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| [Allen Ginsberg & Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, Mackey Auditorium, Boulder Colorado, May 1972. photographer unknown] |
For our last year's birthday celebration posting see here.
For our last year's birthday celebration posting see here.
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February 28 - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's Birthday
For our last year's birthday celebration posting see here.
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Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 115
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| [Lucien Carr & friends, with one of his sons, either Caleb or Simon, East 9th St & 3rd Ave , NYC 1959 . Still from "Untitled Kerouac Ginsberg Carr and Friends film"] |
Lucien Carr's birthday today. Poor Lucien. Dear Lucien. Destined to be carrying an awful lot of karmic weight in the coming months (courtesy the unsolicited spotlight of Kill Your Darlings)
See our 2011 posting about Lucien - Holy March 1st (Lucien) -here
Douglas Messerli on the Pip (Project For Innovative Poetry) blog reprints his 1977 Washington Post Book World review of Allen's Journals (Early 'Fifties, Early 'Sixties) including some interesting addenda - recollections of his encounters with Allen - and this - "a poem (dated 7/5/96) for (a) "calender project" that never came into existence" ("Multiple Identity Questionnaire", subsequently included in the posthumous collection, Death and Fame) - The poem, as Messerli points out, "clearly summarizes his (Allen's) life"
"American by birth, passport, and residence/ Slavic heritage, mama from Vitebsk, father's forebears Kamenetz Podolska near Lvov/ I'm an intellectual! Anti-intellectual, anti-academic/ Distinguished Professor of English Brooklyn College..."
Interesting interview-clips up, and worth checking out, over on Paul E Nelson's blog - notably, Allen on "First Thought, Best Thought" (and the genesis of "First Thought, Best Thought" - "The monk lent down to lace his animal shoes"!)
- also poems and pondering from Michael McClure, Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman..
Our good friend, Hettie Jones is ably profiled on the Australian site Going Down Swinging.
Lisa Jarnot's Robert Duncan biography is reviewed in the Washington Post
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Allen & Prabhupada (Krishna Weekend 1)
Krishna Weekend
Our previous posting on Allen and Krishna Consciousness can be found here
This weekend we focus on his visit to (and meeting with) A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in Columbus, Ohio, in May of 1969, both his public address and his private recorded conversations.
Prior to that, however, there's this - an earlier encounter (from 1967) - "Poet Ginsberg said he was not yet ready to become a devotee, but that he chants the Maha Mantra every day, and will do so until he leaves this Earth"
The legendary Columbus conversations have been published and can be read in their entirety here.
The editor explains: "The following conversations between his Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and poet Allen Ginsberg took place at the Radha Krishna Temple in Columbus, Ohio, May 11,12, and 14, just before and just after the meeting with the Ohio State student body. These conversations, packed with gems, anecdotes, theology, reminiscences, candid remarks, exhortations, Vedic allusions, wisdom, humor, prophecy and joy, are important because they contain succinct yet complete answers to questions many Westerners, and especially young Americans, find themselves asking either verbally or emotionally about Krishna Consciousness. They are also important because they reveal some of the major concerns of the most important ambassador of the Bhagavad Gita to ever come to the West and this century's (20th century's) most famous American poet. The conversations are directly transcribed from tape-recorder and are included in their entirety in two installments".
Audio of the second of those installments - A Walk Through Kali Yuga - (beginning with Prabhupada on "the poet, the lover and the lunatic", and the qualities required for true spiritual devotion) may be heard here (and a transcription of that particular section here)
![]( "Srila Prabhupada and Allen Ginsberg")
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![Allen Ginsberg with Srila Prabhupada]()
Introductory Remarks by Allen Ginsberg on the occasion of a public meeting/presentation/gathering by A.C.. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Hitchcock Hall Auditorium, Columbus, Ohio, May 12, 1969:
Our previous posting on Allen and Krishna Consciousness can be found here
This weekend we focus on his visit to (and meeting with) A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in Columbus, Ohio, in May of 1969, both his public address and his private recorded conversations.
Prior to that, however, there's this - an earlier encounter (from 1967) - "Poet Ginsberg said he was not yet ready to become a devotee, but that he chants the Maha Mantra every day, and will do so until he leaves this Earth"
The legendary Columbus conversations have been published and can be read in their entirety here.
The editor explains: "The following conversations between his Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and poet Allen Ginsberg took place at the Radha Krishna Temple in Columbus, Ohio, May 11,12, and 14, just before and just after the meeting with the Ohio State student body. These conversations, packed with gems, anecdotes, theology, reminiscences, candid remarks, exhortations, Vedic allusions, wisdom, humor, prophecy and joy, are important because they contain succinct yet complete answers to questions many Westerners, and especially young Americans, find themselves asking either verbally or emotionally about Krishna Consciousness. They are also important because they reveal some of the major concerns of the most important ambassador of the Bhagavad Gita to ever come to the West and this century's (20th century's) most famous American poet. The conversations are directly transcribed from tape-recorder and are included in their entirety in two installments".
