Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Birthday

March 24, 2014, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics 42 - (Edward Carpenter 4)

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[Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti c.1990 - Photograph by Eliot Greenspan]

An article in The (London) Observer last month on San Francisco and the alarming effects of the dot.com boom,"Is San Francisco losing its soul?" paid the obligatory visit to Lawrence Ferlinghetti - "He complains of a soulless group of people, a "new breed" of men and women too busy with iPhones to "be here" in the moment, and shiny new Mercedes Benzs on his street..."It's totally shocking to see Silicon Valley take over the city." says Ferlinghetti who still rents in North Beach. "San Francisco is rapidly changing and we don't know where it is going to end up"


   [Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Photograph by Barry J Holmes]

San Francisco's (and, indeed, America's) conscience, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, turns ninety-five years old today
 - and, as we reported on Friday, shows little signs of "letting up".

Blasts Cries Laughter, his most recent poetry pamphlet, came out earlier this year from New Directions. 2012's Time of Useful Consciousness, a more extensive collection, remains available (alongside other books) from the same publishers.
In September of 2015, Liveright will publish Writing Across Landscape: Travel Journals (1950-2013) - wonderful news, since, as well as unpublished work, the book will include a number of hithero out-of-print, hard-to-find, Ferlinghetti titles.   

Earlier Ferlinghetti's-Birthday-on-the-Allen Ginsberg Project posts may be viewed here, here,
here
and here. 

     [Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Photograph John O'Hara]

Here's Pico Iyer in the LA Timeson City Lights

Where's the piece in today's San Francisco papers?

Happy 95th Birthday, Lawrence!

Some Ferlinghetti-on-video - here, from last year (recalling his Italian heritage - and with a little help from, of all people, Johnny Cash!):



The trailer for Christopher Felver's, frankly essential, 2009 documentary,Ferlinghetti - A Rebirth of Wonder:



Ferlinghetti defends free speech and (into the office video-cam) reads us a little James Joyce:





[Ferlinghetti - Portraits by Christopher Felver]

His reading at the Everhart Museum in Scranton Pennsylvania on September 30 1984 has fortunately been preserved for posterity (digitalized archival video) - here and here

Twenty one years later, another great Ferlinghetti reading (in four segments) in San Diego at the wonderful D.G.Wills Bookshop is likewise preserved for us (in color, and better sound-quality) -  here, here, here and here

Here's his farewell poem to Allen.

Here's Lawrence and Allen together in Lowell


[Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg together in Lowell, Massachusetts]

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Expansive Poetics 42 - (Edward Carpenter 4)

March 25, 2014, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Gregory Corso's Birthday

≪ Previous: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Birthday

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[Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) - Photograph by Fred Holland Day]


AG: The other poem of (Edward) Carpenter's we might as well do, while we're on Carpenter, is "The Secret of Time and Satan". The reason I brought him up is he's one of the children of (Walt) Whitman and one of the people who applied Whitman's method of realistic all-inclusiveness, notation in present time, empathy in space, empathy and sympathy going out in space to make notions in present time. (It's) a more philosophical poem based on theosophical ideas. It has Whitman's basic impetus and openness. It has his basic cosmic optimism - belief in transformation and transmigration (of souls). I guess Whitman is a little more tenuous. In this man, I think, it's a very definite schematic idea of reincarnation. But the way he uses it is an uncanny idea. Where it arrives, at the end of this poem, is an amazing, rare, visionary trip - totally enthusiastic and totally personal. There is something about it that makes me think that it is true, (at the same time it's totally impractical - but, on the other hand, (there's) a kind of a heart-yearning in it that gives it a ring of deja-vu familiarity) - the final image (in) "The Secret of Time and Satan"  

The opening lines are very witty in a Whitmanic manner - "Is there one in all the world who does not desire to be divinely beautiful?/To have the most perfect body - unerring skill/strtength - limpid clearness of mind, as of the sunlight over the hills -/To radiate love wherever he goes - to move in and/out, accepted?/ The secret lies close to you, so close./  You are that person - it lies close to you, so close -/ deep down within -/ But in Time it shall come forth and be revealed./ Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away what/ you have/Shall you become beautiful -/You must undo thr wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones,/Not by multiplying knowledge shall you beautify your mind,/It is not the food that you eat that has to vivify/ you/ but you have to vivify the food./Always emergence, and the parting of veils for the hidden to appear" - That tone is a direct steal out of Whitman..
The line "Always emergence, and the parting of veils for the hidden to appear" is exactly Whitman's tone and Whitman's syntax - "Always emergence" - "Always new mothers approaching" - 

Student: It sounds very Theosophical.

AG: Yes. Well, it is, yes. He was a..

Student:  Otherwise, rather than from Whitman.

AG: Well, Whitman got his from Theosophy too

Student: He did?

AG: A bit.. yeah.. the same.. Actually, Edward Carpenter was the tutor to the sons of the Royal Family - Queen Victoria, I believe..

Student:  When did.. do you have any dates for.. Oscar Wilde?

AG: No, I don't have him in here [in the Expansive Poetics anthology].

Student: Because it's sort of Dorian Gray..

AG: Well, they're of the same time.

Student: Phenomenology

AG: They knew each other. They knew each other, probably.
Carpenter was a tutor in the Royal Family (I forget (to) exactly who), and had a very high position in British respectable society, and was considered a very deep and respectable, thoughtful fellow. Then he gave it up, actually, and wanted to chase a spiritual life, and went to America to visit Whitman (who was having a vogue in England at that time). Everybody recognized that Whitman had made a great signal of openness, everybody interpreting him in their own way - the Theosophists, as transmigration of souls, the Democrats, as the man who had formulated a high-class democratic poetry, and exemplified it, and proved it by his images, proved a common humanity (which is what Carpenter (was) getting (at)). People were sexually interested. He seemed to make a "primeval password"for the first time in public, approving any sexual situation - so (Charles Algernon) Swinburne was interested. Then, the people who believed in Oriental philosophy, or Theosophy, found in him the best Western statement (of their beliefs), equal to the Vedas, actually - "Thou Vedic Caesar" ("Vedic Caesar" was Hart Crane's phrase - King of the Vedas, Vedic Caesar) - And (Chogyam) Trunpa (Rinpoche) even - I read some Whiman to Trungpa and Trungpa said, "It sounds like sutras", - as good as sutra - which is to say that expansive insight in sympathy into other sentient beings outside of your skull. 
He was involved, I think, with Annie Besant and other people, but I think it was more of a radical socialist humanistic social shot. I think he was also in favor of the working man. So socialist-labor - labor-oriented


[Annie Besant (1847-1933)]

Student: (William Butler) Yeats a part of that (set)

AG: Yes. Gavin Arthur, who knew Carpenter, also knew Yeats and Maud Gonne. It's a small group of people. [Allen continues reading from Carpenter] - "..The child emerges from it's mother's body, and out/ of that body again in time another child/When the body which thou now hast falls away,/another body shall be already prepared beneath,/And beneath that again another/Always that which appears last in time is first, and/ the cause of all - and not that which appears first" - So that's a funny teleogical viewpoint - "Always that which appears last in time is first, and/ the cause of all - and not that which appears first" - [Allen continues, reading from Sections 2 and 3] - "Freedom has to be won afresh every morning"..."I tune the lute for thee, I prepare my body for thee/bathing unseen in the limpid waters.."..."Wondrous is Man - the human body - to understand/and possess this, to create it every day afresh is to possess all things"..."The eyes ordaining, directing, the feet and all that they indicate.." - that's a Whitmanic word - "the feet and all that they indicate" - "..the path they travel for years and years,/The passions of the body and the belly, and the cry for/food, the heaving breasts of love, the phallus, the fleshy/thighs,/The erect proud head and neck, the sturdy back, and/knees well-knit or wavering.." - To mention the phallus, I guess, in 1889, must have been a big deal. Just to put that in as an artifact and as part of the body I think, probably, was very shocking then, just to include it as one of the instruments of the body with the belly and "The erect proud head and neck, the sturdy back, and/knees well-knit or wavering/All the interminable attitudes and what they indicate -/ Every relation of one man to another, every cringing/bullying, lustful, obscene, pure, honorable, chaste, just and merciful -/ The fingers differently shaped according as they/handle money for gain or for gift.." - (That's a terrific line!)

Student: Really!

AG:  "The fingers differently shaped according as they/handle money for gain or for gift.." - that's a really perceptive piece of karmic observation.

Student: What does he mean by that. I..
AG: Well..
Student: I mean, it sounds like a continuation..
AG: A guy who is, say, handling money, in a bank, for gain, will have fingers that are...
Student: Turned in
AG:.. turned in (and they're certainly not roughened by labor, with the cows, or iron pipes, or Broadway..)
Student: He could be talking about just tension too, almost (a)..
AG: Yes
Student: Grasping attitude.
AG: Yes
Student: Grasping hands.
AG: Un-hmm
Student: He's talking about that
AG: He's talking about physiognomy reflecting attitude.
Student: Yes
AG: Which is tension.
Student: Yeah



AG:  The next line is interesting too, from that. He's introduced this idea - "All the different ramifications and institutions of/ society which proceed from such one difference in the crook/of a finger.." - which means, "won't you come in, in? with a cruxed finger, won't you come in the door?", or "Woncha come in?" - ok - so..  "All the different ramifications and institutions of/ society which proceed from such one difference in the crook/of a finger/All that proceed from an arrogant or a slavish contour/ of the neck" - That's a good one.

Student: Yeah

AG:  That is, "all that proceed", all the different consequences, ramifications, and institutions of society which "proceed from an arrogant or a slavish contour/ of the neck,/All the evil that goes forth from any part of a man's/body which is not possessed by/ himself - all the devils let/loose - from a twist of the tongue or/a leer of the eye..."..."What it is to command and be/Master of this wondrous/body with all its passions and/powers, to truly possess it - that it/is to command and possess all/things, that it is to/ create." 

That's a very Zen attitude, actually - the idea of becoming one with your body, possessing your body - a theme which you'll find in Whitman and which you'll find then spreading more and more and more in the twentieth century as a whole theory of society, with holistic medicine and what-not. But, in poetry, (it's) D.H.Lawrence (who is) continually on that subject of possessing, being in control or possessing a body. (Arthur) Rimbaud, the next poet in this book (theExpansive Poetics anthology), ended his Season in Hellwith the phrase - "Why talk of a friendly hand! My great advantage is that I can laugh at old lying loves  and put to shame those deceitful couples, -  I saw the hell of women back there, -  and I shall be free to possess truth in one body and one soul" [in Louise Varese's translation] - "in one soul and one body" ["Que parlais-je de main amie ! un bel avantage, c'est que je puis rire des vieilles amours mensongères, et frapper de honte ces couples menteurs, — j'ai vu l'enfer des femmes là-bas ; — et il me sera loisible de posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps.] -Charles Olson in "Maximus"-"I feel that I am one with my skin" ["I have this sense,/ that I am one/ with my skin"] (which is an interesting way of putting it) - "I feel that I am, at last, after all these years, one with my skin" - or Wallace Stevens[from"Esthetique du Mal"] - "The greatest poverty is not to live/ in a physical world, to feel that one's desire/ Is too difficult to tell from despair"..(and)  "..who could have thought to create so many worlds,/ so many sensuous selves,/ merely in living as where we live" [the exact quote is "...who could have thought to make/so many selves, so many sensuous worlds,/ As if the air, the midday air, was swarming/With the metaphysical changes that occur/Merely in living as and where we live"]

- So it's actually akin to the Zen theory of "ordinary mind", or the Zen idea-conception of "ordinary mind", i.e. that the mind you have and the body you have, if worked with and accepted and entered into, becomes your possession, and then becomes sane and clear and lucid, (because there's no confusion, (no) looking for another world). You're in your body. But, then, some people don't like it, so they're looking for another (so that they're awkward in their own body because (they're) rejecting it).

Student: Isn't there also the idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm?

AG: Yes

Student: In the body is the universe.

AG: Um-hmm. Well, the body is the universe in a very direct way. It's through your eyeballs that you see space. And if you don't possess your eyeballs, then your view of space will be, like mine, myopic. It's (through) your ears that you hear - your ears - the sounds  of the universe, and if you're going to hate your ears, then all you're going to hear is bad noise, and so forth. In other words, since we see the universe through our senses, the macrocosm is a projection of our microcosmic body. Yes? 

[Allen continues his reading of Edward Carpenter's "The Secret of Time and Satan"] - "The art of creation, like every/other art, has to be/learnt/ Slowly, slowly, through many/years thou buildest up/thy body/ And the power that thou now hast/(such as it is) to/ build up this present body, thou/ hast acquired in the past in other/bodies,/So in the future shalt thou use again the power that/thou now acquirest./But the power to build up the/body includes all/powers./ Do not be dismayed because thou art yet a child of/chance, and atthe mercy greatly/both of Nature and fate,/Because if thou wert not subject/to chance, then/wouldst thou be Master of thyself,/but since thou art notyet Master of/thine own passions and powers, in/ that degree/must thou needs be at the mercy of/some other power -/ And if thou choosest to call the/power 'Chance', well/and good. It is the angel with whom thou hast to wrestle./  Beware how thou seekest this for/thyself and that for/thyself. i do not say Seek not, but Beware how thou/seekest./For a soldier who is going a/campaign does not seek/what fresh furniture he can carry on/his back, but rather/what he can leave behind,/Knowing well that every/ additional thing which he/cannot freely use and handle is an/impediment to him./ So if thou seekest fame or ease/or pleasure or aught/for thyself, the image of that thing/which thou seekest will/come and cling to thee - and thou/wilt have to carry it about..."
 - Boy, that's absolutely true - Absolutely!  - because the last few weeks I've been sort of lusting after various people and getting into relations with them and then I'm finding that my mind is dominated by it now, practically. So that I can't hardly make a move without having to consider "Let's see, who am I going to fuck tonight?" or "Am I going to get laid?" - and, it's a giant piece of furniture on my back, exactly as this. Yes
 - "And the images and powers which/ thou hast thus/evoled will gather round and form/for thee a new body -/ clamoring for sustenance and/satisfaction -/And if thou art not able to/discard this image now,/thou wilt not be able to discard/that body then, but wilt/have to carry it about./ Beware then lest it become thy/grave and thy prison/ - instead of thy winged abode, and/palace of joy" - (Carpenter) sounds like (William) Blake there. And Carpenter would have known Blake, also, or known of Blake, because, being friends with Whitman, he would have known Whitman's great friend in Philadelphia, Mrs Gilchrist (Anne Gilchrist), who was the wife, or the widow, of the first biographer of Blake (so there was oddly an intimate connection between Whitman and Blake, too).

Student: This sounds like a fairly direct connection to that little bit of Blake - "He who binds to himself a joy...

