Spontaneous Poetics - 121 (Whitman and Wordsworth Comparison)

August 21, 2013, 3:30 am

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There's an odd "personism" (like in late Frank O'Hara) that you get inWhitman (or Whitman established the personalist, which sustained him. In other words, he was dealing in direct phenomena, observation of his own nature and his own senses and his own thoughts and the thought-forms of his mind, whereas there was a funny solidification in Wordsworth, where it was no longer quite personal but everybody became abstracted and generalized, until, so, finally, he was having to accept or reject ideas, rather than observe the flow of ideas, let us say. 

One little later political note by Whitman, then I'll go back to Wordsworth

"Thought" ..    ..write a poem...    "Thoughts", ok  [Allen reads from Whitman's "Thought" - "Of public opinion/Of a calm and cool fiat sooner or later (how impassive! how certain and final!)/Of the President with pale face asking secretly to himself,"What will the people say at last?/ Of the frivolous Judge, of the corrupt Congressman, Governor, Mayor, of such as these standing helpless and exposed.." - That's the same of the later extension of this line - "of such as these standing helpless and exposed" - in (Bob) Dylan's "..even the President of the United States/ Someday must have to stand naked" (or the direction of Dylan's thought is the same as that phrasing of the President with pale face secretly (questioning) himself, Whitman (by) knowing himself is able to know others. Just knowing that everybody exists in the world of subjective fantasy, phenomena, daydream, maya, solidity, passing thought, so that he's able to get inside other consciousness and know(ing) that it is as empty as his own, so to speak - [Allen continues with "Thought"] - "Of the frivolous Judge - Of the corrupt Congressman, Governor, Mayor - Of such as these, standing helpless and exposed/Of the mumbling and screaming priest - (soon, soon deserted,)/ Of the lessening year by year, of venerableness.."..."Of the envelopment of all by them, and the effusion of all from them." - (Of public opinion, he's speaking).

Well, an odd sense, compared to Wordsworth's take on the phenomenal universe. Whitman was able to go back and forth, say, between form and emptiness, or between despair and hope (knowing them to be, so to speak, like veils of thought, part of a continuous stream of thought). Wordsworth had the hallucination that he had lost contact with his own consciousness, which Whitman never did. 

[Audio available here, beginning at approximately thirty-four-and-three-quarter minutes in, and concluding at approximately thirty-eight-and-three-quarter minutes in] 

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Spontaneous Poetics - 122 (Wordsworth - 7)

August 22, 2013, 3:30 am

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[Benjamin Robert Haydon - plaster cast of life mask, 1815, of William Wordsworth (via the National Portrait Gallery, London]

There's the famous nostalgic "Ode on Intimations Of  Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood", which I read to my father, several months ago, on his death-bed - and his comment - it was a poem that he'd always loved and wanted me to read aloud to him - it was the last time he heard it (a poem which he'd heard maybe a thousand times in his life, aloud, or read) - but his final comment was, "It's very beautiful, but it isn't true". And I was thinking that Wordsworth, trying to be judicious, trying so hard to be judicious, (to) have a responsible political reaction and a responsible personal reaction, tried to codify, formulate, and bid farewell to anarchic visionary consciousness, accepting heavy responsible maturity, still didn't make it. I'll read it (and) see what it sounds like (because it's actually moving) - [Allen begins and reads Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality..." in its entirety] - "The Child is father of Man/And I could wish my days to be/ Bound each to each by natural piety..."..."To me the meanest flower that grows can give/Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears" - Well that's 1802, published in 1807, same year as he published an "Ode to Duty". There's a very self-conscious close-down on his part of what he thinks of as his original inspiration. Yeah?

Student: But he still... That's an example of him writing his way back to the light, you know.

AG: Well, yeah, because he's got the light solidified as something that was before birth and that ain't here no more, and it's become an idea, so he's got to write his way back to it, and 
actually doesn't really experience it any more, as he says. He says - the key thing - "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star/Hath had elsewhere its setting/And cometh from afar:/Not in entire forgetfulness/And not in utter nakedness,/But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home" - In other words, it was at the key, crucial, point that my father said, "It's very beautiful, but it isn't true". I thought that was very interesting, puncturing that balloon - actually, the balloon of God, but also the balloon of (a) sort of conceptualization of experience, of actually wanting a specific, visionary, God-like experience so much that it had become an idea, and an unreal idea, or become an unreality but an idea of doing exactly what (Walt Whitman) said (in "Respondez!") - "Let books replace trees, forests, mountains, rivers" - "Let ideas replace daylight", so to speak, let ideas of eternity replace the daylight. It's a funny mixture he's got, but I think he finally did get hung up on notions, on ideas, of both eternity and liberty, and therefore his disillusion with eternity was sad, whereas Whitman was able to continue exploring straightforward phenomena that he encountered.

Student:  And Whitman was writing his way back to the light every time that he..

AG: Well, I think Whitman sort of stood more in it. It was there present with him, I think,
more directly. It had become more of an idea in Wordsworth. The idea of liberty, particularly. Political liberty later to Wordsworth became a kind of Frankenstein, but he could only see it in terms of total middle-path Moderation, slow Law and Order, basically. Funny.  
It isn't an open and shut case. It's just simply that there are poets exploring... they're intelligent people reacting.. just as we are intelligent people reacting.. and you have all these alternatives.. and you can't really put down Wordsworth, although you can see certain tendencies there that are pathological (as there are in Whitman too).

Student: It seems to me that, when reading that (Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality") that the seven stages of man, Shakespeare's idea.. was repeated - and also that, I mean, like, what you're saying about (the) poetic idea being crystallized and written about in the present, like "Gather ye rosebuds while you may" - in essence, although you transferred into a more..transferred into a more, you know, eternal story.. but I mean, I mean, that whole idea in English Literature (which is probably prevalent in other literatures, as well, I mean, from the Elizabethans) of....you know, you can see how that's present in that poem, and exactly what you say of writing about an idea, you know, that is not necessarily a real one. That, Whitman doesn't have (or, at least, not in the stuff  you've been reading us)

AG: (Or) Whitman's form of it (They both have the idea of an eternal, some sort of eternal empathy). Whitman's form was maybe more workable, because it consisted in continuous change, and responsiveness to change. Wordsworth seems to have...

Student: Preconceptions.

AG:  (He's) more conceptual. Wordsworth has very good examples of direct experience. In the "Poems of (the) Imagination", oddly enough, you get both - You get some direct experience in Whitman, say, in that little glimpse where he's holding hands with his friend, and you also get a number of very great moments in Wordsworth of direct perception, also (usually around 1801, 1802, 1803 - he died in 1850, remember)

[Audio for the above is available here, starting at approximately thirty-eight-and-three-quarter minutes in, and concluding at approximately fifty-five minutes in]   

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 140

August 23, 2013, 3:52 am

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[Time Magazine cover (Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon) November 12, 1956]


Side-swipes. Time magazine. The voice of "the establishment". Allen memorably excoriated its pomposity and hauteur in 1956 in his poem, "America" -  "Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?/ I'm obsessed by Time Magazine/I read it every week/Its cover stares at me as I slink past the corner candy-store/I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library/It's always telling me about responsibility.." 
Plus ça change, over fifty years later, the snarky caption to a photo juxtaposing Allen and Daniel Radcliffe (early warning, early promo', on the up-coming Kill Your Darlings) - "It's more fun to watch Radcliffe play Ginsberg than it is to read anything by Ginsberg" - anything?  

Still on the topic of monumental Ginsberg put-down's, there's this - John Hollander's Spring 1957 review of Howl & Other Poems for Partisan Review - "It's only fair to Allen Ginsberg...to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in his dreadful little volume. I believe the title of his long poem Howl is meant to be a noun, but I can't help taking it as an imperative.." (and that was just the beginning!) - But Allen, famously rose to the occasion, with what Bill Morgan in The Letters of Allen Ginsbergrefers to as "an epic-length letter in which he tried to set the record straight" - "..(Y)ou've just got to drop it, (John), and take me seriously, and listen to what I have to say. It doesn't mean you have to agree, or change your career or writing, or anything hideous. It just means you've got to have the heart and decency to take people seriously and not depend only on your own university experience for arbitrary standard of value to judge others by..." Hollander, Ginsberg's sometime Columbia class-mate, did indeed "listen and take Ginsberg seriously" (would that the junior sub-editors at Time would do the same!) - From his Fall 1985 interview with J.D.McClatchy in the Paris Review:  McClatchy: Allen Ginsberg was a close friend of yours in the late (19)40's. How did he influence you?  Hollander: Ginsberg was my poetic mentor, very generous and considerate of my early work. At college he was my close poetic, rather than literary friend. That is, we talked about the minute particulars of form as if mythological weight depended on them, and about the realms of the imagination. Not about style, or about "the artist in society" - those were literary matters."
Two very different poetic careers, but a mutual respect.
Hollander died this past weekend, aged 83. The New York Times, among other things, featured lines from "Helicon" (from his 1965 volume Visions From The Ramble) - "Allen said, I am searching for the true cadence.Gray/Stony light had flashed over Morningside Drive since noon.."..."Allen said, They still give you five dollars a pint at St Luke's,/No kickback to the intern either, and I leaned out/Over the parapet and dug my heel in the hard,/Unyielding concrete below..."   
      

[John Hollander (1929-2013]

Hollander was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale. 

Laudably a long way from the academy (she declares so in the interview herself) the extraordinary Joanne Kyger can be seenhere (Marin Poets Live!) on local cable tv, being interviewed by a fawning (if well-meaning) Neshama Franklin and reading from the essential About Now.

The Collected Philip Lamantia - any day now. Here's Garrett Caples note on the editing process. 

Here's a Japanese version of Allen's "Hadda be Playing On The Jukebox". (Rage Against the Machine's (live) version (perhaps a little more recognizable) can be heard here).

Ginsberg on Kerouac and Kesey and Cassady

August 24, 2013, 4:17 am

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1973 Salem State College’s Jack Kerouac Festival - hereand here. (We’ve even previously featured an “out-take” here),. Here’s another one, (similarly focusing on the poignancy and tragedy of late Jack Kerouac (and on late Neal Cassady). An audience member asks about Cassady and his legendary cross-country drive, Allen responds.

[This particular tape begins in media res with Peter Orlovsky, having just finished his presentation, and a (more-than-usually) offensive/provocative/drunken Gregory Corso, meditating/theorizing.. on sudden death! – but then, thirty-five seconds in, is the question, and fifty-five seconds in, Allen’s answer]

AG: I can only talk, I would rather only talk, in relation to Kerouac on that. They, Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady, came across country, during the (19)64 election, with “A Vote For Goldwater Is A Vote For Fun” sign on the side of the bus, and this was their first pilgrimage to New York, as a gang, together, and Kesey felt very strong love for Kerouac (as well asBurroughs) and so Neal said that he would drive a car out to Northport to get Jack to bring him in to see Kesey, and the Merry Pranksters, who were all at that moment, that evening, high on acid, in an apartment on Park Avenue, which was heavily illuminated with electric..electronic bright lights, cameras going, many tape-machines going, wires snaking all over the room – an.. ethereal scene, actually, with a lot of heavy metal, and a lot of electronics around (so, giving  a sense of robot re-echoing, robot re-duplications, and mirror images receding past into infinity), and Neal arrived with Jack, who was brought in from Northport, who was already sick, who didn’t want to come out, who didn’t want to leave the house (because he knew that if he went to the city he’d be drinking and he’d wind up in pain), brought Jack in the room – and me (he sent someone downtown to get me from East 2nd Street and bring me up to Park Avenue, so I sat quiet and watched) – and everybody was eager to see what Kerouac would do in appreciation, or how Kerouac would react to this transposition of On The Roadinto celestial, day-glo, cosmic, electronic, environment. Jack was very shy, sat down on the couch, which was covered in American flags .but shyly - he removed the flag and folded it up first - he didn’t want  to sit on the flag of Joe McCarthy, it boiled down to! – but he wasn’t sure who everybody was and why they were all there, what they were coming on, so there was an element of bewilderment and confusion in Kerouac but, more than that, like, a very deep sorrow, realizing  that all of these eager-beaver Pranksters were going through another stage of dumb-show, another stage of idealistic nonsense, another attempt to make themselves real (though they were all made of phantom-stuff and they hadn’t yet realized it, and in the course of that they were poisoning Cassady with amphetamine, as Jack was poisoning himself with alcohol). So Jack was down-mouthed, sad, reflective, unresponsive to all their enthusiasm and, actually forced, electrical gaiety, (visual) gaiety.

Kesey was, like, a very very beautiful musing angel on the scene, because he was observant, and trying to understand where Kerouac was. Some of the younger Pranksters were mocking of Kerouac – “What’s the matter with him? Why isn’t he jumping? Why isn’t he enthusiastic? Why isn’t he excited? Why isn’t he ecstatic? Well, his ecstacy was in the realization that they were all dead, right there on the scene. The scene is still preserved on a tape and..film (though so ecstatic were the Pranksters that they probably didn’t get any of the film in focus and it was probably all jarred and jumping, so the visual phenomenon might have been denied to later generations, but it’s all recorded on sound tape and could (should) be edited... except they have all the sound-tapes jumbled up, and it’s never been edited after ten years already, it still hasn’t been edited. [1973 - so, almost 30 years later, the footage was, finally preserved and edited, by Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney, part of the extraordinary preparation for the 2011 documentary,Magic Trip].  
So there was that one great meeting, lasting that evening and then Neal drove Jack back out to Northport. But Neal at that point was so jagged up with amphetamine that he wasn’t really capable of carrying on a heart-tender, mellow, conversation with Kerouac. He was laying on Kerouac the story of the cross-country trip. Kerouac was pained and so, because drinking, not able to sit comfortably in the car, and was sweating, in body  So he wasn’t able to attend with complete tenderness to Neal’s condition, and they all arrived in this electronic nightmare together.





