October 27, 2013, 1:18 pm
![]()
[Lou Reed 1942-2013]The news just reaches us that Lou Reed (only recently featured on these pages), has died, aged 71, from, what the AP wire service is reporting as, "a liver-related ailment" (Reed underwent a liver transplant in May at the Cleveland Clinic . "I am a triumph of modern medicine, physics and chemistry", he confidently boasted on his web-site, following surgery, on June the 1st. "I look forward to being on stage, performing, and writing more songs to connect with your hearts and your spirits and the universe well into the future."But, as the AP story notes, quoting his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, recovery wasn't easy, prior to his passing this weekend, "Reed had been in frail health for months". Rolling Stone first broke the story late this morning and you can read their report here. Here's the notice from The New York Times, The LA Times , NPR, The Guardian, The Independent the BBC. More news, of course, to follow.
↧
October 28, 2013, 12:30 am
Here's yet another version of Allen's delightful bitter-sweet Airplane Blues (see our earlier posting about that particular composition here). This one, with Bugs Henderson and Friends, recorded in Dallas, Texas in the Fall of 1985, is one of two cuts by Allen featured on the extraordinary (and extraordinarily hard-to-find!) compilation album, Made Up In Texas, the very first release on Michael Minzer's remarkable and visionary Paris Records. For a later Paris Records project posting (Minzer now in collaboration with producer Hal Willner) see here For more on Paris Records see hereTomorrow, the second Ginsberg track on "Made Up in Texas", a collaboration with the Garland Symphony Orchestra, a setting of Blake, arranged by Steven Taylor,what one critic has described as "one of the more memorable and distinctive tracks of music (Allen) Ginsberg would ever record"
↧
↧
October 29, 2013, 3:30 am
A second cut from Michael Minzer's debut recording on Paris Records, Made Up In Texas.Allen withThe Garland Symphony Orchestra, scored and conducted by Steven Taylor, recorded in the Fall of 1985 in Dallas, Texas. "(This) was Allen's test, Minzer has been quoted as saying, "I think he decided that he was going to test me..to see if I was legitimate enough, or had the resources enough to do this thing. I get a phone-call from the music arranger, Steven Taylor. He tells me Allen has agreed to record. Okay..But on one condition. We need thirteen symphony musicians" - A pretty tall order! - But Minzer came up with the goods, was, astonishingly, able to fulfill the request. The result is a small masterpiece, a lost gem, an exquisite recording and setting of William Blake's "Nurses Song". ![33 26 Nurse's Song]()
[Allen's handwritten transcription of "Nurses Song" - Collection of Randy Roark]
Also on the album was Anne Waldman, who's unaccompanied poem, Stereo Place, and whose poem with guitar accompaniment, Bardo Corridor, may be heard here and here.(A later version of "Bardo Corridor" may be heard here)
Alternative versions of Allen singing the "Nurses Song" may be heard here, here and here
Also on Made Up In Texas - The Reverend Buck Naked with the Farlow Brothers - The Wirehead Conspiracy and Watching Bob on TV - & Spazbot and Los Mineros.Ethan Persoff on this extraordinary record - "the LP [it was released as an LP] is essentially a private press outburst from a completely unknown company. The sound is a blend of yokel punk, Mexican love ballads, one goth track, some Church of Bob screaming, and poetry. Listeners at the time likely found it an entertaining but completely incongruous selection"
We're happy to re-present selections from it here.
↧
October 30, 2013, 3:00 am
Above, courtesy the singular trove at Yale's Beinecke Library, a five-dollar cheque written by Ezra Pound to Louis Zukofsky. Today is Ezra Pound's birthday. Our extensive (and popular) 2011 Pound Birthday posting can be accessed here (our last year's, 2012, update can be found here) - "To have gathered from the air a live tradition/or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame/This is not vanity" - "What thou lov'st well, shall not be reft from thee"
![]()
![]()
[Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Ezra Pound at Spoleto]
↧
October 31, 2013, 3:30 am
![Edgar-Allan-Poe_1249986c]()
![]()
From a new year's, 1977 visit to Baltimore, Maryland. Allen's ruminations on Poe, fittingly published today, on Halloween.
POE IN DUST
Bones groan maliciously under Baltimore sidewalkPoe hides his hideous skeleton under churchyard.Equinoctial worms peep thru his mummy earThe slug rides his skull, black hair twisted in roots of threadbare grassBlind mole at heart, caterpillars shudder in his ribcage,Intestines wound with garter-snakesmidst dry dust, snake eye & gut sifting thru his pelvisSlimed moss green on his phosphor'd toenails, sole toeing black tombstone -O prophet Poe well writ! your catacomb cranium chamberedeyeless, secret-hid too in bright-eyed moonlight ev'n under corpse-rich groundwhere tread priest, passerby, and poetstaring white-eyed thru barred spiked gatesat viaducts heavy-bound and manacled upon city's heart. January 10, 1977
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]() |
| [Allen Ginsberg, Fractured Skull. September 22, 1990. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate] |
↧
↧
November 1, 2013, 3:30 am
![]()
[Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg at Lucien's wedding, January 4, 1952]
Kill Your Darlings - We mentioned last week the dissenting position, eloquently voiced by Bob Rosenthal in his post from last February - here. - "The film takes its..title too seriously", he wrote then. "The large fabrications in the film are not so worrisome as the small ones. In any case, when the truth is stepped on and the nuance of truth is denied, the message becomes moribund". Both Marc Olmsted in Sensitive Skin and Brian Hassett in Brianland have taken up the cudgels and gone, perhaps, even further (the latter, in particular, marshaling an impressive amount of detail, tho' Olmsted is no slouch). Olmsted - "So, Kill Your Darlings is like the new Star Trek movie, an alternative universe where Spock is the one to shout "Khan!" as Kirk dies, instead of the reverse. That would be annoying enough, but including Ginsberg's own photos of the gang at the end of the credits as if what we've just seen is a meticulous biopic moves the film into the unacceptable, a misinformed Wikipedia entry.." There is, he observes, an inherent "sloppiness" in the telling of the story - "It is the fabrication of people who seemed to do research on what they overheard at a cocktail party". Olmsted's critique (more nuanced than these quotations might suggest here) bears reading in its entirety. As does Hassett's - "The problem is", he writes, "tellingthe Kammerer murder story from Allen's point of view is sort of like telling On The Road from Al Hinkle's. Allen was the least involved and the last to find out. And that this key moment in the birth of the Beat Generation should be portrayed as a trio that does not involve Jack Kerouac is like making a movie about the birth of America without Thomas Jefferson. Then there's so much else they got factually wrong, at least compared to every account (that) I've ever read - and they've been working on it for ten years!" - Hassett declares his "biggest beef by far" - "that Frankie Edie Kerouac Parker is portrayed as a shrew. This is so wrong on so many levels".."Then there are all these disconcerting overt implications" - "that Allen's dad sent his mom to the insane asylum so that he could have an affair, that Lucien was the one who first said, "First thought, best thought", that (David) Kammerer verbally asked to be stabbed and killed. When you think of the obvious well-known facts they got wrong...that they're committing these implications to celluloid is something of a crime against real people's reputations.." Hassett isn't entirely condemnatory. He, generously, concludes, "But, in the end..the loving movie they made is an energetic passionate creative youthful super-college film. Good for them for sticking with it and getting it done" -"And they definitely captured Allen's ride..with his parents, in his classroom, with his friends, losing his virginity.. I assume most Allen fans are going to love this.."![]()
[Daniel Radcliffe& Allen Ginsberg from "7 of The Best and Worst Renditions of Allen Ginsberg"]
Fact and fiction - matters of verisimilitude. A lot of the debate seems to be going down about how true can you be, must you be. It is, after all, fiction, a story, just a story. As Levi Asher, echoing screenwriter Austin Bunn, notes, in his review - surely, "any historical movie has the right to cut a few facts up in the name of good cinema". Asher has an intriguing critique of the Radcliffe performance - "I liked Radcliffe's earnest, heartfelt Ginsberg - even though I don't think he quite captures the weird, powerful presence the famous poet had (James Franco and other recent Allen Ginsbergs have also failed to capture his strong vibe. Having met and talked to Allen several times, I've sometimes struggled to describe his presence and have ended up resorting to the word "froggy". Allen Ginsberg had a croaking voice, bulging, peeking eyes, a jumpy, crouched stance. His improbable demeanor added to the considerable urgency of his presence. I wish some actor could capture his heavy presence, his odd charisma, but if Allen Ginsberg's spirit animal is a frog, Daniel Radcliffe's in this movie turns out to be more like a chameleon or a cute lizard. It's not the same thing."
More KYD (it's certainly getting people talking!), here's Jay Michaelson in The Jewish Daily Forward andPeter Rainer in The Christian Science Monitor (unimpressed) and Len Gutkin in the L.A.Review of Books ("a Beatnik Animal House"? uh?), and...
More movies - Jack Kerouac's Big Sur (starring Jean-Marc Barr as Jack) opens in limited US release November the 1st (tonight!). We've already previewed the trailer.
Noel Murray, writing in the LA Times notes -"Big Sur is a slow-paced, moody film, meaning to capture the author's deep melancholy. It's not much fun to watch, but Kerouac fans should find it rings true".
Jean-Marc Barr, who plays Kerouac, is interviewed by Salonhere
![]()
[Jean-Marc Barr as Jack Kerouac in Big Sur (2013)][Writer-Director Michael Polish, talking about the film (Big Sur) at Sundance, earlier this year]Speaking of reviews, Albert Mobilio’s review of the Collected (Philip) Lamantia can be seen in the current issue of Bookforum- "From the mid-1940s till his death in 2005, Lamantia produced verse rich in flourish and invention, every bit as intense as Ginsberg’s, even as it tunes in to abstruse and deeply interior frequencies...From line to line, book to book, the quest is risky, the collisions fraught with possibility as much as with annihilation. It is precisely this deliberate courting of failure that makes him such a compelling writer and a model for any poet who might prize safety over audacity.""The pursuit of marvelous unities" is, (as) this Collected Poems reveals, Mobilio notes, "a turbulent and uncertain one"![]( "Lou Reed")
Reckless pursuit - commitment and risk - "..gonna try for the kingdom, if I can" - Lou Reed, the "iconic punk poet" (as Hillel Italie so defined him in the widely-circulated AP news report last week announcing his death) has been, naturally, extensively, throughout the week, memorialized, eulogized and remembered. Here's just a few selected sites/momentsCarl Wilson in Slate, Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone, Richard Williams in The Guardian.Luc Sante in The New Yorker, Legs McNeil in The Daily Beast, Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed(ucation), Glenn O'Brien in GQ, Kathleen Geir in Washington Monthly, Ray Rahman at Entertainment Weekly, Andrew Epstein for Poetry... The list goes on and on and on..
from 1967, (quoted in Aspen magazine) - "The only decent poetry of this century was that recorded on rock n roll records. Everybody knows that. Who you gonna rap with, Little Bobbie Lowell or Richard Penniman?" from the 2010 Spin Interview - "If something of mine ever got popular, maybe I could've stuck with that. But that was never the point. I had other goalsInterviewer: Which were?Lou Reed: Hubert Selby, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Delmore Schwartz. To be able to achieve what they did, in such little space, using such simple words. I thought if you could do what those writers did and put it to drums and guitar, you'd have the greatest thing on earth.."
Lou Reed on Charlie Rose in 1998, and again, five years later, in 2003 Lou's videotaped conversation with Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone at the Kelly Writers House (bookended by an introduction and a lengthy ambient-sound album-signing!) is available here.
![Frank Lima; 8K]()
Another great (lesser-known) poet, Frank Lima, also recently passed away. Guillermo Parra has a touching review and memoir of him here. & from his Spring 2001 interview with the poet:GP: Your poem "Homenaje" is dedicated to (Allen) Ginsberg. How much of an influence did his work have on you as a young writer, and, in recent years, as fellow poets?Frank Lima: In the beginning there was Allen. Allen was the second poet I read. The first was Robert Lowell. Both were the ultimate influences in my early writing career. Allen gave me a sense of current life and immediacy. Lowell had the elegance and education that I did not have. I benefited greatly from both... My "Homenaje", or tribute, to Allen is an honest and open acknowledgment of how important he was to my early writings - "like God/ Allen will be taken away from us/ to the slaughterhouse of dear God/ what will happen to/ Allen's great eyes..."
Thursday - Noite Beat '13 - Beat celebration takes place next Thursday at the Teatro Cemitério de Automóveis, Sao Paulo. Brazilian celebration of the Beat Generation! ![]()
Friday - November the 8th, at the historic Jefferson Market Library in New York City - "An Evening of Motorvating" - Charles Plymellwill be reading from his new book, Benzedrine Highway(introduced, on this occasion, by the legendary poet-photographer Gerard Malanga). For more information on that (both the book and the event) see here.![]()
& pub. date for Ron Padgett's Collected Poems is next week (November 5th). Here's David Lehman's review in Publishers Weekly. We'll also be having more on that eagerly-awaited book in the weeks ahead.![Collected Poems cover]( "Collected Poems cover")
Tonight Andrew Lindkvist and Daniel Lammin perform Howl at Australia's National Portrait Gallery.