AG: Yeah

Student:  ...does the winged love destroy"

AG: Yeah. "He who binds to himself a joy", or "He who binds a joy to himself" - "He who binds to himself a joy/Does the winged life destroy/ He who kisses the joy as it flies/ Live in eternity's sun rise" [William Blake's "Eternity']


[Infant Joy - from "Songs of Innocence" (1789) - William Blake]


[Edward Carpenter, again] -  " ...instead of thy winged abode,/and palace of joy./For (over and over again) there/is nothing that is/evil except because a man has not/mastery over it" - (that's good (advice) about L.S.D.actually) - "For (over and over again) there/is nothing that is/evil except because a man has not/mastery over it, and there is no good/thng that is not evil if it have/mastery over a man..." - [Allen contines, reading on, until the end of the poem] - "And so at last I saw Satan appear/before me -/ magnificent, fully formed./Feet first, with shining limbs,/he glanced down from/above the bushes,/And stood there erect, dark-/skinned, wih nostrils/dilated with passion -/ (In the burning intolerable sunlight he stood, and I/in the shade of the bushes) - /Fierce and scathing the effluence/of his eyes, and/scornful of dreams and dreamers - (he/touched a rock hard/by and it split with a sound like/thunder) -/Fierce the magnetic influence of/his dusky flesh, his/great foot, well-formed, was planted/firm in the sand - with/spreading toes -/ 'Come out', he said with a taunt,/'Art thou afraid to/ meet me?'/ And I answered not, but sprang/upon him and/smote him,/ And he smote me a thousand times,/and bashed and/scorched and slew me as with hands/of flame,/ And I was glad, for my body lay/there dead, and I/sprang upon him again with/ another body -/ And with another and another and again another,/And the bodies which I took on yielded before him,/and were like cinctures of flame/upon me, but I flung them aside,/ And the pains which I endured in one body were/powers which I wielded in the next,/and I grew in strength,/ till at last I stood before him/complete, with a body like his/own and equal in mght - exultant in/pride and joy./ Then he ceased, and said, 'I love/ thee.'/ And lo! his form changed, an he/leaned backwards/and drew me upon him,/And bore me up inio the air, and/floated me over/the topmost trees and the ocean, and/round the curve of/the earth under the moon-/ Till we stood again in Paradise." - So it really has a great visionary ending after all of that..talk.

   [The Fall of Satan (1805) - William Blake (1757-1827) in the collection of the Morgan Library, New York]

Student: Wow!

AG: It's a great poem, that last piece, I think.

Student: It's...after the dissertation..it..finally..

AG: Yeah, takes off. 

Student: ... (from) some kind of poetry or something.

AG: Well, the dissertation is so smart it's almost poetry. It's good. That's really rare. Some of these lines are almost as good, or equally as good, (as) some of the most perceptive lines of Whitman. And Whitman is a nonpareil - that is, there's one and only Whitman, and yet, he had a friend who visited him, who picked up enough from him to write great lines. There is in this four-volume work (Towards Democracy) at least one totally good book of poetry. It's worth looking at. And these two ("From Turin to Paris" and"The Secret of Time and Satan") I've chosen because they're the most moderne. 


Student: So what happened to him?

AG: Oh, he lived to a very ripe old age in England and was one of the founders of the Socialist party and one of the encouragers of revolution and rebellion among the young. I think you can find a little picture of him in old age in Gavin Arthur's description.
He wound up living in a cottage with a nice garden (a good-sized cottage and well-kept), in the (19)20's., with two young guys who were his lovers (one was something like twenty, or Gavin Arthur was twenty, and the next oldest guy was forty, and the next oldest guy was sixty, and then Carpenter was eighty when Gavin Arthur visited him. There was some kind of family arrangement that seemed to work out, balancing the ages, it's a funny story). So, actually he lived out his fantasy, or he lived out his ambition. He wrote innumerable books. There's a lot of books by him - the biography of Whitman - there are essays (he wrote a lot of Fabian.. Socialist essays, an Anarchist). He was involved in the movement for Arts and Crafts, (and hand-crafts) contrary to the Industrial Revolution.. Beyond that, I don't know much. I haven't read very much beyond it. I read a few essays, but it's mostly his poetry that I really admire. And it's so rare and unknown, it's amazing! - I've been trying to get (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti (at City Lights) to do a "Selected" Carpenter, because there's a lot of good little poems in it.  

I'll put these on reserve [Allen points to his editions of Carpenter]. I got them out today. I'll put these on reserve (in the library) if you want to look at more Carpenter. And it would be interesting..


(Audio for the above is available here, beginning approximately two-and-a-half minutes in and concluding approximately twenty-five-and-a-half minutes in)  

Gregory Corso's Birthday

March 26, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 43 (Robert Duncan)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics 42 - (Edward Carpenter 4)

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[Gregory Corso, aged 31, Tangier, Morocco, July 1961 - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg - c. Allen Ginsberg Estate] 

 [An Accidental Autobiography - The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso (edited by Bill Morgan) (2003)] 

Kirby Olson has been compiling a “crowd-sourced on-line biography” of Gregory Corso since 2010. He sees John Aubrey’s classic, Brief Lives, as a model, and envisions a multi-faceted, impressionistic, “pointillistic biography", ("leaving it", as he declares," to some later person to connect all the dots"). Here’s Anne Waldman’s exemplary start-up contribution:

Anne Waldman: "Gregory Corso invaded my shower one day in the little Townhouse apartment I return to in dreams as “Remember Some Apartments”. It was named “Emerson Apartments”. Ralph Waldo Emerson had always been an inspiration for my memory of this place although he would not have appreciated the commune spirit. Gregory was always barging in, rooting around looking for valium or anything palliative and high-making, gesticulating , checking out my books – did I have any art books? – and would I ever be as good as Jane Austen? So there was that, the sense of invasion. I was soaping my hair with lavender shampoo. We decided we would probably never sleep together. That was a good idea because he was so complicated to think about sleeping with. I mean, it wasn’t even an issue or much of a discussion. I was not going to get my transmissions from Beat poets, I proclaimed, by sleeping with them! I said would you be my pal? And will you behave? He hugged me as we were water rats together in the shower (This was 1975, Boulder, Colorado during a summer session of  The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University)

Here's Andy Clausen:

Here’s Bobby Yarra telling Gregory stories.


[Gregory Corso in Rome - Photography by Bobby Yarra]

Here, once again, the gathering Ed Sanders accrued for his Woodstock Journal

Here's Michalis Limnios' gathering for Blues and Greece

So whatever happened to The Whole Shot, that book of Gregory’s interviewsthat that guy was supposedly doing?

Even more monumental,  whatever happened to The Last Beat?

and how come there’s no PennSound page?



[Gregory Corso - Photograph byIra Cohen]

Multiple postings on theAllen Ginsberg Project(Gregory is, typically, all over this blog) -  Why don't you all just start -  here

We've had Allen-playing-himself-playing-a-character - acting - here's Gregory doing the same thing 



Here's from another film work-in-progress Canadian, (Italian-Canadian) Nick Mancuso plays Gregory in Bomb! Burning Fantasy

We love this (rare) footage of Gregory on Italian tv, of Gregory and Fabrizio de Andre (note - Gregory appears approximately seven-and-three-quarter minutes in)   

Had he stayed alive (ha!)  Gregory would have been eighty-four years old this fine Spring morning, birthday morning 
Birthday Greetings!, Gregory

Expansive Poetics - 43 (Robert Duncan)

March 27, 2014, 3:00 am

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

≪ Previous: Gregory Corso's Birthday

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[Robert Duncan (1919-1988)]

Allen's Expansive Poetics lecture continuing...

AG: Now, the natural next one that I’d like to pick up on, the next text, I’d like to pick up on, is a jump almost a century ahead, but, another theosophist (or someone trained (and) who grew up with Christian Science and studied hermetic philosophy, and theosophy, and tarot,and (Carl Gustav) Jung, and medieval learning), namely Robert Duncan, who has a very beautiful poem, which relates to Walt Whitman again, written in the mid (19)50’s – [“A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar”]- That would be in the American section (of our Expansive Poetics anthology). Born 1919..  Is DM (a Student) here?

Student: Oh, I just ran into him (in the…)

AG: Oh, okay. DM has just read all through Duncan. And, if you’re further interested in Duncan, Joanne Kyger [currently at Naropa] studied with him very early. “ - “A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar” – He’s after Robert Lowell– it’s 1919

Student: So it’d be before (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti and..

AG: After…

Student: ..(Jack)Kerouac

AG: …(Robert) Lowell..

Student: Right after (Charles) Olson

Student (2): Incidentally, Robert Duncan is teaching Whitman – right now, in fact!

AG: At New College?

Student: Yeah

AG: Yeah

Student: It’s an interesting fact that these two courses are going on simultaneously

AG: Yeah. Do you know about New College in San Francisco?

Student: San Francisco?

AG: San Francisco. There’s a thing called New College, which is an older private school that’s been going on ten or twelve years or so, but, I think, partly in response to the challenge of Naropa, out in San Francisco they founded their own school now. And so the directors are Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima, both of whom have taught here. Duncan, I think, disapproved of the basic Buddhist influence here, and so he thought a more secular, American-oriented, extension of the Black Mountain ethos should be founded. And Diane, who is a Buddhist, who comes back and forth (between) here (and there), is also a teacher there. I’ll probably visit New College and teach there this September [1981] at least for a day. I’ll give a reading there. [to Students] - When you get finished with Naropa and you want another variety, (or), if you’re into poetics and want another variety of poetics, New College is probably pretty good.

Student: It’s interesting, because you could get a B.A. here [at Naropa] and then go on and get an M.A. at New College They have a Master’s Program there.

AG: Do we [Naropa] have a Master’s Program in Poetics?

Student: No

AG: We may devise one, if we survive [sic] – or, actually, you could go to New College for two years and then come here for two years and get a B.A, also. Actually, that’s a very interesting shot. I think it may take root, whether or not Naropa (does).. it may take root, whether or not Naropa survives (I’m talking about financially – it’s pretty difficult now – that’s why I’m laying out these little donation vouchers here… [Allen digresses at this point into urgent issues of fund-raising]………

So..(Robert) Duncan.. “Poem Beginning With A Line by Pindar” (done in the (19)60’s, late (19)50’s, rather, or mid (19)50’s, I don’t know what year that was done, (19)58?, same year as the big explosion of poetry in San Francisco (got) recognized – maybe a year after On The Road came out – somewhat impelled and pushed into a populist heart thing by the San Francisco Renaissance, by“Howl” coming out, by the appearance of a great  phalanx of fellow-poets in competition with them – Gary Snyder and myself and (Jack) Kerouac, whom Duncan admired for his inclusiveness).

So this was one of the climactic pieces of Duncan’s writing. As a young man he’d been all over the joint – amazingly smart, and amazingly connected - with the Surrealists inNew York (the Surrealists that came to New York during the war). And he dressed in green velvet coats, and was a gigolo, and a man-about-town, in New York, and a real handsome kid, and was in and out of everybody’s bed in the (19)40’s, knew almost everybody. I think he knew (Ezra)Pound, and visited (William Carlos)Williams, and had correspondence with Laura Riding (and) with Hilda Doolittle, and all the old Imagists and Objectivists and all the Surrealists and international dandies of literature, (19)40’s, (19)50’s, (19)60’s – And had written a number of very brilliant poems - but more hermetic. And this, [“Poem Beginning With A Line by Pindar”], I found, or thought, was his most open, Whitman-ic, poem – 1958 – And so, in the “San Francisco Renaissance” issue of Evergreen Review - (which was a historic issue – I think number two -  of Evergreen Review– gathering together all the new poetry of the (19)50’s – San Francisco, Black Mountain, New York School– which is to say, Duncan, (Robert) Creeley,(John) Ashbery,(Kenneth) Koch, (Frank) O’Hara, and of the Beats, myself, (Jack) Kerouac, (Gregory) Corso  - in one issue, sort of (a) literary explosion) – this was the poem Duncan had in Evergreen.. and also the key piece that he had in the Don Allen anthology, New American Poetry.. – “The light foot hears you and the brightness begins.” – “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar – and so that’s the line by Pindar.

[Allegory of Love - Cupid and Psyche - Francisco de Goya (1746-1828)]

[Allen begins reading Robert Duncan’s poem] – “god-step at the margins of thought,/quick adulterous tread at the heart/ Who is it that goes there? Where I see your quick face/notes of an old music pace the air,/torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre./ In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche/have a hurt voluptuous grace” – I must say, I don’t understand half of this poem (though I like a lot of the phrasing) until we get to the political statement and the appeal to Whitman, the address to Whitman – [Allen continues] – “In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche/have a hurt voluptuous grace/bruised by redemption. The copper light/falling upon the brown boy’s slight body/is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing/up from blind innocence, ensnared by dimness/into the deprivations of desiring sight./ But the eyes in Goya’s painting are soft,/diffuse with rapture absorb the flame./ Their bodies  yield out of strength/ Waves of visual pleasure/wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience” – I don’t know what that means, actually – “Waves of visual pleasure/wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience” – Perhaps I haven’t looked at the canvas that he’s talking about – [Allen continues] – “A bronze of yearning, a rose that burns/the tips of their bodies, lips/ ends of fingers, nipples..”…”..they are not in a landscape/They exist in an obscurity…”…”Jealousy, ignorance, the hurt.. serve them”..”This is magic. It is passionate dispersion//What if they grow old? The gods/would not allow it./Psyche is preserved..”…”It is toward the old poets/we go, to their faltering,/their unfaltering wrongness that has style,/ their variable truth,/the old faces,/words shed like tears from/a plenitude of powers time stores./ A stroke. These little strokes…” – He’s talking about Whitman here

[tape ends – to be continued]

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] 

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]

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 170

March 28, 2014, 3:30 am

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William Burroughs Centennial - We'll begin with the above, a short biographical documentary put together by the Los Angeles Review of Books,featuring Burroughs' biographer, Barry Miles - "William S. Burroughs - 100 Years".


[William Burroughs, NYC, 1984  - Photograph c. Kate Simon]

James Parker, in The Atlantic, on Burroughs (and Miles' Burroughs biography) is well worth reading (as is Davis Schneiderman & Philip Walsh's 2004 Retaking the Universe - William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization, now presented with a new preface and  new introduction, and available, in its entirety, on line, at that nonpareil in Burroughs scholarship, the estimable Reality Studio site)  

[William S Burroughs in London, 1988 - Photograph c. John Minihan]

Other Beats - Todd Tietchen on his custodianship of Kerouac's The Haunted Life.

And here's Paul Maher Jr in the Los Angeles Review of Books (them again!) on that book.

And Douglas Kennedy in The New Statesman on Kerouac and Burroughs

Here's a sweet personal piece we missed - Guillermo Parra on "Visiting Jack Kerouac in St.Petersburg" (Florida).  Kerouac traces. If you're ever in Florida, don't miss out on the Kerouac house.

And another personal note - Tina Siegel looks back on Ed Sanders' 2000 biography-in-verse of Allen,  The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg. 


There's another review of that book here 

 - and another one here 


Kill Your Darlings DVD is now released (in limited markets).  Screenwriters, Austin Bunn and John Krokidas speak about the film here.

next week - in New York - next Thursday, in fact - CUNY's admirable Lost & Found Series (see here and here) inaugurate Lost & Found Series IV - "Editors will read, perform, present multimedia and discuss their projects, which include [sic] the Pauline Kaeland Robert Duncan correspondence, a film script by Ed Dorn intended for Stan Brakhage, Adrienne Rich's CUNY teaching materials... and more. For further information on that event - see here   

Kronos Quartet - Howl, USA

March 29, 2014, 3:30 am

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[Kronos Quartet - Howl, USA (1996) Nonesuch Records - sleeve design Frank Olinsky]



The Kronos Quartet's 1996 Nonesuch release "Howl, U.S.A." (with its distinctive Robert Mapplethorpe cover) has been deemed "a real masterpiece in "modern" music" - "The rendering of (Allen Ginsberg's)"Howl" is spectacular, but to have three other impressive pieces that tie-in thematically, while presenting varied musical approaches..." (The other three pieces are "Sing Sing" (a "setting" of the FBI's J.Edgar Hoover - "We are as close to you as your telephone"! )),"Barstow" - Eight Hitchhikers Inscriptions" (a short selection from a longer Harry Partch piece), and "Cold War Suite from How It Happens.."(featuring the voice of the legendary pioneering journalist, I.F.Stone).  
"Kronos has made many great albums of widely ranging styles", the writer declares, "but "Howl USA" stands out as a particularly brilliant concept and presentation." 

Accompanied by the group, Allen reads "Howl" here in its entirety . 
The recording was made in May 1995 at Looking Glass Studios in New York.