[Jack Kerouac, the last time he visited my apartment, 704 East 5th Street, NYC, he looked like his late father, red-faced corpulent W.C.Fields shuddering with mortal horror grimacing on DMT I'd brought back from visiting Timothy Leary at Millbrook Psychedelic Community, Fall 1964 - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg - copyright Allen Ginsberg Estate] 

Spontaneous Poetics - 123 (Wordsworth - 8)

August 26, 2013, 3:00 am

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[William Wordsworth (1770-1850)]

Why don't I just go through a few little fragments of not-very-well-known poems by Wordsworth, from "Poems of the Imagination". (I'll) just pick out a few lines here and there which give a little haiku-like, or direct, perception, examples of direct perceptual.. examples of the activity of his mind. Like (since) we're talking about the inertness of his mind, we have to balance it. 

He has, (for example), a little poem called "There Was A Boy" - [Allen reads "There Was A Boy" in its entirety] - "There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye cliffs/And islands of Winander!.."..."This boy was taken from his mates, and died/In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old"..."A long half-hour together I have stood/Mute-looking at the grave in which he lies" - He's built a very jocund, lively picture and then, all of a sudden, there's a funny real switch into the experience of looking at the grave for an hour at a time. So there's a solidity there about Wordsworth's experience, particularly there, of death, that's odd, more like the empty strangeness of the situation than in most of Whitman (actually). So, in this case, maybe, Wordsworth is more direct.

Student: What's the name of that poem?

AG: "There Was A Boy". It's the beginning of the "Poems of the Imagination". One thing Wordsworth does have occasionally, to perfection, is observed imagistic detail, or samatha, or vipassana, rather - the insight, detail insight. I remember talking about Imagism with Louis Zukofsky. He pointed out that Wordsworth had one particular phrase that Zukofsky always took as a standard of pure imagery, which was the star-shaped shadow of a blossom cast on stone - Star-shaped shadow of a blossom cast on stone. I think I've mentioned this before when we were talking about haiku. Because what it does is.. it means that Wordsworth is in a field where there's a bright sun, bright enough to cast a shadow, of a little flower on the stone. So you've conjured up space, you've conjured up sky, you've conjured up bright-enough sun, you've conjured up consciousness walking through the field, looking with sufficient microscopic observation to actually see the shadow of the flower underneath the flower on the stone, so, you've actually conjured up, with that one little detail, a whole panorama.

There's an interesting description of the night sky here called "A Night Piece". I won't read the whole poem - [Allen reads from Wordsworth's "A Night Piece"] - "..the pensive traveller, while he treads/His lonesome path, with unobserving eye/Bent earthwards.."..."At length the Vision closes, and the mind,/Not undisturbed by the delight it feels,/Which slowly settles into peaceful calm,/Is left to muse upon the solemn scene." -  So, it's just the parting of the clouds, a really fast description of the stars, and then a strange description of that evanescent sensation we have when looking up and looking away - "How fast they wheel away,/ Yet vanish not!" - That's an odd, almost optical, sensation, or "eyeball kick" that people (have had).. Do you know what I'm talking about? A glimpse up and sudden sense of the entire heavens, constellations "wheel(ing) away" yet "vanish(ing) not"? Of the stars moving yet not moving?" - [tape ends, starts up again] - 

Allen continues his commentary (noting, in "Airey Force Valley"), trees, wind moving the trees - "..in seeming silence makes/ A soft eye-music of slow waving boughs" - "In seeming silence makes a soft eye-music" - Eye-hyphen-music - " a soft eye-music of slow waving boughs" - "slow waving"..

What else is interesting? He went out on "Nutting" - he was messing up little copses, you know, dragging branches around, screwing up the woods - AG reads - "Then up I rose,/ And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash/ And merciless ravage and the shady nook/ Of hazels and the green and mossy bower,/ Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up/ Their quiet being......  - That's sort of an odd moment - noticing the violence he'd brought to the "Shady nook of hazels and the green and mossy bower" - good description of that...   Let's see what we have here. (From "Power of Music" -  Some odd phrasing that's almost Shakespearean - "That tall man, a giant in bulk and in height, not an inch of his body is free from delight"" - it's so Shakespearean..or Blake - "That tall man, a giant in bulk and in height, not an inch of his body is free from delight" - Or (from "Lyre, Though Such Power Do In Thy Magic Live") - "(translucent summer's happiest chance!)/ In the slope-channel floored with pebbles bright" - That's kind of interesting. We've all seen that little river-bed or stream-bed, "floored with pebbles bright", but rarely (so) well described, actually. If you were doing a haiku...

[Audio for the above is available here, beginning at approximately fifty-five minutes in, through to the end of the tape]

Spontaneous Poetics - 124 (William Blake and the French Revolution)

August 27, 2013, 3:00 am

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[William Blake (1757-1827)]

We'll leave (William) Wordsworth for a moment. There was another mind dealing with revolution - (William) Blake, also disillusioned - and there are a couple of brief comments that he made, summaries, of his political changes - that are not too well-known  (The longer, "prophetic books" are difficult to get into, and I haven't mastered them, so I won't deal with those, but some brief comments on the French Revolution by Blake. Since we had Wordsworth's disillusion, this is Blake's) - A generalization - [Allen recites William Blake's "The Grey Monk", in its entirety] - ""I die, I die" the Mother said,/"My children die for lack of bread./What more has the merciless tyrant said?"..."For a tear is an intellectual Thing/And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King/And the bitter groan of the martyr's woe/Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow/  "The hand of Vengeance found the bed/To which the purple tyrant fled/The iron hand crushed the tyrant's head/And became a tyrant in his stead"" -  Talking, I guess, about the same thing as Wordsworth - about Napoleon having "crushed the tyrant's head", or the revolution having "crushed the head of the tyrant", becoming "a tyrant in his stead". As I mentioned the other day, Blake, when Napoleon took the crown, jumped up on his tri-corn(er hat).  

Student: He's advising we all become Buddhist monks or something?

(Another) Student:  Or widows?

AG: We are all widows and monks already. (We're) all "sighing" and "groaning" already. No, first of all, he's saying it as a definite comment on the French Revolution, (as Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) (now makes a comment on the Cuban Revolution), that the revolutionary has become a tyrant. Or as, say, the CIA makes its comment on the Russian Revolution.. (but you've got to remember, all the Capitalist lies about Communism are true, just as all the Communist lies about Capitalism are true - no way around it). So he's just pointing out that, "the iron hand crushed the Tyrant's head/And became a Tyrant in his stead".

As to what to do about it, he thought.. he was an eager beaver also, in the beginning, in a sense of.. he got mad at .. he thought that pity for the King and Queen of France was misplaced, for instance. When Lafayette was a revolutionary but a sensitive, he, apparently, took somewhat the part of the King and Queen of France, and didn't want to see them executed. The thought that (the) blood-letting was going too far - and there's a very odd poem about that called "The Brothels of Paris". So this is an earlier and more pitiless view... [Allen to Student]  I was continuing to answer your question - There's an earlier, more pitiless view by Blake, blaming Lafayette (for) having a kind of reactionary pity for the King and Queen of France - [Allen reads William Blake's "The Brothels of Paris"] - "Let the Brothels of Paris be opened/With many an alluring dance/ To awake the Physicians thro' the city/Said the beautiful Queen of France."..."O who would smile on the wintry seas/& pity the stormy roar?/Or who will exchange his new born child/For the dog at the wintry door?" - So there's a real put-down of empathy there. That's much more powerfully revolutionary. But then, an actual event, for Blake as well as Wordsworth, (and), to some extent, with ourselves, (has) foiled our own, maybe ego-centric notions of revolution, political or spiritual.

[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately two-and-a-half minutes in and concluding approximately ten-and-a-half minutes in]

Spontaneous Poetics - 125 (Blake - The Mental Traveller)

August 28, 2013, 3:30 am

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[William Blake - The Mental Traveller - original ms. circa 1803]

AG: There is another odder way of looking at it that I always dug, in Blake, in "The Mental Traveller". Does anybody know that poem? - "The Mental Traveller"? - It's one of the strangest poems ever written, which (W.B) Yeats, who was a great commentator on Blake, still found indecipherable. It's somewhat a cycle that comes back to itself - like a long story-poem, like a dream, like our own existence, or like Finnegan's Wake, a construction that begins somewhere in the universe and comes right back to the same spot, having gone through various different universes, or births-and-deaths, or re-births. I've never fully understood it, but I've been lately advised to take it as a political parable - that the "Babe" that is born, is Political Liberty, or Intellectual Liberty, or Spiritual Liberty, or Spiritual Open-ness - but maybe, more specifically, political, and the old woman ("Woman Old") is custom and society closing down. So it's a little bit, maybe, similar in theme to the Wordsworth ode, and carries some of the suggestion of continuous change and transformation as re-birth that Whitman suggested (at least as an idea). But it's couched so mysteriously that it seems to come out, not so much from the social womb but from the actual womb of consciousness, because it talks about the perceptions themselves, so it's not just political liberty, it's also, I guess, a wakening - Buddha-mind, or wakening - (that's) also referred to here - [Allen reads the first two stanzas of Blake's "The Mental Traveller"] - "I travel'd thro' a Land of Men/A Land of Men & Women too/And heard and saw such dreadful things/As cold Earth wanderers never knew./ For there the Babe is born in joy/That was begotten in dire woe/ Just as we Reap in joy the fruit/Which we in bitter tears did sow" - I'll interrupt the rhythm of this just to make one (comment) - "For there the Babe is born in joy./ That was begotten in dire woe" - that might be, then, political liberty coming out of blood revolution. Is that clear? (or it's been interpreted that way) - [Allen continues reading the poem, the next twenty-five stanzas, to the end] - "For there the Babe is born in joy/ That was begotten in dire woe/Just as we Reap in joy the fruit/ Which we in bitter tears did sow.  And if the Babe is born a Boy/He's given to a Woman Old/Who nails him down upon a rock/Catches his shrieks in cups of gold".."Her fingers number every nerve/Just as a Miser counts his gold/She lives upon his shrieks and cries/And she grows young as he grows old"... "And none can touch that frowning form/Except it be a Woman Old/ She nails him down upon the Rock/And all is done as I have told" - Figure that out. It's actually the reverse of consciousness, as well as political liberty. I think it was David Erdman and Mark Schorer (two critics who have written books on Blake) who were interpreting that as cycles of civilization, or cycles of social constriction and expansion.

While we're on Blake, there is a portion of "Jerusalem" which I want to get to, which is politically visionary also.

What was going on in "The Mental Traveller" - remember, the title is "The Mental Traveller". Has anybody ever looked at that and figured that out? Has anybody ever puzzled over that one? (Philip) Whalen, do you know it? Have you ever thought about that?

Philip Whalen: Yeah.. a little.. I would suggest Northrop Frye's book on Blake. His interpretations are usually pretty sensible and useful, probably - The book called "Fearful Symmetry". Maybe he has something to say.

AG: In our library, I think we have (S) Foster Damon's "(A) Blake Dictionary", which actually tries to define a lot of the concepts in Blake (like "The Mental Traveller", the "Babe" and "Woman Old"). Yeah?

Student: That poem's also dealt with very interestingly in the novel, The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary

AG: Yeah.    The great line in it that I always took was, the Buddhist line, so to speak, or the line that was nearest to LSD, or the line  that was nearest to one's own experience - "...the Eye altering alters all" - which is a terrific conception, a terrific statement. The Eye altering, alters all" - ah! - "For the eye altering alters all" -  Well, anybody who puts on eye-glasses knows that anyway, but anybody who's dropped acid knows that, and anybody who's had some kind of ecstatic visionary experience knows that.. anybody who's dropped acid knows, or anybody who's got drunk, I suppose, will know - "..the Eye altering alters all" - It's a great way of saying it. Yeah?

Student: In the beginning of the poem, it seems to me, there might have been a little bit about the role of the poet - like Whitman was saying (about) how the country absorbs the poet the way the poet absorbs the country?..or like .. the poet is sucking all the strength out of the country and the country puts him on (the cover of) Time magazine and then sucks all the strength out of him..

AG: Uh-huh. Yeah. There is a certain way that you can follow it up to a certain (point). You can follow it through that way. But it's not the poet. It's just, like, the birth of consciousness in to the vegetable universe, which is the woman who "..numbers every nerve,/ Just as a miser counts his gold" - that having experience of the world at all begins to limit and number and count and measure. What (happens is the) "shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy" (same thing as Wordsworth) . His fingers "number every nerve, just as a miser counts his gold" . It could be seen as that. But, actually, it's just the birth of consciousness and growth, growth in a body.

[Audio for the above is available here, starting approximately ten-and-a-half-minutes in, through to approximately twenty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in]

Spontaneous Poetics - 126 (William Blake)

August 29, 2013, 3:30 am

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[William Blake (1757 - 1827) - Jerusalem, Plate 27, "To The Jews..." via Yale Center For British Art, Paul Mellon Collection]

AG: I'd like to finish this quasi-political section with a song by (William) Blake from "Jerusalem". I'll sing it, because it has a certain natural music in it.