↧
November 2, 2013, 3:30 am
![]( "pasolini")
[Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)]To
day marks the date (the 38th year anniversary) of the assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Following the recantation of his confession in 2005 by Pino Pelosi ("Pino the Frog"), the precise details of his homophobic and racist murder remain unclear. Andreas Pichler's recent documentary (made for the French tv channel, Arte), en francais - "L'Affaire Pasolini", gives us an eloquent and pretty up-to-date survey and account, and we present it here.
Pino Pelosi's "nuove rivelazioni" (new revelations) may be viewed here (in italiano), including a passionate Pelosi vehemently protesting
For more footage of Pelosi (who served seven of a nine-year jail term as the alleged sole perpetrator of the murder) see here and here.
Pasolini un delitto italiano(Pasolini An Italian Crime), Marco Tullio Gioradana's 1995 docu-drama was made prior to these revelations and is available here.
For comprehensive coverage of Pasolini - in italiano - see here (with its current updated site here) Mario Sesti and Matteo Cerami's 2005 La voce di Pasolini (The Voice of Pasolini) is available in six parts here, here, here, here, here& here.
![Pier Paolo Pasolini on the set of Salò a le 120 giornate di Sodome]()
[Pasolini on the set of Salo a le 120 Giornate di Sodome (Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom)]Ginsberg and Pasolini - Fernando Pivano remembers - "Ginsberg spent a few months in Italy and we were very happy to host him..In order to introduce him to some Italian intellectuals, I took him to meet (Eugeno) Montale and (Salvatore) Quasimodo; at my house, I introduced him to Umberto Eco and Enrico Filippini. One day Pasolini happened to be in Milan and the two poets met, on October 17 [1967], in the sumptuous house that the architect Nanda Vigo had decorated for the businessman Spaggiari. The two writers needed an interpreter, we sat on a stone bench and for a couple of hours I felt like some kind of simultaneous translator, without the skills that these professionals have. From that meeting a beautiful friendship was born."
![]( "\"Flower Power\" photograph 1968")
The next day, Pasolini wrote Allen a note - “Caro, angelico Ginsberg, ieri sera ti ho sentito dire tutto quello che ti veniva in mente su New York e San Francisco, coi loro fiori. Io ti ho detto qualcosa dell’Italia (fiori solo dai fiorai) [Dear angelic Ginsberg. Last night I heard you say everything that came into your mind about New York and San Francisco, with their flowers. I have told you something about Italy (flowers only to be found in flower shops)...sei costretto a inventare di nuovo e completamente - giorno per giorno, parola per parola - il tuo linguaggio rivoluzionario. Tutti gli uomini della tua America sono costretti, per esprimersi, ad essere inventori di parole! - "Your bourgeoisie is a bourgeoise of insane people, mine of idiots", Pasolini points out. "You rebel against insanity with insanity (giving flowers even to policemen), but how can one revolt against idiocy?.." - How, indeed!The full text of this letter, in a (it has to be said, less-than-perfect) English translation by Allen, (in collaboration with Annette Galvano), was published, posthumously, in the late 'Seventies, (1979), in Jim Graham's Lumen/Avenue Areview.
As Simona Bondavalli in her cogent essay, "Giving Flowers to the Policeman", has pointed out, "Pasolini mentions the poetry of Allen Ginsberg as the only possible example to renew the social mandate of the poet at a time of poetic and ideological crisis. In (an)..interview with Oriana Fallaci, he includes Ginsberg in the extremely brief list of American authors that he appreciates - "I don't like (Ernest) Hemingway, nor(John) Steinbeck, very little (William) Faulkner - from (Herman) Melville I go straight to Allen Ginsberg".In a short paragraph entitled "The Great Poets" included in what would become "almost a testament", the result of various encounters and interviews with the English journalist, Peter Dragadze, Pasolini lists Ginsberg next to Sandro Penna, Dylan Thomas, (Antonio) Machado and (Constantine) Cavafy. It is particularly the early Ginsberg he likes",Bondavalli writes, "his poetry of the 'Fifties", "a poetry that exalts despair" [in Pasolini's phrase], and where he sees "the rebellion against the domination of the society of prosperity".."This admiration for the American poet even induces Pasolini to think of him as the possible actor for the part of Jesus in "The Gospel According to Matthew"[Pasolini considered even more seriously for this role, Jack Kerouac]. Ginsberg's poetry is also the only poetry that has been able to truly represent New York".
"Like Allen Ginsberg, whose literary impact he in many ways paralleled, Pasolini brought writing out of its hermetic, academic closets and into the street.... Pasolini lived a life of such great honesty, passion, intelligence, insight and richness, that even despite--perhaps because of--its contradictions, I know of no life from which we could learn more today." (Steve Abbott)
Interviewer: You are a poet and a filmmaker. Is there a relation between these two roles?
Pasolini: As far as I'm concerned, there is a profound unity between the two of them. It's as if I were a bilingual writer.
Our posting on the extraordinary event at Castelporziano in 1979 (a festival in hommage to Pasolini) is available here.
↧
November 3, 2013, 4:00 am
![]()
[Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) at NTID/RIT Rochester, New York, 1984 - Photograph courtesy Jim Cohn]
It’s the Year of the Ginz! – didn’t you know it? - According to France’s Liberation -"Après l’année Kerouac, en 2012, c’est au tour d’Allen Ginsberg d’être honoré comme symbole d’une jeunesse en rébellion contre les mœurs de l’american dream puritain". (Following the Year of Kerouac in 2012, it is the turn of Allen Ginsberg to be honored as the symbol of youth in revolt against the manners of the puritanical "American Dream"") Liberation notes the extension of Jean Jacques Lebel's multi-media Ginsberg extravaganza at the Pompidou Center in Metz, through to the beginning of next year.
Beat movies - those ubiquitous Beat movies! From an interview in The Boston Globe, Daniel Radcliffe: “I knew nothing about Ginsberg’s life,” said Radcliffe. “I only knew about his poetry and sort of what he and (William) Burroughs and (Jack) Kerouac and (Neal) Cassady stood for in the pantheon of American literature. I didn’t understand the poetry. I still don't understand all of the poetry"
and Dane DeHaan (from a Reuters news item) - "..DeHaan said he researched Carr (Lucien Carr)'s quirks and character in Ginsberg's books, correspondence between Ginsberg and Kerouac, and in a book written by Kerouac's first wife, Edie Parker[that would be "You'll Be Okay - My Life With Jack Kerouac" from City Lights] (more salt, then, on Brian Hassett's belief that the movie treats her unbelievably shabbily) - "One such anecdote that he (DeHaan) found (that) typified Carr's intensity was an incident where Carr stood on a deck of a ship that (David) Kammerer then sank, just so that Carr could experience the feeling of being on a sinking ship"
"Is Jack Kerouac Unfilmable? - (The new) "Big Sur" (film) is the Latest to Raise the Question" - Gabrielle Lipton has a provocative piece this week, forIndiewire - "Beat writing uses highly specific details to create an allegorical framework on which to hang all the spiritual, interpersonal and personal experiences that the writing is actually about in its quest for human truth. The visible world is the backbone for all that is unseen, which doesn’t make it especially film-able."
"Seven of the Best and Worst Renditions of Allen Ginsberg" in The Advocate. We used one of them on Friday. Catch the other six (actors attempting to portray Allen Ginsberg) hereA little sweet "dish" - Gowri Ramnarayan (recounting an encounter with Allen where she thought it best to keep mum) - "And how do you keep a straight face when poet Allen Ginsberg belts out what he swears is a Kabirbhajan, at a gathering of avant-garde artistes in New York? You can’t recognise a single word or note but he begs you sotto vocenot to let him down before friends who believe he is an “Indian” expert".- Ah, but he was an "Indian expert"! - (ok, well, an Indian aficionado, at least!)
Julio Martinez's Che and Allen, a speculative radio docudrama, mentioned in these pages a few weeks back, is now available to listen to any time, on Streaming Audio, from the Pacifica Radio Archive. Click here.
↧
November 4, 2013, 3:30 am
![]( "The+Fugs++live+1966")
AG: So what I want to do this period is to talk about just what I understand of his (Ed Sanders) notion of "Investigative Poetry", and the things that we've done in common (maybe touching on some things that he'll go into in more extensive detail. I'll just give my angle on the same). I want to begin with a sample of.. This is something that I did that Ed approved or encouraged, (and) that I, actually, got a little bit out of Ed. It's a song. Ed started The Fugs, a rock group, which also began in the early (19)60's, rather the same time as (the) Peace Eye(bookstore) - (19)64. The Fugs would rehearse at the Peace Eye bookstore, and (it included) people that worked in the Holy Modal Rounders, later - (guitaristSteve) Weber,Tuli Kupferberg, soloist, Ed, soloist, a couple of other people that turned up in other bands. I keep seeing (members) now in other bands, people who played withJoni Mitchell or hanging around (places like) The Bitter End in New York. Apparently he was able to get hold of a lot of a lot of good musicians to back up the amateur poet singers of The Fugs.
I remember one of his early interesting songs was "Police State" - [Police State ? Police State Blues? - maybe, most probably Allen was thinking here of the early Fugs classic, CIA Man]
In other words, he was taking that kind of literary political material and investing it into pop songs and rock songs, and making "a total assault on the culture", making a real combine of high culture and low - police low-life and dope-fiend low-life hipness. So he was one of the first that introduced actual politics into rock music, and it actually affected a lot of other rock musicians. Because, when he was playing in Greenwich Village in a little theater, I remember Paul McCartney (of The Beatles) came and people from the (Rolling) Stones band came - other musicians, who were commercially better set-up but who were really curious and interested in seeing the sophistication and intelligence and obvious high balletic quality of what Sanders was doing (in terms of body movements, as well as language).
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-four-and-a-quarter minutes in, through to approximately twenty-seven minutes in]
↧
↧
November 5, 2013, 3:30 am
![]()
AG: Then, later on, I got into writing pop songs. So the fruition of this is "CIA Dope Calypso" (which will be coming out on Columbia Records this Fall) [1977] - [Allen then plays, in its entirety, his recording of "CIA Dope Calypso" - "In Nineteen Hundred And Forty Five/China was won by Mao Tse Tung/ Chiang Kai-shek's army ran away/And they're waiting there in Thailand today/ Supported by the CIA/ Pushing Junk down Thailand way..."] - Well, actually that's a product of a collaboration with Ed (Sanders) over a long period of time, a mutual exchange of ideas and turning each other on to possibilities of poetics as well as possibilities of investigation.
I'll talk a little more about that particular thing. That song is from "First Blues", which is a book of songs put out a couple of years ago, and is a by-product of maybe fifteen or twenty years of preoccupation with the whole dope problem, and research into it, related to literary matters, oddly enough (or, inextricable from literary and cultural research to begin with). It all started (when I was) hanging around Times Square in the (19)40's (as described by (William) Burroughs' Junkie, and my Preface to it, which we have in the library). I realized the official government version of what marijuana was like and my own experience, and my friends' experience, were two different universes. Because, at that time, 1945, (19)46, you've got to remember, it was really a question of "dope fiends" - that it was really terrible - like public cock-sucking, or something, like something awful! - the idea that "grass", marijuana, was in such bad repute, that the official propaganda was that it sent you straight to the mad-house! I guess you know (all) about that historically, don't you? There's been enough re-runs of the old Reefer Madness movies of the (19)30's.
I couldn't figure out how that could be - how people could be so disjointed. And by doing just a little bit of research, I realized that there really was a conspiracy - in other words, a misunderstanding, that could not have come about without an enormous amount of money and effort and energy being put into a campaign of public education that would distort people's ideas. So I began actually doing a little bit of research on it in the (19)40's. And one of the first things I found was that Mayor La Guardia of New York had a report on marijuana made that said that it was alright. It gave marijuana a clean bill of health, only ten years earlier, in 1938 (the same year that Congress was illegalizing it). So I realized it had been a political struggle. Then, doing further research into the whole history of the narcotics bureau, I realized it was a case of Parkinson's Law - that a government bureaucracy like that tends to find more and more work for itself, triesto extend its power and take over more and more territory. And then I began thinking, "well what about the junkies then?". And I began researching that. And the roots of that problem go back to World War 1 and 1918-1920 and the Harrison Act. You find out that, before that, junkies were not considered "dope fiends" but just a medical problem, and that a gang of doctors in New York State, who had a private clinic, who wanted to make money, had legislation passed in New York State making it illegal for doctors to prescribe heroin, that it had to be done in their licensed and registered clinics. So they made a lot of money on it. In other words, it was, like, a group of people who wanted a little monopoly on the commerce. Then there was a guy, Representative Volk, who got up in Congress, (and) denounced it as a conspiracy by a group of doctors to make money by getting a franchise on all the heroin cures in their up-state New York rest homes. And then there was a big fight. And then the Treasury Department stepped in and closed down government clinics. (These clinics were) like the British system now, where you can go, like our present Methadone system. (But the Treasury Department) closed down all the clinics in New Orleans, advising a cut-off of federal funds, and drove all the junkies onto the street, where the junkies then began robbing and stealing to get money for their fix, and that led to the idea of junkie as a criminal. And that was re-inforced by the Treasury Department men going out and busting them with guns. So, pretty soon, like, a circular system had been set up. And then, a lot of doctors protested the government intervention into the patient-doctor relationship, so there was then an attack on the doctors by the Treasury Department, and something like twenty-thousand doctors were busted for trying to do regular medical treatment for junkies, and a number, an enormous amount, paid fines, and about three thousand went to jail! - Yeah?
