Neal Cassady's Birthday

February 8, 2014, 4:00 am

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[Neal Cassady - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg c. The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

                                             [Neal Cassady - original manuscript for "The First Third"]

Neal Cassady's birthday today, "cocksman and Adonis of Denver". Had he lived, he would have been 88 years old.

Hear him with The Grateful Dead quietly noodling behind him (recorded live at The Strait Theater, San Francisco, July 23 1967)



Glimpse him, driving the bus for theMerry Pranksters, rapping some more 

Hear some recollections from some of his friends



Here's Beat artistRobert Branaman recalling his friendship with Neal Cassady - filmed by poet Marc Olmsted in August of last year in Santa Monica, California, a few months before Branaman's 80th birthday.

Here's our friend Andy Clausen evoking the spirit of Cassady.

Heather Dalton's Neal Cassady movie, Neal Cassady - The Denver Years is now pretty much completed.  Catch the highly-informative trailer for it here.

Allen and Neal's letters came out from Creative Arts Press in Berkeley in 1977 under the title As Ever - The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady



The first full-length Cassady biography, William Plummer's appeared in 1981



Dave Moore's collection of Neal Cassady - Collected Letters, 1944-1967appeared in 2004




Here's a little something on the Cassady kin - Jami Cassady Ratto and John Allen Cassady - and not forgetting, of course, Carolyn, their indomintable mother, Carolyn, who passed away late last year.  

Fatboy Slim's Neal Cassady Starts Here is strangely soothing

Check out also our other previous Neal Cassady  postings here and here.

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Reading Out Loud - A Diversion - 1

February 10, 2014, 3:00 am

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In the middle of his 1981 Expansive Poeticscourse (at the beginning of the June 25th class), Allen breaks off into a discourse about vocalization and the various skills required in reading the poem out loud. He goes into some detail. A transcription of his commentary follows here 

AG: Well last night at a party I was talking with Richard Poe, who is an apprentice, and I couldn't figure it out exactly what he wanted to apprentice to me about, what our relationship was, poetically. And, drunk, last night he said, "I figured it out finally. What I wanted, and was interested in, was learning how to read poetry aloud" - which I hadn't considered so much as a formal subject, but it turned me on - because that's what I've been doing in the class [here at Naropa]

So, to make that more conscious, my own training in reading aloud comes from being turned on by (Jack) Kerouac. Kerouac used to read (William) Shakespeare aloud, as well as his own writing, or (Francois) Rabelais, or any other text.

[Richard Poe enters]

You might get yourself a chair, Richard, if you can find one. Do you know where they are?..(so) that he can get to them...  They're over there...  We were just talking about you

Richard Poe: You were?

AG: Yes, you're the subject of the class now.  You know, what I was talking about (was) what we were talking about last night, learning how to read (out loud).
There are tapes of (Jack) Kerouac reading, in the library. Has anyone heard those? Some have. If you don't know that they're there.. How do you get them? You just ask George (Banks) (the librarian).

Student: Yeah

AG: Yeah - and they are on an index, a card index. Kerouac made three or four records in the late (19)50's and we transfered them onto tape. One is "Blues and Haikus" (with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, I think - two saxophonists - in which he pronounced his little haikuand they made a tiny saxophone haiku, a little rhythmic statement about the length of his haiku, with some of the tone of his haiku). He also has a tape of, I think, "Poetry For The Beat Generation" I think it was called, (in) which he reads a little bit of On The Road, and a little bit of Visions of Cody and some of his Mexico City Blues,








I remember him reading Shakespeare (which I've mentioned a number of times already). When he got to the line, "And I sit here like a scullion unpacking my woes like John-a-dreams" [editorial note - from Hamlet - "Yet I/A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak/Like John-a-dreams.."]  it was the way he pronounced "John-a-dreams", he acted out the word and made it sound like some kind of strange day-dreamy phraseology. And I began digging how much he appreciated the phrasing (like you appreciate a piece of musical phrasing, like,when you hear the saxophonist do some little dip in the melody and you say, "Ah", or "Go!", or whatever. So there was a way of phrasing that he had that looked int the vernacular idiomatic pronunciation, was conscious of that, and then exaggerated it a little bit, magnified it a bit, mouthed it on his tongue, appreciated the phrasing in his own mouth. So as I said (I think.. I don't know if it was in the class here, but as I said before), a little bit like cocksucking, in a sense. As in the (Percy Bysshe) Shelley, that there is that column of air, or there's that vowel.. there's the roundness of the vowel inside the mouth, which you can appreciate while forming it.

A further corollary is that with consonants, you become conscious of the consonants, which are formed mostly with the lips and the tip of the tongue and the teeth, and you exaggerate them slightly in order to make them definite and clear. And the reason for exaggerating them is if you’re talking in a classroom like this, with people rushing around and an air-conditioner or some wind, or if you’re like Bob Dylanin the midst of a twenty-seven-thousand-seat open-air auditorium and anything you say is going through a million volts of electricity through giant boxes, being exaggerated out into the air, in order for twenty-seven- or fifty-two- thousand ears to hear exactly what you’re saying, you really have to exaggerate the pronunciation just a little bit, so you can hear every “t” in “little” and every bit of the “t” in “bit” – “Bit” – every bit of the “t” in “bit”. So it gives your pronunciation, in certain respects, a slight Beatles-like British accent. If you’ll listen to (John) Lennon on records (or if you listen to (Bob) Dylan or Mick Jagger, the emphasis on “t”’s (and “p”s and “d”s) at the end of words is generally very conscious and strong, so that somebody listening to the record can hear what they’re saying – otherwise they get drowned out in all the rock’n roll (like I was. more or less, last night)). So there’s a certain theatricality to the pronunciation of consonants.

But then, aside from the theatricality, the very consciousness that you have of the bit of the word that you’re pronouncing puts intelligence into the pronunciation. In other words, mindfulness of breath in meditation practice, so mindfulness of the exactitude of the sounds that you are making, tends to open up an awareness during speech which your intelligence can fill up with intelligent sound. Or you can put your intelligence into the sound and pronounce the words with total intelligence, with complete consciousness that you’re pronouncing the word. Now you might be daydreaming and thinking of something else, but one way of getting back to the meaning of the word is through the pure sound of the word, to the fact that you’re actually pronouncing it, so it’s like getting back to the fact that while daydreaming you still have a word to pronounce. So, distracted as you might be by the crackling of Fritos, you still realize you have to say the word “pronounce”. And by getting back to the physical sound of “pronounce”, you put your mind and your body back into the actual understanding of the word that you’re saying, and you come from the Fritos and get to the pronunciation. It’s like in the process of meditation, as you daydream, in order to get back to the space where you are, you go back to your breathing, and through the breathing you realize you’re here. In other words, grasping onto a straw of the present – so you grasp onto a straw of the sound, and by pronouncing the words you then remember you’re saying something, and then you remember what it means, and then when you’re remembering what it means you might say it even more intelligently. The difference between that and the John Gielgud-esque British acting is in that the words are (assuming you’re reading your own poetry)..you’re trying to figure out what you meant when you wrote it, or what it might mean now, if you had to say it aloud to your mother, or somebody that you knew well. So you address your intelligence to somebody whose intelligence you respect and dig. And then you want them to dig your little twist of body and mind at that moment, and so you instantly go to, “What does the phrase mean in idiomatic vernacular ordinary mind if you were talking to someone?” – Like the opening line of “Howl” –“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”. Now, every time I read that poem (which is relatively infrequent) I have to figure out who I’m talking to or how I’m going to say that line so that it won’t just be another wooden piece of symphony sound - “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed..” How can I get to say that that’ll make sense, that’ll sound fresh, that’ll sound like it means something? (because it doesn’t quite mean anything to me at the moment). Therefore I have to think of Libby [sic], someone to whom I could address that line so that it would make sense, or so that it would have a warning, or a humor, so that it would take on a humor or a color, or take on some significance. Then I could say, ““I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness – you better watch out!” – Something – In other words, you address it as a real speech to someone, a real functional speech, something that actually has to say something. And try to figure out (assuming that you’ve got a line that you can pronounce without being embarrassed, assuming you’ve got a line that does have some kind of straightforward sense to it, that isn’t just pure bullshit that there’s nobody in the world you can imagine saying it to that it would really mean anything (to), except somebody trying to get up and talk and sound good). Well, that means that you’ve got to begin with a line that makes some common-sense – you can’t just begin with complete bullshit – unless you want to do it as pure sound as an exhibition of complete bullshit, in which case, if you have an agreement with the reader or the listener, that you’re now going to give an exhibition of complete bullshit, then you have the pleasure of doing that, and so you can do what you want that way.

But, assuming that you’re talking to someone about something real, you have to first imagine it. I guess like an actor must. I don’t know how actors do it – but you have to first imagine it making sense, making real sense (shocking sense, maybe, or a turn-on sense) to someone, and then figure out how the cadence would go and where your voice would rise, if you were saying it to be understood by someone (as you were saying it to be understood by someone). If "I saw the best minds of my generation", for Libby, I would say like - "my" so I would have to emphasize "my" - "I saw the best minds of my generation" - and then maybe she thinks she's so smart - so "I saw the best minds of my generation" - so it depends (on) who you're talking to and how you want it to be taken.
Usually, if you're just reading someone's work, you have to improvise that as you go along, like walking a tightrope. Instantly, line-by-line, figuring what does the text mean? (your own text, or somebody else's text).

First of all, you can slow down and mouth the vowels. You can put your intelligence to sharpen up the pronunciation of the consonants (which also gives an extra little head-shake of intelligence in the sentence). You're addressing it as actual speech to someone, speech which has a function and which therefore will have a color of different tones of voice in the vowel, and the problem of tone, or the question of tone, is something that musicians know, but it's ancient practice. (Ezra) Pound points out the tone in a little slogan in his preface to Basil Bunting's edition of Selected Poems, 1950, published by Dallam Flynn in Texas. He says, "Follow the tone-leading of the vowels". Follow where the vowels' tones lead, where one tone goes into another tone, vowel to vowel - for musicality, he meant. To understand the music, to appreciate, or to speak, or to hear, the musicality of a line, follow the tone-leading of the vowels. Meaning that the tone or pitch of the voice goes high or low, or middle, depending on the amount of air expelled from the lungs. When there's a great deal of air expelled from the lungs and there's a lot of stress, generally, it goes higher. Stress means more air coming out of the lungs onto the syllable. Generally, I think that's the physiological explanation.More air, more hot air, so to speak, more air, more force. So when there's a force,  or stronger air, generally, the pitch goes up. When there's softer, lower, less air, the pitch goes down. Words you emphasize generally go up. 

[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately two-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately eighteen minutes in] 

Reading Out Loud A Diversion - 2

February 11, 2014, 3:00 am

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Greek prosody has a system for each vowel of up, down, or middle. Rising tones, falling tones, and marked by a circumflex (the little mark, the little upside-down “v” mark) up and down. And I think the first book of Homer’s The Iliad has one word – “Peleus” – which is both up and down. “Sing , oh muse, of the wrath of Achilles, Peleus’ son”– son of Peleus – so that would be marked in Greek line (with an) up and down accent.

That was formal in Greek. There’s no such consideration formally in American or English. Except any hip poet, or any poet conscious of pronouncing, is aware of the musicality of the way he pronounces. And, pushed to exaggeration, these pitches, rising and falling, become tunes, actually.

The way I find tunes in (William) Blake is I find out how to pronounce the Blake idiomatically, like “Little Lamb, who made thee?”. As if you were actually asking the lamb – “Who made thee?”. There might be many different ways of doing it but I finally settled on, “Little Lamb, who made thee?” – that proposes [Allen begins singing] – ““Little Lamb, who made thee?”, or some tune. In other words, by extrapolating the tone that you find yourself using when you try and pronounce it intelligently, when you extrapolate or exaggerate it and push it out further, then you can arrive at a tune. So every intelligent line has its own tune, or it can have it’s own tune, or the way to find the tune is (to) figure out what the line means so that when you pronounce the line, you are pronouncing every single syllable within the line with some meaning. Every single syllable with some meaning – duh dah-dah-dah – and then the tune will have the equivalent of the emotional tone of the pronunciation.- [Allen sings again] “Every syllable” – There was a little intelligent, alert duh-dah duh-duh-dah, a little trumpet call [singing again] “Every syllable!”

The emotional tone expressed in the physical pitch or tone in the syllable in the line will have a melodic manifestation or articulation. In other words, it’s just common sense – I’m using big words, but, if you pour your feeling into the words and you understand each word, understand each syllable, so you’re not sliding over one or two or three syllables as being dead wood, if you don’t have any dead wood in there, then you can have a continuous melody. Louis Zukofsky’s wife (Celia) used to compose tunes to his poetry that way.

Well, that’s taking it all the way over into song, but keeping it into speech you still have the tone. And so you’ve got tone and intelligence in the consonants and conscious power of breath in the vowels. I wouldn’t want to systematize it, but you’ve got power in the vowels, intelligence in the consonants and emotion in the tones. That’s maybe making it all too conscious. The simplest rule, then, is to pronounce each line as if it did mean something, and then find out what your cadence and your.. not find out but just do it with cadence and tone as if it meant something. That’s simple, basically.