Audio of the second of those installments - A Walk Through Kali Yuga - (beginning with Prabhupada on "the poet, the lover and the lunatic", and the qualities required for true spiritual devotion) may be heard here (and a transcription of that particular section here)
Introductory Remarks by Allen Ginsberg on the occasion of a public meeting/presentation/gathering by A.C.. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Hitchcock Hall Auditorium, Columbus, Ohio, May 12, 1969:
AG: ...The amazing thing was that everybody was able to shake their own ass and get up and dance after..a long time of not knowing what to do. When ancient rhythms were floating through, everybody thought, and certainly everybody desired, to dance and sing, rather than be frozen. But such is the nature of our condition, in this (epoch), which is called the Kali Yuga, according to Hindu fairy-tale, Hindu mythology, Hindu religion, Hindu belief, Hindu metaphysics, Hindu cosmography (probably corresponding to what, in our Western tradition, we know as the Gnostic tradition, through Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme and William Blake) - this is an Oriental version of what may be the same tradition, suppressed in the West when the CIA took over religion in 313 AD [audience bursts into applause and laughter], when Constantine, Caesar, made a deal with the church to suppress all alien thoughts and heresies and to formulate a square Western version of heaven and hell. The Kali Yuga concept is one that you can, in a sense, interpret ecologically. If you've been following the scientifical pronouncements of doom-possibility coming over television, radio, and slick magazines (as well as the underground press) you will notice that there's increasing attention to the fact that our own fecal material, the waste products of our robots, have now so polluted (for example, locally) Lake Erie that it's a great lake of green goo-slime, biologically dead, that our atmosphere, the planetary atmosphere, is increasingly polluted with carbon wastes, that we are so sunk in our attachment to automobile exhaust-fumes, to sulphur wastes from great steel factories producing metals that can be sent flying to explode on the other side of the planet, (with the collaboration of the science faculties in such universities as this) [Ohio State University - audience applauds] - so we find ourselves increasingly sunk into what is called a materialistic habit (like a junky, stuck on his junk). People are hooked on matter, and on their own identity in matter, taking their own identity from their faces, nose(s), bodies, and (the) immediate physical city-complex around them, and not realizing another sweeter, deeper but wilder, or "transcendental" identity than the identity of the "one-dimensional man" that (Herbert) Marcuse has talked about. So what we are proposing here is a modern-minded view, or some indications of a modern Western, i.e. Gnostic, Marcus(ian) view of Kali Yuga, as applying to our own situation rather than being an Oriental fairy-tale. As it stands.. I read in the paper today.. the prognosis for our.. According to U Thant, in today's paper, according to the head of the United Nations, mankind has only ten years to reverse the political, social, moral, emotional, bhakti course of the planet and alter our technology, alter our consciousness radically enough to preserve human existence on the planet [audience applauds] - So, this is not only the official UN pronouncement, it's also the pronouncement of most of the ecologists, biologists, and ecosystemic students of the planet that are presently considering the ecological disruption that we have caused through our greed and destructiveness. The Oriental tale, or analysis, has it, however, that we have a good deal more time. The Kali Yuga, or age of heavy-metal entanglement, (the) iron age, lasts 432,000 years and we're only 5,000 years into it. So there is 428..427,000 years to go. In a conversation with Swami Bhaktivedanta today, I was enquiring more about the details of the mythology (which are found in a book called the Bhagavata Purana. He explained that, according to Hindu analysis, we are 5,000 years into the descent from a lighter age, the age of brass, the disappearance of Lord Krishna, (an aspect of the Hindu deity, Vishnu, (the) preserver, or perhaps the supreme form of the preserver aspect of the universe, of ourselves, or of Vishnu). The disappearance of Krishna, mythologically, or historically, is 5,000 years ago. We're 5,000 years into the age of iron, and we have 10,000 years in which to chant Hare Krishna (which is to say, repeating the name of the aspect of preservation, hope, that particular vibration of dancing joy transcending our cosmopolitical words. We have 10,000 (years) for that play before there is a total descent into one-dimensional monsters who eat each other up for meat, because all the vegetables have disappeared, because DDT has completely geared out any biological life-form except mammals who go around eating each other, at that point. For.. I've known Swami Bhaktivedanta for about three years, since he settled in the Lower East Side in New York, which was my territory and my neighborhood [audience applauds]. It seemed to me like a stroke of great intelligence for him to come, not as an up-town swami [audience laughter] but a real down-home street swami and make it on the street on the Lower East Side (as, also, opening a branch on Frederick Street in San Francisco, right in the center of (the) Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, so that people who were tripping in Haight-Ashbury several years ago, coming down, wanting some - quote "permanent reassurance formula" - (unquote), ritual, magic, hope, feel, one truth, if you wish, zeroed in on the Frederick Street rugged, perfumed, incensed ashram, where chanting would be heard at dawn, as they were coming off a trip all night. A great many people who were hung on