Prior to that Allen had appeared live on stage with them. Here's Edward Rothstein's review (from January 1994) in the New York Times : 

"...the entire second half of Thursday's program was given to the world premiere of Lee Hyla [Kronos Quartet]'s "Howl" in which the quartet accompanied Allen Ginsberg reading his classic poem, an ancestral proclamation from the 1950's avant-garde [sic]. With an exuberant sing-song manner, Mr Ginsberg presented an allegro cascade of images and seemed reluctant to pause for breath. The poem is intoxicated with provocations, enthusiasms, outrages and celebrations of homosexuality.
Mr Hyla says in the program notes that his accompaniment was to be an equal partner with the poem. But the music was the least important aspect of the package. Its quirky exclamations, ostinato patterns and strenuous labors only undercut the text, distracting from the poem's angry tipsy whirl, as much as did the changing mood lights"

Er..perhaps that is meant to be a put-down, but it is the Kronos Quartet's respect (and restraint, and, on fitting occasions, full-out enthusiasm) that makes for a sustaining and pleasing, true collaboration. 
"Howl, USA" is embedded above.  
The full album is available here.   

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Mark Ewert

March 30, 2014, 8:30 am

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[Mark Ewert - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg  c. The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

Mark Ewert’s colorful sexual revelations – “He lost his virginity to Allen Ginsberg and maintained an eight-year relationship with William Burroughs” - hit the internets this weekend with a vengeance – courtesy this article, in vocative, but further flamed and considerably amplified by this provocative header – “Allen Ginsberg Teaches You How To Give A Blowjob” - on that gossip-site par excellence, Gawker. The paragraph excerpted, and the justification for that lead, a direct quote from Ewert, runs as follows:

“Basically he blew me; that was a big part of it. And he was really good at it. He did this thing where he had his hand and his mouth working at the same time, and he'd take time out to explain to me what he was doing. He was like, 'See, you do this with your hand so that way your partner's penis is always being touched, and when your mouth is off it, your hand is there and it keeps it warm and it keeps the sensation constant, and that shows real consideration to your partner.' It's very Allen that he's always peppering anything he's saying with little tutorials. But I was totally down for that—it was what I'd signed up for. I wanted the tutorial, I wanted to understand how the fucking world worked. I wanted somebody to help me and mentor me."

Ewert goes on to single out Allen as being, far from predatory, an extremely thoughtful and considerate lover:

“Allen I could really talk to. I feel like I had some of the most real conversations with him than I’ve had with anyone in my life, really. Allen,  I definitely had a deeper relationship with..” – this, in contrast to the more cold and clinical “calcified persona” of Burroughs.

“Sleeping with Ginsberg and Burroughs concurrently”, the author writes,“Ewert felt he had arrived. He didn’t consider himself a groupie, citing a kinship he felt with both, as well as a precocious intellect that allowed him to hold his own in conversation. The fact he was eighteen and sleeping with a sixty-three-year-old and seventy-five-year-old was beside the point; Ginsberg was a skilled lover, and sex he had with both men became only more intimate and loving as things progressed.”

Bedroom secrets and bedroom tittle-tattle. We wouldn't normally be particularly alarmed ("Candor disarms paranoia") except that the reporting and the twist given in these reports makes for some troubling memes, false assumptions and flat-out errors - "Ginsberg had his way with Ewert and then passed him on to his friend Burroughs, whom Ginsberg decided could use a good lay", is Gawker's less-than-stellar (and less-than-accurate) description of Ewert's self-proclaimed pursuit of both men.

We at The Allen Ginsberg Project are just a tad  concerned lest demonization or vain glory take the place of poetic truth or proper understanding.

Barbara Rubin (1945-1980)

March 31, 2014, 3:30 am

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[top image - Allen Ginsberg and Barbara Rubin together at the Albert Monument, outside the Royal Albert Hall, London, May 1965, on the occasion of the First International Poetry Incarnation - bottom image - Barbara Rubin filming in the streets of London - May 1965 - photo by Allen Ginsberg  c. The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]   

Last year's celebrations at the Anthology Film Archives and at Johan Kugelberg's New York City Boo-Hooray Gallery (specialists in the occluded and forgotten), suceeeded in shining a little light, perhaps, on the perennial "underground legend", Barbara Rubin, but not so very much. She seems to have retreated once again into her default mode - posthumous mystery and obscurity. 

There was a time (in the early 'Sixties) when she was a pivotal and important figure for Allen (not to mention, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, and a whole host more)



"Barbara was a great bringer-together of people, often for her own projects", Gordon Ball writes, in his recently-published memoir, East Hill Farm . One of the projects she was key instigator of, it should be pointed out, was convincing Allen, in 1967, that he should indeed buy that (Cherry Valley) farm.
Bill Morgan: "(She) (Barbara) was relentless in her determination...and used all her considerable powers of persuasion to convince him..In the end no one ever knew if Allen bought the farm of his own free will or (simply) to appease Barbara". 

In 1963, she was 17 when she made her ground-breaking "underground (sex) movie", Christmas on Earth(see below)

The deep early connection withBob Dylan?

Perhaps you recall her as the short-haired girl in the striped t-shirt, massaging Dylan's curly locks, on the back-cover of Bringing It All Back Home?

(an image of Allen in a top hat is placed, significantly, next to them)

                                                
[Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Barbara Rubin, Bob Dylan, and Daniel Kramer, backstage at McCarter Theayer, in Princeton, New Jersey, September 1967 Photograph c. Daniel Kramer] 

(In 1965 she's with Allen, in London, in the front row, at the legendary Albert Hall Dylan concert. They go back-stage afterwards and that's where Allen first meets The Beatles.)  

Two months later, she's the primary instigator (not Allen, it turns out), of the great (likewise legendary) international poetry reading at that same venue - the Royal Albert Hall - the First International Poetry Incarnation
Allen has confessed it: "(It was) all Barbara's idea"

1967 Barbara (through the intermediary of Gerard Malanga) introduces Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground (out of which was spawned...)

"When Barbara Rubin asked Gerard to help her make a movie about the Velvets playing at the Bizarre (sic). Gerard asked Paul Morrissey to help and Paul said why didn't I come along, and so we all went down there to see them." (Andy Warhol)

Andy:  She was "one of the first people to get multi-media going around New York"

Her subsequent utter renunciation of her art and retreat into a Hasidic community child-bearing ritual is a tale unto itself - enigma and erasure. 

Meanwhile...   

"Barbara Rubin's 29-minute Christmas on Earth is the filmic record of an orgy staged in a New York City apartment in 1963. This double-projection of overlapping images of nude men and women clowning around and making love is one of the first sexually explicit works in the American postwar avant-garde...Many consider it to be an essential document of queer and feminist cinema.." (Daniel Belasco in Barbara Rubin - The Vanished Prodigy)

More scholarly observation and contextualization here:
"Embodying the Spectator - Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth and the Pornographic Avant-Garde" 

Ara Osterweil at McGill remains the pre-eminent authority, download (in two parts) her definitive article here

and here (so the art outlives the artists) is the film. 

and here, as an addenda (with rare footage of Allen and Barbara in it) is Jonas Mekas' film portrait "To Barbara Rubin With Love"

and here Allen, 1965, naked with Barbara

[Allen Ginsberg and Barbara Rubin, June 3 1965, in London at Barry Miles apartment, on the occasion of Allen's 39th birthday. Photograph by John ("Hoppy") Hopkins]

Elise Cowen (1933-1962)

April 1, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Allen Ginsberg and Elise Cowen]

Al Filreis informative over-view of this lost "Beat" figure (she committed suicide in 1962, aged 29), along with a couple of sample poems, may be read here. Leo Skir's personal memoir may be read here. A volume of work from her only surviving notebook, entitled Elise Cowen - Poems and Fragments, edited by Tony Trigilio and published by Ashahta Press has just recently appeared.































As Trigilio writes: 

"Elise Cowen’s position in literary history has been a conflicted one.  Very little is known about the poems she wrote.  Unfortunately, she is remembered primarily as the woman who dated Allen Ginsberg for a brief time in the early 1950s.  Their romantic relationship ended by the time Ginsberg moved from New York to San Francisco, right before the composition of“Howl.”  Later, she typed the final draft of “Kaddish” for him, adding, as a significant aside when she gave him the completed manuscript: “You still haven’t finished with your mother.” Until 1962, when Cowen committed suicide, the two maintained a friendship that, by many accounts, meant considerably more to Cowen than to Ginsberg.  Cowen appears briefly in major critical studies of Ginsberg, but only by virtue of her role in Ginsberg’s brief period of bisexuality and her typing of his “Kaddish” draft.."

Trigilio continues:

"My books and essays on Ginsberg emphasize the experimental impulse of his work and, I hope, disengage his poetry from the clutches of fanboy hagiography.  It was through my writing on Ginsberg that I kept encountering Cowen’s work—limited to a few poems here and there in anthologies, and limited by Beat biographers’ insistence that she was only Ginsberg’s mad girlfriend-typist rather than a poet in her own right.  When I read Cowen’s actual poems, I saw how much these biographers had missed—and how much we, as readers, were missing—without full access to her work...



[Elise Cowen - Poems And Fragments - Edited by Tony Trigilio, Ahsahta Press, 2014]

Anne Waldman's Birthday - (Manatee/Humanity)

April 2, 2014, 3:30 am

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Anne Waldman, born April 2, 1945, is (those magical numbers!) 69 years old today!

For all your Anne Waldman needs go to Anne Waldman dot org, the official web-site for all things Anne Waldman

(though, first, check out our previous birthday postings - here,here and here)




We, at the Allen Ginsberg Project, choose to spotlight today, her 2009 Penguin volume - Manatee/Humanity  ("a research project, a documentary project, it's actually a whole book") and her reading from and presentation of it for the Academy of American Poets, 
a couple of months back, as part of their"Poet-to-Poet" educational project for (oh yes, it's that time of the year again - April! - just the perfect timing for..) National Poetry Month!



Here's Anne, shortly after its publication, introduced byRobert Polito (and in collaboration with her son, Ambrose Bye), reading from the book at The New School



Here's Anne being interviewed by Leonard Schwartz in 2010 about the book  (audio here - transcription of the audio here)

Anne and Ambrose are interviewed (together) here - "I think the anaphoric litany section with the recording of the manatee song and with Ambrose's own vocals at the end actualizes this magic of wedded brain waves and when Ambrose would do this live, I felt called to respond in kind…" Anne declares.
 "I agree", says Ambrose,  "it happens in the live performance".

Here's a couple of random (You Tube) live performances (one with, and one without, Ambrose's participation) - here, and here.

Here's the text of the opening section  ("..the manatee has no natural enemies but unnatural man/the manatee is constantly threatened by unatural man unnaturally..")

Gossamurmur  (2013) is the most recent of Anne's Penguin titles



but Manitee/Humanity and Gossamurmur are just two of  "more than forty collections of poetry and poetics" from an energetic, energizing,  and seemingly-inexhaustible voice.

More "live" Anne? - Anne Waldman's Pennsound page can be accessed here.

Happy Birthday, Anne!   "making the world safe for poetry"

Maretta Greer

April 3, 2014, 3:30 am

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[Allen Ginsberg, Maretta Greer and Gary Snyder at The Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco,  1967 - Photograph by Leo Holub] 




[Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Maretta Greer at the opening of Timothy Leary's Meditation Center, Hudson Street, New York City, 1967]

Maretta Greer, another of Allen's "girlfriends", his mantra teacher, spiritual goad, and sometime live-in companion, when she wasn't (as she was, a good deal of the time) wandering barefoot around India. 

She'd left home at aged fifteen to become a saddhu. 

Gordon Ball recalls glimpsing her in Allen's company, in 1966 at the Jonas Mekas Cinematheque:

"She was silent, slim, blonde and high-cheekboned, a small wool cap on her head, a big dark heavy coat from neck down. Lips tightly closed, head and back erect, she moved slowly, deliberately, quietly, sternly, a crane among ostriches. She was Maretta Greer, back from many months among saddhus in India, Pakistan, Tibet. Someone in the crowded linoleum-floored lobby whispered, "She knows Tibetan!". 

They met when she had just returned from an Indian sojourn, in 1964. Maretta came round and introduced herself.

She famously stood on stage betweenGary Snyder and Allen in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and led the chanting in the 1967 Human Be-In




Here's Maretta singing "Hare Krishna" with/for The Fugs, alongside Allen, in 1967, on the album Tenderness Junction

Ed Sanders recalls her sorry state only a year or so later:

"It was a snowy January day. I was atPeace Eye (bookstore). All of a sudden a cab stopped and Maretta Greer stepped out, fresh from JFK airport.There she was barefoot in the snow, the cab speeding away. She'd been deported from India. She was trembling with excitement, quite beautiful...She was trembling and distraught. I invited her into the store. She was hallucinating. She pointed at the store desk and said, "They are caught in the Transylvanian Transvestite Time Trap!".. 

Allen's perhaps less generous confidence to Gordon Ball - " Her problem is she thinks wherever she is is her own private garden"
That's a problem?

Chogyam Trungpa's Parinirvana

April 4, 2014, 3:00 am

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 [Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-1987)

It's Chogyam Trungpa's Parinirvana today. Here's footage, from seven years ago, of the opening of the twentieth anniversary parinirvana celebrations at the Shambhala Meditation Center in Boulder, Colorado (held in conjunction with Naropa).



Here's some of the fabled twenty-five-year anniversary celebrations in Sonoma - the two sanghas, Shambhala and the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center, Tibetan Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism, getting together and, movingly, collaborating













"Commemorating the 27th Anniversary of the Parinirvana of the Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche." - a little vintage Trungpa Rinpoche - "Sunyata", (from the Naropa Institute seminar, "Viewing and Working with the Phenomenal World", lecture delivered July 1st, 1976 in Boulder, Colorado)   - "Emptiness, between that and this, beyond concept". 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 171

April 4, 2014, 12:23 pm

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[Iggy Pop and Johnny Depp - Photographs by Allen Ginsberg c. The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

Iggy Pop interviewsJohnny Deppin the current Interview magazine (Vanity Fair’s Julie Miller also picked up on this, on their blog, summarizing it, a little moralistically, with a shock-horror headline (more demonizing?) -  "Johnny Depp Entertained Allen Ginsberg's Shameless Flirtations During the Beat Poet's Final Years". "Shameless flirtation"?
 - Depp: "It was sweet. I just think he wanted affection on whatever level."

Iggy Pop: You mention Ginsberg flirting with you. He visited me once but he didn't flirt, so I'm kind of hurt. I think I was a little over-the-hill by that time. He just looked around my apartment and went, "How much did this cost?"[laughter]



Johnny Depp: I met him when we were doing this documentary called The United States of Poetry in 1995—I was reading some Kerouac for the movie. Afterward, I offered to give him a ride home. They'd sent a limousine—back in those days it was a stretch-limo—and Ginsberg got in and goes, "Wow, how much do you think this costs per hour?" [more laughter]

Iggy Pop: I think, later on, he was a little obsessed with that stuff. But I understand. Those guys were the quintessential starving artists.

Johnny Depp: Indeed. Being in his New York apartment felt like you'd walked into 1950. 



Iggy Pop: With the little Zen tchotchkes. 



Johnny Depp: And books everywhere. He was a relentless flirt. Every time I saw him, he'd want to hold hands. It was sweet. I think he just wanted affection, on whatever level.

The Allen Ginsberg Project posting on Iggy Pop can be read here
The Allen Ginsberg Project posting on Johnny Depp can be read here

Open Culture, always Beat-attentive, generously spotlighted this week Allen's 1980 Shakespeare class at Naropa.
For more of Allen-on-Shakespeare see here, here and here.



[Harry Smith - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg c. Estate of Allen Ginsberg]


On the occasion of the re-issue of a new, limited-edition vinyl release by Portland's Mississippi Records of Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music", Dave Miller at Oregon Public Radio interviews Eric Isaacson, the label's boss, and Rani Singh (head of the Harry Smith Archives).  