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

Reading Out-Loud - A Diversion 3

February 12, 2014, 3:00 am

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Allen continues his June 25 1981 disquisition on the performance and the reading out loud of poetry.

AG: One problem is that some people have an idea of poetry which is mono-tonal. Like Richard (Poe),who (originally) asked the question, reads poetry in a monotonal (way), one tone – and a lot of people do, Somehow when you fall into reading poetry you just get into some kind of half-chant, half-croon, half poetical-sounding trance voice (which is not exactly a trance voice but just a conventional voice for poetry) and you get stuck there. One reason people do that is that they’re afraid (that) if they fall off that plateau and have to vivify the language with different tones and make it sound like it’s a real talk, they’ll all be embarrassed to find out that it isn’t their own speech, and that it’s unpronounceable as if it were real talk. So that it’s a “refuge of a scoundrel” [editorial note - Allen is, of course, quoting Samuel Johnson here], that is, it’s a way of.. well, either hiding the fact that you don’t know what emotion you want in there, or there is no real emotion in there, or maybe the emotions are so strong you just might burst into tears so you just keep it on a montone

It’s also amazing how intelligent people, who are completely conscious of other gestures, when they read poetry get into a croon or a sing-song that doesn’t have a varied tone (which means that their whole approach to poetry, from the bottom, all along, was a little bit blind. They didn’t realize they were actually talking. They thought they were doing something else, besides talking strongly as if they were talking to somebody real). So if you’re talking as strongly as if you’re talking to somebody real, then there should be some variation in tone in your poetry.  Well that was a footnote.  Yeah?

Student: Will reading-out-loud help you with that?

AG: Pardon..?

Student: Will reading-out-loud help you with that?

AG: Well, that’s what we’re talking about! – We’re talking about reading-out-loud.

Student: I mean, like…

AG: Yeah, I think so (though, sometimes I get embarrassed reading out-loud to myself – I don’t get so embarrassed reading out loud to other people, because it’s real).

Student: You couldn’t get in the same (quality of listening to the) poem, reading out loud, as you could to yourself…

AG: Reading? what?

Student: I mean..should you.. maybe let somebody else hear you reading out loud?. Could you get the same qualities of listening to yourself.

AG: Well, I think the ideal condition is singing in the shower. You know, singing, when you’re taking a shower, to yourself, because you really let loose. Nobody’s listening to you so you make all sorts of vocal tones that you wouldn’t normally allow anybody to hear that you were capable of in your body.

Student; Yeah

AG: All sorts of gaga squiggles and hoops. So you have maximum expansion in the shower. Also, maybe, physiologically, because the hot water and your body’s relaxed and then there’s the sound – the echo-box, the echo-chamber effect. Or on bridges is a convenient place (like on the George Washington Bridge or the Brooklyn Bridge) when nobody’s around. I think I mentioned to somebody my favorite place was the walkway bridge overpass over 125^th Street on Riverside Drive in New York, which is a quarter-mile walk and there’s absolutely nobody there but thundering cars and thundering iron, and you can make all the noise you want and nobody will hear more than an ant’s forefoot.  Yeah?

Student: Yeah. I have heard recordings of (William Butler) Yeats and (Ezra) Pound and…

AG: Yeah

Student: …and they both have very sing-song-y types of presentation in the things that I’ve heard, (and now you…)

AG: Because my theories are coming out of Pound.


[Ezra Pound]

Student: That’s why… that’s why I bring up Pound, because, I’m surprised. Yeats, I can understand (given) the sort of meter that he used, but Pound…

AG: Well, Yeats is coming out of the nineteenth-century and what was called “Celtic Twilight” and “dim mists of years” [editorial note - Yeats doesn't actually use this phrase, but..] and “I will arise (and go) now and go to Innisfree..”. As Pound points out, Yeats always wrote with a “chune” in his head (he always had a little tune in his head when he was writing). So there was actually some tone and rhythm – basically the rhythm, a vigorous, muscular rhythm, relating to an actual tone that recurred on itself. It wasn’t as if he were dryly counting syllables, he was actually fitting it into an old Irish tune (at least, in his inner ear, there was some variation of pitch or tone).

Student: Uh-hmm

AG: The other thing, there was that tradition that he was coming out of, the Irish bard chanter. The chanting of an Irish bard. You know anything about that?

Student: Yeah. Yeah.. He was really.. He considered (it) a revival, and what he was doing in Irish poetry was (to) try and get back to the old, the old epics and the ballads and really try to bring back the heroic

AG: Yeah

Student: Because in this.. in this record, he had said.. he made a lot… he made an enormous effort to make this thing poetry..(and) he’d be damned if he’d read it as though it were prose.

AG: Right

Student: And he said it, like, “I will arise and go..”[Student adopts Yeats’  oracular tone] ..”go now, and go to Innisfree..”, like that.

[W.B.Yeats]

AG: Yeah, I remember the record. I don’t have it here and I haven’t played it for years, but he does roll his “r”’s..quite a bit, and he does get a lot of color into the vowels – “I will arise and go..”, with a  quaver I remember, “I will arise (and go) now and go to Innisfree..” – It is monotonal, but it has lots of oomph in it, more from chanting, I think, bardic chanting. Yeah?

Student: There’s a very fine anthology by Penguin – Penguin – The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, and it’s well-worth looking up.

AG: Ballads and everything?

Student: Yeah, just everything.

AG: Then Pound was imitating Yeats. Pound was Yeats’ secretary, and got turned on to vocalization somewhat in studying with Yeats and being Yeats’ secretary, out in the country, 1912 or so.  He was living with Yeats, acting as Yeats’ secretary, carrying on a large correspondence, including a huge correspondence with James Joyce,another Irishman, another singer – tenor? baritone? – tenor, I think. Pound has different tones during different decades of recordings. The tones of the (19)50’s are irritable, but very precise. Tending toward, “And you, beautiful Walt Whitman, sleep on the Hudson’s banks” ["Y tu, bello Walt Whitman, duerme a orillas del Hudson" - from Garcia Lorca's ""Ode to Walt Whitman"] – some kind of heavy, almost nasal, anger, in recordings made at St Elizabeth’s Hospital  [the Caedmon recordings]

And, in 1957, there is a small recording, which I think I have here, made in Milan, just after he got away from Washington DC, away from St Elizabeth’s Hospital, made at the University of Milan, with some kind of electronic music in the back, where his voice is booming, or  more of a booming voice, but a booming monotone. And then, there is a later recording, made in the mid-(19)60’s, when he was in his seventy-eighth or eightieth year (seventy-eighth or ninth), where he’s got this old man’s paper-thin voice with whispers.

Student: (His reading of) The Confucian Odes

AG: Well, some Confucian Odes and some of thePisan Cantosand the later Cantos, Cantos that we have in here [Allen points to his Expansive Poetics anthology] – the Cantos that we have in this collection are on record, where there’s more vernacular tone, more ordinary-speech tone. He’s gotten over his madness and his anger and his irritability and his force – anger force – and he’s beginning to talk more like an old man, recollecting.

But then, the thing that I’m throwing into the pot here, there’s the appreciation of the vowels and the rolling “r”’s of the Irish bullshit artists, and the hang-over of nineteenth-century oratorical monotone in early Pound, but, simultaneously, there’s the practice and idiomatic speech of (William Carlos) Williams. And it’s actually Williams who contributes as much as anybody, in actual pronunciation, to the awareness of tones. If you ever hear Williams’ recordings. Williams has some really great recordings he made as an old man of poems from “Pictures From Brueghel” and “The Desert Music”, and in that, you realize he’s just this wheedling old man, with his funny half-feminine voice half the time. He’s old and he can hardly pronounce it and the voice is coming out of pure sincerity, right out of his heart, like that. And coming up with the high tones , as almost, a bird-like.. I don’t know “oodling”,tones, like The Beatles’ “I want to hold your ha-an-an-and”. That tender oodling tone that the Beatles came out with, Williams came out with, as an old man might come out with that. Or, if you listen to Tibetan lamas, they have a very strange voice, which is (a) quiet, restful, calm, well-grounded voice that comes from their body, but, at the same time, extremely tender, in discussing the fact that we’re mortal,  and everything is transitory, and that existence contains suffering, and actually we have no soul.

So, the explanatory lyric voice, you might call it, or explanatory high-pitch, tender high-pitch, tender explanatory high-pitch, Williams had quite a bit. You know what I’m talking about? – that old man’s high-pitched tender address? – “Little girl, are you going home?”



Student: You know what.. You remember, in “Yellow Submarine”, the old man ["Old Fred"]?

AG: I forgot.

Student : Oh, I don’t know, when they start saving Pepperland. There’s an old man who’s covered with apples ...

AG: What kind of voice?

Student:  ....you know, and he’s telling them about the old man that looks.. so much like him.. and...

AG: Is that a sort of cracked Scotch type of... is that a cracked voice?

Student: No, it’s real high-pitched...

AG: Yeah.


[William Carlos Williams]

Student 2: . I think that…following your idea, that the tone corresponds to the functional meaning of the poetry, that Williams has a tremendous amount of tenderness in his poems

AG: Yeah. Yes.

Student: . .(and) it naturally would come out, of course.

AG: Yeah, so what he said, what he took out of it was, I think, the key – the vocal tone is equivalent to the emotional note. 

Student: Hmm

AG: Once you understand that, then of course it then becomes much more self-revealing and more a matter of vulnerability for you to be able to pronounce your poems openly, with the actual feelings in it.   Yeah?

Student: Allen, my room-mate is about seventy-percent deaf..

AG: Yes.

Student: And he says, if it gives all the clues of being very boring and mundane, he just turns off the whole process

AG: Um-hmm

Student: He says, one thing he does listen to is that..that intonation, to see if they’re saying what they really..what they really mean to say.

AG: I guess “intonation” is the word.  In-tone-nation. In-tone-nation. That’s a good word, yeah. In-tone (the internal tones, the internal tones you make when talking). What does intonation mean? – I guess, exactly that - the tonal quality. I hadn’t thought of that word.  Okay, so you’d pay attention to the intonation, and the intonation would be equivalent to the emotional..what?...the emotional..?

Student: Quality?  meaning?

AG: (Well), content, I suppose.

Student: Really?

AG: Intonation is emotional content. Intonation is equivalent to the emotional content, or to the emotions moving, the moving of the emotion, rising to climax and falling. If you pronounce it with intonation, then you’re vulnerable because you’re showing your heart.

So I would say you take Pound’s consciousness of language (it’s Pound that pronounces things very beautifully – he has a line, “They will come no more,/ the old men with beautiful manners”, (and beautiful speech). [from "Moeurs Contemporaines - VII - Vecchii"] He was talking about Henry James, actually, after World War II. - “(And the end of this you may be sure)"that war is the destruction of (good) restaurants." [from Cantos LXXIV and LXXVI] - "They will come no more the old men with beautiful manners”. He’s talking about himself as much as anyone else. And so the late recitations of the Cantossounds like one of the “old men with beautiful manners” speaking, with (a) whispery, paper-thin voice and very perfect pronunciation of consonants. Conscious talk. In other words, conscious pronunciation, rather than so speedy that you don’t even hardly recognize that you’re talking, nor appreciate the intelligence of your listeners, (and) that they might appreciate your intelligence while talking, also.

Where does that get us?  I don’t know how that might apply to trying to read Lorca, which is a translation from his original intelligent Spanish into dumber English.

[Allen returns to his Lorca teaching – see here

and, noticeably, later remarks   


"If you treat almost every word as if it had some meaning, or if you can find some significance for every syllable, then you can have a complete musical variety of  syllabic chimes, line-to-line. Though the tendency is to (do it) sing-song.  But if you can find at least one word in a line that has a punch, has a tonal punch and you put that through, then you can keep every line alive and you can keep everybody listening."


"Yeah, just exaggerate the tones. Usually for reading, one does have to straighten one's spine. That's the secret - that, in order to get an unobstructed breath, you have to sit up straight, because, otherwise, if you're hunched over (which is more or less of a defensive posture and a withdrawal - like going back in the womb) there is not the possibility of expanding the chest and resonating outward from the inside out and projecting the voice. There's a need to hold the sternum, which is this part of the breast [Allen points to it] up, and shoulders back, and relax the belly, so that the voice can come out of the middle of the body. That's another thing I forgot about in terms of the physical placement of the voice. You actually can speak from the heart, literally, it's not a metaphor, it's a physiological fact that the voice can resonate from the breast area, rather than from the top of the head. But in order t0 do that you've got to sit up straight and lay it out."

 "Yeah, I've been thinking (about this) for years, and people have asked me, and this is about time (I think it's something) that we should be teaching here [Naropa] - pronunciation. Vocalization. We should be actually doing vocalization in class, instead of just referring to it."