acid or other varieties of chemical psychedelics found it much more stable to practice a prolonged ritual, or sadhana, following the instructions of Swami Bhaktivedanta, which are old, classical Indian-style instructions for both ritual, daily living, diet, sexuality, consciousness, thought, apparel, hand-gestures (in other words, a very complicated ritualized yoga, a very ancient one also). I thought Swami Bhaktivedanta made a great move in coming to the Lower East Side and to Haight-Ashbury. And then, naturally, as people dig chanting, centers formed in other parts of the United States so there are small street-level houses or store-front centers in Vancouver, or in L.A, in Montreal, up in Buffalo, down in.. (there's some Buffalo chanters here). And "chant" comes from the word "enchant", which means "to make oneself into.. to make a magical spell about oneself".. So there are Santa Fe centers also. In other words, the indigenous - the importation of a very strange Oriental form, almost a hard-shell Baptist, Oriental form (in the sense of its traditionality and fundamentalism, its reliance on ancient texts, and interpretation of ancient texts by long tradition of teachers) - it's strange (that) so far-out and ritualized an Indian form should take root in the United States a little more naturally than the more Protestant Vedanta Society or the extremely rigorous Zen groups that have taken root. I think partly it's due to the magnanimity, or generosity, or the old-age charm, wisdom, cheerfulness of Swami Bhaktivedanta, his openness of heart, his willingness to come down on to the street, and his sense of his own divinity, and of others around, that it's been possible for the bhakti yoga cult of India to be planted very firmly here in America, so now there are communes, or ashrams, functioning on the basis of the Krishna rituals, which are, in some respect, a model for all those anarchists and political people who are interested in establishing indigenous American communes. The regulations on food, on sexual relations, (which generally cause much confusion in mutual-living health-pads), the regulations on sleep and thinking process, are, like, an interesting model to study for those who are interested in forming affinity groups or large family communes. I will have my turn at language tomorrow, because I'm giving a poetry reading at the [OSU] student union somewhere (I'm not sure where) which is my regular thing, which is why I was invited here by the Student Activities Committee. So I will cut myself off now and be brief and leave the rest of the evening to Swami Bhaktivedanta, who will give a language explanation, or whatever he wants to say, of the cultural, or metaphysical, or religious, roots in.. ..So the rest of the evening will be... Swami Bhaktivedanta will explain his divine self. Then we will continue chanting...
Tomorrow: Allen's Introduction to A.C.. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's version of The Bhagavad Gita - The Bhagavad Gita As It Is
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Allen & Prabhupada (Krishna Weekend 2)
"Kali Yuga we really are in it, heavy metal Age, where Spiritual common sense seems like magic because we're ensnared in brain-wash network - the mechanical conditioning of our unconditioned consciousness.
I grow old and see that renunciation is what happens. The "action" leads there - calm realization of sense-desire illusoriness in youth, or on deathbed at worst.
Even Tantric path (exploration of sensory limits) leads to liberation (relaxation) from sensory grasping (i.e. desire). Because senses are mechanical and repetitious. Infinite in sensation during their apparent minute, in that sense Blakean Eternal.
But trapped in that Infinite, who needs it? As bad as being Srivaka Buddha, the Nirvana-junkie.
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer
-- Ezra Pound, Canto 115
How terrible to be trapped (Ourselves!) in that worst the Kali Yuga. Well at least nothing more bad can happen, we're at the bottom of the material barrel. All them rotten apples of knowledge!
How funny also, given the illusory nature of all this cosmic planet-history. America, Rome, China, Maya! And how lovely that nobody else in other Yugas will suffer as much as we! Everybody else already saved, but us! What an honor! And even we're saved by Vishnu the Preserver if not Shiva the Great Changer or Buddha the Great Emptiness or Christ the Great Sufferer-for-us or Chango the Great Red Creator or Allah the Great Compassionate One or Jaweh the Great Unspeakable Word or Tao the Great Undefinable or Whitman the Great Self-Contradictor!
And here is Krishna with his Magic Mantra, sung by Swami Bhaktivedanta in America, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, 100 Years after theEmersonian Transcendentalists.
Before this age of linear media conditioned our minds, nobody had to learn to read and pore over Ancient Tomes describing the Ignorant Blissful Mind - from Vedas to Einstein the same waves of Illusion are described in detail as relative Illusion. In fact, the first printed text on Earth, Chinese version of Prajna Paramita, announced that all language to be printed and multiplied henceforth was a giant Vanity in as much as the Great Phenomenon as we see it neither exists nor does not exist.
Now XX Century, many versions of Bhagavad Gita appear on our shores, sophisticates such as Sri Isherwood and other princes of prose help turn the Wheel of doctrine-teaching.
We've reached the end of Matter
"...What
do they think they will attain
by their ships
that death has not
already given
them? Their ships
should be directed
inward upon ...But I
am an old man. I
have had enough."
W.C.Williams - For Eleanor and Bill Monahan
The Text (Bhagavad Gita) is awesome. The vision of the Universal Form (Chapter XI) is equal to any Sublime poesy of the West, superior in detailed image to Dante's final Cantos" Paradise vision. Many bellies, many leaves.
