Professor Peter O'Connor is the adacemic director of University of Auckland's Creative Thinking Project. Ahead of his upcoming discussion on Dylan with Harvard's Professor Richard Thomas, we picked his brain for some insights on what makes Dylan, Dylan.

Marijuana was talked about as a gateway drug when I was a young man.  The idea was that if you started on dope it would inevitably lead to harder and harder drugs.  Marijuana was never something that really appealed to me, my gateway was Bob Dylan. I started listening  to him and the gate was opened to Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsburg, the Romantics, the surrealists, Joseph Conrad and a life-long fascination with the power and beauty of words, music and the creative process.

I think most of us with deep passions  for the arts have a gate opened for us by people like Dylan. I remember so clearly the first time I heard Like a Rolling Stone and marvelled that there was someone alive who knew exactly how I felt about the world.  To be on your own, with no direction home  made me shudder with how close it was to my 16 year old life. That ability to communicate a universal feeling of isolation, of moving in, against and outside the world is what has always appealed to me about Dylan.  And I’ve always loved the music, its been the soundtrack of my life.

Ten concerts and over forty years since I first saw Dylan in the ‘70s I’m excited about seeing him again here in Auckland in a few day’s time. It was a heady day when Dylan agreed to be the Patron of the University of Auckland’s Creative Thinking Project of which I am the Academic Director. I was editing a book called  The Possibilities of Creativity and there were discussions with Dylan’s manager about Bob writing the foreword to the book.   It didn’t happen but the degree of separation closed a little. Can you imagine having Dylan write the foreword to an academic text, and it’s yours?

In the arts you can’t break the rules without knowing what the rules are and how - in breaking them - you create new rules for new art forms.

So, on Friday 24th August I’m sitting and talking about Dylan and creativity with  Professor of Classics at Harvard University, Richard Thomas, who knows about Homer and Ovid, and Virgil and about Dylan at a deep level.  I got his book, Why Dylan Matters for my birthday from my wife who looked aghast that I had finished it by the end of the weekend.  I chuckled though, and said “don’t think twice, I’ve only read it once, it needs reading again.”

The book is a treasure trove of how to think about Dylan’s creative process and what it might say about creativity in general.  Richard uses T.S. Eliott’s idea - that young poets borrow while mature poets steal - to consider the tight connections between Dylan and the ancient poets such as Homer, Ovid and Virgil.  

What Richard describes as intertextuality is the process by which Dylan steals Homer’s phrasing and words to reshape and bend them into something new. Dylan taps into thousands of years of poetry, the blues, folk, french surrealism and makes it his own. In this way we might reconsider that creativity is a process where we put together things that have existed in the past but in new ways rather than thinking of creativity as creating something novel, something that is new.

Richard has also been spending time in the Dylan archive recently, poring over the original drafts of Dylan’s songs and looking at how he crafts his work.

Anyone involved in an art form knows that there is a discipline to master.  Dylan long mastered multiple songwriting forms. He knows how to bend and twist them to his own artistic devices because he understands the forms so well. In the arts you can’t break the rules without knowing what the rules are and how - in breaking them - you create new rules for new art forms.

A clear example of this is Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall. This apocalyptic vision of the hippy era has its roots in 14th century ballads, in particular one by the name of Lord Randall. Like it’s English/Scottish ancestor, Hard Rain tells its story by means of Q&A pattern: “where have you been, my darling young one?” Yet Dylan’s story is not linear, but indexical: a catalogue of nightmarish images: dead oceans, a baby surrounded by wolves, armed children, starving populations; such scenes of desolation fill nearly 60 lines, all accompanied by the folksy jingle jangle of his gently strummed acoustic.

Dylan’s songs are not some spontaneous outpouring, but as William Wordsworth said of his own work, they arrive as they are, shaped aesthetically through quiet reflection.  

It seems in Dylan’s case that his lyrics might arise from within but they are crafted, word by pause by word. I’m keen when I sit down with Richard next week to talk about how stolen phrases, images and ideas reappear in Dylan’s songs and what that might tell us about his creative process and how he crafts.  I get the feeling that this will be about what is taken out more then is what is added in. I remember talking once to Kevin Roberts who has thought long and hard about creativity in business and him saying cryptically that creativity is essentially a process of editing.

So a lifetime of listening to Bob Dylan has landed me talking to a Harvard Professor about Ovid and Homer. Finding the gateway into a rich life by discovering at a young age an artist that spoke most directly to me was a wonderful gift. I wonder as I work here at the Faculty of Education and Social Work how important it is for children to not only make art but to learn about the wonderful ways artists in multiple disciplines can enrich their lives.  Exposing children to the arts might just let them know that there are truly important things in life like beauty, possibility. The arts give our lives great joy by reminding us we aren’t alone, just a rolling stone.

You can hear Professor Peter O'Connor in conversation with Professor Richard Thomas of Harvard University on August 24, at University of Auckland.

For further information about Postcards From Desolation Row, A conversation about Bob Dylan and Creativity http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/en/about/events/events-2018/08/postcards-from-desolation-row--a-conversation-about-bob-dylan-an.html