Dylan news from all over

NYT; Dylan, Master Poet?

"Christopher Ricks, the newly elected professor of poetry at Oxford, is also the Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University, where he has a large and elegantly furnished office overlooking Storrow Drive, and he bikes to it every day from his house in Cambridge. The bookshelves contain a complete vellum-bound set of Johnson's "Lives of the Poets" and copies of the many books Mr. Ricks has himself written or edited — books about Keats, Milton, Beckett and T. S. Eliot; editions of Tennyson, Housman and Eliot's early poems; anthologies of Victorian verse and of English poetry from the anonymous author of "Sumer is icumen in" to Seamus Heaney. In a corner by the desk there is also a boom box. Mr. Ricks brings this to lectures when he wants to talk about another of his favorite poets: Bob Dylan."

...

Certain passages of "Dylan's Visions of Sin" may strike some readers as over the top, as when Mr. Ricks devotes four pages (and four footnotes) to the lyrics of "All the Tired Horses," a song that is only two lines long — or maybe three, if you count the long "Hmmmm" at the end.

Other chapters, though, draw insightful and persuasive parallels between, say, "Lay Lady Lay" and John Donne's poem "To His Mistress Going to Bed," between "Not Dark Yet" and Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," and between "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and the Scottish ballad "Lord Randal." And throughout the book Mr. Ricks is particularly perceptive about the way Mr. Dylan, whom he calls "one of the great rhymesters of all time," punctuates his songs with brilliant and surprising line endings. (Mr. Ricks's favorite is the rhyme in "Sign on the Window" that pairs the line "Build me a cabin in Utah" with "Have a bunch of kids who call me `Pa.' ")

funny stuff. Good gag gift for my pa, perhaps....