Thom Tammaro was 14 when he discovered Bob Dylan. Sitting on his bed listening to Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” he’d move the needle to play “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Desolation Row” over and over and over.

Alan Davis, a self-proclaimed “Dylan fanatic,” found the Minnesota-born troubadour as a go-to person in the mid-’60s when “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Blonde on Blonde” and “Bringing It all Back Home” were released.

Tammaro and Davis, both retired from teaching at Minnesota State University, Moorhead, agree that the enigmatic Dylan’s poetic lyrics inspired them and many other writers. That’s why the friends, published authors who’ve worked on many projects together, co-edited “Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan,” made up of 100 poems honoring Dylan by poets in various stages of their careers. Contributors include Robert Bly; Charles Bukowski; Lawrence Ferlinghetti (from Dylan’s days hanging with the Beat poets); Patti Smith, who attended the Nobel Prize ceremony on Dylan’s behalf; and Anne Waldman, a member of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, featured in his film “Renaldo and Clara.”

Tammaro believes this is the first anthology in which other writers celebrate Dylan’s talents as a wordsmith. After all, the Minnesota-born singer/songwriter won two of the top writing honors — a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 2008 for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical composition of extraordinary poetic power,” and the 2016 Nobel Prize for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

“I understand why the committee gave Dylan the Nobel,” Tammaro says of the controversial honor. “I discovered Dylan at a point in my life, and other people’s lives, when we stopped dancing and started listening to lyrics in music. For me, Dylan has always been about the language delivered through music. I didn’t know what that language meant. He was writing surreal lyrics like nobody else was writing at the time. At that crucial moment in my life, I fell in love with poetry and he was there at the beginning. There are no less than 1,800 books written about Dylan. You’d think there is nothing left to say, and yet he is as mysterious still. Mysterious after all these years.”

Tammaro also believes that Dylan, born in 1941, vindicated his Baby Boomer generation when he won the Nobel. “It’s a validation of what we treasure, that what he is doing in literary terms is enduring and of lasting value,” Tammaro said.

Davis says he’s been listening to Dylan as long as he’s been working: “I think I listen to him in my head. I hear lines and bits of his music, (which is) one of the strongest influences on my own writing and life. Sometimes I will be dealing with a situation and a line or two from one of Dylan’s songs comes into my head and I figure out how to move forward.”

In the book, Davis tells about meeting Dylan in New Orleans’ French Quarter in 1976 when Davis was working for the Louisiana Department of Corrections.

“(Dylan) was in town with his Rolling Thunder Revue to play a concert,” Davis writes. “He was very slender of build when he stood next to me, introducing himself as ‘Frank’ … and asked for a smoke. I’m only 5-foot-10 or so, but I was a few inches taller than he was and it surprised me, because he had been a larger-than-life hero of mine.” Davis asked “Frank” if he would play a set for prisoners he worked with. ” ‘Prisoners?’ he said. He was high on something. He smirked, touched the brim of his hat, and turned, as if on a dime, to disappear into a daiquiri bar where a bouncer the size of a boar kept out those of us without a ticket.”

When “Visiting Bob” is celebrated Tuesday in the Readings by Writers series, Tammaro and Davis will read, along with nine of the 13 Minnesota contributors: Tim Nolan, Katrina Vandenberg, Joyce Sutphen, Ray Gonzalez, Margaret Hasse, Linda Back McKay, Diane Jarvenpa, John Reinhard and Marge Barrett.

“The evening will be a chance for people to come together to talk about their work and our obsession with Bob Dylan,” Davis said. It will also be Davis’ swan song as senior editor for 15 years at Moorhead-based New Rivers Press, which published the book. The not-for-profit press, celebrating its 50th anniversary, is one of the oldest continuously publishing literary presses in the country. Working on New Rivers projects is part of the school curriculum, and “Visiting Bob” was designed and printed by students.

Most Dylan fans can probably recite the arc of his life and career from memory. Now 77, the man Rolling Stone calls “a living legend” was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth and grew up in Hibbing. He began his career as a folk singer playing in Dinkytown coffeehouses near the University of Minnesota campus, and through the years, he has confounded critics by doing vocals, guitar, keyboards and harmonica, moving from folk to blues, rock ‘n’ roll, country and gospel. Besides his musicianship, he wrote “Tarantula,” a collection of experimental prose poetry, and a memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” as well as publishing seven books of his drawings and paintings.

Dylan is in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He’s won Academy Awards, the French Legion of Honor and the U.S. President’s Freedom Medal.

“People all over the world want to award Dylan something for his contribution to literature, music,” Tammaro says. “His cultural influence is so pervasive.”

Early on, Dylan touched us with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” his straightforward war protest: “Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the / cannonballs fly / Before they’re forever banned …” That song, along with “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone” are in the Grammy Hall of Fame. Sometimes, he baffled us with songs like “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “You walk into the room / with your pencil in your hand / You see somebody naked / And you say, ‘Who is that man?’ ”

Always, he remained enigmatic and elusive.

Chris Smither — singer, songwriter, guitarist, essayist, short story writer, film scorer — puts it this way in the Foreword to “Visiting Bob”:

“Bob Dylan, confronted by media people early in his career, people seeking nothing more than to put an ‘inspected by’ stamp on his forehead, quickly realized that he was facing one more quasi-authoritarian figure demanding, ‘Explain yourself, young man!’ He answered, and has continued to answer over decades, that he has explained himself, and that it is not up to him to make you understand the explanation.”

“Visiting Bob” began with a call for submissions. In addition, Davis and Tammaro scoured databases and called on their contacts in the literary world to find “good poems by well-known poets” that have been published, as well as unpublished regional poets. They ended up with 500 poems, proving Dylan’s strong influence on writers.

