Dave Van Ronk, singer, songwriter, Marxist, materialist, and activist from the 1950s through 2000s, on poetry and meaning.
Poetry is automatically suspect to me, because if you are a good enough poet, you can make bullshit sound so beautiful that people don’t notice it’s bullshit. I used to hear Dylan Thomas over at the old White Horse Tavern back in the 1950s, and when he had had enough to drink–which was frequently–he would recite his poetry, and my jaw would drop. It was beautiful, gorgeous stuff, and he recited it marvelously. But when I would go back and look at it on the page, a lot of it was bullshit. Not all of it, by any means, but I would challenge anyone to explain what some of those things were about.
I eventually came to the conclusion that you should never say anything in poetry that you would not say in prose. Poetry has the same obligation to make sense as any other statement made by the human mouth. That was something that was driven home to me by reading Ezra Pound, of all people.
–Mayor of MacDougal Street, chapter 14
Postscript, on Andy Warhol:
That towhead was like a vulture–when he appeared, you knew the fun was over.