PRRB Interview with Bob Dylan by Vojo Sindolic
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B R the Pacific Rim R P Review of Books Issue Ten Fall/Winter 2009 Publication Mail Agreement Number 41235032 ISSN 1715-3700 $5.95 “Always Changing” The PRRB Interview with Bob Dylan by Vojo Sindolic The Engaged poetics of Denise Levertov and Thomas Merton by Susan McCaslin Lowry’s Volcanic Eruptions: reading The Voyage that never ends “A Pair Extraordinaire” Joseph Blake looks at Dylan and Willie Nelson David Watmough at 80 by Jan Drabek Plus: new books by Pauline Holdstock, Mary novik, Linda Rogers, Attila József, Thuong Vuong-Riddick, Andrew Schelling, and departments travel, eco-lit, Personal Point of view, and Reg Little on Diplomacy Bob Dylan Contents FEATURES “Always Changing” An Interview with Bob Dylan by Vojo Sindolic page “Imagining David Watmough”: Myself Through Others and Geraldine by David Watmough, reviewed by Jan Drabek page “Lowry’s Volcanic Eruptions of the Soul”: The Voyage that Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words, edited by Michael Hoffman Reviewed by Trevor Carolan page PRRB “Pivoting Toward Peace: the Engaged Poetics of Thomas Merton The Pacific Rim Review of Books and Denise Levertov” Essay by Susan McCaslin page Issue Ten, Fall/Winter 2009 ISSN 1715-3700 “A Piper in Hell” A Transparent Lion: Selected Poems by Attila József Reviewed by Jordan Zinovich page “Summing Up That Force of Goodness”: The Next One Thousand Years, Publication Mail Agreement Number 4123503 The Selected Poems of Cid Corman Reviewed by Gregory Dunne page DEPARTMENTS Published by Ekstasis Editions Canada Ltd. Sound & Fury: “Dylan and St. Willie: ‘A Pair Extraordinaire’”: A Freewheelin’ Time: Publisher/Editor: Richard Olafson A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo; Willie Nelson: an Managing Editor: Carol Ann Sokoloff Epic Life by Joe Nick Patoski, reviewed by Joseph Blake page Diplomacy: America and China: Asia-Pacific Hegemony in the International Editor: Trevor Carolan Twenty-First Century by Randall Doyle Music Editor: Joseph Blake Reviewed by Reg Little page Medical Editor: Dr. Nicolas Kats Environment: “When I Was Young and Easy, Under the Salmon Falls” Circulation manager: Bernard Gastel The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture by Tim Bowling, reviewed by Hilary Turner page A Passion for this Earth, edited by Michelle Benjamin, Cover photo: Bob Dylan reviewed by Chelsea Thornton page Reading Poetry: “The Escapologist” from Anatomy of Keys by Stephen Price Legal deposit at the National Library of Canada, Summer/Fall . 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Reviewed by Peter Grant page Revs of the Morrow: New Poems by Ed Sanders Reviewed by Jim Feast page Reading the Bible Backwards by Robert Priest Reviewed by Linda Rogers page ALWAYS CHANGING: AN INTERVIEW WITH BOB DYLAN Vojo Sindolic ob Dylan and I met for the first time way back in the late Seventies, when I was Things Have Changed, Honest With Me, editor-in-chief of then only Yugoslav rock and roll magazine called Jukebox, and Love Sick, Highway 61 Revisited, BI was often travelling to England and USA to make lengthy interviews with such Desolation Row, It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), rock stars and interesting persons like Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, John Ain’t Talkin’, Summer Days, Lennon, Patti Smith, Neil Young, and members of rock groups like the Grateful Dead, Ballad Of A Thin Man, Thunder On the Mountain, the Pink Floyd, the Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, etc. Like A Rolling Stone As in all other cases in my literary life connected with the Beat Generation and other related writers, it was the Beats goodwill VS: Since I just finished translating Sam Shepard’s book ambassador Allen Ginsberg who put me in contact on your famous Rolling Thunder Revue Tour from the with Bob Dylan. Later, which means mostly in the Fall of 1975, I immediately want to ask you about your Eighties, Bob Dylan and I met several times, and present-day feelings in regard to that tour, but also your almost on each occasion I did an interview with movie Renaldo & Clara. him. Usually, we talked about just everything – from politics to religion, from movies to literature. I must Bob Dylan: Well, Renaldo’s intense dream and his say that I never had, not even the slightiest impres- conflict with the present – that’s all the movie’s about. sion that Bob is such a difficult person to talk to, or My main interest was not in literal plot but in the asso- to approcah to. Maybe the reason lies in the fact that ciational texture – colours, images, sounds. It’s obvi- Bob knew and was aware that Allen Ginsberg highly ous everyone was acting in that movie for dear life. appreciated my friendship and my decades long and Nobody was thinking of time. How else? Life itself is successful efforts to translate the works of not only improvised. We don’t live life as a scripted thing. Beat Generation writers (Jack Kerouac, W. S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, VS: There’s also no sense of time? Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, etc.) but also the works of songwriters and poets like Leonard Bob Dylan: You’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow Cohen, James Douglas Morrison, Patti Smith, etc. all in the same room, and there’s very little that you But, on the other hand, it’s also true that talk- can’t imagine happening… What I was trying to do ing to Bob Dylan is the hardest thing to get going. with the concept of time, and the way the characters Actually, talking to Bob is always a great pleasure change from one person to another person, and you’re and a big challenge because you never know if he’s never quite sure who is talking, if the first person is going to be very exuberant and on a roll; if he’s real- talking or the third person is talking… but to do that ly into something, he’ll want to keep talking about it. consciously is a trick, and if you look at the whole But it’s hard to get Bob to sit down and actually try thing, it really doesn’t matter. anything. In Renaldo & Clara I also used that quality of no- While during the Spring of 2008 I was working time.