Student: What was the Harrison Act?
AG: The Harrison Act was 1918,1920, I think. That was the original law that began regulating junkies - junk, regulating the sale of heroin and opiates
Student: Also booze?AG: No
Student: No booze?
AG: No. It was of that time, though, of the time of Prohibition. It was that same nature. I think the provisions were.. some sort of technical provision that a docor had to be licensed to prescribe for addiction.
Student: Not just a regular medical license, but a..
AG: A special licence beyond that.
Student; A special license?
AG: You had to have a license from the Treasury Department, an Opiate License from the Treasury Department. So the Treasury Department took over the licensing of the medical profession in this area. Really weird, actually. Think of how weird it is anyway that The Treasury Department should have control of Drugs. You take it for granted, but when you think historically - how did that ever happen? Well, it goes back to this situation. (Harry) Anslinger, who was head of the Treasury Department Narcotics Control Board, was.. (and I think he originally worked for Prohibition in Alcohol Control - Actually, I've forgotten half of all this).
Student: Allen?
AG: Yes?
Student: Who was supplying the dope in those days?
AG: Oh, up to 1918, it was a regular commercial thing. You could get snake-oil remedies in drug stores - laudanum, paregoric, tincture of opium, you could buy, There were a number of junkies - legal junkies - old ladies or young, who would have their laudanum every day, Maybe one hundred thousand or a half million, just like now, same thing, except there was no fuss about it. It was just sort of like, Aunt Minnie going upstairs to take her laudanum, and then she'll retire for the evening. But she'll be down tomorrow-morning and cook breakfast!
You can get the history of all this in a couple of really good books. Let's see - America's Drug Hang-Up - Fifty Years of Folly, written by Rufus King, who was former chair of American Bar Association and American Medical Association Joint Committee on Narcotics Policy - a very intelligent guy. And that's the best historical survey of the build-up of the narcotics bureaucracy and of narcotics politics. America's Drug Hang-Up - Fifty Years of Folly - Rufus King. And another good book is The Addict and the Law by Alfred R Lindesmith, Indiana University Press. Those are the early pioneers in all this research. There's lots of other books now, but I haven't kept up with the literature. They were the early breakthrough books, actually. And I guess, Lester Greenspoon's book on marijuana [Marihuana Reconsidered (1971)] probably has some of the early history.
![Drug Hang-Up by Rufus King - America's Drug Policies]()
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-seven minutes in and continuing until approximately forty minutes in]
↧
November 6, 2013, 3:00 am
Yesterday, posted on You Tube was this remarkable footage (by Jonas Mekas) of Allen, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) Ray Bremser, and Frank O'Hara, famously reading together, in 1959, in New York City, at the Living Theatre, at a benefit for Yugen magazine (you're perhaps familiar with Fred McDarrah's iconic photo taken on that same occasion (see below) The footage is silent, but Jonas added a soundtrack, a recording he made of Allen the following year, 1960, reading from his classic "Sunflower Sutra" - "..my sunflower, O my soul, I loved you then!.."
![]()
[Frank O'Hara reading at The Living Theater at a benefit for
Yugen magazine, November 2, 1959 - Photograph by Fred W McDarrah c. The Estate of Fred W. McDarrah]
↧
November 6, 2013, 4:00 am
![]()
Allen on "Investigative Poetics" continues
AG: Well all this is simply to say that there was some kind of vast and large-scale weird conspiracy to interfere with people's lives, to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, to tell niggers (sic) to stop smoking grass, or tell white people to stop (emulating) the niggers smoking grass, for whatever reason. It entered into the poetry because there's this old tradition of Theophile Gautier and the Club of the Hashashins (Club des Hashisihins), or Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, French poets of the 1870's taking hashish, (Charles) Baudelaire's writings on hashish, (Samuel Taylor) Coleridge on writing "Kubla Khan" in an opium dream, Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater", antique vedas written about soma, all sorts of aboriginal literature, as well as anthropological literature, as well as (the) Yellow Decades 1890's literature by Havelock Ellisor Edward Carpenter or William James, dealing with anesthetic revelations. So drug dilletantism has always been some little element of literary history, and the most romantic and interesting parts. The French Decadent writers and the 1840's French literary society with Gautier and (Eugene) Delacroix and Bauldelaire, and real high-minded people.
All of a sudden, if you're a poet in 1940's, (19)50's America, you have all these real interesting poets and their backgrounds, but you find out there's a huge police condition in this area, and so, naturally, you want to find out what those poets were into. Almost every poet in the (19)40's and (19)50's, particularly those who were influenced by Rimbaud (which is, like, one hundred percent, really!), from Jack Kerouac to Patti Smith - they all wanted to know what kind of hashish Rimbaud was taking, "naturally, wouldn't you?,"as (William) Burroughs says. Or what was it like to take opium? - or, just the natural inquisitiveness and curiosity, of poet, or of writer, or just vision-seeker, or smart kid, or old Bohemian, or elegant faggot, or strong-minded macho Hemingway, would also want to know what kind of opium was being used by the bull-fighters (if they were using it)! I mean, it's just natural that you'd want to know what was going on behind the scenes, and yet here was this enormous police condition in this area, that was unnatural - especially if you read history and saw that they actually.. 184o - Theophile Gautier and Baudelaire and those people - don't they belong to a club where they meet every week, and take hashish, and write poems - or something? - What's going on now, you can't do that? You got to go to jail?"
So obviously.. then you scratch the surface and see the La Guardia Report that says there's nothing wrong with marijuana. Then you go down to Times Square and you see all these big hoodlum-looking cops busting people for smoking grass, or carrying it, or trying to sell it. And you realize there's something weird going on. And then you see all the junkies shuddering down the street, with their noses dripping, stealing your overcoat, and wondering what led to that condition and why the police are so mad at them (when they should be sending them to a doctor). And then you begin realizing that the plainclothes detectives are actually selling heroin, and, when you do more research, you realize that the head of the Narcotic Bureau's Intelligence Agency, or the Special Investigative Squad has actually got a working relationship with Organized Crime and the Mafia. And then you do a little bit of more work and you realize historically, if you look up newspaper clippings, that every decade they bust the entire Narcotics Bureau for peddling, And then you do a little more research and then you're involved in Anti-War activities and Vietnam, and you hear rumors that Air America has been transporting opium for the CIA. And then you get all involved with further research , and then, as you go into it deeper and deeper, you see that somehow or other there's a working relationship between the Mafia, Organized Crime, and the dope bureaucracies and the Secret Police Intelligence bureaucracies. And that it's all mixed into one potage. And so you have someone like Ed Sanders from the other side, who's got the LEMUR newsletter, and "Total assault on the culture", and "League For Sexual Freedom", and "Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts", and "Junky's Liberation Movement", and Fugs singing "Police State". And it all sort of becomes one large paranoaic system.
[tape ends here - to be continued] ![]()
[Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)]
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately forty minutes in and continuing until approximately forty-five-and-a-half minutes]
↧
November 7, 2013, 3:30 am
![File:Museo del Prado - Goya - Caprichos - No. 43 - El sueño de la razon produce monstruos.jpg]()
[Francisco Goya (1746-1828) - "El sueño de la razon produce monstruos" ("The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters") - Plate 43 of "Los Caprichos" ("The Caprices"), (1799), etching and aquatint on paper 8.4 x 5.9 inches - in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain]AG: (tape continuing in media res, after brief pause) ...a big paranoiac projection - got that down on tape? - The whole study, finally, leading to the conclusion that it was just a.. big paranoiac projection, and that maybe you're crazy (or, maybe, they're crazy - or maybe you're all crazy together! And then you begin getting angry and paranoid - "maybe they're following you?" - and "who did they kill last time?" - and "who's house are they breaking into now?". So, it's a dangerous field to get into, unless you have something to balance it and stabilize your mind, which is why it's very useful to have this sort of subject taught, surrounded by Zen masters and Tibetan lamas, where there's a recourse to emptiness in the middle of it all, where you can always have recourse to meditation to calm your anxieties and to empty the paranoia out so that the paranoia becomes another playful toy or poetic fancy, rather than something you really have to get worried about, and hide in the basement like The Invisible Man.
So, as Ed (Sanders) will point out, the danger of Investigative Poetics is that your natural paranoia will take over, and then, underneath that, (the cause of that), is actually just anger, really, or aggression, fixated ideas on your own ego-identity, and your own goodness and (the) badness of other people - that you're good and other people are evil people, that the evil people are taking over the good people, and, if only you were strong enough and keep track of all the evil people, you can take them up to the New York Times Supreme Court, and get them all busted through the Washington Post, and all the sins will be cleared up, and everything will come back to normal!
- which is what Ezra Pound was into. Except he thought it was all the banking system, just as I was saying it was all the drug system. So Pound thought it was the banking system. In the Cantos, he's got analysis of money and his point is that as money is used as a commodity, rather than merely some measure of exchange, as money used to make money (like the bank loans out money at a high rate of interest to get more money) that this abuse of the medium of exchange is what poisons the entire economy - when money is loaned out not for production, to encourage socially useful production, but is loaned out to make more money for the loaner, or the bank, then some unnatural imbalance is entered right into the bloodstream, so to speak, or the most delicate part of the nervous system of social communication - the symbol of exchange, the money.
So Pound went into giant research into the history of banks, back through the Medici banks, and back to Roman banks, and communal banks, where there was there was no question of getting money from money (it was just a small rate of interest, and money was loaned out only for useful production), and came up with an entire analysis of the entire society, based on money - which became his obsession, until he was eighty, until he got so close to death that he realized that, well, it wasn't really money, it was greed. So he should have been working on people's minds and psychology rather than the externalized banking system (because that was just a manifestation of greed). Pound finally felt that all his life and work was a mess (stupidity and ignorance all the way through), himself, at the age of eighty. So I was just pointing out some of the dangers of Investigative Poetics.
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately forty-five-and-three-quarter minutes and concluding approximately forty-nine-and three-quarter minutes]
↧
↧
November 8, 2013, 3:00 am
![]()
[Allen Ginsberg - Bloodsong - (edited by James Grauerolz) - Italian paperback, published by il Saggiatore, 2013]Continuing from last week, (we can't seem to leave it alone!) Kill Your Darlings (see earlier digests here and here) continues to garner reviews (mostly positive ones) - Michael O'Sullivan in The Washington Post takes up the debate over the blurring of fiction and fact (in particular, the presentation of Lucien Carr - wait a minute, "the Lucian Carr character") - "You'd better like it complicated", he writes, "The film is awash in delicious and difficult ambiguities". These "delicious and difficult ambiguities" are perhaps part of the reason for a curiously contrasting critical response to the film, nowhere better on display than in "the city by the bay". Here's Anita Katz in the San Francisco Examiner - ("The Beats Come To Life In "Kill Your Darlings"") - "The film is an absorbing personal drama, an informative look at a literary movement's genesis, a lesson in gay history and a moving celebration of the creative spirit". Compare this with Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle ("Muddled Look At Beats") - "Despite it's general intelligence and worthy performances, "Kill Your Darlings" makes it difficult to see how the Beats ever caught on."
