Love and Theft: Dylan's Appropriations

David Dalton. Who Is That Man1 In Search of the Real Bob Dylan. Hyperion 2012. 374 pp. $26.99Sid Griffin. Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and the Basement Tapes. Jawbone Press 2007. 336 pp. $19.95 (paper)John Hughes. Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s. Ashgate 2013. 236 pp. $89.95David Kinney. The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob. Simon & Schuster 2014. 241 pp. $25.00Greil Marcus. Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010. PublicAffairs 2010. 481 pp. $29.95Suze Rotolo. A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. Broadway Books 2008. 371 pp. $22.95Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald. The Mayor ofMacDougal Street: A Memoir. Da Capo 2006.246 pp. $14.95 (paper)Sean Wilentz. Bob Dylan in America. Anchor Books 2011. 397 pp. $16.95 (paper)Poetry must be made by all. Not by one. -LautreamontAnybody can be just like me, obviously. -Bob Dylan, "Absolutely Sweet Marie". . . they're all poets. Y'understand? -Bob Dylan, introducing his backing band, Royal Albert Hall, May 26, 1966"You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet," Bob Dylan y mused to a somewhat nonplussed Nora Ephron in 1966. JL "Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist." With its mix of humor, incongruity, aggressive absurdity, and eccentric association, the statement is as good a self-encapsulation as any. It simultaneously incorporates and challenges treasured cultural artifacts: the link between writing and poetry, the "natural" blues of the workingman, the high-wire audacity of performance. It makes you nod at its truth, even as you want to go, Wha?!? For half a century, the trapeze artist has maintained a precarious balance between tantalizing us with his arresting composites and holding us at arm's length with his elusive burlesque. His ability to piece together a body of work and an identity, seemingly at the drop of a cowboy (or trainman's, or farmer's) hat, compels us to watch and listen even as he refuses to keep still, to gratify our expectations of what we'll see and hear.Dylan's art has always been one of collage. His particular gift has been to appropriate, assimilate, and meld a wide-ranging mass of personal and national lore. The feeling of onrush that many of his songs can give, of freshness and daredevil collision, stems at least in part from the seemingly reckless nature of his juxtapositions-Ma Rainey and Beethoven, Beat 'tude and country corn, headline outrage and subterranean phantasmagoria, starding idiom and rank cliche. In his world, poetry has less to do with the best words in their best order than with an amalgam of street life and street smarts, aura and attitude, the language of composition and the language of cool; songwriting is less about expressing a yearning or inspiration than about preserving a diversified portfolio of loans from the cultural patrimony; identity is not an attribute you are born with or develop seamlessly over time, but something compiled from the flotsam and jetsam of accumulated experience. Nothing is static. Everything is up for grabs, reinvention, revisitation.One can see this in Dylan's album liner notes, which dispense with the standard journalistic pap in favor of enticing glimpses of his thought patterns. One can see it especially in his interviews, which subvert the usual bid for favorable press coverage and instead become confrontational performance pieces-as in his cat-and-mouse fencing with Time reporter Horace Judson, captured in D. A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back ("Do you care about what you're saying?" "How could I answer that if you've got the nerve to ask me? Do you ask The Beatles that?"), or the petulant response he gave to virtually the same question at a Los Angeles press conference in December 1965 ("Do you really feel the things that you write and sing?" "What is there to feel? …