Allen Ginsberg and Sonia Sanchez 1990 at the Miami Book Fair

December 7, 2013, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 5 (Shelley's Cadence)

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 155

$

0

0

This one comes with a qualifier - "What you are about to view is live footage from the 1990 Miami Bookfair International. The quality may not be pristine but it's a glimpse of the past. It was compiled for the Fair's 30th anniversary in 2013". The Miami Book Fair International was produced and presented by The Center for Literature and Theatre at Miami's Dade College.
This particular reading took place in conjunction with the Beyond Columbus Foundation  spotlighting  the 1990 winners of their American Book Awards -
Allen  & Sonia Sanchez, recipients of their 1990 American Book Awards for Lifetime Achievement 

[Sonia Sanchez at the Miami Book Fair, 1990]

Sonia Sanchez reads first - beginning with an elegy on the death of a student  -  "that we walk upright"-"A Poem of Praise" (for Gerald Penney, who died September, 1973 Amherst College and for the Brothers of Amherst College)"  ("Man/ is an alien in this world/ in spite of all the pleasures.." ), followed by a prose-poem, "Just Don't Never Give Up On Love", (a surprised and surprising confrontation with an old black woman, while feverishly writing, (attempting to write to a deadline), in the park - "Feeling tired that day, I came to the park with the children. I saw her as I rounded the corner.."..."Guess you think I ain't never loved, huh girl?..Guess you think I've been old like this fo'ever, huh?"...) . Next, an elegy for her brother, an early AIDS victim - "A Poem For My Brother" (Reflections on his Death, June 8, 1981), and following this, a poem to her grandmother ("What is significant about her is that she let me be"), "Dear Mama" ("Dear Mama, it is Christmas Eve and the year is passing away with calloused feet...") - Sanchez then concludes with two poems, the first,  "style no. 1" ("I come from a long line of rough Mamas..") about sexual harassment, (evoking the spirit of "Mama Dixon" - "Don't you want some of this?" - "and I saw Mama Dixon dancing on his head" - "Muthafucka, you even offend the night.."), and, finally, a long and harrowing poem-performance on torture and repression (beginning with a long litany of heroes), Shakedown Memory. 

[Allen Ginsberg at the Miami Book Fair, 1990]


Allen Ginsberg then comes in, approximately thirty-nine-and-a-half minutes in 

AG: "..(and) I have an old friend with me, Glenn Gant [?], who lives here  [Gant accompanies Allen, discreetely, throughout the set, alongside Allen on harmonium, playing the trumpet] ... (I) ran into him this afternoon and we played music together. So we'll begin with something of note for the locals, particularly those involved with the CIA and the National Security Agency and dope dealing, Miami being one of the great centers of such activity on the part of the government, as part of its great phony "War on Drugs". It seems to have done nothing more than provide off-the-shelf money for Contras, and other unknown activities, and driven marijuana, and the soft, relatively harmless, drugs off the street, and substituted very cheap cocaine". 
Allen then performs a version of his CIA Dope Calypso ("Now Richard Secord and Oliver North/hated Sandinistas whatever they were worth...")


[Richard Secord]


[Oliver North]

Well, the next war! -  [Allen now takes out hisaboriginal songsticks] -  After the unsuccessful war on dope, I suppose we'll now escalate the horror and get caught in the quicksand of the Middle East. So - Hum Bom! -  [Allen performs a rousing version of  his poem, Hum Bom! ("Whom bomb?/We bomb them!.. Whom bomb?/We bomb you!)]  

Then, "Spot Anger" - ("Allen, when you get angry, you got two choices -/ Konk your head on the  floor with words/ Bang the kitchen table, slam taxicab doors/, insult Hotel Omni toilets...."..."konk Mr Temper Tantrum on his green bull noodle & fly off/over Manhattan weaving silver laughter/ round skyscraper spires")

then,  Sphincter - ("I hope my good old asshole holds out..!)

All of these poems are from the book,Cosmopolitan Greetings.Allen next reads the title poem to that volume," a sort of salutation to the poets of the Socialist countries of 1986  ("Stand up against governments, against God/Stay irresponsible/Say only what we know & imagine/Absolutes are coercion".. ."Inside skull vast as outside skull/Mind is outer Space, (Mr Cape Canaveral!)".."Subject is known by what she sees/Others can measure their vision by what we see/Candor ends paranoia")

Allen next reads a long ecological work - AG: "I went out on a canoe yesterday with an old friend Steven Bornstein, an artist, who lives here, and we wrote a poem together, or, I was the secretary of our conversation which turned into a poem appropriate to the occasion of Before Columbus Foundation Awards since it concerns our.. the local 
pre-Columbian ecology here. We went out on the Oleta River and so this is a "Poem in the Form of a Snake That Bites its (own) Tail"("Oleta - (Snake, formerly - River)/ Heron, Manatee, Osprey/Canopy of white red &/black Mangroves..."...."Instructors: any/indigenous populations/ Indians, Africans/Laplanders -/Chernobyl began/the question -/ How much can the/Government lie?/ (Miami Herald pervasive/ and controlling locally)/ Locally the Seminoles Gurus")    

Allen reads next  "Grandma Earth's Song", "A Dream" [including song section sung accapella] ("I started down Capitol Hill side along unfamiliar black central avenues/, uncertain, warily, which way thru the Fillmore district to the City Hall center/as I passed a block or two I saw a fragile old crone marching toward me up the hill..".. "Anything that comes to mind is the right politics to ruin the police state")

He finishes with "one short poem and a song, two songs". The "short poem" is "Proclamation"("I am King of the Universe/I am the Messiah with the new (ecological) dispensation/Excuse me I stepped on a nail./ A mistake/ Perhaps I'm not the Capitalist of Heaven"... "..Don't associate me/ w/ that Crowd/ In any case you can believe every word/ I say"). The two poems, "Father Death Blues" and "Put Down Yr Cigarette Rag". 

[Jesse Helms (1922-2008]

Allen's introduction to "Put Down Yr Cigarette Rag" - AG: ..as you know, most of you, already know, the Senator from North Carolina, recently re-elected [Senator Jesse Helms] is also.. (as he's obsessed with fairies, and gays, and homosexuals, and dykes, in fact, so obsessed that he's fixated on it - in fact, it's kind of suspicious, because he's talking about them all the time, talking about us all the time, and has some funny kind of relationship with us, like S&M, like he wants to punish us is what it is, he's got this sadist trip going - humiliation is his kick, actually, humiliating the homosexuals seems to be his specialist pathology). So he's involved in it, with us too, so we can't totally reject him. On the other hand, since he set himself up as the moral arbiter of America, we should bear in mind that he's the chief lobbyist and purveyor for addictive drugs. As you know, he represents the tobacco interests in North Carolina, and so hardly in a position to be setting himself up as the man with the moral, ethical background to be passing judgment on his fellow fairies.
 So, dedicated to him then, we'll. .(since he's brought so much attention to the threat of this drug, nicotine, alcohol, and (so), finally, I suspect, he's going to become a disgrace to the cigarette industry, because he's bringing so much attention to them that, though we used to subsidize militarily the Iraqis, the tobacco industries, now, they're going to find this odd person in their midst, who's drawing too much attention to the illicit drug that kills  three-hundred-and-eighty-five-thousand people a year (as distinct from alcohol which only kills a hundred thousand, as distinct from coke which only kills ten-, twenty- thousand a year..  So, a non-smoking non-commercial -"Put Down Yr Cigarette Rag"!

Alternative versions of "Put Down Yr Cigarette Rag" (Don't Smoke) are available here.

---

Expansive Poetics - 5 (Shelley's Cadence)

December 9, 2013, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 6 (Ode To The West Wind)

≪ Previous: Allen Ginsberg and Sonia Sanchez 1990 at the Miami Book Fair

$

0

0

Student: [on Shelley's "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty"] - The thing I had trouble with, (with) stuff like that, is wondering if I should (be), like, listening to every word, understanding what's being said.

AG: In this case.. Well, the first thing is, no, you don't need to understand it. The most important thing to get is the most important element, which is the rhythmical cadence - the cadence - to get the amazing cadence of dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-datta-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-duh-dah.

Student: Right

AG: "I vowed that I would dedicate my powers/To thee and thine." - Listen to it just as cadence.

Student: Right

AG: Dah-dah-duh-dah-dah-datta-dah-duh-dah-duh-dah-duh-dah-dah-dah. Duh-dah-dah-dah-duh-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-duh-dah-duh-dah-dah-dah-duh-duh-dah-dah" - "Each from his voiceless grave" - "Dah-dah-dah-duh-dah-dah-datta-dah-dah-duh-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. Dah-dah-dah-datta-dah-duh-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-duh-dah-dah-dah-duh-dah" -"They know that never joy illumed my brow/Unlinked with hope that wouldst free/This world from its dark slavery" (except I took a breath there) 

I think the first element is the rhythm, or the cadence, let us say, or the breath-cadence. 
In Moscow, (in) 1965, visiting Andrei Voznesensky, Russian poet, in his elevator going up to his apartment, he said, "What language do you think in?", and I said, "Mostly English, sometimes Spanish". He said, "Ah, I think in rhythm". I think many poets actually do think in..(rhythms)..they get that dah-dah-dah-duh-duh-dah-dah dah-dah.

Student: Not words?

AG: And then the word..well, the rhythm-cadence comes from a certain emotion. Dah-dh-duh-dah-dah day-da-duh-dah-dah. So there's a specific emotion involved with that breathing. In other words, just as when you're excited you might breathe one way and when you're lying in bed being stroked and, delicately, fingers are running down your titty, down to your pubis, you might have a different breath and a different emotion.

So, probably, these cadences do relate to actual realistic... no, realistic life situations that you're in - death of your mother, (the) approach of love, or post-coitus triste - so that the rhythms actually have a definite realistic intellectual content. You might not know at the moment. There might be some spin-off from yesterday's orgasm, but they do refer to some emotional state of mind and that emotional state of mind refers to a situation you're in in a classroom, or in your bedroom, or on your street on the Mall.. So it would just be a question of producing the words that fit that rhythm

Student: Right.

(Another) Student:  Couldn't it be seen in a more pure form in, say, jazz?, some certain forms of jazz?

AG: Very similar..

Student:  Even the actual.. I mean.. 

AG: Yes. but what..right, but you've also got to remember that jazz itself has its origins in human speech and chant and is only an imitation of the human voice.

Student: Right.

AG: In Indian music , and also in American bop, in the most sophisticated and complex of jazz - bebop - it's found .. bebop in Harlem, in the late (19)30's and early (19)40's, is founded on the musicians - (Charlie) Parker and (Dizzy) Gillespie and others - phrasing through their instruments the rhythms that they heard on the street-corner around them (as in "Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts"). Historically, that was the progression - that they were actually imitating speech.

Student: So there is a direct...

AG: There's a direct thing.. So we can go..

Student: According to..?


[Seymour Wise]


[Jerry Newman]


AG: This is according to (Jack) Kerouac's jazz, or bop, Virgil, or teacher, Seymour Wyse, who with a fabulous character named Jerry Newman, who had a recording company called Esoteric, went up to Harlem in (19)38, (19)39, (19)40, and (19)41, to Minton's, and a few other places, and actually recorded Charlie Christian and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in their earliest.. or, not their earliest, but in their ripest, original, New York, phase of be-bop. And Kerouac and Seymour Wyse were classmates at Horace Mann school in Manhattan near..around Harlem (and) would go up with Jerry Newman, and Wyse told me that that's what the historical thing was - that they were getting their phrasing from speech -"I'm gonna..." Like the rapping on the street-corner.

Student: Rap

AG: When you have disco [sic] rapping now [1981] or, not dissimilar. Just like, "Your mother's cunt stinks, and your father's prick is up, and I'm gonna cut 'em both off, and you're not gonna do nuttin' about (it), so..", ["Signifying Monkey'] or something. Duh-dah-dah-duh-duh-duh-dah dough-dah. So the music comes from speech anyway.

And in India, the classical idea, of course - the first thing you learn - is (that) the human vocalization is the measure of every other instrument. And every other instrument is just an exfoliation, or extension, or practical application, of the voice. 

Student: Right, I was... I was thinking of not actually like.. that person over there was saying..  [tape ends here - but then continues] ... being attached.

AG: Well, I was saying that the first thing to hear is the cadence or the rhythm. But then I was pointing out that the rhythm or cadence has to do with the emotion - with the breathing. The breathing has to do with the emotion. The emotion has to do with the situation. The situation has to do with the intelligible meaning - "My Momma died"- "Duh-dah-dah-dah". "Duh-dah-dah-dah, Duh-dah-dah-dah" - "My Momma died", "My Papa died" - where am I gonna go now? - "Duh-dah-dah-dah" (and that has meaning, I mean, literal meaning).    

Student: InEST [sic], they'll teach you - I've heard, I haven't taken the course - to say things like "My Momma died", but try and make it sound happy

AG: Um-hmm. Well, here I'm just trying to get to the center of the emotion.

Student: Do you feel that that sense of expansiveness (expansive poetics) can occur also in a formula-type poem, as for example, a sonnet, or do you feel...

AG: The "Ode to Intellectual Beauty" ("Hymn to Intellectual Beauty") has the most complicated stanza pattern of anything,

Student: But it doesn't have the sense of a fixed pattern, like say...

AG: Oh, it has a fixed pattern 

Student: Oh?

AG: It has a fixed rhyme, a totally fixed pattern. Yes, completely. Yes. The point of (a) fixed pattern is because you get a certain frame of reference, or a certain rhetorical, or rhythmic, or rhyme, structure. You just build up on it higher and higher, and higher, higher (like, in the end of Dante('s) Divinia Commedia), the cadences that he's used in the last cantos of  (the) Paradiso, the cadences that he used in the rest of the terza rima, gets to be this repetitive ultimate orgasmic - "in te misericordia, in te pietate,/in te magnificenza, in te s'aduna/quantunque in creature e di bontate".. I don't know  ("In thee is munificence, in thee compassion, in thee is whatever abounds through the universe" [or, in (a) more recent, Allen Mandelbaum, translation - "In you compassion is, in you is pity/ in you is generosity, in you/is very goodness found in any creature"]). It's like the repetitive thing that he used in the terza rima works for him to get up into an ecstatic breath and an ecstatic statement. It can be done, yes, through formal form, regular old forms.




However, the problem with old forms (like Shelley's) is that the..  that those forms were evolved by people with different emotions from us Americans (or they got to be used for different emotions) so that the cadences of Shelley became then.. evolved into.. the cadences of (Alfred Lord) Tennyson, and got more and more watered down as they were repeated (people repeating each others' emotions, so to speak). In other words, people were not having emotions of their own, but were getting turned on by Shelley's emotions and were repeating the cadences of Shelley's emotions. 
So that, finally, by the time you get to some 1910 American poets, like William Vaughn Moody, somewhat, or Edward Arlington Robinson, or the standard great poets of the anthologies of the (19)10's, (19)20's, (19)30's, you find that the poems... William Rose Benet, or Stephen Vincent Benet, the Book-of-the-Month-Club poets, so to speak - (famous, not bad, they're in the anthologies), (but), they're just repetitious of those cadences, because they didn't (don't) have any real emotions of their own. 

So that the real emotions of our own in America had to find some slightly different cadences, equivalent to our own breathing and our own speech-patterns, (which were slightly different from the British)  - and what comes to mind is - the very opening passages of (Charles) Olson's "Maximus Poems" -  "How to", "where to", "where can you find it,?""what do you?" "look..?", "wherever you look", "all you hear" - that kind of staccato - "How to", "where to", "all you..""Dah-uh-ah"[ the lines, perhaps, that Allen is recalling are "By ear, he sd/But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last/ that! O my people , where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen/when all is become billlboards, when all, even silence, is spray-gunned?". That was an American thing and you don't find that in Shelley, you don't find that in English. The nearest you find that is in Gerard Manley Hopkins - "Be beginning to despair, be beginning to despair, so how to stay back, beauty, beauty, beauty, from fading, fading away, what?, is there any catch or broach or braid or clip to keep, keep, keep back beauty from fading, fading away, no, no, there's none, none but dying, drooping death, and death's worst, tombs and worms and winding sheets and ruck and wrinkle and tumbling to decay" [Allen is misremembering Hopkins'"The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo"here - "How to keep, is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or/broach or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep/Back beauty, keep it beauty, beauty, beauty...from vanishing away..."] - That's closer to Olson than almost anything else, but that's almost late 19th Century sprung rhythm, where he broke it apart. We have the Olson section as part of our anthology, and maybe I should throw in that cadence, from "The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo" from Hopkins, as a precursor, come to think of it [editor's note - he never did] 

[Charles Olson]


[Gerard Manley Hopkins]


The formal patterns, the formal stanzaic patterns, worked up to Hart Crane's "Atlantis", but it was somewhat of a suicidal pattern. I attribute Hart Crane's suicide to his persistence in sticking within that closed pattern and not being able to break out of it and becoming more and more impacted and trying to intensify it more and more within the closed system of iambic pentameter (blank verse) until it became so powerful and so opaque that he couldn't figure it out anymore, and he couldn't figure it out because it was totally abstract by then, it was just an abstract emotion that repeated from any other emotions, but he wasn't able to introduce new facts from his own life, and so it was sort of a suicide-bomb poem.  We'll get to that later..

[Hart Crane]

Student: Did Shelley get kicked out of school for that poem?

AG: For "...Intellectual Beauty"?  No.. I don't know. 

Student: I think so.

AG: I think it was..  for this poem?

Student: Yeah. They got very upset at school because of  (that phrase of being in) ecstasy.

AG: "I shrieked.."

Student: "I shrieked in ecstasy"

AG: "I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy!" - I thought he was kicked out for something on atheism?

Student: A pamphlet he wrote

AG  on  "The Necessity of Atheism"

Student: Right

AG: But I'm not sure if that was the occasion of getting kicked out, or.. [editorial note - it was - at any rate, his refusal to answer questions about it before a University board was] ..  I mean, I don't remember. Do you know about... where was that? Oxford? 

Student: Uh-hm

AG: There's a little side-passage room in Oxford where they have this white marble near-naked statue of Shelley, which was erected in 1910 or (19)20 as a formal apology by Oxford for kicking him out. It took them a hundred years, and they decided they should formalize their awareness of the mistake for the benefit of future undergraduates.

[Audio for the above may be found here, beginning at approximately forty-two minutes in and concluding approximately fifty-three-and-three-quarter minutes in - It may also be accessed via the Internet Archive here, and here via Open Culture]   

Expansive Poetics - 6 (Ode To The West Wind)

December 10, 2013, 3:00 am

≫ Next: "I Shall Be Released" (1980's Woodstock Jam)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 5 (Shelley's Cadence)

$

0

0

[Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), fair copy of the first forty-two lines of his "Ode to the West Wind" (1819), in the collection of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, England]






Allen Ginsberg's"Expansive Poetics"lecture continues - "Ode to the West Wind"

AG: The other thing is (Shelley's) the "Ode to the West Wind". How many know that? How many have read that? How many have not read the "Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Bysshe Shelley? Never? Well, that's an example, I must say of TV generation.

Student: TV generation?

AG: Television generation. [Allen addresses individual student] Have you read that? - Shelley? - "Ode to the West Wind"? Who has read it now? Put up your hand(s) again - [again, to individual student] - Where did you read it?

Student: In class

AG: Here? - And yourself? [pointing to another student]

Student (2): Class

AG: And who else? Who else raised his hand?

Student (3): I did

AG: Anybody else here raise their hand? Who else? You? [pointing to another student] Where did you read it?

Student (4): Um...

AG: Do you remember?

Student (4): It's sort of.. I think it's sort of part of that European intellectual poems that you read....

AG: Yes. Where are you from?

Student (4): I'm Italian

AG: Uh-huh. What city?

Student (4): Verona

AG: Is that where you went to school?

Student (4):  Uh, no, I went to school, well, partly in Verona, and then in Milan, and...

AG: Okay

Student (4): ...London

AG: So, a European education would include the "Ode to the West Wind" ?

Student (4); Yeah

AG: I mean, anybody who was well-educated would know that as a matter of course - [Allen addresses a new student] - You read it where?

Student (5): I read it when I was a student

AG: Here (in the US)?

Student (5): Yeah

AG: What school?