Student: What part is it?

AG: Perhaps repetitious. It's Plate 27 of "Jerusalem", his last work (or his last known work - apparently, some of his work was burned after his death) - [Allen begins reading/singing - "The fields from Islington to Marybone,/To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood/ Were builded over with pillars of gold/And there Jerusalems pillars stood/ Her Little-ones ran on the fields/The Lamb of God among them seen/And fair Jerusalem his Bride:/Among the little meadows green"..."She walks upon our meadows green/The Lamb of God walks by her side/And every English Child is seen,/Children of Jesus & his bride./ Forgiving trespasses and sins/Lest Babylon with cruel Og/With Moral & Self-righteous Law/Should Crucify in Satan's Synagogue!" - which is precisely what Wordsworth did - "With Moral & Self-righteous Law".."Crucify in Satan's Synagogue" - [Allen continues reading from "Jerusalem"  - "What are those golden Builders doing/Near mournful ever-weeping Paddington/Standing above that mighty Ruin/Where Satan the first victory won"....] - Well, he's got comments on almost every aspect... 
 [tape ends here and then continues] - 
"...that "The iron hand crush'd the tyrant's head/ And became a tyrant in its stead" -  - but he's also got it the other way on Wordsworth, who was in favor of capital punishment - "(H)e who makes his law a curse,/By his own law shall surely die". For Wordsworth, death, in a sense, was, finally, death of the imagination, because he did (unlike Whitman, unlike Blake), somewhat get scared of the anarchy of his own mind, I guess you could say, and the anarchy of nature. But he was scared of the anarchy of his own mind, and wanted, finally, liberty and order. He wanted liberty only within order, and wanted a law and order that would include the punishment of death. That seems to have been a sort of neurotic extremism on his part (although, I know it's counted now to be a great virtue, it's counted by the CIA to be a great virtue).

Philip Whalen: Well, but the thing is they had a definite split. They had.. On one side they said, "You guys, it's alright to have liberty, but you musn't have license - and that's the only possible thing - either liberty or license (and "license" meant you went out with your machete and chopped off everybody's head on the street out of pure...  This is what the expression of the self was, what they figured the self really did, and what-not.. But the idea, like I was saying the other day, the idea that you take people that are left alone, they don't usually do that. When the cops go out on strike, the crime rate drops. The idea of license is a bogey, it's a fake-a-rini that the government promotes in order to stay in power.

AG: Well, he's commenting on the license that the unconscious, or the mob, or the mass, or anarchy, took in the French Revolution, where everybody's head got chopped off, beginning with the King, until finally Robespierre and everybody else...

Philip Whalen: That wasn't anarchy. That was organized.  

AG: Yeah

Philip Whalen: And Blake says, (in) about nineteen different places, there's  no such thing as organized innocence. You've got to.. That was a  set-up..It was done on purpose. It was people (that) got it going, and other people said, "okay, we're tired of it", and they stopped it. People say, "Oh my goodness! The Cultural Revolution in China was terrible! They went out and blew up the Museum(s) and what-not!", and, "What's going to happen?", you know, "It's horrible." - But it got stopped, also. It was started for a purpose, and it was stopped for a purpose. It took some doing. It took Chou En-Lai (and his minions) to get those kids back down to the farms. And (but) they didn't blow up everything - they didn't burn down every tourist!

AG: Well, I think I presented a confused picture here. Because, we're dealing with it on a lot of levels. First of all, there's a level of political activity that we've all gone through, one way or another, or are empathetic with. Then there's the level of subjective psychological revolution - Gay Liberation, Women's Liberation, anarchy liberation, sensory liberation, biochemical liberation, vegetarian liberation. Then there's the aspect of liberation from Capitalism to consider, (which everybody's preoccupied with), or liberation from police state Communism (which everybody is equally.. preoccupied with somewhere else). And then there's the liberation from the vegetable universe (which Blake was preoccupied with, actually - seeing Woman (sic) as having imposed the vegetable universe and having "number(ed) every nerve" of the (male) "Babe",  so, seeing Tirzah (sic), or Woman, that wants reproduction and recreation of the vegetable material universe, as being the big enemy - In Blake, "Tirzah"). So you get a little of that too.

Philip Whalen: Whereas there is this brainless, mechanical, reproduction. That's the real fear - getting rid of that, and getting into conscious imaginary creation , which is what he's all in favor of.

AG: Anyway, we've got Whitman, Wordsworth and Blake, with their mental revolutions, revolved in our heads at this point, and I'm not sure that I've come to any conclusion. Because everybody's sort of solidified little notions of it, or all the poets solidified notions of it, in various forms, and we're still stuck with having to deal with all the symbols laid on us, and all the insistences of all the revolutions and counterrevolutions. So I'll leave it there, because it's twenty of one (twenty of the other)

[to the class re their assignment] - Bring in your blues next time

[class and tape end here]   

[Audio for the above is available here starting at approximately twenty-one-and-three-quarter minutes, through to the end] 

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Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 141

August 30, 2013, 3:30 am

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[Johnny Depp at Allen Ginsberg's kitchen table, New York City, 1994. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]


["Harry Smith with Flowers and Cigarette in the kitchen 437 East 12th Street NYC,  August 3, 1986. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]


[Joanne Kyger, Allen's kitchen, 437 East 12th St.NYC, November 1989 c.Allen Ginsberg Estat


[Gary Snyder, 437 East 12th St kitchen table, March 1991. photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

[Peter Orlovsky 437 East 12th St, New York City, 1996. Photo Allen Ginsberg. c Allen Ginsberg Estate] 

Allen's table. We've been contacted about Allen's kitchen-table, historical hearth and meeting point, also setting for innumerable photos. Paul Seatonand Dorothy Shostak of Vermont now have it (legally!) in their possession and are looking to find it a home (either with an institution, or a private collector). "We would like to offer a percentage of any proceeds to Karmê Chöling  and to a local community kitchen", they write. 
Contact them here for further details.     

Here's the first poster (just released this week) forKill Your Darlings. The text/blurb at the top is from Entertainment Weekly - "An expressive, jazzy and ambitious movie, sexually alive and yearning. Daniel Radcliffe [Allen Ginsberg] is fearless and full of vitality. Dane DeHaan [Lucien Carr] is hot and dangerous." Further (all - so far - positive) reviews can be seen here (at Rotten Tomatoes).Bob Rosenthal's wise dissenting opinion may be seenhere. October 18 is release date.  



An earlier, more sedate one ("Before he could become a great poet he had to live life" is the tag line) has also been circulating. 



and now this


Footage of  the Patti Smith-Philip Glass Ginsberg hommage earlier this month at the Edinburgh Festival - here. 

A glimpse from Jean Jacques Lebel and Xavier Villetard's "Beat Generation: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs" film - here.

Bea Kozera dies, aged 92 - Bea Kozera?



                                     [Allen Ginsberg c. 1986 - Photograph by Peter O Whitmer ]

Charles Reznikoff's Birthday

August 31, 2013, 3:30 am

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[Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) - Photograph by Abraham Ravett, 1975]




It's Charles Reznikoff 's birthday today. We've featured him here before, with great pleasure, quite extensively. 

Previous "Rezzy" postings on the Ginsberg Project:  here - here, here, here and here,  here and here.

Today, the recording of a memorial gathering held for him at St Mark's Poetry Project, March 20, 1976.

Audio notes from the Internet Archive, via Other Minds:  

"A veritable who’s who of American poets, many hailing from New York, read their favorite poems by Charles Reznikoff and others, during a memorial for the late Jewish-American poet, author, and playwright. Those marking the passing of the first of the Objectivist poets include, Allen Ginsberg,Ron Padgett, Joel Oppenheimer, Anne Waldman, Armand Schwerner, Charles North, and many others. The poems they have selected represent the incredible range of Reznikoff’s writings, from one-line mediations on a bridge to excerpts from book-length poems about the Jewish Holocaust. Written in the clear plain language that was a hallmark of the Objectivist poets, this reading serves as a fitting memorial to a quintessential American poet of the 20th century, whose “brightness dwindles into stars.”

Note: All poems are by (Charles) Reznikoff, except where noted. The attribution of these poems is based on the 2005 edition of The Poems of Charles Reznikoff  edited by Seamus Cooney. Certain poems have been renumbered from their original publication and this has been indicated when possible."

Allen can be heard reading from "Five Groups of Verse" (from 1927), approximately thirty-four minutes in. He is followed by Peter Orlovsky reading a brief section from "Holocaust".   

Spontaneous Poetics - 127 (Morning Meditation - 1)

September 2, 2013, 3:30 am

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[Philip Whalen in ceremonial Zen garb at the Hartford Street Zen Center, San Francisco, circa 1991] 

Allen Ginsberg's Spontaneous Poetics/Improvised Poetics class continues,  August 6 1976.

[Original transcriber's note - "As in all tapes from this summer, this is recorded by a not-very-attentive teacher's assistant somewhere in the middle of the lecture hall. The windows are open, it's summer, the students are restless and the dialogue between Ginsberg and (Philip) Whalen is often (regrettably) lost in the mix"]

[Whalen arrives in the classroom, partially attired in ceremonial robes]

AG: (Oh! the) glory!

Philip Whalen:  This is only part of it. I'm not wearing my...   (it's in my bag at home)... 
It's.. (This is) great for zazen in the morning - or in the evening.. (and)..

AG: [to class] - Philip, I believe, is what's titled a sensei.

Philip Whalen: I don't have a title, as far as I know...

AG: Occasionally.. he (has), once, acted as chief monk at Tassajara sitting Center

Philip Whalen: Oh, that's what Bill (Kwong) gets to be.. Bill gets to be sensei, but he's been a monk many years longer than I was. He was selected.. he was supposed to be one of Baker roshi's dharma heirs.. but [Shunryu Suzuki] the old man died before he got all the final ceremonies made up

AG: Isn't there something.. Wasn't Baker roshi supposed to do something about that?

Philip Whalen: Somebody will. It will probably be alright

AG: So if anybody wants to do any sitting - Bill Kwong, his class was (when)? 

Philip Whalen:  Seven.. but now we're just going to sit from eight to nine..

AG: Every day?

Philip Whalen: ...and then we'll do zazen from six to seven....

AG: Oh, six to seven in the evening, you're sitting?

Philip Whalen: Yeah.. (we'll) sit in the morning with everybody..(but) I don't see any point in  having  separate sesshins, everybody will sit together, with all the rest of Naropa, at eight..

AG: Where is that at? Karma Dzong or here?

Philip Whalen: Next door

AG: So what are your hours?

Philip Whalen:  The same time as everyone. We sit there, eight to nine..

AG: Eight to nine in the morning

Philip Whalen: ...and then, yeah, at night, from six to seven, we'll sit there..(do the) traditional Zen thing, we'll sit for an hour too

AG: So six to seven..

Philip Whalen: At night

AG: ..at night, you'll be doing the traditional.. See, I'm confused what's the schedule... I'm asking you what is the schedule? (because I don't know)..

Philip Whalen: Yeah, eight to nine

Allen: Eight to nine in the morning? Six to seven (in the evening). And which will be the Zen style?

Philip Whalen: It's all the Zen style.

[Audio of this initial banter can be found here, beginning approximately a minute-and-a-quarter in, and concluding approximately three-and-a-quarter minutes in] 

Spontaneous Poetics 128 - (Morning Meditation - 2)

September 3, 2013, 3:00 am

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AG: How many here sit?  (How many) have sat? And how many have not? Raise your hands. Of those that raised their hands, how many have not gone to get instruction in sitting? Do you know? I guess you may or may not know about that, but part of the Naropa services includes free sitting instruction, which you can get by going up to the Naropa office at 1441 Broadway, and they'll assign a meditation instructor to you, who will show you how to sit. It's in what's called the samatha style, which is related to, or very similar to, Zen sitting style, basic Zen sitting style. The instruction doesn't take a long time, so, while you're here for the summer, you might as well check it out and get it under your belt, so you'll always know, from the inside, what the other people are doing (since the majority are sitting). You can find out very easily. And, actually - that's a homework assignment for this class. It's not assigned that you sit for the rest of your life, but it is an assignment that you go to sit at least an hour, as part of this course, so you know what mindfulness is, in Buddhist terms, because (in these lectures) I'm relating that to mindfulness in poetic terms, in relation to William Carlos Williams. The sitting meditation practiced here involves attention to the breath, and that intersects with Williams' poem "Thursday" (which I read in the first session), which goes something like [Allen paraphrases Williams' poem] - "I have had my dreams, like other men, but it has come to nothing, so that now I stand here with my feet firmly planted on earth..on the ground, feeling the weight of my body in my shoes, the brim of my hat passing before my brow, my coat hanging on my shoulders, the breath passing in and out of my nose, and resolve to dream no more". So that's related. That's sort of an intersection point of American direct observation and mindfulness of primary phenomena, and Buddhist-style mindfulness, and, really, it's, for me, the main reference point of this course in poetics, sort of an intersection point between Buddhist metaphysics and American Yankee pragmatic metaphysics. A serious point, because, basically, what I've been dealing with all during the summer, (though maybe a little less directly in the last few days, because I've been reading long balloon-like passages out of Wordsworth and Whitman), the main point that I've been trying to propose, is that poetic yoga (to the extent that it involves yoking the mind to the body of the world and observing particular detail) involves an investigation of consciousness, or involves mindful consciousness, or involves recollection of the phenomena of your own consciousness, the procession of thoughts in your head, the rising of preoccupation or thought, the flowering of mind-forms and the decline of mind-forms, in that one method of poetry is notating the procession of thought-forms that go through the head, or rhythmic forms that go through the body, at any rate, notating in verbal form some of the phenomena of consciousness, when you directly observe your consciousness and when you're mindful of it. So that the homework assignment to go sit down and be mindful of your breath, and, as a side-effect, observe the procession of thoughts in your head - (that's)  a logical homework proposition. I should have started the class with this suggestion and I kept forgetting to do it - but most have been sitting, so that's alright. 
(All of you), you should be checking that out. It's one background depth thing that Naropa can offer that other schools don't generally offer, or other schools either of poetry or any other kind of writing don't generally offer.