The purports, or explanations of Swami Bhaktivedanta are transparent and exquisitely detailed - expositions presented here for the first time to common public Western mind - a storehouse of old age, experience, devotion, learning, scholarship, Hindu granny-wisdom, sincerity, gaiety, and sweet transcendental insight.
Condemnation of the World is harsh. Transvaluation or transcendental transformation is unutterable relief. Swami Bhaktivedanta came to USA and went swiftly to the Archetype Spiritual Neighborhood, the New York Lower East Side and installed intact an ancient perfectly preserved piece of street India. He adorned a storefront as his Ashram and adored Krishnatherein and by patience and good humor singing chanting and expounding Sanskrit terminology day by day established Krishna Consciousness in the psychedelic (mind-manifesting) center of America East. He and his children sang the first summer through in Tompkins Park. Upaya - skilful means- is theSanskrit word for this divine Tact. To choose to attend to the Lower East Side, what kindness and humility and intelligence! And a second center for chanting Krishna's Name was thereafter established in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury at the height of the spiritual crisis and breakthrough renowned in that city, mid-sixties, twentieth century.
The Hare Krishna Mantra's now a household word in America (through the appointed Beatles among other Musicians and Bards). Or will be before the end of present decade, "this Prophecy, Merlin shall make, for I live before his time.""Covers The Earth", said an old media advertisement for a household paint. The personal vibration set up by chanting "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare" is a universal pleasure: a tranquility at realization of the community of tender hearts; a vibration which inevitably affects all men, naked or in uniform.
It seems like Magic because we are so locked into our heads, so hung up in the metallic illusions of Kali Yuga that manifestation of our natural Sacred Heart desire is a rare fortune. This rare fortune (as Thoreau and Whitman our natural-hearted forefathers prophesied) is our heritage, our own truest Self, our own community of selves, our own true America."
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Spontaneous Poetics - 45 (James Shirley)
[James Shirley (1596-1666)]
AG: My own favorite poem of this genre [song] is one by James Shirley, dated 1659, which I used in travelling with (Bob) Dylan as a key lyric, to set aside his own lyrics, and everybody else’s lyrics, like Joan Baezand Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, or the more amateur musicians who were flying around on the Rolling Thunder Revue (in 1975). I published this in our phantom newsletter, (which was like a mimeographed newsletter, sent out to everybody, (but) for Dylan’s eyes), comparing this to his lyrics to see who beats who. James Shirley is the author. [Allen proceeds to read the poem in its entirety - “The glories of our blood and state/ Are shadows not substantial things;/ There is no armour against fate/ Death lays his icy hand on Kings;/ Sceptre and Crown/ Must tumble down,/ And in the dust be equal made/ With the poor crooked scythe and spade./ Some men with swords may reap the field,/ And plant fresh laurels where they kill:/ But their strong nerves at last must yield;/ They tame but one another still:/ Early or late/ They stoop to fate,/ And must gibe up their murmuring breath/ When they, pale captives, creep to death./ The garlands wither on your brow;/ Then boast no more your mighty deeds/ Upon Death’s purple altar now/ See where the victor-victim bleeds;/ Your heads must come. To the cold tomb;/ Only the actions of the just/ Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.” – I got interested in that poem when I was twenty or so, and wrote a prophetic version, or paraphrase, of it, or, prophetic, in the sense that a couple of the lines seem to have come true. This is dated 1949. And what I was paraphrasing (was) – “Some men with swords may reap the field” – Some men – duh datta - might do this, but that, that (and then) that will happen. And also, “And plant fresh laurels where they kill:/ But their strong nerves at last must yield;/ They tame but one another still”.
Student: Is there a title to that poem?
AG: “The Glories of Our Blood And State”– James Shirley – 1659, apposite to (my own) “Stanzas: Written At Night in Radio City”, 1949. [Allen reads in its entirety, all 8 stanzas of his poem – “If money made the mind more sane./ Or money mellowed in the bowel/ The hunger beyond the hunger’s pain,/ Or money choked the mortal growl/ And made the groaner grin again,/ Or did the laughing lamb embolden/ To loll where has the lion lain,/ I’d go make money and be golden”…”If fame were not a fickle charm/ There were far more famous men;/ May boys amaze the world to arm/ Yet their charms are changed again,/ And fearful hero’s turn to harm..”…”O hollow fame that makes me groan;/ We are a king without a name/ Regain thine angel’s lost renown/ As in the mind’s forgotten meadow,/ Where brightest shades sleep under stone,/ Man runs after his own shadow” ] - Well what I was doing there was, talking about heroes there, “some men with swords”.. (battle, Pentagon), “may reap the field/ And plant fresh laurels (the laurel brow for poetics, music), “where they kill/ But their strong nerves at last must yield;/ They tame but one another still.” ..”Yet their charms are changed again,/ And fearful heroes turn to harm;/ But the shambles is a sham/ A few angels on a farm/” (a communal farm), ”Fare more fancy with their lamb.”
