This week, Bob Dylan finally gave the Nobel people an answer to their offer of the Literature Prize—he’s happy to accept, but he’s afraid he’s too busy to go pick it up. Everyone’s having a good chuckle at that. Nonetheless, the Nobel Prize-committee has explained that declining to accept in person is not without precedent, and that Dylan will nonetheless be honored for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

Those new poetic expressions—modern poetry, semi-nonsense poetry—are, thanks largely to Dylan, the only kind that anyone writes anymore. Certainly it’s the only kind of poetry that anyone publishes. Finding new conventional, rhyming and coherent poetry is as unusual as finding new tonal classical music, or new paintings of boats and horses. (I don’t mean to sound curmudgeon-ish.)