On Bob Dylan and John Ashbery

So one of the predominant responses I'm noticing to Bob Dylan's Nobel for Lit. is (generally unfavorable) comparisons to John Ashbery, of all people, e.g. "Look, Dylan's fine, but he's no Ashbery" or "So when does Ashbery win a Grammy?" and etc. Implicit in these responses is the argument that Dylan, as a song-writer, is not a poet, that he writes in a completely different genre.

However, though I'm sympathetic, this argument is complicated by the fact that Ashbery himself blurs the lines between genres; for example, his 1972 work "Three Poems" is a collection of extended, book-length prose meditations--"prose-poems" we now call 'em, but usually folks just call them essays. In fact, I'm willing to bet a number of critics would still dispute whether they should be called "Poems," so much do they resemble straight-prose. 

 But that's exactly the nomenclature that Ashbery is questioning with the title "Three Poems": can any text be read as a poem as long we label it as such? How does genre influence our engagement with a text? Why *can't* song-lyrics be read as poetry? Was not ancient epic poetry sung? Was not Beowulf? How do we even define "poetry"? We are a long, long way out from meters and rhyme-schemes.

Don't get me wrong, I still think Bob Dylan's Nobel is kinda silly: the man certainly doesn't lack for recognition, and I generally prefer the Nobel goes to folks who do (e.g. as happened with Samuel Beckett and William Faulkner). Nevertheless, Ashbery deeply complicates these questions, not clarifies them.

Also, this comes only 8 years after the Nobel Lit. committee announced that there were no plans to award an American in the near future, considering out literature to be too "provincial". The pull of Boomer nostalgia crosses national partisanship, I suppose.