Expansive Poetics - 34 (Hart Crane 2 - Cape Hatteras)

March 4, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Hart Crane (1899-1932)]

Then he (Hart Crane) goes directly into an address to Walt Whitman - or, in another section of the poem he has an address to Walt Whitman, in the "Cape Hatteras" section. He quotes Whitman to begin with - " - "Recorders ages hence" - ah, syllables of faith!" - That was one thing he noticed about Whitman. It's rueful - "Walt, tell me Walt Whitman, if infinity/Be still the same as when you walked the beach/ Near Paumanok" - Long Island - "...your lone patrol - and heard the wraith/Through surf, its bird note there a long time falling.../For you, the panoramas and this breed of towers,/Of you - the theme that's statured in the cliff./O Saunterer of free ways still ahead!/Not this our empire yet, but labyrinth/Wherein your eyes like the Great Navigator's without ship/Gleam from the great stones of each prison crypt/Of canyoned traffic...Confronting the Exchange,/Surviving n a world of stocks - they also range/Across the hills where second timber strays/Back over Connecticut farms, abandoned pastures --/Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with myth!" - 
Then there's a really interesting mouthy passage of Crane here, describing the Machine Age, which  I didn't include (in theExpansive Poetics anthology), but it's a brief thing, so I'll read it - [Allen begins reading] - "The nasal whinw of power whips a new universe.../Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky,/Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power house/Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs,/New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed/Of dynamos, where hearing's lease is strummed.../Power's script, - wound, bobbin-bound, refined -/Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred/Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars./ Towards what? The forked crash of split thunder parts/Our hearing momentwise; but fast in whirling armatures,/As bright as frogs' eyes, giggling in the girth/Of steely gizzards - axle-bound, confined/In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee/The bearings glint, - O murmurless and shined/In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy!" - Kind of a weird vision - "As bright as frogs' eyes, giggling in the girth/Of steely gizzards" - That's kind of a weird vision of the Machine Age. 
He takes up then the Wright Brothers'at Kitty Hawkflight, the invention of the airplane - the "Skygak", as he speaks of it - "..pilot, hear!/Thine eyes bicarbinated white by speed, I Skygak.." - and then he gets back to Whitman - "O Walt" - we have it in replica here - "Ascensions of thee hover in me now" (in) "The stars have grooved.." ("The stars have grooved our eyes with old persuasions.."), that section - [Allen contnues reading] - "O Walt - Ascensions of thee hover in me now/As thou at junctions elegiac, there, of speed/ With vast eternity, dost wield the rebound seed!/The competent loam, the probable grass - travail/Of tides awash the pedestal of Everest." - It's just pure funny language there - "travail/Of tides awash the pedestal of Everest." (I suppose the tides of modernity, the tides of (the) Machine Age) - "..fail/Not less than thou in pure impulse inbred/To answer deepest soundings! O, upward from the dead/Thou bringest tally, and a pact..." - (that's the same as (Ezra) Pound's "I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman" -  "...new bound/Of living brotherhood" - [Allen reads on] - "..Thou, there beyond - /Glacial sierras and the flight of ravens,/Hermetically past condor zones, through zenith havens/Past where the albatross has offered up/His last wing-pulse, and downcast as a cup/That's drained, is shivered back to earth - thy wand/Has beat a song, O Walt - there and beyond!..."..."...Thou, pallid there as chalk, Hast kept of wounds, O Mourner, all the sum/That then from Appomattox stretched to Somme.." -  From (a) battle of the Civil War to World War I - the Battle of the Somme - [Allen continues] - "Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam/Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring/When first I read thy lines, rife as the loam/Of praries, yet like breakers cliffward leaping!/ O early following thee, I searched the hill/Blue-writ and odor-firm with violets, 'til/With June the mountain laurel broke through the green/And filled the forest with what clustrous sheen!/Potomac lilies.."..."Heard thunder's eloquence through green arcades/Set trumpets breathing in each clump and grass tuft - til/ Gold autumn, captured, crowned the trembling hill! / Panis Angelicus!.." -  (Angelic bread)  -  "Panis Angelicus! Eyes tranquil with the blaze/ Of love's own diametric gaze, of love's amaze!/Not greatest, thou - not first nor last, - but near.." - So he's saying of Whitman, of all the poets in antiquity, he's not the greatest, nor the first, nor the last, but near, the only one that was near us in America - "And onward yielding past my utmost year/Familiar, thou, as mendicants in public places" - (Familiar as beggars in the town square) - "Evasive - too - as dayspring's spreading arc to trace is -" - (A funny line. A funny rhyme.)  - "Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel/And it was thou who on the boldest heel/Stood up and flung the span on even wing/Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!/  Years of the Modern! Propulsions toward what capes?/But thou, Panis Angelicus, hast thou not seen/And passed that Barrier that none escapes -/ But knows it leastwise as death-strife? - O, something green/Beyond all sesames of science was thy choice/Wherewith to bind us throbbing with one voice,/New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt -/Thou, Vedic Caesar, to the greensward knelt!" - (So, in this passage, he's praising Whiman for giving place to nature, for pointing back to nature, although (at the same time) accepting the "modern propulsions" toward new invention - modernity, steel, the locomotive and everything. He's saying that, ultimately, Caesar (or Kaiser or King, Master of the Vedas, master of alphabetic epic), kneels down "to the greensward") - "And now, as launched in abysmal cupolas of space," - (with the Space Age, with people going to Mars) - "And now, as launched in abysmal cupolas of space,/Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light - .." - (talking about approaching the speed of light, and everything turns into the time changes, so it's like "Easters" - crucifixtions of speeding light) 

Student: Resurrections.

Student: Resurrections of speeding light, okay. Resurrections of speeding light. [to the class] - (A) good Catholic boy here! - [he continues] - "Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace/On clarion cylinders pass out of sight/To course that span of consciousness thou'st named/The Open Road.." - (which is, actually, still the theme of the Kennedy-ian Cape Canaveral flights, "Open Road", basically) - ". .- thy vision is reclaimed!/What heritage thou'st signalled to our hands!/ And see! the rainbow's arch - how shimmeringly stands/Above the Cape's ghoul-mound, O joyous seer!/Recorders ages hence, yes, they shall hear/In their own veins uncancelled thy sure tread/And read thee by the aureole 'round thy head/Of pasture-shine, Panis Angelicus!" - (that is, the light (or) dew-light in pastures, the rainbow light in pastures) -  "yes, Walt,/Afoot again, and onward without halt, -/ Not soon, nor suddenly, - no, never to let go/ My hand/ in yours,/ Walt Whiman -/so -" - (At the end, it gets to be very beautiful. After all the rhetoric, it gets to be a very beautiful, heart-felt offering of hand, "picking up the relay", as Gregory Corso would say).  

[Audio for the above begins here at approximately seventy-seven-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately eighty-seven-and-three-quarter minutes in] 

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Expansive Poetics - 35 - (Hart Crane 3 & Poe)

March 5, 2014, 3:00 am

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AG: And then there’s another funny passage right after that from (the section of “The Bridge”called) “The Tunnel” where (Hart) Crane also picks up on the image ofEdgar Allan Poe, whom we’ve already dealt with a little bit. Weird Poe – Poe of the weir, or weird. And he sees a vision of Poe in the subway. Poe, as you know, at the end, his last day– or you may know – was dragged from place to place, voting, from voting-place to voting-place. He’d drunk a little, and was found in the gutter, and was, like, a dead-man vote (which was common in those days [the practice of cooping] – you just take some old bum and drag him from polling-booth to polling-booth and vote him).

Student: Jesus!

AG: So Poe died on the last round of the voting-booths of Baltimore – [Allen begins reading] – “The photographs of  hades in the brain/Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love/A burnt match skating in a urinal -/Somewhere above Fourteenth TAKE THE EXPRESS/To brush some new presentiment of pain-/ “But I want service in this office SERVICE/I said – after/the show she cried a little afterwards but -/ Whose head is swinging from the swollen strap?/Whose body smokes along the bitten rails,/Bursts from a smoldering bundle far behind/In back forks of the chasms of the brain-/Puffs from a riven stump far out behind/in interborough fissures of the mind…”/  And why do I often meet your visage here,/Your eyes like agate lanterns – on and on/Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?/- And did their riding eyes right through your side,/And their eyes, like unwashed platters ride?/And Death, aloft – gigantically down/Probing through you – toward me, O evermore!/And when they dragged your retching flesh,/Your trembling hands  that night through Baltimore -/ That last night on the ballot rounds, did you/Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?/  For Gravesend Manor change at Chambers Street./The platform hurries along to a dead stop.” – Just a little fragment from a section called “The Tunnel”

Peter Orlovsky [sitting in on the class]:  (Did you deny the ticket?) ..

AG; The ticket. The voting ticket  -Did you refuse to vote the ticket that they tried to make you vote? (and also, did you deny the ticket – death – again.

Student: What about the train? The fare?

AG: I don’t know. Might have been. The fare.

Student: A tram?

AG: Might have been pay your dues

Student: Yeah

AG: Ticket. Pay your dues. Ticket, in the sense of pay your dues. But, I guess, more, would you deny the big ticket of death, sort of

Student: This is very eastern, very Oriental.

AG: Yeah

Student: The influence of Oriental poetry, perhaps..?

AG: Yeah

Student: ..by accident..

AG: No, no, everybody was studying haiku then.   

Well, Hart Crane had a great heart. We’ll get to that with the “Atlantis”(section), later on in the term, wherein he combines the Whitmanicexpanson with some Surrealist language juxtaposition,with the great Shelley-an  breath-inspiration that we started the term with, that we started off in the first session. But that would be for later on, because the recitation of “Atlantis” is something amazing. So I would like everybody over the next weeks to read it carefully, because we’ll do a choral recitation of that because it’s a great text for choral recitation, like (Percy Bysshe) Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. People should read (the) “Atlantis” section of Hart Crane (‘s “The Bridge”) carefully, paying attention to the commas, and read it aloud to themselves, and then we’ll organize it as a choral symphony.

The next I’ll take up is Robert Duncan’s address to Whitman in his“Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar”, which you have here in the  book (Expansive Poetics). It’s 1958-(19)59-(19)60 – another hand in Walt Whitman's hand.