[Daniel Radcliffe]

From a French interview with Daniel Radcliffe (on playing Allen Ginsberg): 
"I discovered Allen Ginsberg at fourteen . That was the age when I read the first lines of his poem"Howl ". I read the rest of his work much later. I remember at the time I found it all very chaotic and dark. I also felt closer to Jack Kerouac . His work spoke to me more. ( J’ai découvert Allen Ginsberg à 14 ans. Cet à cet âge-là que j’ai lu les premières lignes de son poème "Howl". J’ai lu le reste de son œuvre beaucoup plus tard. Je me souviens qu’à l’époque j’avais trouvé tout cela fort chaotique et sombre. Je me sentais d’ailleurs plus proche de Jack Kerouac. Son œuvre me parlait davantage. - What have you discovered about him with this film? (Qu’avez-vous découvert de plus sur lui avec ce film ?) - I mostly understood what the real relationship was that he had with his mother ... but also with the rest of his family. Not forgetting his friends. In a certain sense, these human relationships have influenced his poetry. Once filming ended, yes, I can say that I became a big fan of Ginsberg's work. (J’ai surtout compris quelle était la véritable relation qu’il entretenait avec sa mère… mais aussi avec le reste de sa famille. Sans oublier ses amis. Dans un certain sens, ces rapports humains ont influencé sa poésie. Une fois le tournage terminé, oui, je peux dire que je suis devenu un grand fan de la littérature de Ginsberg.)

et aussi en francais - les Beats - (Le Magazine Litteraire) 

Some recent ( you may well have missed them) obituary notices - on Rene Ricard in The Daily Telegraph and  Robert LaVigne (this week) in the L.A.Times

[Rene Ricard (1946-2014)  - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg c.Estate of Allen Ginsberg]


[Robert LaVigne (1928-2014),  in 1965, San Francisco,in his studio - Photograph c. Larry Keenan]

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Allen Ginsberg's Parinirvana

April 5, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Allen Ginsberg, Bob Rosenthal, James Grauerholz, Michael McClure, Peter Orlovsky - from Colin Still's No More To Say And Nothing To Weep For - An Elegy For Allen Ginsberg 1926-1997 (1997)] 

Saturday April 5th - Allen Ginsberg's Parinirvana.

Two Perspectives on Allen's Last Hours 

First, Gelek Rinpoche

We lost Allen [Ginsberg], but believe me, he died very well - extremely well. We would be very lucky to go like he did. He was absolutely ready. It is interesting. It looked like he was always thinking that he had another ten years to live. Last year, after the summer retreat, I told Allen that when someone is getting sick and they are told that they are going to die, then it is very difficult to talk to them about it. So it is very important to talk to people about death when they are well. You never know when you are going to go. You may have plans to live for another ten years, but you should always be prepared to go. Allen said that he was always scared of dying. He said, "If somebody told me that I was going to die now, I don’t know how I would take it." We talked about all his practices and I was then able to share with him the Uncommon Inconceivable Practice of Vajrayogini. Normally you are not supposed to give that practice to people before they have done a retreat. But then for Allen to do a retreat at this point would have been extremely difficult, so somehow I made an exception, seeking the permission of the lama and the yidam. Allen did spend quite a lot of time doing that practice. I tried to work out a very simple practice for him to do and he always had his hand-written notes with him and he tried to read through this practice daily.   

When he finally got the news that he was terminally ill, he took it very well - better than me! It took me two days to come to terms with it. I was in Mexico when I got the news from him. It sort of spoiled my holiday - but he was very excited, thinking that now the time had come. And as things started to function, his life started to become something like a celebration. The directions he was giving to his staff and his closer friends pointed in that direction. He was very excited and started to call everybody, telling them that "Look, I have incurable cancer and I am going to go now!"


From that day on, for a week he was very excited and quickly made all the arrangements that he wanted to make and although he accepted that he was going to die and would not continue, he knew that he still had a lot of unpublished manuscripts of his poetry and there would have been something like six more years to work on all of that and he now gave instructions what to do with all this material. He also had tremendous numbers of
photographs and gave instructions what to do with these and then finally he was ready. Suddenly he then had a little stroke and congestive heart failure. That was good. Congestive heart failure is the best way to go, because you don't have any pain, you just fill up with water and that is it. Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche always said that we all wish to go easily and the easiest way was by maintaining the water in the body. And that’s what Allen had. If you think about it, it was only that Friday that he was in a semi-coma and Saturday morning at two thirty-nine a.m the death process started. We reached his place on Friday afternoon at about five p.m. and when we walked into his room there were so many people! Some people were drinking tea, some were eating, there was food on the table and people were coming and going and all these very famous people were there. It was really like a celebration. Nobody was crying, but they just went up to him and looked at him and then went back and talked to each other. Some people were reading. His cousin, who is a doctor, [Joel Gaidemak] was there too. At first he forgot his stethoscope, so he had to go down and get it, so that everybody knew that he was the doctor. Then he explained to everybody what was happening to Allen and what happened before and why and what was going to happen next. When there were no more questions, he went on to explain what the latest books were saying about that condition. It was very interesting. Allen had a very open life and in the same way, a very open death too. Everybody was there, going in and out - sort of a celebration, really.

From our point of view, the first thing we did when we arrived was to do the Lama Chöpa. We did it very slowly and by the end of the practice I thought he was very close to going.  but after twelve p.m (midnight) we took a break and went to sleep until at two forty-five a.m. Kathy woke me up and we went back in and by three a.m he was obviously in the dissolution process and we did Vajrayogini self initiation. By about seven a.m to seven-thirty a.m. there were only few people there. It was very funny. When good opportunities come, there are never many people around. It was the perfect timing. I did the Vajrayogini initiation for Allen and we also did the five-deity Chakrasamvara self-initiation, and by eleven thirty a.m, it was clear that his consciousness had left the body.

Normally, when the consciousness leaves the body, there are signs, like water leaves the body. In the case of Gelong-la,who died in the retreat [the monk Gelong-la died at the Jewel Heart Winter Retreat in 1995, Allen (and Philip Glass) were in attendance], he had blood coming out of the nostrils. Ken [sic] was saying later that he had seen blood on the pillowcase. At the time, I just said that the blood must be from a cut to his head when he had shaved it. But in Allen's case there was no blood coming from the nostrils and because there were many people around I could not look at his lower parts, which was even more difficult because they had put diapers on him. It would not have looked good to all these people. Before eleven thirty, his head was still upright on the pillow and after eleven thirty, it was down completely. That is a clear sign. Immediately after that, his temples became hollow and his complexion became ashen. Then I said to the other people that he was dead and to call the doctor and to do what had to be done and they took the body to the funeral home.

Afterwards, all these people came and talked to me and they had all these different theories about why Allen had died. One of his cousins said it was because he worried so much about Peter Orlovsky. Another person had the idea that with our prayers we were pushing Allen out of the life. That’s why I thought I better explain a little bit what happened. There is no question that Allen was concentrating on the Mahamudra and Vajrayoginiand that is how he went. It was a very successful death. Of course, to us it is a great loss, no question about that, not just for us, but for society as a whole. However, for him, he began his own celebration and it really was a celebration. And I probably should not say that we are very happy, but on the other hand, we all have to die and you could not have a better death than that. We all wish to continue but we cannot. I said to Allen when he gave me the news, "We always think we could go on for some more years, but look at your life, you are seventy years old and have made a tremendous contribution." Aura (Glaser) keeps telling me it was a five lifetimes contribution. I told Allen, "I don't think that in the (19)60s you thought you were going to live that long." And he said, "No, definitely not. If I had thought so, I would have taken care of myself a little better." Then I said, "You are seventy now and although it is not a very long life, like one-hundred-and-fifteen or so, it is also not a short life either. So it is okay."

In his last days, he called a lot of people and said good-bye to them. He definitely called Philip (Glass)on Sunday, thanking him and saying good-bye. Actually, Philip did not see him after that. Later, Allen rang me and said, "Rinpoche, I wrote my own funeral poem, it looks quite good, shall I read it to you?" But I did not want him to read it. Philip was there with me, so Allen talked to him and said, "You listen to this!" and then he read his poem to him and of course it is his "Gone, Gone, Gone" poem. At the funeral it was supposed to be read out, but nobody knew it, except Philip. Luckily, he had listened to Allen and remembered it. So he recited it at the funeral. Everybody respected him, he was very open and nice and made a tremendous contribution to society. So we should remember Allen in that way. That is my suggestion.

Gone Gone Gone


Allen holding an abbreviated version of his poem "Gone, Gone, Gone" (Gone gone gone / gone with yesterday / gone gone gone /all gone old & gray / Gone, gone, gone /Gone to graveyard play / with spells & / Tombstones Gay!") January 1997. Photo: c.Richard Nagler, used with permission]

Then this first-hand account from Rosebud Feliu-Pettet

April 4 Friday
evening - Peter Hale calls and asks me to come quickly, Allen is in a coma, dying. Pull on my sneakers and taxi down, trying to keep calm breathing, trying to arrive in a state of peace. Fifteen minutes after Pete's call he opens the door to the loft and I go in to join those already gathered. I went and embraced big Peter Orlovsky, and Eugene, Allen's brother. About twenty friends, talking in low voices, looking lost, comforting each other.  After being diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer the previous Friday at Beth Israel Hospital, Allen had been told he had maybe two to five months to live. When I heard the news, for some reason, I felt strongly that it would not be that long - I felt that he would go very soon. He had come back home Wednesday in good spirits, organizing things as ever, making plans for the coming days. But someone (I forget who; perhaps it was Bob Rosenthal) had said that Allen personally felt that he had very little time left. A month or two, he thought. So Wednesday he was busy, writing and making phone calls to his friends all over theworld, saying goodbye. Amiri Baraka said Allen called him and said,"I'm dying, do you need any money?
But Thursday he was much weaker, he could hobble from bed to chair only with difficulty. There was a phone call from Italy [from Fernanda Pivano], in the middle of it Allen begins to vomit, throws up right there on the phone!. "Funny", he says, "never done that before!" Said he was very tired and wanted to go to sleep. He fell asleep and later that night had a seizure and slipped into a coma. He was alone. 
In the morning, Bob Rosenthal discovered him unconscious and called the Hospice doctor who came and told him that Allen had most likely had a stroke and hours to live. The task of notifying family and friends began.
Everybody feared that, as word spread, there'd be a huge throng appearing at the loft, but that wasn't the case. People came and went quietly during the afternoon. Bob, Pete Hale, Bill Morgan, andKay Wright, [the accountant], the office-staff, were busy constantly at the phones, making and receiving calls. Shelley Rosenthal and Rani Singh helping with everything that needed doing. Eugene and several neices and nephews of Allen's consoling each other. Larry Rivers, down from his apartment upstairs, wandering around forlornly in his pink white and blue striped pajamas. George and Anna Condo and their little girl. Francesco and Alba Clemente. Beloved friends of Allen's. Patti Smith sitting in tears with Oliver Ray and her young daughter, Bob and Shelley's sons, Aliah and Isaac. Marc Israel  and David Greenberg, two of Allen's young boyfriends, Philip Glass and June Leaf, Robert Frank, Simon Pettet, Andrew Wylie, Roy Lichtenstein, Steven Bornstein,who had flown up from Florida. A few others. I don't remember who all was there. 
I went to the back of the loft and Raymond Foye stood looking pale and so sad. I told him he must be very blessed, he had spent so much time giving support and love to the dying - Henry Geldzahler,(Herbert) Huncke, Harry Smith. "Yes, but this is the big one, the hardest", he said. Allen lay in a narrow hospital bed beside the windows overlooking Fourteenth Street. There were two almost invisible tubes coming out of his nose, attached to a portable small oxygen tank on the floor. His head was raised up on a couple of big striped pillows and he looked tiny and frail, thin arms with bruised veins from hospital tests sticking out from hisJewel Heart t-shirt. Head to the side, slight shadows under the eyes. I had walked through the loft, people whispering greetings, hugging, telling me all that had happened. But still not really prepared for the sight of him. The windows were open, curtains waving softly. His breathing was deep, slow, very labored, a snoring sound. "Hey, Allen, wake up!" Joel Gaidemak, his cousin and doctor, was there constantly, and a young lady nurse sat in the corner reading, occasionally getting up to check on heart and pulse, or administer morphine for congestion. Gelek Rinpoche said he thought Allen might last the night. Joel didn't think so.
A few chairs were set up nearby, and there was a big white leather Salvation Army sofa, of which he was so proud. People sat, or at intervals went to sit beside the bed and hold his hand or whisper to him and kiss him, his hand or cheek or head. An altar had been set up along one side of the loft and Gelek Rinpoche and the other monks sat chanting and praying, the sound so soothing constantly in the background, bells tinkling. A faint scent of flowers and incense hung in the air.  
I had a little throw-away Woolworth's camera and Gregory Corsoasked me to take a picture of him with Allen. He knelt beside the cot and placed his arm over Allen"like that picture, or statue, of Adonais, right?"  
There was a medical chart, a picture of the human skeleton, hanging over the bed. Bob said Allen had put it there, half as a joke, half as a reminder. And Allen's beautiful picture ofWhitman (that had hung in the kitchen on 12th Street) gazing down from the wall at the other dear bearded poet in the bed below. As it got late, many went home to try and catch a little sleep. It was around eleven. Bob and Pete were just playing it by ear, deciding that anyone who wanted to stay would find a place, on the floor if necessary. Peter Orlovsky was taking photos and I felt a little uncomfortable, the idea of taking pictures at this time, but I figured, hey, if it was you, Allen would be the first one through the door camera in hand!  Eventually, Eugene leaned over, held Allen's hand, whispered "Goodbye little Allen, goodbye little Allen. I'll be back later. See you soon". He kissed him and left. And Gregory - Gregorio! - too, telling us to call him at once if there was any change.
Joel had said that there was no way to know how long it would be, minutes or hours, surely not days. I had felt from the minute I saw Allen there that it would be very soon. I sat at the foot of the bed where I had spent the last few hours, holding his feet, rubbing them gently from time to time . An occasional cigarette break - the little guest bathroom by the office area was set up as the smoker's lounge. Bob and Pete and Bill were as strong and remarkable as ever, supporting everyone, keeping a sense of humor, and constantly dealing with the dozens of phone-calls, faxes, and the visitos as they came and sent. They'd had a few days for the news to sink in, but they were dealing with - literally - hundreds of people over the phone or in person who had just found out and were in the first stages of stunned, disbelieving grief. 
I had remained at the bedside and it was now after midnight. I could not believe he still hung on, the breathing so difficult, the lungs slowly filling with fluid. Labored breathing (gulps for air - like those gulps he'd made when he was singing - almost like he was reciting poetry in his sleep). Those who had ben there all day were exhausted. It was down to a few now. Bob and Pete and Bill Morgan. Peter Orlovsky ao bravely dealing with his pain, strong. Beverly [Isis] holding his hand. David and Mark. Patti and Oliver, there together all day trying to be brave and sometimes giving wat to red-eyed tears. Simon Pettet sitting beside me for hours.
Allen's feet felt cooler than they had been earlier. I sat remembering the thirty-three years I'd knowh hm, lived with him, my second father.
And still he breathed, but softer now.
Around two o'clock, everyone decided to try and get some rest. Bob and Joel lay down in Allen's big bed near the cot where he lay, everyone found a sofa, or somewhere to stretch out.
Simon and I sat, just watching his face. Everyone was amazed at how beautiful he looked - all lines of stress and age smoothed - he looked patriarchal and strong. I had never seen him so handsome. The funny-looking little boy had grown into this most wonderful-looking man.(He would have encouraged photos if he had known how wonderful he looked!) But so tiny! He seemed as fragile as a baby in his little t-shirt.
The loft was very quiet. Most were resting, half-asleep. Suddenly Allen began to shake, a small convulsion wracked his body. I called out, and Joel and Bob sat up and hurried over. I called louder, and everybody else came running.Iy was about two-fifteen. Joel examined him, pulse, etc., and said that his vital signs were considerably slower, he had had another seizure. The breathing went on, weaker. His feet were cooler. Everyone sat or stood close to the little bed. The loft was dim and shadowy; only a single low light shining down on him. It lent a surreal, almost theatrical, look to the corner of the loft. Peter Orlovsky bent over and kissed his head, saying "Goodbye Darling".
And then suddenly a remarkable thing happened. A tremor went through him, and slowly, impossibly, he began to raise his head. He weakly rose until he was sitting almost upright and his left arm lifted and extended. Then his eyes opened very slowly and very wide. The pupils were wildly dilated. I thought I saw a look of confusion or bewilderment. His head began to turn very very slowly and his eyes seem to glance around him, gazing on each of us in turn. His eyes were so deep, so dark, but Bob said  that they were empty of sight. His mouth opened, and we all heard as he seemed to struggle to say something, but only a soft, low sound, a weak "Aaah," came from him. Then his eyes began to close and he sank back onto the pillow. The eyes shut fully. He continued, then, to struggle through a few more gasping breaths, and his mouth fell open in an O. Joel said that these were the final moments, the O of the mouth the sign of approaching death. I still continued to stroke his feet and thin little legs, but the Tibetan Buddhist tradition is to not touch the body after death, so I kissed him one final time and then let go.
At two-thirty-nine, Joel checked for vital signs and announced that the heart, so much stronger than anyone knew, had stopped beating. A painless and gentle death. The thin blue sheet was pulled up to his chin, and Peter Hale brought over a tiny cup and spoon, and placed a few drops of a dark liquid between Allen's lips. It was part of the Buddhist ritual - "the last food". Bob put his hand over Allen's eyes, and said the Shema. We all sat quietly in the dim light, each withour own thoughts, saying goodbye.    