More "Kill Your Darlings" reviews (all of them finding it hard not to acknowledge, at the very least, the energy in this project) - see (for example) here and here, here and here![]()
The other "Beat" movie playing, Michael Polish's adaptation of Kerouac's Big Sur, , similarly, has had critics both contrastingly enthusiastic and despairing. Stephen Holden in The New York Times - ""Big Sur" cracks the code of how to adapt Jack Kerouacfor the screen. The secret is deceptively simple. Go to the source and stay there. The hot-wired energy and spontaneity of the Beat mystique are embedded in writing that distills its feverish essence better than any hyped-up action. The hard part is melding readings with live action but "Big Sur" makes it look so easy that you hardly notice the transitions". Holden gives high praise to Polish's screenplay - "a seamless blend of astutely chosen swatches from the novel" narrated by Kerouac (Jean-Luc Barr) alongside "scenes of his interactions withNeal Cassady, Neal's wife, Carolyn, and Neal's mistress (here re-named "Billie)". This emphasis on the text (as well as some undeniably "gorgeous" cinematography) is, for Holden, the film's particular strength. Not so forShelia O'Malley, (writing in the space of the late Roger Ebert) -"Michael Polish's "Big Sur"..is a strangely tepid experience", she declares, "for such searing psychological material". "The fault lies", she believes, "in the heavy reliance on voice-over (all (of which is) taken from the book) which distances us from what is happening onscreen. Scenes are not allowed to unfold, to explode, to develop, to sit there, because the voice-over is too insistent, interjecting itself every other moment. What would have happened if (it) had been used more sparingly? What if the beautiful collage effect of Kerouac's time in the woods (the film is stunningly beautiful) had been allowed to develop on its own, leaving more room for interpretation, chaos, life? There are moments that are allowed to breathe but they are few and far between"John DeFore in his review in the Washington Post recognizes this too, calling it a "beautiful and sometimes affecting film", but "its powerful literary voice..threatens to overwhelm the director", and, as a result, it "sometimes feels like a beautiful illustration, rather than an adaptation, of Kerouac's prose". It's "an understandable impulse" ("with Kerouac so eloquent on the subject of Cassady's masculine appeal or the incomparable ache of awakening after four days of drinking"), but, regrettably, "an uncinematic one".It's important to point out that "Big Sur" is not a fun-fest, so its distance and restraint is plausibly in keeping with its subject-matter (a point that DeFore comes to at the end of his review) - and Robert Abele in the LA Times -"the muted emptiness of the ill-fated sojourn wills its way towards something like existential meaningfulness".."there's a strange heft to its hollowness".
Before leaving the matter of Beat movies, we couldn't resist quoting again from our oldbête noire, Rex Reed (see here for his pompous dismissal of "Kill Your Darlings"). Here's Reed on "Big Sur" - "Fans of all that Beatnik self-indulgence find a literary significance in Kerouac's writing that has always eluded me. Apparently, they eventually wore out the author too. The deadly screenplay (in the form of voice-over narration) is culled by writer-director Michael Polish from the verbose novel without regard for an audience's patience. Don't worry if you don't connect. There's nothing to connect to. The characters are never developed and nothing ever happens. The film has a restless, nomadic quality similar to Kerouac's lifestyle, but [Reed quoting Gertrude Stein] there's no there there. Such a surfeit of ranting despair and self-pity led to a nervous breakdown that signaled the end of the Beat Generation." - Did it? - Moving on..
Steven Fama's extraordinary celebration on the occasion of the publication of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia is not to be missed. It can be accessed here.
Ron Padgett will be reading from his Collected Poems this coming Wednesday at the St Marks Poetry Project in New York City.
Jon Day reviews Iain Sinclair's American Smoke in FT (the Financial Times), and Gerard DeGroot ("A wild, obsessive homage to the writers of the Beat Generation") reviews it for the Daily Telegraph -here James Campbell interviews him in The Guardian about the book (and about the Beats and other writers) here (Sukhdev Sandhu's review in The Observer is here)Lou Reed remembered by Patti Smith (in The New Yorker) "..I didn't understand his erratic behavior or the intensity of his moods, which shifted, like his speech patterns, from speedy to laconic. But I understood his devotion to poetry and the transporting quality of his performances. He had black eyes, black t-shirt, pale skin. He was curious, sometimes suspicious, a voracious reader and a sonic explorer. An obscure guitar pedal was for him another kind of poem..He was our generation's New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.."
Laurie Anderson, his widow,'s obituary note is here oh, and Happy Birthday Alice Notley!
↧
November 9, 2013, 3:30 am
↧
November 11, 2013, 3:00 am
![]()
[Santo Trafficante Jr. (1914-1987)]AG.. I('ve) sort of concluded research on my own obsession with dope police state, with dope police, in about 1971. I presented a paper at the Institute For Policy Research [Institute For Policy Studies] in Washington DC, which is published in a book called Allen Verbatim, with myriad footnotes and references and it was a climax of my obsessional preoccupation with that subject, and I sort of got out of it since then, having laid it all on paper. But it forms a basis for a number of references in songs and poems that I published as poems rather than as prose, and I'd rather not go on and on more with it now. I just sort of started going into it and found myself going back into the same compulsive rap, going back to 1918, in which you have to finally pull all the different parts of your knowledge and all the historical references together, and it can go on for days and days and days, and anyone of you who've been involved with somebody obsessed with the Assassination Committees, or whether (Robert) Kennedy was killed by Sirhan Sirhan or whether John F Kennedy was killed by (Lee Harvey) Oswald, or (Jack) Ruby, or Santo Trafficante.. (You've heard it all, I guess, haven't you?)
So I'll read a poem on that subject next, in which, finally, I try to get it all together, but in a poetic form. So the whole point of Investigative Poetics, I guess, is, how do you take all that material (like (Ezra) Pound's obsessive accumulation of data on Roman banking systems and long boring accounts of Chinese production and equity and Renaissance banks), how do you find a way of putting it concisely on the page so that people don't get bored and stop thinking? You're walking around with an albatross of this idea around your neck. I think Sanders' phrase is, how do you present "data-clusters"? How do you deal with.. How do you dress up or present data-clusters in a way that the information that you think is crucial will get across to the intellectual reader but also to the general public, and, at the same time, be pretty? - (and) at the same time last for a thousand years, so it's not boring, so it's not boring, so it's still got some kind of poetry in it? How do you make poetry out of all these facts? And, as the world gets bigger and more complicated and bureaucratized, (and socialized or communized or capitalized or CIA-ized), to the extent that the poet does deal with history, it gets more important, as time goes on, to actually be master of (the) facts and to be involved in such matters. But, at the same time, it becomes more and more unimportant (because it becomes more and more boring, more and more detailed, and routine, and obsessional - and anyone can do it - and it's the daily newspaper, and if you get really into it, you're cutting up all the daily newspapers and keeping clippings services that refer to everything and interconnect. And you know it can be done better by IBM [computers - this is 1977 (sic)], but who's going to program the IBM to take care of it and find the results that you're looking for? - which is that the CIA killed Kennedy because they were connected to the Cuban heroin pushers. who are now living in Tampa and were also dealing dope out of Saigon. Well, you have to get a computer-programmer who will search out all the files and get it, get all that data together.
Well, anyway, I'll start with this poem called "Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox", dealing with (the issue of) what do you do with data-clusters? - "May 30, 1975, 3 a.m" - I was up late at night, worried about this whole problem - 1975 - [Allen begins reading "Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox" - "Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox/ Hadda be flashing like the Daily Double/Hadda be playing on Tee Vee/Hadda be loudmouthed on the Comedy Hour/Hadda be announced over Loud Speakers/CIA & Mafia are in cahoots/Hadda be said in old ladies' language/Hadda be said in American Headlines"] - I guess that started that way because I had an old lady friend, eighty years old, that I visited down around the Lower East Side (of New York) who's a family friend, living by herself, and she was an old radical, red, Communist, from the (19)20's and (19)30's, she knew my mother. And I went to her, to show her how smart I was, and said, "Well, you know, that dope isn't so bad". And she said, "Well, all these young people, always smoking marijuana, they should be having revolutions". And I said, "Well, dope isn't so bad, (it's) at least, a revolution - and, besides, don't you realize that the CIA and the FBI, and blah-blah-blah, are all against the dope-smoking, they think the dope-smokers are all Communists?!". And she said,"Yeah, well, the Mafia and the CIA are in cahoots anyway. Everybody knows that!" - And I liked that "in cahoots", because I realized that she had found that that was the right word in old ladies' language (like, in American-ese). I was always saying that the Mafia and the CIA had "a working relationship". It's sort of like the New York Times, but, (how does it play on) the jukebox? How do you convince an old lady in Peoria? - So when she said "in cahoots", I realized that I had the poem. There, was finally the verbal key that would unlock the rhythm. So this is related to how you deal with all this material in the right language. How do you present it on the page? - [Allen continues reading - "Hadda be announced over Loud Speakers/CIA & Mafia are in cahoots/Hadda be said in old ladies' language/Hadda be said in American Headlines/Kennedy stretched and smiled and got double-crossed by low-life goons &/ Agents/Rich bankers with Criminal Connections/Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers in Cuba/working with Big Time syndicate Tampa Florida/ Hadda be said with big mouth"] - Well, I'm going to footnote here - This being 1977, March 17th, 1977 - The guy I had in mind was a guy named Santo Trafficante, who lives in Tampa, Florida, working with big time syndicates in Tampa, Florida. Trafficante was interesting to me because, in the research I did on CIA involvement in Indo-China, it turns out that Trafficante, who had been a big head of the narcotics trafficking in Cuba, had been kicked out by (Fidel) Castro with the rest of the prostitution, gambling and narcotics people, (and) was in Saigon in 1968, at the Caravelle Hotel, for a conference to divide up the opium traffic. And he was a known narcotics pusher. So how did he ever get into Saigon ((which was) under US control)? Why was he there in the biggest hotel in Saigon and at a big conference, reported publicly, and how could he get away with this unless the CIA were somehow involved and had some complicity, or there was some relationship? Because, I remember, there were lots of newspapermen who couldn't get in to Saigon, and people were always being plucked out of Saigon who were protesting the war, so how could a big-time gangster dope pusher get into Saigon? And, actually, the information about him being in Saigon came from Colonel Lucien Conein, who was a big CIA agent in Saigon from 1961 on, and who knew all the Italian dope connections and who knew all the local dope connections, and who was part of the old French Intelligence Agency, which used to support itself by the sale of heroin. So Conein and the CIA knew that Santos Trafficante was there, so what was going on? - So it struck me,so I wrote, "Dope pushers from the CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba/working with Big Time syndicate Florida" - except that's (written) 1975 - (and)...
[Allen reads from (a) newspaper-clipping]"March 17th, 1977, (AP) Washington: Santos Trafficante, sole survivor of three U.S. underworld figures who plotted with the CIA against Fidel Castro, declined to answer any questions Wednesday from the House Committee on Assassinations, including whether he discussed plans to murder President John F Kennedy."Did you ever discuss with any individual plans to assassinate Presient Kennedy prior to the assassination?" Chief Counsel Richard A Sprague asked. Trafficante, a former gambling figure in Cuba, refused to answer that and the thirteen other questions put to him, invoking Constitutional provisions, including the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Trafficante refused to say of Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald (whether he) had once visited him when he was in prison in Havana, Cuba, and refused to say if he was involved in CIA assassination plots against Castro, or whether any Federal agency had tried to keep him from testifying before the House Committee. Trafficante was one of three underworld figures involved in the CIA assassination plots against Castro. The other two, John Roselli and Sam Giancana were murdered after the Senate Intelligence Committee sought their testimony two years ago. Rosselli was assassinated after testifying and Giancana was killed right before he was scheduled to testify. Sprague also asked Trafficante if he had ever met with CIA representatives to discuss assassination of world leaders, including Fidel Castro. The Senate Intelligence Committee said two years ago that Rosselli, Giancana and Trafficante were recruited by the CIA to have Castro assassinated. It is said that Trafficante lined up an assassin in one of the plots to put poison in Castro's food at a Havana restaurant".
It was just interesting to get it all locked in in one figure, and get all my paranoia rolled into one character.
[Allen continues reading (from his poem)] - "Rich bankers with Criminal Connections/Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers in Cuba/working with Big Time syndicate Tampa Florida/ Hadda be said with big mouth/Hadda be moaned over Factory foghorns/Hadda be chattered on Car Radio News Broadcast/Hadda be screamed in the kitchen/Hadda be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting/Hadda be Howled on the streets by Newsboys to bus conductors...." and reads the entire poem, culminating with "..Hadda be rich, hadda be powerful, hadda hire technology from/Harvard/Hadda murder Indonesia 500,000/Hadda murder Indochina 2,000,000/Hadda murder in Czechosklovakia/Hadda murder in Chile/Hadda murder in Russia/Hadda murder in America"] - Well, that was a summary of al of my research and paranoia in one sort of spurt, with the problem of getting the right language - like "hadda, hadda" - H-A-D-D-A - "Hadda be flashing like the Daily Double" - In other words, how to get through somehow the Dick Tracy comic strip, to make it (because the Dick Tracy comic strip is just the reverse, controlled by the FBI), how do you get it through in such clear language that it becomes slogan-esque and people can remember?, how do you put all the data together? (because there's a good deal of data in there - there's Trafficante in Tampa, Florida, or "FBI chief, J.E(dgar) Hoover and Frank Costello, syndicate mouthpiece, meeting in Central Park, New York together weekends, reported, posthumously, Time magazine" - one line!). So how do you get it pretty? How do you make it pretty? Or how do you.. "Corsican goons in Office Strategic Services pay busted 1948 dock strike in Marseilles, 'Sixties port trans-shipment Indochina heroin".. In other words, to get all that (my own associations in combinations together), how do you do it in a line that's pretty enough that.. that's not so pretty, that one. The one I liked was "gang wars across oceans, Cambodia bombed to settle score when Soviet pilots manned Egyptian fighter planes". Now that's actually a Surrealist's line - pure Surrealism! - "Cambodia bombed to settle score when Soviet pilots manned Egyptian fighter planes" (I don't know what it sounds like to anyone now, whether it makes sense, but someone reading carefully, that has some political savvy, will say, "Well, that's an odd statement to make, I wonder what authority there is to say that?" - And the authority, actually, is (Daniel) Ellsberg quoting (Henry) Kissinger in 1970. Ellsberg said Kissinger told him that he had bombed Cambodia as a warning to (the) Russians, because the Russians had sent fighter-pilots to man their Soviet-built planes, which was against the ground rules of their turf . They had their "turf "and they were having a "rumble", and this was, like, you go hit the man across town. "Chile's red hot democracy bumped off with White House pots & pans, a warning to Mediterranean governments"- Kissinger said that the reason that they got in in Chile was a warning to the Italian Communist Party not to try and take part in the government. They didn't want to have them in Europe.