[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately eighty-seven-and-three-quarters minutes in and concluding at the end]

Expansive Poetics 36 (Shakespeare and D.H.Lawrence)

March 6, 2014, 3:00 am

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[William Shakespeare's Timon of Athens - Act IV Scene 1 - Timon renounces society -  Engraving by Isaac Taylor (1803), after a painting by Henry Howard]

Allen's Expansive Poetics class continues...  class reconvenes, July 2nd 1981

Allen begins with a reading (Timon's speech)  from William Shakespeare's Timon of Athens)

AG:  "Let me look back upon thee, O thou wall,/That girdlest in those wolves, dive in the earth,/ And fence not Athens! Matrons, turn incontinent!/ Obedience fail in children! slaves and fools,/ Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench,/ And minister in their steads! To general filths/ Convert, o' the instant, green virginity!/ Do't in your parents' eyes! Bankrupts, hold fast;/ Rather than render back, out with your knives,/ And cut your trusters' throats! Bound servants, steal! -/Large-handed robbers your grave masters are,— /And pill by law. Maid, to thy master's bed;/ Thy mistress is o' the brothel! Son of sixteen,/ Pluck the lin'd crutch from thy old limping sire,/ With it beat out his brains! Piety, and fear,/ Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,/ Domestic awe, night-rest and neighbourhood,/ Instruction, manners, mysteries and trades,/ Degrees, observances, customs and laws,/ Decline to your confounding contraries,/ And let confusion live! Plagues incident to men,/ Your potent and infectious fevers heap/ On Athens, ripe for stroke! Thou cold sciatica,/ Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt/ As lamely as their manners! Lust and liberty/ Creep in the minds and marrows of our youth, 
That 'gainst the stream of virtue they may strive,/And drown themselves in riot! - (Like last night's party!) - "Itches, blains,/ Sow all the Athenian bosoms, and their crop/ Be general leprosy! Breath infect breath,/ That their society, as their friendship, may/ Be merely poison! Nothing I'll bear from thee/ But nakedness, thou detestable town!/ Take thou that too, with multiplying bans!/ Timon will to the woods; where he shall find/ The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind./ The gods confound—hear me, you good gods
all/ The Athenians both within and out that wall!/ And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow/ To the whole race of mankind, high and low!/ Amen."

Well, Timon, I guess....what's the adjective?  "timonious"? "timonian"? "timoniac"? "timonic"? - I've heard an adjective made out of the word.

Student: "Timonious"?  "Timonian"?

AG: "Timonian", I guess.. Yes, (Walt) Whitman was in a "timonian wrath" when he wrote "Respondez!"(similar to that) - but why? Why is everyone getting so mad? - or why in America was everyone getting so mad?

There's an interesting poem of D.H.Lawrence that we have inour collection -"The Evening Land" - if you can find that. We'll get to Lawrence and Hart Crane's other poems later, but it's just this Whitmanic theme that I was harping on. (He's in the English section, and he's after Ford Madox Ford, and it's the next-to-last poem in (the) Lawrence section, in "England", and it comes right before Edith Sitwell.

Student:"The Evening Land"?

AG: Yeah. I'm sorry this book is so unmanageable to find things in. As I said,  (my student, SS) had a very good idea. She took these little yellow pages and made labels so you can find the sections easily (and that's the major problem). I would recommend that - you get a couple of little cellophane sticker-labels that stick out (I don't know what you call them..)
Student: You can buy them...
AG: Tabs
Student: (They come on a page, like this)
AG: Yeah, you buy the page.
Student: You can buy the whole thing
AG: Yeah - Tab-page, or something
Student: Something
AG: What do they call it?..You need not many - one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.. nine, for the sections.

So,"The Evening Land" by (D.H.) Lawrence is found on page 289 of his Complete Poems,  - the Viking Compass edition, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F Warren Roberts - a pretty good buy, actually. This book is a bargain - you've got all of Lawrence's poetry from beginning to end, and it's a big thick thing.  You can also get it in Penguin (I think this is an older edition). The Penguin edition is probably more available, although it's slightly smaller in type. This one is terrific for a paperback. It originally cost...god knows what? Four (dollars) fifty, cheap - When I got that..
Student: Six (dollars) ninety-five now [1981] 
AG: Six ninety-five?
Student: Penguin's ten
AG: Ten. Yeah, the Penguin's imported. But for four (dollars) fifty, to get all of his poetry, is amazing. And he's a good poet to read, because (a) rare poet, after Whitman. These specemins in American poetry of open-form verse are not that easy to find.

to be continued..

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 167

March 7, 2014, 3:00 am

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Published this past Tuesday in the UK by Penguin and this coming Thursday in the US by Da Capo Press, and edited by respected Beat scholar, Todd Tietchen -The Haunted Life - a previously-unpublished, only-recently rediscovered, short (19,ooo word) novella by Jack Kerouac, seventy years after it was written, finally gets to see the light of day.

Written when he was only twenty-two and attending Columbia, lost almost immediately (Kerouac left his only hand-written final draft in a New York taxi-cab), re-surfacing thirteen years later in a Columbia University dormitory, and then in 2002 on the auction block at Sotheby's, post-The Town and the City, pre-On The Road, The Haunted Life has had an unsual (to say the least) progress to publication.


As Penguin publicity proudly declare it - "Now, 70 years after Kerouac wrote it, his second novel will be published for the first time..."

The Haunted Life was originally conceived as part of a longer work (tentatively titled An American Passed Here, the coming-of-age story of  (Kerouac-surrogate) "Peter Martin" in the fictional town of "Galloway" (based, recognizeably, on Lowell).

The novella is rounded out, in this edition, by sketches, notes and observations kept during the time of its composition, and with a revealing selection of correspondence between Kerouac and his father, Leo. 



[Jack Kerouac with his sister Nin and parents (Gabrielle & Leo), 1944 - New York Public Library Jack Kerouac Archive. Image courtesy John G Sampas] 
  
It's a little ahead of time (his birthday is actually next Wednesday) but, not coincidentally, this weekend sees, once again, the annualLowell Celebrates Jack Kerouac celebrations, leading off with an event tonight, "Happy Birthday, Jack", at the Zeitgeist Gallery on Market Street (in conjunction with "You Don't Know Jack", a show combining Kerouac and JFK, presently up on their walls). Saturday (tomorrow) is the main day, starting off with a tour of Lowell High School in the morning, and featuring, in the afternoon, "The Millennial Generation Meets the Beat Generation" - a panel discussion with Jay Atkinson, the author of the Kerouac-inspired, updated, American odyssey, Paradise Road,  and students of his from Boston University (the focus there will be on Kerouac's relevance - "the enduring appeal of Kerouac and his work among a new generation of readers"). Beat legend, David Amram will be present, as he will be for the rest of the festival, closing down Saturday night's festivities with music and improvisation at The Athenian Corner (also on Market Street).
A fine time, assuredly, will be had by all. 

On Thursday, Todd Tietchen will be speaking on The Haunted Life at the LTC Meeting Room, 246 Market Street. 




Announcing the digitalization of The Partisan Review. The always-informative Hyperallergic has more on this. Alison Colbert's 1971 interview with Allen can now be read, in its entirety, on line. For more of Allen in its pages see here

"This may seem incredible, but Allen Ginsberg had a magnificent body". The quote is from Inge Feltrinelli, widow of Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, and, prior to that union, (as Inge Schoenthal), noted photographer/photojournalist in her own right.  

Here (by way of proof?) her shot (from 1963) of Allen and the poet Edoardo Sanguineti 


[Allen Ginsberg and Edoardo Sanguineti - Photograph by Inge Schoenthal-Feltrinelli]

Here's another of Schoenthal-Feltrinelli's Ginsberg-Sanguineti pictures (Allen, clothed this time).


[Allen Ginsberg and Edoardo Sanguineti - Photograph by Inge Schoenthal-Feltrinelli]

 For an illuminating interview and recollections from the photographer, see here

Currently up at the Utah State University's Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art  (and highly-recommended) - "Nobody  Goes Home Sad - Photographs of the "Six Gallery" Poets 1956-2000. Walter Lehrman's digitally restored prints and John Suiter's more recent images. For more about that show (up until March 14) see here 



We'll conclude with another photograph, Beth Vail's photo of the late Robert LaVigne, taken only last year.

[Robert LaVigne, Seattle,Washington 2013 - Photo by Beth Vail]

and with this heart-felt call to another recently-deceased, Diane Di Prima on the late great Amiri Baraka  (" (& don't kid yourself, /Ginsberg/it's all of it/gonna be lost)")

William S Burroughs - Cut-Ups

March 8, 2014, 3:00 am

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[William S Burroughs from Towers Open Fire(1963)]

Just because February, the birthday month, is over, it doesn't mean our William Burroughs celebrations, here on the Allen Ginsberg Project are over, far from it!  Here for the weekend, a little more from and aboutEl Hombre Invisible.Looking back on his legendary "cut-up" work (with particular reference to his film collaboration(s) with Antony Balch).


[Antony Balch (1937-1980)]

(A new monograph, Guerilla Conditions - Le Cinema d'Antony Balch by French scholar, Adrien Clerc, named after a planned-but-never-completed Balch-Burroughs collaboration,  is scheduled to appear shortly). Meanwhile...







To begin with, some preliminaries.

It was Brion Gysin, of course, who was Burroughs' original inspiration (We'll be featuring - and have more on - Brion Gysintomorrow)

Hereare  some early (1958) Gysin cut-up recordings.

More Gysin audio here



Burroughs: "Now these experiments started not on tape-recorders but on paper. In 1959 Brion Gysin said that writing is fifty years behind painting and applied the montage technique to words on a page and this technique had already been used at that time in painting for fifty years, it was, in fact, kind of old hat in painting. Brion copied out phrases from newspapers and magazines, then took his scissors and cut these selections into pieces and rearranged the fragments at random and these cut-up experiments appeared in Minutes To Go in 1959. When you experiment with cut-ups over a period of time, you  find that some of the cut-ups and rearranged texts seem to refer to future events. I cut up an article on.. written by John Paul Getty and got "it's a bad thing to sue your own father", (this was a rearrangement and wasn't in the original text), and a year later one of his sons did sue him. We had no explanation for this at the time, (perhaps, suggesting that when you cut into the present the future leaks out), but we simply accepted it and continued the experiments...






Here's a key statement by Burroughs  on the Cut-Up Method, from 1963, (from The Moderns - An Anthology of New Writing in America)

1963 - same year as the first and most realized of the Burroughs-Balch collaborations, Towers Open Fire





"Kid - what are you doing over there with the niggers and the apes? Why don't you straighten out an act like a white man? After all, they're only human cattle you know that yourself. I hate to see a bright young man fuck up and get off on the wrong track - sure it happens to all of us one time or another. Why the man who went on to invent shitola was sitting right where you're sitting now twenty-five years ago when I was saying the same thing to him - well, he straightened out same as you're going to straighten out. You can't deny your blood kid - you're white, white, white, and you can't walk out on life times change there's just no place to go.
Gentlemen - this was to be expected after all he'd been a medium all his life
Lock them out and bar the door
Lock them out for ever more
Nook and cranny window door
Seal them out for ever more
Curse go back
Curse go back
Back with double pain and lack
Curse go back
Curse go back
Back with double fear and flak
Silver arrow through the night
Silver arrow take they flight
Silver arrow seeks and finds
Cursing heart and cursing mind
Shift-cut-tangle-word-lines
Sell at ten-minutte intervals - rac, tel and con-Burroughs B & M - Transvestite Airlines -Molec Caper-United Narcotics-Uranium Limited-Allied Drugs-Lazarus Pharmaceuticals-sell 50,000 units at arbitrary intervals
Dramatic relief from anxiety
Dimethyltriptamine alarming and disagreeable symptoms
Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways
The use of opium and/or derivatives
Breaking bounds by flicker-flicker administered under large dosage and repeated later could well lead to overflow of the brain area seeing sounds and even odours that is a categorical characteristic of the consciousness expanding Grey Walter produced many of the phenomenon -
I wrote your fading movie-feed in all the words you think developed, pouring in the resistance message, handcutting dirty films here, hand takes-from vulnerable honesty to org in a leaky lifeboat takes action against time - This is the Mayan caper - Hand takes inexorable feeding board books ripping film flakes - shatter the theatre - the ovens - your two-bit narrative line to Wallgreens - the theme explodes strictly from moochville - poisoned techniques drop - you can take that to the sky, that rebought branch of Italian air - This is your last 'are you serious?' loud and clear. - You Mr D. - you can't smudge two speeds - moving out cutting layout flying flags coloured with contriol thoughts, feelings. cocolaco, junk, and cancer control shit - and you Mr D, who under the name of Hassan i Sabbah feed into the machine on subliminal level unimaginable disaster of Nova we feed in dismantle your miserable shit bodies - TOWERS OPEN FIRE!"

