Tarantula is an experimental prose poetry collection by Bob Dylan, written in 1964 and 1965 and published in 1971. It employs stream of consciousness writing, somewhat in the style of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg.
Its style is also reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud's in A Season in Hell. One section of the book parodies the Lead Belly song "Black Betty." Reviews of the book liken it to his self-penned liner notes to two of his albums recorded around the same time, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. The book follows a structure similar to that of a few of Dylan's songs; the vague story, references to various historical or made up characters and unusual punctuation. It also uses literary techniques such as allusion, ambiguity, symbolism and fantasy.
Dylan would later cite Tarantula as a book he had never fully signed up to write: "Things were running wild at that point. It never was my intention to write a book." He went on to equate the book to John Lennon's nonsensical work In His Own Write, and implied that his former manager Albert Grossman signed up Dylan to write the novel without the singer's full consent. Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Croatian, Czech and Polish.
References
Further reading
- Spitzer, Mark, "Bob Dylan's Tarantula: An Arctic Reserve of Untapped Glimmerance Dismissed in a Ratland of Clichés", Jack magazine, v.2 no.3A
External links
- Tarantula preview at Google Books