Student: Is that mostly newspaper, or...
AG: These two pieces of information I got directly from Ellsberg, in conversation (his describing conversations (that) he('d) had with Kissinger in 1970, before he quit)
Student: The thing on Chile related to Italy?, is that what you're talking about?
AG: Yeah, yeah. The strategy behind knocking off the Chilean government, aside from general Anti-Communism, aside from fear of Communist take-over in South America, was that.. Well, the Chileans got elected. Reds got elected in Chile, and there would be elections later in Portugal, and in Italy, and in France, and it looked like, it does look like, the Communists, sooner or later, will get elected, at least enough to take part in the government. And the crucial matter will be when they get elected with sufficient power to take part in the Security Departments (that is to say, the Secret Police, the Intelligence Departments, the nerve-center. That's where all the crux is, actually). Are they going to... If they take part in the Government, will they get the Police or not? Because whoever gets the Police, and the Secret Police, and the Intelligence, they've got the ball-game (which was actually the secret of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 - that the Liberals in the Czech government had, apparently, gotten so much power that, the next day, they were going to take over the Offices of the Interior Ministry, the Secret Police, where files were that showed that the Secret Police, until that time, had been controlled by the Moscow Secret Police, and that all the killings and assassinations and jailings, from the late (19)40's on, in Czechoslavakia were ordered from Moscow - which would have been a major scandal which would have rocked the whole Communist world if that had come out, there would have been a Watergate there) - So the tanks rolled in to prevent (it) - That information I got from a guy named Josef Skvorecky, who was a great novelist, who had to flee in (19)68, and his friends told him that that was the crucial point). So, the crucial point in all this, in a way, is Investigative Poetics, is intelligence. It's sort of like the poets and their intelligence versus the Secret Police and their intelligence, who's writing a better poem..
Student: Irrelevant
AG: ... or who's writing the more exquisite prose, or the more interesting strategy? - "Total assault on (the) Culture"
[Audio for the above is available here, starting at approximately fifty minutes in and concluding at approximately sixty-nine-and-a-half minutes in]
↧
November 12, 2013, 3:00 am
![]()
![]()
[SAC Albany, August 25, 1967] - FBI COINTELPRO Against Black Liberation Movement] AG: So now I'd like to move on to some samples of prose by the Intelligence Agencies. These are documents (retrieved) under the Freedom of Information Act. As background to this, I should say that, in 1960,or (19)62, I don't know what the proper citation is, J.Edgar Hoover got up at, I think the Republican Convention, and said that the three biggest threats to America were "the Communists, the Beatniks, and the egg-heads" (He actually said that - "the egg-heads")
Student: Who are the egg-heads, specifically?
AG: Well, Adlai Stevenson. The...
Student: Adlai Stevenson?
AG: ..eggheads were sort of faggot, pro-Communists, I guess, intellectuals, who didn't do any work and..
Student: "Pinkos"?
AG: Fancy-pants eggheads. "Fancy pants intellectuals" was Joseph McCarthy's phrase, for people who weren't macho enough to want a big army and fight the Communists, or something.Anyway, so there's always been.. Hoover, apparently, as early as (19)65, there's this Operation Cointel,COINTELPRO - Counter-Intelligence Program - aimed at many many different groups. I don't have much on it but I think it probably included the Beatniks as a formal, organized, Counter-Intelligence matter. I don't have any papers on it, but sooner or later, I think there will be enough research, or research will show, that the FBI, or the Federal Police, the FBI, probably collected as much scandalous information as they could from local newspapers or local police - things like "Bearded Hippie Stabs Grandmother In Iowa Farmhouse", or whatever, and took as many of those stories as they could, and made sure they were circulated all over the United States, to give an image of bearded, unwashed, bed-bug-ridden, hairy, murderous Beatniks. I think that was, actually, literally organized, but I don't have any papers on that to prove it. But there were, on many other groups, vast organizations, on many more overtly political people.. like Hoover was involved in making sure that the charisma of many Black (African-American) writers and organizers and spokesmen were stained. So he went on a giant campaign against LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, Eldridge Cleaver, and anybody, any artist, or anybody, that got mixed up with them.
![]()
So here's some papers to begin with on LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). This is 1970 - the program maybe reached its climax in 1970.
F.B.I. Date 11.13.70 Via Airtel To: The Director of F.B.I. 100-44-8006 From: SAC, Newark - I don't know why the Strategic Command in Newark, Strategic Air Command? no, that's S.A.C - the local FBI office in Newark - Subject: Co-Intel Pro Black Extremists RM - The following Counter-Intelligence proposal is submitted for consideration. It is recommended that a letter be sent with a Jersey City, New Jersey postmark to LeRoi Jones at 502 Hugh Street, Newark, New Jersey, and the Newark, New Jersey newspapers. Consideration might also be given to wire distribution. It should be signed "Ministry of Information Black Panther Party, Jersey City, New Jersey. The letter should read similarly to the following - "LeRoi Jones, the poet who calls himself Amiri Baraka, is Tom Pig pretending to be a true Black Revolutionary. He asked people not to buy the Black Panther newspaper because he wanted the People's money for himself. Jones uses the People's Liberation Soul Power to line his pockets. His goons threatened Panthers selling papers and people trying to buy them. Now Jones tries to put himself on a throne, like maybe you saw his picture. He fancies himself the reason Ken Gibson got elected Mayor of Newark. Jones had visions of his throne in Newark, then the whole country, then the world. Jones is shoving his Congress of African People idea down the throats of Brothers and Sisters on High Street. He hustles them as religion to make them his slaves. He thinks he's Black Jesus and should be put on his own cross. Even Africans laughed at Baraka's home-made dashikis in New York. When will the Black People of Newark wake up and see Jones - Baraka is just playing his King role and they're just pawns" - In connection with the above suggested letter, a copy should be sent with a return address of 501 High Street, Newark, New Jersey to..[and then it's eliminated, blacked-out, one line blacked-out] through the papers, or even if the papers will not print the letter, as if it were smuggled out of Newark by a loyal C.A.P member within Jones' organization who agrees with this letter. It is pointed out that the conflict between Jones and the Black Panther Party has risen and fallen over a period of years. This letter attempts to take advantage of the current renewed conflict engendered by Jones' anti-Black Panther propaganda to both belittle Jones and to expose the Panthers' resentment of Jones.
Student: God!
AG: Then, from S.A.C. to Newark, let's see.. the answer: "To: S.A.C. Newark From: Director, F.B.I. November 19, 1970 Co-Intel-Pro Black Extremists Racial Matters - "Your Counter-Intelligence proposal regarding Leroi Jones and the Black Panther Party is approved. Ensure that the letter sent can not be traced to the Bureau. Advise the Bureau of all positive results from this proposal. A copy to San Francisco"And then, "Note" (and on these replies, generally, Hoover's office gives an analysis - "LeRoi Jones, the Black Extremist poet and playwright who helped elect Kenneth Gibson, the Black Mayor of Newark, New Jersey. has been in conflict with Black Extremist, Black Panther Party for some time. Jones has been known as "the Black Messiah" of the Pan-African Movement in the United States. Newark has proposed a letter to Jones signed Ministry of Information, Black Panther Party, Jersey City, New Jersey, attacking Jones as an Uncle Tom who is using the Black people of Newark for his own purpose. Copies of the letter will also be sent to Newark newspapers and a letter to the Chairman of the Congress of Afrikan People, in which Jones is now active in a leadership role. This proposal will cause disruption not only within Jones' group but also n the Black Panther Party, since Jones has an appreciable following in New Jersey who will resent this statement."
Then from Newark to Washington - "Attached to file a xerox copy of the approved letter sent out on this day to the Newark Evening News and the Newark Star-Ledger, Newark, New Jersey, and to LeRoi Jones, 502 High Street and to the Hudson Dispatch, Jersey City, Union City"And then the letter read, finally, well, more or less as I read it [Allen reads again, commenting on the erratic punctuation and spelling throughout] - "LeRoi Jones, the poet who calls himself Amiri Baraka, is Tom Pig pretending - comma - to be a true Black Revolutionary - period - He asked people not to buy the Black Panther's newspaper because - comma -he wanted.. - it's real good prose, I mean, it's right from the street! - the People's money for himself - comma - Jones uses the People's money for Liberation Soul Power to line his pockets - period - His goons threatened [t-h-r-e-t-e-n (sic)] Panthers selling papers - comma - and people - [papers comma and people] - trying to buy - [b-y (sic)] - them. Now Jones tries to put himself on a throne, like maybe you saw his picture? He fancies himself he reason Ken Gibson got elected Mayor of Newark. Jones had visions of his throne in Newark, then the whole country, then the world. And so forth..Same thing..So that was all sent out an done.
Now what's interesting about that - (the) plot-within-the-plot - of course, Jones (Baraka) was a very interesting figure and a great figure, as he was, in the literary world, maybe the precursor of Ed Sanders in terms of literary activity - mimeographed, home-made cultural newspaper and magazine publication. In (19)58-(19)59 (he) had a magazine called Yugen and was hanging around with (Jack) Kerouac and (Gregory) Corso and Peter Orlovsky and myself and Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch at the Cedar Bar in New York, and was the one central figure uniting all the different schools of poetry in one magazine (more effectively than Evergreen Review or the Chicago Review, which were also doing that). Plus (he) was uniting all of us to the Black groups, with the Black musicians, like Albert Ayler and Don Cherry (and I think Elvin Jones was around there). (So) he would have parties where Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor would play, and it would be mixed with all the painters, like (Willem) de Kooning and Franz Kline - and (Jack) Kerouac and (Gregory) Corso and myself - and A.B.Spellman, and a whole bunch of Black writers - Plus (Frank) O'Hara, plus people from Partisan Review. So he had the greatest salon in Newark, and it was an era of good feeling and a fantastically organized social scene, resulting in cultural activity that really was powerful, because it was an unbeatable combination - all those people.