[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately twenty-two-and-a quarter minutes in  and concluding at approximately thirty-seven-and-a-quarter minutes in. The three additional quotations come from later in the class - see here] 

Expansive Poetics - 24 (Lorca on Dali)

February 13, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali c.1925]

Expansive Poetics - June 30 1981, a new class. Allen takes up, once again, briefly, after he left of, with further remarks on Federico Garcia Lorca and the wider context of European modernism - and a read-through/analysis of Lorca's poem, "Oda a Salvador Dali" 

AG: .. my own method was, as I conceived it, taking the naturalistic long-line of (Walt) Whitman, or the naturalistic humanistic open form, and combining (it) with the mind-jumps of twentieth-century post-Einstein-ian Surrealism. Because (Albert) Einstein's Theory of Relativity was actually conceived around 1907-1917, about the same time as the Dadaists and Surrealists were beginning their operations in Zurich. In fact, the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, 1916-1917, was carrying on with literary activities with Hugo Ball,Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, and others, simultaneous with Einstein's teaching (in Basel, I believe, in Switzerland), same years. Simultaneous with (Vladimir Ilyich) Lenin's residence, one block away from the Cabaret Voltaire, on Spielgasse Street in Zurich, where he was writing The State and Revolution and preparing to take thesealed trainto Russia. Simultaneous with James Joyce writing Finnegan's Wake [editorial note - Allen means Ulysses here] in the cafe where Hans Arp, Picabia, Tzara and Lenin visited. It was all happening at the same time. It was 1917 in Zurich 


[The Cabaret Voltaire opened its doors for the first time at no.1 Spiegelgasse, Zurich, on February 15 1916]

Peter Orlovsky: Einstein (around)  too?

AG: Einstein too, yes. Einstein had been around teaching. There was a concentration of change of consciousness in one spot.




(Federico Garcia) Lorca was an inheritor of Whitman's spirit, but he was also a practitioner of the Surrealist style.  Salvador Dali had a painting show in New York in 1958, or (19)59 was that? or so..

Peter Orlovsky: (195)8, I think...

AG: Yeah, so we ran into him at his show. And that was the first time that I'd ever seen him And, apparently, he was just hanging around the show, looking at it (at Madison Avenue, at some gallery, I've forgotten which, Gallery Maeght, I think)). We went up and said, "Have you read Lorca?" (or, I think, I went up and said, "Have you read Lorca's "Ode To Walt Whitman"?). And he said, "Ah yes, but have you read Lorca's "Ode to Salvador Dali"? It turns out that, at one point or other, they were friends, lived together and exchanged art (I don't know when). But I never did get to see the "Ode to Salvador Dali" until this year (all those years it was elusive). There's a Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, chosen and translated by Paul Blackburn(whose translationsDavid Henderson is also using for Nicholas Guillenand other Spanish writers in his [NAROPA] class)

The Oda a Salvador Dali (Ode To Salvador Dali) is not as interesting as the others, but I thought, since it's an outright Surrealist work, and it's Lorca's interaction with Surrealism, and since we'll be taking up Surrealist methods, it would be a good specimen to introduce to your ears (if not to your eyes, because I didn't make a copy - although, if anyone's interested, we can do that). I'll read from it. I won't read the whole thing. [Allen begins reading Lorca's poem] - "Una rosa en el alto jardín que tú deseas./Una rueda en la pura sintaxis del acero./Desnuda la montaña de niebla impresionista./Los grises oteando sus balaustradas últimas." - "One rose in the high garden you desire./ A single wheel in the pure syntax of steel./ The mountain stripped of Impressionist fog./ Greys overlooking their final balustrades" - Well, I guess that's descriptive, actually, it sounds Surrealist but it's just descriptive. "Mountain(s) stripped of Impressionist fog", because, you remember, Dali was painting hard-edge (Surrealist, but, nonetheless super-Realist) - "final balustrades" - balustrades in eternity, with great grey skies or deserts in the background.


[Salvador Dali - Invisible Afghan With The Apparition on the Beach of The Face of Garcia Lorca in the Form of A Fruit Dish With Three Figs (1938)]

Modern painters in their white studios/cut the sceptic flower of the root squared/In the Seine's water a marble iceburg/ chills windows, the ivy shrivels./ Man stomps the flagstone streets./Mirrors avoid the reflection's magic/The government's closed down the perfume shops./A machine perpetuates its double beats/No woods, screams, frowns. Mint growing on the roofs of old houses. Air polishes its prism upon the sea and the horizon rises like a great aqueduct." ("Los pintores modernos en sus blancos estudios,/ cortan la flor aséptica de la raíz cuadrada./ En las aguas del Sena un ice-berg de mármol/ enfría las ventanas y disipa las yedras./ El hombre pisa fuerte las calles enlosadas./Los cristales esquivan la magia del reflejo./El Gobierno ha cerrado las tiendas de perfume./La máquina eterniza sus compases binarios./  Una ausencia de bosques, biombos y entrecejos/ yerra por los tejados de las casas antiguas./ El aire pulimenta su prisma sobre el mar/ y el horizonte sube como un gran acueducto.") - Actually, that's quite good for a description of Dali - the horizon rises like a great aqueduct." [Allen continues] - "Sailors, unknowing of the vine and the line between light and shadow, decapitates sirens on leaden seas./Night, that black statue of prudence, holds/ the rounded mirror of moon betwee her palms./A desire for forms and limits wins us over./The man with a yellow meter measure comes./Venus is a white still-life and butterfly collectors run./Oh, Salvador Dali, your voice olive dark/I do not praise the adolescent imperfection of your brush" ("Marineros que ignoran el vino y la penumbra,/ decapitan sirenas en los mares de plomo./ La Noche, negra estatua de la prudencia, tiene/el espejo redondo de la luna en su mano./ Un deseo de formas y límites nos gana./ Viene el hombre que mira con el metro amarillo./ Venus es una blanca naturaleza muerta y los coleccionistas de mariposas huyen./...Oh, Salvador Dalí, de voz aceitunada!/ No elogio tu imperfecto pincel adolescente..") - That's kind of nice, and very, very elegant - "I do not praise the adolescent imperfection of your brush" - there he's getting back to the "Oda a Walt Whitman'' - "..or your color which guards the color of your time,/ but I commend your everlasting circumscribed longings, hygienic mind" (ni tu color que ronda la color de tu tiempo,/ pero alabo tus ansias de eterno limitado./ Alma higiénica..") - that's pretty good for Dali - 

[Federico Garcia Lorca - Retrato de Dali (Portrait of Dali) (c.1925)]

"Hygienic mind, you live above new marble pillars./ You file the dark wood of incredible forms/Your imagination attains whatever your hands arrive ("..vives sobre mármoles nuevos./ Huyes la oscura selva de formas increíbles./Tu fantasía llega donde llegan tus manos" - That's pretty good - "Your imagination attains whatever your hands arrive/You take pleasure of the sonnet of the sea at your window."../The thud of steel recites its short, resilient line./Uncovered islands now contradict the sphere. The straight line speaks as vertical power, and learned mirrors sing their geometries." ("Tu fantasía llega donde llegan tus manos,/ y gozas el soneto del mar en tu ventana./...Dice el compás de acero su corto verso elástico./ Desconocidas islas desmiente ya la esfera./ Dice la línea recta su vertical esfuerzo/ y los sabios cristales cantansus geometrías.") - That's good descriptive realism for Dali. And the conclusion is -"Oh, Salvador Dali, your voice olive-dark/ I speak only what you and your canvases tell me./I do not praise the adolescent imperfection of your brush/ but I sing the firm direction of your arrows.  I sing your beautiful spirit full of Catalan lights,/ your love of what has possible explanation./ I sing your heart astronomical and tender,/out of the French deck and with no tear whatsoever.." ("Oh, Salvador Dalí de voz aceitunada!/Digo lo que me dicen tu persona y tus cuadros./No alabo tu imperfecto pincel adolescente,/ pero canto la firme dirección de tus flechas./ Canto tu bello esfuerzo de luces catalanas,/ tu amor a lo que tiene explicación posible./ Canto tu corazón astronómico y tierno,/ de baraja francesa y sin ninguna herida.")  - What's a "French deck" (baraja francesa), does anybody know? - must br some kind of..

Peter Orlovsky:  Deck of a ship?

Student(s): or of cards.. Cards..

AG: Well, I'm assuming it's a deck of cards, but what's a "French" deck?

Student: ...(or maybe)..alongside the roof, where they have the railings..on top of every...

AG: No, I think it's a deck of cards

Student: Thirteenth-century... ...the Marseilles deck...

AG: Oh, yes, of course, the tarot,  yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay - "I sing your heart astronomical and tender", so that would be.. "astronomical".. astromancy, and what not. [Allen continues] - " I sing your heart astronomical and tender,/out of the French deck and with no tear whatsoever/ I sing the statues' longing you pursue without let/ fear for the emotion which awaits you in the street./I sing the small siren of the sea who sings to you/ from a bicycle of conch and coral./But I sing, above all, a common thought/ which unites us in dark and golden hours./Art is not the light that blinds our eyes - it is love first, friendship or fencing./ It is first that painting you sketch so patiently/ - Teresa's breast, she with the restless flesh/, the tight curl of ungrateful Matilde/it's our friendship painted as a game of dice./ Typewriter tracks of blood set upon gold/ underline the heart of Catalonia eternal" - "Catalan"..which, I think, was where Dali was from - "Stars like fists without falcons make you glitter/ while your painting and your life flower./ You may not face the hourglass, its membranous wings/, nor the hard scythe tough with allegories./ You saw it, and naked always, your brush in the air,/ face to sea, peopled with boats and the men who sail them"

 ("Canto tu corazón astronómico y tierno,/ de baraja francesa y sin ninguna herida./ 

Canto el ansia de estatua que persigues sin tregua,/ el miedo a la emoción que te aguarda en la calle./ Canto la sirenita de la mar que te canta/ montada en bicicleta de corales y conchas./  Pero ante todo canto un común pensamiento/ que nos une en las horas oscuras y doradas./ No es el Arte la luz que nos ciega los ojos./ Es primero el amor, la amistad o la esgrima./ Es primero que el cuadro que paciente dibujas/ el seno de Teresa, la de cutis insomne,/ el apretado bucle de Matilde la ingrata,/ nuestra amistad pintada como un juego de oca./  Huellas dactilográficas de sangre sobre el oro,/ rayen el corazón de Cataluña eterna./Estrellas como puños sin halcón te relumbren,/ mientras que tu pintura y tu vida florecen.  No mires la clepsidra con alas membranosas,/ ni la dura guadaña de las alegorías./ Viste y desnuda siempre tu pincel en el aire/ frente a la mar poblada de barcos y marinos.") - So that's somewhat humane and somewhat surreal

AG (to Peter Orlovsky): You ever hear that before?

Peter Orlovsky: No

AG: Finally, after all these years, I just got (to) this the other day....



[Audio for the above may be heard here, from the beginning till approximately nine-and-a-half minutes in]

Song ("The weight of the world is love")

February 14, 2014, 12:00 am

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We've been wanting to post this one for a while - and today's the perfect day. From Jerry Aronson's absolutely-definitive DVD ,The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (and posted here with his generosity and permission), Allen's extraordinarily-moving 1992 recitation of his poem,"Song" - "The weight of the world is love" - It is indeed. Happy Valentine's Day!




and as an added little bonus (it being the Burroughs' Centennial):

Allen Ginsberg Dot Org - New Web-Site

February 15, 2014, 11:00 am

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A big big announcement today. It's been a  long-time in the making. Today sees the launch of our totally refurbished web-site - Allen Ginsberg dot org. Initially launched in 2002, that site, we'll be the first to admit, was getting a little long-in-the-tooth. Twelve years is a long time (and an eternity if you're talking about the internet!), so, for the past couple of years, assisted by dedicated web professionals and a wise cadre of devoted Ginsberg scholars, we've been revamping. Special thanks to Ghan Patel for the design & back end work, and hats off to Wyeth Stiles for the previous site.  And the results? - Well, here it is. Let us know what you think. Obviously, work will continue to be done on the site, wrinkles to be ironed out, etc, but, as it says on the splash page, "have at it, folks!" 

Expansive Poetics - 25 - (Respondez!)

February 17, 2014, 3:00 am

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                                RESPONDEZ !










AG: So I wanted to continue with (Walt) Whitman's children (one of them is in Russia, someone whom we'll pick up on later on (Velimir) Khlebnikov, the Futurist writer. 

But before we get to Khlenbnikov, there's one other poem of Whitman's which I would like to add to our anthology). In one shortened form, there's about a five-line version of it in the regular Whitman books. Let's see if we can find that. I have it around here somewhere. Wait a minute.. It's called "Refusals", in my book, it's page 281 in a standard Whitman text - "Reversals", rather - "Let that which stood in front, go behind, let that which was behind advance to the front/ Let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions!/ Let the old propositions be postponed!/ Let a man seek pleasure everywhere except in himself!/ Let a woman seek happiness everywhere except in her self!" 
 Well, that's a censored version of a big freak-out poem he wrote which he was so ashamed of (that) he didn't include in Leaves of Grassand (it) is only to be found in variant editions.
[to Student] - What's the edition you got it from? Can you give me the bibliographic?

Student: It's Riverside.

AG: Riverside what?

Student: Riverside Editions.

AG: What company and what year? - That's on the title-page you'll find it. I want the biblographic citation so people can get it if they want to look up the poem.

Student: Houghton Mifflin.