The men are happy about how many high-profile poets are represented in the anthology. “I think we got every ‘big fish’ we wanted,” Tammaro says with a laugh.

Among those good catches is Johnny Cash’s “Of Bob Dylan,” which made up the liner notes for Dylan’s 1969 album “Nashville Skyline,” and won a Best Album Notes Grammy:

Complete unto itself, full,

flowing.

So are some souls like stars

And their words, works and songs

Like strong, quick flashes of

light …

“When I looked at Cash’s book of poetry, that poem was not in it,” Tammaro says. “We were able to give it new life.”

Have the men heard anything from Dylan himself about the book? They sent a copy to Elliott Landy, who took the cover photo of Dylan in the living room of his Byrdcliffe home in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1968, and one to Dylan personally.

“But what that means,” Tammaro says philosophically, “I do not know.”

WHAT DYLAN MEANS TO ME

We asked Minnesota poets whose work appears in “Visiting Bob,” and who will read at Tuesday’s celebration, to tell us their feelings about Dylan (followed by a few lines from each person’s poem in the anthology).

RAY GONZALEZ teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Minnesota and is the author of 15 books of poetry: “Bob Dylan influenced me to become a writer in the 1970s. His music showed me that poetry comes from everyday life, and the level of the emotion in his lyrics gave me permission to write about my own feelings as a young writer. Contemporary music and literature would be different without Dylan. I belong to a generation of writers that grew up in the glory days of rock music and Dylan is the closest companion I turn to when I write poetry.”

“Bob Dylan in El Paso, 1963”

When he sang, “they got some hungry

women there and they’ll really make a mess

out of you,” my buddies and I knew the place,

the high school ritual of having to go there

to find Dylan and his shadow going upstairs …

TIM NOLAN is the author of three poetry collections and is the curator of Readings by Writers: “When I listen to Bob Dylan, I enter into a frame of mind where I want to make something. Shakespeare has this effect on me, as do many other poets. Dylan’s lyrics are odd, inventive, surprising, all of these characteristics being what poets aim for. There is so much to admire in his work ethic — he’s still touring all the time, making the old songs sound new again. He’s one of those great artists who take in an influence and put something out that has his personal spin on it.”

“Microfilm” (Inspired by Bob Dylan, “Chronicles: Vol. 1”)

… In the microfilm cubby, on a wobbly table, he spun the film

through those shiny sprockets, paused on medicinal remedies,

the news from Fort Sumter, the call-up of recruits. The day

he was in didn’t matter too much. He had slept in someone’s apartment,

listened to records, read a French poet, drank coffee with sugar and cream.

The day that mattered was long ago. He was trying to hear the music

of that day through the news of that day …”

JOYCE SUTPHEN, Minnesota poet laureate: “What can I say? Bob Dylan’s songs thread through the fabric of my life, from when I was a kid to the present moment. The first time I heard him, I knew that particular voice was perfect for what he had to say. He is a poet and a singer in the troubadour tradition (a singing-word poet!) and I’m grateful that he keeps changing with every album and that I have been on the planet to hear it. When he won the Nobel Prize, I was elated and got to say so on the radio. On a desert island I’d want all of Dylan, Shakespeare, and the Bible.”

“To Take Her Home”

“When she is free — as wind, as speed, as this

song that she summons up again with just

the push of a button, and then the voice/riding the guitar and harmonica …”

KATRINA VANDENBERG is an associate professor of creative writing at Hamline University and poetry editor of “Water~Stone Review”: “I tremendously admire Bob Dylan’s artistic process: He never stops re-making himself, and has never stopped revising his songs. He’s released dozens of albums. He’s tried painting and writing novels. He’s prolific, a moving target, so if occasionally he misses, who cares? He takes the kind of great risks we all do well to imitate.

“Then there is the way he has changed the sound of our language. His lyrics have seeped into American English, like Shakespeare or the Bible.”When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose,” “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” — we quote him all the time whether we realize we’re doing it or not.

“Finally, I think ‘Blood on the Tracks’ to be a near-perfect album. I would not have made it through the upheaval of my mid-20s and the decimation of the hemophilia-AIDS community without it.”

“Record”

Late night, July, Minnesota,

John asleep on the glassed-in porch,

Bob Dylan quiet on cassette

you made from an album

I got rid of soon after

you died. Years later,

I regret giving up your two boxes of vinyl,

which I loved …

MARGARET HASSE, winner of the 2016 Midwest Book Award in poetry, writer, teacher at poetry workshops: ” ‘Dylan (1973)’ is the background music of my move to the Twin Cities. I’d graduated from college in California that spring, then worked during the summer, saving money and plotting a return to the Midwest in the fall, drawn to Minnesota by its liberal politics and support for the arts.

The album, a compilation of covers and traditional songs, came out in November. At night, alone in my rented apartment, I wailed along to songs I knew, and learned unfamiliar lyrics such as ‘Spanish Is the Loving Tongue’ adapted from a poem by Badger Clark, a cowboy Poet Laureate of South Dakota where I’d grown up. One of my first poems published in my new home, in ’25 Minnesota Poets,’ was a wishful-thinking poem about Bob Dylan giving me a sign that I, too, could become a writer.”

“Summer of Love,1967”

… His mouth tasted of garlic hummus.

Her perfume was patchouli oil.

On his “Nashville Skyline” album,

Dylan kept singing “Lay, Lady, lay

lay across my big brass bed …”

IF YOU GO

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Pandemic prose: COVID-19 sparks literary efforts What: Celebrating Bob Dylan and publication of “Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan”

When/where: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 20; University Club, 420 Summit Ave., St. Paul

Admission: Free

Publisher/price: New Rivers Press, $25