[Audio for the above can be found here, starting approximately three-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding approximately nine minutes in]  

Spontaneous Poetics- 129 (Blyth and Haiku)

September 4, 2013, 3:30 am

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AG: I got some complaints that last time (that) I was  getting up in the air, reading too much and boring people, (which is probably true, because my attention wavered occasionally when I was reading through the Wordsworth - most of the time I was there and present, but my attention waved too, as your attention must have -  partly out of desperation, because, actually, (with Wordsworth) I've sort of run out of things to teach! - except the things that I knew already, like "Tintern Abbey", or "Intimations of Immortality.."  I would, if I had it, read through some of Christopher Smart, (since only five people in this class said they'd read Smart). Yeah?

Student: I'd like to hear some (D.H.) Lawrence and (Herman) Melville, if we're coming on to it

AG: Melville..

Student: Lawrence, Melville


AG: Yeah, I'll get to them. But today, I thought I'd leave things open and just talk, and leave some space for you to talk too. In fact, not have a subject today for a change. Because, my problem has been, I went to the doctor yesterday and found out, that I have slightly high blood-pressure, and that's because I was constantly looking for a subject. Like, total anxiety! - I haven't finished reading your blues (assignments), I haven't gotten my paperwork together, I haven't finished marking and grading last session's poetry  class. 
I'm having a nervous break-down!  So, therefore I thought I'd have it in class, and let all structure fall!  So that anybody can say anything they want and (they don't even have to) talk about poetry, (which will appeal, I guess, to the whiners in the class.. they're the ones who were complaining). So I brought (along) a lot of books to read, anyway.. Yeah?



Student: I was wondering if you have, from the East, from the Orient, if you have any favorite authors?

AG: From the East?

Student: Yeah

AG: Well, one thing that we put in the library, the four volumes of haiku by R.H.Blyth. Have you seen that? - (Those who were not familiar with the Blyth books, would you raise your hand? - R.H.Blyth  - Haiku - four volumes). Well, Blyth was a Zen practitioner who lived in Japan. Maybe Phil(ip) (Whalen) can tell (you) about him?  There is a very beautiful series of books, published by (the) Tuttle Company, in pretty covers - pretty, a strange cloth, Oriental brown simple rough peasant cloth - dealing with (the) history of the haiku and then spring, summer, fall, winter - the haiku cycles, divided into the seasons. Blyth's books are a fantastic anthology of all the great historic haiku by Issa, Basho, Buson, and others. Issa I like particularly, as being similar to William Carlos Williams, as an objective subjectivist [sic] - and he writes directly about himself - "Spring evening/There are thoughts in the mind of Issa" 

Philip Whalen: There's also a little separate volune called "The Year of My Life", translated by some guy at the University of California [Nobuyuki Yuasa], which is very beautiful.

AG: By Issa?

Philip Whalen: Yeah.It's a combination of incredible diary and... 

AG: It's (they're) a basic handbook of poetry, the Blyth haiku bibles, that Phil (Whalen) and I (and Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder) were all using, to my recollection, around 1955 to (19)56, in Berkeley, when we were all living together in a cottage. And the Blyth haiku books were one of the poetic bibles that we constantly referred to. They give you the Japanese writing script (writing, or whatever you call it), then they give you a transliteration (so you get the sound), then they give you a very good English translation, then they give you an explanation of all the private Japanese references, and show(ed) how it relates to the seasons. They say "uguisu", which is a bird that's crying, (and) then they'll explain what the "uguisu" is.  And they have all the great classical haiku - so.. like, "Wiping my snot on the flowers, ah, the plum blossoms at their best" - [to Philip Whalen] - Do you know more about Blyth? I don't know much about him


[R(eginald) H(orace) Blyth (1936-1964) at Gakushuin University,Tokyo, 1962]

Philip Whalen: He died a few years ago. He was the English tutor to the Crown Prince, among other things. He somehow lived in Japan all during the war without being interned as an enemy alien or something.  How he got the job of being tutor to the Crown Prince, I don't know, but he was, and he was very interested in.. he was a close friend of Suzuki Daisetsu, also (who helped) get him into Zen practice, (I think (he would) go down, take the train down...)...and, anyway, he lived in Japan for many many years. I'm not at all sure what his competence was in Chinese. He could probably speak it. In any case, you can compare his translations with a number of other ones. There's a book of haiku brought out by the Japanese Cultural Ministry (with has many of the same things in it, so you can cross-check, in case you're interested.

[Audio for the above can be found here, starting approximately nine minutes in and concluding approximately fifteen-and-a-half minutes in] 

Spontaneous Poetics - 130 (Ginsberg & Whalen - Oriental Influences)

September 5, 2013, 3:30 am

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[R(eginald) H(orace) Blyth (1936-1964)]

AG: There's another book by (R.H.) Blyth called Senryu Notes

Student: Called what?

AG:  Senryu Notes - S-E-N-R-Y-U - Is that right?  [Senryu - Japanese Satirical Verses]

Philip Whalen: Yeah, yeah

AG: "Senryu" means what?

Philip Whalen: Senryu is the comical and obscene and..

AG: vulgar?

Philip Whalen: ..vulgar, that type of thing. Also, there's a.. 

AG:  A two-volume history of haiku

Philip Whalen: Yes, a two-volume history. Then there's another book that's called Oriental (Wit and) Humor [Oriental Humor], which is also..(a book of) senryu, and other jokes and song, and... (A) big book.



Student: Also this book -  Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics



Philip Whalen: Yeah, only that one is a real drag-o-la, because  he says Basho is the same as (Johann) Sebastian Bach, and I don't think that's really (accurate), (or) to say that Basho is the same as Wordsworth and...

Student: When he says Don Quixote is the man who lives by Zen, also..

Philip Whalen: Well, that's an interesting idea, but...

AG: It exists only in the realm of the ideas

Philip Whalen: : Where Don Quixote existed

Student:  (Michael) McClure mentioned something that he felt was the best book that had been published this year (1976)..

Philip Whalen: Well, there are  two, there are two good ones. There is one that we put together by Dr Yip Wai-lim  down at the University of San Diego just called Chinese Poetry and it has a long, very interesting, introduction about how Chinese poetry is manufactured, (put) together, and then, (in) the main part of the book, he gives you Chinese texts and he gives you a list of words (that gives you the full) meaning of all the characters, and then he gives you, finally, some sort of complete English version of each poem. And he has quite a wide selection of stuff... - And the other book, is the one I was reading from the other day, called Sunflower Splendor, a big anthology  big thick thick anthology (with) Chinese stuff from every period (from the earliest times down to Chairman Mao)



AG: That's probably the best Chinese anthology ever made (so far in English translation). Super. I haven't looked at that (yet) but..

Philip Whalen: Well, it's been done by a number of people. It's not done by just one guy. It's done by a whole raft of scholars and so on, and other poets, and so forth, and it's a very nice book.

AG: Prior to that book, I've been using The White Pony..



Philip Whalen: Yes

AG: ..by Robert Payne.  It's a huge anthology..

Philip Whalen:  And then there's our Arthur Waley.

AG: ...of Chinese work. And Pound's translations of the Odes are really interesting... both as  Pound's poetry, and, sort of, his idea of Chinese manners and ideas..
My own favorite. I have a book called "Sufis, Yogis, the Saints of India" - the Poets" [correct title:"Sufis, Mystics and Yogis of India"], put out by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan (which I think I brought along, and I think it's in the library, in my little reference shelf), which has one poem, which is always my favorite poem of the Orient, something like, let's see - "Nivruttinath adorned himself with a neck-garland of smells, Sopan decorated her hair with water of pearls, Muktabai fed herself on cooked diamonds. The secret of all three have come into my hands. So says Changadeva" - So it's about the lineage of some fourteenth-century Indian yogis. There's where I got that phrase, "cooked diamonds". That's my favorite Oriental poem - by Changadeva. The book is in the library, I think. It's a great anthology of Indian crazy poetry.

Philip Whalen: Yeah, but the more elegant kind of Indian poetry is available in paperback. Daniel Ingalls' translation - An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry from Harvard Press. Very nice sort of book, but all about.. highlighted by.. more jewels and ladies sweating, and so on. It's quite wonderful, elephants and bodices and armor. Very expensive to buy. It's reminiscent rather of the goings-on that Lady Murasaki tells about in the Tale of Genji about how these ladies.. Instead of the gentlemen, it's the ladies slipping out of the house at night and tracking down the gentlemen that they're interested in and coming home in the morning with scratches and what-not on their.. love- bites, and it's beautiful. Quite elaborate descriptions of how they get themselves out of (their)...  about the weather and flowers.. 




AG: The opposite of that would be Kabir, who was a shoe-maker (with) a sort of Blakean intelligence - K-A-B-I-R  - (Robert) Bly's translated  some of it  (but) I don't know if they're very good translations. And there's a little tiny section of  translations of Kabir by Ezra Pound in Pound's Collected Translations. And in the book I (just) mentioned, "Sufis, Mystics and Yogis...", there's a long excellent section of translations of Kabir. His line is "If love was for sale at the market-place for the price of a head, I'd cut off my head". It's a whole series of saint conceptions, but done by an illiterate shoemaker who's words were taken down by others. Fourteenth or Fifteenth Century. But also Mirabai, the singer of songs, devotional songs to Krishna, Mirabai of Brindaban - M-I-R-A-B-A-I - And Kabir - so those of Medieval Indian..

What else, specifically do I like? I like Ho Chi Minh's poems, actually. There's little translations that are very good. Prison poems by Ho Chi Minh are accurate and exact and sharp. There is (also) a modern Japanese poet, translated in theNew Directions series...

Student: Shinkichi Takahashi?

AG: No. Do you know the one that Gary (Snyder) likes a lot? There's a...

Philip Whalen: There's one guy that (has published translations from..   

AG: Yeah, what is the name?

Philip Whalen: ...and now there's a paperback (but I don't think it's from New Directions, I think it's from some other publisher, I can't think of its name)

Student: Is that Kenji?

Philip Whalen: Yeah

AG: Yeah, Kenji Miyazawa

Philip Whalen: Yeah, yeah, that's (it)..

Student: Yeah, he's beautiful.


[Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933)]

Philip Whalen: He has a whole book. And Gary just translated one poem...  ["Kurakake yama no yuki" - "The Snow on Saddle Mountain" - included in The Back Country, 1967] ..and now there's this little volume of..

AG: He was an engineer-agronomist, really.

Philip Whalen: Yeah.

AG: So he lived it, like Gary Snyder, actually. The forest, the forest man, agronomist, practical poems about going out and  working with peasants... and the intelligence and sadness of peasants, like losing their crops.

Student: There's one poem by him about the snow on Saddle Mountain that's really beautiful. He says, you know, "The snow on Saddle Mountain, everything else, woods, trees, changing all the time, but the snow on Saddle Mountan shifting, moving, changing, all the time, but still the only faint source of hope is the snow on Saddle Mountain, you know. It's really...

AG: And one line - "All is Buddhahood to he who has said, even once, "Glory be!"" - I wrote a whole series of poems imitating his style, which is in a little book called Sad Dust Glories, which I think is in the library somewhere.

So there's modern Japanese (poetry). I got turned onto that by (Gary) Snyder, originally, Gary's (translations of) Japanese poems also. His translations of (quite a) lot of poetry. that's right, (and) Chinese...

[Audio for the above, begins here, at approximately fifteen-and-a-half minutes in and ends approximately twenty-five minutes in]

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 142

September 6, 2013, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Allen Ginsberg June 1986 Radio Interview

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[Michael C Hall ( David Kammerer) and Daniel Radcliffe (Allen Ginsberg) in John Krokidas' "Kill Your Darlings"(2013)]

[Daniel Radcliffe (and John Krokidas - Radcliffe speaks on Ginsberg, Krokidas speaks on his casting of Radcliffe) - at the Venice Film Festival, September 2013] 

[Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe)'s first meeting with Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) at the Columbia University South Hall (Butler) Library - scene from the upcoming "Kill Your Darlings"




[Dane DeHaan and Daniel Radcliffe - The Official SONY Pictures Classics trailer for the upcoming film, Kill Your Darlings]

So, to begin with the Kill Your Darlings buzz. It premiered this past week at both the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals. It opens in the U.S. October 18.