AG: Houghton Mifflin. What year?  And what city?

Student: Boston..yeah..1959

AG: And what's the whole title?

Student: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (by Walt Whitman)  edited by James E.Miller



AG: James Miller. Okay. So this is the full version. Apparently, it's dated 1856-1876. I'm not sure where the text comes from or how it was first published - "Respondez"- Now the Whitman we've been reading so far has been a happy, healthy, affirmative, yeah-saying, expansive, sanguine, charming, balanced, even-tempered Whitman. This is Whitman freaking out

[Allen reads Whitman's poem, "Respondez" in its entirety] -  
"Respondez!  Respondez!/(The war is completed - the price is paid - the title is settled beyond recall!/Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!/.."..""Let the limited years of life do nothing for the limitless years of death/ (What do you suppose death will do, then?)" -

So that was , I suppose, 18.. right after the war, the Civil War. But apparently he didn't feel that that was healthy. He didn't want to expose this in public. He didn't..

Student: I would guess, then, that that's probably in the "Drum Taps"edition..following the Civil War [1865 - incorporated in] the two-volume [1876] edition.. of Leaves of Grass.

AG: That would have..

Student:  Yeah, there were two...

AG: Regular sized?

Student: I think so, yes. Two editions came out in two volumes... "Drum Taps"...

Student: (Did he read out loud at all?)

AG: Yes, he did. He read quite a bit and gave lectures.

Student: So it's possible that a poem like that could have been read right after the Civil War...

AG: Well, sure. [to Student]  Could you check it in that book of yours where the provenance of that is? Does somebody know how to look it up in the book? Would there be any way of consulting the acknowlegements? (in the rear, generally, they sometimes have scholarly  reference). You might look it up. If you can figure out where it came from. I'll try and...

Student: Whitman did quite a bit of that to Leaves of Grass?

AG: Yeah

Student: His editing days

AG: He was constantly changing it.

Student: Right.

AG: What I had originally here was called the 1890 edition. What I think we will do is I'll get this thing xeroxed up for everybody. It's a good addition to the Whitman canon, because it's one of his freak-out revelatory poems.

["Respondez!" originally appeared as "Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness" in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. Lines 2 and 17-19 were added in 1871, the same year as Democratic Vistas. The poem appeared in all editions until 1881, when he eliminated it but transposed lines into the poems "Reversals" and "Transpositions".]

[Audio for the above can be heard here (starting at approximately nine-and-a-half minutes in - (Allen's reading of "Respondez" begins appproximately  twelve-and-three-quarter minutes in)  - through to approximately twenty-one-and three-quarter minutes in]

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Expansive Poetics 26 - (Khlebnikov's Menagerie)

February 18, 2014, 3:00 am

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                                                          [ Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-19220]





AG: Now, by  (Velimir) Khlebnikov, a poem called "Menagerie" [ "Zverinets", also translated as "Zoo"], which would be 19.. let's see, 1909. Russia (St. Petersburg, probably, among a group that were hanging around a coffee-shop called The Stray Dog Cafe, where Khlebnikov and his friends resided.
[Allen then  proceeds to read Khlebnikov's poem "Menagerie" in its entirety]




"Oh Garden, Zoological Garden! /Where the iron is like a father reminding brothers to be brothers and stopping their bloody grapple/Where the Germans drink their beer and girlies sell their bodies/Where the eagles sit like an eternity finished with this day which still lacks evening/Where the camel knows the secret of Buddhism and harbors the grimace of China./Where the stag is pure terror, blooming like a massive rock/Where the finery of the crowd is swank. And the Germans bloom with health./Where the swan is a replica of winter, despite the beak like an autumn thicket and the black gaze somewhat guarded, even for a swan/Where the blue  splendorial lowers a tail like Siberia seen from the rock of Pavda when the clouds throw a net of blue over the gold foliage and the green of the forest, all of it tinted variously by the roughness of the land/ Where the monkeys, variously angry, flaunt the tips of their torsos.." - (that's a very elegant way of saying flaunt their pricks, I suppose!) 



 - "Where the elephants, squirming as mountains squirm during an earthquake, beg a child for food, imparting an ancient sense of the truth - "Give me food. I want to eat" - and then kneel as if to supplicate/Where the bears scramble deftly up and then look down, awaiting the orders of their keeper/Where the bats hang suspended, like the heart of a modern Russian/Where the breast of the falcon suggests the downy clouds that precede a storm/ Where the low-flying bird pulls in its wake the sunset and all the coals of its fire/Where the tiger's face, with its frame of white beard and the eyes of an elderly Moslem.." - (that's a tiger's face)



 - "with its frame of white beard and the eyes of an elderly Moslem, we pay hommage to the first Mohammedan and read the essence of Islam/Where we begin to see the faiths as ebbing currents of waves whose surge is the various species/ And that the earth harbors animals in such multitude because each of them sees God in its own way/Where the cannon shot at noon compels the eagles to gaze skyward in expectation of a storm/Where the eagles plummet from their lofty perches like idols toppled by an earthquake from temples and rooftops/Where after a brief rain the ducks of a certain species cry out in unison, as if offering a thanksgiving prayer to the deity of ducks - has it feet and beak?/ Where the ash-silver guineau fowl have the aspect of professional beggars/ Where in the Malayan bear I refuse to recognize a fellow northener and discover the Mongol there concealed/Where the wolves convey compliance and devotion/ Where the parrots and their stifling habitat acccosts me as I enter with their coral salutations - "Idiots! Idiots!" 


- (With a parrot) - "Where a fat and glistening walrus undulates, like a langid beauty, his black, slippery fan-shaped foot, then leaps into the water, and when it slides once more onto the ramp, upon its massive greasy body, appears with spiny bristles and smooth brow, the head of Nietzsche/Where the jaw of the white black-eyed exalted llama and the jaw of the flat-horned buffalo move evenly to the right and to the left, as does the life of the land with popular representation and a government responsible to the people - that paradise desired by so many/Where the rhinoceros holds in its red-and-white eyes the unquenchable fury of a toppled tsar - he alone, of all the animals, regards mankind with the unconcealed disdain which tsars reserve for slave rebellions. In him lurks Ivan the Terrible/ Where the gulls with long beaks and cold blue eyes that seem rnged by spectacles resemble international financiers, confirmation of what we find in the adroit way they filch the food thrown to the seal/Where remembering that the Russians were wont to call their  chieftains by the name of falcon, and remembering the keenness of  Cossack and falcon eye alike, we begin to know who instruct the Russians in the art of war/Where the elephants, their trumpet-calls forgotten, make a sound that seems to mourn their sad condition./Do they make such paltry sounds in deference to our own excessive falconness?  I  don't know/ Where the animals loose lose their marvelous potentialities, like "The Song of Igor's Campaign" embedded in a Book of Hours." 



( "A Book of Hours " is a monastic book, in one copy of which, a more pagan Russian epic, the early Russian epic, the "Song of Igor's Campaign" manuscript was found).

That's not exactly the same reversals (as Whitman's "Respondez"), it's just the use of the line, the use of the long line - and the anaphoric"let...let...let" Whitmanic style that I thought was interesting. I ran into it the other day. 

Student: Isn't that..

AG: Velimir Khlebnikov..

Student: ...a litany..

AG: Yes, similar to a litany.

Student:  ..and you use that in...

AG: Yeah

Student: Kaddish?



[Audio for the above may be heard here beginnng at approximately twenty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-seven-and-three-quarter minutes] 

Expansive Poetics - 27 (Khlebnikov - 2)

February 19, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922)]

AG: Well, it's the list poem, or litany, or anaphoric return to the margin, which is characteristic of a lot of this kind of composition. The most common form is (in the) Bible
- [from Ecclesiastes 12:6-7, King James version] -   "Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern/Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it" - So you have it in the Bible. You have it in all ancient poetry. 

For twentieth-century, the great example you can look up is Christopher Smart's ("Rejoice In the Lamb") (which is the first specemin in our book, among the "Precursors")  but I won't go into that here (but I did put it in the book as a precursor - although, actually, it's a twentieth-century manuscript, because Smart's "Jubilate Agno""Rejoice In the Lamb", written in (the) 176o's or so, was not published until 1920, it was considered so outrageously cranky - Written three lines a day in a mental hospital. Smart was where I got my structure for "Howl", more than Whitman). 

 
[Christopher Smart (1722-1771)]

Student:  (Velimir) Khlebnikov[in"Menagerie"]  is a naturalist. It reminds me of Whitman's "animals..animals..animals", you know.. in "Song of Myself"...

AG:  I don't know that.

Student: (That's) just a nick-name for the poem.

AG: "I would be content to go live with the animals" ?

Student: Yes, yes, 

AG: I want to move on to other topics

Student: Um-hmm]

AG : Is Khlebnikov's descriptions of the animals accurate? 

Student: Very good. It's very fine.

AG: He worked in a zoo.

Student:  ..Let me see what I can think of. Just (remembering).. 

AG: The Nietzche look of what is it..the sea-lion?

Student: The walrus.

AG: Walrus.

Student:  Yes. No, what I was thinking of was that some of his accounts of birds in there are particularly very good, and...

AG: There's also.. one of the animals was chewing with his jaw first to the left and then to the right.

Student: Yeah

AG: The flat-horned buffalo.

Student: I like the way he switches from the nauralism into the political neo..somewhat..is that surrealism? - to jump from one to the other and compare them back and forth?

AG: Well, the jump of mind...

Student: Mixed metaphor?

AG: ...would be surrealism, I would guess... continuous junping around like that..

Student: These..these two lines here about "Where after a brief rain the ducks of a certain species cry out in unison, as if offering a thanksgiving prayer to the deity of ducks." 

AG: Is that so?

Student: Oh, they all come out of the water. They just all... quack-quack-quack-quack-quack. You know it's...

AG: After a rain?

Student: After a rain. And the next line too is like a double-punch here -  "Where the ash-silver guineau fowl have the aspect of professional beggars" - And the "guinea fowl" are a semi-domesticated bird which will just follow you around everywhere. A little.. and they're kept like chickens, hens, in the..

AG What is implied..  What was his line for it? "Where the..."?

Student:   "Where the ash-silver guineau fowl have the aspect of professional beggars"

AG: Oh, they do follow you around

Student: They follow you all around the place.  They're a nuisance.

AG: Yeah

Student: It's great

AG: Actually then, observed carefully. 

Student: Very well. Very good



AG: Nineteen...? I don't know when these (next) poems by Ezra Pound are. They're probably around the same time or around World War (I), between 1910 (and)... (which was) when Khlebnikov wrote his Whitmanics, which are..  The footnote, incidentally, to this little piece that I read [Menagerie] does mention Whitman. It says that "'Menagerie' was first published in Sadock Sudei, St. Petersburg, 1909 ."Sadock Sudei" means either a "Trap", or a "Hatchery", for Judges. This was the first document issued by the Russian Futurists. It actually appeared in April 1910, in an edition of three hundred copies, which were printed on wallpaper as a parody of elaborate bourgeois books. Khlebnikov's prose poem, one of the few outstanding works in this collection, shows the influence of Walt Whitman whose  poems had been translated by Kornei Chukovsky in 1907 - see (Vladimir) Markov's Russian Futurism - A History" - So, apparently Whitman had an immediate impact on the Russian  Futurists. Translated in 1907 into Russian (for) the first time.
   

[Sadok Sudei - Zhuravi', St Petersburg, 1910]

[Audio for the above may be heard here beginning at approximately twenty-seven-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-two-and-a-quarter minutes in]

Expansive Poetics - 28 - (Pound & Whitman)

February 20, 2014, 3:00 am

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So there's two poems by Ezra Pound - I haven't got the dates on them but I'm guessing that they're around 1917, around World War I or before.

"Commission" - First is Pound's address to his own poems (just as Whitman had addressed his poems to go out into the world - "who touches this book touches a man" ["Camerado, this is no book,/Who touches this touches a man"]  "missing me, stop somewhere, you'll find me under your feet" ["If  you want me again look for me under your boot-soles"..."Missing me one place search another/I stop somewhere waiting for you"])

[Allen reads Ezra Pound's "Commission" in its entirety - "Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,/Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-by-convention/Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors./Go as a great wave of cool water,/Bear my contempt of oppressors/  Speak against unconscious oppression,/Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,/Speak against bonds./Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,/Go to the women in suburbs/Go to the hideously wedded,/Go to them whose failure is concealed,/Go to the unluckily mated,/Go to the bought wife,/Go to the woman entailed./ Go to those who have delicate lust,/Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted/Go like a blight upon the dulness of the world;/Go with your edge against this,/Strengthen the subtle cords,/Bring confidence upon the algae and the tentacles of the soul./Go in a friendly manner,/Go with an open speech./Be eager to find new evils and new good,/Be against all forms of oppression/Go to those who are thickened with middle age,/To those who have lost their interest./ Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family—" - (or, "go to the adolescents who are smothered in family")  - "Oh how hideous it is/To see three generations of one house gathered together! - (it's actually one popular Whitmanic opinion that is just the opposite now - "Oh how charming to see three generations of one house gathered together!") - "It is like an old tree with shoots,/And with some branches rotted and falling./ Go out and defy opinion,/ Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood./..Be against all sorts of mortmain - ("dead hand""mort main") - Actually, there's a little bit of Whitman's reversal (in "Respondez!"), there's a little bit of the same bitterness toward society or toward America.