Student: San Francisco State (University)

AG: [turns to his student,Sam Kashner] - Yeah, I guess, Sam, you know it. From where?

Sam Kashner: Well, originally, I was here.

AG: First time?

Sam Kashner: (Robert) Duncan read it, as a.. one of the poems in his...

AG: But you had read it before hadn't you? Where? (I'm trying to figure out where did you pick up on it ordinarily, in the earliest...)

Sam Kashner: Hamilton College.

AG: So it was in college only?

Sam Kashner: Oh yeah.

AG: See, I got it.. my fatherwas a high school teacher and they had it in high school in Paterson, New Jersey in the (19)30's - you'd get that as part of just.. Edgar Allan Poeand a few other things, (Walt) Whitman, you'd get in high school. Anybody else here?

Student (6): I got it in high school

AG: Yeah. Where?

Student (7): (Ordinary) high school

AG: Uh-huh

Student (8); Texas A & M, 1974

AG: So that'd be college then.  And where? [to another student]

Student (9): High school

AG: Oh. Around here?

Student (9); Yeah

AG: That's pretty good. Anybody else? Did you ever..?

Student (10): I got it at the University of Colorado.

AG: So now, maybe, between high school and college (you heard this poem), but (for the) most, no, the majority haven't heard it. That's just astounding. 
Well, the reason it's astounding is Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is considered the traditional great Romantic poem. That is, if you think of a poet writing a poem, that's Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind", the inspired poem. "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is a little bit specialized caviar, and poets or scholars might know (it), but "Ode to the West Wind" is supposed to be the traditional poem, if you think about poetry. And here's a whole class of people that are into a specialized poetry (and are all writing poetry, I presume, or (are) close students), and I guess the majority have not heard or read this particular poem (which, actually, for me, is a pleasure, because it leaves it wide open for me to have a ball, because it's such an obviously great thing to teach -  but, on the other hand, it means that, if you write poetry, you don't have these cadences in your veins or in your bones already, and it's useful). The reason I'm reading them aloud is that once you hear certain cadences, they enter your nervous system and permanently alter it. That is to say, they break through new ground, or they open up new neural patterns and new rhythmic connections, so that you're familiar with that particular ecstatic emotion, or inspired emotion. And it could then, maybe, enlarge the capacity of your own breathing and rhythmic expansiveness when you're writing yourself, so that you can start and continue a cadence that goes on as long as this (does), once you see that it can be done.  

So, "Ode to the West Wind". And the end is interesting, because finally the subject of the poem is the immortality of the cadence, that is that the rhythm itself will go on and on throughout history - that once he's created this rhythm it's going to be heard forever, people are going to recognize it. Once they hear it, it's going to go on because it's such a great powerful rhythm it's going to turn people on so much. And that, in this way, his very breath, the cadences of his breath, or the sequences of his breathing, is going to become historically immortal. So Shelley's own body, (or) a piece of Shelley's body, is going out into the world to persist in other people's bodies. So he created a machine which, when introduced into our bodies, will recreate itself over and over again. And that means that particular emotion he's feeling, the breath or the emotion, the cadence of the breath of the emotion will then be felt by other people. So he's really projected a piece of his body out permanently. Louis Zukofsky has a phrase, "Only objectified emotion endures". That is to say, you have an emotion,  then you make an object out of it like this cadent breath, and then it will endure. If you don't solidify it or objectify it into an artifact that can be used by other people, the the emotion won't persist and endure. But if you are able to transform your emotion into a set of breathings and a set of sounds and vowels and consonants and maybe some ideas, you create an object that will endure.

Student: Having like.. making it concrete.

AG: Concretizing it in a physical poem, concretizing it physically in the cadences and sounds of a poem.
It's an interesting phrase - "Only emotion objectified...""Only objectified emotion endures". And (Ezra) Pound, in the Cantos, repeats it in another form, "Only emotion endures". But he may have gotten the phrase from Zukofsky (or Zukofsky got it from him, saying "Only objectified emotion endures"). In other words, your emotion can endure, you can make it permanent, but if you want it, if you want to be stuck with it throughout eternity - "I want love" - throughout eternity, longing, painful longing, for the rest of history - you could do it, but you have to make an artifact, you've got to concretize it.

Student: How about the fact that (the) air molecules actually (that) we expire are randomly moved about by Brownian motion and that they will...

AG: That'll penetrate throughout the furthest reaches of the universe.

Student: Right

AG: Of course

Student: ..and that every person will, everlasting(ly),  be breathing, at this moment, one molecule..

AG: A certain vibration.

Student:  (Really?)

AG: Yes

Student: ( Actually?)

AG: Absolutely.

Student: Right.

AG: Yes, I mean, that's the whole principle ofmantra and chanting, anyway

Student: Yeah

AG: Or of theI Ching - that any moment in the universe - that is, any moment in the great hanging myriad balance of the universe, any dropping of a leaf, or a sparrow-cry, vibrates and influences every other molecule in the great hanging mobile of the universe.

Student: Right

AG: However, on a simpler level, and without getting into invisible Brownian movements, you can get into apprehensible breaths and auditory kicks.

So what time are we supposed to quit? Twelve?

Student: (Twelve)-fifty.

AG: Okay, so I'll try the "Ode to the West Wind". I'll maybe xerox this, because I think it may be interesting.. I tried it once before in class. Later on, to make this point, I'll xerox this so we all have a copy. And we might do it as a choral chant

Student: Wow!

AG: I've done it before and it's great. The reason it's not done more often is that nobody can keep time!  - people are saying different words at different times! - But if you follow the punctuation, follow the breaths, then it's possible for everybody to stay on the same breath, and it makes it easy to do it choral

[Allen begins a solo reading, an enthusiastic reading, of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" ] - "O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn's being.."..."..O Wind/If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"]

Student: Wow!

AG: Well that's really "wow!". It really totally makes it.

Student: Wow!

Student (2): Yeah, that's wonderful

AG: Because what he does is that the breath that he's talking about finally is the subject of the poem and the mighty breath that he's talking about is exemplified and manifested in the poem, outlined in the poem. The breathing is outlined by the punctuation so that you know where to take a brief breath, and, at certain points, he gives you the chance to take a brief strong breath for one word and then a real deep breath to knock out the next one  (like "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!" - that's two lines for one breath and that's a real solid piece of breathing, mouthing. Then he wants to get even higher, so he gives you "And" - "And" - comma - by the incantation of this verse", so that you have enough air in your lungs to go dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. Then, again, "Scatter - comma". Then he has one of his great lines that you want lots of air for that one - "as from an unextinguished hearth/Ashes and sparks" - not "Scatter as from an unextinguished hearth [pause - Allen takes a breath] - Ashes and sparks" but "as from an unextinguished hearth/Ashes and sparks" in one. And then another breath so you can get "my words among mankind!" And then another long one  - "Be through my lips to unawakened earth/The trumpet of a prophecy!" - ah-duh-duh-dah-dah-datta-datta-dah-duh-dah-dah-duh-duh-dah-dah-dah. And then "O Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" - "if Winter comes - comma - can Spring be far behind?

Well, how many have never heard that before or read that before? 

Student: Now I've heard it

AG: It's just amazing. It's after all.. well, actually, then, more than half the class had heard it. Yeah, well, I think that "Ode to the West Wind" and "Adonais".. "..Intellectual Beauty", "Ode to the West Wind" and "Adonais" are his high points, his most powerful breaths, his most powerful breathings. I know these pretty well because my father taught them in high school, so he used to go stomping around the house actually reciting these aloud!  And then I developed a dislike for them for a while, because he didn't pay (proper) attention to the commas!

Student: Oh?

AG: He just did it like in one voice, one monotone - but he had the inspired cadence - (but he didn't have the stops right, so it was just, like, a blind cadence, without the delicacy of being able to stop for breath)

Student: Well I.. I kind of think that's the problem with most high-school teachers.

AG: Yeah

Student: You know, the only poem that I ever remember was "The highwayman came riding, riding.."You know, the way the teacher would read it and the class would read it was so..boring!

AG: Yeah, well, in every American high school there's usually one strange genius weirdo teacher who turns everybody on to (Walt) Whitmanor somebody. I had one doing Whitman
(A footnote here - those of you who are in my apprentice class? who is it? just two? - okay, so we've already got that for three o'clock).

[Audio for the above may be found here, beginning at approximately fifty-three-and-three quarter minutes in (the reading of "Ode to the West Wind" begins at approximately sixty-two-and-a-half minutes in) and concluding approximately seventy-and-three-quarter minutes in  - It may also be accessed via the Internet Archive here, and here via Open Culture]   

[In addition here's Gregory Corso reading "Ode to the West Wind" -  from a 1975 class at Naropa, (beginning, approximately thirty minutes in, and concluding approximately thirty-four minutes in). Later in the class, W.S.Merwin attempts a complete reading of the poem (beginning at approximately fifty-one-and-a-quarter minutes in, and concluding approximately fifty-four-and-a-half minutes in). Anne Waldman also attempts the poem (beginning approximately fifty-five minutes in).  A transcription from that class (with the readings and the conversation around it) is available here]

[Actors, actors - here's Sir John Gielgud (introduced by fellow actor Sir Ralph Richardson) - Gielgud's recitation begins, after some prefatory recollections by Richardson about a minute-and-ten-seconds in).  Here's Vincent Price's 1956 recording (and, while we're at it, his equally orotund rendition of Shelley's "Ozymandias")  

"I Shall Be Released" (1980's Woodstock Jam)

December 10, 2013, 1:30 pm

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 7 (Adonais)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 6 (Ode To The West Wind)

$

0

0

Happy Traum just put this up on You Tube, and we were all uplifted and figured that, without any further ado, we just had to share. To quote his accompanying note - "This is an excerpt from a benefit concert in Woodstock, NY in the late '80s to honor our sister city in El Salvador. Rick Danko and Happy Traum are sharing the lead singing with other members of the (extended) Woodstock music community: Artie Traum (lead guitar solo) John Herald, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders,Amy Fradon, Leslie Ritter, Mark Rust, Mikhail Horowitz, David Deusing, all singing along. Peter Schickele and Neil Eisenberg are on the keyboard. 
Yes, that's Allen glimpsed enthusiastically right at the beginning, and, indeed later on in the video. Oh, and I guess we should also give props to the (on this occasion, not present) author of the song.

thinking of February 11 1990 right now
but thinking of freedom from imprisonment and political repression everywhere

Expansive Poetics - 7 (Adonais)

December 11, 2013, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Denise Levertov

≪ Previous: "I Shall Be Released" (1980's Woodstock Jam)

$

0

0

AG: I'd like to read the end of (Percy Bysshe Shelley's)  "Adonais". We don't have time for the ideal thing which is to read "Adonais" from beginning to end, but it's.. I've forgotten how many..fifty-five stanzas or something?..it's a little long. I've done it in the open air. It's great. It's a lamentation in classical form for John Keats, so it's a great subject - the death of a great poet.

How many have read "Adonais"? [show of hands] Yeah. And how many have not? [further show of hands] - So that's even more. "(Ode to the) West Wind" is better known. "Adonais, however, ends even higher than "Ode to the West Wind". It has even more symphonic power or inspiration.

And also, the interesting thing is the end of it, as in the end of many great or heroic inspired poems, is a reference, again, to the breath - to the breath-spirit. In other words, spirit means breathing - "spiritus" - Latin - breathing - inspiration means breathing. The ideal idea of spirit - spiritual - actually relates to the breath. And if you take the word "spirit" to relate to the physical breath, then you've got something you can work with, literally, without bullshit, without being a faggot aesthetician, you can actually just have real spirit, meaning breath. You don't have to worry about the validity of your discussion of inspiration. You can do it with ordinary mind. You can have inspiration with ordinary mind in the sense that there is such a thing as inspiration (or unobstructed breath, in this case, or breathing). Unobstructed inspiration, I should say, is a possibility.

What I'll read as an example of unobstructed inspiration, which finally talks about.. the subject of which, finally, is the breathing itself, is the last stanzas of  "Adonais". And to understand it, has anybody here been to the American Cemetery (the Protestant Cemetery -  Cimitero Accattolico (the A-Catholic Cemetery - the Non-Catholic Cemetery) at Rome ever?

Student: Yeah

AG: Yeah. Well, there's a very beautiful spot on the outskirts of Rome or the ancient wall, near the old wall, which is now in the middle of town, near Cestius' pyramid (a tiny pyramid maybe as high from the ground as the ceiling is from the ground (here) in Boulder, called the English cemetery [sic]. I think it's called the English Cemetery [sic], where many of the Englishmen who came during (the) Renaissance and later times, during the Romantic times, 1750-1850, 1900 - ex-patriots, remittance men who settled in Rome to enjoy the boys, or the sunlight, or whatever they were getting away from in England. Shelley is buried there. I think (Edward John) Trelawny, his friend, and (John) Keats are buried there. So it's a really illustrious poetic cemetery. Anybody else, do you know? Who else is in there? I think Leigh Hunt or one of Leigh Hunt's children. [and also, notably - this was recorded before his death - Gregory Corso!] It's nice. If you ever get to Rome, it's one of the most charming  poetic places in Rome to visit. It's mentioned here - "Go thou to Rome" - and it mentions the cemetery, or the pyramid next to the cemetery.

I'll read the first stanza (which (Jack) Kerouac loved also, because so romantic) - "I weep for Adonais, he is dead" - and then the last one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen... the last about twenty stanzas altogether - about half the poem.
It's an elegy on the death of John Keats. Some believed his death had been hastened, if not directly caused by, a harsh review of Keats' early poem "Endymion" in the Quarterly Review of 1818. But for the emotional Shelly, Keats had been murdered by his critics, and "Adonais" is an oblique attack on his murderers. Then the title of the poem is an adaptation of the name of Adonis...

Student: Oh

AG:.. the beautiful youth loved by Venus and killed by a boar, which is written (up) by (William) Shakespeare in "Venus and Adonis", the long poem.
And the immediate sources of the poem (particularly at the beginning) are the"Lament for Adonis" by the Greek poet, Bion (and that's very much worth looking up, the early pastoral melancholy elegies - the "Lament for Adonis" by Bion, I think we do have in the library here).

Student: B...

AG: B-I-O-N. It's a Greek pastoral poetry, it's (in) the old Loeb Library series. I have it. If it's not there, I may have it in my house.  
And the "Lament for Bion", for the poet who wrote the "Lament for Adonis", by Moschus - M-O-S-C-H-U-S. These are worth looking up if you like this strain of poetry.These are the classical beginnings of it, the lineage from which Shelleyean melancholy inspiration comes from.
The "Memorial Idyll" by the Greek poet Theocritus - pastoral. And then (John) Milton had tried a similar form, or a similar mode, or a similar high style"Lycidas" - okay. 

The poem is written in Spenserian stanzas, by the way , okay. So. [Allen begins reading, as announced, from the opening stanza of Shelley's "Adonais" - "I weep for Adonais - he is dead!/ Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears/Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head"..."Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be/An echo and a light unto eternity" - and then, taking up the poem from the 39th stanza - "Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep-/He hath awakened from the dream of life-/'Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep,/With phantoms an unprofitable strife...", through to the poem's end - "The breath whose might I have invoked in song/Descends on me, my spirit's bark is driven,/Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng/Whose sails were never ti the tempest given;/ The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!/ I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;/ Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,/The soul of Adonais, like a star/Beacons from the abode where the Eternals are"

Student: (Has your understanding and) reading of this poem changed..since the time you wrote "Kaddish"?

AG: No, I picked up this poem before.

Student: Yeah?

AG: I mean, that's why I always liked that..

Student: Uh-huh

AG: ...but it influences "Kaddish"

Student: Yeah..

AG: That was the point that I was making, that if you absorb into your body these rhythms and these breathings, then you can make variations and reproduce them yourself. Once you know that expansiveness of breath, once you have that spirit in you (which you can get from another poet), then you can do it yourself, because you've already done it, you've already pronounced it aloud. You've already done the breathing so all you have to do is your own.

Student: Well, what opened you up to the.. to that reading of it, when you say, for example, that your father was reading...it different(ly).. 

AG: Lead Belly! - Listening to Lead Belly sing blues on the phonograph over station WNYC, singing! -  
We'll continue, then, next..

Student: Oh

AG: We probably won't have the anthologies ready (yet). It'll probably cost fifteen or twenty dollars. So those who want it, before we go, please sign up those who want to order the anthology, sign up. I'll make three extra copies for the library. For those who are broke, it'll be there, but I would recommend you getting it, if you can afford it, sometime during the course of the class, because it, actually, is permanently useable. You can take it home and breathe over it for a decade..
Those who didn't sign up for attendance, sign up on one page. Those who came late and have a car...  [tape and the class end here - to be continued]
   
[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately seventy-and-a-half minutes in and running through to the end of the tape. Allen's reading from Adonais may be heard, beginning approximately seventy-seven minutes in]

- oh, and as a postscript

Denise Levertov

December 12, 2013, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 156

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 7 (Adonais)

$

0

0

The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov are now available in a handsome one-volume edition edited by Paul A Lacey, with an introduction by Eavan Boland, published by New Directions. 

Here, from her reading in Los Angeles, in 1993, for the Lannan Foundation,  are six poems, "Settling", "Open Secret"."Tragic Error", "The Danger Moment", "A Gift" and "For Those Whom the Gods Love Less".

Here, in an audio over-view from The Poetry Foundation, are recordings of several poems recorded in 1971 at the Library of Congress, "At The Justice Department, November 15, 1969","What My House Would Be Like If It Were A Person", "The Wealth of the Destitute",  "Psyche in Sommerville", and "Somebody Trying".

Here's a recording of a 1964 reading in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  

The Poetry Foundation, incidentally, reproduces her important 1965 essay - "Notes on Organic Form" - here.

From WNET's 1966 "Poetry USA", here's Denise reading "Life At War".

The significance of the Levertov-Duncan correspondence can not be underestimated.

The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard has a treasury of audio - three readings (from 1960, 1962 and 1986.  

Here's a whole slew of poems. 

Here's Denise reading "Woman Alone"at the St Mark's Church Poetry Project in New York in 1977. 

Robert Creeley recalls Denise Levertovhere.

Allen and her were, of course, co-participants in the legendary 1963 Vancouver Conference.
Her reading there is here (and her panel participation here, here and here)

Here's Publisher's Weekly's enthusiastic reviewof the Collected

Here are more reviews - Drew Calvert in The American Reader and Bob Arnold's note in his always-wise Longhouse Birdhouse blog 


For more on her extraordinary life, fighting for poetry, fighting for social justice, Donna Hollenberg's recent biography from the University of California Press - A Poet's Revolution
should certainly not be missed.  

                   [Denise Levertov 1923-1997]

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 156

December 13, 2013, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Peter Orlovsky's 1975 Naropa class (Poets Who Have Influenced Me)

≪ Previous: Denise Levertov

$

0

0

Jack Hirschman's 80th birthday today!


From an (undated)  interview on American Legends 

Interviewer: Of the early Beats, Allen Ginsberg is the one you're most closely identified with.

Jack Hirschman: I was in touch with Allen early on for a bunch of reasons. When I was a professor [Hirschman was a Student Teaching Assistant at Indiana University, 1955-59, Instructor at Dartmouth College, 1959-61, and Assistant Professor of English at UCLA 1961-1966, before being fired, in 1966, for alleged "activities aganst the state", at the height of the Vietnam War], I translated a book of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Futurist poet. This was done in collaboration with Victor Erlich. I showed the book to Allen. He was very moved and impressed because he identified with Mayakovsky too. We became friends by letter, then he came to visit, I was in the university at that time which was really part of the corporate world. When I came into the street, I read with Allen two or three times in Los Angeles. Later we read together with poets around here (San Francisco).

and, in an interview with Marco Nieli in Left Curve, he continues:

" In those days, a rather rhyme-y, clanky translation of Mayakovsky by Herbert Marshall was the only text available. But Mayakovsky, the first street poet of the century, caught my attention, also because of his relation to the Bolshevik Revolution and because Ginsberg's"Howl" had evoked something of Mayakovsky's journalistic notation. So, before I had learned Russian (which was to come eighteen years later) I had Victor Erlich, a friend at the time in Indiana, give me the translations of the texts and I wrote Mayakovsky into American in free verse form. And it was that translation (though I'd written a short praise poem to Allen after "Howl"'s publication) that actually began my friendship with Ginsberg, when I brought the text to New York in the late '(19)50s".