"Towers Under Fire", was, as Rob Bridgett has written, in his definitive essay, in Bright Lights Film Journal - "The Films of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Antony Balch", 
"a collage of the main themes and situations or "routines" that appear in Burroughs' cut-up novels of the period.[notably, Nova Express, The Ticket That ExplodedandThe Soft Machine]. The soundtrack accompaniment is a mixture of recordings made by Burroughs on a cheap Grundig tape-recorder and resembles many of the cut-up tape experiments achieved [around that time] in collaboration with [his friend] Ian Sommerville. The rest was done in a studio, with some Arab music used. The film depicts society as crumbling in the form of a stock exchange crash, shots of which were purchased from Pathe news. Members of a "board" [look out for the cameo by Alex Trocchi] are dematerialized, and Burroughs plays an omnipresent role in the film (not least as the victim of an "orgasm attack" in which he leaps through a window and shoots family photos with a ping-pong gun!). There are also important scenes using facial projections in which a face has a light mask projected onto it. Also appearing in the film are earlyFlicker experiments courtesy of (Brion) Gysin's "dream machine"...There is also a scene in which Burroughs' friend, Mikey Portman dances around in a music-hall fashion, and looks up to the sky to see a dancing series of pink and blue dots. These were hand-painted by Balch onto clear leader for each print of the film. An important section...is the actual cut-up sequence. Filmed on a quayside in Paris. this sequence is the first filmic example of the cut-ups and it lasts about thirty seconds..." 



The eponymous "Cut Ups", though filmed at essentially the same time, appeared three years later. Bridgett again: "The Cut-Ups" was conventionally edited and then cut into four approximately equal lengths. It was then assembled into its final state by taking one-foot lengths from each of the four sections that were cut together with mathematical precision -                1,2.3.4,1,2.3.4, etc. Variations to this structure occur randomly when a shot change occurs within one of the already edited one-foot lengths....The length of the shots, with the exception of the last, is always the same (apart from the shot changes within the one-foot sections)...The soundtrack was made by Sommerville, Burroughs and Gysin. They asked Balch how long the film was, and they produced permutated phrases to the exact length of twenty minutes and four seconds, including the final "Good, thank you". These permutated phrases are repeated and phased, like a (minimalist) composition. There are four in all - "Yes Hello?""Look at that picture", "Does it seem to be persisting?" and "Good, thank you"."
The sheer reductive repetition and monotony proved to be too much for the film's original London audience. "It ran for a fortnight and eventually had to be shortened from twenty to twelve minutes because staff and manager couldn't stand running it five times a day". As Bridgett has perceptively observed, in Here To Go, Gysin  remarks that "Burroughs pushed Cut-ups so far with variations of his own that he produced texts that were sickeningly painful to read". "The Cut-Ups", Bridgett notes," recreates this in cinema". It too "is almost "sickeningly painful" to watch and try to make sense of". It is an intentional mind-game, a Rimbaldian "dereglement de.. les sens".

Here's another early Burroughs-Balch collaboration, shot in Morocco (or perhaps, as Brion Gysin has suggested, Gibraltar) - "William Buys A Parrot" 



and the identity-exchange from 1972, "Bill and Tony"



Jed Birmingham's informative note on the Burroughs- Balch correspondence may be seen here 

Taking it right up to the present (and back in the past) - and into the future, Joe Ambrose& A.D.Hitchin's  "Cut Up"  anthology will be out any day now



Brion Gysin tomorrow.

Cut-Ups 2 - Brion Gysin

March 9, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Brion Gysin with Dreamachine at Musée des Art Décoratifs, Paris, 1962  - Photograph by Harold Chapman - © Harold Chapman] 

Weekend of  The Cut-Ups - Two Brion Gysin movies on the Allen Ginsberg Project this weekend. The first, Nik Sheehan's 2008 Canadian documentary, FLicKeR, (a documentary examining and exploring Gysin's mind-expanding, trance-inducing invention, the dreamachine); the second, from ten years earlier, Joe Ambrose, Frank Rynne and Terry Wilson's record of the 1992 Gysin celebrations in Dublin, Ireland, Destroy All Rational Thought (the latter of particular interest, since it features one of the very last filmed interviews with William Burroughs, alongside previously-unseen vintage footage). 
As a bonus, here's more rare footage - Gysin at work
  

Allen Ginsberg on Jack Kerouac - 1

March 10, 2014, 3:00 am

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This week (Wednesday) is Jack Kerouac's birthday. As a warm-up, we present today, a little fugitive item - Allen's "Letter on Kerouac". It appeared in the inaugeral (Spring 1970) issue of the magazine Madrugada

Dear Barry (Gifford) - Thanks for your kind letter made sense - Someone mentioned reading Desolation Angels (not in paperback yet!) [editorial note - it is now!] and I've been thinking about (The) Dharma Bums - those two plus Lonesome Traveller come into focus this decade [the 1970's] as Gary Snyder also comes into focus.
Put all the books side by side and perhaps Vanity of Kerouac (Duluoz) has a kind of proper proportion and sweet wit about it.
I am so appalled by the effort at sticking to writing that I am amazed how much Kerouac has written and how complete it actually is.Big Sur is a powerful and detailed record of physical illness and paranoia as well as Nature and City Scene & Poets etc. Even (F.) Scott Fitzgerald for all his honor & genius & pride & Literary Placement couldn't complete his own Crack Up as Kerouac so energetically did.
This morning I woke up 6 AM & over breakfast read Thomas Wolfe's description of Train Engine pulling into station - (Of) Time and the River - that kind of poesy both neolithic-futuristic visionary power stile [sic]. Guard your Gleam with humour - Best luck - Allen 
P.S. I made an early vow - 1956? 1950? - any political or revolutionary situation wherein I'd find myself enemy of Kerouac or people on my side saying "up against the wall Kerouac" I'd know I and the world were mad.
Can't kill lambs. Even that Kerouac's not a lamb as he gnashingly repeats's no excuse to create more horror scenes worse than he already imagined.
& there's late Dostoevsky and Celine and Pound too. Even though Kerouac's a shit and a mean lush. Still Stella (Sampas) keeps the literary feedback from electrifying him to Boredom death.

Barry Gifford, the recipient of this note, is, of course, the respected poet, novelist and screenwriter, (and author, (along with Lawrence Lee), of the invaluable oral history, Jack's Book, in which Allen (necessarily) features as a prominent and illuminating contributor). 



from David Wills' 2007 interview with Gifford, in Beatdom

DW: How willing were Kerouac's friends and associates to be interviewed for the Oral Biography?
BG: Everyone we found was willing to be interviewed. Only two asked for money. Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso. Instead of paying Corso, a friend of mine agreed to substitute his own piss for a urine sample of Gregory's so that Gregory could get his methadone in Paris!" 
...
DW: ... finally, could you describe your friendship with Allen Ginsberg?
BG: I first met Allen in 1966 in London. I remained friendly with him until the day he died. He published a book of poems, Sad Dust Glories, with a small press I edited with another guy [Gary Wilkie], and, of course, I edited the book,As Ever - The Collected Correspondence of Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, working on it with Allen. He was always very generous and affectionate with me, as he was with almost everybody".

"My god, it's just like Rashomon - everybody lies and the truth comes out" (Allen's observation on Jack's Book) - Jack Goodstein's review of the book may be read here

Allen Ginsberg on Jack Kerouac - 2

March 11, 2014, 3:00 am

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 "I would say he [Jack Kerouac]  offered his heart to the United States and the United States rejected his heart. And he realized what suffering the United States was in for, and so the tragedy of America, as (Walt) Whitman had seen the tragedy of the United States. "When the singer of the nation finds that the nation has sickened, what happens to the singer of the nation?" This is Gregory Corso's question. 

And America, by his day, was sick. Militarily sick. Military-Industrial-Complex had taken over. Hard-heartedness had taken over. Everything that as a Canuck-peasant Kerouac hated had taken over - the mechanization, the impersonality, the homogenization, the money-grabbing, the disrespect for person - that had all taken over. And vast wars - and the attack on the provincial in the wars.  

So I would say America broke his heart."

(Allen Ginsberg - from Hermenegilde Chiasson's 1987 documentary, Jack Kerouac's Road - A Franco-American' Odyssey - the entire film may be viewed here)

and more Ginsberg-on-Kerouac 
- on his infamous appearance, in 1968, onWilliam Buckley's "Firing Line" (from the Malcolm Hart, Lewis Macadams, Richard Lerner, 1986 documentary,  "What Happened to Kerouac?" (DVD extras) )



Here's the programme in question

AG: "So the question is what happened when William Buckley invitedJack Kerouac to “Firing Line”, his program, 1968, late. (William) Burroughs had just come back from Chicago (1968) tear-gas Convention and was staying, at the expense of Esquire magazine, to write an article, in some uptown hotel on the East Side, and Jack came down from Lowell with his brothers in laws ..maybe Mike and Tony Sampas, or a couple of his friends, or brothers-in-law from the Greek family of his wife, and he was drinking, and he was in a sports shirt and sports jacket and kind of like blue-collar-looking pants, (and) I think he had a little hunting cap or something like that, and his big guys who were with him who were trying to keep him from drinking, but taking care of him, were very gentle and very friendly, and curious to see - “this is Burroughs?, this is Ginsberg?” - and friendly, and, sort of.. Kerouac was, as ever, being absent-minded, funny, insulting, cheerful, dear, tippling (carrying his bottle, talking about his bottle) had a hip flask.

Jack thought he was going to have this big intelligent conversation with Buckley. We got there, came down in a cab or something, (and) who do we meet on the sidewalk but Ed Sanders? What’s Ed doing there? Ed’s supposed to be on the show. So we went up the elevator with Ed, and Kerouac said, “I don’t know you. Why are you on this show? Why are they putting hippy beatniks on this show?”, and Ed said, “But Jack, I’m your.. you’re responsible for me! I came out of your On The Road, or, I came out of your art. I’m your child, or, I’m your second generation. You’re my father”. And Jack was being really sort of ugly drunk disgruntled. Normally when I went on the program, I went on one-to-one with Buckley and someone of Jack’s stature, I would have imagined, would have gone on one-to-one. Instead, he was set up on a panel with the young beatnik Ed Sanders and some guy who’s a professor of sociology who’s going to sit and…examine him as a specimen or somethin’.

(Because) he realized that, in some way or other, he was set up – to be the object of discussion, rather than a grown-up discusser. Because it really was.. You know, I don’t see how it could have arrived at that situation where he didn’t know that he was.. where… where he was set up not to be alone, one-to-one, but set up, as sort of an object, on a panel.

