though-She says in her mission statement that she founded this organization because she failed in establishing herself as a poet through the usual corrupt channels. But why create a farcical replica of those structures?... I respect her ambition and drive but I suspect my respect when I remember
Yeats -"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".
I suppose we are back in Groucho Marx territory: ‘I wouldn’t be a member of any club that would have me!’ But Dylan, did, after all, accept a Nobel Prize after a judicious pause. I do agree that we don’t associate the Beats with organised bureaucracies but, for me, I just enjoy the crossovers that can arise with that literary community of writers as a linking fulcrum. Like Ed Ruscha, Pop artist and Kerouac fan, doing the Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’ cover.