From the American Legends interview:

"Of the Beats, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were the ones who were really progressive. Even today Lawrence still carries on and tries to provoke. It's quite amazing." 

[On his avowed Communism] - "How can Marxism not influence us today? How many kids don't have healthcare, and the government is making war largely to secure oil routes. If that is not the reason to change the way money is distributed in the society, I don't know what is."

Here's Jack Hirschman, introduced by Jerry Cimino, at the opening of San Francisco's Beat Museum



"It's great to be here. There's no doubt whatever - the journey I've taken in my own life, identites with political dimensions, in a very direct way - that the Beat movement has been part of my adult life - and I would not say an unimportant part, in relation to some of the poets that have been connected with it."

Here's Jack, explaining his relation to the Beats (in Italian) to an Italian interlocutor

City Lights this past Wednesday hosted a Jack Hirschman Birthday Celebration

City Lights published Front Lines (Pocket Poets Number 55), his Selected Poems, (and, more recently, in 2008, All That's Left)

The Arcanes, Jack Hirschman's one-thousand-page magnum opus, published in 2006, is available here 

Jack is, it has to be said, (and may he continue to be), gloriously prolific, the author of over one hundred volumes (of poetry, prose, anthology, and translation).




SoKill Your Darlings, the Daniel Radcliffe "Beat" vehicle successfully opened it's run in the UK.  More press. Here's Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian. Here's Mark Kermode in The Observer.
Here's Jenny McCartney in The Telegraph,
Here's Nigel Andrews in The Financial Times.

John Krokidas, the director, talks to The Economisthere  and to HeyUGuys.               
Dane DeHaan and Daniel Radcliffe talking to HeyUGuys is here.




So the Lana del Rey/Anthony Mandler "Tropico" film that we mentioned last week,  has, it turns out, a little more of Allen's "Howl" in it than just the opening line.  Moody posturing, arty titillation, chic [sic] violence. Portentous declamation. A group of businessmen order a bunch of strippers for "Jack" [sic]'s birthday, but get, shockingly, held-up at gunpoint instead - "with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares" - Heterosexual fantasies - will this bring in a whole new generation to the poem?

Sherill Tippins' exhaustively-researched Inside The Dream Palace (The Life And Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel)has just been published. Allen is, of course, of necessity, all over it. One representative charming little anecdote from its facts-filled pages:
 "Stella Waitzkin, a part time Abstract Expressionist and housewife from Riverdale, divorced her salesman husband to live the bohemian life at the Chelsea, inviting such creative friends as (Willem) de Kooning,(Gregory) Corso, (Allen) Ginsberg,Larry Rivers, and even Arthur Miller to share drinks and conversation in her spacious fourth-floor suite. Waitzkin..turned her Chelsea home into an artwork in progress, covering the walls with shelves full of faux books made of resin cooked up in the hotel basement...It was the perfect environment for pot-fueled, poetry-and-art-filled evenings, such as the one in which she dreamily informed Ginsberg that "words are no longer sufficient to say what needs to be said", that "only images will work now", just as one of the young guests suddenly looked ill, and Ginsberg, wanting to spare Stella's floor, held out his backpack full of handwritten poems for the girl to throw up into.."

Eulogies, nostalgia. Excess. It's a very very different Chelsea Hotel today.

Next Tuesday (December 17), on BBC's Radio 4, Allen is the focus of the "Great Lives" series (a "biography series exploring the greatest people who ever lived" !). Matthew Parris is the compere, Michael Horovitz is the nominator, Barry Miles will also be on hand to provide "biographical detail"

Peter Orlovsky's 1975 Naropa class (Poets Who Have Influenced Me)

December 14, 2013, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 8 - Pushkin

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 156

$

0

0

[Peter Orlovsky with mama goat ("Shiva") and her baby, Cherry Valley Farmhouse, Cherry Valley, New York State - Photograph by Gordon Ball- Copyright Gordon Ball] 

An "unusual" transcription for this weekend. From the very early days of Naropa (August, 1975), Peter Orlovsky's Naropa Class - "Poets Who Have Influenced Me". He concludes, "Well, I'm sorry I wasn't prepared. Maybe next year I'll be better prepared", but it is precisely the spontaneous un-prepared nature of the conversation (and the reading) that's so interesting. If you're listening to it on the audio, be prepared for several ponderous silences, rifling through books and papers, etc, (not to mention stumblings over, and mispronunciations of, words, especially foreign words - on several occasions he will ask the class how to pronounce a certain word, even enquire about that word's meaning). There is also the scatalogical (hey, it's Peter!), the candid confessions of drug-taking, and two singularly long "diversions" (the first about dental hygeine, the second, a detailed description of growing cider apples in Cherry Valley!). Peter's pedagogical chops, he's gleaned from Allen ("Who here's read X?, Who here's not read X?"). Esenin, Mayakovsky, Catullus, Apollinaire, Jack Kerouac. He also reads poems of Allen, and of his own, plays unique recordings (of Esenin and Mayakovsky) - "a big booming voice" (as he describes the voice of Esenin) - and, of course yodels!  

PO:(Sergei) Esenin - have you heard of him before? You've heard of him?  He's a Russian Imagist poet, committed suicide in, I think in 1930? -  1925? [1927, actually] - and was friends of (Vladimir) Mayakovsky, and there's a translation here by Cid Corman, that's called "The Tramp's Confession". I also have him down here on (LP) record too, him reading in Russian. So I'll read..I'll read..it's a poem called"The Tramp's Confession" [also translated elsewhere as "Hooligan's Confession", or "Confessions of a Hooligan"] - [Peter reads from Corman's Esenin] 

"Not everyone can sing/Not everyone can be/ The plum that falls at others feet/Here goes with the last confession/ Professed by a tramp to you/ I mope around deliberately uncombed/My head, like a gas lamp, on my neck/ I get a kick out of lighting at night/The bare autumn of your souls/I enjoy the jeering stones thrown at me, hail of a farting storm/ I am happy to get a good hold of the swaying intestines of my hair/Then it's nice to remember/ A moss-covered pool and the harsh alder/And a father and mother who live somewhere/Who don't give a damn for my poems/Who love me like a piece of land, or meat/Or the thin spring rain that wets the green soil/They would come with their pitchforks to fix you/For every insult you hurl at me/ Poor poor peasants!/ It's true, you're not very pretty/And you still fear God in the bosoms of bogs/ Oh, if you could only get it through your head/That your son is Russia's best poet!/ Do you fear for his life with your hoar hearts/ When he buried his bare feet in the autumn puddles?/He strolls in a top hat now and polished slippers./ But he still lives with the old gaucherie of the son/ Of a village buffoon/As soon as he catches sight of a butcher's shop/He begins from a way off to pay his compliments/ And when he meets the coachman in the square/Minded of the manure of the fields where he was born/He is eager to bear the tail of every mare/ As though it were the train of a bride's gown/ I love my country/ I love her verily/Though the rest of her sorrows hangs from the willow trees/ The dirty snout of the hog I love/And in the calm night the throbbing toads/ I am sweetly sick of thoughts of my childhood/ The langour and mist of April evenings haunt my dream/ You could say that our maple to get some heat/Bent before the brazier of the dawn /Oh, how often I shimmied its brows to find the nests of magpie and jay/ Is it still the same, all green at the top?/And its bark as rugged as ever?/  And you, my friend/my faithful spotted dog?!/ Age has made a blind bark of you/And you haul about the yard dragging your long tail by/Oblivious to the scent of doors and stables/Oh, how I loved our mischievous games,/ The time I stole the crisp end of a loaf of bread/And we both took turns tearing into it/ Without ever disgusting each other/ 
I haven't changed/At heart, I haven't changed/ As cornflowers in the corn, the eyes grow in the head/Showing off gold straw, the palette of my poems/ I want to say something sweet to you/ Good night!/ Good night to you all!/ On the twilight meadows, the red sickle of the setting sun no longer swings/Right now I feel like pissing through the window at the moon/ The light is blue, so blue!/ In such blue light even dying might not be bad/ Who cares if I wear the eye of a cynic/With a lantern swung from the behind!/Good old Pegasus/ Who needs your easy job?/ Some August such as this one, my fat head my self will drain drop by drop away/ in a wind of his foaming hair/ I want to be the yellow sail/ spread between the land/that we set sail for")

So he committed suicide in a Moscow hotel..he cut his wrists and wrote something on the wall in blood, something to do with Mayakovsky. I forget what exactly what it.. "Dying is.. er..er..  Living is nothing new, it's dying that's new", or just the opposite, something like that, ["V etoi zhizni umirat' ne novo,/No i zhit' konechno, ne novei" -  There's nothing new in dying now/Though living is no newer." - or, in an alternative translation, "In this life there's nothing new in dying/But nor of course is living any newer"] - but let me play you so you get a sound of his voice


[Sergei Esenin (1895-1925) on his death-bed]


Student: Who is this?

PO: Sergi Esenin - Imagist poet from the (19(20's,  1919's..    [some delay as Peter sets the record-player up, then plays the audio recording of Esenin (in Russian) (actually, David Burliuk) reading this poem) 

Arrivederci! - "Arrivedici" is "goodbye" in Russian. [It is, of course, "goodbye" in Italian] That's one word, the other word was.. ["malkova"? "makolva"?]  - you see how long (it was) - Arriverderci!  - [Peter blasts out the word and elongates the word] - as if he's, like, reading poetry to fifty thousand people with no microphone, you know. It's a big booming voice.

Student: Who is it again?

PO: That's Serge Esenin (Yesenin?)  E-S-E-N-I-N - He married Isadora Duncan, went off, and.. He probably had some Russian mushrooms probably too, maybe, though he didn't write about it. I think he drunk a lot...

This is..  (I've) got another.. I was in Yugoslavia, I think we stopped off, and they were selling his book of poems in the square. He (Esenin)'s well liked in Yugoslavia. 

Then, the other Russian that I read a bit is Mayakovsky, and.. has anyone here heard the Brooklyn Bridge poem? - are you familiar with the Brooklyn Bridge poem?  Well, he came to the United States somewhere in the early (19)30's, late (19)20's, and he fell in love with the Brooklyn Bridge. He walked across the Brooklyn Bridge - [Peter proceeds to read Mayakovsky's Brooklyn Bridge in translation] - "Give Coolidge,/ a shout of joy!/I too will spare no words/about good things.."..."Brooklyn Bridge, yes, that's quite a thing!" - 1925 - 

Well, are you familiar with "At The Top of My Voice"? - I think Allen said he read it here last year. This is.. I guess poems like this one started getting him in trouble with the Communist hierarchy - [Peter reads Mayakovsy's "At The Top of My Voice" - "At The top of My Voice - First Prelude to the Poem - My most respected/comrades of
posterity!/Rummaging among/these days'/petrified shit"..."When I appear before the CCC (Central Control Committee)/of the coming/bright years/by way of my Bolshevik party card/I'll raise/above the heads/of a gang of party hacks/ all the hundred volumes of my/ poets and rogues/ all the hundred volumes/ of my/ Communist Party poems" - [The translation is close to, but veers away occasionally from, the Hayward-Reavey translation]  
That's 1930 - Then he committed suicide right after that. 
This is called "Past One O' Clock"  
[Peter proceeds to read Mayakovsky's "Past One O'Clock"] - "Past one o'clock. You must have gone to bed.."..Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars./In hours like these one rises to address/ The ages, history and all creation" 
- And then he put a bullet through his head. 
- So we have Mayakovsy's voice, Allen has a record of it - [Peter next puts on an audio recording ("Mayakovsky's voice") of, allegedly, Mayakovsky]


[Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)]

Student: Who's giving this reading?

PO: Mayakovsky. Vladimir (Vladimirovich) Mayakovsky.. He did a lot of posters about the Revolution and..  and this is his voice. I don't know what poem it is now. I'd have to get... my father knows Russian, I'd have to get him to translate it ["An Extraordinary Adventure"]

[Peter plays the recording (audio) of "Mayakovsky" reading]

Student: Have you seen anyEisensteinfilms?

PO: Yeah, I've seen four or five Eisenstein films

Student: Does that remind you...that was kind of like sounding like the soundtrack of one of his films

PO: Oh yeah

Student: Sounds like Ivan the Terrible! 

PO: (Andrei) Voznesensky, who I've seen read. Are you familiar with Voznesensky's poetry at all? Is anyone not familiar with Voznesensky? Well, Voznesensky's the same as  Mayakovsky today. City Lights put out a book of his poems called..

Student: Red Cats

PO: Red Cats. [Voznesensky - and Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Semyon Kirsanov, all translated by Anselm Hollo - is indeed featured in Red Cats (1962), but, perhaps, Peter is thinking of Voznesensky's stand-alone collection, Dogalypse, published, also by City Lights, ten years later]  - and Andrei Voznesensky..he comes and reads and he also, when he reads his poems, he reads from memory, and he reads in a very.. Rooskii...[Peter stretches and shouts the word] - he reads in Russian, and then someone translates, but he reads in a very big full bouncy iron voice, full of penetration. I have (the) book of poems to read it's called Red Cats its in the City Lights Poet Pocket (Pocket Poet) series..And he was an architect, and then he switched from architect(ure) to writing poetry, and he's got.. 
[Peter becomes momentarily distracted - "There goes our exams, burning in a safe like the red needles..the silver needles on a compass, turning around crazily. There, the flames are coming out of the architectural window buildings like red-assed baboons going up into flames. Our exams, Karen, are all going up into flames!"]
....then he (Mayakovsky) wrote another poem about when he was traveling in the United States - Why do they do that, people in America, when these children go to ask for trick or treat during Halloween, why do they put razor blades in oranges and glass in cupcakes? , he wrote a poem about that. 

But I always liked that line of Esenin - "Right now, I feel like taking a piss through the window at the moon" . It's a nice..nice line. And "The rust of the Russian sorrows hangs on the willow tree, sorrows of.. the rust of Russian sorrows hangs on the willow trees".  - " I love my country/ I love her verily/Though the rest of her sorrows hangs from the willow trees"

[Gaius Valerius Catullus (84 BC- 54 BC)]

Then, let's see, then there's ..are you folks familiar withCatullus?, a Roman poet..who's not familiar with Catullus, in the class?  Well, I got this book at the Earth.. at the bookstore here, I think they've got another copy left (they're at the bookstore..Plants, "Books & Plants"..

Student: How do you spell that?

 C-A-T-A-L-L-U-S - Just about..thirty-four years before Christ. He's a very dirty Roman poet, very dirty, very raw, very.. drunk a lot, I guess, and "Malest..  Allen always used.. I don't know, when I first met Allen, in 1954, he used to read this poem to me a lot -"Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo" - Cornificius Catullus..Cornificius, Catullus, your friend is sick,/ by Hercules, man, mighty sick, bad off,/and getting worse every day and hour/ and what condolence have you given him as easy a little thing as that?/, I'm irked with you, my love nests this, some little word of condolence please/ more sad than the tears of Simonides" 

.. then Allen wrote,  from that he wrote this one - "Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo" -  "I'm happy, Kerouac, your madman Allen's/finally made it, discovered a new young cat"..."It's hard to eat shit without any visions,/ when they have eyes for me it's like heaven"

Student: Peter

PO: Yeah

Student: I thought you said he was a poet before Christ

PO; No..er..yeah..er..thirty..nineteen.. I mean, thirty-four BC

Student: Really?

PO: Yeah ..Catullus is 34 BC.. no , I'm sorry, let's see, [consults book] -  "who lives, it seems, from about 84  to 54 BC", between 84 and 54 BC - 54 BC

Student: Who wrote the last poem?

PO: Allen wrote that one. He wrote it about me, in a letter, poem I guess, to (Jack) Kerouac.

Student: Oh I see, alright.

PO: Now there's another one. There's a lot of different translations of Catullus and they seem to be getting better and better. (Louis) Zukofsky did some interesting translations of Catullus, I think word for word [word for sound - homophonic] so the sense is quite..to make sense of it, is quite different  - [note - Celia Zukofsky's contribution to this work should not be underestimated]
     
[Peter reads a translation (not Zukofsky's) of Catullus'"Egnatius quod candidos habet dentes" - Because Egnatius has white teeth,/ he smiles without a stop/ and should it come to trials/ where lawyers rule the courts to tears,/ he smiles. Suppose a mother mourns her only son,/ he smiles. Whatever it is, whatever he 's done, whatever it is,/ he smiles. It's a disease, not elegance, I think, nor does it please/. So, good Egnatius  (E-G-N-A-T-I-U-S  - how do you pronounce that? Ignateus? Inatius? Eggnatius?) - So, good Egnatius, I must give you warning,/ were you a Roman Sabine (what's a Sabine? Tibortine (what is a Tibertine?) - or frugal Umbrian (well, the Umbrian Valley), or fat Etruscan/or dark Lanuvian with big buck teeth/ or a Transpadine, to bring my people in, or/one of any group that cleans its teeth with water/ Constant smiles would still displease./ Nothing's as far from tact as tactless grins./ But you're from Spain and Spain's the spot/ where teeth are scrubbed and red gums rubbed with what is pissed the night before into a pot/ so that your teeth tells by its higher shine/ how much you've drunk the dregs of bedroom wine."

Student: What is that you're reading, Catullus?

PO: Catullus - Yeah - Poems by Catullus. Then, he's got another one here, about giving his love a thousand kisses and another thousand more, and then another thousand after that, a thousand..  It's straight talk, writes down what's (in) his head and what's happening to him.


[Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)]


Then I'd like to read you..well have you read Guillaume Apollinaire's "Zone" poem? Who's not familiar with that poem? - Zone? - Well, Allen was just telling me this was a poem that affected T.S.Eliot (T.S.Eliot liked it a lot and..

Student: Is that Catullus again?

PO: No, this is Apollinaire. One of his well-known poems is "Zone", and it's.. let's see,it's... it's free verse and..oh, what's the word for, how would you describe this writing?, it's free verse, but it's also, association, I guess.

Student: (...Automatic?) 

PO:   No, Free association, no, it's not automatic writing. 
 - [Peter reads Apollinaire's "Zone", in its entirety [despite stumbling on several words and the audiotape drops off at one point -The translation of the famous concluding couplet here is "The sun is a severed neck" - (compared with Samuel Beckett's "Sun Coarseless Head" or Ron Padgett's "Sun throat cut", Roger Shattuck's "Sun a severed head", etc) 

Student: That was all of "Zone"?

PO: That was "Zone", yes, all of "Zone". I think so. That's what's here. 
And he wrote a poem like raindrops falling down the page - [rifles through papers]


[Peter Orlovsky and Jack Kerouac, on the beach, Tangier, 1957  - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg - c. The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

And I'd like to read you a couple of poems of  (Jack) Kerouac's ..Mexico City (Blues). Who here has not read Kerouac's Mexico City Blues?

Student: Not all of it.

PO: Who has not read any poems of Kerouac's at all? - Mexico City Blues is put out by Grove Press. Mexico City Blues - 242 Choruses - There's also an (LP record of this, it's on record too, with.what's that artist, the pianist who plays..

Student: Steve Allen?