His agent should have been out there with a limousine or his assistant bringing him in and explaining the situation and smoothing it away, saying “Mr Kerouac will not appear if he does not get the twenty minutes he was invited to do, because he is the central person and has prepared a statement – and, don’t do this” -  or, he himself could have handled it that way – but he didn’t. So he acquiesced in the situation, out of some kind of confusion and also basic kindness – he didn’t want to make trouble. So I remember Buckley asking him, very interestedly, " And what do you think about the Vietnam War?", hoping that Kerouac would make some either left-wing diatribe or some right-wing denunciation of the lefties, and instead Kerouac gave this magnificent answer, which floored Buckley, which was – “Ah, all them South Vietnamese wanna do is get hold of our jeeps!” – (which is something like “all these welfare-chissellers wanna do is get hold of our tax-payer’s money!”) – and of course Buckley could have no answer!– because it was accurate, because it really was that corrupt South Vietnamese military Catholic elite, you know, corrupt and getting.. making money off the war. So it was really a brilliant and incisive, very funny, answer.

But.. Kerouac wasn’t really paying attention, he wouldn’t relate to Sanders (though Sanders on the screen said, I think you’re good, you’re my father) and he wouldn’t relate to the sociologist [Lewis Yablonsky] (who was kind of dumb, I think, who was just applying non-esthetic, non-art standards to an artist and didn’t understand art, thought Kerouac was a social phenomena rather than an artist – and (who?) mispronounced his name a number of times - (and) the guy got upset, thinking that he was being anti-Semitic, (which Jack was - but sort of rightfully, because he was being attacked constantly by all the New York Jewish intellectuals who did have a vendetta against him – beginning with a guy named Bernstein, [Theodore M Bernstein] an editor at the New York Times who hated Kerouac, according to family gossip brought to us byErnest Von Hartz, a co-editor on the New York Times, [& the father-in-law to Lucien Carr] who said that Bernstein was so afraid and scared of Kerouac that he did everything he could tosmutch his name in the New York Times - that should be known, that’s (not only) a little footnote - or to leave him sort of prey to attack if anybody wanted to attack him,

And Kerouac was so uncooperative, and at times spaced-out, it seemed to Buckley, that Buckley asked me to step in and replace him for this "sociological discussion of the Beat Generation".. [Any Beatnik will do?] -  Yes, so I just said I was some distinguished Beatnik or other..one of two drunks, try this one.. So Buckley I think got upset, because Kerouac was no inconsiderable figure, and Kerouac had spoken nicely to Buckley, and Buckley had invited him in, and here was this great hunk of drunken meat, making witty remarks (and completely irreverent remarks), like destroying the format, by being completely honest and clear. It wasn’t a disaster at all with Kerouac, who was drunk, but one hundred percent frank and one hundred percent real, It was one of the realest programs I ever saw. So I said, naturally, “No, no no no, I didn’t get into this… I wouldn’t dare, you know, replace Kerouac, it would be like a lese majeste

[Allen then reads out Buckley's letter to him, from 1981, in response to an invitation to join him at the 25-Years Celebration of On The Road - the 1981 Naropa Institute Kerouac Conference]

"Dear Allen, Thanks for the invitation. Kerouac was a very special guy, awfully difficult, and I am pleased that somebody is paying such dramatic attention to him, but I should not be included in that number because I am not sufficiently a student. He was very kind to me in several public references and I attempted to be kind in return but I did not take seriously his philosophical odyssey. With warm personal regards, Bill.

Very nice letter  - very literate (which is what Kerouac liked about him, that he was literate). But.. Kerouac also liked..McCarthy..Joe McCarthy, oh yeah, loved McCarthy ..because McCarthy would get up there drunk and, you know, talk funny – he (Kerouac) said, he thought McCarthy was the only honest man in the Senate, (in the sense of someone talks from the top of his mind and says outrageous things, while everybody else is trying to keep it..  everything fine under the cover) (In that sense) McCarthy was a hypocrite. 

From someone with a sort of anti-artist point of view it [Kerouac's "Firing Line" appearance] might have seemed like a disaster, but, actually, as time goes on, Kerouac will look more and more interesting and Buckley will look..the occasion, the necessity to be polite on the occasion  and the necessity to be rationally coherent and linear on the occasion will fade and the monumentality of Kerouac’s drunken humor will emerge as a kind of tragic-comic Rabelaisian beauty, and his remarks will get clearer (as he was really shrewd, drunken-shrewd – he was very good when he was drunk, he was never at loss for trenchant lines of beauty in poetry).

[Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in 1959 - Photo by John Cohen]

Allen Ginsberg-Jack Kerouac Letters, in case you haven't read it yet, is essential reading

here's profound  self-examination from way back in the Summer of 1945  

AG: "Jean [Jack], you are an American more completely than I, more fully a child of nature and all that is the grace of the earth....To categorize according to your own terms, though intermixed you [and Lucien Carr] are romantic visionaries. Introspective, yes, and eclectic, yes. I am neither romantic nor a visionary [this is 1945 (sic)] and that is my weakness and perhaps my power, at any rate, it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America...I am not a cosmic exile such as (Thomas) Wolfe or yourself for I am an exile from myself as well. I respond to my home, my society, as you do, with ennui and enervation. You cry "oh to be in some far city and feel the smothering pain of the unrecognized ego!" (Do you remember? we were self ultimate once.) But I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence..."

Jack Kerouac's Birthday tomorrow

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Wednesday March 12 - Jack Kerouac's birthday

March 12, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Jack Kerouac's Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitchhiking Trip Narrated in On The Road]


from a "Journal during first stages of "On The Road" (by John Kerouac [sic], 1948-49)

Monday November 29 - That's 32,500 words since I started on Nov 9, or better than 1500 words per day...per sitting, very high. Although this is only the first draft, and I still have no idea where I'm heading with it, I delight in the figures, as always, because they are concrete evidence of a greater freedom of writing than I had in Town and the City. However, who knows about the quality? I have been sitting down and writing with perfect equanimity and I hope that I can go on like this from now on and write a great many good books all intertwined. Still - lately - I've had a feeling of emptiness...not boredom, just emptiness & even falseness.These are not the reverent, mad feelings during Town and.. City, altho I'm convinced it indicates "artistic" growth; as for "spiritual growth", I can't say at all yet.My whole feeling & knowledge now is concentrated on people, and not beyond them in the realms of "spirituality" (I do believe). So a new notebook (the other one was sloppy to write in due to the bulge of the pages). This is better. These absurd little interests in notebook-paper are connected with the gravity of early boyhood diaries.

Kerouac's birthday today. We'll celebrate with those obsessives of On The Road, who have constructed/reconstructed maps of the routes. Michael J Hess's map-making is here. Dennis Mansker's even more thorough tracking, here. 

In a (post)-modern experiment that received international press, German student, Gregor Weichbrot created a mash-up of On The Road and Google Maps!  
On The Road for 17527 Miles computed it as just that (and the journey estimated as taking just over two-hundred-and-seventy-two-and-a-quarter hours!)

Weichbrot's avowedly purely-conceptual piece is currently on show (in e-book form) at the "Poetry will be made by all!"exhibit at the Luma Foundation, Zurich (until March 30)

Rather disappointingly, "I'm not really a fan of Jack Kerouac", he tells PRI (Public Radio International), "I have to admit. I don't even..I haven't (even) read the whole book". 
The whole process, once he had written the requisite computer code was "pretty easy", he declares, and took him little more than 'half an hour".

On The Road leeched and reduced to a mere series of robotic directions, (we're all for conceptual waggery, but it also becomes necessary, especially today, on his birthday, to sing and salute, once again, this extraordinary testament to the human imagination that is Kerouac's writing, the human spirit contained within, the extraordinary wealth of language).



Here's the source, Jack, in 1959, on the Steve Allen show, reading from both On The Road and Visions of Cody    - Happy Birthday! 

Expansive Poetics - 37 (Lawrence and Whitman)

March 13, 2014, 3:00 am

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Allen's "Expansive Poetics"lectures continue..

AG: These specimens in American poetry of open-form verse are not that easy to find. Even after (Ezra) Pound and(William Carlos) Williams - 1905 or so – most American poets continued writing in the more archaic, nineteenth-century, iambic patterns. And when I first discovered free verse, working with William Carlos Williams, it was an adventure going out and trying to find poets in America or England who had written in an open form and had done it well (not just sloppy free verse, but poets who had some kind of electricity in the line).

One of them Williams recommended to me was Marsden Hartley– and (D.H.) Lawrence,obviously. Robinson Jeffers, also, who was a favorite of Gary Snyder’s (but I don’t have any Jeffers in our anthologyyet, though he’ll be put in).

But a big thick book of open form verse like this is hard to find by a great writer. There aren’t that many. I mean, see if you can think of that many? Maybe after 1950 you can find a large body of work by many poets, like Robert Duncanor Denise Levertov or myself or Gary Snyder or Philip Whalen. But (D.H.) Lawrence is rare because there is less of a rigid artistic idea as you might find in (Ezra) Pound or (Gary) Snyder. His really is open form verse, loose verse. It really is a novelist writing poetry with his ear and with his mind but he ‘s not really trying to arrange the lines by any archaic order, or any new invented order like William Carlos Williams. It’s just open speech, open loose talk. Loose talk. And because of that it has a vivacity and vividness and clarity and personality that my own work or Snyder’s doesn’t, because ours is a little literary – or Duncan, say, or Pound. Here is just a guy – a man, or an intelligent man – spouting off.

So here’s his spouting off in Whitmanics, or (a) post-Whitmanic Timonian complaint about America. But here he’s setting the case specifically for America, given the disillusionment that Whitman hinted at in“Respondez!”where he turned everything around, and a disillusionment that Whitman spells out in detail in his prefaces (and) in his prose works, particularly the preface to Democratic Vistas (which we might pick up on in a few minutes)

[Allen then begins reading D.H.Lawrence’s poem, “The Evening Land”, stumbling with the opening before reading it in its entirety] – “Oh America,/The sun sets in you./Are you the grave of our day?/ Shall I come to you, the open tomb of my race?/ I would come, if I felt my hour had struck,/I would rather you came to me./For that matter/Mahomet never went to any mountain/Save it had first approached him and it had cajoled his soul./ You have cajoled the soul of millions of us, America/ Why won't you cajole my soul?/I wish you would/ I confess I am afraid of you./ The catastrophe of your exaggerate love,/You who never finds yourself in love/But only loses yourself further, decomposing..."...."Dark faery,/Modern, unissued, distinctive America/Your nascent faery people/Lurking among the deeps of your industrial thicket,/Allure me till I am beside myself,/ A nympholept./ "These States", as Whitman said - / Whatever he meant!"

AG: That's a pretty good poem for..whatever year that was..

Student: Wow!  Really!

AG: Baden-Baden. So, it would be in the (19)20's - There's a number of little poems about America - a little note, a little notice. And then he's got a great essay on Whitman in.. what is it?

Student: Classic Studies of American Literature

AG: Studies in Classic American Literature

Student: Yeah

AG: A book worth reading. But the chapter on Whitman is totally devastating. It's mean, actually. It's just macho mean. I mean, it's so mean that it's untrue. 