Expansive Poetics - 44 - (Mayakovsky - 1)

April 7, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)]

July 7, 1981, Allen Ginsberg's class on Expansive Poetics continues

AG: We were on (Robert)  Duncan ("A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar"),  and actually I read up to Duncan's introduction of (Walt) Whitman, and I want to leave it there. Actually, when I first read that poem it was that particular cadenza - "I always see the under side turning,/ fumes that injure the tender  landscape. From which up break/ lilac blossoms of courage in daily act/ striving to meet a natural measure" - I guess, the part two, the "litany of the Presidents", the litany of the dreary Presidents who did not "bride-sweet break to the whole rapture" of love of nation (like Whitman's imagination of (Abraham) Lincoln). Did you all, did you all, pick up on that? It was quite a tender passage, a tender, historical passage, and it's sort of like a last blast of Whitmanic sentimentality about American promise. It's not far from the old.. the heroic, nationalist, holy Russia projections of the nineteenth-century Russians, including (Nikolai) Gogol (who had a great "On The Road" passage in Dead Souls, in which he said, "Where are you going,  Oh Russia, in your troika?..Horses galloping up the dirt road leaving all the chickens squawking behind.. Where are you headed for? What kind of apocalypse? What kind of revolution? What kind of nationalist-devised denouement of all the strivings and hopings of  the Petrashevsky Circle, and all the bomb-throwing Anarchists, and all the police vibes, where are you gonna wind up?" There was this famous passage in Gogol's Dead Souls that I was just paraphrasing, which was a call to Mother Russia, to Russia, of Russia, personnification of Russia, asking where she was going, what her future was.

I'd like to jump back to Russia, 1915 would be the first text we'll take up (not in our book) - Ann Charters is here. She's written a personal biography of Mayakovsky's love-life in relation to his poetry, called "I Love", his relations with..  a great lady, great international letters..Lili Brik.

I would like to begin by playing a recording of Mayakovsky's voice, which we have, which I got from (Yevgeny) Yevtushenko, in Moscow in 1965, and had reproduced last night.. The poem I don't know what it is. Actually, it may be a later poem.. but I just want to get the sound of his voice, and maybe go back a little bit, and also (Sergei) Esenin's voice (it's a voice that might be a little bit familiar, deja vu, from heroic pronumciation..when I titled the course "heroic" or "expansive" poetry, I had Mayakovsky's recitation in mind, and his recitation, the tradition of his recitation, is continued actually by (Andrei) Voznesensky and (Yevgeny) Yevtushenko, and, at moments, Joseph Brodsky - that is, public declamation - but loud declamation, so that it could be heard in an open-square, or in a factory, before the years of amplification. So, let's hear the sound of his voice [there is some brief delay, Allen having some technical difficulties, making sure that the recording is switched on,  before, eventually, Mayakovsky's voice is heard ] -[afterwards] -  could you understand anything? did it? anything?..apparently.. Ann thinks that it's a poem on Lenin, big poem on Lenin



Student: (Where was it done?)

AG: Done in the studio?

Ann Charters: There's one apocyraphal story.It's a shame that he didn't record more. This is all that exists of the poet's voice. He died in 1930, and certainly there was ample opportunity for recording, in his time, but it just didn't happen. And the story about his  recording-session was that he read for a radio, the first time it was going to be broadcast (usually, it was always in public appearances that he gave his readings, first time that he was going to read, recorded and then sent out, you know, he was rather impressed by  the whole technical procedure involved and he asked the recording-engineer in the studio, "How many people will listen to this?", and the engineer said, "The whole world!", and Mayakovsky is reported to have replied. "That's enough".
But it's not a performance, there's no audience..there no sound of wind..it's inside.



AG: There's one of Esenin I'd like to play if I can find it. Sergei Esenin coming up..
[Allen plays Esenin recording - actually, it is not Esenin, it is David Burliuk, his contemporary, reading Esenin]  ...Some Russians consider Esenin to be the greater of the poets.. both of them [he and Mayakovsky] committed suicide.. it's interesting to be hearing their voices.

Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at the beginning and ending at approximately thirteen-and-three-quarter minutes in - the recording of Mayakovsky reading begins approximately five-and-a-quarter minutes in, that of Esenin, approximately eleven-and-three-quarter minutes in)  - Audio also available here 

Expansive Poetics - 45 (Mayakovsky - 2)

April 8, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1914 - "Futurist Mayakovsky"]

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Читающим наше Новое Первое Неожиданное.
Только мы — лицо нашего Времени. Рог времени трубит нами в словесном искусстве.
Прошлое тесно. Академия и Пушкин непонятнее гиероглифов. Бросить Пушкина,Достоевского, Толстого и проч. и проч. с парохода Современности.
Кто не забудет своей первой любви, не узнает последней.
Кто же, доверчивый, обратит последнюю Любовь к парфюмерному блудуБальмонта? В ней ли отражение мужественной души сегодняшнего дня? Кто же, трусливый, устрашится стащить бумажные латы с чёрного фрака воина Брюсова? Или на них зори неведомых красот?
Вымойте ваши руки, прикасавшиеся к грязной слизи книг, написанных этими бесчисленными Леонидами Андреевыми
Всем этим Максимам Горьким, Куприным, Блокам, Сологубам, Аверченко, Чёрным,Кузминым, Буниным и проч. и проч. — нужна лишь дача на реке. Такую награду даёт судьба портным.
С высоты небоскрёбов мы взираем на их ничтожество!
Мы приказываем чтить права поэтов:
1. На увеличение словаря  в  е г о  о б ъ ё м е  произвольными и производными словами (Слово-новшество).
2. На непреодолимую ненависть к существовавшему до них языку.
3. С ужасом отстранять от гордого чела своего из банных веников сделанный вами Венок грошовой славы.
4. Стоять на глыбе слова «мы» среди моря свиста и негодования.
И если пока ещё и в наших строках остались грязные клейма ваших «здравого смысла» и «хорошего вкуса», то всё же на них уже трепещут впервые зарницы Новой Грядущей Красоты Самоценного (самовитого) Слова.

["A Slap In The Face of Public Taste" - Russian Futurist Manifesto, 1912]

AG: So Ann Charters and I went over some ideas this morning, attending a few texts that are not in our anthology, beginning with an early poem - [to Ann Charters] - maybe you can explain the.. beginning with, we're going to do texts up to and around the Revolution, 1915, 1916,1917,1918, and then 1920..with (Vladimir) Mayakovsky intersect.. calling for, intersecting, and reacting to, the Revolution. So, beginning with what? "Cloud in Trousers"? - Pants? - "Cloud in Pants", or "Cloud in Trousers". [облако в штанах]

Ann Charters: Before I start, maybe I should say a word or two about who Mayakovsky was, and to point out that, if we were going by the pre-Revolutionary Russian calender (if we were, we're not, but if this were the case), we would, today, be celebrating  Mayakovsky's eighty-eighth birthday.

AG: Today?
Ann Charters: Today.
AG: Terrific!
Ann Charters: He was born, according to the old pre-Revolutionary calender on July 7th (it is July 7th, isn't it? - I often don't know the dates!). Today, in the Russian calender, it's the 19th - they moved it up twelve days, after the Revolution, but..
AG: Eighteen-ninety..
Ann Charters: Eighteen-nighty-three, July 7th on the old calender, which would make him 88 years today [1981] - He could be in the room with us, it's not inconceivable). 
He was a modern poet, there's no question about it. His suicide, however, ended his brief and tormented life, at the age of not-quite thirty-seven (he was 36 years old when he committed suicide, successfully), (that) was (on) April 14, 1930, so it was a few months before his thirty-seventh birthday. April 14 a very sad day and I think his suicide is probably..
AG: Nineteen-thirty.

Ann Charters: Nineteen-three-oh, yeah.. (and) was probably one of the most notable suicides, of any... of any (that) one's heard about on this planet, because his death seemed to symbolize for many people, not only a personal death but a political death. In other words, any people who were thinking about the.. (thinking) of (the) Revolution in Russia (as) symbolizing some sort of new start, a true Revolution, can take Mayakovsky's suicide as the failure of that Revolution to achieve its highest goal. Esenin's suicide in 1925 (Esenin was a contemporary - (here's a book you might want to look at (of Esenin's poems), a tremendous translation by Geoffrey Thurley - 50 Poems by Sergei Esenin - the publisher (in case you want to look it up, it should be still in print), is C-A-R-C-A-N-E-T, Carcanet Press, it's a small press..

AG: It's England, isn't it?  Carcanet?

Ann Charters: It's England.. Yeah, but I found this for three (dollars) fifty in a New York garage - "Confessions of A Hooligan - 50 Poems by Sergei Esenin" - "Esenin's suicide in 1925 was the first personal tragedy, because he never welcomed the Revolution, he never wrote any poems celebrating the Revolution. He was never what we call the spokesman for the Revolution in  Russia that Mayakovsky was. (But) Mayakovsky's suicide, many people take to be a political act, Esenin's was a personal tragedy. 1925 - Before we go on - last background, ok? - I want to give tribute to an English translator named Herbert Marshall, whose translations of Mayakovsky (one of the tattered remains you can see in this much-thumbed book owned by Allen Ginsberg). [Ann Charters displays Allen's personal copy of Mayakovsky's poems] 

AG: Xeroxed, so it's in the library. A xerox copy is in the library.

Ann Charters: I can see that it was puchased in 1963 in India for..well I don't know, the equivalent of seventy cents, or something, published in Bombay, third and last edition in 1955. This is how Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg encountered Mayakovsky in Herbert Marshall's translations. This is also still around, not this particular edition, but Herbert Marshall's translations. There are only really two books of Mayakovsky [currently in 1981] in English, in poetry, and one of them is still Herbert Marshall's, and it's not that bad, and the other is this one, the American edition..

AG: (reads out) "The Bedbug and Selected Poetry". The translators are Max Haywood and George Reavey, edited by Patricia Blake, World Publishing Company

Ann Charters:   Published by University of Nebraska or something. You can look in Books-In-Print and you'll find it [editorial up-date - look now on Google!]

AG: (in) 1960

Ann Charters: Herbert Marshall was the first and he had actually spent time in the Soviet Union and was very very familiar with the whole scene and it's a marvelous,. marvelous achievement -  Mayakovsky and His Poetry - that  was the title of it - So we give tribute today to Herbert Marshall, who turned many people on, including me, to Mayakovsky's poetry.

AG: Oh you read him (Marshall) too?

Ann Charters: Of course!  That was the beginning.

AG: I read Mayakovsky.. as a matter of fact, Frank O'Hara recommended him, particularly the "Cloud in Trousers", which he quoted from - and you may know, I''ve forgot but.. which poem.. ."In the church of my heart, the choir's on fire!'" - there's that line   - [У церковки сердца занимается клирос!]


[Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)]

Ann Charters: ..which you'll hear

AG: You know that line? You know O"Hara ? - "In the church of my heart, the choir's on fire!". Is that familiar?  - In the church of my heart, the choir's on fire!'."  Well okay..
["In the church of my heart, the choir's on fire!" is used as the epilogue to (Frank) O'Hara's poem - "Invincibility"]  

Ann Charters: Well, ok, that tells you a little bit about how we (both) encountered Mayakovsky, in English, and who Mayakovsky was, and who Esenin was. Another difference between them was that Mayakovsky in... well, we won't go (on about..) we'll talk about texts, ok? ,
 Mayakovsky was influenced by Walt Whitman (which you'll hear about in a moment in a poem called "(A) Man", an early poem from 1916), to carry on some of the themes you've been discussing here in this class.
But the poem which, I think, most presents him as a young, avant-garde, highly idealistic young Communist is a poem called "A Cloud in Pants", which he wrote in 1915, after a series of very unhappy love-affairs. He had a very tempestuous private-life, always, and, at the age of twenty-two, he was fully coming into his own. Twenty-two years old, he'd fallen in love with a girl from Odessa on a reading-tour with a group of young poets, led by a man called (David) Burliuk, who was his best friend. They were doing a program that was titled, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste", and they were avant-garde, they were part of the whole Modernist tradition..

AG: And that's the (Russian) Futurist Manifesto

Ann Charters: The Futurist Manifesto, which (David) Burliuk and  (Vladimir) Mayakovsky drafted

AG:  And (Velimir) Khlebnikov signed ?

Ann Charters:  Yeah, yeah, a whole group of friends in Moscow. Privately, he was wooing a girl when he was in Odessa, when he was off the stage, called Maria, who turned him down and this private event gave the opportunity for Mayakovsky to write this early Futurist poem, which Allen wants to read....today - Do you all know what Futurists stood for? what this term means? This is important to understand. It was..  it's probably as difficult to define as to define what a Beat poet was - what was a "Futurist" poet?, what was a "Beat" poet? - these terms are aggregates of ideas and associations, but when Burliuk and Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky and others met in Moscow around1911and formed a... they met at art school, they were art students, in their early twenties (Mayakovsky was about, at this point, nineteen, or twenty, years old, Burliuk was a little older, twenty-five maybe?. They met at the Moscow Institute as art students, both profundly bored by the conventional academic training they were being offered at this point. The international situation  (this was of course just about the beginning of World War I) seemed to have no, no connection with what their professors were talking about, and they felt also totally bored about where Russian poetry was at the time (Mayakovsky was always writing poetry, poetry as well as painting). And they decided to form a new group, of idealists, shall we say, a poetic and artistic group called "the Futurists" (they modeled themselves and took the name from the Italian Futurists ( (F.T.) Marinetti had a school, even earlier, in Italy, propounding the idea that the past was only a dead weight and had no bearing to the future, and that men of the future (they were sexist, highly sexist, they wouldn't say "people of the future")...