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Spontaneous Poetics - 46 (Carew and Waller)
[Thomas Carew (1595-1640)]
AG: The reason I’ve been going through all this poetry is that I’ve been proposing, in a sense, to teach modern poetics, or improvised or spontaneous poetics, but what I’m pointing out is that into my own verse, and in my own ear, and in my own body, there are certain rhythms from classic English poetry, from the anthology of songs, which makes my verse subtle, so I’m trying to introduce those same rhythms into your ear, for texts for you to go back to, to get these rhythms in your nervous system so that your own songs, when you come to compose them, will at least have the advantage of having heard the most refined and delicate rhythms that have already been invented and used by song-men past.
As Thomas Carew, 1640, wrote a song which also has an archetypal sequence or rhythm – “Ask me no more where Jove bestows,/ When June is past, the fading rose..”…”Ask me no more if east or west/ The phoenix builds a spicy nest;/ For unto you at last she flies,/ And in your fragrant bosom dies” - Just as rhythmic music. If you have words like that, the melodies come instantly, with that kind of time, with that kind of sweet time. You can hear that practically. What would that be, then? [Allen begins/attempts singing it] “–“Ask me no more..”, “Ask me no more where Jove bestows/ When June is past, the fading rose”, or whatever you come to, but, “Ask me no more where Jove bestows,/ When June is past”. No, “more where Jove bestows,/ When June is past, the fading rose..”, “the fading rose”.
So, just by following up the forms of the spoken voice, in reciting, the tones of the spoken voice making complete common sense of the words, you can decipher or elicit melodic tones, so that in some good poetry, where the vowels are heard clearly, the rests are heard clearly, like, “Ask me no more where Jove bestows,/ When June is past, the fading rose..” (you can actually hear the musical melody notes implicit in the spoken tones). But for that you have to have very clear music.
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[Edmund Waller (1606-1687)]
The most clear music in this genre is by Edmund Waller, whom (Ezra) Pound also relates to . Another great classic “Song”[Allen reads “Go, lovely rose!/ Tell her that wastes her time and me/ That bow she knows/ When I resemble her to thee,/How sweet and fait she seems to be..”…”Then dir! That she/ The common fate of all things rare/May read in thee/How small a part of time they share/ That are so wondrous, sweet and fair!”] – There, for commencement rhythm, as it is a song – “Go, comma, and, long rest – “Go lovely rose”. That would be the equivalent, in a way, in Pound’s ear, as, say, if you were counting vowel-length, or if you were balancing weight of statement on weight of statement, the three-word, “Go, lovely rose!”, might well balance “Tell her that wastes her time and me”. The two lines are, in some respect, equal, and actually would be sung, probably, as..[Allen attempts to demonstrate by singing] - “Go, lovely rose!/ Tell her that wastes her time and me”, or some similar statement in melody. The ear here, unlike most 20th century lyric ears, or rhyming ears, is musical, an ear of music-time – an ear with music-time in it, so that the lines don’t have to be exactly the same length of syllables, or length of accents to be the same length for the breath. The “Go, lovely rose”, is carried on in the same length of breath as “Tell her that wastes her time and me”. How many knew of that song, “Go, lovely rose!”? How many had read that before? How many had not? [disappointing show of hands] – That’s astounding, because I thought (that) that was the most famous poem around, practically. Anyway, it’s by a man named Edmund Waller and it’s 1645.
[Edmund Waller (1606-1687)]
The most clear music in this genre is by Edmund Waller, whom (Ezra) Pound also relates to . Another great classic “Song”[Allen reads “Go, lovely rose!/ Tell her that wastes her time and me/ That bow she knows/ When I resemble her to thee,/How sweet and fait she seems to be..”…”Then dir! That she/ The common fate of all things rare/May read in thee/How small a part of time they share/ That are so wondrous, sweet and fair!”] – There, for commencement rhythm, as it is a song – “Go, comma, and, long rest – “Go lovely rose”. That would be the equivalent, in a way, in Pound’s ear, as, say, if you were counting vowel-length, or if you were balancing weight of statement on weight of statement, the three-word, “Go, lovely rose!”, might well balance “Tell her that wastes her time and me”. The two lines are, in some respect, equal, and actually would be sung, probably, as..[Allen attempts to demonstrate by singing] - “Go, lovely rose!/ Tell her that wastes her time and me”, or some similar statement in melody. The ear here, unlike most 20th century lyric ears, or rhyming ears, is musical, an ear of music-time – an ear with music-time in it, so that the lines don’t have to be exactly the same length of syllables, or length of accents to be the same length for the breath. The “Go, lovely rose”, is carried on in the same length of breath as “Tell her that wastes her time and me”. How many knew of that song, “Go, lovely rose!”? How many had read that before? How many had not? [disappointing show of hands] – That’s astounding, because I thought (that) that was the most famous poem around, practically. Anyway, it’s by a man named Edmund Waller and it’s 1645.