When Malcolm X got killed.. Apparently Malcolm X had told Jones (Baraka) that he would have to take over.. In case anything happened to him, Malcolm X himself had told (him) that he would have to take over a certain spiritual or cultural leadership. And (he - Jones/Baraka) at that time was a funny guy, literary, you know, grabbing Peter (Orlovsky)'s cock at parties, and smoking a lot of grass (and even shooting a little junk and lots of cocaine), writing poems that seemed somewhat Beat - a Beat poet but an aesthetic person, and also a student, visiting (a Roshi, who was a) Zen master in New York that Gary Snyder had worked with and trained in English. So (he) was right in the middle of that. And (then), all of a sudden, there was a (the) traumatic assassination of Malcolm X plus threats of assassination on Jones (Baraka), so (he) got completely paranoid and moved away from the White community and began getting scared of them. Then the FBI made all sorts of similar poison-pen letters so that (he) was separated out from the radical group of, I think it was Tom Hayden, who was organizing the SDS (Students For A Democratic Society) in Newark, and so (he) denounced Tom Hayden and further isolated himself. Then (he) got into an involvement with a Black Nationalist theoretician, Ron Karenga in UCLA - (has anybody heard of him? - the US Group, it's called - Ron Karenga of the US Group, UCLA, who were also in a fight with the (Black) Panthers - in fact, several people got murdered, the Panthers, got murdered, at UCLA, by Ron Karenga's US Group). Karenga's view, unlike the (Black) Panthers, and unlike Jones (Baraka)'s previous view, was that the Blacks would have to make it (by) themselves, without any White help, that Black and White cultural mixture was a mistake, that the Blacks had to find their own macho, or their own balls, that White leadership would always betray them, that White honky Liberal leadership would soften the scene, that it was really [as Mao declared it] "power grows out the barrel of a gun", and that you couldn't have "the barrel of the gun" unless you had a unified community, (and) you wouldn't have a unified community unless it was a community of the really oppressed, (and) the only really oppressed people were the Blacks, (so) the Blacks should identify with themselves and not with the White, Liberal, Middle-Class, Hippie, Revolutionary, or White, Communists, and Blacks should identify with African culture, and there should be total separation. Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) should not talk to Allen Ginsberg. Everything should get really paranoid. So from 1965-1970 Jones (Baraka) was getting intellectual advisement and ideas of a very brilliant nature like this from Ron Karenga. Then, in December last year (1976), I went to Hollywood to do some Buddhist work, and played at a.. did a show in the nightclub called the Troubadour, and ran into Ronee Blakeley, the singer, (who was the star of the movie, Nashville), who I spent time with on the Rolling Thunder Revue, and she said, which surprised me, that she had been a big radical all though the 'Sixties and (had) hung around with Weathermen and people from the SDS. And it turned out that her boyfriend, who had been fucking her all through the 'Sixties and (her time with) the SDS, had later turned out to be an agent. And then, after he was unmasked as an agent, he kept calling her up, wanting to have more dates. So she, being very intelligent, said, "Well, where is his head, anyway?". She says "yes, I'll go out and find out". So (she meets him and) he took her out to a party, full of FBI agents, and who was there but Ron Karenga! - So I said, "What?" - Then I saw Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) in January in New York. He had meanwhile changed his view and had become a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist, with the idea that he was wrong in the 'Sixties, actually, that the White-Black oppressed had to work together, that the problem was Capitalism, not race (or that greed, or Capitalism, was not, necessarily, a racial matter, but was an economic problem - so it was a Marxist interpretation). So he was now willing to work with everybody. And I told him and his wife that story about Ronnie Blakeley, and he said, "Yeah, we had some suspicions about that", and his wife said that, long ago, they'd broken with Karenga, thinking that there was something funny about him, (that) he might be an agent. Though, she said that, for five years, they were basically working with him and getting ideas and information and direction (intellectual direction and social direction) from Karenga.Then I saw in an underground newspaper, a little item from J.Edgar Hoover, (like one of these pages - [Allen points to his Freedom of Information xeroxes]), saying, "Use the US. Group and Ron Karenga as a group to split Black from Black, Black group from Black group" (like Panthers from Jones (Baraka) and Panthers from the US Movement). So, apparently, that group was, so to speak, influencing him (Jones/Baraka), who was like a giant intellectual and poetic and spiritual and cultural leader - he was being influenced by Karenga, who was being influenced by the FBI. And whether or not he was an actual agent...? (because I then went to Les Whitten, who works with Jack Anderson, to see if he had any information, and his information was that Karenga was just a clown, (a) publicity-hound, who would do anything, and who probably would work for the FBI, but was not a paid agent).
So what's the upshot? The upshot is that the entire cultural history of the "Sixties would have to be re-written, because one of the major events of the 'Sixties was the Black/White paranoia, the split of the whole Movement, which was, apparently, engineered by the government. All the radical radicals on the Left were saying, "Right on, bro'! The Blacks are absolutely right". It was, I guess, the white Liberal guilt that made people feel that it was in, not realizing the sensitivity and inhumanity of separating White from Black, or separating brother from brother, or the tearfulness of not being able to relate to Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) after a while, on a literary scene, if not a social scene. Investigative Poetics, I think, at this point, would have to go into the whole cultural and social and political and artistic history of the 'Sixties, (which was quite a vast, traumatic, revolutionary time), and re-investigate a great many things that happened of an intellectual-symbolic nature, to find out what was the story behind it. Because a great deal more of it was manipulated than we realize.
[Audio for the above is available here, beginning at approximately sixty-nine-and-a-half-minutes in, and concluding approximately eighty-seven minutes in]
↧
↧
November 13, 2013, 3:30 am
![]()
[
National Guardsmen wielding rifles with bayonets advanced along Springfield Avenue in Newark on July 14 1967 - Photograph Don Hogan Charles for The New York Times]AG: "Investigative Poetics, I think, at this point, would have to go into the whole cultural and social and political and artistic history of the "Sixties, (which was quite a vast, traumatic, revolutionary time), and re-investigate a great many things that happened of an intellectual-symbolic nature, to find out what was the story behind it. Because a great deal more of it was manipulated than we realize" and one of the major things that was manipulated was the split between the psychedelic movement and the political, (that between(Timothy) Leary, say, and (Eldridge) Cleaveramong other things). And that was done, according to Leary and according to Cleaver (though I haven't yet seen the papers on it, but I heard from Leary, and I've seen it in underground papers, and, I understand, there was a story in Rolling Stone, in October of (19)76 to the effect that when Leary was helped by the Weathermento escape from Vacaville Prisonin California, or wherever he was, on his twenty-year sentence for possession of a joint, he was then sent off to Algiers to take..refuge with Eldridge Cleaver. Do any of you remember that? Leary went to Algiers. Anybody not remember that here? (it's alright if you don't, that was all of ten years ago now, practically, seven years, and you were (maybe) twelve years old then!). So, and then, do you remember Cleaver arrested Leary and put him under house arrest, and said that Leary was too loud-mouthed, and (that) he was talking with FBI agents in the cafes of Algeria, and he was too frivolous, and, like, he was refusing to be part of the world revolution, you'd better hear the clang of iron! And then everyone was shocked, because what it meant was, "Well fuck (Timothy) Leary and Eldridge Cleaver, a bunch of egotists!, they can't even get along!", or "What does that mean? The psychedelic and the political are irreconcilable?". "There were these fancy-headed psychedelic people wanting visions and there were these realistic, gun-toting, political people ("Power comes out of the barrel of a gun"), and we thought we had them together but it wasn't together? In fact. Leary's lawyer boasted when he left jail, boasted in the (Berkeley) Barb, that it was a true marriage of dope and dynamite, when Leary left with the Weathermen. And then there's this denouement in Algiers, where they're fighting amongst themselves. And so Michael Swerin of the Village Voice went over there and made a t.v. videotape of the two of them arguing, (the transcript of) which ran for two separate issues of the Village Voice, and it was like a class left-wing Movement intellectual poetry psychedelic scandal that they couldn't get along and they were suspicious of each other, and what kind of revolution was this, and who was on who's side? and was Leary wrong or was Cleaver wrong?
So it all boiled down to the fact that the FBI forged one of these letters from the Black Panthers in New York, ordering Cleaver to arrest Leary as a spy, which information only surfaced when Leary and Cleaver, both together in jail, had a Thanksgiving supper (I think it was in 1975) and began comparing notes. [tape ends here - continues]
Student: Where's Eldridge Cleaver these days?
AG: He's, I think, living in Texas
Student: Doing God spots.
AG: Yeah. Doing God spots. I think they drove him crazy. Would you? - Here's an earlier.. I don't have anything on that particular..
Student: (I know he) said he'd gone, but I didn't know (it was) that far gone!
AG: Well, I wouldn't worry. He probably knows what he's doing.
Student: (Is he) out of jail?
AG: He's out of jail, yeah.
![]()
![61xFV37mRiL._SL500_SY346_]()
![American actress and activist Jane Fonda is surrounded by soldiers and reporters as she sings an anti-war song near Hanoi during the Vietnam War in July 1972. (Photograph by Associated Press)]()
Here's a set from the FBI on Cleaver. This is from Jane Fonda's files, because she was sent a copy of a phony letter (this is an earlier, phony, forgery, letter). What it is is.. let's see here, let's get it in order.. What they were trying to do was make trouble between SNCC (Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee) and Eldridge Cleaver of the Panthers. They were trying to split the Panthers and Cleaver. "New York has suggested" - (This is COINTEL- again) - mailing of a suppose memorandum prepared by the current leader of SNCC, Muhammad (William) Hunt, and addressed to all SNCC workers and to various Black Panther officers, leaders, and certain BPP apologists" - (These files are Jane Fonda's - the "BPP apologists" (the Black Panthers)) - "The memorandum is to enclose an article which appeared the June 20th, 1970 issue of The Black Panther, as written by leader, Eldridge Cleaver, a Black Panther fugitive residing in Algeria, criticizing SNCC leader, Phil Hutchings as a do-nothing revolutionary. The supposed SNCC memorandum not only defends Hutchins' status as a revolutionary, but severely criticizes Cleaver as a coward living in exile while the revolutionary struggle is carried on at home by SNCC and Hutchings. The proposed memorandum, submitted by New York, has been altered at the seat of government' - (that's Washington, that's J.Edgar Hoover's office) - to indicate the BPP article was only recently brought to SNCC's attention and to include a brief, final statement indicating the SNCC memorandum was also being brought to the attention of Cleaver and the Black Panther organization. This counter-intelligence activity is designed to further disrupt an already-strained relationship between the Black Panther Party and the SNCC"
And then there's further correspondence - "This letter should be directed to the following individuals" - (including Jane Fonda) - and then the memorandum, signed by Hunt, Chairman of the RPC (Revolutionary Political Council), from the SNCC office in Atlanta. It attaches a re-print, "in the Black Panther, Saturday, June 20th, 1970, page 9, recently brought to our attention". This article contains a senseless.." - (this is the FBI forgery now) - "This article contains a senseless attack by Eldridge Cleaver on SNCC and Brother Phil Hutchins, a vanguard revolutionary. Eldridge Cleaver, now enjoying a self-imposed exile is an intellectual pimp. He believes that his Panther pussies are the only revolutionary group in Babylon. SNCC disputes this claim of leadership and his right to lead. SNCC has no quarrel with the revolutionary aspect of the Panther program and accepts their basic program as correct. However, we do dispute and detest the cult of personality created by certain Panther leaders about themselves - Cleaver, (Huey) Newton, (Bobby) Seale et al, while "Little Phil", as Eldridge calls him, is in the vanguard of the revolution, Eldridge is safe and ineffective four thousand miles away. When a revolution is being made, the leadership consists of those who are fighting in the vanguard, no matter what the risk. Where were Fidel (Castro), Che (Guevara), Kim II Sung, Mao Tse Tung, Patrice Lumumba, when the revolutions were being made? They were with the people, not four thousand miles away from the front - like the FBI! - So Mr...Cleaver, before you seek to criticize those of us who are engaged in making revolution in Amerikka - K-K-A - M-E-R-I-K-K-A - you must establish your right to primacy. You must show by example, not by exile, how to wage revolution. You must, in short, become a credible revolutionary, SNCC believes strongly that the lackeys of the beast are as dangerous as the beast and that the masses of Blacks must be educated to recognize real leadership from mere allegation of leadership. SNCC accepts the challenge of revolutionary leadership and refuses to accept the criticism of Eldridge as valid. Until Eldridge returns to the wilderness of North Amerikka and joins in the day-to-day battle in Amerikka, we will continue to regard him as a coward. Love and Revolution, Yours in Struggle, Mohammed Hunt"So.. the FBI sent out copies of that to all local offices. And it says - "Enclosed for the Bureau Atlanta, Cincinnati and San Francisco are two copies each of a letter aimed at disrupting any relationship which might exist between SNCC and the Black Panther Party. It is recommended that mimeographed copies of the enclosed letter be prepared and mailed by the Atlanta office, in view of Mohammed Hunt's residence in that city. Mimeographed duplication is recommended, since SNCC's apparent poor financial condition would mitigate it against any more expensive duplicating method" - They're very smart!
Student: Allen? Did the people take the time to see that and then write something encouraging that? Did he (Ira Lowe) ever find out about that?
AG: I don't know, I don't know. All I have is all this stuff - and actually it was (from) 'Roi, it was from LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) actually. The lawyer (Lowe) asked me to talk to (him) when I got back, and see if he could go through his files to see if the letters were actually printed, and what were the actual damages, and if they could sue. These are new, fresh, papers that I just got a month or two ago [1977]. They haven't been in the newspapers.
There's another one, to Army Archerd, well, it's from FBI, to "the Director of the FBI from FBI Los Angeles, regarding Counter-Intelligence Program Black Nationalist Hate Groups - Racial Intelligence, Black Panther Party" - "Bureau authorities requested in sending the following letter to Army Archerd, Hollywood gossip columnist for Daily Variety, who noted in her column that Jane Fonda, film actress, was to be present at a Black Panther fund-raising function sponsored by Committee to Help the Black Panthers (CHBP) in Los Angeles. It is felt that knowledge of Fonda's involvement would cause her embarrassment and detract from her status with the general public" - "Dear Army" - (here's the text) - I saw your article in the Daily Variety about Jane Fonda last Thursday and happened to be present at (Roger) Vadim's "Joan of Arc" performance for the Black Panthers Saturday night. I hadn't been confronted with this Panther phenomenon before, but we were searched upon entering Embassy Auditorium, encouraged in revival-like fashion to contribute to defend jailed Panther leaders and buy guns for "the coming revolution". And led by Jane and one of the Panther chaps in a "We will kill Richard Nixon or any other m-f- who stands in our way" refrain, which was shocking to say the least. I think Jane has gotten in over her head as the whole atmosphere had the nineteen-thirties-Munich beer-hall aura. I also think my curiosity about the Panthers has been satisfied. Regards, Morris". If approved, appropriate precautions will be taken to prelude the identity of the bureau as the source of this operation"
Student: Morris?
AG: Yeah that was "Morris"
Student: Did they publish it?
