Poetry News

Bob Dylan in Allen Ginsberg’s America

Originally Published: August 17, 2010

A chapter from Bob Dylan in America by the historian Sean Wilentz is excerpted at the New Yorker’s News Desk blog this morning, and it's a fascinating read. The book is a comprehensive account of Dylan’s life and music, but the excerpt —the story of how Dylan’s music was informed by Beat culture and his friendship with Allen Ginsberg—is complete in itself. Wilentz gives an impressively detailed account of how Dylan connected with the Beats and found inspiration in Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. This is a story about Dylan and the Beat Generation, but it is also a classic tale of how one era bleeds into the next. The collision of cultural circles has always been a catalyst for art, and Wilenz sweeps across a nearly a century of American history to show why and how. Bob Dylan in America is due out in September.

From the New Yorker:

Dylan’s continuing link to the Beat generation, though, came chiefly through his friend and sometime mentor Allen Ginsberg. Dylan’s link with Ginsberg dated back to the end of 1963, a pivotal moment in the lives and careers of both men. Thereafter, in the mid-1960s, the two would complete important artistic transitions, each touched and supported by the other. On and off, their rapport lasted for decades. And in 1997, in New Brunswick, Canada, Dylan would dedicate a concert performance of “Desolation Row” to Ginsberg, his longtime comrade, telling the audience it was Allen’s favorite of his songs, on the evening after Ginsberg died.

As with Dylan’s connection to New York’s Popular Front folk-music world, his connection with the Beats had a complicated backstory. The origins of the Beat impulse, like those of the folk revival, dated back much further than the 1950s, let alone the 1960s, to the days of Dylan’s childhood in Duluth and Hibbing. For all the obvious differences between the Beats and the folk-music crowd—the Beats’ affinities were with the arts of Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, and Charlie Parker, and not Anglo-American backwoods balladry—the Beat writers found themselves, early, locked in conflict with some of the same liberal critical circles around Partisan Review that decried, for different reasons, the folksy leftism of the Popular Front, including its high-or middlebrow version in Aaron Copland’s music. Out of that conflict emerged Beat artistic ideas that Dylan admired, remembered, and later seized upon when he moved beyond the folk revival. Even though Dylan invented himself within one current of musical populism that came out of the 1930s and 1940s, he escaped that current in the 1960s—without ever completely rejecting it—by embracing anew some of the spirit and imagery of the Beat generation’s entirely different rebellious disaffiliation and poetic transcendence. Dylan in turn would make an enormous difference to the surviving, transformed Beats, especially Ginsberg, each influencing the other while their admirers forged the counterculture that profoundly affected American life at the end of the twentieth century . . .