AG:  The Marinetti group was
Ann Charters: Both of them, sadly enough
AG: Was Marinetti's.. manifestos were when?
Ann Charters: This was about 1912
AG 1912 1910.  1905 , you're beginning to get some kind of break-through..
Ann Charters: It was the beginning, but he didn't come to Russia and they didn't read Italian
AG: Was there any literary activity at that time in 1905 in Italy?
Ann Charters: Oh yes, yes. And France, of course.
AG: And Russia too?
Ann Charters: Yes
AG: (Velimir) Khlebnikov..1907
Ann Charters: But there was a difference. These people were very young.. 
AG:  So the formal name "Futurism" came in after 1910?
Ann Charters: Yes. And it came from the Italian. 
The Russians had a little trouble because the word for "futurism" and the word for "football" is very close.  (And) when they would come through provincial towns, on tour (as) young Russian poets (and) they would hire boys to run through town  (they were too poor to get posters) - screaming, "The Futurists are coming! The Futurists are coming!", you know, they'd think the football teams were coming!  and they all..they all got very good audiences! - until they began to read! - But the idea was to wear bizarre clothes, it was to be as unconventional as possible, it was, really, literally..

AG: Early punk!

Ann Charters: Early punk! - exactly, exactly!

AG: And the introduction of the machine...

Ann Charters: Yeah, the idea was, of course, that they were welcoming the technicological age that was to come, this was an incredibly innocent period (I mean the Industrial Revolution had just really come into full force and the whole idea was that Russia would be a very backward nation and they would industrialize, and there was an enormous sense that a new future was going to beckon with some promise, promise..  and that machines and science and technology - this was incredibly naive, but at the same time it was not our  times, we have to look back with different eyes (now) to try and understand the excitement


AG: Well, the  French were doing it too. Same time. There's  (Guillaume) Apollinaire in France,  (Pablo) Picasso, like, a whole new age...relative to.. the introduction of taxi-cabs and factories  - and the word "taxi-cab" (used in the poem, and "factories").  In Marinetti, it was the image of "factories suspended from the sky by (the) thread of (their) smoke", like, really taking the entire machine....  what year was that, Marinetti, Futurist..?  when did that begin?
Ann Charters: 1906



[Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) - Abstract Speed + Sound (Velocità astratta + rumore), 1913–14. Oil on unvarnished millboard in artist's painted frame, framed: 21 1/2 × 30 1/8 inches (54.5 × 76.5 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice]

AG (190)6 - so it's that early? - and (Giacomo) Balla and the other painters?
Ann Charters: Balla would be..
AG: (19)14
Ann Charters: .. 1911
AG: Uh-huh, So the expression, the expression that we see, here in America, in the Museum of Modern Art, or in books on Futurism, familiarly, would be, painting, about 1910, 1911, and the first literary manifestations of these..1906. The Futurist Manifesto which speaks of "thefactories suspended from the sky by the thread of their smoke". What year is that, do you know?
Ann Charters: That (would be) 1906
AG: Yes. So that's really early.
Ann Charters:  Either 1905 or (19)06, I think.
AG: And in Russia you have Khlebnikov?  Did they call it Futurism then?
Ann Charters: Oh yes.
AG: ..As early as 1906 -  

[Allen to Student] - I've forgotten your name, I'm sorry - Student: My name is Esther]
AG: So Esther teaches at CU (Colorado University)  Italian.?  French?
Student: I don't teach Italian.

Ann Charters: That naivete,  I'm not talking about the art - No, no, no -or the poetic forms, (or)..

AG: The politics of..

Ann Charters:  No, just the belief in science as a way to make a perfect societ.y

Student:  That's what I mean - the attack on science and technology, as being somehow our enemy, I think (that)..

AG: Well, but, yeah, their first approach to it was that, once we get control of the machines, we'll..

Ann Charters: The only time that Mayakovsky (well, this is not the only time, but), the first time that Mayakovsky came to terms with the reality of scientific progress and tehnicological advance was in 1925 on his trip to America, and that's.. I mean, because Russia was a backward land, and it was only living in New York City that made him aware that they had subways, (but the poets had to speak in the cars, so you've got to do something about the noise, about the dirt), but it wasn't until then, you see, that he felt a little more..reasonable, shall we say, and less idealistic.

AG: In Russia, the earliest manifestations are about the same time 1915 - (some of the poems in your Anthology, by Khlebnikov, sound poems, experiments with pure sound and weird noises, a new kind of poetry, are from 1908 - 1907, (1908) 1909 - I think the poem on laughter is from around that time, if you take a look at the Khlebnikov.

I wanted to go to Mayakovsky direct, starting with Khlebnikov (tho' we did have Khlebnikov's "Menagerie") , and Ann is here, and (so) while Ann Charters is here, we might as well work with real information.



Ann Charters: Lets begin with "A Cloud in Trousers" to give you the idea, the tangible idea, with this poem, of what the Futurists stood for and how they felt toward society of their time, and how they welcomed change, especially revolutionary change. Do you want to talk (about this), Allen?



AG: In 1919.. I Myself , an autobiographical precis summary by Mayakovsky, says (that)  "in 1917, travelled to Maxim Gorky - (Maxim Gorky, the great Russian novelist) -"read him parts of "..Cloud.." Gorky touched , wept on my shoulder. Poem affected him. I was a little proud". And then, Gorky was the first writer to defend Mayakovsky in his journals. In his journal of April 15, he wrote -"Take, for example, Mayakovsky. He's young, only twenty years old. He is vociferous, unbridled, but, undoubtedly, somewhere underneath talent is hidden. He needs to work, to study and he'll write good genuine poetry. I have read his book of poems. Some of them arrested my attention. They are written with genuine words."  Then Mayakovsky called it a "tetraptych" (four parts) and he described it (what we were saying earlier) - "down with your love" - (down with social love, down with the accepted bourgeois view of love) - second part, "down with your art", third part, "down with society", fourth part, "down with your religion".  This is.. Marshall did the first translation, and I'll read... the first part I'll read is from Marshall, actually - "Your thoughts,/ dreaming on a softened brain/ like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,/with my heart's bloody tatters, I'll mock again,/impudent and caustic, I'll jeer to superfluity.." [Вашу мысль/ мечтающую на размягченном мозгу,/как выжиревший лакей на засаленной кушетке, буду дразнить об окровавленный сердца лоскут:/досыта изъиздеваюсь, нахальный и едкий.].."Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid,/there's not a single grey hair in my soul!/Thundering the world with the might of my voice,/I go by – a handsome,twenty-two-year-old..." [У меня в душе ни одного седого волоса,/и старческой нежности нет в ней!/ Мир огромив мощью голоса,иду – красивый,/двадцатидвухлетний.].."..not a man but a Cloud in Trousers!.." [..не мужчина, а — облако в штанах!..] 

- So that's his Introduction -  then we made little selections from each section - 
so, section two [Allen means section one, actually], which is the put-down of "your love"..and here's a.. a little, a little piece of it - 
"You swept in/ abruptly like take-it-or-leave it/mauling  your suede gloves,/ you declared, "You know,/ I'm getting married"./ "Alright, marry then,/ so what?/ I can take it. /As you can see I'm calm, like a pulse of corpse./You ask when you used to talk/ Jack London,/ money, /love,/ but I saw only one thing/ you, La Giaconda had to be stolen/ and they stole you. In love I'll gamble again with the arch of my brows ablaze/What of it?.." [Вошла ты,/резкая, как «нате!/муча перчатки замш,/казала:/Знаете/я выхожу замуж/Что ж, выходи́те./ Ничего./Покреплюсь./Видите — спокоен как!/Как пульс/покойника./ Помните?/Вы говорили:/Джек Лондон,/деньги,/любовь,/ страсть», —/а я одно видел:/вы — Джиоконда,/которую надо украсть!/И украли./Опять влюбленный выйду в игры,/огнем озаряя бровей за́гиб./Что же!..]..."have you seen that terror of terrors my face when/ I'm/ absolutely calm?" ["..а самое страшное/видели —/лицо мое,/когда/я/абсолютно спокоен?].." Mama/ I can't sing/In the church of my heart the choir-loft is on fire" -[Мама!/ Петь не могу./У церковки сердца занимается клирос!] - that's what.. that line is what Frank O'Hara used to begin, I think, Second Avenue - Second Avenue - it was a little epigraphical quotation for "Second Avenue", which was O'Hara's big break-through poem, like a long improvisational thing, long, improvisational tour de force, and long lines, with the intention of writing anything that came to his mind with total sophistication and New York Museum of Modern Art brain. 

So the second part..

Student: (Was that by Marshall?)

AG: I was mixing, The prologue I read by (Herbert) Marshall, the others, (George) Reavey.
..and (now) part two, which is the "down with art" - 

Ann Charters: This is not schematic. I mean, he.. this makes it sound as if he said, "Aha, now int part two, and I will write down.." - Mayakovsky never dictated what he was doing in his head,  in his heart.. And in this early work, it's association of images, there's not a narrative flow that's a coherent story. He gives you all the clues, you know, (that) you need to understand  the situation, Maria, the rejection from his girl, but there isn't, you know, "And then, what I did was closed the door and I went out and met so-and-so". It doesn't work that way. The "sun poem" that you have is a narrative poem and it goes chronologically. This is association, this is images (shall we say) - like a Chaghall, an early (Marc) Chaghall painting - ...hearts on fire, fire engines coming.. not really taking it literally, so it's Surrealist.. 

AG [resumes reading] "I spit on the fact that neither Homer or Ovid invented characters like us, pock-marked with soot/I know the sun would dim on seeing the gold fields of our souls!" - [Плевать, что нет/у Гомеров и Овидиев/людей, как мы;/от копоти в оспе./ Я знаю —/солнце померкло б, увидев/наших душ золотые россыпи!]....Have you seen/ a dog lick the hand that thrashed it?/ I/ mocked by my contempories/ like a prolonged dirty joke./ I perceive whom noone sees/ crossing the mountains of times.." [Видели,/как собака бьющую руку лижет?!/Я,/обсмеянный у сегодняшнего племени,/как длинный скабрезный анекдот,/вижу идущего через горы времени,/которого не видит никто.]...."I shall root up my soul/till it's red with blood/I'll trample it hard till it spread blood/ and I offer you this as a banner." [вам я/ душу вытащу,/растопчу,/ чтоб большая! —/и окровавленную дам, как знамя].

Ann Charters: We should also say that Mayakovsky was involved in politics. He wasn't only a lady's man or a poet. He was imprisoned, actually, for politics, after his family moved from the country, from Georgia (southern Russia) to Moscow, after the death of his father. He was very young when his father died and his mother had to support the family. In Moscow, his mother took in lodgers in their big apartment and some of the lodgers were involved in (plotting) - this was 1908 or 1909... Mayakovsky was fifteen, sixteen, years old - and the police (it seems to be the Tsar's police) got wind of the activities of some of these people, among others, and arrested Mayakovsky, even though he was a kid, he was sixteen. And in August of 1909, he was sent to prison, where, with his temperament, he absolutely could not make it. He was confined, for the first time in his life, and he became hysterical and so they put him in solitary, (which, of course, it made him.. it had a very profound effect on him) - and he was in solitary for three months at the age of sixteen. And that's something to remember - not just your average city kid who's falling in love with girls, in Odessa. And his mother pleaded his youth and inexperience and got him out in January of 1910. There was also, after prison, the threat of three-years exile, so he had to leave politics (that's when he decided to go to art school - but he had been politically involved at a very early age, and remained to his death a committed Communist  (at this point it was the Socialist (Party). So this was the Mayakovsky who is able to write about volcanos and fire-engines and revolution coming - and he gave the year 1916, (he was off a year, you know, but there was no certainty that, after the 1905 Revolution, there'd ever be another attempt, so we can give him credit for just being one year wrong). 

Student: (When was that poem?)

Ann Charters: The one that Allen read is written  in..

AG: 1915

Ann Charters: .. when he was twenty-two years old

AG: As he says of himself, "Handsome twenty-two years old"

Student: (What occasioned his suicide?)

AG: Oh,we'll get on to that later on. That's a long..  ten years later... conflict with the Party, conflict with the bureaucracy


Ann Charters:  Let me read you a little bit, ok, from a poem about his suicide (he never wrote about this, he never talked about it). I asked his love, Lili Brik, to tell me what he said about this period in his life, at sixteen, when he was put into prison, and he said nothing (really), he didn't want to talk about it, it was a traumatic experience, but he did write about it in one poem later on. He says "Youths have a lot of cramming to do./We teach grammar to every big fool/But I was kicked out of the Fifth Class and was thrown around the Moscow jails.."... "Those who look at the sun every day, shrug,/ "What's so special about those ordinary sunbeams/But I, for a yellow jumping speck of sunshine on the wall/ would give now -  everything in the world."

AG: Where's that from?

Ann Charters: That's from a later poem. I'll find the title.. (written) ten years after..

AG: A little bit like Andy Clausen..if any of you remember Andy Clausen from last term.. (a  rebel)

Ann Charters: Oh yes, definitely.Why don't you go on to..

AG: Well, I'll go on to part three, which is "down with society". A  little, (just) a couple of  fragments from the longer poem, "Cloud in Trousers", (long, meaning thirty pages) -
"From you/ steeped in love,/ who watered/ the centuries with tears,/I'll turn my back, fixing/ the sun like a monocle/ into my gaping eye..."...  [От вас,/которые влюбленностью мокли,/от которых/в столетия слеза лилась,/уйду я,/солнце моноклем/вставлю в широко растопыренный глаз.]...Night will arrive, bite into and gobble you up! - [Ночь придет,/перекусит/и съест]

So it's like - I think - punk! - very much like punk - "down with..." - down with everything! . And it.. so that the notion of punk, or the notion of rebellion in punk, the tones, the outrageousness, actually is a twentieth-century style, probably earlier, but certainly charateristic of wave after wave of twentieth-century literary movement, like the overwhelming, crushing weight of machinery on everybody's head and then a, like,  complete "ecrasez l'infame"- wipe it all out - and begin all over again  and bomb it all down..actually, it's the easy way.. (it's) very much a  traditional Futurist.. - except that she doesn't have the history that. .this guy did it and then had to commit suicide when he got his revolution, you know, when everything he prophesized came true, then the revolutionaries all turned their guns on him, or their words and bullets, on him. 

So, then, the last part is "down with your religion", which is the most outrageous of all - "Listen, Mr God!/, Isn't it tedious/ to dig your puffy-eyes/ every day into a jelly of cloud? - — [Послушайте, господин бог!/ Как вам не скушно/в облачный кисель/ ежедневно обмакивать раздобревшие глаза?] ".....that even frowning (Apostle) Peter will want to step out into the ki-ka-pou" - [чтоб захотелось пройтись в ки-ка-пу/ хмурому Петру Апостолу.] - [ki-ka-pou - I don't know what the ki-ka-pou is - ki-ka-pou?]  

Student: Why, it's a dance. 

AG: A dance, a dance, ok.. [Allen continues reading] - "In Eden again we'll lodge our little Eves... [А в рае опять поселим Евочек...]..."The universe sleeps, it's huge paw curled upon a star-infested ear." [ Вселенная спит,/положив на лапу/с клещами звезд огромное ухо.] - It's 1914-15

Student: That was the ending of the poem?

Ann Charters: That was the end of the poem. And that note will come again about the universe sleeping - the cosmic orientation - the poem comes from the inside of (the) heart (in) the world to God and then beyond. That's the way of Mayakovsky's poems..

(Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately thirteen-and-three-quarter minutes in, and ending at approximately forty-five-and-a-half minutes in.) - (also available - here)

Expansive Poetics - 46 (Mayakovsky - 3)

April 9, 2014, 3:30 am

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[Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)]

AG: I think what I'd like to do is skip to the suicide poem ["At The Top of My Voice'], just to get the correalation between the universal (and the personal). "At The Top of My Voice -  Unfinished Prologue To the Second Part of A Poem on the Five Year Plan"- one -  (this is Lily Brik, his girlfriend, having gone out of town to London - "She loves me. She loves me not".. Who's he referring to now? (Tatiana), the girl in Paris?