Student: Um-hmm

AG: Because he won't have any homosexual contact of any kind, and that's what he sees in Whitman immediately - some kind of a vast outspreading piece of fat - trying to rub up against everything in the universe, or trying to annihilate all boundaries. And it scares Lawrence (although he's got that himself, in his book The Plumed Serpent). But it's an intelligent view, actually, and it's the best anti-Whitmanic, anti-gasbag statement ever made, I think, except that it doesn't have as much humor as Whitman himself, so it fails that way. It's not as simple-minded and amusing (ultimately it's not as amusing as Whitman -  It's not as sophisticated as Whitman, finally - because Whitman did have a basic humor, as in that "certain impalpable rest, neither in the game, nor out of it" that surpasses Lawrence's spleneticism, finally - (a) splenetic shot.

Friday Weekly Round-Up - 168

March 14, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Allen Ginsberg in drag - from Pickup's Tricks,  Gregory Pickup's 1973 documentary about the legendary exploits of the San Francisco drag-performance group, The Cockettes (this footage is also included in Bill Weber & David Weismann's 2002 feature-length movie)]

March madness. Ginsberg silliness. It's not April Fools Day yet, but will be soon. 

First off, Exploitation Corner - more bizarre, inappropriate items, starting with.. 


Surely what the world needs! -  "Allen Ginzburg's typewriter Luggage Tag" !
(we'll stop right after that (what should be a red-light) shameful mis-spelling).

The same companyoffers an "I heart howls [sic] Reusable Shopping Bag" 


(presumably for those moments of "hungry fatigue" when you find yourself (lycanthropy temporarily under control) in the supermarket,"shopping for images"! ) 

Need to have Allen watching you shower?  Well you, clearly, need, (for only $68!), an Allen Ginsberg shower-curtain!



or perhaps you'd like that purloined image on a clock ?



You just know Allen was thinking about all this that night he sat down to write in San Francisco, right? - right?

"Onesies" are one of our particular favorites. If you're going to buy "onesies", we strongly suggest you buy onesies from City Lights. Indeed, for non-exploitative shopping, for "merchandise", City Lights is the place 

- and also the Allen Ginsberg Estate (for officially-sanctioned items - and with more to come - see here)

The Allen Ginsberg Estate did officially sanction the PressPop"limited edition"Allen Ginsberg doll, yes. (it's sold-out)



Recently-available from us - the (tastefully-designed) Harry Smith mug - Allen's iconic logo - now you can drink your coffee out of it (while meditating on the enigmatic three-fish-with-one-head)



Do you find this particularly funny? (A Prairie Home Companion) Well some folks apparently do.

Time to give another "shout-out", in case you've never seen it, to Yelp 

In other news:
Peter Aspden reviews the new Kerouac novella in the Financial Times

James Grainger reviews the new Burroughs biography in the Toronto Star

Kerouac week this past week - Todd Tietchen - "On Kerouac's Maximalist Writings and Unfinished Works in The Huffington Post. Also in The Huffington Post, enthusiastic student, Odelia Kaly.  (Predictably, New Republic churn out a 42-year-old (sic) hatchet-job - "Jack Kerouac Wrote On The Road in Three Weeks. It Shows.")

Breaking news - the maverick, idiosyncratic, American poet, Bill Knott died this week (Wednesday) (he was 74)

and, The New York Times quotes Allen's great line (from Memory Gardens) ("Well, while I'm here, I'll do the work - and what's the work? - To ease the pain of living..") in its obituary notice on the tragic early death of award-winning travel journalist Matthew Power (he was only 39!). 

Don't miss Power's candid and sweet memories of Allen here. We mean, really - don't miss it. 

Next Tuesday (March 18) John Krokidas'Kill Your Darlings becomes available in the US on Blu-ray and DVD  (it'll be available elsewhere (Australia, April 3, the UK, April 21) shortly)



Stay tuned.

Burroughs Sings! - (Falling In Love Again)

March 15, 2014, 3:00 am

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Another Burroughs weekend. We're doing a lot of William Burroughs posts here on the Ginsberg blog - unapologetic - it being the Burroughs Centennial. Today, Wiliam Burroughs Sings! (We've already posted a Jack Kerouac Sings! - Allen Ginsberg Singing is, of course, pretty ubiquitous!)

As he explains at the outset of another musical encounter..."just something I picked up, a knack of going along with somebody's song, putting myself into it..".."Marlene Dietrich, not one of my favorite people, but.." - William Burroughs' spirited rendition of Dietrich's classic torch-song, "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss Auf Liebe eingestellt" (literally, "I'm head to toe ready for love" - perhaps better known in its English transformation as "Falling in Love Again") is not something to be missed, and, once heard, unlikely to be forgotten.
It appears as the last track on the 1990 Hal Willner-produced Dead City Radio album of recordings made in Lawrence, Kansas. 


Here's Dietrich's version (in German)



and Dietrich in English


and Dietrich in The Blue Angel

Dietrich doesn't "own" the song  (we will now heretically suggest Burroughs now "owns" the song!). There have been numerous versions made. Among them, Billie Holiday in a typically personalized version here - and Nina Simone does a haunting version 
It was even covered by a little English group in the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962 - listen to it here (and for a digitally-remastered version of that same recording - see here)  

Kill Your Darlings Outtakes

March 16, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics 38 - (Edward Carpenter - 1)

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Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan, of course, but..

Allen (Ginsberg) visiting Lucien (Carr)in prison.
 ( "What's it like out there?"),
 one of several deleted scenes now available on the upcoming DVD/Blu-ray release
 of John Krokidas' Kill Your Darlings.

(For previous Ginsberg Project postings on Kill Your Darlings, 
see here, here, here and here
 (not forgetting, here).

Here's another clip -  homophobia, sexism and racism in Columbia in the (19)50's
 ("slicing up the cake and...er?..licking the frosting?") 



As we mentioned on Friday, the DVD/Blu-ray of Kill Your Darlings will be available in the US on Tuesday (April 3 in Australia, April 21 in the UK).

Expansive Poetics 38 - (Edward Carpenter - 1)

March 17, 2014, 3:00 am

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AG: And Whitman had a few rare students who actually made it as poets, using his style and using his amplitude of vision or inclusion - his amplitude of ambition, let us say - to include everything. There's one really remarkable writer, Edward Carpenter. We have some of his work in the precursors (section), actually, (of theExpansive Poetics anthology). [ see also Allen's earlier discussion of Carpenter here, here and here]

This here [Allen displays book] is a copy of Edward Carpenter's book of poems in four volumes, called Towards Democracy, an odd edition that was published in... I got in 1966. Vietnam War Peace March Day, purchased from the Gotham Book Mart, a month or so after hearing"The Secret of Time and Satan" read aloud by Gavin Arthur in San Francisco

The book is an odd.. it has no opening title pages (except in Volume 1). We can look at it. It's an odd little shot. You might pass it around. Take a look at the title page, because it's rare. I don't know if it's available any more. I'll have it on reserve in the library - London, T.Fisher/Unwin, Paternoster Square, 19..? - what is that? can you read that?

Student: Oh, 19.., let's see, it's...

AG: I can't.

Student: Eighteen! - 1892

AG: Eighteen Ninety-Two.

Student: That's the year Whitman died.

AG: Really?

Student: Yes, it is

AG: Ah-ha, so this is an 1892 edition of Towards Democracy (third edition, enlarged). I'll pass the volume around. Let's see if I've got the right one here. The one.. did I pass the wrong one that way? I...

Student: What are you looking for?

AG: Page.. oh, I got it. It's alright. Yeah, you can pass these around [Allen hands around xeroxes of a couple of Carpenter's poems] so you can see it.
In the "precursors", you'll find two specemins of poetic writing by Carpenter. C.C. [Allen's teaching assistant]  reminded me that he (Carpenter) wrote an excellent biography of Whitman

Student (CC): Yes

AG: Have you read it?

Student (CC): Yes. Early 1900's. Very good. Very.. I guess the opposite of what you just said about (D.H.) Lawrence..

AG: Uh-huh

Student (CC): Perceptive, sensitive, supportive.. very honorable.. and solid.

AG: Where did you run into it?

Student: Boston Public Library

AG: (In the anthology) it's just before (Arthur) Rimbaud, the heroic "precursors", the first section of the book (I put mostly material published before 1900 in that precursors section).  There's a poem, "From Turin to Paris".. 

[Audio for the above is available here, beginning at approximately sixty-three-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately sixty- six-and-a-half minutes in] 

Surkov on Allen & Tupac (& Jackson Pollock)

March 17, 2014, 6:04 pm

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[Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)]

It's not every day you get such a glorious global name-check!                                                       (new Cold War name-dropping/ name-calling?)

Vladislav Surkov, the Russian power-broker, eminence grise (and, now, under-the-sanctions-of-the-US  Russian power-broker)

[Vladislav Surkov -  via www.kremlin.ru.]

whose rendition of Allen's "Sunflower Sutra" we featured here last year.                            

 (Here it is again in case you missed it  (it begins approximately two-minutes in)) 

So, his statement, made to the Russian newspaper, Moskovsky Komsomolets:

"...The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur,Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don't need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing."

Tupac, Allen and Jackson Pollock, eh? - so that's the troika? 

      [Tupac Shakur (1971-1996]                                                                      [Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)] 

---

Expansive Poetics 39 - The Gay Succession

March 18, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Edward Carpenter]



[George Hukin and Edward Carpenter]

AG:  Born in 1844, (Edward) Carpenter. He was a theosophist. Gavin Arthur knew him. Gavin Arthur was a theosophist (too) and an astrologer, in San Francisco in the (19)60’s, an eminent personage who was one of the elders of the San Francisco, or Bay Area, spiritual network. Frederick Spiegelberg, a Tibetan expert, Gavin Arthur and Alan  Watts,and a few older people, formed a sort of group that supervised the various shelves and drawers of spiritual life that were being opened and filled up in the Bay Area during the (19)50’s and (19)60’s.


[Gavin Arthur (in 1934 aged 33 - photograph by Brett Weston)] 


[Gavin Arthur c.1967]

Gavin Arthur was the grandson of  Chester A Arthur,President. He had sold newspapers when he was in his middle-age, broke. He sold newspapers on Market Street in San Francisco. But before that he had been to London, and met and slept with Edward Carpenter, and also met Maud Gonne and William Butler Yeats, and all the Bloomsburypeople, and had met Meher Baba in Honolulu in 1920, or something, and had been around, and was a sort of gilded youth in the early part of the century, coming from an aristocratic, or high political, family.

(He) hung around with the theosophical people and so had his connection with Carpenter. He said that he had slept with Carpenter, and Carpenter, in bed, told him that (he) Carpenter had visited Whitman and slept with Whitman, and that Whitman had blown him. So that’s the only legitimate documentation of Whitman’s sex life that exists, first- or second- hand. I asked Gavin to write that up for posthumous publication. So, after he died, his little three- or four- page description of that succession of  blow-jobs was published in Gay Sunshine Interviews (as an appendix to my interview in GaySunshine) . And it’s actually, historically, a really interesting piece of Whitmania – because it’s the only glimpse we have of Whitman’s famous closet life.

Student: Well there’s..

AG: You got more?

Student: ..Yes

AG:  You know something else?

Student: Yes, there are the letters to young men that Whitman nursed at the end of the..towards the end of the..Civil War, and there are a number of letters, really, that are just.. there’s no doubt. .they clearly demonstrate..

AG:  Yeah, but the scholars (have) all argued..

Student: No, this is… these are letters to young men. This precedes, pre-dates, Peter Doyle. (Then) there is (of course) the Peter Doyle relationship..




[Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle]

AG: I’ve seen some (of the letters). They’re very emotional.

Student: Very emotional.

AG: Rapturous, but…

Student: And…yeah..

AG: …they don’t say anything direct.

Student: No, they don’t.

AG: They don’t say anything direct. Whereas Gavin Arthur asked Carpenter, What did you do in bed with Whitman? And Carpenter said, “I’ll show you”.

Student: Yes, but then..

AG:  And then went down on him.

Student: ..faint clues and indirections..

AG: Yeah.

Student: ..are sometimes stronger than hear-say

AG: Okay, well this is all gossip, asides, background material. Still, it’s part of the basic poetic gossip that should be handed down…

Student: Absolutely,

AG: …since you won’t find it in any.. I don’t think any definitively.. you won’t find it in any of the books about Whitman – even the most recent biographer [1981 - sic] didn’t include it, though he said he knew of it but he had not looked it up. [(Justin) Kaplan].

Expansive Poetics 40 - (Edward Carpenter - 2)

March 19, 2014, 3:00 am

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AG: So..however..he (Edward Carpenter) went to visit (Walt) Whitman in, I guess, Camden (New Jersey), and Whitman told him to go to India, and so he did go to India, and I believe Carpenter met a number of swamis and yogis and actually did study some meditation, and I think he may have contacted Ramakrishna. So that’s another interesting piece of..late-nineteenth-century gossip about the international mucous membrane network (that’s a phrase you’ll find in this book (Expansive Poetics Anthology) in a poem called “Foam”  ("Schaum") by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 1926 – born in (19)26 or so – “I too am a member of the international mucous membrane network”)

Well, I chose this piece from Carpenter.. I chose two pieces from Carpenter…One is “From Turin to Paris”, an account of a railroad train journey - which is prophetic of later train journeys you’ll find in my own poetry – or earlier, in the “Trans-Siberian” poem of Blaise Cendrars(there’s a long poem by Blaise Cendrars that’s also in this book – travel poems, or the “Panama” poem by Cendrars). This is one of the first travel poems, where you take notes (like in  (Jack) Kerouac). You take notes or (are) sketching on the way in travelling. And this is a really honorable, high-class, development out of Whitman’s method of long-line notation. It’s one of the rare pieces directly influenced by Whitman and at the same time worthy of the old man.

[Allen begins reading Carpenter’s “From Turin to Paris”] – “Tireless, hour after hour, over mountains plains and/rivers,/the express train rushes on..” – Note, to begin with, he’s using a prose poetry form. He’s not starting it at the margin, he’s just indenting, like paragraphs (I used this same method for “Transcription of Organ Music”, and it’s a workable line if you’re interested in that expansive kind of poetry that tells anecdotes or gives accounts, where it’s on the border-line  between prose and poetry, or where it’s acute prose that rises into poetic flash every five lines or so, then this is an appropriate form because you can read it as prose or you can read it as poetry, or you can break it up into very short lines, indented and isolate little phrases, if you want, (like “the express train rushes on”), if you want that special emphasis.

  

I’m just talking now about the arrangement of lines on the page, the typography of the page, which is something we haven’t got into [in this class] – how you arrange lines on the page if you’ve got open-form verse. This is a very interesting example. Put it next to (Arthur) Rimbaud’s  prose-poems.  [Allen continues] - “Tireless, hour after hour, over mountains plains and/rivers,/the express train rushes on/ The shadows change, the  sun and moon rise and set/ Day fades into night, and night into day/The great cities appear and disappear over the horizon./ On through the hot vineyards of Piedmont the/ express train rushes,/The great-limbed Ligurian peasant/sprawls asleep in/the third-class carriage  which has/been put on for a portion/of the course…” – That’s an interesting shot – “The great-limbed Ligurian peasant/sprawls asleep in/the third-class carriage” sounds exactly like (Jack) Kerouac, actually  - sounds a little like (Walt) Whitman, but there’s more of a little bombastic thing – “the great-limbed” – ““The great-limbed Ligurian peasant” – the appreciation of that “great-limbed Ligurian”, the oddity of it, of the word “Ligurian”. I mean, it’s normal, it’s (literally) a Ligurian peasant, from Liguria, Italy.

“The calm grave country girls droop their lids to slumber” – “droop their lids to slumber” is straight out of Whitman – or Kerouac (there’s a funny genre of language that runs between them, (and) maybe Herman Melville, Thomas Wolfe– Whitman-Melville, Whitman-Thomas, Wolfe, Kerouac  - a special sound, that’s imitable and recognizable - “The calm grave country girls droop their lids to slumber” – “droop their lids to slumber”

“The huge unwieldy friar with elephantine limbs,/small eyes, and snout like an ant-eater /– not a particle of/ religion in his whole body – gazes/blankly out of the/window./ And the  young mother with black/lace on her head/looks after her little brood./  On through the hot vineyards in the fierce afternoon/the express train rushes – the/villages on the hill-tops/twinkle through the blaze - the fireman opens the furnace/-door of the engine and stokes up/again and again./ The first-class passengers/dispose themselves as best/they may, with blinds down, on the hot and dusty cushions -/ The respectable and cold-mutton-/faced English/gentleman and his wife and/daughters, the blasé Chinaman/with yellow fan, the little Persian/boy so brown, lying   asleep/against the side of his instructor -/ The deeply-lined large-faced/shaven old Frenchman/ - the Italian artist, bearded,/ nearing forty years old, with/expressive mouth and clear/discerning eyes,/Dispose themselves as best they/may” -  Well, actually, his perceptions are pretty sharp.  I like that “hot and dusty cushions” – the dusty cushions on the train. He was there. He really was there and he saw dusty cushions.

Then, the little fast sketches, the face-sketches of people – “mutton-/faced English/gentleman”, “blasé Chinaman”, “Persian/boy so brown”, “Italian artist.. expressive mouth …clear/discerning eyes” – very late-nineteenth-century-sounding, that. The “expressive mouth” – sounds like Henry James– “Most expressive mouth, clear, discerning eyes” –

“The sides of the carriages  lie open like glass” – So he’s preparing an open brain there – like open-space vision now – “The young priest fresh from/College recites his/evensong, then addresses himself to/the conversion of his/Protestant fellow-traveller – I see/his winning manners at/first, and then his intimadatory/frowns followed by threats/of hell-fire,/ The group of laughing girls in/ one compartment are/ talking three or four languages….”

to be continued. 

[Audio for the above is available here, beginning at approximately sixty-six-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately seventy-seven-and-a-quarter minutes in] 

Expansive Poetics 41 - Edward Carpenter 3 (From Turin to Paris)

March 20, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Allen Ginsberg, aged 24, c.1950 - Walt Whitman, aged 35, c.1854]




[An early draft of Song of Myself]

AG: Actually, I have a poem called "Sather Gate Illumination" and it's simply an imitation of this method of notation [Carpenter's, in "From Turin to Paris"], if any of you know of that poem. I don't know if I had read this ["From Turin to Paris"] by then. In fact, I don't think I had. I had read  (Walt) Whitman, I think, just before writing "Sather Gate Illumination", and was turned on by Whitman's static descriptions - that is, descriptions of one place. But there must be some very basic archetypal method proposed by Whitman in that it would affect me to get a style that's almost exactly the same as his. In other words, it just rises naturally, once you grasp Whitman's method of looking out and notating inclusively, without looking for a plot, but notating what he notices, in the order in which he notices it, I take it., once you get onto that method, then you have a style, actually. There is a whole style that proceeds from Whitman. It's very simple, based on nature, based on sketching from nature  (also based on the nature of (the) long line - a single long line - or maybe one perception in a long line that might be a run-on line, with fragments hanging over. I think there's a line in "Sather Gate Illumination" - "a girl explains regarder is to look -/ the whole French language looks on the trees on the campus" (was my note).

Student: Where does that appear?

AG: In a book called Reality Sandwiches, I think

Student: Reality Sandwiches. A poem called "Sather Gate Illumination". It's an interesting poem to look up. A combination. I got it out of Whitman (reading into Whitman a lot) but also two years acquaintance with the sketches in (Jack) Kerouac's Visions of Cody and his method of sketching, which was similar.  That is, just looking out through the windows of  your eyes, looking out through the windows of your eye-balls as through the windows of a room, from the inside of your skull to the optical field outside, and sketching details of the phenomenal world viewed in the optical field - simple. Just taking the instant, taking the optical field of the instant as an instant in eternity, and then sketching eternity by just looking out through your skull, looking from behind, from the back of your skull outwards , as through a window, and then just taking down what you see.



[Allen continues with his reading and analysis of Edward Carpenter's poem, "From Turin to Paris" ] - "The group of laughing girls in/ one compartment are/talking three or four languages,/In another an Italian officer leans close in conver-/-sation to a yellow-haired young/woman, and touches her lightly every/now and  then on the arm,/In a third sits a bedizened old/hag, purveyor of/human flesh - with great greedy/clever eyes (once beautiful/under their still long lashes), deep/wrinkles (yet not one of wisdom or/of sorrow), and thin cruel lips -/On a frequent errand from Italy/to London she/travels/ I hear her pious expressions as/ she talks talks to the lady/sitting opposite to her - I note her/habit of turning up her/ eyes as of one shocked,/And still the train rushes on,/and the fields fly past/ and the vineyards." -





 [Allen continues, beginning the second section] - "Dusk closes down, and the train/ rushes on,/The mountains stand behind/rank, and valley beyond valley,/ Towering up and up over the/clouds even into broad day again/ Lo! the great measureless slopes/with receding dwindling perspective/of trees and habitations" - Now here's a real test of a sketcher - He's got a landscape. How do you sketch a landscape? - Is he going to be smart enough to pick out little details or depend on "Lo! the great measureless slopes/with receding dwindling perspective/of trees and habitations"? - I mean, that's a great general sweeping line, but a really great sketcher will get down (and) pick out by accident, passing through on the train, just grab the first thing that hits the eye -  "Here at their foot the trellised/ gardens, and rivers roaring under/the stone bridges of towns" - That's pretty good! - "And there the far ledges where/the tumbled roofs of tiny hamlets/are perched - the terrace after/terrace of vine and wheat, the/meadows with grass and flowers,/ The zigzag path.." - He's actually getting a few little fast shots - "...the lonely chalet, the/patches of cultivation, almost/inaccessible,/ The chesnut woods, and again the pine woods, and beyond again, where/no trees are, the solitary/pasturages,/ (The hidden upper valleys bare of/ all but rocks and grass - they too/with their churches and villages)" - 



And if you do take a train through Europe, you do get those glimpses - "And beyond the pasturages, aye/beyond the bare rocks, through the/great girdle of the clouds - high/high in the air -/The inaccessible world of  ice,/scarce trodden of men" - That's pretty good. That's what it looks like going through Switzerland, Austria.. Taking what? - Turin to Paris? - so you go up (from) Turin to Paris. I think Peter (Orlovsky) and Gregory (Corso) took that train once. - [to Student] You've been on that..?