PO: Steve Allen  (playing),   Kerouac reading some from.. reading some prose pieces the Mexico City Blues

Student ..    some people were talking about.. I don't know what it is, but (it has) a bunch of people in it and Kerouac...
Student (2):  Pull My Daisy
Student: Yeah, Pull My Daisy.
PO: Pull My Daisy
Student: Is that still around?
PO: Oh yeah, they show it at the universities from time to time, yeah, it goes around. It's a story..Robert Frank's.. Robert Frank, a filmmaker, in Third Avenue, around Ninth Street in a loft, was.. made a film. I was in it. Allen was in it. David Amramwas in it..another artist, Larry..
Student: Rivers?
PO: No, Larry Rivers, no, [Peter's confused, Larry is in it, goofing around with his saxophone, playing the role of "Milo"], that friend of Larry Rivers, artist from Brooklyn who's in it, [editorial note - not clear who Peter's thinking about here - Richard Bellamy, perhaps?, who plays the key role of "the Bishop", tho' Bellamy was more a downtown Manhattan dealer, than Brooklyn artist] -  and then I think Robert Frank's son, Pablo is in it [Peter's at least right in his recollections here]. And it's in a loft and we're all goofing around, doing different things, and then Kerouac's.. then the film is finished, and then Kerouac sees it, and Kerouac gives a description of what he sees and improvises on what he sees.
Student; Wasn't.. Ken Kesey made a film too?
PO: Ken Keseymade a film of the buses as they drove across country
Student; Yeah, and they went to visit Kerouac? and they made a film there with Kerouac? I haven't seen the film, I just heard about it.
PO; Did they get to see Kerouac?
Student: I don't know. They just went in there and it wasn't very good. It wasn't..
Student (2): It's not in the book [Electric Kool Aid Acid Test]
Student  (3): Yeah, It is in the book. They did get to see him.
PO: Not in his home, in the city maybe?
Student (3): Yeah
PO: Not his home, because Kerouac's mother wouldn't let anyone, wouldn't let anything like that happen in the house.
Student (4): Even when Allen...
PO:  - Huh? - They wouldn't let me and Allen come. I had long hair and his mother said to.. because my mother used to live in Northport, Long Island, right nearby,maybe eight, ten, twelve blocks away, and I used to come over when I had short hair. They even had a house closer to my mother's in Northport and we used to go over there and talk and read and..  Then, years later, when we came back again, they moved to a further part of town, a smaller house, and we had long hair and his mother wouldn't let us in at all. so.. she wouldn't let Allen in.. and then we tried to see him a year before he died, in Massachusetts, and he.. we went with Panna Gradywho was..  but we couldn't get in the house, his mother wouldn't let us in the house. We were going to meet him around a couple of corners in a bar, but we didn't, it didn't work out
Student: Is she still alive? [1975]
PO: I think she's still alive, or is she dying now or still alive?
Student: She's got one foot under Saint Pete
PO: She's in the hospital now?
Student: No, it's just a phrase "One foot under Saint Pete"
PO: She was a grouchy.. home-mother   She didn't make friends too much. Or maybe she did? I don't know. I don't think she didn't make too much friends. She..
Student: She always had that cat?
PO: She had a cat, yeah

Student: The record that you were talking about. Was that Kerouac actually reading his own poems?
PO; Right, yeah, he's reading from Mexico City Blues and he's reading from, I think, prose pieces (maybe something from On The Road). But you should hear it, you'll get a sound of Kerouac's voice, and..
Student: Do you know anybody here who has it?
PO: No, I don't, no. Probably Allen will bring it out, Allen will bring it out (to Boulder) next year. You could ask Allen - Maybe tonight at the reading [sic] where to get it, or...

This is a poem that I like that I've often heard Allen read of Jack's  - "The wheel..." - it'sChorus 211 - [Peter reads "Chorus 211" from Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues - 
"The wheel of the quivering meat/conception/Turns in the void..."..."Poor! I wish I was free/of that slaving meat wheel/ and safe in heaven dead  - and also Chorus 230 ("Love's multitudinous boneyard of decay.."... "Like kissing my kitten in the belly/The softness of our reward").. There's something, on the record, that I wanted to read, but I don't know if I can find it, let's see  [Peter rifles through the pages] - Well, it's about "them bacon and them eggs", them bacon and eggs, lay it down on table, lay them bacon and eggs down, oh-ba-di-di-boop-bop - I think it's up here.. yeah, [finds it] - "GOOFING AT THE TABLE", (80th Chorus)" - ""You just don't know"/"What don't I know?"/How good this ham n eggs is/"If you had any idea /whatsoever/How good this is/Then you would stop/writing poetry/And dig in"/"It's been so long/since I been hungry/it's like a miracle"/  Ah boy them bacon/And them egg -/Where the hell/is the scissor?/ SINGING" - "You'll never know how much I love you" - [Peter continues to Chorus 81] -  Mr Beggar & Mrs Davy - /Looney and CRUNEY/I made a pome out of it,/Haven't smoked Luney/& Cruney/In a Long Time./  Dem eggs & dem dem/Dere bacon, baby/If you only lay that/down on a trumpet,/'Lay that down/solid brother/'Bout all dem/bacon & eggs/Ya gotta be able/to lay it down/solid -/ All that luney & fruney" - [and Chorus 82] - "Fracons, acorns & beggs/Lay it, all that /be boppy/be buddy/I didn't took/I could think/so/bepo/beboppy/  Luney & Juney/ - if - /that's the way/ they get/ kinda hysterical/Looney & Boony/Juner and Mooner/Moon, Spoon, and June" - [and Chorus 83] - "Don't call them/ cat men/ That lay it down/with the trumpet/ The orgasm/Of the moon/And of June/ I call em/them cat things/ "That's really cute,/ that's un"/ William/Carlos/Williams" 
  
PO: "William/ Carlos/ Williams" - 80, number 80 (that was the end of the (sequence)..

Student: Last phrase?

PO: Yes, that was the last.. "If you only lay that/down on a trumpet,/'Lay that down/solid brother" -  I'm sorry, that was the 83rd Chorus - I call em/them cat things/ "That's really cute,/ that's un"/ William/Carlos/Williams" is the last.. 

Student: "un?"

PO: That "un" -U-N -  That "un", that "un" - U-N - He's got the "That's really cute, that un" in quotations - and then, at the bottom of that, "William", and the bottom of that "Carlos" (and) "Williams"

I think he wrote these in a pocket notebook so they're very.. they're.. they.. "don't they call them" is four words, so it's, like, probably a very narrow notebook, a pocket, or a shirt breast-pocket notebook.


[Jacques Prevert (1900-1977)]

So those are the poets that have influenced me. And then I read Jacques Prevert (Peter, amusingly, unintentionally,  mispronounces his name - Jacques Pervert!) - He wrote nice poems, very clear picture-like poems. Is anyone familiar with Jacques Prevert? Do you remember any of his poems by heart?

Student; Not by heart.

PO:  You remember any lines?

Student:  The one about how terrible is the sound of a hard-boiled egg on a zinc counter, "terrible is that sound in the heart of the man who is hungry" [from "Lazy Morning" , in Prevert's Paroles - the poem concludes, in the translation by Lawrence Ferlinghetti - "It's terrible/ the faint sound of a hard-boiled egg/cracked on a tin counter/ that sound/it's terrible this noise when it stirs in the memory of a man who's hungry" 

PO: "And terrible is that sound of?"... "In the heart of the man who is hungry?". He had a lot of pictures, City Lights also published him. 

Then Henri Michaux was very good too for writing about..the trains on the tracks and.. writing story-poems, you know, sort of..

Student: Yeah, a poem about his penis called "My King"

PO: Who's that?

Student: Michaux.

PO: Michaux.

Student: It's really funny about his penis, " I shake him again and again like an old plum tree, and his crown wobbles on his head"



PO: Well, I've got something in the New American.. I've got a poem here in the Don Allen anthology. It's called (the) "Second Poem", and then I wrote something on.. a biographical note - [Peter reads his biographical note - "My biography was born July 1932. Grew up with dirty feet and giggles. Can't stand dust so pick my nose.."..."This summer got to like flies tickleing nose and face. I demand piss to be sold on the market. It would help people to get to know eachother. I.Q. 90 in school, now specialized I.Q in thousands"]  - Well it's a biography. That wasn't on poetry

Student: Will you read a poem out of that (book)?

PO: Yeah, sure  I wrote this in Paris in 1957, and it was just sort of a lucky thing. Let's see now, did I write in a book first, or from the typewriter? - I don't know. Sometimes you write a poem from the typewriter, straight, other times you write it in a book, you know, a notebook, with pen, or..  [Peter begins reading "Second Poem "- "Morning Again, nothing has to be done,/maybe buy a piano or make fudge/At least clean the room up, for sure like my farther [sic]/I've done flick the ashes and buts [sic] over the bedside on the floor" - then stops] - But now I should really (re)consider because, my father, when I was about eleven years old, used to wipe his ass with a rag and he'd stick it behind the toilet bowl when we lived in Flushing, Queens [class explodes into laughter] I mean it's..now, if I would write the poem again you know, I would throw in that line, because he was really a dirty fuckin' slob! - he was dirty, he would wipe his ass, and (then) my mother would come by and pick it up, and - phew! - (and) I remember seeing her doing it one time, you know - but he had these Russian mannerisms, manners, you know, that  there's really..  He would smoke in his room (he had a little room in there) - And it was the first time we had a house, but it was a real messed-up house, because my mother would stay up all night long and sleep all day, because she was deaf, and so, this... it turned our teenage life inside-out. So we never did any homework, you know, I mean, it was just a horrible, it was a real mess - but my father added to it, weird, because he would go into his room (and, like turn The Inner Sanctumon on Sundays, all Sunday's we'd listen to these horror stories on the radio, you know, in the late (19)40's, Inner Sanctum, The Shadow, The Clock, Fat Man, all these other mysteries, you know and he would just.. the ash-try was just at the side of the bed, and he would just lay back and read these mystery, you know, outer-space books, you know, stories, you know, and he'd lay back, and he'd push the pot over and you'd see this whole row of ashes, you know, it was just..a mess. But.. 
"At least clean the room up, for sure like my farther/I've done flick the ashes and buts over the bedside on the floor/But frist [sic] of all, wipe my glasses and drink the water/ to clean the smelly mouth"


See, one of these poems I'm going to write now is how I stopped.. I was in Sharon Springs, up in New York State, buying - it's a Jewish community, where the Hassidic jews come to rest up from the city, and this young kid (I think from upstate New York) walked in and he smiled, and you could see that his two side teeth were rotten, so instead of saying "Hello" to him, I said, "How's your teeth?" - I said.. "Your teeth. You know you've got to brush your teeth three times a day, right after you eat, and, at the end of the day, you have to use dental floss. And he didn't want to, quite want to, talk to me about it, but I said, "See, you gotta take care of your teeth, they're the best thing you've got, and it costs more than a million dollars". And he said, "Yeah, I know, the dentist, he's not too good to me", he said. I said, "What's the matter?". (so he was trying to tell me, but I could see (that) he was a little..a little bit of... displeased, but then, when he got.. he still wanted to talk, because we were talking and he was saying that his dentist was no good). But he DOES NOT brush his teeth three times a day! - Imagine that, a young kid, eighteen years old, and he doesn't brush his teeth three times a day! I mean, it's sad, it's pathetic! - So, whenever I see a young kid, you know, and I'm next to him in line, or something like that, (and) I've got a minute to..  it's his teeth that I take a look at, you see

Student: Like a horse!

PO: Like a horse, right  - It's better than saying "Hello, it's a nice day, it's hot, it's going to rain, I wish it's going to rain" and stuff like that, you know, I  miss being .. It's a little hard, because, you know, the kid, being the kid, thinks you're putting something on him, but you have to go with a certain amount of sincerity, you have to develop a certain amount of concern for the actual guy's teeth. Once he perceives that you're not messing around, with nothing beyond, that you only care about his teeth (which is something that he cares about, because he's young), then you're on real ground, see, you have nothing to.. See, I was with a guy, Paul Burk (?) who was an electrician, who was with me, and then, when we came back to the farm, he said, "You know, don't you think you were being a bit impolite?, (and I said) "No, I thought I was being helpful." And he said, he thought I was being... and probably in a..  But if you have enough experience.. but you've got to get the experience (and) the only way to do it is to.. you know, I mean, is talk about someone's.. to look at someone's teeth.

Student: Did you have bad teeth when you were young?

PO: I..I wish to god that someone had come along when I was fifteen years old, I wish someone did it four times a week in different stages (because I used to ride the train back and forth from Jamaica to Long Island, to Northport, Long Island, and I wish strangers on the train had said "Let me see your teeth, by the way", "Open your mouth wider, I can't see nothing" and then they would hit me with the solid thing about teeth, you know, I mean - but yes, my middle teeth have started to go bad! When I was fifteen, my mother would say "Fifteen dollars for the dentist?!"- "Oh!" (I think the whole bill came up to one hundred and fifteen dollars - when I was fifteen),  and you know, it's insane, it's really insane. But I think there's a lot of poems to be made of teeth, because a lot of young people just don't take care of their teeth and they don't brush three times. The latest dental information has been a.. the last dental discovery, in the last couple of years, has been, brush your teeth after you eat, three times a day, right after you eat, and at the end of the day use unwaxed dental floss. And if you don't do that, you're gonna get.. you're gonna have a lot of cavities, you can have receding gums. And I've started to get receding gums.

Student : What toothpaste do you recommend?
PO: Whatever's cheap. Colgate, you know - but you just use a little bit of toothpaste. You don't use much at all. You just use a tiny drop of toothpaste, just a little drop, you don't need too much at all. Do you know what I mean?  About a quarter of a finger-nail - that's all - You just use very very little toothpaste - a little toothpaste goes a long way.
Student: Do you know where they have the highest amount of cavaties per area?
PO: What areas?
Student: Like, do you think that the water people drink has an affect on their teeth?
Student (2): It's mostly diet
Student : It makes sense. The water.. with all these chemicals in it..
PO: I don't know. I know if you eat too much sugar and candy and stuff and don't brush your teeth after you eat, then you get it.
Student : You get it?
PO: You get decay - you get decayed teeth and you get receding gums
Student: And now you've got all the chlorine in the water that you drink and stuff like that..carcinogens..
PO: I don't know much about that. Probably. Probably so

[Peter resumes reading (and completes reading) his poem] - "Time for another cigarette and then let the curtains rise, then I notice the dirt path makes a road to the garbage pan"... "My life and my room are like two huge bugs following me around the globe/Thank god I have an innocent eye for nature./I was born to remember a song about love - on a hill a butterfly makes a cup that I drink from, walking over a bridge of flowers"
Student: What's the name of that poem?
PO: Second Poem - Second.. I was just sitting at a typewriter (or) a notebook pad ..room and having a good time, giggling to yourself a lot, you know, and writing whatever comes into your mind, or whatever you get all excited about, or whatever is..whatever appears to you funny or odd, or..
Student: Why is it called "Second Poem"?
PO: It was the second poem I wrote. It was the second poem I wrote . I wrote the first poem (which is about the same size, a little bit different) and then (the) "second poem", and then, from then on, I ..the third poem was about.. er..I think..on the way to work, using the subway in New York City (I wrote poems on the subway, and I wrote poems working in the Mental Hospital, and..

Here's a poem (from) Gregory Corso's "Gasoline". I wanted to read some poems of his, but I don't have it (a copy of the book) with me. There's a poem called "Dirty Ears points a knife at me" ["Birthplace Revisited"] - "I pump him full of lost watches". These two torpedos from Brooklyn are after him - ["The garbage cans haven't stopped smelling/ I walk up the first flight, Dirty Ears/aims a knife at me.../ I pump him full of lost watches"]

Student: You weren't writing poems when you were younger?
PO: No, I wrote when I was... I was writing dreams when I was eighteen, I wrote those poems ("Frist" and "Second" Poem] when I was twenty-four, or something .. (twenty-seven? twenty-four?), twenty-seven, in Paris.
Student: Have you written anything recently?
PO: [pause] Yes, I'm writing some now - about the farm, I'm working on a farm  - and no, I haven't (much), because I've been working on the farm and I just.. I'm supposed to.. I got more excited working on the farm, so I have.. and, just lately, I 've been able to get up at five o'clock in the morning, quarter-to-five in the morning.. See, I've stopped reading the New York Times. If you stop reading the New York Times, you get to bed early, and when you get to bed early you get up early, but when you get up early, you work all day in a.. 
Out in the fields, you know, it's difficult to write poems. You have to break the day, I think, up, to now.. I'm going to break.. work on the farm in the morning, and in the afternoon do writing, break it up that way, because you just get very tired. You have to have..
Student: Where's your farm?
PO: Upstate New York
Student: Where?
PO: Near Cherry Valley, New York -

 [Peter then glances at a sheet of paper] - What's this? - "Next Visiting Poets class - Jackson MacLow - Wednesday at one p.m".?  What's it say on the bottom? - "Poetics of Chance and the Poetics of Simultaneous Spontaneous Spontaneity..
Jackson MacLow:  Oh, oh, oh, they must have sent it over.  
PO: This is Jackson MacLow here, who is going to read.
JM: I just thought of the title for the seminar on Wednesday..
PO: So the title is called?
JM:  "The Poetics of Chance and the Poetics of Simultaneous Spontaneity -
(or The Sacred Heart of Jesus!)
PO: Right - and where is that at now?
JM: Right here.
PO: Right here, Wednesday at one.      
JM: We might as well, since I've broken your (flow), I am having a rehearsal here at three thirty of two pieces and I'm especially looking for good players of pitched instruments

PO: Jack..Jack, who used to.. I went to Mexico City with (Jack) Kerouac and Allen (Ginsberg) and Gregory (Corso), we all went down there for a couple of months, and Jack had a room up (at) the top and I came up one night with a.. and watched him write a poem, and he said, "This is how I do it, Peter", and he opened up his notebook and said,  "Every hour I write a poem - (no) "Every hour I write a line". He was smoking away some pot. Every hour I write a line, and then he would think of a line, you know, and at the end.. So every hour he writes a line so at the end of the day he's got a poem
Student: That's where Desolation Angels came out of..
PO: In Mexico? and..
Student: ..other places. Tangiers also.
PO: Is there Tangiers in Desolation Angels?
Student; He was in Mexico and he was in Tangiers and he was in Paris and also going baxck to New York - all around. Sometimes up in the country..
PO: Well, Jack always had a notebook, little notebooks that he'd write down from... [long pause]... He would talk all the time, there's no stopping him. He would talk and talk and talk..        

What's this one here? - 127th Chorus - "Nobody knows the other side/ of my house/My corner where I was born/dusty guitars/ Of my tired little street where/with little feet/I beetled and I wheedled.."..."Where I lived a myriad kotis of millions/Of incalculable be-aeons ago/When white while joyous/was also/ Center of lake of light" - [pauses - continues to rifle through the book] - 84th Chorus -"SINGING - By the light/Of the silvery moon/I like to spoon/To my honey/I'll/Croon/Love's Dream"..." - 85th Chorus - "Do you really need/the right word/Do you really need/Of course it's all asinine.."..."That's a poem/The poem/Will end/Asininity" -86th Chorus - "Take your pick,/If you wanta commit suicide./ [Peter mis-reads this first line to begin with, to much laughter - "Take your prick/ if you wanta commit suicide"] So that we'll know/What it woulda been/like without life.."..."Beware/The Share/is Merde/Air" 


[William CarlosWilliams (1883-1963)]

Student: Did you ever meet  (William Carlos) Williams?

PO: Yeah I met Williams. Allen took me to meet Williams. We went and talked and I went and left a.. we met up twice, I think, and he read my poems. and he said he liked them, He said I had a lyric quality or a lyric gift and to keep.. he encouraged me to keep writing. And I think he had.. did he have a stroke? I think he had a stroke then, and he was sort of looking out of the window worried about things going on out there that he. .he was a little bit slowed-down from the stroke, and I think Allen went to see him about something now.
I just remember this was in Rutherford, New Jersey.

Student: Did Kerouac come?
PO: No, I don't think Jack made it with us that day or something or other
Student: You never saw him?
PO: Gee, I don't know. That's a good question.. I don't remember. 
Student: I think Allen once mentioned..
PO: Did he?  - Maybe years ago 
Student; I know Allen...Allen  gave him the manuscript of On The Road
PO: Did Williams read it?
Student: Yeah, liked it.
PO: Then Kerouac wrote a lot of haiku(s) - "The winter flies.. or the winter fly in a medicine cabinet has died of old age. ["In my medicine cabinet/the winter fly/has died of old age"].  He wrote that out in Northport, that haiku
Student: I just read Visions of Gerard and there's a line in there - he's talking to Gerard or something, or Gerard is talking to him about a dead fly in the medicine cabinet and Allen  read us that haiku out of his Journal.. So I just picked that up also..Is that the same haiku? no?
PO: Same line.

 Jack took mescaline, I think, a couple of times and I think he fell backward in a swoon of  golden eternity, a golden flood, a golden flood, it took him,  - I think he wrote about it also 
Maybe it's in Scripture of the Golden Eternity or something like that

Student: What was he taking when he wrote Mexico City Blues? (I heard he was taking morphine)?

PO: No, Jack didn't take too much morphine, no, maybe wine or beer, a bennie or two, but.. 

Student: Yeah, the story in Kerouac, Ann Charters' Kerouac, is that it was mostly marijuana and benezedrine and the guy he was with was (on) morphine, and they...