Ann Charters: Each girlfriend that I interviewed said the poem was to her. So.. you don't know. There's no name on the fragment. It's just fragments, in his desk.. - 

[Allen  resumes reading] - "She loves me  - loves me not/With my hands I pick/ and having broken with my fingers/ fling away.."... "the incident has petered out/the love-boat of life/ has crashed on philistine rocks...".. "..Night tributes the sky/ with silver constellations/In such an hour as this,/ one rises and speaks/ to eras,/ history/ and world creation.. -  pssh!- and then he committed suicide

Ann Charters: No no no.

AG: Quite soon after.

Ann Charters: Soon after.

AG: Actually, there's another little piece involved it in another book..

Ann Charters: There are a lot of fragments, parts of  the poem, "At The Top of My Voice", which I think you have.. 

AG: Yeah.

Ann Charters:  ..in your red book there.   He had the idea of writing part two (of this long poem, and in his desk were manuscript pages, fragments of lines, that he, perhaps, was going to work into part two of that poem.

AG:  An alternative translation - What I was reading was the (Herbert) Marshalltranslation, but the alternative to the last piece about the milky way  - "Past one o'clock, You must have gone to bed, the milky way streams silver through the night..".."love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.." ..."Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars/ In hours like these, one rises to address the ages, history and all creation.."

Ann Charters: You can see that Marshall's translation has some.. He doesn't have the ear, quite.

AG: I think Marshall hada better ear- "In such an hour as this, one rises and speaks to eras, history and..."

Ann Charters: Well, it's one word .. "The incident has petered out.." 

AG: "..on philistine".. yeah.. "Love-boat 0f life" is crashed "on philistine reeds"?..

Ann Charters: It's impossible to do a perfect job, because Russian and English are not equivalent languages. It's just impossible. [Ann Charters addresses student]  Would you agree?

Student: Yes, I agree.. Russian translation is better in French than English

Ann Charters; Exactly, exactly, and this is the statement I also heard from Lili Brik. It's even better in German, I feel, but somehow the English is...

Student: It is really a harsh sound in German, in..  it might work, but in sound and rhythm..

Ann Charters: Yes, well, French is the best. If you can read French, read Mayakovsky in French if you cannot read him in Russian. The last resort is reading him in English.

AG: Just one last footnote - Esenin's suicide-note (1925) - "Goodbye, my friend, goodbye./ goodbye, you're in my heart as evidence, our pre-ordained separation predicts reunion by- and by./ Goodbye No handshake to go through./ Let's have no brows wrinkled with sadness./ Nothing new dying,/ though living is no newer" - 
"There's nothing new in dying now,/ though living is no newer" - Not a very good translation.

Ann Charters: That was written in blood. He didn't have a pen.

AG: On the walls of the Hotel Metropole, in Leningrad?

Ann Charters: Yeah, in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg)....not Metropole,  (Hotel) Angleterre.. He hung himselfand he had no pen - pretty incredible! - Mayakovsky comment on that (he had to, of course, say something official, after Esenin, his arch-rival, committed suicide) was that Esenin had never welcomed the glorious revolution (and therefore he was discouraged with life).  But it wasn't at all the way Esenin had written in that last poem to Mayakovsky because what was hardest of all was to live, it was a coward's way out to commit suicide - the easiest thing is to die (which was turning around Esenin's last line).

AG: Well, we had his poem..

Ann Charters: One had a sense of a forced creation in the Mayakovsky answer, however 
I should.. before we go too much further say, in addition to these problems of translation, that often the experience of living in a country is not translatable until you experience it living in another one - and this determined, (in) the suicide note, what Mayakovsky called the "everyday", (or what was it "philistine"?)  reality (we have several different translations)..

AG: Oh you have a translation? - Great. Yours is done by your husband, Sam?

Ann Charters: By my husband Sam and a woman from Moscow called Rita Rait  R-A-I-T, [Rita Rait-Koveleva] who was a Russian lady, who was a translator of English and American Literature into Russian. We met her because she and Lili Brik, Mayakovsky's love, had become friends in 1920. This over-eighty-year-old amazing woman Rita Rait (still alive today, makes her living as a translator, still) and is probably best known in the country for translating Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut (the translations of Kurt Vonnegut made her very famous in the Soviet Union and she's come out here (to the US) a couple of times to visit Vonnegut,  She also wrote a biography of Robert Burns (and had to leave Russia to do that), she's an amazing..  came to stay with us in Stockholm and helped translate for us from Russian into English - her book that we wrote on Mayakovsky. But, it was impossible for even her, with all her skill and all her sixty years of experience translation of English into Russian, impossible for her to explain what this word was, that was central to understanding what Mayakovsky's Revolution was about and that's the word called B-Y-T, in Russian, byt

AG: Byt?

Ann Charters : Byt. And it means..ordinary reality, that's all it means. I mean, that's all it means, just.. the hardness of things, the grind, the mundane, the trivial, the commonplace. As he says, "love's boat has crashed against it"

AG: Against Byt?

Ann Charters: Byt,  yes. That's right, against everything that is commonplace, that we couldn't.. our love was unable to rise above and (this is a very important word. I think it's the word that Mayakovsky uses most of all. He found this existence incredibly boring and difficult and he really wanted to live on an elevated plane. He felt that the second revolution of 1917 was only the second of at least three and he was heartbroken that the third revolution had not happened. He thought that the Revolution in 1917, the second one, the successful one, the political revolution, had a… ..in government, to be fair, but he looked for the third revolution (he called it "the revolution of the spirit" and he kept waiting for it to happen and  felt that his job was to help to bring it about, and that this revolution was, in his own experience, forever defeated by byt - B-Y-T  "the experience of the mundane, commonplace, running a government, bureaucracy (amazing isn't it?)



Student: Was he also a political revolutionary? a spiritual..
Ann Charters:  It's beyond politics..
AG: Well, they've already had the Russian Revolution 
Student: The first two revolutionary attempts are both political?
Ann Charters: Political, yeah - and the second one suceeded.
Student: And the second one suceeded, right, and the third one.. spiritual?
Ann Charters: ..is to come
AG: And that' might be..  It might be good to bring up the... the Whitmanic 
Ann Charters: Yes, let's go there now.
AG: Because that leads on to  his conception of the Revolutionary Man, or Future Man, Whitmanic man.
Student: Let's get on with it   
AG: So.. Ann was.. when we were talking about what we had gone through before, with (Fernando Pessoa and  (Federico Garcia) Lorca, and so forth, and I said What if, or..and she suggested that Mayakovsky..... Oh, could you tell me about Mayakovsky's relation to Chukovsky?
Yes.


[Korney Chukovsky (1882-1969)]


Ann Charters: When Mayakovsky was hanging out with Burliuck and the others in Moscow, he was very poor, he didn't have any money, he would stay with his mother, she gave him unlimited credit at the grocery store where she shopped, you know ...and he was a very decent chap and didn't eat too much and he walked for miles in the Moscow streets rather than spend the little money that he had on subways - I mean street-cars, trams, the buses Anyway, he stayed a summer. He was publishing, beginning to publish with Burliuck's group and, of course, drawing great attention to himself (he was over six feet tall, almost like a basketball star, (and) a physically beautiful man, and quite a presence in Moscow). So he was invited to spend the summer at the home of a very fine man, a contemporary, named (and I'm going to find this in a minute) Korney Chukovsky -  C-H-U-K-O-V-S-K-Y , in English Chukovsky - and, at this time, or around this time, Chukovsky who was many things, he  worked in magazines, he was a poet, he was also a translator, he wrote children's books, and, at this particular time in Mayakovsky's life, he was translating  the first extended translations of Walt Whitman (this is why I...

AG: Do you have the Khlebnikov poem?..

AC: So, he was living, Mayakovsky, in Chukovsky's summer-house while Chukovsky has just finished his new Russian translation ofLeaves of Grass, and Mayakovsky had read Whitman in fragments, he'd read no English, he read no French . Everything had to come to him through his friends. And he had loved the Whitman that he had heard from Burlieu -"Whitman impressed him (Mayakovsky) as being, like Mayakovsky, a fore-runner of world poetry as a destroyer of philistine literary tradition. When Mayakovsky heard Whitman's poetry from 1855, he said "well, it's already happened in America, this has happened, this ideal of the destruction of the past and the new spirit". But Mayakovsky had been very critical of his friend's translations, he thought they were too smooth and  polite. He wanted an impolite and a rougher Whitman in Russia. And his friend, who, as I said, was a very fair-minded and intelligent man, Chukovsky, felt that the young Futurists response, intuitive responses to the spirit of authority,were much closer to the original than his smooth translations. So, when Mayakovsky began to write a poem, after the "..Cloud.." called "A Man", which was autobiographical, in 1916, 1917, there are, sometimes, echoes from specific Whitman passages, especially the cataloging, the device of, you know, cataloging, elements of your body or the world that Whitman uses to great effect. This is not Mayakovsky's  innate distinctive response to speech rhythms in the poem. As I said, with "Cloud in Trousers", he was going mostly with association and images and clusters of images and developing those. So, the passages in "A Man" which strike (me, at any rate, and my husband) as definitely influenced by Whitman (and there have been one or two scholars who felt  the same way) are just a few, in these catalog passages. However, you will notice that Mayakovsky is not just imitating Whitman, he has his own personal style, even as early as 1915-1916, and he has an undisguised swagger, which, well, is even beyond Whitman, the personal swagger.. It's egotistical (Mayakovsky)

AG : The opening of "A Man" (which is found in this Ardis House publication  - Russian Futurist Poetry) . Ann says..

AC: Why don't you show them the pictures, it's possible. There's Mayakovsky in one of his Futurist outfits  -  he dressed  in this incredible flowing blouse, you know, with ties, sashes, he was just incredibly theatrical



AG: This publication is (the Ardis anthology of)  Russian Futurism  - Burliuk,ZamyatinPasternak,Meyerhold, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh,Mayakovsky (and it's got lots of Khlebnikov translations in it, also.. - and the first translation of this poem, "A Man"

Ann Charters: A very long poem. It's the first complete translation
AG: Well..er..
Ann Charters: Actually he doesn't say it but it could be that his sister sewed his blouse, made his costumes 
AG: Oh.. costumes...  
Student: (What page?)  
AG:  It's actually page 37 to page 62
Ann Charters: It's a long one
AG [begins reading] - "The palm of the Minister of peace, remitter of all/ sins, the Sun's palm is on my head.. The gown of the most precious nun, Night's robes/ are on my back/I kiss the thousand-paged Gospel of  the days of my love" - is the first passage - [Allen continues with the poem] - ... "It is I/ who has raised the heart like a flag./ Fantastic miracle of the twentieth-century!'…



Ann Charters: This was written after he met Lili Brik, again, it was a poem to her. As I said the "Cloud  in Trousers" was (a) poem to the other loves, the earlier ones, the Marias in his life. Marie also was not the name of the girl but the poem in its attack had attacked religion, obviously to take Maria, the name of Christ's mother, as the central sexual figure in the poem, that's important, there are endless Christian parallels in  "A Cloud in Trousers". In this one, in "Man", the one with the Whitman influence, written specifically about his torment, the torment of his love for Lili Brik, there isn't a sense of betrayal that the woman marries someone else but there's a terrible sense that the woman cannot respond to love as much as the lover gives the love, a sense of betrayal, in other words, in that poem as well. 
I'd like to read some of that. 

AG: Which is this?

Ann Charters: This is the one you're doing now, Whitman-influenced, it's arranged like Cloud in Trousers, a long long poem, arranged in sections

AG: What section?

Ann Charters: I'm reading the very end of  it now.

AG:  Ok, Great

Ann Charters  (It's) "Mayakovsky Through the Ages".  And it's celebrating, as Allen said, the "thousand page gospel of the days of my love" - still anti-religious, the gospel of a private love-affair - and "Mayakovsky's Nativity" is the first section - "Mayakovsky's Nativity" - "The Life of Mayakovsky" (section two) - "The Passions of Mayakovsky" (section three) - "The Ascension of Mayakovsky" (section four), "Mayakovsky in Heaven", "Mayakovsky's Return", and "Mayakovsky Through The Ages" -  (those are all of) the sections of this poem

AG: And the last, there's an eight-line last section, too
Ann Charters: Ok - and what he describes at the end is his suicide, he was a suicidal person, had tried it several times before he suceeded. He played Russian Roulette with his one bullet. Yes.. He was a gambler
Student: (The last time was) when he came to America?)
Ann Charters: Who can say? He had tried it before. At any rate, it was the same pristol. He.. yeah?
Student: This is an important question, when you speak of .the 1930 successful (suicide attempt)  as a political response, how do you...
Ann Charters: Well, that's just it, I can only say that it's a complicated motivation behind it and it is taken by outsiders, who don't know, for example, that he tried several times.
Student: Is it possible that suicide was related to the spiritual revolution?  
Ann Charters: Of course, of course.
AG: You mean the spiritual revolution is suicide?
Ann Charters: No, he's not equating that but he's
AG: ..relating the failure, or some..
Ann Charters: ..failure . You didn't think suicide was a spiritual revolution?
Student: I was just askinng the question.
Ann Charters: I didn't understand the question
Student: The question is -  Is suicide a spiritual revolution?. Is death a spiritual revolution?
Ann Charters: Oh, I don't think so. I think Mayakovsky had no feelings about..  death was death, period, it was the end of being.
Student: Maybe guilt?
Ann Charters: Oh, I don't know, You'll find out.. So much happens to him. You don't have any idea of the context.
AG: Big deal, Yes it was guilt! [laughter].  You thought it was politics? - no, it was love! -   "Fill out a form" -
Ann Charters:  …fascinating, fascinating, fascinating..
AG:  - "Can you commit suicide over Guilt? Failure in Politics? Love? - or.." you could write (on) the form (what) you like(d) - or you got a C minus in Expansive Poetry!



Ann Charters: Lets go on, let's go on, ok? Lets go on here. This is a 1916, "Man", the one with the Whitman catalogs, yeah? This is an account of a suicide attempt that is imaginary, ok, that failed, that doesn't fail, it succeeds, but it's imaginary. He pretends that he does it, ok?. and then he pretends that he comes back to  the apartment of his loved one (in this poem he commits suicide over the failure of Lily to love him as fully as he wants to be loved), that simple. Then he comes back to haunt her after he does it (and he's a strong fellow), and he describes what her apartment was like on Zhukovsky Street - the street lights were set into the middle of the street  - the same way - (he comes back years later) - houses were similar.. ["The streetlights were again located/in the middle of the street./The houses were the same"] - (I went to that apartment house, it still exists, in Leningrad, and they really do have a horses head carving in a little recess - it was very elegant apartment house at one time) - He asked the passers-by "Is this Zhukovsky Street?" (that was the name of the street when they lived there) -  "He [the passer-by] looks at me/ the way a child looks at a skeleton/eyes this big,/ tries to get past,/ "Oh no, it's been Mayakovsky Street for thousands of years./ He shot himself here at his beloved door" - So the poet goes up, you know, he ascends, to the height of the apartment (they live, I think, on the seventh floor) - "High, high,/ further upward I passed,/ floor after floor,/ she has put herself behind a curtain./ I look behind the silk,/ everything's the same,/ the same bedroom,/ She's passed through thousands of years and still looks young .."...  "There's a legend:/ she jumped to him/ from the window/.They were scattered about/on top of each other" - (So he imagines his shooting himself and when she imagines the death of his love, throws herself out the window!) - "Where to now?" -  he asks -  "Wherever the eyes look. To the fields?/Let it be to the fields!.." And he says, after Lili sacrifices herself to love, it will be a reminder to mankind  that love is the supreme power remaining triumphal after all living things - and Mayakovsky ends the poem with this section - "Everything will perish,/ It will all come down to nothing/ And the one who moves life... "..."I stand/ entwined in fire/ on the inextinguishable bonfire/ of inconceivable love."