AG: "You are authorized to prepare a letter as send forth and mail to Army Archer. Ensure that mailing can't be traced to the bureau". "Note. Analysis - Los Angeles proposes a letter from fictitious person be sent to Hollywood gossip columnist in the Daily Variety in a connection with a column indicating that Jane Fonda, noted film actress, would attend a Black Panther Party fund-raising function" - I think the funds were being raised for some kind of a fake frame(d)-up trial, anyway, to begin with, they'd probably got some Panther guy in trouble by busting him for grass, or..faking a shoot-out! - and then, she's going to try and raise money, and now they're trying to block that - "Proposed letter states the writer entering the function was searched upon entering, urged to contribute funds for jailed Panther leaders and buy guns for the coming revolution. Also Jane and other Panthers led the refrain, "We will kill Richard Nixon and any other motherfucker who stands in our way". It can be expected that Fonda's involvement with the Black Panther cause could detract from her status with the general public if reported in a Hollywood gossip column". So approval was given.
A couple of other brief things here, from my own files, just, very short. In March 16, 1970 - "To the Director of the FBI - from SAC, Springfield. Subject - Appearance of Allen Ginsberg at Quincy College - Issue - Miscellaneous. "Advise that Allen Ginsberg, billed as "the Hippie Poet" was scheduled to read poetry at Social Hall, Quincy College, Quincy, Illinois. This appearance is sponsored by the Quincy College Cultural Affairs Committee, a faculty organization at Quincy College - Just a little note - It's like they were following Ed (Sanders) around. So there were all these agents at poetry-readings too! - Amazing! - "1967, District Number 3, New York, September 28, 1967 - From (black-out, blanked-out narcotic agent) - Subject of this memorandum is photograph of Allen Ginsberg - Recommendation - Pending - Details - If report is over two pages in length, summarize in first paragraph - (1) On this date I received a photograph of Allen Ginsberg where he is pictured in an indecent pose. For possible future use the photograph has been placed in a locked sealed envelope, marked "Photograph of Allen Ginsberg", General File - Allen Ginsberg. The locked, sealed envelope has been placed in a vault of this office for safe-keeping"
![]( "71-key-cointel-doc")
(Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning approximately eighty-seven minutes in and continuing to the end, and here, continuing through to approximately ten minutes in.)
↧
November 14, 2013, 3:00 am
![Angletn.jpg]()
[James Jesus Angleton (1917-1987), Chief of the CIA's Counter-Intelligence Staff 1954-1975]AG: Well, ok, what does all this mean? [all this COUNTELPRO information] - It means that.. Well, one thing it means that, see, their budget was enormous.I mean they had seven billion dollars a year, the CIA alone had seven billion. So there was a budget of anywhere between seven and twenty billion, who knows? to employ millions of secretaries and lots of telephone bills, automobile bills, cars, mimeograph machines, people to write letters, specialists, agents who would analyze other agents work. Almost every move that was made in the Peace Movement was infiltrated and checked, and it was almost impossible to get anything done, from a poetry reading to a..Yellow Submarine march in New York..to a Be-In.. without some surveillance and interference of some kind or other. Yeah?
Student: What would be their budget today?
AG: Probably the same. Not much different. The White House has given orders - "no more (of) this stuff". Thereby hangs a tail. A number of FBI agents are being.. forty-one agents I think, are being indicted for hanky-pankey in their treatment of the Weathermen - wire-tapping, mail-opening, illegal behavior - and thereby hangs a tale, in this sense - I saw (Timothy) Leary about three weeks ago for the first time since he was out of jail, the first time we (had) met (he told me before on the phone about this (Eldridge) Cleaver business). There was one thing.. there was one technical point I always wondered (about). You see, the FBI and the DEA were (actually) the ones who spread most of the stuff about Leary being a fink. That was another counter-intelligence thing, to discredit him and confuse everybody. Leary's position was ambiguous to begin with as a sort of egoist and someone who was set up, so he did have enough problems to begin with, but they just escalated it, in order, specifically, to poison people's minds against him and to make everyone think he was an irresponsible.. (that) his brains had been cooked by acid, and (that) the whole acid thing was hopeless and historically a great failure, and Leary, his brains were cooked and he was finking on his friends, and there was no community come out of it. And, actually, they succeeded (in) convincing Marc Raskin, who's a big left-wing intellectual and head of the Institute for Policy Studies, which was a Washington think-tank. When Leary got in trouble, I tried to arrange through Raskin to get all Leary's papers sequestered in a Congressional sub-committee, to save his papers from being seized by the DEA. So Raskin said he would try, and I said, "Well, what do you think all this means?", and he said, "Well, one thing it proves is that acid does not lead to community, and I'm interested in community, as a political person" - which was precisely the point that the FBI was trying to make and working toward, that is, to break up any community that might exist and to poison everybody's minds, taking advantage of natural problems (because there were natural ego problems), and escalating them to a point where they became unmanageable and hidden. In Leary's case, Leary was actually talking with the FBI about the Weathermen (said Leary) and, at the time, the one quote...the one thing I saw quoted was that, when people knew what he was talking about, they would appreciate it rather than hate him. So I asked him what was that point actually? - and that, years later, (19)74 to (19)77) - and he said, "Ah, that the entire FBI case on the Weathermen rested on whether or not they were getting money from Moscow, whether they were getting foreign money, and I knew the Weathermen a little (not really enough to get them in trouble, because I didn't know much more than what was in the papers and what I knew was years old, but I did have..) what real evidence I had was that they were not getting any money from abroad, so I talked as much about them as I could, saying that I wanted to talk about the Weathermen to the FBI, and thus claim some credit for helping undermine the entire FBI case, (he said), against the Weathermen, as you see they're now indicted precisely for that point. And now, their only defence, they couldn't have proved money, so they're trying to prove now, as their defense, (was) that the Weathermen were getting military training from Cubans, that there was some connection, somehow with.. See if the Weathermen were foreign agents of a foreign.. [Allen pauses here] - I wonder if there's an agent here, in this room if the Weathermen were agents of a foreign country, there naturally would be one if their budget's the same, actually!
Ed Sanders' Investigative Poetics, it's a very interesting conception. It is an interesting conception, but anyway... Leary was claiming credit for having undermined the one defence that the FBI's right wing Hoover neanderthal group had in defending itself. So anyways, it's all very complicated.
Well what has all this got to do with Investigative Poetics? I don't know. I thought this information would be useful and put lots of cultural history in context.
Student: How did you go about getting your file?
AG: I got a lawyer . Anyone can do it. Its harder and harder to get because so many people are asking, but you.. there are forms you've got to fill out and letters you've got to write. I got hold of a lawyer [Ira Lowe] who was working for Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda and who was a friend of mine, a friend of my dentist in Washington, and I'd known him for years, and he likes me as a poet, and so he suggested.. We were talking one day and I said "Can I get mine?, and he said "Sure", and I said "How much?", and he said "Well, I'll do it for free, just pay the court costs, or whatever duplicating fee - they charge you two cents a page or something - or filing fees if you've got to sue them. So, actually, I've been working on it for three years. I still haven't got all my papers, but I have a pile this high.
Student: Do you trust the information that they're sending out.
AG: No no, they don't give you everything. No question of trusting it. I don't trust.. There's no.. I trust that they haven't sent me everything that they've really got. I know, certain areas, where I know they've got information where..f or instance, I was busted by the Secret Service at the 1968 Convention and kidnapped for about an hour, and then kicked out of the Convention Hall - illegally, when I had the proper accreditation, and there's no record of that in the Secret Service file, although when they brought me to the Secret Service room, the guy dressed in black, looked at me and said "Hello, Allen"... So, I mean, they must have had..there must be something on paper, you know, (but) there's no paper. There's a lot of stuff. All that stuff about CIA dope, that was my most active research, and there's endless newspaper-clippings and television broadcasts (that) I made talking about it, until I cultivated that whole thing until it actually became a reality, as far as a public notion, and there's absolutely nothing on that, except a couple of letters that I sent to the CIA in my file. There's no.. I had interviewed Richard Helms and there's no report on that, and I had had stuff published in the papers which is not.. even newspaper-clips were missing (Jack Anderson columns describing my accusations against the CIA, even that was out). So I know that I've only got the tame stuff..Well, the tame stuff, but there's so much stuff, that, even among the tame stuff, you can see the extent of the surveillance.
Student: Didn't you think that some of the stuff they're sending you is lies, they may have made it up before they send it to you
AG: What?
Student: I have no idea. I just would assume..
AG: Well, nothing.. there's nothing that.. lies? in which direction?
Student: Well, confusion .. In the same way that. .false things that have been said in the past In other words, you would be given..
AG: Might be. That's possible - but there was nothing here particularly confusing. I mean, here was the FBI (who) had tried to confuse everybody about Cleaver andSNCC and tried to seperate Leroi Jones(Amiri Baraka)andthe Black Panthers, tried to manipulate Jones to be anti-White, tried t0.. It all fell according to Hoover's prescription to try to break down any charismatic Black leaders(hip).
Student: I just wondered...
AG: It's possible, but I don't think so, because, you see, it's a whole decade later now, they're different clerks, who are letting things through that you wouldn't... [Allen breaks off] How late is class supposed to go?
Student: Till one
AG: Okay, so we've got a little time.
Student; What do you personally think that say the CIA or the FBI with its agenda is up to now?
AG: Well, one thing, I've always had a theory (which I've never been able to prove). I used to think it was paranoid but now I get more and more to feel that it is possibly true, that part of the literary war of the mid (19)40's (19)50's and (19)60's (in which I was involved, somewhat, from the mid 50's on), part of the literary world of Beat Generation and different styles of poetry was somewhat weighted and influenced by activities both by CIA and FBI.. CIA in their manipulation of Encounter magazine in a world-wide network, in literary and intellectual, ideological cultural magazines - Encounter, Quest, Preuves, Der Monat, a world network of magazines subsidized by the CIA and edited by them to their own interest promoting somewhat liberal but conservative non-revlutionary, non-psychologically visionary, anti-Whitmanic, pro-conservative Eliotic manners - and they were very nasty about Kerouac (reviews in Encounter and those magazines were always very.. (Jack) Kerouacand (William) Burroughs. In fact, in 1958 in Paris I sent a copy of Burroughs'Naked Lunch to Stephen Spender, asking if he'd publish some of it in Encounter magazine, and Spender wrote back that he would not, that it was only of interest to psychologists or a psychiatrist! - And I got so mad, and I'd heard already rumors, so I wrote to Spender saying, "Is or is not Encounter magazine funded by the CIA?" And Spender wrote back saying, "No". And then it turns out it was. ![ENCOUNTER Magazine August 1962 IAN WALLER HEINRICH BOLL]()
Student: What kind of magazine was Encounter?
AG: It's still going [1976], it's still running
Student: A psychology magazine?
AG: No, no, it's a literary.. like Partisan Review - but an international.. Anglo-American.. You never saw it?
Student: No, I never saw it.
AG: Oh well, look it up. It was the most elegant and prestigious magazine, and it was the magazine of intellectuals that were being quoted, with Partisan Review (also, sometimes subsidized), quoted in Time magazine and Newsweek as being the prestigious source of.. if you want to know what's going on in the world of intellectual ferment, just check it out in Encounter. So that everybody.. all these high-school teachers and college teachers reading Time magazine and Encounter, they all got the idea that, well, literature was like this, and that the really important intelligent people that were at it, you know, who say this is this, and who were these other interlopers who are scroungy and creepy and have bad literary manners, you know, not part of the tradition, not part of the school, which is actually a CIA version of literature. Easily-done, because the head of CIA counter-intelligence was a guy named James Angleton, who was a great friend of Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot and William Carlos Williams, and he was chief of all CIA counter-intelligence, all over Europe. He was the one who arrest.. who had Pound in a tiger-cage and kept Pound from getting killed (he says) as a traitor here (in the US). He edited.. He and Reed Whittemore, edited Furioso magazine out of Carleton College in 1938, and he brought Pound over to the United States on a pre-war trip, which is famous, and so.. and then he worked with a guy named Cord Meyer Jr in the CIA, who was a friend of Wendell Willkie and in favor of "One World", and was a poet. Cord Meyer Jr was the bag-man who gave the money to Encounter through the foundations and figured out how to spread CIA money through foundations - it would go to, like, labor journalists, who would write anti-Communist columns denouncing the dock workers in Saigon going on strike against the American puppet. So it was a very complicated matter. They were the same group of people who paid off Corsican goons to take over those 1948 docks at Marseilles to prevent a strike against Marshall Plan arms being unloaded, thus giving the Marseilles docks into the hands of criminal elements who later trans-shipped all the heroin. Oh, it's too complicated! - So.."data clusters" - how do you deal with all those inter-related data-clusters?![]()
[Cord Meyer Jr. (1920-2001) - CIA Officer]
So, anyway, my theory was, (and always has been), was, that J.Edgar Hoover who hated the Beatniks publicly, did everything he could to make everything sound bad, and spread all the worst misinformation that he could, and that the CIA just had a natural dislike of a Whitmanic, non-Eliotic temperament and.. They also subsidized student movements, the International Student Association, and so blocked the development of a radical student movement until it got, sort of like, over-hysterical, and then SDS came in and so what would have been developing without CIA intervention in the student movement in the 50's onward would have been something more radical than what developed and less violent and hysterical, but because the CIA blocked the natural development of a hip radicalism, what came on at the end was this over.. over-compensating SDS shot, which finally lead to, you know, like total paranoia![]()
Well, bringing all this back. Well, what it proves is that poetry, poetry and imagery has got something to do with the larger world of policy and decision-making and history and politics. The Intelligence people sure do pay a lot of attention, spend a lot of money keeping track of all the poets and all the cultural figures that write books and novels and essays. We've come through a long period of very heavy police surveillance and maybe one thing poetry can now do is do surveillance of the police, if possible not getting caught up in their mentality of secretiveness and competitiveness. On another level, from a tantric point of view, we must give credit to the CIA and the FBI for two great services. One - they took our own neuroses and exaggerated them so greatly that they made our sicker plans unworkable, by escalating any paranoia, distrust machismo and stupidity passion, aggression and ignorance, by exaggerating those elements, at least they brought them to a boil (as far as pus, you know, brought them up), where they were visible and where we could learn from them. And also, they kept invaluable archives!, really fantastic archives! - things that I never would.. letters that I never would have had, phone-calls that I never would have been able to retrieve, correspondence with my Congressman, their archives are fantastic! - and, in the long run, one must thank them for doing kind of bibliographic literary work that nobody else had time to accomplish, because, though Ed (Sanders) and I and other people were trying to keep records, and keep all sorts of filing systems, they had it all down on computer and it's all there, waiting for scholars to work with, make use of.