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Spontaneous Poetics - 47 (Shelley and Hart Crane 1)
[Joseph Severn (1793- 1879) Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus UnBound (1845), oil on canvas, Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome, Italy]
AG: We were onto the subject of time and breath and (now) I want to skip a couple of centuries and shift to (Percy Bysshe) Shelley, to hear another kind of breath. (Also, I should say, as far as I know, I will be staying here until the end of the session. I won't be here in the second session, (or I certainly won't be teaching in the second session, because I'll be called home. My father isn't in such good shape, but I don't have to rush home now, so I'll be here teaching). [Allen, as it happened, was indeed called away. He was at Naropa, teaching, when his father passed away, on July 8, 1976 - On his flight back to New Jersey, he wrote the immortal "Father Death Blues" - "Hey Father Death, I'm flying home/ Hey poor man, you're all alone/Hey old daddy, I know where I'm going.." ]
So now I want to get into some longer breath (since I'm established here and not running away). There are a couple of poems of Shelley's that I'd like to lay out. Now how many have read Shelley here? Lets see, we have, it says, in the class, forty. Forty have read Shelley. How many have not read Shelley? - Great - As long as there's some new ears that's the best. How many here (of the 40) have read The "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty"? - How many have not read that? -- "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty"? - Okay - And how many have read the "Ode To The West Wind"? - So that's the most famous poem around. How many have heard the "Ode To The West Wind" read aloud? vocalized? Who did it? Who's reading all that (aside from me)?
Student: Didn't we read it here last year?
AG: Yeah. Well, in the class we did, I read it, Gregory Corso read it, W.S.Merwin read it, and Anne Waldman read it, in one classroom..
So..yeah..we're dealing with time and the rests, which have an emotional quality, because they relate to the breath and the halts in the breath, and the sudden stoppings of breath, or impulses of breath - the tones which are carried on the breath, where they're sincere syllables to intone, where they're sincere syllables to intone. We were dealing with the smaller pieces, smaller constructions of breath, but then with the Romantics, we have a longer, or a more dazzling or longer inspiration, (meaning breath). So poetic inspiration has to do, literally, with breathing. That old hackneyed word - inspiration. There are a few poets who have that ecstatic inspiration articulated in their poems (and manifest-able, in the sense that anybody who will pronounce the sentences that they've written down, following their own score of time - by punctuation - commas, periods, exclamation points - following their punctuation, anybody who's willing to open themselves up and vocalize it, can get into that, or a similar state, of ecstasy. So it's like an ecstasy-machine of language, because it works on the nervous system, through the breath. What you're doing is reproducing the breathing of the poet in his state of ecstasy, as he's arranged his breathing for you to breathe it. So, in a sense, his spirit (breath - spirit, somewhere in its Indo-European root, has something to do with breath, the poet's breath)..
Student: Spirit - to inspire.
AG: Yeah, inspire, spirit. The poet's spirit is actually then, in a way, if not eternal, immortal (in the sense of it passing from body-to-body), it can be passed from body-to-body - that spirit, or that breath, or that inspiration, or spirit, that exact spirit, that measured spirit, that spirit measured to ecstasy, can be passed body-to-body.
There are a few poems that exemplify that out of Shelley. It's a quality you get a little bit in (Edgar Allan) Poe, you get a little bit of it in Hart Crane, there's some in (William) Wordsworth, there's some in some of the earlier poets that I've skipped over, like (Henry) Vaughan and (Thomas) Traherne, a little in (John) Milton. Actually, almost any poet has a little of it and you can get it in a little form, like that really mournful "Go, lovely rose!" - that's really a terrific thing if it can (be) put into a small form. Sometimes it needs a little more breathing, like hyperventilation. "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty" - "Beauty perceived not by the senses but by spiritual illumination", says the footnote. [Allen proceeds to read all seven stanzas of Shelley's "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty" - "The awful shadow of some unseen Power.."..."Whom Spirit fair, thy spells did bind/ To fear himself and love all human kind"] - That's Shelley in 1817, at the age of 25. And at the age of 28, (let's see, born 1792, so at the age of 28, he died at 30, so, two years before he died) is the "Ode To The West Wind", which is in a later tradition of (Arthur) Rimbaud,Jimmy Dean, self-dissolution, suicide-rhapsody, suicide-prophecy, at the same time, triumphant penetration through time with his intellect and with his rhythm and breath, or spirit, or inspiration. [Allen begins by surveying the notes] - Let's see, a "clarion" ("Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth") is a melodious trumpet-call, as in a battle, "Maenad" ("Of some fierce Maenad"), for those who don't know, they're frenzied dancers, worshippers of the drunken drinking god Dionysus, god of wine and fertility - "maenads" are mentioned, "Baiae" - B-A-I-A-E ("Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay") - Baiae Bay is a bay outside of Naples - very pure blue water - theCumaean Sibyl, the Sibyl of Cumae, had her cave near Baiae's Bay. It's outside of Naples, a little north of Naples, very blue water. Near Capri, the island of Capri is nearby. And he mentions a "lyre" ("Make me thy lyre..") which is a small harp, traditionally used to accompany songs and recited poems and poems which are recited. So it ends with a lyre. The "Ode To The West Wind" has always been considered, like, the (best) apologia for poetry, or a romantically perfect demonstration of inspiration. So this is an "Ode To The West Wind". [Allen begins with the opening line] - "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being" - So he begins with breath, notice. And it's about breath, so it's about inspiration. The poem is, in itself, about itself - 0r the speaker is writing about his own spirit, or it is spirit writing about spirit, or it is breath on the subject of breath, or inspiration on the subject of inspiration. The "West Wind", wind of change, of Autumn, beginning of decay and Winter, wind coming from the West, from autumnal cold. [Allen then proceeds to recite the whole poem, all five sections, in its entirety - "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being"..."The trumpet of prophecy! O Wind,/ If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"] - I think he made it. Because there have been so many voices after him who walked underneath the Tower of London, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or at Stonehenge, saying "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is", that self-immolation into the breath, that actually his voice has re-echoed over and over again and that particular ecstatic entry into inspiration has repeated itself over and over wherever the poem is read aloud with any kind of breathing equivalent to the lines. It's a little bit different each time you read it, but it's worth going (to) a solitary place, on a bridge, or on a beach, where you can't be heard, and trying to read that, and get(ting) to that line, "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is/ What if my leaves are falling like its own", and you'll be the forest!