However, seeing that he'd actually arrived at some kind of identical position as Whitman.. (though, as you can see, a bit more shallow - because Whitman would have loved those large mother and large fathers and large families). Here he's actually cursing the family - the American family system (in those days, I suppose, more of a smothering influence than it's conceived to be now.

Then there's a very brief poem - ten lines - called"A Pact", which is very famous, because, at this point, the high-talking, intelligent, Ezra Pound concedes something to Whitman whom he despised and talked against. He was mostly pissed at Whitman because Whitman did not invent a new measure for America. (Whitman) seemed to have abandoned all the old European measures without substituting anything new except a worn-out biblical style (which is somewhat of a fault in Whitman) - which Pound and (William Carlos) Williams tried to advance on. That is, Whitman wiped out the old measures and Pound and Williams were now trying to reconstruct some measure for the line of verse in America, and some standard for the diction that had been wiped out by Whitman's explosion. 

So Pound says - "I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -/ I have detested you long enough./I come to you as a grown child/Who has had a pig-headed father,/I am old enough now to make friends./It was you that broke the new wood,/Now is a time for carving/We have one sap and one root -/Let there be commerce between us." - So what did he mean, "Now is the time for carving"? - I'm interpreting that as meaning - "Now is a time for reshaping and reconstituting some kind of American measure" - and the phrase "American measure" stays with William Carlos Williams and becomes his obsession by 1950, half a century later - the idea of finding a way of measuring American verse.  Yes?

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

Friday's Weekly Round Up - 165

February 21, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Allen Ginsberg, 1954 - oil on canvas - painting by Robert LaVigne]

Two weeks since the last round-up, so let's get right to it.


[Robert LaVigne - Photograph by Myles Aronowitz]

Robert Lavigne - The troubling case of Robert LaVigne and the allegedly stolen paintings.

Newspaper reports last year noted a court case involving LaVigne and his former assistant George Chebanyuk - ("Chebanyuk is alleged to have tried to sell off six works created by LaVigne, including a nude presumably depicting Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg"). 

A jury deliberated for four hours, on February 4, and returned a not-guilty verdict. 
A civil lawsuit remains outstanding (in May, Chebanyuk sued the Seattle Police Department for the return of the artwork). 

Over all this in-fighting and bickering sits the sad, dwindling, spectre of the artist (seminal artist of the Beat Generation), "in declining health".   

[sad update - we've just heard today (Friday February 21) of the death, yesterday in Seattle, following a stroke and brief hospitalization, of Robert LaVigne - he'd been, as we say, ailing for some time -  he was 86 - more news when we get it - he's, of course, very much in our thoughts]




Vintage Ginsberg audio - Ginsberg reads (Giuseppe) Ungaretti - Thanks to Guilherme Ziggy for putting up on Soundcloud Allen's July 1967 reading, at the Festival of The Two Worlds in Spoleto, from "Il Taccuino Del Vecchio" ( Ungaretti's "The Old Man's Notebook").
Plenty more Ginsberg on Soundcloud. See, for example here - andhere - and, most interestingly and curiously, here.



More Burroughs materials.  (Burroughs, of course, is, likewise amply featured on Soundcloud).  We don't think we've mentioned the University of Delaware Library's show - "Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted - William S Burroughs at 100"on view until June 13. We did mention the Lawrence Art Museum's William S. Burroughs - Creative Observer (up for a week or so more, until March 2nd). Curator Yuri Zupancic can be seen speaking of that show, and of Burroughs' art work in general, here. 

Recommended reading - Chal Ravens' piece, "The Priest And The Wild Boys - William Burroughs As Musician", in The Quietus - on "the rise and fall of (his, Burroughs') musical legacy".
William, having been commissioned by the magazineCrawdaddy, on attending a Led Zepplin concert in 1975: "I declined ear-plugs. I am used to loud drum and horn music from Morocco, and it always has, if skillfully performed, an exhilarating and energizing effect on me".
(The rest of that piece (including Burroughs' interview with Led Zepplin's Jimmy Page) may be read here).

Iggy Pop "reflects on Burroughs' extraordinary life with close friends and artists who felt his influence", on BBC's Radio 4, here.

Here's Heathcote Williams' recollections, (looking back over almost five decades), of Burroughs in London.



Jaap Van Der Bent's judicious review of  Hilary Holladay's American Hipster(Herbert Huncke biography) on the European Beat Studies Network may be found here 

Check out also Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo's review (both in English and Spanish) 0n Bob Kaufman

andThomas Antonic's conversation with the extraordinary ruth weiss, on the same site,is also well worth perusing.

The European Beat Studies Network next conference will be in Tangier, Morocco in November (November 17-19). For more details on that - see here 




[Maggie Estep (1963-2014)]

New York East Village stories - Poet/performer Maggie Estep died last week - a little too soon, a little too suddenly. An alumnae of theJack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at  Naropa (she memorably studied there in the mid 1980's, taking classes with, amongst others, Allen and Burroughs)

Here's a little memoir/note she wrote on Allen, on the occasion of  last year's Tompkins Square Park "Howl" Festival:
"His was an excellent spirit. He gave me very useful critiques when I was starting out, and I also had the honor of opening for him at NYU [New York University] not too long before he died. Best part of it was coming off the stage and Allen standing there beaming, then giving me a bear hug and saying, "That was magnificent". It meant the world to me - 
Also, one time, my kid brother Chris was visiting me at my hovel on East 5th Street in the mid 1990's. He casually asked me for Allen's street address and then said, "I'm going for a walk". Chris came back several hours later to report that he had randomly rung Allen Ginsberg's bell, said, "I just want to shake your hand" into the intercom, then was buzzed up. Allen showed him his library (really, his library) and made him some oatmeal".  

William Burroughs - (Commissioner of Sewers)

February 22, 2014, 3:00 am

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Burroughs Centennial celebration continues. Here is Klaus Maeck's 1991 documentary - William S Burroughs - Commissioner of Sewers, featuring, in a suitably cut-up form, Jurgen Ploog's interview with Burroughs, and footage from a 1986 Burroughs reading (recorded in Berlin, Germany, in May of 1986). 
We've featured a snippet of this before (on Burroughs' birthday) but here is the whole thing.

JP: I want to ask you William, what made you become a writer? I'm referring  to your remark, in the preface toQueer, where you said that your wife, your wife Joan's death had played an important part in your decision to say "I have to go into writing now? What.."

WSB:  What.. yes..but, excuse me, it's never.. I don't think it's a conscious decision at all, until you really committed yourself. Someone once asked (Jean) Genet when he started to write and he said at birth. Now that doesn't mean there's something particular in the chromosomes of a writer, but it does mean that all his experience is focused in that direction long before he puts pen to paper or sits down at a typewriter. You'll remember something that happened years ago and that will fit right in to what I'm writing now. So my past experience becomes meaningful in terms of material for writing in the future, but I was comparatively late, you see, I wrote Junkyat the age of thirty-five, and it was published in..1963 (publication is, I think, very important for a writer. If I hadn't suceeded in publishing Junky, I might just have given up writing.

JP: What do you think the fact, or the state, of death represents? Is it just an end of something, or is it a transition, or..?.. like, like when we mentioned books like The Tibetan Book of the Dead  and all that, do they indicate that there is more than we normally realize?

WSB: "We"? -  please, don't do the "we" - it depends,  there are all kinds, there are all kinds,  of attitudes..

JP: No, I mean in our culture..

WSB: ...towards death..  Well, as I said, "Kim had never doubted the existence of God, so the possibility of an after-life", and Kim is my alter-ego and spokesman (like Larry Speakesis the White House spokesman). Well, now... however, the Egyptian.. and the Tibetan, Book of the Dead are quite different, because the Tibetan Book.. was based on the premise(s) of re-incarnation, whereas the Egyptians had no concept of  reincarnation.

JP: But they believed in death after..  or.. resurrection, because they kept their mummies.

WSB: Ah yes, but only those people who had mummies could resurrect themselves.

JP: They needed a body.

WSB: They neeeded a body. That's why the Egyptians took to Christianity like a vulture takes to carrion. It's the resurrection of the body - this whole mummy concept..which I find..well..very..very unsatisfactory, to put it mildly.

JP: Well, and your personal feeling about that. Do you believe in reincarnation?

WSB:  Oh yes, I more or less take that for granted, the possibility of reincarnation, and of course I agree with the Buddhist system, that it is something to be avoided if possible, it's the worst thing that can happen. It may  -  " el delito mayor/Del hombre es haber nacido" [Pedro Calderon de la Barca]

JP: What's that in English?

WSB: That  means the first, delito, mistake, you can say, is to have been born in the first place...


["The Western Lands" - William S Burroughs (1987)]

JP: Lets get back to the subject of the writer. What is the original field of the writer? what mechanisms should he consider, work on..?

WSB: The word "should" should never arise. There is no such concept as "should" with regard to art or anything, unless you specify. In other words, if you're trying to build a bridge, then you can say we should do this and we should do that, with respect to getting the bridge built, but it doesn't float in a vaccuum, My feeling about art is that, one very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don't know that they know. Now this applies not only to.. to all creative thinking, For example, people on the sea-coast, in the Middle Ages, they knew the earth was round, they believed the earth was flat because the church said so. Galileo says.. tells them the earth is round, and nearly was burned at the stake for saying so. (Paul) Cezanne shows people what objects look at, seen from a certain  angle, in a certain light. and literally, people just thought he'd thrown paint on canvas, and they attacked his..his canvases with umbrellas when they were first exhibited. Well now, no child would have any difficulty in seeing a Cezanne, There's.. Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness, but there's always reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough, and, for example (James) Joyce then made people aware of their..their stream-of-consciousness, at least on one level, on a verbal level, and he was, at first, accused of being unintelligible. I don't think many people now would have any difficulty with Ulysses.

JP: No

WSB: So, the artist, then, expands awareness, and once the..once the breakthrough is made this becomes part of the general awareness.

JP: So it's a matter of seeing things in a new way, differently

WSB: Well, yes, but seeing things that are there

JP: And well.. of seeing.. I'm interested in.. That takes me to the subject of (the) picture. Like, we have an alphabetic writing, like the..  but the Chinese, for example, they have an ideogramic way of writing, and they..some people say they have a different way of thinking because of that. Does the...the visual aspect, is that important? Does it come... 

WSB: Oh, well I think it's quite important to have so-called pictorial writing like Egyptian hieroglyphs. (Well, it is not as completely pictorial as people might think - the grammar is extremely complicated and you must have a number of concepts, that are arbitrary - so the word for "dawn" will be the word for "sun", but there are also what is known as determinatives..

JP: Yes

WSB: ...that must accompany that).  So, there are many arbitrary factors in any pictorial system.

JP: A set of  symbols that could be arranged in different ways?

WSB: Yes, but, for example, how do you say your propositions in pictures? The answer is you don't, you have pictures that represent them, but they're arbitrary.  

JP; Maybe you could say, we could say that "should" could not be expressed in pictures.

WSB: I don't think it could. Sometimes I will ask someone, you know -  they're asking me something, I'll say, "well, draw me a picture of it" (and) if they can't do that, I say, "Well then, Where is it? What does it mean?"

JP: I think that's an important...

WSB: Very, very, yes

JP: Of visualizing things

WSB: Particularly for a writer and artist.

JP: Well that takes us right into the subject of language, the way it is used in our culture and Western alphabetical culture, and techniques that are..that have been found, like cut-ups, to counter the effect of a language becoming more and more abstract and meaningless.

WSB: Well, yes, you see the.. I'd.. I'd spoken about the artist being the people making people aware of what they know and don't know that they know. That is, the cut-up is really  much closer to the actual facts of perception. As soon as you look out the window, look around the room, walk down the street, your consciousness is being cut by random factors - life is a cut-up - so the cut-ups are actually closer to the  perceptions, human perception than straight narrative, straight linear narrative.

See, the cut-ups was not my idea, it was Brion Gysin's idea, it's essentially a painter's idea of applying the techniques of painting to writing. This was the montage technique, which was pretty old hat, actually, in painting.

JP:  Well, there's a theory of saying that all things are happening at the same time, and only because we live in a certain way of time, of looking at time that we feel that it's all lined up in one line, going from one line, coming from one point and going to another point....

WSB: Well, yes, but this is..

JP: Chronological,

WSB: Yes but this is just part of the.. I mean, it's integral in the.. part of the word medium. We know things are happening simultaneously, but there's just no way of doing that on a page. You can't do it. If you tried, it just wouldn't work. You could say, "here is one column" (and) this is going on at the same time, that is going on, and that is going on, and that is going on". But it's just not going to, it's not going to work. You can do it much better, of course, in painting, you can do it, come closer, in cinema

JP: Film?

WSB: In the film, yes. (a page a printed page)


["Tornado Dead 223" - William S Burroughs & Brion Gysin collage (c.1965)]

JP: Do you have any advice for young writers?

