All sections About Mtl Restaurants Movies Music Perf. At the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, Wales, a friend relates, he met a man who had known the poet and who told of hearing Dylan asked, at a party, who were his favourite poets. My friend thought it an admirable sentiment. We debate the virtues of conferring laureateship upon a bard deserving of that honour. This strikes me as cockeyed thinking.
People tune in to music awards because they know the songs and the singers.
By exposure and example, we cultivate in our children an appetite for movies and popular music. Not so for poems. Later, the task is harder. Wrapped in sung words, they have to first step back to silence before they can listen to words dance by themselves. Silence is a precondition for poetry - but Walkman culture, in filling the day's interstices with personally selected sound, fosters an intolerance of silence.