AG: His [Herbert Marshall's]  translation  "incomprehensible love" 

Ann Charters: Beyond anything you can conceive of

AG: Or else,  so confused?

Ann Charters: Yes, yes. Well, this is another kind of poem..

AG: (It's) 1914, 1916, 1915, just before the Revolution

Ann Charters: Right, this was just before the Revolution  and, of course, when you write a poem like this to your beloved, to you mistress (they weren't lovers at this point, Lily Brik was married to a man and had been married to him for several years, the man she fell in love with when she was fourteen, another Jewish man (she was Jewish, Mayakovsky was not) - and he became lovers with Lili Brik, and her husband Osip Brikbecame his life-long friend, and they lived together. It was a menage a trois that, again, was as famous as the suicide, these three people. Osip was his publisher and his theoretician, shall we say, his best friend, and Lily was his lover.

(Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately  forty-five-and-a-half minutes in and ending at approximatelyseventy-one-and-three-quarter minutes in-)   

also available - here)

Expansive Poetics - 47 (Mayakovsky - 4)

April 10, 2014, 3:30 am

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[Vladimir Mayakovsky - Costume Art for the Seven Pairs of the Clean and the Seven Pairs of the Unclean from the production of his play, Mystery-Bouffe (1918/1921)] 

AG: Footnote..speaking of menage a trois - Heartbeat..
Ann Charters: Yes
AG: ... is playing  today and tomorrow at the cinema down on the Mall. I've never seen it so I'll probably go But, in case any of you are curious how Hollywood's handled it.

Ann Charters: The thing about Mayakovsky which is also important to stress is that there is (there are), of course, at least two Mayakovsky's, the one who wrote these private poems and the one who had a public role and was writing about revolutions and about society  - the Futurist, in other words. Sometimes they were combined, but often they were separate. After the Revolution, they became more and more seperate.  The public Mayakovsky, the spokesman forLenin and the private Mayakovsky, with his love affair, the times with the Briks [ Lili and Osip] and his search for love with other ladies. Important to say, that, in 1918, to celebrate the success of the first Bolshevik Revolution, the first year of the Revolution, Mayakovsky wrote probably one of his most famous political, the public Mayakovsky, creations, and it was a play, called Mystery Bouffe, and he wrote this play (he wrote a lot of plays, he was interested in the theatre, he acted in the theatre) As you hear, it was an oral tradition and it was a highly theatrical performance when they read - Esenin and  Mayakovsky, And the play Mystery Bouffe, in 1918 [it was re-worked in 1921]  is a wonderful play (you should give it at Naropa some time, it's a good English translation and there's a book of collected, complete plays in English - and, you want to talk about that (one) Allen?

AG: I'll read that, if you explain it

Ann Charters: Yes, what he does is create a situation where the two sides - it's an endless Marxist dialectic, there are two casts of characters, there is "the clean" and "the unclean". The "clean" are the people who do not welcome the Revolution, (clean, meaning they're white-collar workers, intellectuals who are not fellow-travelers), then there's the "unclean" who are the proletariat.  A little confusing because we have moral feelings about "unclean" and "clean", but..he uses "unclean" for the good guys and "clean" for the bad guys, if you can follow that.. 

Student: Sounds like (William) Blake?

Ann Charters:: It is,  in a sense, or I am reminded of..

Ann Charters: Anyway, he creates a character. while their squabbling, the "clean" and the "unclean"". I'm really simplifying the plot, but they go in an ark together, like Noah's ark,  and there's a flood and they're the only ones saved from the flood, which is Revolution, and it destroys the past, and then its time to make the new, the new life. And the "unclean" are having troubles with the "clean", who.. they throw overboard and they let them starve and drown. But the "unclean" when they arrive at the sort of Promised Land, they are milling about in great confusion. They don't know anything, They don't know how to live. The Revolution has occured and then the confusion is after their side has won. So Mayakovsky creates a character named "The Man of the Future", (who he played himself, in the theater) ..and he created lines of poetry which are statememts to his belief as to the political program, in a sense, that the people needed to hear at this time. This is, in other words, supporting the Bolsheviks regime and it's a statement to the workers who have succeeded in taking over the system and the question is "Now what?" -and here is Mayakovsky's answer

AG: Well, before that, there are brief speeches by workers -  "Blacksmith: (God is an orange, cherries and apples…)" -  [Allen reads (enthusiastically! and at some length) from Mayakovsky's play.....] .. "What prophecies did he succeed in creating?"..and so forth..

Ann Charters:   and so forth-  He  suceeded in creating   on earth, again a reference to the Christ figure who is no more Mayakovsky, the "Man of the Future", is an ordinary man and also a reference to the Brotherhood of Communism, the eventual statelessness of all of us under utopian heroic Communism, you understand?   - this is before Russian Communism became the phenomena that it is today . This is still what you would call "Visionary Communism", or, the term usually used by art historians is "Heroic Communism",  and it existed for, well, two or three years after the Revolution. It was a kind of enormous cultural turmoil and wonderful production...

AG:  (Anatoly) Lunacharsky..?

Student:(Was it popular?)

Ann Charters:  This is a positive.. Well, there you go again, is it a popular play? - not as popular as Mayakovsky wanted it to be and part of the problem he said (and Lily was involved in the production) was that there was no support, there was of course confusion. There was no good theateres and do forth.  The actors when they were given these roles to play, the traditional conventional actors said they couldn't understand, that this was bohemian avant-garde stuff and there was a difficulty getting it produced the way Lunacharsky and Mayakovsky wanted it to be.


[Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933)] 

AG: Who's Lunacharsky?

Ann Charters: Okay, After the Revolution, a man who was in charge called the Commissariat of Education and who was the co-ordinator, the administrator really, in the Arts, was a remarkable man called Andrei? or Alexander?(Anatoly) Lunacharsky - and he was an administrator but also he had tremendous sympathy for the avant-garde in Russia at the time, and so, although government people were askance at what he did, he let wild guy poets like Mayakovsky and unknown Jewish intellectuals like the Briks, have space in theaters to produce their plays and publish their poetry, and this was one reason why that period of Heroic Communism was as outstanding as it was, because the avant-garde was, for a brief time, able to consider themselves spokesmen for the masses. But your question is a good one -  were they?  You know, did the common man come to the "Mystery Bouffe"  and laugh and think that it was the greatest thing he'd ever seen, or would he rather see Charlie Chaplin?

AG: Well, I think that's answered by our next poetic trip which would be the.. "The 150 Million"

Ann Charters: Mayakovsky, you see, really believed that he could do it, that he could, almost single-handedly, with his poetry, raise the consciousness of the masses. And he decided that he would write a poem, in 1920 (this is the same time that he dashed off the poem to the sun which you have in your red book  - This is now 1920.  He's making his living Mayakovsky writing slogans, advertizing slogans, which.. and political slogans for the telegraph company, (not advertising, at this point, that came later, at this time he's working for the telegraph, the Russian telegraph company) (because) they didn't have newspapers, and in Moscow, they had big posters in the windows of all the storefronts which had no food, no goods..civil war.. completely impoverished, you know, the country - the Reds and the Whites fighting each other. So, in order to get the news about campaigns to exhort citizens to wok even harder on the next quota. Mayakovsky and lot of other people drew these cartoons, a lot of people were illiterate also so that things had to be very simple texts and pictures... there are some wonderful cartoons. He was drawing as well as writing the poetry.

AG: Anti-capitalist cartoons.




Ann Charters: And he worked for RSTA for almost two years and he worked for about eighteen hours a day. He was a very strong man and he worked, he really worked. There was no heat, there was no material (the poorest quality), art..

AG: Actually, we have some sample of his slogan posters , some stuff (well, from 1922 this is)



Ann Charters: This is committed poetry. This is how he served the revolution.

[Allen begins reading -  "Peasants, Look at these pictures here, /You'll understand why pears are more dear".. "Transport was ruined by foreign intervention/Now it's partly put right by Soviet invention/And everybody who wants to may/Travel by night and travel by day."…. - Allen reads right down to the details - "Poster issued by.. Chief Political Education Committee, number 250, 1922.." etc]

Ann Charters: Yes, yes, and these posters were duplicated, they were stenciled and then duplicated off and sent to all the hamlets in the Soviet Union, and his work reached..  He was the most-read poet, certainly, on that level.

AG: These are... Those lines are sub-titles to two color posters

Ann Charters: Yes, yes.  And his poems were read by everybody for the news as well as for the political slogans that they contained, but he had a grander ambition, in 1920.. You havethe sun poem, which is a personal poem about being visited in his country-house, but his public poem from that time, a very long poem, very complicated poem, called "150 Million", that's to speak for every one of the citizens of the Soviet Union (there were one
-hundred-and-fifty-million people in that country). (It) was to be published anonymously, because Mayakovsky believed that a poet didn't have any right to claim to speak for one-hundred-and-fifty-million,  but (that) somebody had to, and so he did it - It was published anonymously - Five thousand copies, which is, right there, a little ironic - five thousand copies for one-hundred-and-fifty-million people? . Well, (but) what was the literacy rate at that time? - it was really not very high, not very high..

AG: You've got to..

Ann Charters: Yeah, let me read you a little bit of it 

AG: So what's interesting is this attempt to be heroic, expansionist popular poet and then ..and then afterwards there are the comments by Lenin and Trotskyon this text.

Ann Charters: Again, to answer your question, how was his work received..

Student: (Did other people read this aloud or hear him read it?)

Ann Charters: Oh yes, of and course and he went around factories and he went around youth groups and schools.. and reading. He was professionally involved reading all of his life, made most of his income from reading - [Ann Charters begins reading] - "150 Million is the name of the Creator of this poem..." - I mean, I can't do justice. You can just hear him, shouting it out! - 




AG: "150 Million!"

Ann Charters:  "..is the name of the Creator of this poem". Why don't you do it? - Just a little bit there.

AG: [Allen begins reading] - [ "150 Million is the name of the creator of this poem/ its rhythm, bullets.....  my poem no-one is the author!" ]

Ann Charters: Now this poem had a play that was within a poem. There was mock-heroic proportions in this poem. He had two characters - "Woodrow Wilson", who was the American defender of world capitalism, but in the gigantic monolithical struggle with "Ivan", the Russian champion of the oppressed proletariat, Wilson is ignobly defeated (this is a poem of world dimensions again, a cosmic battle). Now, we are presenting it almost as a comic poem, but scholars of Mayakovsky assure me that it is not meant to be funny, he's deadly serious and it is one of his greatest poetic achievements. Now, there's great divergence of opinion about Mayakovsky, and the within the Mayakovsky camp, (which people like what poems, you know, it's very complicated), but people whose judgment, scholarly judgment, I respect say this is one of his greatest poems, and it has never been translated into English. All I can say is from the summary, I can't understand why it would be called this, but I come from a very different place..

Student:  (...Is that (this particular poem) an example of what the Russian government likes?...)

Ann Charters: The Russian government likes most of Mayakovsky and his works are in print and countless..

AG: Let's cover this answer to this question historically. So what's the immediate reaction?

Ann Charters : The answer is, yes. Segments of it are known. It is not that positive in the Soviet Union because it is an intellectual's poem again. Mayakovsky took the advice,  he was interested always in linguistic innovation, and that's something, (that), without a knowledge of Russian, we can only get through scholarly documentation, but in his poems he endlessly made-up forms and made-up words. He was just terribly inventive with the language and he created this poem as a parody of the ancient folk epic called the bilyny and he tried to create two figures, as I have said, of mock-heroic proportions because this was the tradition of the folk epic that he was imitating. He got his knowledge of the folk epic, not because he was a student of Russian poetry, he got his knowledge from Osip Brik, who was a student of epic poetry, was the.. was, in fact, one of the founders of the Russian Formalist critical group, which if you're involved in literary scholarship, you've heard of Formalism and Structuralism - it was all started in Russia after the war in the apartment where Mayakovsky was living with the Briks. So, is it a popular poem? no, because it's kind of a fake poem, it's modeled on an ancient style, and it's very very long , it's mock-heroic, it doesn't seem to be as funny as it might have been once.

Student : (I don't know but), it would seem to me that there would be some tremendous conflict on his part, after the Revolution, of him seeing it as a propagandist versus an idealist poem (which).. .

Ann Charters: No, no conflict at all. No, no, I mean, this is a man who believed in.. 

Student:  (But)  it wasn't taking a direction, was it?, that.. that the idealist that he, apparently was...

Ann Charters: Well he, he thought, of course, that within the party, they didn't understand him and let me read you, I'm glad you asked, because I have the response and..

AG: This is the gist. Now this gets interesting.

Ann Charters: This is why it's impossible to say in a few words why he committed suicide, because, although he was a spokesman for the party, he was nevertheless not finding favor 
right?  And that's terrible. Who else is there to commend you? - Alright, Mayakovsy had a lot of trouble getting this poem published. It was published by the State Publishing House in, as I said, an edition of  five thousand copies, and this was very difficult to pull off in 1920.

AG: Lunacharsky's work

Ann Charters: Lunacharsky made it happen. There was very few paper.. there's no type, ink (all these physical things were really a problem) and they devoted enough (time) to do five thousand copies, and bound them, and so forth - the State Publishing House. His name was never on the copies, and he had, however, (Mayakovsky) insisted that three copies of this poem would have his name on it and would be given to the Briks, (one copy for Lily, one copy for Osip), the special dedications to the Briks, he felt that that would be his only payment, the three special copies. You can see right away this is a problem. You're dealing with a bureaucracy. These copies were never delivered and he never forgot that and finally he made the State's printers write an official apology. He was difficult, as far as payment was concerned. He sent copies of the poem to Lenin and other important people in the Comfut group, and this was one of the important organizations of  the time - The Committee of Futurist Communists ok&gt - Comfut - because, not only was he (Mayakovsky - and the Briks) not very close to Lenin and Trotsky but also other Futurist Communists in the group (they were a very splintered group). So this was also a problem. The important thing here was that Lenin's response, and the response of the Party members in control, was immediately hostile. Lenin wrote a note to Lunarcharsky (who was in charge of the whole shenanigan) that unmistakably clarified his position toward Mayakovsky and the other Futurists. And this is Lenin now - [Ann Charters reads Lenin's response] - "Lunacharsky, aren't you ashamed of yourself? for bothering to print 150 Million in five thousand copies? It's nonsense, stupidity, double-died stupidity and pretentiousness. In my opinion, only about one in ten of such things - (and he meant avant-garde (publications)) - should be published, and then in editions of not more than one-thousand-five-hundred copies - (I love that - Lenin is such a.. you know, particular, specific mind!) - 

AG: It's amazingly generous too

Ann Charters: It is generous to think...he speaks of art.. and presses here,  but , he wants these in editions of not more than "one-thousand-five-hundred copies, "for libraries and eccentrics" -  (that's Lenin's response to Mayakovsky and that poem) -
(Leon) Trotskywas more sophisticated. He understood at least that the poem was supposed to be a literary parody  but he thought it was brutally heavy-handed

AG: .. Parody of the the original folk song form

Ann Charters: Folk-song genre, yeah - a whole epic genre, actually. He thought it was a very heavy-handed and completely unsuccesful, unsuccessful parody, and he wrote inLiterature  and Revolution (which is where I got it from), his book, (Trotsky, he wrote journalism) -  "How out of place and, particularly,  how friviolous do these primitive ballads and fairy tales sound when hurriedly adapted to Chicago mechanics and to the class struggle" - (he's putting him down as if he were a theoretician primarily)..

AG:  And the other angle you were talking about - there were Writers Unions. So there was... so there were rival groups of writers too.. who were also competing for paper, print, attention and public notice, who were they?

Ann Charters: Well, this  was.. among others, of course, others, others in the Futurists group who had...

tape ends here 


(Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately seventy-one-and-three-quarter minutes in  and ending at the end of the tape)   
It may also be heard here)