Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club for the month of February 2017.

I'm Katie Waldman, a staff writer here at Slate, and I'm joined today by two special guests.

John Dickerson, host of Face the Nation and beloved political gabfuster. Hi, John. Hey.

And Megan O'Rourke, a writer and critic, and importantly for today's discussion, a poet as well.

Hi, Megan. Hi, Katie. Today we're going to dive into the collected lyrics of Robert Zimmerman,

otherwise known as Bob Dylan. Dylan controversially won last year's

Nobel Prize in Literature, so we wanted to talk about how his lyrics work as lines on a page,

not just sounds in our ears, and who maybe decide once and for all whether the Nobel Prize

Committee completely misunderstood Dylan's artistic accomplishment or was spot on to recognize his work as exceptional poetry.

So I'd love to take both of your temperatures on that question before we begin.

John, are Dylan's lyrics, poems in their own right, and should they have won the Nobel Prize in Literature?

You know, he's been conflicted about this through his whole life, which is perfect

since he's been conflicted about everything, sometimes because he's genuinely conflicted

and sometimes because he's putting us all on.

So at one point he said in 1978, he said said i consider myself a poet first and a musician second um

and then uh and then another time he said i think this is earlier in his career he said it's not

the melodies that are important it's the words so he's basically been and there and it goes on and on on and on, he's said this a bunch of different tone, a bunch of different times. I mean, I've always considered that they, that some, some, that basically it's a moot, it's a mush, you can't read it just on the page and you can't, it's a mix, it's its own thing, that it's, that, that you can read it on the page

and do lots of things with it, and whenever I'm trying to figure out new songs, I do look at

the lyrics on a, on a page to just kind of ground me in that, and then listen to them.

But I think there, so I don't know if that, I guess you could be, so I just kind of think it's its own thing.

It's not just words on a page.

The music is a part of it.

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