Student: (But) of course, if they were not as opposed to us in the long run.
AG: If they were not..?
Student: I say that's opposed. They...
AG: You mean they got killed? or snuffed out? - No, I think it('ll) just settle down. One way or other, it all turned to mush anyway and everybody'll get their files.. I don't know. I think the political situation now, according to the White House (which Peter (Orlovsky) and I visited about a month ago, to see some of the lower echelon people).. but the Drug Czar (sic), their idea is that the FBI and the DEA doesn't tell the White House its secrets. The FBI still doesn't tell White House secrets, CIA doesn't. And (at) the White House, maybe, the Drug Advisor, a man, Peter Bourne, has maybe twenty, or fifty, telephones. And the DEA still has a budget of a billion dollars, more or less (the drug bureaucracy has a budget of a billion dollars, and fifty thousand telephones!) so what can the people in the White House do against these built-in bureaucracies? And that's the general problem in Washington (not only in the Drug Department but also, say, (in) the Highway.. the Interior Department with the Indians, or the Pentagon, or whoever deals with Oil or Energy and Aerospace, these giant bureaucracies, which are really uncontrollable, or would take generations to control, unless a whole new evolved personnel, new generations of hippies coming into government, taking the lowliest secretarial jobs till you can cover the whole filing system, then it would take decades for anybody to read through it. In fact, nobody will ever know what happened because there's so many files and it's so extensive that to put everybody's energy into figuring out what happened in the past, you wouldn't be able to do anything now! You'd be totally occupied in paranoic scholarship about the past.
So, one literary project we have. (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti would like to publish a sort of cahier, a book, of records of celebrated interventions and fuck-ups by the government (like maybe the thing of the bust of (Eldridge) Cleaver, some of these papers about (Amiri Baraka) Leroi Jones and Cleaver and .. Ed (Sanders) has a collection of them, and I have a collection of them at home, so Ed and I have been talking together about trying to put together some sort of book, and that might be a project that this class could get involved with. I think that in his catalog, he says... but he was interested in local projects, local investigative stuff, see how it works out, but one thing possible is everybody spread out and gather all the different cases and documentation and make one, sort of like..one interesting book of sample things (because you could never be able to get enough to cover the whole pattern).You know, you'd get, just like a couple of cases about the Panthers, couple of cases about the Peace Movement, couple of cases about (the) Poets, a couple of cases of.. (the) bombing (of) Grove Press - (The Women's Movement, infiltrated by the FBI, leading a Women's Lib strike against Grove Press because Grove Press was publishing anti-CIA stuff - that also happened).. Grove has a.., The Women's Lib movement was infiltrated. In fact, (Timothy) Leary said.. There was a point when the Berkeley Barb was attacking Leary for being anti-feminist and machismo for taking all the credit and leaving Rosemary, his girlfriend, aside, or something like that - they were attacking him for his treatment of Rosemary, his girlfriend, and he says that it was the FBI intervening in the Women's Movement to drive him out of Switzerland. The effect of that Barb article was to reveal where he was, in Switzerland, trying to be quiet with Rosemary. So he said that the infiltration was that delicate and that witty. So anyway it might be interesting to.. this class might work on something like that.But the main problem is - one - how do you deal with it without going crazy, and there's an excellent atmosphere here [Naropa], because we have a Buddhist atmosphere - you (we) have to clean out your mind - where you can learn to meditate.. So the question is..
Student: What's the question?
AG: Is there anybody who does not sit, at all, or never has had any experience with sitting? [Allen observes a show of hands] Well, those who have not, please check (it) out and learn how you sit, Buddhist-style, and sit for an hour, and then go on if you like it, or don't go on, but, have the inside experience of examination of your mind, examination of the cycles of paranoia, so to speak, cycles of passion, aggression and ignorance, so that if you do work with this kind of dynamite material, it doesn't take over your brain and turn you into a frothing hippie!.. an angry.. to deal with the anger that rises in dealing with this material, (tremendous) resentment and anger, that's the difficulty . The other is what is the poetics of it, how do you take all this information, which is important for people to understand, even for Buddhists to understand, even Buddhist gurus to understand, how do you present it to them? because I, for instance, have lots of trouble.. this.. well, I've been rapping for an hour-and-a-half. You can't do that to (Chogyam) Trungpa (Rinpoche), or a Zen master, or Roshi Baker, or Jimmy Carter? - how would you get all this information together in such form that it could be presented to people without making them feel up-tight, educating people, delighting people, illuminating people (because these stories about what happened with (Eldridge) Cleaver, (Timothy)Leary, (LeRoi) Jones (Amiri Baraka) and the Whites, those are really illuminating and relieve a lot of pressure on the brain, I mean, you realize that the whole anti-White trip of the Blacks was not necessarily inevitable history or historical necessity but was just human fuck-up, as much as anything else, and that one's communal impulses all along, that one suppressed, were right. So there's some humane value in getting all this information out and in digestible form but how to do so?Well, Ed (Sanders) has samples, I have samples. I didn't cover any of it. There's some clear material in William Carlos Williams' Paterson, some in (Ezra) Pound's Cantos,and some in (Charles) Olson's Maximus, and a great deal in (Charles) Reznikoff's Testimony and Holocaust. So there are four great poets, at least - Reznikoff, Pound, Williams and Olson - who've worked in the twentieth-century on this kind of material in one way or another - and Ed (Sanders)'s worked on it, and I've worked on it, and he's got innumerable other examples, and so it's a really interesting subject to focus on, so the whole.. It' s the first time Ed (Sanders) has actually, I think, tried to teach it, a whole sequential season (he's got this one pamphlet which is based on lectures here [at Naropa] two years ago). So I'm really interested in seeing what will come out of it, both in terms of production of poetry and also the techniques (because he knows a lot about how to do research, which will be valuable for everybody to pick up, you know, where to go to get material like this, and how to get it, and how to work with police, how to be the police, finally
Student: Is there anything available about the personality of the people that engineered all the FBI things..?
AG: I don't know
Student: It'd probably be helpful in understanding..
AG: Don't know. Edgar Hoover himself, there's quite a bit of material on him. But, actually, I don't know.Ed (Sanders) would probably know a little bit more, because he knows.. he's been working with police a lot.. knows police jargon, he gets along with them..
Student: Also magazines like the Berkeley Barb and Akwesasne Notes, magazines, newspapers like that have that information, they give names, the apartment they're in in Washington, and all that stuff. So..those are good sources to check out
AG: Yeah. My own conclusion is that when you finally get closer and closer to the source of the information and it becomes realer and realer you get less and less angry and finally see it as some sort of Dostoevsky novel, and, finally, when you finally confront and meet the head of the CIA, (or the head of.. like I've met (James) Angleton (had brunch with Angleton for three hours about a month-and-a-half ago), finally meeting these imaginary nemesis figures, then some kind of Buddhist attitude is really useful - observation (like you observe your mind, like you're observing them, rather than fighting, in the sense of getting more and more information. I think the key principle is a phrase of (William) Blake's - "If you want to know Satan's nature.. examine.. ask him to explain his system" [Allen is, perhaps, conflating some ideas here - "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's" (fromJerusalem)] , examine his system to the bottom until you finally find that spot where he's blanked out of nature, he's got some weird idea - "If you want to know the nature of Satan, find his system" - So, in a sense, it's like trying to find the system behind all this. What is their idea in doing all this? What's going on? What are they doing? - You know, if you're collecting dirty pictures of poets, and all those things?, What? - Instead of getting mad, it really would be more interesting to just explore it, get way into it, find out who they think they are, see it's a question of, the old Buddhist question of, "what is their identity?" and what fixation, or solidification, or fixed notion of identity are they clinging to that they're organizing this seven billion system of surveillance of everybody else's identity. Because it's identity, (a) Buddhist identity problem is what's going on, really, and intelligence - you know "Intelligence" and "Counter-Intelligence", composition of poetics - it's a funny area. Intelligence itself, it's a funny area. The name itself, Intelligence - Central Intelligence - Federal Bureau of ..what is it, Intelligence?
Student: Investigation
AG: "Investigation", yes, well "Intelligence", "Counter-Intelligence" - COINTELPRO - Just the very terminology is poetry. Okay, I guess that's enough for (today). I thinkMichael Brownstein will do the next class unless Ed (Sanders) is here.
[tape and class concludes]
Audio for the above is availablehere, beginning at approximately ten minutes in.
↧
November 15, 2013, 3:30 am
![Beat Generation / Allen Ginsberg]()
Jean Jacques Lebel's Beat exhibit (extended in Metz) now comes to Budapest, Hungary, to the Ludwig Contemporary Art Museum (it opened just last week, and will run there until January 12). Here's a variety of Hungarian artists, in individual videos, extolling the Beat ethos (it's all in Hungarian, but for those of you who speak Hungarian...) - musician and tv personality, Varga Livius, poet-rapper, Peter Zavada, poets Tibor Babiczky and Karafiath Orsolya, and DJ Erelyi "Superman" Zsolt (Lebel's own introduction to his "jungle", as he calls it (see above), a helpful survey of the show, (advance warning about the sound quality) is presented in English).![Daniel Radcliffe ϟ]()
[Daniel Radcliffe]Radcliffe - On his first experience with"Howl" - "As soon as I got beyond three pages, I found myself in the "What the fuck?" territory" - On his favorite English poets - (John) Keats ("His language is so gorgeous") (and ("Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard") Thomas Gray..
- On his own poetry-writing - "By his own reckoning", Green writing again, "Radcliffe wrote close to a hundred poems between the age of sixteen and twenty-one, experimenting with a variety of forms - heroic couplet,terza rima, and an obscure form called pantoum - "The second and fourth lines of the first verse become the first and third lines of the second verse, and the second and fourth lines of the second verse become the first and third lines of the third verse..It's kind of complicated!"... Radcliffe said that his work included many love poems and poems about the vagaries of celebrity, along with a sonnet.."
The article (New Yorker fact-checkers, aren't you legendary for your exactitude?) suggests 206 East Seventh street was an address where Allen "shared an apartment with (William) Burroughsand Gregory Corso" (uh? - maybe a very young Gregory passed through, but don't you, perhaps, meanJack Kerouac?)
![]()
[Anselm Hollo (1934-2013]Anne Waldman, Reed Bye, Ed Sanders, Simon Pettet, and his widow, Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, remember (the much-missed) Anselm Hollo in The Poetry Project Newsletter. See here and here for our posts on Anselm Hollo Here's an interview with Baltimore-based writer, Katherine C Mead-Brewer, author of "The Trickster in Ginsberg", by J.Haeske, in Retracing Jack Kerouac
Brian Hassett continues his Naropa 1982 memories (Allen, Edie Parker, Henri Cru) on Brianland![]()
[Henry Cru 1921-1992]Here's David Willis' review of American Hipster, the Herbert Huncke biography, in BeatdomDangerous Minds features the 1994 Jeremy Isaacs BBC interview with Allen that we presented and transcribed for you here. (How come no shout-outs or credits, Dangerous Minds?) This coming Wednesday, Wednesday November 20th, in San Francisco, at City Lights, it's the book launch for Michael McClure's new edition of his classic collection, Ghost Tantras
↧