Student: ....Not that (particular) one

AG:  If you go..  Yeah. You look up and you see.. what is it? - "inaccessible world of  ice,/scarce trodden of men" (although, when you get there, actually, you find they've got ski-lifts and paths all the way up - for a hundred years they've had ski-lifts up to the most inaccessible places) -  "There the rich sunlight dwells,/calm like an aureole of glory, over/a thousand..." - That "aureole of glory" is.. you can tell that nineteenth-century theosophical generalization a bit (t)here -  "...over a thousand forms of snow/and rock clear-cut delaying./But below in the dusk along the/ mountain-bases the train climbs/painfully,/Crossing the putty-colored ice-/cold streams again and again with/tardy wheel.." - Now, that's a good line - "Crossing the putty-colored ice-/cold streams again and again with/tardy wheel.." - There's a lot of things in there, but the direct observation  "putty-colored ice-cold" - "putty-colored ice-cold"

Student:    ("Putty-colored" - is that the sound of the train?)

AG: Well, maybe, the sound of the train. But, actually, that's just what those..

Studen: They are....

AG:  ...what those alpine streams look like. There is that putty color in them. I haven't seen it described as "putty-colored'" anywhere else but here, but it's just right.



But then "tardy wheel" - You've got the two things. I mean, you've got the stream and then you've got the train in there in the line - both of them at once - It's like a little haiku -"Till the great summit tunnel is/reached, then tilting forward,/With many a roar and rush and/whisle and scream from gallery to/gallery/ It flies - rolls like a terror-/stricken thing down the great slopes/into the darkness - and night falls/in the valleys." - "Here too then also, and without fail, as everywhere/else" - This is really Whitman there. It's trying to include everything - " "Here too then also, and without fail, as everywhere/else". Okay, so you've got this great line of inclusiveness.. 

Student: Tautology

AG: Tautology. But then what he comes up with out of that is pretty good - "The same old human face looking forth-/ Whether in the high secluded/valleys where all/winter comes no sound from the outer/ world, or whether by/ the side of the great iron road/where the plate-layer runs  to/bring a passenger a cup of cold/water.." - Well, he stopped on that one, picked it up fast - [Allen continues reading, from "..or whether loafing in the/market-place of the fourth-rate/country town - the same.."] - "..or whether loafing in the/market-place of the fourth-rate/country town - the same/ Here too from the door of her/little wooden tene-/-ment the worn face looking forth -/fringed with grey hair/and cap - the old woman peering/anxiously down the road/for her old man/ (Saw you not how when he left her/in the morning/how anxiously, how lovingly, with/what strange transformation of/countenance- Death close behind her-/she prayed him early to reurn?)/ The little boy with big straw hat,/and short blouse/bringing the goats home at evening,/ the gape-mouthed/short-petticoated squaw that/accompanies him,/The peasant lying in the field/face downwards and/asleep, while his wife and children/finish the remainder of/his meal - the bullock-faced workers/on the roads or over/the lands -/ Ever the same human face, ever/the same brute men/and women - poignant with what divine obscure attractions!" - So he just takes a look at him and he wants to make out! - "divine obscure attractions" indeed!  Yes. 



Now, this (next line) is the nicest line in the poem - "And the dainty-handed Chinaman.." - I like that - "the dainty-handed Chinaman" - It's so delicate, and funny. Like, wherever did he get the idea to write a poem in 1889 about "dainty-handed Chinamen? It's such a modern idea, such a personal idea, such an oddly personal noticing, a personal piece of noticing. And the humor of it, I like- "And the dainty-handed Chinaman in/the first-class/carriage.." - [Again, Allen continues on, reading from the poem] - "And the dainty-handed Chinaman in/the first-class/carriage surveys them as he passes,/with mental com-/parisons,/And the string of mules waits at the railroad crossing"..."The faces seen within the cars,/hour after hour, with/ closed eyes - the changed equalized/expression of them, the/overshadowing humanity -/ (The great unconscious humanity/in each one!)/The old bedizened hag/overshadowed,/The young priest and his/recalcitrant opponent both/equally overshadowed - their/arguments so merely nothing/ at all, the beautiful artist-face overshadowed" - This is actually a great cadenza here, I think, where's he got the "overshadowing"? Precisely what that "overshadowed" is, I don't know if it's stated, we'll find out, but it's a funny rhetorical trick. He has to review them all again, to review all the  faces again, to review all the personalities again, one-by-one, look in their faces, and see them under the aspect of eternity, "overshadowed" by a common humanity, I guess.

Student: (Was it the overshadowed...cities?)

AG:  No, no, it's "the changed equalized/ expression of them, the/overshadowing humanity" - of course, you get the great cities, which would be, like, concentrations of "overshadowing humanity" also. But here it's "overshadowed".. they're all relaxed and at rest and (with) a blank expression (inward-turning faces, or in-turning thoughts, and sort of day-dreaming, silence and boredom in the car, and all of a sudden, or during that time, his mind wakes up to recognize the mutuality among all of them and his sympathies go out, and so it's an occasion for him to go through a greatrun, where he re-views every detail on their faces again and sees those details as through the sky, as from the sky, or under the aspect of eternity.



[Allen Ginsberg1955 photograph - caption: "Neal Cassady and Natalie Jackson, conscious of their roles in eternity..."]

Then - "The young priest and his/recalcitrant opponent both/equally overshadowed" - then, the turn of phrase is great - " their/arguments so merely nothing/ at all" (that's actually quite idiomatic for a poem of this time) - "so merely nothing/ at all" - Very intelligent, that turn of phrase. You'd think that an intelligent man would say something like that - "Your argument is merely so nothing at all". It's an odd assertion. Like you've got a character in it. - [Allen continues] - "...the beautiful artist-face/ overshadowed,/ The unsafe tunnel passed in the dead of the night,/the slow tentative movements of the/train, the forms and/faces of men within - visible by the/light of their own/lanterns, anxious with open mouths/looking upward at the/roof - all overshadowed,/ The little traveller asleep with/his head on the lap of/his instructor - the Persian boy -/travelling he too on a long/journey, farther than London or Paris.." - i.e. from Persia, or death, or birth - "The westward swing of the great/planets through the/night -" - So he's got the long journey, then a big panoramic glimpse of the planets themselves in space.. - "...the faint early dawn - the farms and fields flying/ past once more.." - My guess is that he started writing and then he fell asleep and woke up around here. The night wears on. He wrote late into the night. His eyes became heavy, he fell asleep, he woke, after a long gap of time, probably after three or four hours, around the (line).. - "The little traveller asleep with/his head on the lap of/his instructor - the Persian boy.." - (He) opened his eyes and saw that little picture, in the kind of eternity feeling you get when you wake up from a sleep on the train. You don't remember (or half-remember) where you are, and just suddenly see these pictures of strangers travelling through the universe. So you get the strangers travelling through the universe vision. And I imagine he woke up right then, because, by this time, "faint early dawn". And if you notice, if he was doing it in the car, he would have had time to write a lot more, if he'd stayed up all night. So he didn't stay up all night, obviously. After that junction, after "hour after hour with closed eyes", I guess (or I imagine) he must have written "all overshadoeed", and then fallen asleep. That is,"open mouths/looking upward at the/roof - all overshadowed", and then fell out, and then woke for the next note. Yes?

Student: Are those trains lit at all at night? It probably got really dark and it would be harder to write (What illumination would there be?)
AG: Gas lamps
Student:Gas lamps?
AG: Gas lamps maybe 
Student: "(V)isible by the/ light of their own/ lanterns"
AG: Yeah. Where is that?
Student: They bring their own lanterns?
AG: Yes.. Um-hmm - No, these are the train-men, I think
Student: Oh
AG: Or "the forms and faces  of men within" - "The unsafe tunnel" maybe? - They were "visible by the/ light of their own/ lanterns".

Anyway, he wakes up, and you know that feeling of waking up at dawn and seeing the universe? - and getting a sense of the space and extension of the universe? - He's got that here very nicely. It's rare. I haven't seen it described too often - "The great sad plains of Central France, the few trees,/ the innumerable cultivation - the peasants going out do/early/to work/ - The rising of the sun, for a new day - the great red /ball so bold rising unblemished on all the heart-ache and suffering, the plans, the schemes, the hopes, the desires, the despairs of millions -/ And the glitter and the roar already, and the rush of/the life of Paris." - That's pretty good. From "the draw of the great cities, Paris and London" - "And the glitter and the roar already, and the rush of/the life of Paris." - It's a pretty good description sketch.
So if you want to you can look ahead  and compare this with (Blaise) Cendrars..There is a poem by Blaise Cendrars called  "Trans-Siberian Express"....  that's a week or longer, a couple of weeks, done around World War I, which was translated by John Dos Passos, which Kenneth Patchen lent me a copy of back in 1955 in San Francisco, so that was like a big influence from World War I on on the elite of ..avant-garde writers, the Cendrars, because what it is, it is, like, a twentieth-century..you've got twentieth-century trains an wireless and.. (..railway across America from the nineteenth-century on..)
tape ends here - but continued...

AG: ...by the beginning of the twentieth-century poets are beginning to register that by writing poems up in dirigibles, flying across continents, writing poems on airplanes, and on trains, and, finally, writing giant epics in automobiles like  On The Road. It's a whole genre of anabasis (that is, a wandering) that was done more slowly in ancient times, on a ship, or on a camel, or on a horse, but now on an iron horse, or ship, or plane. There's a new form of poem which is invented, which is a poem between haiku-size and thirty pages, which is the complete account of a trip - and all the wakings, and flashes of eternity, and dawn moments, and sleepy babblings, and observations of passengers, with a background of travellers through time, travellers through eternity.


[Blaise Cendrars  (1887-1961)]

And I think the archetype in the twentieth-century is Blaise Cendrars'"Voyage Transsiberian"["La Prose du Transsiberian et de la Petite Jehanne de France"[. If you look it up.. I think we have a copy of it around in the library, or I have a copy somewhere. I had meant to put it in [our anthology] but "the Panama poem" by Cendrars [ "Le Panama ou les aventures de Mes Sept Oncles"("Panama or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles"] is a little more lively, actually. 

Student: You have the.. in Japan, the poetic travel diaries.

AG: Yeah.. Basho and everybody. Issa. Well, it's an old form, back to Xenophon, or earlier - The (Homer's)  Odyssey.

Student: Yes.

AG: Or Anabasis, But what I'm saying is the nature of it is changed when, all of a sudden, you step in a train. You can sit down with your notebook and look around, and its accelerated.

Student: Modern

AG: Also, twentieth-century poetry, the sign of twentieth-century poetry is when they started putting trains, garbage-pails, taxis, (in writing) - trains and taxis, in a way - (A) twentieth-century Parisian poem has taxi horns (and) automobile horns, beginning around World War I..

[Audio for the above is available here, beginning at approximately seventy-seven-and-a-quarter minutes in until the end of the tape, and from the beginning of the tape until approximately two-and-a-half minutes in] 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 169

March 21, 2014, 3:00 am

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March 21, in case you didn't know it, has been officially declared by the UN (by UNESCO) "World Poetry Day"

Fanny Wallendorf's wonderful translations into the French of Neal Cassady's Letters ("Un truc tres beau qui contient tout")  ("It's a beautiful thing, with everything in it") -  (the title, taken from Neal's 1948 letter to his pal, Bill Tomson) have just been (just this past month) published. 
See here and here. ( note - texte en francais)
We should point out that the book only covers the years 1944-1950 (a second, concluding, volume is due sometime in the future). For the full range, see David Moore's 2005 Penguin Books collection (curiously Moore and his work is nowhere credited in the Wallendorf book)   

Here's another important book of letters, (from theUniversity of New Mexico Press) - Amiri Baraka's critical correspondence with Ed Dorn



(there will be a book-launch and discussion about this book, this coming Monday, at the City University in New York, (CUNY), 6.00 p.m. at the CUNY Graduate Center)  

and we recently reported on this one, didn't we, (from the University of California) - Robert Creeley's Selected Letters


not forgetting... 