Here's Daniel Radcliffe at the press conference at the Venice Festival  (in the clip, he begins speaking about fifty-five seconds in)

Daniel Radcliffe: "I had been aware of Ginsberg since I was about fourteen years old, and I read the first line of "Howl" when I was about that age.. ["I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix"]... It was a few years before I then read the rest of it.. (but)... I was more a fan of... I was given Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, when I was fourteen to read, and I really really got into that, just because it was so anarchic and chaotic and appealed to me at the time. And so I was really.. I was much more aware of Kerouac and Burroughs than I was of Ginsberg, when I started making the film (but then, yeah. I'm a (I have) a huge interest in poetry, so, when I.. so I was obviously very aware of his work). And then, when I got the part, it was just.. it was a fantastic excuse to dive into his life and start researching him.. and.. and.. The main resource for me in looking at his character were his diaries, (which he started making when he was very young), and they're just...they're an amazing insight into the mind of a young genius (and he did.., you know, he, absolutely, you know, saw himself as a genius, and was just not sure what form that was going to take). So, I mean, I think that, in the.. And, in doing the film, I learned about his relationship with his mother, and his family, and that really informed how I read his poetry, in a much deeper way.. and I.. yeah, I think doing the film's given me a much greater appreciation of Ginsberg and his work."



"I'm not playing Allen Ginsberg, the great literary giant that everybody knows, I'm playing a guy called Allen from Paterson, New Jersey, who's going to a University for the first time where he... and he thinks that everybody is smarter and richer than he is, and he feels socially insecure, and intellectually insecure, and it's about him finding his way out of that, and falling in love in the process, and the way that, you know, turned him into the poet that he became, or the part that I played in that journey."



"Yeah, I don't think I felt particularly a pressure because it was Ginsberg and because I'm..    I think that, you know, had it been..John Keats, it would have been...I would have felt it in a different way, because I am an obsessive sort of Keats fan, but because I didn't have that relationship with Ginsberg, I didn't really feel that pressure, but I did feel a huge amount of pressure to put in a good performance, and to.. I loved John (Krokidas)'s script so much that I just wanted to be, you know, an important part of bringing it to life, and I wanted to, you know, do justice to the great characters that.. and great character that he'd written. So that was the only pressure I felt."    

Daniel Radcliffe, from an earlier interview: "I don't care why people come and see (my) films. If they come and see a film about the Beat poets because they saw me in Harry Potter, fantastic. That's a wonderful thing. I feel like I have an opportunity to capitalize on "Potter" by doing work that might not otherwise get attention. If I can help a film like this (Kill Your Darlings) get attention, that's, without doubt, that's a great thing". 

Undoubtedly, Kill Your Darlings is getting (and will continue to get) attention.     




As for other news:
     
Katherine Campbell Mead-Brewer's academic study (of Howl), "The Trickster in Ginsberg - A Critical Reading" gets an enthusiastic "five-star" review here.


George Jarniewicz's two-part interview (in Polish) on Allen in Poland (here and here).

Seamus Heaney passed away last week. Here's Geoffrey Heponstall's memory of meetings with both Heaney and Ginsberg.

Noli timere - Heaney's "last words" (in a text message he apparently sent to his wife) - "Don't be afraid" 

"Aware Aware wherever you are  No Fear/Trust your heart Don't ride your Paranoia dear/Breathe together with an ordinary mind/ Armed with Humor Feed & Help Enlighten  Woe Mankind"  (Allen Ginsberg - "Capitol Air" ( from Plutonian Ode, 1980)

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Allen Ginsberg June 1986 Radio Interview

September 7, 2013, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Spontaneous Poetics - 131 (Henri Michaux)

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City Lights put up (as a podcast, on-line) earlier this summer, an interview (a phone-interview) with Allen, dating from the mid-1980's, the (Ronald) Reagan era, (June 2 1986, in fact, the day before Allen's 60th birthday!). We thought to shine some more light on it, to feature it this weekend. 

Here follows a transcription.  Allen, with the two interviewers, Walter Isgro, and another, un-named, (the context being a visit to the state of Maine), discuss poetic history, censorship, art, education, politics (both global and local) and Allen and the Beats as representatives of a tradition, the tradition of "good old American individualism".

"The Moral Majority", "Star Wars" (Strategic Defence Initiative), "The Rapture" - just to refresh you with some of those now-dated terms!

Interviewer: First of all this is going to be.. you’re going to have me, and then you’ll be talking with Walter Isgro, my partner in crime, here, and..   First off. Allen...  or do you prefer, Mr. Ginsberg?

AG: No, Allen’s alright, too.

Interviewer: Okay, Allen, perhaps you can tell us.. Now you got interested in poetry, I take it your father did a little bit of poetry as well

AG: My father, Louis was a poet. He lived in Paterson, New Jersey. And he wrote..  was of the old school of poetry, he wrote very beautiful lyrics actually, that were in the  anthologies of his day, which was the thirties and forties and fifties, the old Louis Untermeyer Modern American and British poetry, which was a book that was used in the high schools when I went to high school in Paterson New Jersey, Paterson Central High, so I had it in the family. It was a family business, so to speak.

Interviewer: Was your father a major influence on you and some of your work?

AG: Well yes, certainly, in matters of sentiment, you know, of feeling, and also, I learned from him, very early, all the different forms that are used in traditional nineteenth- century poetry, also, since he taught Milton and Wordsworthand Blake in high school and later in college, when I was a little kid, (which is to say, 5,6,.8, 9, 10, 11, 12 years old), I used to hear him stompingaround the house reciting Milton, or pieces from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” - or Edgar Allan Poe’s “(The) Raven”. Do you know (“The Raven”)?

Interviewer: Oh yes.

AG: [begins reciting "The Raven"]  - “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,/Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,/While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,/As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door./'Tis some visitor,' I muttered…Only this, and nothing more.”

So I remember all those rhythms in my head when I was a little kid so that got me off to a good educated start to be a professional poet, and then, when I grew older, I ran into Jack Kerouac when I was seventeen years old, and William Burroughsthat same year. They had a new idea of poetry which was to write your mind, or to write the way you talk and to write out of your real experience, rather than making it up like Poe was – imaginary (out of) the old archaic romance(s) - so then I began writing more realistically, and, I guess, around 1950,I ran into Doctor William Carlos Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey, nearby Paterson. He was a very great modern poet whose idea was to write the way you talk, use the rhythms of talk, making poetry as interesting as actual conversation with a good friend.

Interviewer: Now is that something that they also picked up from, say, Walt Whitman as well?

AG: Well, yes, of course,  Whitman was a big influence too  that my father taught me, and Whitman’s message was “I Celebrate Myself”/I sing myself/andwhat I shall assume you shall assume" . And that’s a good way of beginning, either on radio or television, or in poetry, that is talking frankly and personally about your real experience.

Interviewer: And this was important in your art form?

AG: Well, I think any art form you’ve got to come out of your own experience, you can’t just be a re-hash of someone-else’s great master-work, or of the newspapers , (what you read in the newspapers), or what you see on television. You certainly can’t be parroting what the President says, otherwise you’d be a mindless idiot - like almost everybody in America!

Interviewer: Well, why do you think a lot of people follow him [the President, President Reagan]?

AG: Oh, Because they stick their faces in television sets for six hours a day and that’s their whole life! – That’s why they follow him. He [Ronald Reagan]’s an old actor, he’s a faker, or he’s a specialist in that medium of having phony emotions, acting.

Interviewer: Well, you speak a lot, or rather you write a lot, I should say, about alienated Americans, I guess you’d have to call them, the Beat Generation.

AG: No I don’t think they were alienated Americans. We were the old-fashioned good ol’ American individualists! We were the kind of people that George Washington and Tom Paine liked.

Interviewer: You don’t see these people as more or less outcasts in their own time at that time you wrote about?

AG: No, no. I think that America was outcast at that time. They were getting into the Atom Bomb, getting into foreign wars in Indo-China which they were going to lose anyway. (And) they were getting into conformity, they were getting into censorship, they were getting into all sorts of horrible things that were un-American, getting into organized religion taking over the government like the Moral Majority wants to do now . The founders of our country didn’t want any organized religion running the country. That’s why they separated the Church and the State.

Interviewer: So these revolutionaries that you are writing about maybe are the... It’s American, it’s on course..

AG: The good old-time Americans that ran for Tom Paine and George Washington and Thomas Jeffersonand Walt Whitman,  (Henry David) Thoreau, and, all the great.. all the great patriarchs, the real Americans, not those guys up for political office who who wrap themselves around the flag like bunch of scout groups.. Like the President! 

Interviewer:  Yeah, like the President.

AG: Like the President..

Interview: Allen is this perhaps the most important..

AG: ...(who) asks about God and hardly ever goes to church, who asks about family and has got a dispersed family (because you are (he is) just interested in power, and doing everything against what the founders of our country wanted to do. I’d say.. (So) I say that the President of the United States Ronald Reagan is Un-American.  I’m talking as someone in the lineage of Thoreau and Whitman - and Ralph Waldo Emerson -

Interviewer: Ah, there we go.

AG: There’s America.

Interviewer: Yes – and Thoreau, I loved his writings

AG: Well, that’ s what we learned in grammar school. What’s going on now in Washington isn’t anything like we learned at grammar school, where democracy was supposed to be democracy (and) against purity.

Interviewer: So the people you wrote about in the (19)50s and early (19)60s are much like the people of the 1980s?

AG: Well, there were people around in the 1980s who were independently-minded adults (who were not) plugged into the electric network.

Interviewer: Why do you think that might be, Allen?

AG: Oh, I guess, at some point or other when you grow up you suddenly realize that you’ve got to make your own life, you’ve got to make your own judgments, that an individual human consciousness is a real thing and that the notion of a faith is not quite so real, more of an abstraction, that your fidelity is to your friends, to your own life and to your family, to maybe the community, to the community that you live in, not just some nasty abstract Nazi Germany, or Stalinist Russia, or Capitalist America.

Interviewer:  So people live for themselves…however..

AG: With other people, certainly ...but, they can’t live.. It’s like saying to Adolf Hitler, I don’t want to live for you! – I don’t want to live for you!. Just like saying to Ronald Reagan I don’t want to live for your ideas of Armageddon!..

Interviewer: And if people had done that perhaps we wouldn’t have had the problems that we had in the (19)40’s.

AG: Well, I think so. Well, we still would have had to deal with Hitler, but I don’t think we..  At the present moment, like, what this nation, I think, needs, is some spiritual rediscovery not some fake god that asks you for money over television.

Interviewer: Allen, I’ve read that your followers, even some of your critics, say that much of your work is prophetic in almost the way that the Bible was.



AG: I don’t think so.

Interviewer: Yeah, I was going to ask you what you thought about that?

AG: Well, it depends what you mean by “prophetic”

Interviewer:  (Well, some recognition of) ….good and evil, for example.

AG:  (Well, you find) what's in your heart to write. Then you can touch on something that’s close to you, and that's real and that's sincere,and then, if you lay that out in public, other people say, “ok, he’s not trying to make money off of it, he's just telling everybody what he thinks, he’s not looking for a vote, he's just saying what he thought a minute ago", so if someone comes out in public and says it frankly and sincerely, it’s a lot different from what you read about in the papers, or what you hear on television, because, after all, television is there to sell you somethin’ – not to advise you, whereas poetry’s there to tell you what the truth of the poet is, what he really thinks when he's all alone at night in bed talking to nobody but himself.

Interviewer: Just getting very introspective..yeah

AG: No,  speaking frankly to yourself, instead of conning others. So you con yourself too. But, the whole point of poetry is not to con yourself.

Interviewer: The whole point is truth, I take it.

AG: Yeah - and there’s no abstract truth. I define it (truth) as, “what you really think when you’re not trying to lay a trip on other people” - You know if you just look(ed) around at anyone in public life and ask yourself, “Are they saying what they’re saying in private? or are they saying in public something different than what they say in private? . That’s the critereon, I would say -  talking in public the way you talk to yourself in private.

Interviewer: Allen, I’m going to turn it over to Walter Isgro for a few questions to ask you as well, and, once again, I thank you very much for taking time out from what I know must be a hectic day…

AG: It is a bit hectic.  Someone just told me they were taking a big vote on censorship here in Maine..

Interviewer: Oh! that is a hot issue.  Next Tuesday, they…

AG: Those people who claim they’re talking for God are trying to re-impose censorship on the good ol’ individualistic Americans again!

Interviewer: It’s something that comes along all the time, and probably always will - but I don’t think it’ll ever pass..

AG: They were censoring the Bible a couple of centuries ago and they were trying to censor Shakespeare in the 19^th Century.  There’s some people want to censor the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights!

Interviewer: I know that Noah Webster, of all people, tried to censor the Bible.

AG: He did?  That’s a famous case, isn’t it

Interviewer: Yes

AG: Well he was trying to do better than..

Interviewer; Well I’m going to get Walter to ask you a few questions. Thank you very much again Allen I appreciate it

AG: Okay



WI: Hi Allen, Walt Isgro.

AG: How do you do

WI: Hi. We’re from the Waterville Arts Project,  We’re a non-profit foundation in town here, trying to spread our wings,

AG: Yeah

WI: (So) we really appreciate what you’re doing.

AG: Are you folks taking part in that reading of banned books, that open reading by Maine writers, at the State Office building - that’s two nights, isn’t it?

WI: Well, right now, we’re kind of brand-new. We’re in the embryonic stage, and people either don’t know we’re around or ..

AG: What do you do?

WI: Well, right now, I’m just kind of.. what do you call it? I’m a painter, that does carpentry to feed my habit.

AG: Uh-hmm.

WI: What I did is start this organization about a year ago to try to support children in the arts, and to give artists some kind of outlet for their work in the community rather than running out of town all the time, or out of state, to survive.