His best-known poem is "Adonais". Well, maybe not his best-known, but the solidest, the most solidly-known poem is "Adonais", and, actually, it would be worth reading the entire text of "Adonais", but it takes about twenty minutes and we don't have that time. (But) it would be an interesting thing to do. I've done it a few times, and what I'd like to do is just read a piece of it, toward the end, and then compare it with one other American writer from the (19)20's/(19)30's, who is one of the rare Americans who could also build a mighty organ-like, doom-like, choir-ing stanza, like Shelley, Hart Crane. "Adonais: is Shelley's elegy for John Keats, a younger friend, poet. So I'll read the 47th to the 55th verses. Well, it's too good to skip, actually.. Maybe I'll start it from the 41st..I could go back to the 39th - "Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep.." - 40th - "He has outsoared the shadow of our night" - 41st verse - "He lives, he wakes - 'tis Death is dead, not he/ Mourn not for Adonais.." - 42 [Allen, at this point, picks up Shelley's "Adonais" and reads it through to the end - "The soul of Adonais, like a star/ Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are"] - Do you have the Hart Crane? Does somebody have a copy of Crane? Well, we could examine references and the ideas, like the young kid Thomas Chatterton, who was a poet-suicide. But what I want to do, while we're in this field of inspiration, (is to) read from Hart Crane. If you have time, we'll run over, maybe five minutes, the last stanzas of his long poem, "The Bridge", called "Atlantis" (The whole poem, "The Bridge", begins with a quote from Shelley, actually - so Hart Crane was turned on to Percy Bysshe Shelley also). To make it clear - you don't have to follow the meaning here. just the sound and the ecstasy, because it's a very complicated poem (complicated, in the sense that he was really hung up on it, and he put into (it) everything he could think of, and made all the words totally dense, so it would be like iron ringing on iron from vowel to vowel). It's called "Atlantis", so it's like an ideal land, or a vision of a universal harmony force-field. The image that he uses to locate it is Brooklyn Bridge, which looks like a harp, because of all the strings, or like an altar, to him (and those are the main images). The whole section of the poem is building, superimposing different images of perfection, music, natural seasons, cycles of seasons, prayers, harps and altars, on the image of the Brooklyn Bridge, which is supposed to bridge, (to) be the bridge between the past and the future in this industrial age, the bridge to some divine idealistic Whitmanic futurity. Mainly, actually, finally, music is the answer here. And he has a quotation from Plato at the beginning - "Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and system". [Allen proceeds to read from Hart Crane - "Through the bound cable strands, the arching path/Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings - /Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate/The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.."..."Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring/ The serpent with the eagle in the leaves...?/ Whispers antiphonal in azure swing".
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Allen Ginsberg-Brian Shields 1987 Dallas Radio Interview
BS: Welcome to People - Brian Shields - KRLD News. This week on People, we’re talking with Allen Ginsberg. Now if you haven’t heard of Allen Ginsberg, one wonders where you’ve been for the past 20-25 years. Allen Ginsbeg is, of course, a poet, one of the best-known poets, really, of this part of the 20th Century. He has written extensively and has been involved in politics and political movenents as well, and we’d like to..
AG: And artistic movements
BS: And artistic movements. In fact, one of the great leaders of artistic movements in this century. Thank you very much for joining me today.
AG: Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. I have lots to do in town, actually, I came down for a number of reasons, one is for the opening of my photographic show, on the 15th, I think it is, that’s tomorrow night, (or Thursday), January 15 [1987 - sic], at the Dallas Museum of Art, (from 7 to 9, I think it’ll be). I’ll be doing a poetry reading in relation to a series of photographs that are being hung in the museum, work that I’ve done, snapshots, over the last 40 years, ((the) first one is 1947, a self-portrait, and the last is 1986, (a) portrait of William Burroughs).
BS : So what sort of things keep you busy these days?