WSB: Well, no, because advice that may be quite valid for one writer may be quite useless to another. Well, you've got to see it. If you can't see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, your reader isn't going to be able to see it. And, well, as Sinclair Lewis says, learn to type (and he also said something which I have found to be very true. He says if you've just written something that you think is great, you just can't wait to show it to somebody or publish it, he said "throw it away, it's terrible!", and this is... I've found to be true, quite true. I'll write something that I think is great and I'll look at it a couple of days later and I say, "tear it into very small pieces and put it into someone else's ashcan, it's terrible. I guess I've destroyed I don't know how many thousands of pages of writing. So ..and then something that I wrote that didn't seem anything special at the time, I'd almost..  I think some things..sometimes I'm looking through a notebook, I  have forgotten that I wrote them, and I say "oh, well, this is, this is something really something good here". Writers are very poor judges of their own work, I find.

JP: So keep a notebook is one thing, What about dreams?

WSB: Oh well, I always write my dreams down and I get a great deal of material from dreams. 

JP: So they are a source of material?

WSB: Oh, good heavens, yes. Well, for me, at least, Now some people they don't remember their dreams at all. I've talked to people who say they do not remember ever..they don't remember a single dream

JP: Why's that?

WSB: Well, I always ask if they're heavy sleepers and they usually are. They forget their dreans in the time it takes them to wake up. We know that everybody dreams and we know that dreams (this is a very important discovery) that dreams are as necessary as sleep itself. Deprived of dream-sleep someone would die, in about a month or two, just as they would die from lack of sleep, no matter how much dreamless sleep they get. They've experimented with people and they've experimented with animals. They can tell by the REM (therapid eye movements) when people or animals are dreaming, and this, apparently, is.. serves some very essential biological function. It's a biologic necessity. Dreaming is a biologic necessity.

JP: Yes, they say even animals dream

WSB: Oh, certainly they dream. All warm-blooded creatures dream. Presumably cold-blooded creatures, cold-blooded creatures like snakes and fish do not dream.  

JP: So maybe they have a different mind? 

WSB: Well, obviously, they have a completely different consciousness, almost inconceivable to us. Have you noticed that we can identify very well with animals, particularly with predatory animals. It's much harder to empathize what a deer feels than to empathize what a cat feels, much harder. I mean the idea of something that eats grass is extremely alien, I think, and I find it very difficult to identify with birds.


["My Education - A Book of Dreams" - William S Burroughs (1995)]

JP: One German writer, Gottfried Benn, he phrased a saying that - "the word, is the prick of the mind" - that's how he put it. I'd like to get into the..  what is the nature of word. Have you.. You once talked about a field theory of word. What were your findings there.

WSB: I really didn't come to any valid conclusions at all, except thatthe word seems to be an organism, and also my guess that the written word came before the spoken word.

JP: Is it a dangerous organism, or just an organism?

WSB:  Well, it depends. It can become dangerous. It acts like a virus, that is, in that it replicates itself. Of course.. you would.. a virus would not be recognized as a virus, can only be recognized as a virus by its symptoms, and a virus that produces no, what shall we say, psychopathological symptoms would not be recognized as a virus.

JP: The symptoms of the virus, where could you detect them in words or language?

WSB: Well, one thing that you can detect them in is that it is compulsive and involuntary, It's very difficult for anyone to stop their flow of words. Most people don't try but if you try you find that it's extremely difficult. So here's something that's happening against your will actually.

JP: Yes, that's something that indicates an influence from the outside. What about the language of the mass-media or the political language, the demagogic language, is that influenced by it too, or is it just a by-product?

WSB: Well, of course the political language is always concerned with generalities. They don't want to be precise. It's deliberately being used to confuse rather than elucidate. The difference between a... a writer is trying to evoke clear images through language, rather an awkward instrument, but a politician is trying to do just the opposite, he's trying to cloud issues rather than clear them.

JP: The writers are mainly concerned with.. working with the word but we have a multi-media effect right now going on, I mean, we (I keep saying "we"!)  you can notice it everywhere, like music is very important, pictures are very important.

WSB: Oh yes, yes, certainly, you have the film medium in which you have words and music and images, oh certainly.

JP: Could it be helpful for a writer to go out into other medias, like film, like you have been on records (with Laurie Anderson) and you have been in films. Is that a..?

WSB: Well, since you go into films, you're in another medium and you do what you can. You do well, or you don't do well. Simply, it's a different... different medium.
The lines between disciplines are breaking down. Everywhere the lines between music and word, between painting and words, and so on, photography. There's a general tendency for the media, the disciplines, to be breaking down, the lines are breaking down.


["The Black Rider" -William S Burroughs, Tom Waits and Robert Wilson (Canadian tour program) (1998)]

JP: William, you did a lot of travelling, You lived in Mexico City, South America, Tangier, or London, for a long time. Do you think travellng is important for a writer, that it adds to his perspective?

WSB: Well, generally speaking, yes, but there are writers who don't seem to have any neceessity to travel at all. Emily Dickinson.(Samuel) Beckett you don't feel has any need to travel, it's all taking place inside, but, certainly as a general proposition, yes, it gives you new perspectives, new material and so forth.

JP: And it also brings you in contact with other cultures.

WSB: Precisely. Precisely, yes. all the people that have had a completely different conditioning

JP: Can you travel in space..I mean, can you travel in time?

WSB: Well, we do travel in time, of course, all the time, we move back and forth in time. I have found that..there was a man named (J.W.) Dunne and he wrote a book called Experiment in Time[An Experiment With Time]  and found that his dreams consisted not only of the past but the future events as well. And I have found this to be true, since I write my dreams down and very often I will dream somethingthat then later happens. So, in that sense, yeah, I think that it is more.. it would be easier to travel into the future, in a real sense, than into the past.There is a law of evolution that any change in an organism that involves biologic mutation is irreversible.. that is, once a creature gives up his gills and gets air-breathing lungs, they'll never get their gills back, that evolution, in that sense, is a one-way street. 

JP: And that effects.. that has something to do with time?

WSB: Well yes

JP: Meaning you can't go back

WSB: You can't go back.

JP: You can only go forward?

WSB: Well, it means that you can't go back beyond any change that involves a biologic mutation.

JP: I think many of your writings are good teachings in how to survive under hostile situations, whatever they may be. Does that have anytingto do with your appeal for weapons?

WSB: Why yes, weapons are certainly one way of surviving in a chaotic situation, generally speaking, of course, the whole matter of flexibility, being able to change and alter your thinking to accomodate an unfamiliar new situation, so that I would say, at the present time, when we have an escalating rate of change, that flexibility is very necessary for survival. And therefore the old dogmatic ways of thinking are counter.. counter-productive for our survival. If you can't change when the circumstances change, then where are you?

JP: Right. You end up being extinct

WSB: Yeah, you're at a terrible disadvantage.

JP: Of course, there is a concept..saying.. which is very popular at the moment, that. .when there are no weapons, then you have peace, automatically, so to speak, but I think that threatens your ability to survive.

WSB: Oh, I think so too. What do they mean, when there are no..  I mean, there are always weapons.

JP: Right. Even your body, your fists are weapons.

WSB; Yes. Anything you can pick up, a glass, or a chair, or any bottle.


[William S Burroughs wields a sword]

JP: Bill, I'd like to take a look at the future, if there is any at all, well, there is always some. Do you see mankind moving into space?

WSB: Well, it's the only way he.. the only possible solution. I don't say that they will, but it's the only place for them to go. There's no place to go except up and out.

JP: To move into space, is there any mutation necessary for man, or do you think we're equipped to go

WSB: I don't think we're equipped at all. That's the point. It would require a biologic mutation quite as drastic as was involved in the shift from water to land, but the possibility, the air-breathing potential, must be there before the transition can be made, otherwise it's simply suicidal.

JP: And psychologically?

WSB: Well, any.. any physiological mutation is...

JP: ...psychological..

WSB: ...going to involve profound  psychological changes, necessarily.

JP: Do you see that taking place here already? - or is it very far away?

WSB:  Well no, I don't think it's very far away at all. We know that people..if the astronauts should stay in space, say, for five years they'd lose almost all their bone. If you don't use it, you lose it. And skeletal structure has no use in a weightless environment, so the end-result would be something like a jelly-fish.

An edited and longer version of this interview is included in Burroughs Live - The Collected Interviews of William S Burroughs as "Writing in the Future" (the interview was conducted in Berlin, May 9 1986) 

and a bonus - Maeck talks about his film-work and his first encounter with Burroughs (he made a brief cameo in Maeck's 1984 movie, Decoder).  In Megan Legault's film, Encoding /Decoding, he recalls the circumstances of the filming (the Burroughs recollections starting approximately nine minutes in).  The film itself, in its entirety, may be viewed here.

Expansive Poetics - 29 (Longfellow's Metrics)

February 24, 2014, 3:00 am

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["Thou too, Sail on, O ship of State.." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) autographed manuscript]



["The degredation of life in America" - William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) annotated typescript -
 c.Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale, Connecticut ]


Student: Did they [the early American modernists] manage to do it? (find a way of measuring American verse)?

AG: Yes, I think (William Carlos) Williams did. There were a number of people working on this problem at the time who were friends - William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and Marianne Moore, altogether went to the same school [editorial note - not exactly, Williams and Pound went to the University of Pennsylvania, Doolittle and Moore to near-by Bryn Mawr] and were friends and lovers, slept with each other, got drunk together, went out to dances, read poetry together. Willams [born 1883] was a little bit older than Pound, [born 1885],  Marianne Moore, I think, about the same age as Pound [1887, two years younger] and Hilda Doolittle [born 1886] maybe slightly younger. Hilda Doolittle is famous as an Imagist poet.


[H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)]

They all attempted to solve the problem of measure by different strategies. And among this group of poets - the avant-garde Imagist school, that was modernist, Imagist, Objectivist, you could call it, who received the influence of the international poets that we'll been dealing with, like the Futuristsand Surrealists and Dadaists, who understood the sense of relativity of speech and morals and philosophy, and who had God swept out from under them, and all absolutes swept out from under them, and even patriotism, as you can see, after Whitmanand Pound. After World War I and the destruction of all civilized values, there was no reference point in civilization that one could count on as a permanent value. The older measures - the stress - duh-dah duh-dah duh-dah duh-dah - had fallen into disrepute because (they) had finally come to pervert speech. So, by 1860, or (18)80, there was a poem, (by) Oliver Wendell Holmes, I think [editorial note - it was in fact by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow], "The Ship of State" [from "The Building of The Ship", the final section - "The Republic"] (which was quoted, in 1945 by (England's Prime Minister) Winston Churchill, as sort of official poetic rhetoric, the kind of poetry a man could listen to).  And it was "Thou too sail on, O ship of state.." You know that poem? 

Student: Hmm

AG: Does anybody know or ever hear of that?



["Sail on Oh Ship of State.." -Franklin D Roosevelt to Winston Churchill, January 20, 1941]


Student: Yes

AG: Well, maybe I'll bring it in. It's in all the high school anthologies of the (19)20's - (And) it has the line - "Thou too sail on, O ship of state" - And it's considered to be (a perfect example of) iambic pentameter.
[Allen moves to the blackboard] - There doesn't seem to be an eraser here. Can we make sure that there are (in the future)...in case we need...

Well, it's the climactic line which Winston Churchill quoted - "Thou too sail on, O ship of state" - That's how it was measured - "Thou too sail on, O ship of state" - Right?  You can all hear that?. However, if you notice, the exclamatory "O' - Oh! - which is, if anything, an exclamation with stress, here receives no stress. So, finally, the poetic measure of America and England had become so reversed that it made absolutely no sense at all - that an exclamatory "O" was given an unstressed mark. So that can't be any kind of measure at all because it runs counter to speech. They'd finally come to the point where the formal measure had actually begun contradicting speech cadences. So there was no way of using this anymore except by putting your emotions into some kind of box that it didn't fit. Because, actually, I would say, " THOU too SAIL ON O ship of STATE", (and) if you're going to say "O", you're going to say "OH!" - "OH ship of state" - but the "OH! - " would be bigger than anything else (or "SAIL" - probably "SAIL" and "OH!" would be equal) - "Thou too SAIL ON O ship of state" (So " sail", "O", "ship" - or maybe the "state" too). But that's just exactly weirded out. I mean, that's weirding out, the way it's set up there [Allen is referring to the iambic measure that he has inscribed upon the blackboard]

Peter Orlovsky: How did (Winston) Churchill say it?

AG: "Thou TOO sail ON o SHIP of STATE" - It's automatic... like robot cadences.
Yeah, I think in Fulton, Missouri, the "Iron Curtain" speech,I think, he did that. When he declared Cold War on Russia, he did it with that kind of cadence - in other words, a completely faked public language. [editorial note - 'the "Iron Curtain" speech" referred to here was delivered in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. - in it, Churchill declared, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."] 


They all had to deal with this problem, that is to say - Pound, Moore, Williams, H.D. 
They all solved it different ways.

