Anne-Marie Mai is a Danish literary scholar, critic, and professor. Based at the University of Southern Denmark, she has published extensively on modern and contemporary Nordic literature, literary history, authorship, and Bob Dylan’s poetry.
Mai’s ambition is to bridge academic research and public literary debate and she has contributed to making literary scholarship accessible to wider audiences through books, essays, lectures, and media appearances.
Her research has explored the development of Danish literature from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular attention to poetry, literary culture, and the relationship between literature and society. She is especially interested in the Danish literature of the 1960s and in Bob Dylan’s influence in this period. She has given many public lectures on Bob Dylan and has witnessed a growing interest in his entire body of work among both older and younger readers.
Our Bob-Dylan-Book-Club-Book-of-the-Month for October 2026 is Bob Dylan: The Poet by Anne-Marie Mai, a Danish Dylan scholar and professor. We will meet at 2 pm Eastern (US) time on Sunday, October 11th--the Zoom link will go out that morning. Anne-Marie has generously sent us a pdf of the book which I have posted on our website. She will participate in our discussion.
Those of us who have attended the every-other-year World of Bob Dylan Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, have been impressed with Anne-Marie at those meetings. She is active in Dylan scholarship and most recently (2024) co-organized a conference, Bob Dylan -- Questions on Masculinity, with Bob Dylan Book Club Member Erin Callahan.
Anne-Marie and Erin have also organized a conference entitled Bob Dylan and the Value of Art in the 21st Century, to take place November 5-7, 2026—more information HERE.
Mai is currently working on a new book The Creative Melancholy of Bob Dylan’s Oeuvre – it is planned for publication in 2028.
After she published Bob Dylan: The Poet in 2016, she was the editor edited of New Approaches to Bob Dylan, published in 2020.
Photography by Høeck
When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the Swedish Academy Permanent Secretary Sara Danius wrote that Bob Dylan "can be and should be read on the page". Bob's acceptance speech urged us to recognize that the most important fact is that, like Shakespeare's plays, the songs were written for performance and gain part of their meaning and impact through live performance--in the acceptance speech, Dylan wrote the songs were "meant to be sung, not read on the page" (a contrarian, some say!)
What I think needs to be said is that BOTH are true! Anne-Marie Mai's book, published 2 years after the Nobel Prize, establishes a firm foundation for Bob Dylan as a poet, whether he is heard OR read. Dylan's poetic turns of phrase, the metaphors, the ambiguities, the rhymes, the alliteration...and more. Anne-Marie tells us what is poetic about Bob, regardless of labels.
Even in his earliest songs, you can find a poetic flare: "Thought I’d seen some ups and downs/’Til I come into New York town/People goin’ down to the ground/Buildings goin’ up to the sky" (from one of only two original songs on his first album). People going down to the subway system to get to work, but workers leading uncelebrated lives while the products of their labor, the buildings, soar above them, promising immortality. Down to the Ground can also be seen as Grave-ward, but the buildings remain, having a presence of their own whether empty or filled with human activity. Given the sweep of that vision, New York's ups and downs made Dylan's personal ups and downs, pre-New York, seem small. In NYC he is nearing the center point for artists.
I also like the fact that Anne-Marie establishes that it isn't up to either the Nobel Committee or to Bob Dylan to label Mr. Dylan a poet. Rather, that task belongs to all of us. For that matter, Bob did assert that he was a poet, albeit by starting with a childish putdown of poets and adding a tagline to cover where he wanted to go: "Yippee! I'm a poet and I know it, Hope I don't blow it." Dylan also said that anything he could sing was a song and anything he couldn't sing was a poem. He also wrote in the liner notes for Bringing It All Back Home, "a poem is a naked person...Some people say that I am a poet", a quote about essences, truth, and rawness, rather than about requiring melody. Ever critical of labels, he wrote elsewhere "I don't call myself a poem because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist."
Dylan has also written poems without music, of course, especially in the 1960s. Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie is fabulous. Dylan's poems without music were the subject of our March 3rd, 2024, meeting, so if you'd like to savor that side of Bob, visit our web page:
https://www.bobdylanbookclub.com/linernotes
—Peter White