PO: Jack..  Garver, Bill Garver

Student: Yeah Bill Garver. And that Jack Kerouac would just write a line of his and when he'd heard Garver saying something, he just scribbled down what Garver said, and that's where it all comes from, pretty much a cut-up of words, thoughts.. 

PO: Yeah,  Garver was still.. I think he winds up..  I think we left him and he was clawling out his window..He had a basement.. He didn't want us to leave. We had  to leave  that moment, to drive, back in a car, to New York, and he didn't.. he was clawing at the window..he didn't want us to go. He didn't want us to leave. (I think) he was worried about getting his morphine, or something like that.
I took a lot of morphine by mistake in India. I really booked up my time in India by shooting up morphine, I had a very bad habit shooting up morphine a lot. It's a shame because I probably would've done a lot of writing in India. I just wasted a lot of time. I was so obsessed with morphine thatI had gotten.. I was taking some Indian singing lessons, and was taking some sarod lessons, and Allen threatened to throw my sarod out the window. He was going to grab.. he was about to grab it and throw it (out) if I didn't promise that I wouldn't take no more morphine. But..

We met Henri Michaux and talked about mescaline. He was taking mescaline then. And I shot some mescaline up in the arm. It was..  but I got very scared and crawled under the bed-sheets, shaking and what-not, you know.But..
And then we [Allen and I] had taken some, I guess, some peyote, and climbed up aHalf Dome mountain inYosemite National State Park, high on peyote, which was very good. And..

Student: See God?

PO: No, but I saw the mountain.. face of the mountain side walls, which looked like elephant-skin, and the mountain walls looked like they were living and growing, and dying at the same time, so it was very awesome, to look at the side of the Half Dome mountain walls

Frank O'Hara's poetry I like a lot too.. There's sort of a feeling that he's writing a poem as he's walking down the street. There's a poem.. he's got a poem about ..Second Avenue (New York City), where..  I think Allen expressed interest one time, he would like to, you know, just walk around New York City with a pencil and paper and write, you know, write what he sees, you know, but here he doesn't..hasn't gotten around to it, because he's been very busy, but that would be a very nice thing  A very nice thing to do is to take a long walk around New York City ((or) wherever you live, and write a poem about what you see along the way.
So Frank O'Hara, you get a feeling that Frank O"Hara does that, like in (that) Second Avenue poem..

Student; But you never did?

PO: I've never taken a long walk and written, no. I've written, while I've gone to work, on the subways. I've written a poem about a.. I wrote it on.. let's see, I wrote it on the subway 
[Peter reads section 2 of "Poems From Subway to Work" - "Let the subway  be our greek meeting place/ because there's where everyone goes..".."Some angry woman throws a baby into my lap./I look at the Pepsi-coala [sic] sign and drink water in my mind/Then the rush for the doors and crowded platforms./No snow or yelloo [sic] leaves in the dark iron subway"]                  





And then, Jack, too, would lay down against a building and write. He'd always be jotting things down and..Allen, I was with Allen when he wrote "Howl" (or was I? was I off at school or something?) but he had a desk at 1010 Montgomery Street [in San Francisco] and he wrote..I think he wrote that at a desk, you know, full of.. concentration.

And, well, what other poets? [long pause].. hmm, lets see..


Anne Waldman (in attendance):  Was your experience with Allen reading the poems aloud, or reading  them yourself aloud, or reading them in books?
PO: Always.
AW: Did you hear...you used to hear Frank O'Hara read?  
PO: Yeah, we (heard) Frank O'Hara read - or Allen would read it to me. Allen used to read (to) me a lot. He used to.. We'd walk around San Francisco and recite Hart Crane, going through the Broadway Tunnel in San Francisco (or the Brooklyn Bridge). Allen knew a lot of it by heart, Hart Crane by heart, and Catullus by heart, and.. who else did he read? - Catullus and.. We met..




Student: Are you going to read your apple-juice poem?
PO: Apple-juice poem?
Student:  Yeah
PO: Gee, I don't know What kind of poem is that?  Where did I read that at? 
Student(s): It's a song..
AW: It's about making apple juice (at) the farm
PO: Oh yeah - Gee, I don't know, I've got to.. I don't remember it. I think this Fall we're going to jar a lot of apple juice. There's a lot of wild apple trees around and I'm going to jar a lot of apple juice. (This time I've) promised. I have to do it. I think you've got to boil (it) for ten or twenty minutes and give it a water bath, You cover it up and you boil it for ten or twenty minutes. Yeah, there's a lot of wild apple trees, apples around. I think at one time we got a hundred. I think with Denise (Mercedes [his then girlfriend] me and you, and Julius [his brother], and someone else, we collected about.. we collected one hundred and forty-five gallons of apple-juice.
AW: So that's about twenty-thousand pounds (of apples)!
PO: All wild apples, all wild apples. And then we bought these...we bought these two big barrels, that Allen paid for, rum barrels, but they were apple-cider barrels, but they were fifty-five gallon drums, two fifty-five gallon drums we brought, we bought one twenty gallon drum, we bought one ten gallon drum, and when you fill up..
Student: Did you let it ferment?
PO: Well, I never knew how to take care of the stuff so we filled up the two fifty-five gallons. We took it to a cider press who pressed it for nineteen-cents a gallon. We filled up the two fifty-five gallon drums and then we put it in the barn or on the porch. It was so heavy to move, you know. It weighs about five-hundred, no, it's more than five-hundred, pounds, it's around seven-hundred pounds, so you can figure it out mathematically, you know, it's very easy to figure out, but it's.. it's too much. You just can't buy a fifty-five gallon drum. You can do it. I guess. You get two boards and you push it out - (It's) good to work with fifty-five gallons, it really gives you something to think about (instead of playing with all these jars and containers, you're doing it all in one fifty-five gallon drum, it's really a great idea, I love it myself). The problem is how, when you put it there, the cork and.. well they put benzoate to keep the stuff from going bad, but it only stays a couple of weeks before it all goes bad, so you have to jar it. You have to boil it in containers and then boil it in glass jars and jar it, with good caps, to make it last all winter long. So I guess we're going to have to do that with it, you know, instead of these big fifty-five gallon drums or twenty-gallon druns or ten gallon drums.
Student: Are these the small green apples, or..
PO: Green apples, yellow apples, red apples, small apples, biggish apples, not-too-biggish apples (because they're wild - all the hundred and forty-five gallons is wild apples.
Student: Up in Maine, they leave fifty-five gallons of it.They bury it, and during the winter, and when it gets cold, it starts freezing, and, in various centers, what's left is all the alcohol and it's almost pure alcohol with little taste of apples in it - That's one way of doing fifty-five gallons.
PO: I'm sorry, say that again, What do you do now?
Student: Okay, they take a fifty-five gallon drum and fill it  full of cider, apple juice, and then they leave it out in the winter and it freezes
PO: Uh-huh
Student: and as it..and it starts on the outside and it freezes in.. but it starts fermenting (the alcohol doesn't freeze)
PO; Uh-huh
Student: The alcohol gets caught in the center of this massive frozen..
PO: So what's that good for? alcohol? or for apple cider?
Student: It's good for drinking
PO: Drinking apple cider?
Student: For drinking apple-alcohol, apple-whisky,"applejack"it's called.
PO: Well too much stuff gets you drunk, gets you weak, you know. You gotta..
Student: You don't have to drink it, you just have to smell it! - because it's pure
PO: Jack (Kerouac) used to drink a lot, you know..


But (so) there are many translations of Mayakovsky's (poems). There's a lot of.. there's different.. there's not too many of Catullus. This one is by Arthur Swanson
Student: You want another one?
PO: What?

PO: Then I wrote somesex experiments, where you get in bed with your lover and you put a typewriter where the pillow is and, as soon as you do something, you say, "Just a minute" (you type a line), and then you've got a sort of history poem of a love scene between you and your lover, of what you were doing or what the other one was doing or where were your....
[tape ends - but continues on new tape]



Student: Have you seen Jaws, the film?  It's playing right around here;
[ long pause] -

 So the main thing in writing is.. keep writing every day, you know, don't stop writing, write as much as you can, and write it, you know, and then type it up, so you can see it more clearly, that helps also, and so, in effect, you're sort of re-writing it, twice. The more you write, the more you get good at it, the more easy it is, it's likeyodelling - [Peter breaks into a vigorous yodel!]   The more you do it, the more you really get faster at it, or you slow down, or you..

Student: How do you do that?

PO: Do you folks write here? -  Just by doing it, you know, working on the farm, doing it, you know

Student: Can you sing us a song before you close down shop. Do you have your guitar or banjo with you?

PO: I don't have, no.. [Peter then breaks into a brief improvised acapella version of  "All Around The Garden"- "All around the garden, May 30th, 1973/Only planted 600 feet of Edable [sic] Pea Pods/Oh lord, how lazy can I be?" - ending with statistical delineation of "300 feet of red, white and yellow onions, 300 sweet basil transplants, and 120 feet of modern hybrid tomato transplants..200 feet of mustard greens.. a dozen egg-plants..a dozen peppers..a dozen celery..a dozen cabbages.. a dozen brussel sprouts.. a dozen broccoli, and a couple of kinds of winter squash.."

Student: Where is your garden?
PO: Up in Cherry Valley. It's not my farm, it's..  Up in New York State, yeah.
Student: How did you get the money to buy it?
PO: It's the Committee On Poetry corporation. (Allen) Ginsberg went around and gave dozens and dozens of readings.
Student: A lot of acres?
PO: Seventy-five acres.
Student; Where's Cherry Valley located?
PO: It's two hundred miles, two hundred and fifty miles, north of New York City.
Student:Who's taking care of the garden now?
PO: There's a young couple who are watching the famhouse.
Student:  (Deep in the valley?)
PO: No, it's 3,000 feet elevation.
Student: Is it strictly organic?
PO: Yeah. Everything's organic bred, yeah.
I want us to go.. There's a college nearby. I'd like to go and study soil agronomy, so I know more about balancing the soil out, but it's all organic right now.
Gordon Ball, who has been working with Allen for years, was a farm manager and he studied up on it and got, ordered, organic fertiliser and found.. and then we took the soil samples to an organic agronomist, who wrote a prescription for the garden and we followed his prescription. Could we have gotten it mixed up? Now, I don't quite know, I don't know the correct..how many pounds of phosphate to apply..I've got to figure out so I don't imbalance the soil, the mineral content.
Student; Do you have any animals?
PO: We did. We have animals, yeah. we had cows, had a big baby pet pig, chickens and ducks, and a couple of geese.
(Robert) Creeleycame by one time. Creeley dropped by on his way from Buffalo, dropped by.
[long pause]
Student: How is he?
PO: Creeley? He's fine, I think he smokes too much. He's getting his.. He's fine he's..
Student: Are his teeth (out)?
PO: I wasn't into teeth then too much. It's only lately I've gotten into teeth I don't know, I guess he's alright. He's a smart fellow, he can take care of his teeth.
Student: (But) his eye?
PO: Bob's eye?
Student: What happened? Why does he have a patch over his eye?
PO: I don't know, I don't know.
Student: He lost it?
PO: He lost it, yes? Do you know how he lost it?
Student: I thought it was aJoyce face

PO: There's one Allen used to read [a Catullus poem] , it's called "O Hymen, O Hymen" - Does anyone know that poem? [Peter is presumably refering to the repeated line - "Hymen o Hymanaee, Hymen ades o Hymanaee! - in Catullus Poem 62] -  They've got the words here in an asterisk, (so) I guess they.. Well here is this, "...Cornifici Tuo Catullo", only a different translation - [Peter begins reading] " Sick at heart Catullus, your dear friend, Sick at heart that labors to beat on.."A little something please, a word or two?/More full of tears than old Simonides" - and (then) that other one ("Egnatius quod candidos habet dentes") - " Somebody told him once he had fine white teeth/So now he smiles and smiles and smiles"... "The higher the shine on your gums we see/ the more we know you have drink of pee"]

That's an old custom you know. Russian saints they drink piss. The main monk gets high on mushrooms and the lower monks wait in line for the bottle of piss to pass to them and they drink it to get high. Mushrooms are very expensive. A good mushroom is hard to come by.
I used to do it, not all the time, I used to do it. I was taking amphetamine, like a dope, and I'd shoot up and I'd think, "My god! maybe I'm throwing something away with my piss, you know, so I'd drink my own piss, you know - I don't know, I got such bad amphetamine.. I was really insane to talk about it. But we used to.. At one time, I brought my..a little spool of my shit to Kerouac and (we were living on 2nd Street (New York City), and Kerouac had just come back across from the West Coast with Lew Welch and a Japanese writer-poet, now what's his name, ) 
Student: Albert Saijo
PO: Albert Saijo, right, and they were all excited about cleaning your asshole with water, and.. in fact they had wrote something in (it) (in) a little book called what? 
Student: Trip Trap
PO: Right. Trip Trap.  And Eleanor Roosevelt, in her big bloomers... (probably why she squirms on the seat so much because she doesn't wash her asshole with water..) had a  smear of dirt of asshole, you know.
Student: Speaking of assholes, what did you do with your stool?
PO: Huh?
Student: What did you do with your stool?
PO: I showed Jack - at some part in some conversation, you know, something or other, I don't know, I .. but that was when that Trip Trap was... - What time we got?  Three o'clock?
Student: Three o'clock
PO: Is it close-up. Yeah? - Well, I'm sorry I wasn't prepared. Maybe next year I'll be better prepared
[applause]

Audio for the above may be heard, via the Naropa Audio archives, in two segments here and here

---

Expansive Poetics - 8 - Pushkin

December 16, 2013, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 9 (The Bells and Annabel Lee)

≪ Previous: Peter Orlovsky's 1975 Naropa class (Poets Who Have Influenced Me)

$

0

0

[Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) - Self-Portrait  c. 1820]

So, last session I was reading aloud some of (Percy Bysshe) Shelley as precursor to the heroic and expansive breath that we'll try to follow for twentieth-century poetry. And there are a few other poets of the nineteenth-century that are worth noting. There's a lot of them actually but I'm zeroing in on he ones that had a big impact on my own nervous system, which is what it boils down to.
There's a line of Antonin Artaud, the French Surrealist poet, who said that there are certain human sounds, certain sounds of music, or human cries, which, entering your nervous system permanently alter the molecular structure of your body. And he himself specialized in certain high-pitched screams of agony which were supposed to have that effect on his hearers. He's celebrated for that, and there are people who still remember it, including Carl Solomon who once heard him scream and wound up in the bughouse (and Carl insists it was on account of the effect on his nervous system of Antonin Artaud screaming in Paris in 1944).




When I was in high school I began reading Russian literature and came across (Alexander) Pushkin,and I hadn't ever read much more Pushkin beyond what I read then. But there were four or five standard lyrics, translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinski, dating from (the) 1820's. And they're prophetic poems that Russian poets still rely on, as a reference point for Russian poets - partly the philosophical statement of transitoriness and gloom and time and death, and partly for the poetic prophetic statement - the trumpet-call that Pushkin blew.



So I'll read a couple of them - 1823 -"The Coach of Life" - Pushkin was born in 1799, was part black, actually, part Afric, was killed in a dual in 1827, 1837. So he died at thirty-eight. And he's still considered by most Russians to be the great mouth and mind (and also the great contender-with-empire - the contender against the Czar - the great protestor against the bureaucracy and the police.
This one's just a philosophic shot called "The Coach of Life" ["Telega zhizni"] (and the translations are relatively fustian and archaic and old-fashioned lyric, its not modern poetry, at least in translation, except for the sentiments) - [Allen reads Pushkin's "The Coach of Life" - "Though often somewhat heavy-freighted,/The coach rolls at an easy pace;/And Time, the coachman, grizzly-pated,/But smart, alert, is in his place./  We board it lightly in the morning/And on our way at once proceed/Repose and slothful comfort scorning/We shout "Hey there! Get on! Full speed!"/ Noon finds us done with reckless daring,/And shaken-up, now care's the rule/Down hills, through gulleys roughly faring/ We sulk and cry :Hey, easy, fool!"/  The coach rolls on, no pitfalls dodging, /at dusk to pains more wonted grown/ We drowse, while on the night;s dark lodging/Old coachman Time drives on, drives on" - Well, anyway.. it's not great - not in English, but it's basic. It's your basic lyric poem. That is to say, quatrains that have to do with life and death and find an excellent little image to portray it.

But what was really interesting in Pushkin (are) some visions of evil in politics and prophecy. There's one,"The Prophet", which is a standard nineteenth-century prophetic portrait of what a poet should be like, which is actually what is expected of all of you in the class. It's called "The Prophet" - [Allen reads Pushkin's "The Prophet" - "I dragged my flesh through desert gloom/Tormented by the spirit's yearning,/And saw a six-winged Seraph loom/Upon the footpath's barren turning".."My wizard eyes grew wild and wary;/an eagle's startled from her eyrie/He touched my ears and lo! a sea/Of storming voices burst on me/ I heard the whirling heavens' tremor/The angels' flight and soaring sweep/The sea-snakes coiling in the deep...".."Upon the wastes, a lifeless clod/I lay and heard the voice of God:/"Arise, o prophet, watch and hearken,/And with my Will thy soul engird,/Through lands that dim and seas that darken,/ Burn thou men's hearts with this my word'] - 
Well, every Russian poet after that has got to live up to that. And they do, actually, in a sense. The ones we'll get on to in the twentieth-century all had a living burning coal pressed into their hearts ["And in my stricken bosom pressed/Instead a coal of living fire"] , whether by suicide, or concentration camp, or starvation, or arrest.

Student: Was that translated by Yarmolinski?

AG: Well that's Babette Deutsch, actually. I think my note had Babette Deutsch, but there is an interesting book you probably can get in theNorlin Library [at the University of Colorado, Boulder], a sort of dated book, published in the (19)30's, [1921, actually] translations from modern Russian poetry,  by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinski - D-E-U-T-S-C-H - They also did the Complete Poems and Prose (sic) of Pushkin, which is in the Modern Library, which this is from, if you ever want to check out Pushkin."Eugene Onegin", his long, great poem. 

But, when I was looking at the twentieth-century, the sufferings of the twentieth-century poets - and thought, "Gee, that's all Stalin(ist)", I came across this little poem, translated in the (19)20's by Max Eastman, called"Message to Siberia" (so it's, actually, the same scene, the same Czarist, or the same terrorist.. Secretary of Terror, same King of Terror, running things). This is Pushkin, 1827, "Message to Siberia", so it's the same situation as it was in the (19)20's in this century, except repeated then. I don't know if you ever.. In other words, this is Pushkin's politics of 1827 in Russia - [Allen reads Pushkin's "Message to Siberia" - "Deep in the Siberian mine/Keep your patience proud/The bitter toil shall not be lost/The rebel thought unbowed"..."The heavy-handed chains will fall,/ The walls will crumble at a word/ And Freedom greet you in the light/And brothers give you back the sword" -  Well, that's pretty hopeful. (But)  It didn't really happen. At least not in the twentieth-century.

I was in Moscow in 1965 and got drunk in the Writers Union with (Yvgeny) Yevtushenko (who was a poet in good repute then), with a group of other poets.. all drunk, and (it was) really a bad drunk, so I blacked out and woke up the next day, not knowing how the evening had ended - pickled mushrooms and vodka!  And Yevtushenko said, "Under Stalin, between 1935 and 1953, twenty million people were taken to Siberia, and fifteen million didn't come back". Then a few days later, I saw an underground poet, Alexi Esenin Volpine, the bastard son of the poet (Sergei) Esenin, who was an outcast from the Writers Union, and I asked him if that figure was correct, and he said, "Give or take a million, that seems the figure around Moscow". And that was the first I'd heard of that, actually (well, I'd read it in the Hearst newspapers, but I thought it was Capitalist lies about Communism). So my conclusion that year was - that all of the Communist lies about Capitalism were true, and 
(that) all of the Capitalist lies about Communism were true!

The other poem - 1828 - "The Upas Tree"- Let's see if I have it right. Yeah. Also a political parable. The upas tree is a poison tree - [Allen begins reading Pushkin's "The Upas Tree" - "Within the desert like a scar/ On wastes the heat has desolated./Like a dread sentry, an antiar/ From all the world stands isolated" - (The)"antiar" must be the tree, I guess - [Allen  continues with the remaining eight stanzas] - "Nature, who  made the thirsting plains/Upon a day of anger bore it/And root and branch and inmost veins/With foulest poison did she store it"..."And in the pitch the mighty Czar/His arrows soaked without contrition,/And to his neighbors near and far/ He sped the couriers of perdition" - So this was an attack on the Czar with the most violent imagery possible. A poison tree, from which the Czar puts his arrows, a kind of interesting intense moment in nineteenth-century prophetic mind.