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-seven-and-a-quarter minutes in, and concluding approximately forty-two-and-three-quarter minutes] 

Expansive Poetry - 30 (The Spirit of Romance)

February 25, 2014, 3:00 am

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AG:  To make a long story short, (Ezra) Pound went to Venice, (and) studied some classical languages and Renaissance, andProvencal poetries, specializing in two areas - one, where the language moved, from Latin to a provincial language, that is to say, where writers made the transition from writing in classical Latin to writing in French Provencal, or troubadour language, or.. what other languages?..in Italy, that was...

Student: It's Provencal in the south of France, and koine for northern Spain and Italy.

AG: What was it called?

Student: koine

AG: [phonetically] ko-ee-nay

Student: K-O-I-N-E  It's a common language..

AG Northern Spain?

Student: But the lower... and, uh.. the whole south of France.. and then the Italian poets learned it and wrote in that language rather than Italian.

AG: Who was the first to.. what did Petrarchwrite in ?

Student: He wrote in Italian.

AG: Was he the first to shift?

Student; No, he was the last of the troubadours.

AG: Uh-huh.. So who was the first of the...

Student: William of Aquitaine. He died in 1127.



[William IX Duke of Aquitaine (1071-1126) - from a 13th Century miniature in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris]

AG: Um-hmm.  And then Dantesort of climaxed all of that by making formal Tuscan language?

Student: Well the.. first Italian poetry was composed at the court of the Emperor Frederick IIwho died in 1250. So those first decades there..

AG: Yeah

Student:   ....saw the origin of Italian poetry...

AG: Yeah

Student: ...but most of the terminology was adapted from Provencal to Italian.

AG: Um-hmm - So (Ezra) Pound's special study was Provencal, and he translated many of the troubadours, minstrels, and German minnesingers, His interest was that cultural change where people wrote in idiomatic languages rather than in the official language, in Latin. He was also interested in going back and researching the measures of ancient Greece and Rome, (because we got our nomenclature and our structure of prosody from the old Greek. As I said, the Greek prosody specialized in quantity or the length of the vowel rather than stress).  



[ 14th Century Troubadours - Anon via Archiv fur Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin]

He also went to study Chinese a little bit, because Chinese had a picture-language, which was visually clear, like Imagism, so you couldn't get away with bullshit - writing big poems about truth and beauty without defining them. Whereas in Chinese those words had a pictorial, functional definition - a process rather than an abstraction.  

Marianne Moore decided that what she would do would be to count the number of syllables in each line, arbitrarily - make a stanza-form that would have five syllables, and then the next line ten syllables, and the next line two, and the next line twelve, say. It was a little bit like a butterfly's wing, sort of arbitrary-looking. Then she would repeat the same syllable count and stanza form from stanza to stanza. With her, it was taking the mechanical count of the syllables and then having the rhythm of the speech run counter to that, so you get a little syncopation that way. And I worked a little bit with that in an early book, Empty Mirror, and that syllable-count is one thing that everybody should practice, because to get an ear for syllables is very good. And also many of the classical lines are syllable, hendecasyllable...

(tape stops here)

(to be continued..)


[Audio for the above may be heard here starting at approximately forty-two-and-three-quarter minutes, and concluding at approximately forty-six and a half minutes]

---

Expansive Poetics - 31 (WCW & Others)

February 26, 2014, 3:00 am

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tape resumes in media res.. class discussion of traditional and modernist metrics

AG:.... how many (syllables in the) French alexandrine?

Student: Twelve

AG: Twelve. And if you write in eight, eleven, or twelve syllables, pretty soon you develop an automatic body ear for being able to do it. Among moderns, Kenneth Rexroth's longer works are done by syllables - you'll see a long column of poetic lines and they're all six or seven or eight syllables. A number of poets worked with that. So that was Marianne Moore's way.

H.D. - Hilda Doolittle was a lesbian and was very much influenced by Sappho and Greek poetry, and, as far as I understand, she attempted to reconstitute classical quantity and measure in her line by the vowel length. I don't know her work so well, so I'd have to look that up to find samples.

William Carlos Williams abandoned all attempts to go back to the ancient world and to imitate earlier forms. And so what he did was listen to people talk around (him), hear the raw data going into his ear, hear the rhythms of speech as people spoke - dah duh dah dah duh dah, duh dah-dah duh - and began recognizing and appreciating the ordinary mind, so to speak, or ordinary mouth, rhythms of everyday speech - and that's the nearest to some sort ofZen, or Buddhist, approach, which is to say, to take the elements of speech as he found (them) around him and recompose the intensest moments of it into a little machine, a little poem-machine. He would listen for samples of archetypal emotive idiomatic rhythm (archetypal, that is, repeatable - emotive, containing some kind of affect, affection, or anger, or feeling - idiomatic, what he heard his wife say, what he heard his patients say). And in his Collected Poems, you'll find little poems called "Specimens". He goes into a woman's house, and the woman says (he's a doctor, a pediatrician) and the poem ends, "Doctor I-I-I-I-I don't think she's breeeeethin'.." - B-R-E-E-E-T-H-E-N - " He was trying to get that "breeth-en" -"I don't think she's breethen" - So he was listening for that kind of rhythmic piecework, and putting those pieces together, composing them into poems, or listening to himself. Like the famous,"I have eaten/the plums/that were in/the icebox/ and which/you were probably/saving/for breakfast/ Forgive me/they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold" - Just a note he left his wife, which he read in the morning and maybe decided that was perfect speech, perfect American speech, perfect poem. 

So all four (H.D., Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams - and Ezra Pound) did a different turn in developing an American measure. William Carlos Williams, at the end, arrived at a triadic line, a line that went down the page in three steps, which he would divie and balance by ear, with a number of  different criterea for how you make it balance. You'd have a middle - by "triadic", I mean three [Allen moves to the blackboard], like that on the line. [Allen to class] - Do we have any Williams here? Does anybody have any William Carlos Williams (poems)? 

Student: Yes, I have..

AG: Do you have a late Williams, that would have.. Pictures from Brueghel ?

Student: Yes, that's what I brought.

AG: Great, okay, that's perfect. If you can pass it along..



[cover to New Directions paperback edition of "Pictures from Brueghel"]


Student: Ah, forget it, I'm sorry, I.. (don't actually have that book).

AG: Well, okay. Do you remember any Williams? Okay. I think it's - I may be wrong -"The descent/beckons/as the ascent beckoned" [from Williams' poem,"The Descent"] - Is that right?

Student: Yes

AG [writing the line/three lines on the blackboard]: "The descent..." - you're getting old...  I may wrong in dividing the line up. 

Student: (Actually, it's two lines - "The descent beckons/as the ascent beckoned")

AG: Well one is enough. "The descent" -  introduction of the idea - "beckons" - so he's stating the idea of the descent - "beckons/as the ascent beckoned" - So it's three seperate idea pieces, three separate pieces of the idea, maybe spoken haltingly that way - "The descent/beckons/as the ascent beckoned" - So he would balance his line, perhaps, by idea, by balancing the idea of it out. That is, this you might count as one idea, two ideas. Idea one, two, three - think, number one, think, number two, think, number three - or three parts of one thought

Student: Is the word "even" in there? - "The descent/beckons/even as the ascent beckoned"

AG:  Maybe. Maybe -  "The descent/beckons/even as the ascent beckoned" - Maybe - I don't knoe. But for... yes?

Student: Perhaps, just in respect to breath, is it - or thought - is it..is there a relationship between the triadic foot and the haiku. I mean, just by accident.

AG: I don't think he worked it out.

Student: No, but by...

AG: No, I don't think it's that well worked out...

Student: Simultaneous...

AG: ..because Williams' practice.. was very varied. Williams' practice was totally varied. There's no single rule for why you break it up. Sometimes it's breaking up the idea.. which would then  have a relation to haiku, sometimes breaking up the mouthing breath, sometimes it's arbitrary, just to emphasize one word. Sometimes he'll have a single wor likr "a" or "which" in the middle, and balancing two large wings of thought. So it's by the seat of the pants. There isn't any necessarily scientific shot. Williams is much criticized for bullshitting and saying he invented an American measure, and Reed Whittemore, former Library of Congress poet-in-residence and friend of the CIA ((who) wrote the testimony of James Angleton, the intellectual, CIA chief), wrote a book on Williams denouncing him, saying (that) he was a fool, (that) he didn't know what he was doing, he was just coming on, trying to justify all his lousy prosody all his life, by saying  (that) he'd invented an American measure.  But most poets that follow Williams feel that it's an enormous contribution

[undated typescript of William Carlos Williams "Pictures From Brueghel" - "Breughel 1" - via Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Connecticut] 


The key, however, is a relative measure - post-Einstein-ian - relative. It's not a fixed arithmetical foot, like you'd count five syllables, or three long vowels, or three or four iambic feet - it's relative. That is to say, according to your perception, according to the weight in your own ear, according to the seat of the pants - like flying by the  seat of the pants. But what it means, the real key, is something that Buddhists would appreciate - somewhat as in flower-arranging - it's mindfulness and awareness in arranging the line. Not necessarily that the line be symmetrical or even, it's just that when you arrange it you see what you're doing when you're doing it and you don't just leave it slop on the page. So that every line, every one of those triads, is arranged as you might arrange a flower arrangemen, that is to say, with the same attitude of care, weight, weighing the sound one way or another, whether you're weighing the idea, or weighing the sound, or counting the syllable, or combining all of those. I have a little essay on that called "Some Considerations of Mindful Arrangement of Lines on the Page in Free Verse", at the end of a book called Composed on The Tongue, and that was passed out during the various (classes here). It was composed for one of the classes here. You might look that up. It's all the different considerations that might go into this.    Let's see.. Yeah?

Student: I wanted to ask you if you could shed any light on the influence of theArmory Show on (Ezra) Pound or (William Carlos) Williams.. What was...that about?

AG: Well, maybe.. but let's get on..that's a little later. That's 1914 [editorial note - actually, opening-night was February 17, 1913] and I'm still...I still want to stay on this line of not so muchSurrealism or Armory Show, but I want to stay on "children of Whitman", further Whitmanics.

[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately forty-six-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately fifty-five minutes in] 

Expansive Poetics 32 (Walt Whitman - Crossing Brooklyn Ferry)

February 27, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Fulton Ferry Boat (Brooklyn, New York), July 1890 via The Library of Congress, Washington DC]


AG: So the next one chronologically that I want to take up is Hart Crane, whom we have in our book


[Hart Crane (1899-1932)]

(Incidentally, SS [sic] gave me a good idea. (She) gave me, as a gift, one of these things where she made little stick-out labels and divided the sections into European, American, Greek, German, Russian, Eastern European. That seems to be a good way. I'll try it out for dividing up the book. I hadn't thought of that but it sounds like a good idea)

We're going to get to Hart Crane (who's under the American section) - see what year he is?
Student: 1899
AG: 1899, ok..
Student: (Born July 21, 1899).
AG:  After (William Carlos) Williams [William Carlos Williams was born in 1883]
Student: Oh, before Thomas Wolfe! [Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900]
AG: Before Wolfe
Student: Yes, it's right before Thomas Wolfe..and  (right) after..(Williams)..

AG: Okay, now there are two things in Crane. The section of Crane from"The River"- well, let's see. The reference in Whitman for Crane would actually be "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry".. How many know that? How many here have read (Walt) Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"?  [Allen observes a disappointing show of hands] - Ah, well, I think, maybe we should do that then, because that relates to Crane. We've got enough time. 
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' is (on) page 127

Student: It's in here? [pointing to the book]

AG: Yeah, page 127 in there. I actually did my homework and looked it all up last night. I actually prepared all this as a scheme.

Student [to Allen]: We're about a couple of minutes away from the end of this tape.

AG: Okay. Is there anybody here who's good at reading? Is there anybody who would like to read? - (to Student [D.P.]) Could you? Could you read it. Straight ?

Student [D.P.]: Read what?

AG: (Whitman's) "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

Student [D.P.]: Um..

AG: Would you like to try?

Student [D.P.]: Yeah, sure, I could do it.. (but).. I don't know [Student, it transpires, has a serious problem with stuttering (altho' in his reading of Whitman's poem, manages to triumphantly transcend this disability and gives an increasingly assured rendition]


[Walt Whitman 1819-1892]

AG: Try it straight, you know. Please, I just want to get it. You've read it before?

Student [D.P.]:  No, not that I know of.

AG: Oh well, let me see.

Student [D.P.]: Don't worry about it, I'll just read it.

AG: Okay. It's about five pages. Do the first part and then we'll turn it on around.

Student: [D.P.] Yeah. [Student [D.P.] begins reading] - "Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!/ Clouds of the west - sun there half an hour high - I see you also face to face./  Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!/On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,/And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and  more in my meditations, than you might suppose.."


[Whitman's first published version of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in the 1856 second edition of Leaves of Grass under the title "Sun-Down Poem" (opening page)] 

AG: Yeah, go on. It sounds right.

Student [D.P.] [continuing reading] - "..The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,/The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme.." - Shall I continue?

AG: Yeah. For a while.

Student [D.P.]: I'm going to start to stutter.

AG: Yeah, well, until you stutter. The first stutter you take, I'll take it away.