AG: Oh that’s a lot like that Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, they’re trying to do that too, to develop local talent, publish local poets..

WI: Yeah..  Eventually I hope to be communicating with them on a regular basis

AG: Yeah, they’re very interesting people. They’re the ones who brought me up here.

WI: Yeah I read about.. where I found (that) you were going to be here is I read it in the paper.

AG: We did a reading to raise money for them last night

WI: Aha!  I hope they’re happy about that.

AG: They’re also one of the groups that come out on June 9^th from one to three p.m. at the State Office building. They’re reading some old-time banned books to show the public that there have been trying to censor books all through the centuries, including, some of our classics.

WI : Yeah, that’s true, I …Unfortunately, I agree with much of what you’re saying. I wish that times were not the way they are.

AG: Fortunately, we agree

WI: Well. I mean unfortunately because I wish the situation didn’t exist

AG: Situations are always going to exist..

WI: Yep.

AG:  …as they say, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”

WI: Absolutely.

AG: So, what kind of art are you focusing on?

WI: Well, what I’m trying to do is encourage all the types of art, painting, visual, performing, and literary, art.

AG: And in what particular style? (are you involved in) particularly

WI: In myself, personally?

AG: Yeah, in your painting?

WI : I don’t know it’s kind of hard to describe

AG: Who are your masters?

WI: Well, I most(ly)... the Impressions.. European Impressionists were the ones that influenced me the most, and then I found, back when I was in Europe, people said there was a likeness to (a) Modigliani, and I hadn’t never even heard of him at the time..

AG: I guess you’ve seen it by now.

WI:  And Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso..

AG: Corso’s at his best now.

WI: Is he?

AG: Oh yeah, he’s writing marvelous poems

WI: Oh that’s good to hear.

AG:  He just got a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

WI: Oh great! That’s great!

AG: I’ve been reading Cezanne’s letters lately

WI: Ah!

AG: He’s very interesting, his letter-writing  (writing to) Emile Bernard,the Impressionist painter, talking about perception itself, (and) the optical field, how do you transfer what appears to the eye to the (nature) of the canvas?

WI: That’s an interesting question.

AG: Yeah  and he said that he could stand in one spot and compose a painting, and then move his head to the left and create an entirely different composition

WI: Exactly, exactly. Someone called me recently - it had to do with video - you mentioned tv - how are images made on television, and used as an example, as a fact that you see in this little screen an event, such as a car- accident taking place on a street, and the illusion is that the entire street is in chaos, when, in fact, it’s a staged production on a tiny corner of the street. So I can see how that would relate to the canvas too, how... What do you think about the borders, the traditional borders that separated visual, literary and performing arts being broken down now?

AG: Well, it’s just a development of ..I think mainly because of video, in a way.. It’s a good thing, I suppose. I myself don’t (compose) music, tho’ I do poetry-and-music very often. I have written a play, but I’ve never tried to write a musical play - but I’ve got a friend, Ed Sanders, who’s writing a big funny opera on “Star Wars”..

WI: Alright!

AG: ..where it’s rock n roll and pure poetry. It’s politics-based as well as theater-staged. It begins with a scene in the Oval office with this baritone President singing an aria which goes –  [Allen sings] -“This Evil Empire”

WI: Ha! That sounds great!

AG:  He just took the whole natural scene at the White House and put it on stage as an idiot melodrama

WI: Well I think that’s the proper perspective, right there, what.. disappointed, maybe, that John Wayne is the President , huh?

AG: Well, somebody may be disappointed.. There’s another scene He’s got some born-again preacher at the Pentagon talking about "The Rapture".You ever hear about "The Rapture"?

WI: I don’t think so.

AG: Oh,well that’s some of those “born again” people that believe in Armageddon think they’re the only ones that are going to be saved.

WI: Okay.

AG: ..for the Rapture... When everything explodes with the Atom Bomb, they’ll be taken up to Heaven all by themselves. They’re praying for the Rapture ! 

WI:  Oh well! …The movie what was that? with the guy riding the Atom Bomb?

AG: Oh, Doctor Strangelove.

WI: Right, right. I think those movies now, when I see them once in a while, I’d say they were predicting what’s happening now.

AG: Yes so that was the nature of a mixed-media performance-comedy-distraction-politics-reality-unreality–Surrealism-technicolor-Hollywood-money-no-money, that kind of odd image-combination.

WI: Yeah? – I feel pretty lucky to be alive when all these things are going on.

AG: Yes, it’s lovely to survive these things that are going on, and die our nice-old-natural-death of cancer in our death-bed, instead of getting blown up in The Rapture!

WI:Yeah Yeah, I agree with you.

AG: I don't believe that Rapture will come, unfortunately, (for) those who want it.

WI: I agree with you there. I remember, back when I first started reading your work and your contemporaries, you weren’t considered famous or popular then, and I was  wondering.. I’ve read a couple of nasty things, once in a while, and kind of like just skimmed them over, but… do you think that America’s more respectful to you now than it used to be?

AG: Oh yes, my poetry’s (now included) in all the anthology (and they teach it) in college and high school, so it’s probably standard by now. Sure. That’s not a problem. The problem is having people understand what it means, understand what “Beat” said.

WI: Yeah, okay.

AG: ..you know, begin to look into their own lives, enlarge their spiritual lives, become more aware of themselves and their own feelings, aware of their own love, aware of the brilliance of the sky, aware of the greatness of the situation that we have of being alive in the universe, (it's) sort of like taking care of themselves and others in the universe.

Interviewer: So it seems to me that what you folks were saying, and still are saying, is that the wonder of life..

AG:  I think.. Well, to be more aware of the brilliance of (the) earth, and enough aware so you dnot going to throw your beer cans on the moon, thatyou don’t throw your industrial excrement into the ocean, you don’t wreck the Garden of Eden that we’ve got.

WI: No,right.

AG: …which means really an end to all nuclear power.

WI: Yeah

AG: I notice the Russians, I read in the paper today, the Russians  are building this tombfor the(ir) Chernobyl thing  - they said they’re gonna bury it for hundreds and hundreds of years, until the radiation (goes..), but, actually, we’re stuck with that all over. Atom(ic) plants.. is irreducible radiation waste of plutonium, that lasts twenty-four thousand years in half-life…(you have got to consider) how they gonna get rid of that?. They can(t)..  Now they want to bury it in the (Texas) Panhandle, .so the ranchers in Texas are getting upset - and who wouldn’t be?

WI: And they’re going to try Maine and Mainers are pretty shook-up.

AG: Yeah, when it comes home, you realize the consequences.

WI: Oh, definitely.

AG: Basically, it’s what they call excrement,  the waste product..

WI: Oh sure. 

AG: …of a hyper-rationalistic, prideful, vague, science that that did not figure out the whole equation…that got half the equation, but hasn't figured out the whole chemical equation - what do you do with waste product? 

WI: Exactly.

AG: ..(and) until they figure that one out they shouldn’t be messing around with it. It’s like “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

WI: Yeah


AG: You know that old story of the apprentice to the Sorcerer?  (He) got the formula to make the broom carry the water for him from the well so he doesn’t have to do it himself, he didn’t figure out the formula to make the broom stop carrying the water, so he got flooded.

WI: Did you ever in your travels run into a little issue called Planet Drum?

AG: Oh sure, Planet Drum… they’re all friends of Gary Snyder….

WI: Okay, well I knew those guys back around 1970, 1971

AG: Peter Berg

WI: Yeah, Peter Berg, and I helped them put out one issue  and the issue that we worked on was dealing with nuclear waste.

AG: Right (He) was a specialist in remembering that.

WI: Yeah, I remember that people were laughing and they were saying, "this is totally absurd, ten thousand years? whoever heard of such a joke?  these guys are crazy, they don’t know what they’re talking about!"

AG: Right

WI: Now you can read it in your local home-town (newspaper)

AG: Yeah, well, the fact is, people don’t realize it. The half-life of plutonianis twenty-four thousand years.. before the plutonian becomes physically inert.. The full life of plutonian is two hundred and forty thousand years. And what you realize (is) that according to the "born-again" people (who love nuclear stuff), according to their interpretation, the earth is only six thousand years old to begin with - the Garden of Eden was 404 BC ! So plutonian itself lasts something like four times as long as the Garden of Eden! (in half-life!)

WI: Isn't that wonderful!

AG: What are they gonna do? Send armed guards to sit on elevators to guard.. in the Panhandle for twenty-fourthousand years? That's the biggest vanity you ever heard of!..

WI: I know

AG: ..ancient Babylonian(s) (thinking) it will last forever!



WI: It seems like history repeats itself, but (and) the weaponry is the only thing that changes.

AG: Yeah, but I don't think we've seen this particular one before.....

WI: No

AG: What they..

WI: But it still seems the same old power struggle. I don't know. Maybe I'm off-base.

AG: Well, the inventor of the Bomb said, because we have an absolute weapon that is going to be absolutely up-to-date, we don't have to change it. Einstein-ian man will have to have a change in consciousness in order to deal with the unobstructed aggression (and find) a viable and workable situation...

WI: Exactly.   

WI:  I just have one more question, if you’d be kind enough to..

AG: I don’t know if I answered your (last) question.

WI: You did, you did. In fact, it’s amazing. I’ve got a list of questions in front of me, you answered every one of them without my having to answer them – that’s crazy!

AG: What haven’t we covered?

WI: The only thing that I was wondering about, you know, in the light of all that’s going on. I hear a lot of negative stuff on the street nowadays, but I was wondering - I like to try and be as positive as I can – I was wondering, what you think.. what direction poetry is headed in?

AG: Well I think it’ll have to be.. Well, I’ll give you… anybody who wants to know, come hear my poetry reading tonight at the University of Maine..

WI: Ok

AG: ... or Robert Creeley or Anne Waldman, all of whom are top world-class poets..

WI: We’re going to be getting in touch with them too.

AG:…tonight, tomorrow and Wednesday, Thursday, at the University of Maine at Orono. My reading is at seven-thirty tonight - but what we’re all, four of us, doing (is) our thing here - trying to check out our own minds, trying to say, in public, what.. the way we talk to each other in private, talk to ourselves.. and (to) deal withthe thoughts that pass through our heads, and put them out in public. So it’s not high art thought.

WI: Ok.

AG: So I don’t see how poetry can go anywhere except through that kind of sincerity, whatever form it takes, whether it’s written in sonnets or written in vernacular (though I think it will be tending more towards the idiomatic and vernacular language). I think the poets will pay more attention to the tones of their voices, the different pitch of the vowels as they speak them, because it's the tone that gives you the feel of the emotion, like tone leads the pitch, like, the way I’m talking to you now. So just like when you talk to a baby, I know people who.. (so) you find tones which people can understand, you find the rhythms that people use in their everyday speech, that people will recognize, like (Bob) Dylan,   instead of being up there like a narcissist making up a beautiful lot of  castles in the air, talking about our real problems, (talking in the) pitch of idiomatic speech and the rhythms of idiomatic speech, find those rhythms which are more vivid, most muscular, characteristic of our speech, and compos(ing) poems out of those rhythms. In other words, making poems out of our own lives.

WI: That sounds pretty good to me

AG: ...or turning our lives into awareness

WI: Alright!

AG: … an aesthetic understanding and practical, workable, common-sense, communication between... 

WI: Sounds great yes yes I agree.

AG: Why not?

WI: Yes

AG: Once and for all!

WI: I agree

AG: Originally (that) was what the Beat Generation was about - you're getting out from under a whole boat-load of.. (woe), and, when it came.. more to.. ((not) trying to rehash old poems,  trying to write pretty poems that sound  like everybody else - Hiawatha!), (but, instead) begin talking turkey about our own  feet, eyes, brain, thoughts, mind, speech….

WI: That sounds good. You know, what makes me feel feel really high is the fact that I thought that when I was reading (of course, I didn’t have anything to bounce it offbut now I’m hearing you say it. So I guess I got the message

AG: Well, we got a couple of slogans that go with that – “Writing is writing your mind” (so) write your mind

WI: Okay.

AG: ..and how do you know your mind? -“First thought best thought”.

WI: First thought best thought.

AG: That goes for painting too, I guess.

WI: Yeah..sounds right to me. I don’t see a difference myself. The only thing I see is the difference in tool(s).

AG: Yes, It’s just a different means of expression, but (there) spoken. Painting is with the material, Speech is with the breath and the air..

WI: Yes  ..and recently we interviewed  a dancer, and I said when I watch dancers I see paintings in space, and that’s how I feel about poetry, and then what you did tho’, to me (in those years, and I was I guess..)

AG: How old are you now?

WI: I’m.. I’ll be fifty in two weeks.

AG: I’ll be sixty tomorrow!

WI: Oh well, congratulations!

AG: Well, my sixtieth birthday, I survived!

WI Well, I’m glad, I’m glad. I think the world’s a better place with people like you.

AG: Like most of those poets that were friends, we all  survived pretty well, better than the academic poets, a lot of the academic poets drank themselves to death early.

WI: Well you exercised and they didn’t.

AG: Yeah, I exercised. and also we had other stimulants besides killer alcohol and killer tobacco..

WI: Yes yes, yes, definitely, definitely.

AG: ..or (the) killer crack, or whatever they’ve got now.

WI: Yeah, there’s a new one every day, it seems like! Whatever makes the most money!