[Audio for the above may be heard here, for the first approximately thirteen-and-a-half minutes (it begins, for the first forty-five seconds, with Allen shuffling through his papers)]

Expansive Poetics - 9 (The Bells and Annabel Lee)

December 17, 2013, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 10 (A Digression - Metrics)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 8 - Pushkin

$

0

0

Then, in America, the most interesting person around (at) the same time (as Pushkin, in the nineteenth-century), born 1809 and died early, 1849, is Edgar Allan Poe. Are most of you familiar with Poe? How many here are familiar with Poe? How many here are not? [Students raise a show of hands] - Yeah. How many have read "The Bells"by Poe? And how many have not? Poe's "..Bells" Well, that'd be kind of interesting to do.
"The Bells" was the earliest poem that I knew, and that determined my rhythmic system, probably, because my father would go around the house reciting it, because he taught it in high school. So the way he recited it was very rapid and purely emphasizing the rhythm. Has anybody heard this read aloud? Yeah, I've read it here a few times. [Allen gives a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" - "Hear the sledges with the bells/Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells!/ How they tinkle tinkle tinkle/In the icy air of night!/While the stars that over sprinkle/All the heavens seem to twinkle/With a crystalline delight/Keeping time time time,/In a sort of Runic rhyme/To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells/From the bells, bells, bells, bells/Bells, bells, bells/ From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells".. .] - That's a real piece of sound. That's really amazing. There's not very many people who get that. That's powerful, a rhythmic cadence. Has anybody ever tried writing with that kind of jingle jangle jingle at all? It's really interesting to try.

The thing that I notice is that it's actually really rare among poets to get a construction of sound that's as definitely rhythmical as that. That is to say, you've got the rhythm, but you've also got the vocables of the sounds of the vowels that make it possible for the rhythm not to be merely sing-song but actually be clangorous and effective in the mouth and in the ear. Because he's got all that bom-hom-bom-hong-bomb-gong-bong-gong. It isn't just twit-twit-twit-twit, or twittwittwittwittwitt - wittwittwit, it's bah-bah-bough-bah-bah-bough-bah-bah-bah. (Percy Bysshe) Shelley has it - that mighty, passionate, rhythmic, force. Poe has it. I think that's the highest thing that poetry has, actually. Pure sound. Pure musical sound. Of course, a lot of people don't like it, because they say it's just stupid, that is, it's just pure sound and there's no intellect, or there's no serious conception that goes along with it (except the physical excitement in itself, (or) the ecstasy of that kind of pronouncement, is another form of intelligence. It certainly makes you more open to sympathies, the sympathies of nature, say, more open to sex, probably, makes you more open to music, to the beat of your own heart, the possibility of your own excitement. It makes you open to the possibility of your own ecstasy, and that certainly would lead to intelligence (even) if it isn't intelligence itself).
Has anybody much experience of this poem. Ever get high on it?

Student: Yeah

AG: Somebody. Has anybody ever featured this particular poem in their childhood? Or has everybody? - I don't know. It was a standard thing when I was a kid. We had it in grammar school, even - the text



(Jack) Kerouac's favorite rhythm in Poe is"Annabel Lee" - and that was one poem that Kerouac knew by heart. And I think it was the rhythm in it that he imitated, that turned him on, a very specific rhythm (as well as the dreamy symbolism) - [Allen reads Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" in its entirety] - "It was many and many a year ago/In a kingdom by the sea..."..."And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side/Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride,/In the sepulchre by the sea/ In her tomb by the sounding sea." - Well, that's a very pure continuity, (or) continuum -  "And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side/Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride  - in her dah-duh-duh-dah-duh-dah What is that? - "(all) the night-tide" - that'sanapest- anapestic rhythm. - You all know anapestic rhythm?

[Phil Ochs' recorded version of "The Bells" may be heard here,  Joan Baez's recorded version of "Annabel Lee" may be heard here - "The Bells" read byBasil Rathbone,here 
and "Annabel Lee" by Marianne Faithfull, here]

Annabel Lee" read by William Burroughs,here

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at approximately thirteen-and-a-half minutes in, and concluding at approximately twenty-three-and-a-quarter minutes in] 

Expansive Poetics - 10 (A Digression - Metrics)

December 18, 2013, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 11 ( Herman Melville)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 9 (The Bells and Annabel Lee)

$

0

0

AG: You all know anapestic rhythm? Is there anybody here that doesn't know rhythms, I guess. Well, we might as well go to the board. We won't be using this much in the twentieth-century but, just for those who don't know, this is standard (or was, at one time, standard) simple measured iamb. [ Allen proceeds to write on the blackboard]. What's an iambic pentameter line? Does anybody remember one?

Student: "Let me not to the marriage of true souls.."["Let me not to the marriage of true minds]

AG: Well, it's kind of mixed. It's "Let me not to the marriage of true.." Well, I don't know. I don't have a book of English poetry here. I keep forgetting them. Oh well, let's see..

Student: "Whether to be or not to..."

AG: Come here.. "To be or not to be, that is the question". Yeah, okay. "To be or not to be, that is the question." Of course it doesn't (fit). They never fit. But it's the general rising cadence - duh-dah-duh-dah-duh-dah-duh-dah-duh-dah. And the alternative would be trochee. That's iamb. Most of you know them. For those who don't we might as well get that in. Then there is dah-duh-dah-duh-dah-duh - "Tyger, tyger, burning bright/In the forests of the night. Trochee. Then there is dactyl - "This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the..." Homer is supposedly dactylic hexameter - Six feet - ""This is the forest primaeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks. And then, anapest - what we just had there (in Edgar Allan Poe) - "And so, all the night-tide, I lay down by the side/Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride" -  "And so, all the night-tide, I lay down by the side/Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride/ In her tomb by the sounding sea/In the sepulchre by the sea" - So that would be anapest. And those are the standards that you're supposed to learn in grammar school and high school. Did you learn those? Anybody not? Yeah. What school did you go go?

Student: What high school?

AG: Yeah?

Student: Burke High School in Omaha, Nebraska

AG: I couldn't hear you

Student: Burke High School 

AG: What city?

Student: Omaha, Nebraska

AG: And you?

Student (2): A place called Inglemoor High

AG: Where's that?    (Is) that (in the)  Northwest?
It was standard. I don't know nowadays. Things have fallen apart a bit. Those were the standard magazine verse rhythms. What was interesting was that - I've gone over (this) a few times with people with other classes, so I don't want to get too much into it, but there are a lot of varieties that are very rarely picked up on.   Is there anything I can answer. No? Anything I could answer?

Student: A poem's spondaic or spondee?

AG: Yeah. There are a lot of different varieties. We'll get to (the) spondee in a minute.
They are originally derived from the Greek. They are called "feet" - I guess this would be a poetic foot - dah-duh-duh  dah-duh-duh. It's called a "foot" because, originally, it was a dance rhythm - Dah-duh-dah  dah-duh-duh dah-duh-duh dah-duh-duh - that the Greeks used in Greek choruses. So the nomenclature for poetic feet comes from the fact that it was originally danced - it was a measure for dancing. - and chanting at the same time. So you could chant and dance. The Greek chorus could chant and dance across the stage.
But the Greeks had a much greater variety of dance rhythms and poetic rhythms than we used commonly in the early part of the century, in America and England. Because we never had the idea of.. we had dah-duh-dah or duh-duh-dah, but we never had (the Cretic foot, I think this is called) - dah-duh-duh-dah dah-duh-duh-dah dah-duh-duh-dah dah-duh-duh-dah. That's not common. That's not common. It's common in speech but not common as a poetic rhythm that you might write to scheme, or you might scheme out.
Or the Greeks also had duh-dah-duh-dah, No, Duh-dah-dah. Duh-dah-dah, duh-dah-dah,
duh-dah-dah, duh-dah-dah, duh-dah-dah, duh-dah-dah, duh-dah-dah, duh-dah-dah, duh-dah-dah, duh-dah-dah.
So there are many variatios of the three-syllable feet, like dah-duh-dah, duh-dah-duh, dah-dah... dah-dah-duh. (two sharp..) Duh-dah-dah duh-dah-dah, duh-dah-dah. Or, duh-dah-duh, duh-dah-duh. duh-dah-duh - "I'll fuck you", "I'll fuck you" - They're part of our speech. "I'll kick yuh", "I'll kick yuh", "I'll kick yuh" - or, "You kick me", "you kick me","you kick me" - or, "He'll kick 'em","He'll kick 'em","he'll kick 'em","he'll kick 'em","he'll kick 'em","he'll kick 'em" "- Duh-dah-dah. "- "He'll kick 'em", "he'll kick 'em","he'll kick 'em", "he'll kick 'em". 
Then there's a great variety that are not generally ised in English but were often used in Greek (and also by Ezra Pound, and people who studied Greek - and also by Hungarian poets, who have a great range of rhythm that they command).
Then there are four-syllable thythms, called.. I forgot. They have a name. They have a regular nomenclature. There's a little book in the (Naropa) library which has the whole system. It's a little xerox manuscript I put in a couple of years ago [editorial note: There are at least sixteen four-syllable meters. The ones Allen refers to most are the choriambic, the four paeonics, and the four epitritus meters]. But there are rhythms that go one-two-three - dah-duh-duh-dah, dah-duh-duh-dah.

Student: So was this something that was carried over from the Greek language to English translations, or..

AG: The.. Well, I just want to outline a few of the sounds first.

Student: Okay

AG: Duh-duh-dah, duh-duh-dah, duh-duh-dah, duh-duh-dah, which would be two, three, four - in other words, four-syllable meters, which we rarely encounter in English, actually. Very few people use them. And there are a number of varieties, like dah-duh-dah-dah, dah-duh-dah-dah, dah-duh-dah-dah. Or duh-dah-duh-duh, duh-dah-duh-duh, duh-dah-duh-duh,duh-dah-duh-duh, duh-dah-duh-duh. Or, duh-duh-duh-dah, duh-duh-duh-dah. In other words, your accent is in a different position than the first, second, third or fourth. Or it could be dah-dah-dah-duh, dah-dah-dah-duh. In other words, three sharp and one light. Duh-duh-dah-duh, duh-duh-dah-duh, duh-duh-dah-duh. Or, Dah-dah-duh-dah,  dah-dah-duh-dah,  dah-dah-duh-dah,  dah-dah-duh-dah. Or, Dah-duh-dah-dah, dah-duh-dah-dah, dah-duh-dah-dah. Or, dah-dah-dah-duh, dah-dah-dah-duh, dah-dah-dah-duh. Are you following? Just shifting the unaccented syllable. 
Have you heard of those? or do they teach those at all... (R) where you were educated?.. Yeah, (the) Latin would have them.
Well, there's a history in English of people who are interested in those kinds of rhythms - mainly the Renaissance poets - Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, and (Edmund) Spenser - people who went to Italy for their educations back in Renaissance times at a time of revival of Greek learning and pagan antiquity, and revival of the meters, and revival of stanza-forms - like Sappho's stanza (Sappho uses the spondee, which is two accented or two long syllables - actually, they were measuring the length of the syllable rather than the accent of the syllable).

Are people familiar with that - quantitative measure? How many here have heard of quantitative measure - the length of the syllable. We were teaching it last term. How many have not heard of quantitative syllable length? Well, I'll get into it later on, when we get to Ezra Pound, because he revived it in English for the twentieth-century, and that's his speciality. But, basically, it's just measuring the length of the vowel/

The Sapphic stanza is quantative and ends with a spondee. Some of the lines end with a spondee, and a spondee is two long (syllables) - "wave splash",  [Allen illustrates this on the blackboard] . When you measure long vowels you may do it like that instead of a sharp sound. In English, we took over the nomenclature of Greek and Latin prosody - the measure of the line - and made it into accents - a count of accents. The Greeks originally were counting he length of the vowel. Like (Ezra) Pound's "with usura" - with usury - "with usura the line grows thick" - duh-duh-dah-duh-duh-dah-duh-dah - he's hearing "with usura the line...grows...thick". It's a slow-down.  "Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet mouthed" - "sweet mouthed" is a spondee - two long vowels in a row, a foot consisting of two long vowels or two accented vowels.
This is too complicated to get into right here. Is this confusing people? Is anybody confused? Well, we'll straighten it out later.     

Student: (What is the difference between a foot and) a beat? 

AG: Well, a foot is a combination. A beat would be when you're counting (as we do, standardly, American, in English, nowadays, or 1880-1890), a beat would be the accent. No, a beat would be the stress, the stress. Duh-duh-dah duh-duh-dah duh-duh-dah. A foot of four stresses, or a foot of four syllables, one stressed and three unstressed, is duh-duh-dah, duh-duh-duh-dah, duh-duh-duh-dah. That's a foot. A four-syllable foot with four...three unaccented syllables - duh-duh-duh - and one accented syllable - dah. Or three unstressed syllables and one stressed syllable. So a foot would be four or three or two, or even one. It could be one.

Student: When you write poetry do you think about this..?

AG: Never!

Student: No?

AG: But, yes, actually, yes I do sometimes. I wouldn't start out with a scheme necessarily. I start out with a rhyme like dah-duh dah-duh dah-duh. You might start out with that kind of a rhyme - like "love me, love me, love me", "give it to me, give it to me, give it to me". I might start out with something like that - an impulse like that - and then want to reproduce it and then it might stumble. So then I might analyze it and say "duh-duh-dah-duh, dah-dah-duh-duh dah-duh-duh-duh dah-dah-duh-duh, dah-dah-duh-duh" - That is an actual meter - "Dah-dah-duh-duh" [editorial note - it's calledionic a maiore - "high hat into"] - two stessed syllables and two unstressed. That is a foot. So I might want to reproduce the foot. Or I might use these kind of analytics to analyze a line that doesn't fit right (or) doesn't sound right. I was writing a poem called "Plutonian Ode"(which you heard me read). So I actually figured out the line at one point.. I got to a line of "Over your dreadful vibration this measured harmony floats audible" - talking to plutonium - "Over your..." And I wanted to continue the line but I had to figure out what meter I was using, in order to continue the line. So it was  "Over your dreadful vibration this measured harmony floats audible". Well, it was basically dah-duh-duh, dah-duh-duh, dah-duh-duh, dah-duh-duh, or dactyl, I guess. That was dactyl, wasn't it?  I forgot - dah-duh-duh - [it is] -  "Over your dreadful vibration this measured harmony floats audible/These jubilant.."  - duh-dah-dah-duh-dah - "These jubilant tones are honey and milk and wine-sweet water poured on the stone block floor". Well, I didn't stick to a consistent thing, but I wanted to know what I was doing so I'd know where to vary,
So it's useful, if you're tinkering at the level or height of ecstatic rhythm, like you've got in (Edgar Allan) Poe, or you might have in "Howl", or some kind of heroical poem - (Percy Bysshe) Shelley?  It's really useful to know what the count is, so you can always reproduce it and extend it another two or three lines, if you want. If you get a run, that's really nice. (If you) get a run that's getting sort of orgasmic and building up, then you might want to extend it, so you want to know what the beat is. It's useful. But I wouldn't... 
What one does is absorbs the poems into your nervous system, like "Annabel Lee" - duh-dah-dah-dah - "So all the night-tide, I lie down by the side" - that's reversed a little. That is, you absorb the poem in the body, and that influences you, so that you come up with variants of those rhythms. Does that make sense?

Student: Um-hmm

AG: So, in other words, the best way to learn is (to) just take strong pieces of rhythm that attract (you when) you hear them. Maybe you can analayze and find out later what they are but to absorb them into your body by repeating them aloud.

Student: And then try to write in that style in your own...

AG: You don't have to try. I think that if it gets into your nervous system, then it comes out. It just comes out naturally. In other words, after a while you tend to think in those forms, in those cadences, tend to feel those cadences, or you recognize yourself talking in those cadences, or you recognize yourself talking in them. 
There was one cadence I thought was very interesting that was used... it was a five-syllable foot, five-syllable meter, called dochmiacmeter, that was traditionally used by Greek dramatists at the height of the revelation in the Greek play. At the moment when Oedipus discovers that he's married his mother and killed his father and gives a great cry, it would be "Dah dah duh dah dah", something like that [the dochmiac is actually -unstressed, stressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed - "I bit off his nose"] (which, in English, we have in milder (form) in Ben Jonson - "Droop herbs and flowers/Fall fruits in showers" - Dah-dah-duh-dah-dah - "Fall fruits in showers" [editorial note, the actual line is "Fall grief in showers" - and inHart Crane, (in the) twentieth-century, more powerfully - "Lo, Lord Thou ridest!/Lord, lord, Thy swifting heart/ Nought stayeth, nought now bideth/But's smithereened apart!" - but "Lo, Lord Thou ridest!.." - the hurricane - bom-bom-puh-dah-dah - and that's a single recognizable foot, actually (as a dance foot- you can imagine (it) - bom-bom-puh-dah-dah - that'd be great)).
["Dah dah duh dah dah" - Randy Roark transcriber's note: "Although there are four five-syllable meters listed on the hand-out Ginsberg distributed to his classes, I can find none approximating this one. "Lo, Lord Thou ridest!" is anaclastic or hypodochmius, but it's stressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed, unstressed"] 
"The Raven" by Poe is dah-duh-dah-duh, dah-duh-dah-duh, dah-duh-dah-duh, dah-duh-dah-duh. One, two, three, four - it's a four syllable. "Once upon a.." - well, it could either be a four-syllable - "Once upon a.." - "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered , weak and weary,/Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" - or else just trochee - "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered , weak and weary" - Everybody know "The Raven"? Anybody here never heard "The Raven"? Anybody? "The Raven" is the one poem that finally penetrated through every skull. Terrific. I always liked that one.

[Audio for the above can be found here, beginning at approximately twenty-three-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in]

Expansive Poetics - 11 ( Herman Melville)

December 19, 2013, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 157

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 10 (A Digression - Metrics)

$

0

0

AG: Then, another heroic precursor, nineteenth-century, is Herman Melville, as a poet. How many here have run across Melville as a poet? Yeah. Has anybody here read Melville as a prose writer? - Moby Dick?  That's much more common. And how many have seen his poetry again [show of hands] - Yeah - I think he's one of the four great poets of the nineteenth-century - (Emily) Dickinson, (Herman) Melville, (Edgar Allan) Poe (and) (Walt) Whitman. His work in poetry isn't as well known, but it's great. And he's got a big thick book. Robert Penn Warren did a selection of them back in 1967, and then a guy calledHoward P Vincentdid a Collected Melville - (a) thick volume, about eight-hundred pages (five-, six-, seven-hundred pages)). University of Nebraska, back in the (19)40's. His poetry is almost Shakesperean in some ways. Let's see what we've got here.

Peter Orlovsky: Did he read a lot of (William) Shakespeare?

AG; He read a lot of Shakespeare, yeah - Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne, and the great English prose writers


[Sir Thomas Browne 1605-1682]

There are a  few poems by Melville that I'll bring up. How many have read "Billy Budd" - the handsome sailor?. There's a poem at the end of "Billy Budd" that's very beautiful, that has a Shakespearean ending, actually. Billy is a handsome boy who is attacked by some evil, covetous, first-mate, who loves him in secret and so contends with him, and puts him up-tight, and lies about it, and says that Billy is trying to start a revolution, a mutiny - and Billy is so outraged by this when he finally hears about it, and confronts.. Innocent Billy is so outraged that he stammers, and suddenly strikes out, and with one blow kills Claggart, the evil guy. And then Captain Vere, who has to judge in this situation, says, "Well, you've got to die for it. You broke the law. You "fought the law and the law won" - So this is Billy's "I Fought The Law and The Law Won"- Billy is tied up [Allen begins reading Melville's poem - "Good of the chaplain to enter Lone Bay/And down on his narrowbones here and pray/ For the likes just o' me, Billy Budd..but look -/Through the port comes the moonshine astray".."..me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep/Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep./I feel it stealing now, Sentry, are you there?/ Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair,/I am sleepy and the oozy weeds about me twist" - So the thing with him (as with Moby Dick) there's that vowelic melody - "I am sleepy and the oozy weeds about me twist" - Like the last line ending his great prose-poem,Pierre - "and her long hair fell over him and arbored him in ebon vines" -" And her long hair fell over him and arbored him in ebon vines" - that's the line of a novel, Pierre.