Student [D.P.]: Alright - [Student  [D.P.] continues reading] - "The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme/The similitudes of the past and those of the future,/The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river.."..[Student continues reading until the end of the tape].."Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shor to shore,/Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,/Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,/ Others will see the islands large and small;/Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,/A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them/Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide./     It avails not, time nor place - distance avails not,/ I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,/Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,/Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a living crowd,/Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, so I was refresh'd/Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,/Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd/ I too many and many a time cross'd the river of old,/Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,/Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow..."

tape ends here - then  continues 

"..Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south/Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water/Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,/Look'd at the fine centrifugal..."


[from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry- An Online Critical Edition]


AG: Can I have the book?...? May I have a book?  A book. Whitman. Whitman.


Student [D.P.]: "..Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water/Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward/Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,/Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,/Saw their approach, saw abroad those that were near me./Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor/ The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,/The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants.."

Peter Orlovsky (sitting in on the class): A serpentine what?

Student: Pennants

AG: Pennants

Student [D.P.]: "..The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses/The white wake left by the passage.."

AG: Passage

Student [D.P.]: ...passage/ The quick tremounterous [sic]...

AG: Tremulous

Student [D.P.]:  ...tremulous whirl of the wheels...

AG: "Quick tremulous" - "The quick tremulous whirl.."

Student [D.P.]: "..the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,/The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset/The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the laddeled [sic] cup..."

AG: "Ladeled cup"

Student [D.P.]: Lathened [sic] cup

AG: "Ladeled cups"

Student: [D.P.] Do I have to continue?

AG: Just to the end. [end of section three] Another five lines.

Student(s): Go go go!

AG: Only five lines.

Student(s): Go!

AG: Five more lines, six more lines


[Scene At The Ferry Landing, Brooklyn by William J.Pierce 1857 (with modern tinting) via Russell Granger - Whitman's Brooklyn] 

Student [D.P.]: "..the scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups,/ the frolicsome crests and glistening,/The  stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the grey walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,/On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank'd on each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter,/On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,/ Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down  into the clefts of streets...."

AG: Right. Okay. (So) the key that will come to.. that will bring us to Hart Crane is - "Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shor to shore,/Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,/Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,/ Others will see the islands large and small;/Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,/A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them" - Well, Hart Crane is "fifty years hence" from this poem, I think. That was the key part I wanted to point out in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry".

[Audio for the above is available here, starting at approximately fifty-five minutes in sixty-seven-and-a-half minutes in]

Friday's Weekly Round-Up 166

February 28, 2014, 1:00 am

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Chogyam Trungpa would have been 75 years old today

Previous Trungpa birthday postings on the Allen Ginsberg Project may be viewed here and here 

For a rich wealth of Trungpa materials - see here (Shambhala), here (the Chronicles Project) and here (the Chogyam Trungpa Legacy Project)

not forgetting his pivotal role in establishing "the first fully-accredited Buddhist-inspired university in America" - Naropa

A selection from Johanna Demetrakas' 2011 documentary - Crazy Wisdom - The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche may be viewed here

Here's, on the occasion of his birthday, footage of Trungpa, from 1975 - Surrendering Your Aggression



more video (and audio) lectures are availablehereon the Chronicles site.

Shambhala released  The Collected Works of Chogyam Trunpa Rinpoche(edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian) in eight individual volumes. 

Carolyn Rose Gimian also collaborated with Diana J Mukpo (Trungpa's wife - they married when she was a mere sixteen) on her revealing, candid and intimate memoir, Dragon Thunder.  

By the way, this weekend (Sunday March 2nd) sees the start of the Tibetan New Year, Shambhala Day or Losar, auspicious, we hope - goodbye to the Year of the Water Snake!, hello to the Year of the Wood Horse! 

In other news
Barry Miles' Call Me Burroughs  biography continues to get an enthusiastic reception.  Ann Douglas declares it "authoritative" in last Sunday's New York Times - "Appropriately, this biography, as Miles is at pains to tell us, (she writes) "is..collaboration, resting on the monumental research (James) Grauerholz did for a biography he abandoned in 2010, and the extensive taped interviews Ted Morgan conducted for Literary Outlaw, his pioneering 1988 biography. Miles himself knew Burroughs for many years, it was he who discovered the lost manuscripts of Queer (1985) and Interzone (1989), and he has written a number of books on the Beat Generation, including a fine biography of Ginsberg and an early study of Burroughs. Although he occasionally simplifies Burroughs' story with superficial moralizing..his access and wealth of detail will make this the go-to biography for many years to come."

Davis Schneiderman interviews Miles here for the Huffington Post 

James Attlee's review appeared recently  in the (London) Independent

Duncan White's review appeared, a few weeks earlier, in The Daily Telegraph


[William S Burroughs - Self Portrait (1959)]

Iain Sinclair's lecture on Burroughs, "Ghosts of a Ghost - William Burroughs, Time surgery and the death of the image"  (delivered in conjunction with the show of photography currently up in London at the Photographer's Gallery, and following an introduction by John Sears, the show's co-curator), may be viewed, in its entirety, here. 

Sears and curator Patricia Allmer are interviewed here





Did you all hear of these recently-discovered, previously-unknown, Sappho poems? 

March 1 Birthdays - Lucien Carr & Basil Bunting

March 1, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Basil Bunting (1900-1985)]


[Lucien Carr (1925-2005)]

Two strangely contrasting birthdays, celebrated today (strangely contrasting? - or maybe not). We'll draw your attention to fairly comprehensive initial postings on each of our two subjects of study -Basil Bunting - here 
andLucien Carr - here

First, the latter. Due to the success of Kill Your Darlings, (out in America on DVD later this month), from a quiet unassuming back-seat, Lucien, (at least in the Dane DeHaan version), has been catapaulted to, clearly unwanted and unsought for, global notoriety, slandered (the movies can do this, even if it is just "fiction"), fixed forever as the hyper-, young, "mad, bad and dangerous to know", beautiful-boy - the spotlight forever on the fatal encounter with David Kammerer. 

That the real picture is so much more than that needs hardly to be stated. Bob Rosenthalhas previously addressed such matters on this site - To quote Bob: "Those of us who knew Lucien knew that he only wanted anonymity and spent his life quietly loving his family and drinking. His silence was a remorse for a youthful blunder, not a conspiracy to hide the truth. Allen loved Lucien without reservation and protected (him) from close scrutiny out of that strong love. I think this ugly portrayal of Lucien [as he is depicted, by DeHaan in the film] will be hurtful to those who call him Pops and Granddad". 

"Pops and Grandad" - he lived for a "full four-score years", blundering no further (at least not so spectacularly, or with such fatal consequence), and, as a wire-service reporter (old-time newspaper man), established a laudable reputation. Veteran reporter, Helen Thomas, who worked with Carr at UPI for many years, has been quoted as saying, "I think he was one of the greatest editors UPI has ever known. He was unflappable, he was a terrific writer, and he had an uncanny sense of being able to catch any error before it hit the wire."Former UPI Managing Editor, Ron Cohn called Carr, "the absolute best newsman I ever knew. He was very special to all of us. I don't know of anyone in the twenty-five years I've worked with the company who was as universally beloved, admired, and respected."

(A dissenting voice on this account may be heard from Lucien's son, Caleb, in this recently-published provocative screed - "that my father was considered a hero at UPI was more than outweighed by the fact that he was considered a terrifying monster at home", he writes - Allen is bizarrely depicted here as a "fringe militant" homosexual activist with a vindictive ego-bound "agenda" (no love lost here!). We'd direct you (and him) to Trungpa Rinpoche's remarks (featured yesterday in this space) on aggression and anger)   

[Lucien Carr at UPI - Photograph c. The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]





[Basil Bunting beside the River Rawley, Cumbria, 1980 - Photograph c.Jonathan Williams]

Basil Bunting was both revered and forgotten/occulted (and occasionally slandered) too. Not, of course, by Allen, an early admirer, or by the cognescenti, who recognized (especially after the publication of his epic masterpiece, Briggflats, that this was the great British poet of the twentieth-century - not (perish the thought) Auden, or (the American) Eliot - and who recognized (and recognize) in his marginalization, further verification of (an admittedly obdurate and uncompromising) authenticity. It is thus mildly ironic, and deeply terrific, that Don Share's long-delayed and clearly-definitive edition of the Collected Poems(right now, we have to make do with the New Directions volume) is scheduled for publication by the (Eliot-associated) London-based Faber house, for early next year.

Prior to that we've seen the publication of a stunning and equally definitive biography -A Strong Song Tows Us - The Life of Basil Buntingby Richard Burton. Share gives it the thumbs-up, calling it "thorough and companionable". Tom Pickard, Bunting's most famous student, calls it "an extraordinary life, the tale of the century". Matthew Sperling, writing in The Literary Review, declares it to be "a triumph of patient archival spadework and sympathetic understanding, (representing) a major contribution to modern literary studies". "I hope", he writes, "that this biography will contribute to a resurgence in Buntings reputation." We hope so too! 



Here's Mark Ford's review of the book in The Guardian - "Bunting emerges from Richard Burton's thorougly researched and enthralling biography as living a life far more active and variegated than the bookish Eliot's, and even the pugnacious, controversial Pound's.." - a life, Sperling notes, "almost implausibly replete".
Here's Ian Pople reviewing the book for The Manchester Review. 
Here's Wynn Wheldon reviewing the book in The Spectator
Liam Guilar has many intelligent things to say about it here and here (and here's his thoughts on the Share's 2012 edition of Bunting's translations, Bunting's Persia)



Alastair Johnston and Greer Mansfield's observations on that, frankly, indispensible volume may be found here and here, and Share can be heard discussing the book with Leonard Schwartz here

Listen to Tom Pickard and others talking about Bunting in this brief BBC Radio 4 clip

Listen, most importantly listen, (Bunting was all about sound) to the wonderful trove of recordings of him reading his work available on PennSound.


   

 [William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg - Photograph c. The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

[Allen Ginsberg and Basil Bunting]

Expansive Poetics - 33 (Hart Crane 1 - "The River")

March 3, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 34 (Hart Crane 2 - Cape Hatteras)

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[Hart Crane (1899-1932)]

So we have Hart Crane, "The Bridge", which is the bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn - a whole poem is supposed to be symbolic between present and future, present America and future mechanical scientific space-age America, written in the (19)20's and early (19)30's, at a time ofBauhaus architecture, Chrysler Building, space visions, science-fiction, Expressionists, Fritz Lang "Metropolis", visions of futurity. Several elements common between Whitman and Hart Crane are there. 

I"ll begin with the section that we have here - "The River" - I don't have the whole section of "The River", I just have fragments from it, so I'll read all of "The River", so you get it in its context. [Allen begins reading from the opening of "The River"] - "Stick your patent name on a signboard/brother - all over - going west - young man/ Tintex - Japalac - Certain-teed Overalls ads/and lands sakes! under the new playbill ripped/in the guarenteed corner..."..."But some men take their liquor slow - and count/ - Though they'll confess no rosary nor clue -/The river's minute by the far brook's year./Under a world of whistles, wires and steam/Caboose-like they go ruminating through/Ohio, Indiana - blind baggage -/To Cheyenne tagging... Maybe Kalamazoo" - So here's where you have your text (in the Expansive Poetics anthology) - "Time's rendings, time's blendings they construe/As final reckonings of fire and snow;/Strange bird-wit, like the elemental gist/Of unwalled winds they offer, singing low/My Old Kentucky Home and Casey Jones,/Some Sunny Day. I heard road-gang chanting so./And afterwards, who hada colt's eyes - one said,/"Jesus! Oh I remember watermelon days!" And sped/High in a cloud of merriment..."...."Trains sounding the long blizzards out - I heard/Wail into distances I knew were hers./Papooses crying on the winds' long mane/Screamed redskin dynasties that fled the brain,/ - Dead echoes! But I knew her body there,/Time like a serpent down her shoulder, dark,/And space, an eaglet's wing, laid on her hair..." - More Americana, this is a description of the Mississippi River. So I'll continue for the rest of the section - [Allen continues] - "Under the Ozarks, domed by Iron Mountain,/The old gods of the rain lie wrapped in pools/Where eyeless fish curvet a sunken fountain./And re-descend with corn from querulous crows./Such pilferings make up their timeless eatage/Propitiate them for their timber torn/By iron, iron - always the iron dealt cleavage!/They doze now, below axe and powder horn./ And Pullman breakfasters glide glistening steel/From tunnel into field - iron strides the dew.." -  That's a pretty line for the railroad - "iron strides the dew" - 
[Allen continues, to the end of the poem] - "Straddles the hill, a dance of wheel on wheel,/You have a half-/hour's wait at Siskiyou,/Or stay the night and take the next train through/Southward, near Cairo passing, you can see/The Ohio merging.."...."The River lifts itself from its long bed./ Poised wholly on its dream, a mustard glow/Tortured with history, it's one will - flow!/ - The Passion spreads in wide tongues, choked and slow,/Meeting the Gulf, hosannas silently below." - Well, a bit longwinded. I probably bored you a little bit with that. It's a nice long passage, but the key was the part I took out, which was the Whitmanic Kerouac-ian address/apostrophe to the bums of America - the railroad bums. 

[Audio for the above [ Allen reading Hart Crane] can be heard here, starting at approximately sixty-seven-and-a-half minutes in, and continuing until approximately seventy-seven-and-a-quarter minutes in]