AG: Well, for one thing, I think about marijuana, was that, at least it wasn’t commercialized by big companies…

WI: True

AG: ...whereas tobacco kills..kills .. and alcohol, of course, causes awful car-crashes, whereas somebody who drops LSD… one person.. (it makes) a newspaper-headline. (It’s)  really disproportionate.

WI: I know.

AG: Maybe some of the bad humor in America is alcohol and coffee..and nicotine – the  bring-down..

WI: Yeah, definitely, it sure puts you in the cave.

AG:  Well, it makes you nervous - "(I) wanna build that, I wanna build "Star Wars", build another laser beam to dominate space".

WI: Well, maybe that’s why they’re always after somebody else’s power, because you lose so much of your own power when you use those kind of drugs..

AG… You go into a bar and see a drunk trying to get power over the others – [Allen then puts on/mimics a drunken inebriated arrogance] - “Yeah, you can’t talk to me that way!"

WI: Yeah, yeah, “I’ll hit you in the head”,  or whatever.

AG: “You can’t talk to me that way.”

WI: Yes, definitely.  Well, listen, I really appreciate this.

AG: “Bomb Libya, that's what we've got to do, bomb Libya, they can’t talk to us that way! I wish Libya, was Syria! We should’ve bombed Syria, not Libya!" [sic – 2013, Allen's prescient black-humor - this is, don't forget, 1986!] - like a bunch of punch-drunk drunks!

WI: How are they gonna use all that stuff now?

AG: Well, they’ve paid so much money for it, they’ve got to find a use for it.

WI: Oh yeah.

AG: They’ve got a whole economy practically built on it.  They’re robbing all the money from the poets and the artists and shifting it all over to the pigs in the Pentagon (by “pigs”, I don’t mean that they’re pigs in the sense that.. (but) they’re at the trough, the so-called "pork-barrel".

WI: I think it’s time for all the artists in the world to take over now because…

AG: I think it’s time for the citizens to take over

WI: Well, these other guys have had their chance, right?

AG: Yeah and they’ve just about wrecked the economy

WI: Yeah, they wrecked the planet..so I think..I don’t know too many destructive artists myself!

AG: Oh, all artists are...

WI: I guess you’re (right).

AG: But they’re exercising it in art rather than in threatening life with mustard gas or lasers or atom-bomb. Because, if you explode an atom bomb in a poem, nobody gets hurt..

WI: Right.

AG: ..whereas in real life, everybody’s got their little Chernobyl vegetables that they've got to dump.

WI: And for a long time to come too!

AG: So what’s going on in Maine?

WI: Well, Maine to me is the cave. It was funny because I was saying to a friend of mine today, Jeez, ya know, before I moved to Maine, I used to... Allen Ginsberg’s name used to pop up here or there or somewhere, anywhere, you know what I mean?

AG: Uh-huh

WI:  And then I moved to Maine in 1970 and I never heard of you again!

AG: Good for me!

WI: I never heard of anythingagain!  So.. but, and, along with that wave, another wave was developing, and that’s the wave of the artist. Like, when I first came up here, sixteen years ago, it was very rare to meet anyone that spoke about writing or performing or whatever, now everywhere you look is exhibits, readings, shows, plays, music events, it’s great!

AG:  I wonder, however, if that isn't the fore-runner of the pushing out, the invasion of the so-called civilization..

WI: Oh that’s what’s going to happen, I’m sure.

AG:  I’m wondering if the number of artists who seek refuge up here in the appeal for free expression and civilized communication. I wonder if that isn't.. a sort of a biological feeler, in advance of the heavy wave, heavy investment, that’s coming later. It may not be such a good sign.

WI: I agree with you there. In one respect, it seems to be a blessing and in another respect it definitely could be that the life-boat’s going to get too full too fast.

AG: Yeah, well, what it’s also going to mean is that the artist community, the first wave, is going to be supporting  what’s coming ahead and...

WI: Yeah, That too. I see.

AG: It is likely that the first wave, the first signal, will be attacked, or censored, or be vetted and not realized that the artist is doing a service in reporting the problem (of what might have been) the demon of Greed, that is to say.. greed..

WI: It sounds to me.. It sounds to me.. Oh yeah. Mammon, the God Mannon. It sounds like that’s what you’re doing here now..

AG: Well what we’re doing is, actually, teaching poetry, basically teaching sensitization of mind, which is a new thing, teaching people to notice what they notice, (and trying myself to notice what we notice), notice our own surprised mind, and noticing the vividness of our experience, appreciating the vividness of nature itself, and that is our riches, instead of..

WI: Yeah that sounds great to me...sounds good to me. My only regret is I don’t have any way to get over to Orono.

AG: ..Well there are people who live up here.  Seven-thirty at night I’m reading. So, if you       jump into your car, (and if there’s any) aging beatniks that want to hear what I’m writing this year, then they're all welcome.

WI:  Yeah, my car is two worn-out sneakers!  ..Yeah, I'm going to have to do something..

AG: How about some wings on them and fly there? You’re an artist, grow some wings, make yourself some wings!

WI: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

AG: Don't get too near the sun, tho'!

WI: No, no. I’m going to have to grow wings to carry my two kids on too. I got my two boys with me, my partners.

AG:Do they know how to draw?

WI: Oh jeez, those boys are great. My five-year-old boy does silk-screening.

AG: Already?

WI: Oh yeah, these guys are incredible! They just blow my mind. I’m so happy when I see them.. To me, they’re the connection, they’re the key, right there. If I…

AG: How’s the schools here in Maine? They got enough money for educating the kids?

WI: Well, you know, surprisingly enough, obviously, people set their standards and they never reach their standards but  to me, I think Maine schools, as a whole, are decent, they try their best to teach the values that you were speaking of earlier, Me? to me? like, oh, people might not take this the right way but I think a lot of Maine is twenty to thirty years behind the rest of the country and I do mean that in a positive way because they are trying.. like, I use my children as an example – my children love to go to school. Now I went to school in Brooklyn, New York, and I hated every second of it, I dreaded every second  of it..

AG (It was maybe) kind of violent?

WI: Yeah and it makes me feel good that my children come home from school and say Wow!, I had a great day at school today. I learned a lot of nice things. So I would say, from my personal experience, the schools seem decent and they’re very very concerned with cultural activities for the children. They  want the kids to have the freedom to draw or paint or ..

AG: Do they have poets here in the school too teaching contemporary poetry?

WI: Well, they’re trying, you know money’s always the monster that makes the talk. You don’t have a lot of money, there are a lot of things that are excluded from your school, but there are (there is) also the Maine Arts and Humanities, which tries to fund, make funding available for artists residencies. So there are exposed, yes definitely.

AG: (I think (they’re)  getting more sensitive and less and less inclined to juveline pranks.

WI: Oh yeah, I definitely notice the kids using their energy toward constructive things rather than destructive things. I remember when I was a kid it was  hanging out in the alley, and doing whatever, smashing this or ganging up on that – but these kids around here, they’re really on the ball.

AG: They gang up on their imagination.

WI: Yeah that’s it. They do have imagination, and they’re not afraid to use it and that’s one thing I’m really happy to see Because my son said the other day, that it seems to him like most big people’s imaginations are asleep.  I laughed about that one.

AG: Well, just because people get discouraged, because they think that the reality of theworld is too tough for them, and it's just idiot sentimentality to indulge in, or further blocking(of) their feelings and dreams, (from) entering - and it is, very often, sentimentality, except that it's only through alternative (things) that we can figure out what it is that we want in the future. 

WI: Exactly. 

AG: Vow Peace (that the Reagan laser-project rejects, it seems to me - nobody wants to       

make it real, put it in 3-D, and battle.. so, housing-projects and marriages (and)..).... The imagination really is what starts things going, so development of a big imagination is a good thing, in the sense that.. children are not naive, they are being straight and thoughtful so (give them the opportunity to) exercise more of the range of thought possible.. (here possible)... on the Maine coast. 


June 2 1986

Spontaneous Poetics - 131 (Henri Michaux)

September 9, 2013, 3:30 am

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Student: I wanted to ask you about Henri Michaux

AG: Yes

Student: And Ed Dorn, and James Tate

AG: Henri Michaux, Ed Dorn and James Tate! - Well, once I was standing on a street corner in Paris, talking with Henri Michaux and Gregory Corso. And, let's see, it was 1965 probably, and we'd known Michaux since (19)58). He'd come to visit. He lived around the block in Paris from Rue Git de Coeur, where we lived. He lived on Rue Segur near the Seine, on the Left Bank. He came in. I'd left a note saying we were American poets. We wanted to meet him and we lived around the block. And he came in one day and knocked as I had my foot in the sink, washing my feet, which he thought was very funny behavior on the part of American poets, probably typical (American) behavior We gave him a copy of  Corso's Gasoline, and he looked at it and then kept repeating, like a mantra, "mad children of soda-caps, mad children of soda-caps". He liked that line, instantly. The reason he was interested in meeting us - and vice-versa was that he had done a lot of experiments with mescaline and we were probably the first of the American poets that had any literary background, who approached him to discuss it sort of sanely, without excessive enthusiasm, but just trying to check out what was going on. And I remember him saying, "I'm not so much interested on what visions people have while on mescaline, I'm interested in what they do with them after, what they do the next day with them". In other words, descriptions of terrific experiences and visionary imagery is..  after a while gets boring, after everybody's got a vision, and everybody drops acid a hundred times, visions change  every day, so what?, finally. It's just like you tell your dreams over and over again, which would be interesting if you were able to work with it  or anything, but just to say, "Well yesterday I saw this fantastic astrological combination, which indicated that my own shoe-style is absolutely right, because it points towards the east", or something. The fiftieth time, it gets boring. So he was interested in what do people do afterward, what kind of earthly existence do they build on the basis of their visions? - or, to what extent is there some reconciliation of visionary perception and ordinary mind every-day dish-washing attitudes? So he said he was interested in what people did with visions after.

He was a very shy, reclusive, guy, so the thing that sticks out in my mind was that we met on the street-corner where our two blocks intersected, and were sort of hopping from one foot to another discussing matters, amazed to meet him, and, all of a sudden, a lady came up and pointed her camera at us, so, Michaux (realizing that we were famous "American Beatniks" that had been written up in Life magazine) said, "Oh, this lady is for you", because he was very shy, and he moved away (he didn't want to be photographed, or not photographed with us, or he thought that maybe it's a plot, that we were trying to trap him into getting a photograph with us for publicity reasons). And I felt a little bit.. This was Paris and it was his own territory, so I assumed it was some French photographer trying to get a picture of him, and said, "Well, this must be for you, Monsier Michaux". And then the lady said, "Would you all please move aside? We're trying to take a picture of this building!  

(tape ends here - and then continues)

AG: ..which was great..  I thought, if he's that paranoid that he thinks we're going to ...or that we're that creepy that we're actually going to bring along a photographer to secretly try and get our picture taken with him without telling him, if he's that paranoid to think that ill of us, it's going to be awful hard to explain this away. But, fortunately, the lady did it. So..
(I saw him this January, actually, again. I had a long afternoon with him and Gregory Corso and Gregory's girlfriend, Jocelyn (Stern) who was pregnant...

PW: Still?

[Michel Bulteau]

AG:  - well, was pregnant. (Now she's) has the baby, called Orpheo.. Orpheo Max Corso - and Michaux recommended a younger French poet called Michel Bulteau - B-U-L-T-E-A-U - who was wandering around. He's a long thin kid with long hair, (a) tall thin kid with long hair and a kind of sleepy expression (like an American suburban hippie beatnik still living, in the basement, with his parents and going out to smoke a lot of grass). So he's one of the few younger French poets that's a big dope-fiend and wants to work with rock n roll groups, and lives with a kind of degenerately decadent vampire-y-looking girl. with purple painted under her eyelids and sequins all over, to speak as his mouthpiece, who pushes him  (he's very silent) and goes around making dates for them. So Bulteau came to America and wanted to meet Andy Warhol. He wanted to meet Andy Warhol and Patti Smith. Because that was the younger generation that Michaux picked up on. He was that much alert at the age of seventy-eight or something.



He had a new book out called Moments - M-O-M-E-N-T-S - ... and they were just moments on different drugs, including ritalin  (one on hashish, one on ritalin, one on mescaline). So he gave me the book and showed me which experiment was with which drug. (He) says he doesn't take too much any more because he's getting old - too wearing . He was recently involved with a lot.. with nitrous oxide and (with) ether. He got interested in that... later.. for the first time.. I guess in the last ten years Do you know his work at all?

Student: Yeah, I've read Miserable Miracle and ...Ordeals of the Mind (The Major Ordeals of the Mind). I've read the Collected Poems. My favorite book of his, I think, a great, great book is Ecuador - A Travel Journal


AG: Ecuador- A Travel Journal ?

Student: (translated)  by Robin Magowan and..

AG: Robert McAlmon?

Student: Macgowan, Macgowan..I think.. In any case, it's a travel journal about going to Ecuador and it's written with mordant genius.

AG: Mordant genius? Biting genius? - It's speaking with mordant humor?, biting humor?

PW: I thought he said "warped".

AG: Warped?

Student: Well, it's warped too!

AG: "Mordant warped teeth"?  

Student: Sometimes  It's kind of a pleasurable black humor. And it's hard to get the book. I talked to a guy named..  the guy who translated  Mount Analogue? [by Rene Daumal]

AG: Simon Watson-Taylor? 

Student: No, the one who just won the National Book Award for..

AG: Richard Howard?