[Terence Stamp (Billy) and Robert Ryan (Claggart) in the 1962 screen adaptation of Billy Budd]

And so there's a kind of power-sound he gets - There's a famous poem called"The House-top", from New York, July 1863, when there were Draft Riots. He went upon the roof of his house on Twenty-third  Street and heard the noise of people screaming, and shots. This is when (President Abraham) Lincoln, I think, ordered troops to fire on the draft rioters.

So, it's called "The House-top - A Night Piece" - Now, "Draco" - who knows? - Draco? - you know the term "Draconian laws"? 


                         [NewYork City Draft Riots 1863 - contemporaneous image from The Illustrated London News]

Student: Sure

AG: Draco was an Emperor, a Roman Emperor, who came and gave... Roman? What?

Student: It's Greek.

AG: Greek?

Student: Spartan

AG: Spartan, yeah - What's the story of Draco and his harsh laws?  

Studen: I think he was an Archon, who, during a time of trouble, set up some laws to stabilize the state

AG: Yeah, and the phrase (adjective) "Draconian laws" means really tough, tough laws - chop your hands off for stealing a pea!

And "Calvin's creed measured" here is the creed that, if you are prosperous, you'll be prosperous. And if you're pre-destined to be damned, you can see it by the weak look on your face, and the fact that you ain't got no money in your pocket, and you're going around asking for spare change" - [Allen then begins reading "The House-top - A Night Piece"] - "No sleep, the sultriness pervades the air/And binds the brain - a dense oppression such/As tawny tigers feel in matted shades/ Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage" - that's very Shakespearean - "Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage./ Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads/Vacant as Libya.." - That's a real Kerouac-ian line - and Shakespearean - "Beneath the stars" - This is New York City, Manhattan - Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads/Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by./Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf/Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot/ Yonder, where parching Sirious.." - the star - [Allen continues, reading the poem] - "..set in drought,/Balefully glares red arson.."...  "The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied/Which holds that Man is naturally good,/ And - more - is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged"..] - Are you (were you) able to follow? - Well, (so), he's up on the roof. There's a vast solitude of roofy desert, "vacant as Libya", everything is hushed, but from down on around Wall Street, Twenty-third (Street) to Wall Street, he hears a rioting, the roar of the draft riot....[Allen continues] - "Yonder where the dog star Sirius, is setting.." - Downtown, I guess. In the south, that would be - Where does Sirius set in the sky? 




Student: In the north?

Student: Isn't there some relationship to the Big Dipper?

AG: Does anybody know?

Student: It's part of  Canis Major

AG: So if you were in Manhattan, looking at Sirius, what direction would that be? Uptown? Downtown?

Student: (Well, it would depend what time of the year it was)

AG: Well this is July. Anybody know astronomy..?

Student: Nobody can see the stars in Manhattan anyway!

AG: Anyway, whatever direction Sirius is, there are burning buildings..."Balefully glares red arson" - Arson is the burning up of buildings. All the hippies, and draft-rioters, and Yippies, and Dippies, are out making riots - "The town is taken by its rats - ship-rats/ And rats of the wharves" - All the conventions, or "civil charms'' ("All civil charms/And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe.."), or agreements (social agreements) that kept order so nobody was sticking each other in the teeth....

Peter Orlovsky: This was the Civil War?



AG: Yeah. There were draft riots. People didn't want to be drafted to go down and fight. "All civil charms" which kept people in order are suddenly dissolved and it looks like everybody's turning into beasts, going back aeons in time. And then, all of a sudden, you hear the fire engines and the paddy wagons coming up - "Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead/And ponderous drag that jars the wall", as they bring up the cannon (and I guess with horses - I guess it was a horse-drawn cannon, and horse-drawn...)

Peter Orlovsky: To shoot at the draft resisters?

AG: Yeah, to shoot at the rioters.  I love that line  - - "Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead/And ponderous drag that jars the wall" -  "ponderous drag that jars the wall" - he has a fantastic ear. It's very distinct...

Student: Who is this?

AG: Herman Melville!. - the author of Moby Dick, writing poems...

Peter Orlovsky: But why "hail"? Is he.. he's..

AG: Well, I guess he's..

Peter Orlovsky: ..happy the riot's being stopped? - or..?

AG: Well, I think he was on the Northern side and he thought slavery was a bad thing. But, also, I don't think he was that much involved, in a sense of judging. It was just that it reminded him of an old Roman riot, the clang of a Roman scene..

Peter Orlovsky: You think..

AG: But he's got Rome mixed up with Greece. He's talking about Draco coming and then "nature"'s Roman ("aeons back in nature"). So he's got it mixed. That's why I got it mixed up.

Student: Do you think..do you think that the reference to ship's rats is indicative of the fact of, you know, that, in contemporary times, a riot was seen as being perpetrated by shady outcasts of society?

AG: Probably. Just like now. Because he's calling them "ship-rats" - "The atheist roar of riot" (is) interesting too - the atheistical subversives! - "godless Communists"!



Peter Orlovsky: Wasn't Melville.. Wasn't Melville an atheist?

AG: Later, I think he got to be, yeah. But I don't know. Well, I don't know. He was fighting with it, sort of. Because the whole point of Melville ( is) he's got his hero chasing God, chasing the big white whale, or chasing the vast abstraction.

Peter Orlovsky: Where was Melville, when this was.. I mean..

AG: Out..

Peter Orlovsky: Whitman? (Walt) Whitman..?

AG: Whitman, I think, was in Washington, taking care of the wounded.

Student: The ship's rats there are probably immigrants...

AG: Maybe..But (so) you were mostly able to follow it? - It just went on to say, so the troops are coming to shoot at the rioters - "Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll/ Of black artillery"- That's the line I like the best - "Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll/ Of black artillery" - See, it's actually a round thing in your mouth when you pronounce it. It's like cocksucking or something! -"Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll/Of black artillery"- You've got a thing in your mouth there when you're pronouncing it, an "air-cock" is what I'm saying, you've got an "air-erection" in your mouth! 

No, but the physical mouthing of the language is what gives the power, I think - the realization of the hollow vowels, the hollow-ness of the vowels. It's like, in a state of inspiration the body becomes a column of air, actually. You've heard that description?.. like the empty body becomes a column of air. The body seems to be hollow and become a column of air, very light. And that's the actual physical sensation of a state of inspiration. Has anybody experienced that? You might get it, say, in a love situation, where you're talking, or perhaps in an anger situation - righteous wrath - duh-dah! - But when the speech is unobstructed and breath is unobstructed and it feels like a column of air or a hollow reed..



So, he comes, Draco, the dictator comes, to restore law and order, the man on horseback, as we know him these days, "though late". 
I didn't understand the (next) line(s) - "In code corroborating Calvin's creed/And cynic tyrannies of honest kings" -  "cynic tyrannies of honest kings"? - what is that? - (Henry) Kissinger? - "cynic tyrannies" - or is it just...

Student:  He seems ambivalent of  himself or the situation.

AG: Pardon me?

Student: He seems ambivalent

AG: Oh, yes, he is. Oh, definitely, definitely. And actually what he says - "and the Town redeemed/Give thanks devout' - the dumb fucks are glad to be rescued from themselves!

Student: Yeah.

AG: "(N)or, being thankful" - The crowd, the town, doesn't heed that it's a big insult to the original conception of the Republic - the original conception, the faith, of the Republic, which was that that Man is naturally good, and is not going to be punished. Like the Roman citizen - you don't get punished - you're a free man. You might punish the slaves, but not the citizens. But here he's saying that they're asking for it, they're asking for it from above.

I'm interested in his rhythm and his sound. Here's an interesting piece of (short quatrain) rhetoric - "Implacable I, the old implacable Sea;/ Implacable most when most I smile serene --/ Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me" [section V of his poem "Pebbles"] - talking about the ocean - "Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me" - or his person - "Pleased, not appeased, by myriad" failures of his life.  Then next ["Healed of my Hurt"] -"Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea -/ Yes, bless the Angels Four that here convene/ For healed I am even by their pitiless breath/Distilled in wholesome dew named rosmarine " -  Just so pretty! - but also powerful -   "Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea.." - it's old-fashioned rhetoric -  Yes, bless the Angels Four that here convene " - "Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea" - try that on - try "laud(ing) the inhuman Sea".



Then he has a really interesting poem during the Civil War (or a few interesting lines in it (that) I like). (It's called)"The Swamp Angel. I've mentioned it before a few times. This particular poem had quite an effect on (Jack) Kerouac's adjective and rhetoric - "There is a coal-black Angel/ with a thick Afric lip.." You know that? Did I bring that up before (I think I mentioned it before) - "The Swamp Angel" - [Allen reads Melvlle's "The Swamp Angel" - "There is a coal-black Angel/ with a thick Afric lip/And he dwells (like the hunted and harried)/In a swamp where the green frogs dip"..."Who weeps for the woeful City,/Let him weep for our guilty kind -/Who joys at her wild despairing -/Christ, the Forgiver, convert his mind." - So the "Swamp Angel" is a cannon. You all got that? Anybody pick that up?  -  "There is a coal-black Angel/ with a thick Afric lip.." - There's also a parable of the guilt over slavery, I imagine. Interesting. "Vainly she calls upon Michael/(The white man's seraph was he)" - I never thought of that. But I liked the way he said “Afric” (he cut the adjective, instead of “African” – “Afric) – and “tropic” instead of “tropical”  - “tropic” – “Carib” – “Has thou sailed on Carib waters toward the Afric shores?”...

AG:  Then, “A Canticle Significant of the National Exaltation of Enthusiasm at the Close of the War”– this is his poem at the end of the Civil War. And it has a refrain which is really amazing. It’s a little bombastic, I think, but the refrain that he repeats several times is really something worthy ofBeethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as a chorale. [Allen proceeds to read, in its entirety, Melville’s , “A Canticle Significant of the National Exaltation of Enthusiasm at the Close of the War” – “O the precipice Titanic/Of the congregated Fall/And the angle oceanic/Where the deepening thunders call…”…”Thou Lord of hosts victorious/Fulfill the end designed/By a wondrous way and glorious/A passage Thou dost find -/A passage Thou dost find/ Hosanna to the Lord of Hosts/The Hosts of human kind” – I just like those two lines –“ A passage Thou dost find -/A passage Thou dost find” – [Allen continues] – And the rest is weirdly interesting, like I don’t understand the  “But the foamy deep unsounded/And the dim and dizzy ledge,/And the booming roar rebounded,/And the gull that skims the edge” – Well, some vision of the ocean – “The Giant of the Pool/ Heaves his forehead what as wool” – (I don’t know what that is) -  “Towards the Iris/Rainbow.. ever climbing/ From the Cataracts that call -/irremovable vast arras/Draping all the wall.” – This is somewhere in Poe-Land, Edgar Allan PoeLand. 

You’ll have copies of all these poems when we xerox up our book so you can examine them..examine them yourself.

There’s an interesting prophetic verse on America also. I  don’t think I have the full thing here, though. Let’s see.

Then there’s one other national prophetic one, that’s sort of like (Bob) Dylan’s poem [sic], “Idiot Wind” – it’s like (Melville’s) “Idiot Wind” – a poem called “America”. I don’t have the full text, but the lines in it that I thought were interesting were, “So foul a dream upon so fair a face” – for America - So foul a dream upon so fair a face/And the dreamer lying in that starry shroud” – It’s kind of interesting – two lines in it – The Civil War – the slavery he was talking about and the battles of the Civil War – the flag – “that starry shroud”  


[Civil War Quilt (1864) - from the collection of the Belfast Historical Society, Belfast, Maine]

And there’s another aspect of him which is extremely tender. Recollections of young fellows he loved when he was young and sailed with, when he was a sailor, put together with some sense of later (Walt) Whitman– that the United States was turning into a  MammonMoloch material late-Roman civilization that was wrecking everything fine and original and individualistic. So there’s a tiny short poem that’s equal to some of the more delicate poems of William Butler Yeats on the subject of the cycles of time and civilization. It’s called“The Ravaged Villa”– just eight lines [Allen reads, in its entirety, Herman Melville’s “The Ravaged Villa”] –“In shards the sylvan vases lie,/Their links of dance undone/And brambles wither by thy brim/Choked fountain of the sun!/The spider in the laurel spins, /The weed exiles the flower:/And flung to kiln Apollo’s bust/Makes lime for Mammon’s tower.” – That’s great, short, sharp, precise, clear – “In shards the sylvan” is pastoral  - (an older..a villa in Italy, actually, he’s talking about)  - in “shards”, pieces, fragments, the “sylvan vases” (like the“Grecian Urn” that you remember) –“In shards the sylvan vases lie,/Their links of dance undone” - (because on those on those vases there were linked dancers incised, or carved, or painted), so “Their links of dance undone/And brambles wither by thy brim/Choked fountain of the sun” – So it’s a Roman fountain in sunlight, but “brambles withering by the brim”, so no longer water. “The spider in the laurel spins” – The laurel is for what? – What’s the laurel crown? – That’s poetic.

Student: Victory

AG: Victory.. military victory

Student:  Or poetic also?

AG:  Civic victory?

AG:  Oak is military. Laurel, I think, is..poetic..yeah

Student: Definitely



AG: So, “The spider in the laurel spins” – that’s the worst prophecy that he could have for himself – “The weed exiles the flower:/And flung to kiln Apollo’s bust/Makes lime for Mammon’s tower.” – which was literal. there was.. I think, there was a point in time when the Turkish occupation of Athens, when they used the Parthenonfor a…

Student: They stored ammunition…

AG: Stored their ammunition. And I think, at some point or other (I’ve forgotten where, in Rome, or in Greece - or both), a lot of old marble statuary was ground down to make limestone, for medieval churches probably - do you know?  do you remember?

Student: Well, it happened all over Italy so you will find medieval buildings that have Roman stones that.. there are too many to number.. 

AG: Yes, I think there was actually one period when, actually, stones were being ground down for lime.. (from) marble, the better marble would be ground down to make lime.. but,  I don't know.. Limestone? Limestone? Lime comes from limestone?

Student:(Typically) limestone is used to make cement [editorial note -  more specifically, cement is formed from a powder of calcined limestone and clay, mixed with water]

AG: Limestone was used for cement? 

Student: The lime in the marble.. the marble-lime combination was used to make cement. 

AG: Do you know what particular period or what particular occasion that.. Was there any particular historical period when this was rampant?

Student: It was was one, the beginning of the fifteenth-century.. especially the... - no, excuse me, I'm thinking of something else..

Student: I remember when they were building St. Peters in Rome, they used the RomanColiseum as a quarry for stones.

AG: Yea, yeah, that part I know, that part I know. I was just wondering about the literal thing of grinding down the marble to make lime - grinding down Mona Lisa's nose! Winged Victory's wing or arms!


[The Winged Victory of Samothrace - Parian marble - by an unknown Greek Sculptor  (200-190 BC) - in the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris]

The last poem of Melville's that I have here is"To Ned (Bunn)", who was a sailor friend of his when he was young, and this was written in his old age, looking back on the decline of nature, on "Silent Spring", so to speak, looking back on the corruption of the South Sea Islands, which  once were paradise islands for him when he visited them with Ned Bunn when he was young. And now, later, in a book calledJohn Marr and Other Sailors, he goes back and recollects, like an old sailor talking to his wife, over a cup of coffee and a pipe, by the fire-side, retired from the ocean - [Allen proceeds to read "To Ned Bunn"] - "Where is the world we rovd, Ned Bunn?/Hollows thereof lay rich in shade/By voyages old inviolate thrown/Ere Paul Pry cruised with Pelf and Trade"..."But ere, in anchor-watches calm,/The Indian Psyche's langour won/And, musing, breathed primeval balm/From Edens ere yet overrun;/Marvelling mild if mortal twice,/Here and hereafter, touch a Paradise." - So, could you follow the sense of that? The thing I liked was "Enamoring of what years and years - /Ah Ned, what years and years ago!" - that's so sentimental! (just repeating the "years" over) - "But, tell" (the thythm is very delicate too) - "But tell, shall he, the tourist find/Our isles the same in violet-glow/Enamoring of what years and years -/ Ah, Ned, what years and years ago!". There, the traditional rhetoric of this kind of poem is just like somebody really talking for real - just sighing and talking - "Ah Ned, what years and years ago!" - it's nice to be old enough to feel that, actually.  

[South Sea Islands Schooner]

Peter Orlovsky: What year of shipping is that?

AG: Well, let's see, he mentions Typee, which is a South Sea island novel he wrote when he was shipping out with Ned Bunn. And when was Melville shipping out to the South Seas?

Peter Orlovsky: Eighteen twenty something

AG: Anybody know? Well, let's see, Melville is what? - I'll find out [ Allen consults his book] - "born  1819, died 1891, and he was on the sea when he was twenty, so 1840-1845, I guess. So there's Melville.

Peter Orlovsky: It's always the way that things.. actually, when they sailed 1840

AG: "Authentic Edens.." - what is it? - "Authentic Edens in a Pagan sea." - "The Typee-truants under stars/Unknown to Shakespeare's Midsummer-Night" -  "...Adam advances, smart in pace" - I like the line "Adam advances" - mankind - "smart in pace" - if you're nineteenth-century - or mankind is getting smart -  his step forward - "But scarce by violets that advance you trace" - You can't trace the advance of manind by the strewn violet flowers. It's more "Pelf and pride" ("Pelf and Trade")

Peter Orlovsky: What does "Pelf" mean? [ editorial note - "Pelf" means wealth or riches]

AG:  What is "Pelf"? It's a biblical word. People were looking for their own "pelf and pride", or something  - their own skin and pride? - Pelf?  Who knows that? It's a common phrase.

Student: Money

AG: Money?

Student: Um-hmm

AG: I don't know.. 

Student: Uh-huh.

AG; It's a phrase I used to hear in sermons all the time - Man's only interested in his own pelf and pride!

["There are some spirits nobly just, unwarp'd by pelf or pride/Great in the calm but greater still when dashed by adverse tide" (Eliza Cook (1818-1889)]     

[Audio for the above can be found here, beginning at approximately forty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately seventy-seven minutes in 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 157

December 20, 2013, 4:00 am

≫ Next: Jewel Heart Howl Reading

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 11 ( Herman Melville)

$

0

0

[Allen Ginsberg by Dan Bratton (with digital enhancement by Steve Silberman]

New books from theUniversity of California Press noted on the horizon (we'll be saying more about them all in the weeks ahead) - Robert Duncan's  Collected Essays and Other Prose and Collected Later Poems and Plays(the introduction to which by the editor, Peter Quartermain can be read here) and (eagerly-awaited) Robert Creeley's Selected Letters
(for those of you who missed it,here's a taste from last October's Poetry magazine - Rod Smith's introductory note's here - there's also a glimpse, some further early missives, on the UCP author's page).

and Peter Orlovsky and Allen's extraordinary love-letters - Maria Popova’s gleanings, last week on BrainPickingsreminded us of this particular remarkable volume, not exactly a stocking-stuffer, (and long-time out-of-print), but a singularly important title – Straight Hearts Delight





"Dear Petey, O Heart O Love everything is suddenly turned to gold!.." (A.G., 1958)
"Hello Hinde Long Sweet Beard Hair Eyes - Was just crying thinking you may die before we meet again..." (P.O., 1963)

We confess we were a little alarmed when we read Sarah Tomlinson's piece in the current Volume 1.Brooklyn - "The Last Soup of Allen Ginsberg" - Someone stole the soup?  (Steve Silberman's definitive piece from 2001 in The New Yorker on the legendary soup, preserved "for the benefit of future scholars", may profitably be read here). 
That line about serving it up to her sister (even just a single spoonful - a guarenteed recipe for botulism, even a few days past its making) alerted us to the likelihood of fantasy-fiction. A phone-call to Soup Central (current location of the beleaguered endangered artifact) verified the facts. The historic mush, you'll be pleased to hear, continues to be preserved and respected. Meanwhile, while we're on the subject of Allen's culinary habits, guess it's too cold these days for a spot of borscht?  