Thursday March 27 - International Theatre Day - At the Art Center in Maracaibo (Venezuela),  La Tribu Teatro Experimental (the Tribe Experimental Theatre) will be staging this - "Holy, holy, holy""Santo santo santo" - "Fragmento de Aullido" "Footnote to Howl"

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti's travel journals are to be published, it's been officially announced - “Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals (1950-2013)” will be published by Liveright in September 2015.  According to the publishers, it will "offer a fuller portrayal that goes beyond more fleeting associations with the Beats, revealing a more intimate, personal side and a deeper view of Ferlinghetti's political engagement at significant moments in twentieth-century history"..""(It) will bring together a vast store of primarily unpublished hand-written travel journals and notebooks as well as out-of-print and hard-to-find published works".

Here's Alison Flood in The Guardian on this. 

Lawrence's 95th birthday coming up this Monday



[Lawrence Ferlinghetti]

Allen Ginsberg 1990 Loyola University reading

March 22, 2014, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Birthday

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A Night With Allen Ginsberg - Allen Ginsberg's reading at Loyola University, New Orleans, 1990. An eye-witness recalls:  “The overflow crowd filled up the aisles and the outside lobby, so he (Allen) invited audience members to sit on the stage with him. (we see them on the stage there)/ He also (that same visit) did a meditation workshop, and his Collected Poemshad just appeared so he spent a whole afternoon signing copies and illustrating each with a drawing".

AG: So, I’ll begin with music in honor of the President and the great phony war on dope. This is a calypso song which gives you from before you were born, some of you, a history of American government involvement with the transport and spread of opium (and it continues in the Reagan and the Bushyears with the American government involvement with cocaine – C.I.A.Dope Calypso. It’s a little long because the history’s pretty long. [Allen begins singing (a detailed version of his) "C.I.A Dope Calypso"  – “In nineteen-hundred-and-forty-nine/China was won by Mao Tse Tung…”…..”…read the Times Picayune or the New York Times” (in this extended version, he shapes the piece to its present location) –

Now, Lower East Side New York is where I live – a little short poem ["Lower East Side" from"After Whitman and Reznikoff"]– “That round-faced woman/She owns the street with her three big dogs/ Screeches at me…”…” You Big Jerk ...you think you’re famous...reminds me of my mother.”

This is a little poem, a nice poem, which I put in a rock ‘n roll form but is now banned on the radio – as you may know the…Senator Jesse Helms, who is  preoccupied by homosexuality due to some flaw of character of his own (also preoccupied with miscegenation, homosexual miscegenation, apparently – his objection to the (Robert) Mapplethorpe show, according to the New York Times was, as they quoted him, that it showed “men of mixed race making love on a marble table top!” (it was the “mixed race” he objected to!) – Anyway, as you know, he’s the..the tobacco-cult Senator, legal narcotics (I think, the reason that he’s making so much noise, and Joe Coors who produces lots of alcohol and funds Jesse Helms’ research. And so between the alcohol lobby, or alcohol-pushers, and the tobacco-pushers, we have a lot of loud-mouths trying to cover their own..(sins, as you might call it at Loyala). So that’s the reason for all their vehemence.

Anyway, this is a poem that I put in rock n roll form, which was pretty good 45 record – but, Jesse Helms introduced a law, in 1988, banning, twenty-four hours-day,  all so-called quote “indecent” unquote language from the airwaves, so for the first time, all of my poetry (which is being broadcast for the first time behind the Iron Curtain) is being banned here in America!

There’ll be a hearing before the FCC on the twentieth of this month, followed by a court case. (We already won one court case on the subject when the FCC banned “indecency” between six a.m. and midnight – we won that, so Helms introduced a law covering that, saying, ban it twenty-four-hours a day, directing the FCC to do that).

It’s now being challenged. It means  (William) Burroughs, Henry Miller, myself, lots of stuff can’t get on the air. So this can’t get on the air (tho’ it played for quite a while as a 45) – “Birdbrain”– [Allen reads his poem “Birdbrain” in its entirety …”..he wrote this poem to be immortal"] (and)  follows it with "Kiss Ass" (“Kiss Ass is…") -  Let me say, since this is a religious college. I also teach in a religious college, Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colorado, where I’ve taught for fifteen years, which is the first contemplative Buddhist college in the Western world that’s been accredited, and so the first Buddhist college in the West, and it was, since (19)86, it was accredited, for an interchange of credits. And this is like a little Manifesto,  (from) 1974, “Let me say (at the) beginning, I don’t believe in Soul…"..." Cause and Effects Nightmare”– Figure that out.

My father was a poet, Louis Ginsberg (who) was quite a good poet and was in all the old anthologies that I used to study in high-school – Louis Untermeyer’s “Modern American and British Poetry” . He died in 1976, philosophic-minded, not in great pain (tho’ he had the cancer – he was quite old, he was eighty). So there were a few poems I wrote on taking care of him at the end of his life – helping him bathe or helping him get around the house and working with the problem of somebody very old, bidding farewell to life. So I’ll read a few of those, and a song, written on his death, called “Father Death Blues” (and the general title is “Don’t Grow Old”) – “Wasted arms, feeble knees..” - My father died and flying back from Boulder to Naropa I wrote a threnody and death lament – Father Death Blues– [Allen performs this ("Father Death Blues", with harmonium accompaniment] -  “Near the scrapyard, my father will be buried....”

Next, to introduce a classical note (tho’ calypso is also a classical way of spreading the news, in a village, or oral cultures, where the network is not so closely associated with the powers-that-be and the government – General Electric, or whoever owns the (tv) networks). There’s also the “tyger” of revolution and mental effort and wrath (which we’ve seen in Romania recently , and we haven’t seen..well, we saw yesterday in Russia, overthrowing the old government).

We still haven’t had glasnost to make some change here. I hope that happens pretty soon. It should spread. So, in honor of that, by William Blake, who used to sing his songs, "The Tyger " - [you all know the Tyger, Blake’s Tyger - how many here heard of that?  yeah, heart-beat - boom-boom, boom-boom. boom-boom  - “Tyger, tyger” trochee – trochaic meter - Allen sings (a rousing versionof) William Blake’s “Tyger”..

So now what I’ll do is read poetry for about three-quarters-of-an-hour from where I began, beginning with earlier work, and then I’ll move forward chronologically, and to the extent that we have time, read poems from the mid- (19)50’s, mid (19)60’s, mid (19)70’s,mid (19)80’s up to this last year. I’ll take a break in about fifteen , or ten minutes or so, those of you who have had enough, can go out and get high or go home, and I’ll continue for another half hour or so, So we’ll have a break in the middle, (so) relax. Beginning with “Sunflower Sutra”....

If you’re on can you see if you’re blocking the view of anybody. No, just be aware of the space behind you. I think you are. So it might be possible for everybody to move up just a little, make a little room so that those that are on the edge there an over there are not discommoded by your presence, just be aware of the space around you – like a space-awareness exercise, so.. panoramic awareness, what is going on around you, an old Buddhist trick

So, beginning 1955, Sunflower Sutra  - [Allen reads “Sunflower Sutra” in its entirety -   “I walked on the banks..]

Start again, with music, as before. I talked about meditation so I’d like to sing a song which,.. [part two begins here] -  the style would be classic samatha or vipassana, or classic Buddhist empty.. empty sitting, paying attention to the breath. It's the form that I practice and have for a long time. It's the standard, basic  "oldie-but-goldie". So “Do The Meditation Rock” ("…generosity, generosity.."). And maybe a little Blake, another (William) Blake, tiny Blake, a country ‘n western Blake – “A flower was offer'd to me/Such a flower as May never bore.." [...My pretty rose tree”] -  “ But my Rose turned away with jealousy/And her thorns were my only delight”

So some short poems – “Irritable Vegetable”  (Don’t send me letters, don’t send me poems, too busy to write poems..” “You’re a hypocrite who eats hot-dogs!’ – Some one-line single.. one-line single simple declarative sentences ["136 Syllables at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center"] – "Put on my shirt and took it off in the sun walking the path to lunch” – “A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitos” – “At four a.m, the two middle-aged men sleeping together holding hands” – “In the half light of dawn a few birds warble under the Pleiades” – “Four skinheads stand in the street light rain talking under an umbrella” “Caught! shop-lifting ran out of the department store at sunrise and woke up” – These Two (“That tree - "I don’t like that car under me, it smells of gasoline". The other tree next to it, “Ah, you’re always complaining, you’re a  neurotic, you can see by the way you’re bent over!"...) – Why I Mediate (“I sit because..”... ".. I sit for personal world revolution”) – “Arguments” (“I’m sick of arguments – “You threw the butter in the pan” – “I did not” – “You let it melt on the stove”…”Why don’t we turn off all the loudspeakers?)” – “Prophecy”(“As I’m no longer young in life and there seem not so many pleasures to look forward to, how fortunate to be free to write of cars and wars.."..       "….throw away all useless ties and pants that don’t fit”) – “Moral Majority” ("Something evil about you..."... “I’ve seen God as much as any man on earth and he doesn’t look like you alone, he looks like me too.."... “Big mouth full of good cheer, not money, honey”)

The last poem..I was thinking one longish poem and one song and I’ll be done. This poem is called “White Shroud” which is also the title of the book White Shroud. The big red book I was reading from is Collected Poems 1947-1980and there’s overed 1980-(19)85 here [in White Shroud]  and then there’s a whole bunch of stuff  here that’s new, including that little Bush-Noriega calypso. Here, a more serious, interesting,poem. In 1960, I wrote a long poem called “Kaddish”, (a) Jewish funeral word, elegy for my mother who died in 1956 in Central.. in Pilgrim State Hospital, mental hospital in New York (which was one of the largest in the world at the time, I think, twenty-five or thirty thousand people, and “Kaddish” was a narrative story of my difficulties as a kid with my mother who was having nervous breakdowns, creating a chaotic situation that I wasn’t able to handle, except in the poem, (I) tried to recreate that – and I had it typed up by an old girlfriend [Elise Cowen] who said, “You’re not done with your mother yet”.  So.. in (19)83, when I was in Boulder, October 5^th, I had a dream, at about six a.m., and woke.. (it was sort of like a dream-vision)..and woke, and immediately wrote it down, and this is the dream (like the William Carlos Williams dream). more or less exactly as first scribed in a notebook, called “White Shroud” – Let’s see, I’ll read.. well, I won’t explain further, but, reflecting on the sort of grief, or guilt, I felt about my mother dying alone in a mad-house – White Shroud – [Allen proceeds to read the poem in is entirety]   (I am summoned from my bed to the great city of the dead..”..”I went downstairs to the shady living room where Peter Orlovsky/ sat with long hair lit by television glow to watch/ the sunrise weather news, I kissed him and filled my pen and wept”