Student: Roger Shattuck. He thought Ecuador was one of the finest, most important books he's read of poetry




AG: How many here have ever heard of Michaux?  Heard of Michaux? And how many here have read any Michaux? - At least about a dozen. How many have never heard of Michaux, or read any Michaux? - okay

Michaux, a French poet - M-I-C-H-A-U-X, Henri - H-E-N-R-I . The Collected Poems [Selected Writings, actually] of his (are) available through New Directions, and I'd recommend the prose-poems dealing with Monsieur Plume - P-L-U-M-E - I guess plume and pen  - the other old feather pen . Monsieur Plume, who is a kind of Coyote figure who rises and vanishes and appears and disappears and goes through Chinese Charlie Chaplin adventures constantly (like being eaten by leviathans and popping out the other end of machines and being destroyed simultaneously by vultures and hippopotamuses and coming up out of the sewers of Paris again. "The Life and Adventures of Mr Plume", which you can find in Michaux's Collected Poems and I think we have in the library here a City Lights version of. Miserable Miracle - Miserable Miracle (Miracle Miserable) - it's an account of his experiments with mescaline - Miserable Miracle - He grew basically out of an intelligent, 20th Century, French, Surrealist-Dadaist high-class literary mind and got to be one of the most humane of all French personages, like a kindly old man - very secretive for being, at the moment, I guess, the most celebrated French poet alive - lives quietly by himself and doesn't see very many people and doesn't go out to parties - and plays around with his ether and laughing gas and sees young poets.

Student: Mr Octavio Paz thinks he's the best.

AG: Well, he's probably the most open and the most interesting of living French poets.

Student: I just thought I'd get that on the record.

AG: Okay. Yeah



[Henri Michaux's Images du monde visionnaire (Images of a Visionary World) (1964)]




[Henri Michaux - Untitled (ink drawing), 1960 - from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art]

Spontaneous Poetics - 132

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Student: I'd like to ask you and Philip Whalen what languages that you read poetry in besides English and in what ways you find it useful?

AG: I read Spanish - (Federico Garcia) Lorca and (Pablo) Neruda, and Saint John of the Cross, and various little odd things in Spanish - and I was influenced a good deal by Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman" - the rhythm and sort of the general attack of it - viejo hermosa Walt Whitman,/he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas,/ni tus hombros de lana gastados pro la luna.." - "Not for one single moment, beautiful  old Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies/your corduroy shoulder, worn by the moon./Your voice like a pillar of ashes,/ancient and beautiful as the mist" - So I got a little Spanish and a lot of French (which I learnt by reading the Louise Varese (translated) New Directions bilingual version of Rimbaud's Season in Hell, while taking French in school. I would recommend that as a great way of getting into French!) - Rimbaud got built into my ear, and then from Rimbaud I went to a little (I had a little) (Charles) Baudelaire that I read in French, and a lot of (Guillaume) Apollinaire that I picked up in French (particularly the poem "Zone", which, since very few of you have read any Apollinaire, you might check out - "Zone" (translated by Roger Shattuck in the New Directions Collected (Selected) Apollinaire.

Philip Whalen: Roger Shattuck did a very interesting book called The Banquet Years...



AG: Yeah

Philip Whalen: ..which nails down the funny period of total fermentation and hoopla that started in with the people like the Douanier Rousseau, and going through Alfred Jarry, and.. I forgot who all else (is) in it.

Student: (Eric) Satie

Philip Whalen: Satie

AG: Yes

Philip Whalen: All sorts of funny people

AG: There was a place called the Bateau-Lavoir (where) Picasso lived and where (he) was visited by Marie Laurencin, who was a painter  - and I guess Apollinaire came through there. Their favorite character was Douanier Rousseau, the "primitive" painter  (you know? the painter of "The Sleeping Gypsy"?) - And so one day they all got together, and all these great literate intelligent Parisian 20th century innovators gave a banquet to Rousseau, naive Rousseau, toasted him, put him at the head of the table, and made him play his violin for them. So it was called "The Banquet Years" after that, I guess.

Philip Whalen: No, no

AG: I think it was from there, wasn't it?

Philip Whalen: No, no there was some..

AG: No?

Philip Whalen: There was some other big political and literary ones.. The greatest account, and supposedly the most infamous account, of that particular banquet is the one that Gertrude Stein wrote up in The Autobiography of Alice B Tolkas, that made everybody mad, everybody in Paris who had anything to do with that place and time were enraged by her account of that particular occasion, and how drunk Marie Laurencin was, and what all else happened, who else got out of hand,and how Frédé  at Lapin Agile brought his trained, but un-house-broken, donkey to the party, and so on.. it's terrible mess..


[Frédé and Lolo] 

AG: That's a good book of gossip.

Philip Whalen: Yeah?

AG: What other good books of gossip are there?




Philip Whalen: Well, The Autobiography of Alice B Tolkas is a marvelous book of gossip about..

Student: (And Everybody's Autobiography)

,

Philip Whalen: Yeah. That's sort of a sequel to it. But it's not quite as lively.

AG: The best (gossip) I ever read was Being Geniuses Together by Robert MacAlmon...

Student: Yeah

AG: ...which has been reprinted, re-edited, and added to, by Kay Boyle was it?

Philip Whalen: I think so.


AG: Being Geniuses Together is actually terrific - because that's the real inside dope on who was screwing who, who ran off with what lesbian's wife. MacAlmon was rich at the time, and was a friend of Hart Crane, and a friend of Eliot and Pound and Hemingway (I think he figures in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as one of the characters), so he really knew everybody and was very intelligent.. and wrote this thick, thick, thick brilliant detailed account...

Philip Whalen: He's the guy that married Bryher..

AG: Yeah he married Hilda Doolittle, H.D., the Imagist..

Philip Whalen: No, no, no , no. He married Hilda's friend Bryher!

AG: No, I (was about to say) he married Hilda Doolittle's girlfriend..

Philip Whalen: Yeah, yeah.

AG: ...who loaned him a lot of money..

Philip Whalen: Hilda was married to that other fellow...Richard Aldington..

AG: That was one of the most influential (books) that I ever read - Being Geniuses Together. That's what determined my particular attitude toward companionship in the Beat Generation.

Student: Who wrote that book?

AG: Robert MacAlmon - M-A-C-Capital A-L-M-O-N. Capital M-A-C, Capital A-L-M-O-N. It showed all the mistakes they made and all the sort of funny times they had

Spontaneous Poetics - 133

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AG: That was one of the most influential (books) that I ever read - Being Geniuses Together. That's what determined my particular attitude toward companionship in the Beat Generation.

Student: Can you enlarge on all (that)?

AG: Well, a realization that almost every gesture (I) make is history, so I try and make pretty gestures. So I try to keep my gestures interesting..

Student: (That) must be hard work!

AG: ..like having nervous breakdowns in Naropa English classes!

Student: You don't look like you're having a nervous breakdown.



AG: Well, I really am.

Student: Are you?

AG: You wouldn't believe it. It's all your fault for telling me I was...  [Allen addresses the rest of the class] - She was complaining when I was reading Whitman that my attitude to Whitman was blank.

Student: It was.

AG: I went to the doctor next day and I had (a blood pressure of) one hundred and fifty!

Student: See what it does to you?

AG: This time I tried (not) to exhibit any faggot Whitman in public and I get put down. 
I've got to take my revenge by doing (William) Blake's"Tirzah" - "Whate'er is Born of Mortal Birth/Must be consumed with the Earth" -  Sick line - [Allen begins singing (sic) "To Tirzah"] - ""Whate'er is Born of Mortal Birth/Must be consumed with the Earth/To rise from Generation free,/Then what have I to do with thee.."..."The Death of Jesus set me free./Then what have I to do with thee" - (It is Raised a Spiritual Body)" - That's Blake's "Tirzah". "Tirzah" was his name for the feminine creative principal that created the mortal degenerating world of samsara and suffering.

Philip Whalen: My great-grandmother was named Tirzah Gray

AG: I beg your pardon?

Philip Whalen: My great-grandmother was Tirzah Gray.

AG: I think he took the name "Tirzah" from one of the Gnostic names for the creative feminine principal - what created the Earth.

Student: (It) sounds like a bad experience..



AG: Well, apparently. "To Tirzah". That was Blake's Gnostic Manichean put-down of the "Vegetable Universe" (which is similar to (William) Burroughs', though Burroughs, apparently, has slowly been changing his mind, fortunately, lately) - That's an interesting poem - "To Tirzah" by  (William) Blake. It's the last poem he entered in the "Songs of Experience" in the book, "Songs of Innocence and (Songs) of Experience". It's written later than the others. It was, like, a later reconsideration as whether he really did like what he called "the Vegetable Universe" - that is, I guess, the corporeal, material, world - or "Vegetative" - was it? - "Vegetative Universe" (as distinct from "Spiritual (Universe)" - So he was laying blame on (the) symbolic feminine principle, because it gave birth to matter, and he wanted to take it on and come out against motherhood (a pretty bold statement!) - - Someone had their hand up?

Student: Some editions don't include that last line, don't use that last line. Do you know why that is?

AG: Well, the last line - "It is Raised a Spiritual Body" is in the plate. It's in the plate and is not part of the four-line stanzas, but is written along the robe of a tall figure that's holding the dying Christ's body, so it's not officially part of the poem - it's just a little tag-end - it's there, printed on the plate, on the original plates... Has everybody here...

Philip Whalen: It crosses over with that line, "Woman, what have I to do with you?" That's what Jesus said to his mother when she came waltzing around to see what was happening. She says, "But Jesus, I'm your mama", and he says, "Woman, what have I to do with you? . And then the tag-line - "It is Raised a Spiritual Body". I've got rid of this..

AG: The Vegetative mode

Philip Whalen: ..now I'm pure spirit, and so on..

AG: So later on he took another opposite position anyway.

 [Audio for the above is available here, starting at thirty-five minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-five-and-a-quarter minutes in]  

Spontaneous Poetics - 134

September 12, 2013, 3:30 am

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AG: Has everybody here seen the illustrated colored version of Songs of Innocence and Of Experience? Raise your hands if you have not. How many have not. Well, very few haven't,  there is a copy here in the library - Trianon Press, Trianon Press Editions, which has reproductions, I think, of the Lessing J. Rosenwald copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake originally etched the poems and pictures around them and then hand-colored them with his wife, and then printed about twenty-five copies altogether, and then hand-colored each one. So there's a complete pretty colored reproduction of that entire book here in the library.

Student: Yeah, and if anybody's interested, and from Philadelphia , the original plates are there in the Rosenwald-Lessing edition.  Pretty (amazing)

AG: Have you ever been there? I've never been there.

Student: Oh, it's magnificent, its just north of Philadelphia

AG: What's the name of the town?

Student: I guess the town it's in would be either Melrose Park or Jenkintown

AG: Jenkintown. Jenkintown

Student: Jenkintown

AG: (The) Lessing-Jay Rosenwald collection.

Student: Right. It's in the Alverthorpe Manor. That's the name of the place where he lives and has his collection. We take students there. [1976 - The Lessing-Jay Rosenwald collection is now part of the Library of Congress and the National Gallery in Washington DC ] 

AG: They've got more than (just) the "Innocence and Experience", "Marriage of Heaven and Hell", and...

Student: Oh they have everything

AG: Whatever big city you are (in) you ought to go to a big library and take a look at the original Blake. In New York there are some at the New York Public Library, (and) there are some in the Morgan Library (there are two copies of  Songs of Innocence and Experience in the Morgan Library, actually)

Philip Whalen: Isn't there some in Chicago?

AG: There are some in Chicago and there are some in Washington and there are some in LA in the Huntington-Hartford

Student: The Huntington Library

AG: Huntington...

Student: How many of the original....  how many of the original plates still exist?

AG: I'm not sure, actually

Student: He kept using them

AG: There are some, there are some. I think there are some but I don't know how many.

Philip Whalen: The copper plates?

AG: Yeah

Philip Whalen:  still exist?

AG: Yeah,  Yeah, some do. I think for "..Job"

Philip Whalen: In the British Museum?

AG: I don't know who has them. You can find out. There's a book which we have here, which is a giant, good-sized, thing, it's about a foot-and-a-half long and two inches thick, which is a reproduction of every single plate and drawing of Blake, and it also gives the provenance, so you can find out what plates exist and where copies of all the books exist. So it's actually interesting to check out, if you're in a big city. London, also - the British Museum has a copy of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"



Student: The Tate has his (watercolors)



AG: Yeah, the Tate in London has a huge collection of drawings and paintings, and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has "Heaven and Hell' and "Innocence and Experience" and there's a copy of some Blake at Oxford in the Ashmolean Museum. Probably (some) at Harvard.



So, if you're in a big town and you're interested in Blake, just check out what's around. It's a great thing to do. It's better than going to the movies. You actually have the thing he did himself with his own hand, water-colored! - his own vision, his own mind, right there in front of you.

Student: Are there any Blake's in Denver [nearest local town]?

AG: I don't know if there's any in Denver. I don't think so.



Philip Whalen: I was very surprised when I was down in Colorado Springs, that they had one of.. a copy of Brancusi's "Bird in Space" in a tiny museum down there.

Student: Bird In Space?

Philip Whalen: Yeah. To walk in and see a live Brancusi was quite marvelous.


[Brancusi - Bird In Space (1923) - Musee National d'Arte Moderne, Paris] 



[Audio for the above is available here, starting at approximately forty-five-and-a-quarter minutes in and through to approximately forty-nine-and-a-quarter minutes in]