Michael Horovitz and Barry Miles' Ginsberg profile on BBC Radio 4 is now up on line and can be listened to here 

Producer Ali Skye Bennet announces her "Untitled Allen Ginsberg Project", a projected 2014 theatrical event, an attempt at "a  Howl for the 21st Century" - "The cultural, social and political landscape may be different now", she writes, "but our howl - for recognition, revolution, and solidarity - is the same."

Jewel Heart Howl Reading

December 21, 2013, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Allen Ginsberg & Bob Dylan at the Grave of Jack Kerouac

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 157

$

0

0

,






Allen Ginsberg reads "Howl" in 1994 at the Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan, at a benefit for Jewel Heart

From the program notes:

On "Howl, for Carl Solomon"

Allen Ginsberg's writing and first reading of "Howl, for Carl Solomon" in 1955 marked a change in American letters and public life that is still unfolding today. Some felt that both "Howl"'s words and the act of speaking them aloud were profoundly liberating, while others thought that they were a threat to public order.

Ginsberg himself, at the start of writing, felt that the emerging poem could never have a public existence. He later recalled:

I sat idly by my desk at the first floor window facing Montgomery Street [in San Francisco]...I began typing not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but  stating my imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth. As my loves were impractical and my thoughts relatively unworldly, I had nothing to gain, only the pleasure of enjoying on paper those sympathies most intimate to myself and most awkward in the great world of family, formal education, business and current literature.

The story of "Howl"'s development is of Ginsberg's willingness to at last speak the "unspeakable", to accept what most wanted to be said - first to himself, then to those he loved and trusted, finally to everyone.

Though Ginsberg finished "Howl" in a few months, in a sense its composition included the previous decade of Ginsberg's struggles with his muse and with society. The poem goes to the heart of  the conflict between our experience as persons and the requirements of a society that feels both rigid and out of control. As Ginsberg wrote in 1986:    

The unworldly love hypostatized as comradeship through thick and thin with Carl Solomon rose out of primordial filial loyalty to my mother, then in distress. Where mother love conflicts with social facade, the die is cast from antiquity in favor of sympathy
Blocked by appearances love comes through in the free play of the imagination...a shrewd humor that protects our unobstructed sympathy from chaos. The matter is in objective acknowledgment of emotion.

 In 1955 poetry largely stayed on the printed page. Today it walks abroad, finds audiences in public places, and seeks out musicians and makers of images in a way that was inconceivable back then. More than any other single poem, "Howl" was the catalyst for this change. Ginsberg's first reading of it - in a packed art gallery, where Gary Snyder also read and Jack Kerouac shouted encouragement - was charged with the excitement of transgression and breakthrough of new energy and generosity.  

As a sidelight, Ginsberg adds, I thought to disseminate a poem so strong that a clean Saxon four-letter word might enter high school anthologies permanently... "Howl" has long since won its court battles against the censors. But its affirmation of personal experience - physical, sexual, emotional, intellectual, political and spiritual - against all the forces of denial still carries the excitement of happy transgression.

You have to be inspired to write something like that. It's not something you can very easily do just by pressing a button. You have to have the right historical situation, the right physical combination, the right mental formation, the right courage, the right sense of prophecy, and the right information

Allen Ginsberg, 1982

Allen Ginsberg & Bob Dylan at the Grave of Jack Kerouac

December 23, 2013, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Jack Kerouac's Christmas

≪ Previous: Jewel Heart Howl Reading

$

0

0

This little excerpt, this classic excerpt, fromBob Dylan's lost epic, "Renaldo and Clara"
(courtesy of the essential"The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg", Jerry Aronson's deluxe two-disc DVD set). 

Bob and Allen, in 1975, in Lowell cemetery (Edson cemetery), on the occasion of a stop-over on the legendary Rolling Thunder tour, famously standing together, beside Jack Kerouac's grave, musing, (Allen's certainly taking the lead), in memento mori. 

Allen (gesticulating towards the grave):"So that's what's gonna happen to you?" 
Dylan: "No, I want to be in an unmarked grave."

The clip begins with Allen reading from Kerouac (from the conclusion of Mexico City Blues' "54th Chorus")
"Once I went to a movie/ At midnight, 1940, Mice/ and Men, the name of it, the Red Block Boxcars/ Rolling by (on the Screen). Yessir/ life/ finally/ gets/ tired/of/ living -. On both occasions I had wild/ Face looking into lights/Of Streets where phantoms/ Hastened out of sight/ Into Memorial Cello Time"

AG: You know what's written on (John) Keats' grave?

BD: No

AG: "Here lies one whose fame was writ in water"..writ in water, yeah, all his fame was writ in water [Editorial note - Allen, actually, mis-quotes here - his "name" was writ in water, not his "fame"] 



BD: Where's he buried?

AG: He's buried in a beautiful cemetery in Rome, the American cemetery [Cimitero Accattolico (the A-Catholic Cemetery - the Non-Catholic Cemetery)] - in a Pyramid, next to (Percy Bysshe) Shelley [Editorial note - well, not in the Pyramid of Cestius, and not, strictly, next to Shelley, but, yes, in the cemetery, close by] 

BD: We have to read this?



[The two read, in collaboration, from Kerouac's Mexico City Blues - ". Allen begins, reading, at random, from towards the end of the "230th Chorus"]
AG: "..frozen /and sliced microscopically/ In Morgues of the North" - [Editorial note - The complete line is "Pieces of the Buddha-material frozen/and sliced microscopically/ In Morgues of the North"]

BD:  "Quivering meat of elephants.."

AG:   "of kindness" - [Editorial note - The complete line is "The quivering meat of the elephants of kindness/being torn apart like vultures"] 
What I liked actually was (the next line) "Conceptions of knee-caps" - [Editorial note -"Conceptions of delicate kneecaps"] (and the concluding line) "Like kissing  my kitten in the belly/The softness of our reward". It's like a Shakespeare sonnet that ends funny. 
He quit football because he wanted to study Shakespeare.

So Sebastian [Sampas] went off to war and got killed in Anzio beachhead in World War II, and just before he died, he sent Jack a litle phonograph record with Shelley's Adonais, saying "I weep for Adonais - he is dead!"


[Sebastian "Sammy" Sampas (1922-1944)]

BD: Ever been to (Anton) Chekov's grave? 



AG: No, but I've been to (Vladimir) Mayakovsky's in Moscow




What graves have you seen?

BD: Victor Hugo's grave



AG: I used to haunt graveyards in Paris. I went to see (Guilllaume) Apollinaire's grave.



AG: So, that's what's gonna happen to you?

BD: No, I want to be in an unmarked grave

AG: I laid a copy of Howl on (Charles) Baudelaire's grave....

---

Jack Kerouac's Christmas

December 25, 2013, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round-Up -158

≪ Previous: Allen Ginsberg & Bob Dylan at the Grave of Jack Kerouac

$

0

0

NOT LONG AGO JOY ABOUNDED AT CHRISTMAS 

"I think the celebration of Christmas has changed within the short span of my own lifetime. Only twenty years ago, before World War II [sic] it seemed that Christmas was still being celebrated with a naive and joyous innocence whereas today you hear the expression, "Christmas comes once a year like taxes". Christmas was observed all out in my Catholic French-Canadian environment in (the) 1930's, much as it is today in Mexico. At first I was too young to go to midnight mass, but that was the real big event we hoped to grow up to. Until then we'd stay in our beds pretending to be asleep till we heard the parents leaving for midnight mass and then we'd come down and sneak a look at our toys, touching them and putting them back in place, and rush up again in the dark in gleeful pajamas tittering when we heard them come back again, usually now with a big gang of friends for the open house party.
When we were old enough it was thrilling to be allowed to stay up late on Christmas Eve and put on best suits and dresses and overshoes and ear-muffs and walk with the adults through crunching dried snow to the bell-ringing church. Parties of people laughing down the street, bright throbbing stars of New England winter bending over rooftops sometimes causing long rows of icicles to shimmer as we passed. Near the church you could hear the opening choruses of Bach being sung by child choirs mingled with the grownup choirs usually led by a tenor who inspired laughter more than anything else. But from the wide-open door of the church poured golden light and inside the little girls were lined up for their trumpet choruses caroling Handel.



My favorite object in the church was the statue of the saint holding little Jesus in his arms. This was the statue of St Antoine de Padoue but I always thought it was St. Joseph and felt that it was quite just that I should hold Him in his arms. My eyes always strayed to his statue, he who now with demure plaster countenance, holding the insubstantial child with face too small and body too doll like, pressed cheek against the painted curls, supporting in mid-air lightly against his mysterious infinite breast the Son, downward looking into candles, agony, the foot of the world, where we kneeled in dark vestments of winter, all the angels and calendars and spirey altars behind him, his eyes lowered to a mystery he himself wasn't let in on, yet he'd go along in the belief that poor St.Joseph was clay to the Hand of God (as I thought), a humble self-admitting truthful saint - with none of the vain freneticisms of the martyrs, a saint without glory, guilt, accomplishment or Franciscan charm - a self-effacing grave and demure ghost in the Arcades of Christendom - he who knew the desert stars, and spat with the Wise Men in back of the barn - arranger of the manger, old hobo saint of haylofts and camel trails - my secret Friend. Now in midnight mass I gloried proudly in his new honorable position at the front of the church, standing over his family in the manger where all eyes were turned



After mass the open house was on. Gangs would troop back home or to other houses. Collectors for a Christmas organization of Medieval origin and preserved by the French of Quebec and New England, called "La Guignolee", and now sponsored by the Society for the Poor, St.Vincent de Paul, would appear at these open house parties and collect old clothes and food for the poor and never turn down a glass of sweet red wine with a crossignolle (curlier) and even join in singing in the kitchen. They always sang an old canticle of their own before leaving. The Christmas trees were always huge in those days, the presents were all laid out and opened at a given consensus. What glee I'd feel to see the clean white shirts of my adults, their flushed faces, the laughter, the bawdy joking around. Meanwhile the avid women were in the kitchen with aprons over best dresses getting out the tortierres (pork pies) from the icebox. Days of preparation had gone into these sumptuous and delicious pies, which are better cold than hot. Also my mother would make immense ragouts de boulettes (pork meatball stew with carrots and potatoes) and serve that piping hot to crowds of sometimes 12 or 15 friends and relatives: her aluminum drip grind coffee pot made 15 large cups. Also from the icebox came bowls of freshly made freshly cooled cortons (French-Canadian for pate de maison), a spread to go on good fresh crusty bread liberally baked around town at several French bakeries.
In the general uproar of gifts and unwinding of wrappers it was always a delight for me to step out on the porch or even go out on the street a ways at one o'clock in the morning and listen to the silent hum of heaven diamond stars, watch the red and green windows of homes, consider the trees that seemed frozen in sudden devotion, and think over the events of another year passed. Before my mind's eye was the St.Joseph of my imagination clasping the darling little child.
Perhaps too many battles have been fought on Christmas Eve since then - or maybe I'm wrong and little children of 1957 secretly dig Christmas in their little devotional hearts." 

- Jack Kerouac from The New York World Telegram and Sun, December 5th 1957

Friday's Weekly Round-Up -158

December 27, 2013, 5:54 am

≫ Next: Robert Duncan

≪ Previous: Jack Kerouac's Christmas

$

0

0

"Junge Wilde" (Wild Youth) is the German title for John Krokidas' Ginsberg-centric Beat movie, Kill Your Darlings (actually, to be scrupulously accurate, the German distributers have chosen both - "Kill Your Darlings - Junge Wilde"). In Italian, it's "Giovano ribelli" (Young Rebels), just in case that William-Faulkner- (actually, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) -based title gets "lost in translation". When it opens (not until next February) in Brazil, it will be "Versos de Um Crime" (Verses of  A Crime? Stanzas from A Crime?). 

Here's John Krokidas, from an interview with The Back Lot: 
"I initially was terrified to contact the Allen Ginsberg Estate or any of the Beat estates while writing the movie because I thought I'd suddenly try to write up the legends of who they later became in life. I wondered perhaps if my depictions were inadequate".."I think the greatest encouragement I've gotten was from people who worked with Allen Ginsberg and people who've worked with the Beats. They absolutely loved the movie and told me that Allen himself would've loved it. That was the greatest compliment of all".."Hearing now from people who were really close to him...hearing those kind of compliments - it's humbling, and makes me proud that the work that Austin (Bunn) and I did researching the project and creating the characters was close to the truth and served one of my idols justice."
Er.. hold on a second - here's Bob Rosenthal, Allen's long-time (twenty-year) secretary, addressing the issue of "truth" and ethics, in a piece we published here in February (shortly after a post-Sundance pre-release, pre US-release, screening) - "The film, "Kill Your Darlings", confuses me greatly", Rosenthal writes, "..(T)he film takes its own title too seriously. 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 become's moribund.... "Kill Your Darlings" purports to be sensitive to the characters but falls into reductive cliches and hurts those who knew and loved those characters.."
Marc Olmsted and Brian Hassett follow up here, citing numerous particular instances and weighing in on this all-important issue of responsibility and truth.


[Lucien Carr (1925-2005)


[Dane DeHaan (as Lucien Carr) and Daniel Radcliffe(as Allen Ginsberg) in John Krokidas'"Kill Your Darlings" (2013)]

That having been said, there's no question that "Kill Your Darlings" ( or "Ubij svoje najdraže" - that's its Croation title!) has met with a singularly rousing and enthusiastic response. We strongly urge you to go see it. For our various "Kill Your Darlings" postings (reviews postings)  see here, here, here, here, and here - with doubtless more to follow.



[Allen Ginsberg teaching at Brooklyn College, 1991 -Photograph by Christopher Funkhouser] 


Allen as a teacher - The writer Kirpal Gordon recently published a heart-felt memoir - "Allen Ginsberg expressed in his person a remarkable quality of courage and being his summer apprentice at Naropa in 1978 helped give me the courage to change my life.." - "Allen's was a calm voice. I was knocked-out by his spoken-word delivery and how he used music to enrich his long lyrical lines with (Walt) Whitman and (William) Blake as touchstones. I read, liked & taught his work to inmates in maximum security and eighteen-year-olds on a campus nicknamed Sin City. But meeting with him at his Boulder apartment, sharing work every other day (he was finishing "Plutonian Ode"), doing readings with him, going to his class and hanging out with him at parties - that was the thing.."

The improbably-named "50MillionChickens" (on the social-media site Reddit) picks up the story several years later - with an account of Allen teaching at Brooklyn College - "He helped me make a commitment to actually writing honestly about myself and my own view of the world I lived in. He would be brutally dismissive of any poetry that had any pretense or any hint of fakery in it. It was like he was a really well-defined bullshit-detector and he could red-line bad poetry like nobody else. He was able to help me highlight the "moments" in my own poetry where my own true self really came through and had something to say. I could then gut the rest of it and build on the true insight." (This is just the beginning of what is a clear, unvarnished, portrait of Allen that is well-worth reading - for the whole piece (the author responds to questions about Allen and (Neal) Cassady, Allen and (Jack) Kerouac, Allen and (William) Burroughs, etc), see here). 

Don White - "Allen Ginsberg and Me" - "When Allen Ginsberg died, I cried. And cried. I couldn't stop the tears. I was forty-four years old, married with two small sons, an English teacher, a school administrator living in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and I cried".
  
Troubling news this week about Amiri Baraka, On Monday, he was rushed to the Newark, New Jersey's Beth Israel Intensive Care Unit in critical condition, for, (so far), unspecified reasons. On Christmas Eve, his son, Councilman Ras Baraka of Newark's South Ward, through a spokesman, announced that he "seems to be steadily getting stronger", and, hearteningly, the message this morning was that "he continues to improve" and that "his condition is not dire", tho' the family remained deeply concerned and on high alert, and have decided to keep publicity to a minimum. We all have him very much in our thoughts   



Amiri Baraka in Gloucester Speaking onCharles Olson and Sun Ra on the John Sinclair blog. We were going to run this anyway. So here it is.   

Robert Duncan

December 28, 2013, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Happy Birthday Patti Smith

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up -158

$

0

0

The concluding two volumes of the University of California's magisterial commitment [magisterialis, from the Medieval Latin, master] - toRobert Duncan -  a commitment to publishing his complete Collected Writingsin four volumes (the first two volumes, the legendary H.D.Bookand The Collected Early Poems and Plays, appearing at the beginning and end of last year, these last two, forthcoming in January, 2014) is, we at The Allen Ginsberg Project believe, cause for considerable celebration and excitement. 

We should also perhaps mention (from the same publisher), Lisa Jarnot's definitive biography, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, and from Richard Grossinger's North Atlantic Books, the Christopher Wagstaff-edited  A Poet's Mind, Collected Interviews..   

The newly-expanded and revised Michael Rumaker memoir, Robert Duncan in San Francisco is also well worth reading.   

And if all that weren't enough, Duncan's centrality within an all-too-neglected California visual art world is finally being recognized.  An Opening of the Field, Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle is the catalog to a groundbreaking show that will be opening atNew York University's Grey Gallery on January 14 (after which it will travel to Washington and Pasadena - the show originated this past summer in Sacramento at the Crocker Art Museum )     

The Allen Ginsberg Project's previous page of Duncan resources is here

Any mention of Duncan would be remiss without mentioning Jess.  He is central to the "Opening The Field" show, and is also well-served by a new book from Siglio -Jess, O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica". 
Patrick James Dunagan's review of the book (and of the "Opening The Field" catalog) is available here

An extraordinary Jess-Duncan collaboration, the "Scrapbook for Patricia Jordan"has been made available on-line by the Archives of American Art.       

Jess is now represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

[Jess (Burgess) Franklin Collins - "The Enamored Mage" (Translation#6) (1965)]

Happy Birthday Patti Smith

December 30, 2013, 3:30 am

≫ Next: New Years Eve (Looking Back on 2013 & Forward to 2014)

≪ Previous: Robert Duncan

$

0

0

Happy Birthday, Patti Smith, 67 years old today! - Our last year's birthday posting (including links to many other Allen Ginsberg Project postings) can be found here.  

PattiSmith.Net, is, of course, the official Patti Smith web-site, and that may be accessed here.

She, along with Philip Glass, have, for some time now, been performing together, often taking the opportunity to present stunning live renditions of Patti's "Spell" (Allen's "Footnote to Howl") and "On The Cremation of Chogyam Trungpa Vidyadhara", and Philip's  "Wichita Vortex Sutra (from "Hydrogen Jukebox")" - and presenting the full-length show, "The Poet Speaks" (most recently at this year's Edinburgh Festival)   

An earlier version of that tribute to Allen may be seen here. 

Patti and her band will be gigging tonight (where else?) in New York City at the second of their two dates downtown at Webster Hall. Ubiquitous, non-stop, hard-working, always inspiring. Yes, Happy Birthday, Patti! 


[Patti Smith& Philip Glass performing live a selection from "Wichita Vortex Sutra" at the opening reception for the exhibition "Swords Into Plowshares/Tony Price",  held, 2005, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York]

New Years Eve (Looking Back on 2013 & Forward to 2014)

December 31, 2013, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Good Morning, Mr Orwell

≪ Previous: Happy Birthday Patti Smith

$

0

0

["Buddhist (and one non-Buddhist) Action Figures" Photograph by Reverend Danny Fisher 2013]

Last posting of 2013, we thought we'd list a few of our "greatest hits" from the past year - January - Nanao Sakaki and Allen Ginsberg singing "Birdbrain" in Osaka, Japan, February - William Burroughs' 99th (next year will be Burroughs centennial), March - (speaking of nonagenarians) Ferlinghetti was 94, April - the Beats and the rock muse - "Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll, May - our Bob Dylan birthday posting, (this year - "The Night Bob Came Around" (and the night Harry Smith refused to see him!)), June - Marianne Faithfull and Gregory Corso, July - "Arabic America" (Allen's famous poem in, symbolically, Arabic translation), August - the wit and wisdom of Herbert Huncke (from his 1982 workshop at the Jack Kerouac Conference at Naropa), Philip Lamantia, in September, Lou Reed in October (just a week before his death), Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett in November, the wild wonderful Peter Orlovsky in December..
And that, as our friend, Michael McClure says, (see our Michael McClure birthday posts here and here) is nothing, doesn't give the half of it, is merely "scratching the Beat surface".
Happy New Year!