AG: Well, I’ve been working with some Dallas musicians, including Bugs Henderson and a producer here, Michael Minzer, We produced.. This year (I) came down earlier, (and) worked with Bugs Henderson’s band doing the blues number, and then worked with the Garland (Chamber) Symphony Orchestra and did a version of (William) Blake’sNurses’s Song,and that came out on a record called “Made Up In Texas”, which is being distributed now in most of the independent record shops So you can get that. It’s a lot of Texas musicians (including me, I’m not a Texan, I’m just a solo-ist with a bunch of Texas musicians), but it’s, like, a compilation album, and I have two really nice works on it. I was really pleased. It’s about the best thing I’ve done recording - singing blues, (which I always wanted to do - as an old Jewish intellectual, naturally, I always wanted to sing black blues! – like Al Jolson, or somethin’!) And then, singing William Blake, (as a sort of Gnostic intellectual, I was interested in making mantra out of William Blake’s songs. So that I have this chorus.. and it’s a chamber orchestra, working on that Blake text, with a tune that I made up. Then, at the same time, I’m lecturing at.. today I lectured at TTU (Texas Technology University) on “Poetry, Culture and Power Politics”, pointing out that everything in the world these days, and evermore, and ever since, and in the past, has been subjective, from Einstein backward and forward. We’re people, and we’re subject, and its through our eyes we see the universe. It’s nobody else’s, but us. We don’t see the universe through microscopes or telescopes, because we have to look through our eyeballs at those, so, actually, everything is person, everything is subject, everything is subjective . Or as Einstein said,“the measuring instrument determines the shape (the appearance) of the phenomenal world”. So I was lecturing on the Imagination and how it really determines how we see the world, whether you‘re in the Oval room in the White House, trying to double-cross the Iranians andtheContras and the Sandinistas, or in our own bedrooms, trying to make love to our wives, or double-cross them, it still is (always is) a subjective world that we’re working with.
BS: Where does poetry fit in with all of this? I mean it seems that sometimes that poetry is almost a forgotten art , people don’t think of modern poets that much, where does poetry fit in in this realm?
AG: Well, in my world, it fits in from the point of view that I just put out two books of poetry. Last year, I had Collected Poems (1984) – which covered the years from (19)47 to 1980, and is called "Collected Poems", and this year I have another book called "White Shroud", which are the poems I wrote from 1980 to 1985, and that just came out from Harper and Row and I was doing some book-signings (and will be signing books at the museum when I give that poetry-reading/lecture with my photograph show)..
BS: I guess I was asking a slightly more esoteric question..Where do..
AG: I didn’t finish my own personal..
BS: Ok. Go for it.
AG: I didn’t finish my personal answer. And then, I did a thirty-year retrospective volume of the poem Howl, which is the best-known poem I wrote, which has the original texts with.. in a facsimilie, from the original manuscripts, and transcriptions, and it is sub-titled “..Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by (the) Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, (an) Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts..” (that’s a mini-anthology of texts that fed into my own style, from Christoper Smart to Hart Crane to William Carlos Williams to Kurt Schwitters, the Dada-ist) - and it also has a lot of photographs that I took in the (19)50’s - and a bibliography.
So what does all that amount to? - (and) on a larger scale? – (It’s) that poetry is just simply, really a representation of our own imaginations, of what we see in the world, and how we interpret it. Ronald Reagan getting up and reading from a script in the White House is pronouncing his own prose-poetry, (written, scripted for him, presumably by a Mr (Pat) Buchanan, or someone else, another script-writer), So that’s their imaginative version of reality, and we all have our own. But the government, ultimately, is of words. You know, you get up and pronounce words, and they’re made into laws, or they’re made into speeches, and they influence people. And in the long run, poetry has a (the) longest influence. The projection of the poet’s imagination, the statements of the world, or the description of the world that the poet gives, in the long run, lasts much longer than the politician who's trying just to manipulate your mind. The poet is trying to give a candid account of how he really sees the world. The politician is trying to give a non-candid, somewhat deceptive, version of how he wants you to think he sees it, which might be different from the way he (actually) sees it. So, if the politician’s poetry is self-contradictory, you find his cover-story, or his imaginal story, falling apart in mid-air, like a snake uncoiling himself in mid-air, as we see happening now [1987] in the White House, with the contradictory images of tall-in-the-saddle simultaneous with pay-off-the-hostages, pay-off-of-the-hostages, the contradictory image of not one cent tribute, but everything for defense and the alternative image of we’re-actually-cowards -"why-don’t-we buy-them-off- and-get-our-hostages-back”, the contradictory image of “we’re living by the rule of law” and then the alternative image - "we’re secretly doing deals with the Contras", the contradictory image of “we don’t believe in building up the national debt” and the alternative image of spending and spending and taxing and taxing in order to buy a huge military-industrial complex, located in.. Dallas Texas, probably! So, where does it all wind up? If you want, not the objective truth but the subjective truth, you gotta ask the poet. If you want a subjective lie, you gotta ask the politician.
So what does all that amount to? - (and) on a larger scale? – (It’s) that poetry is just simply, really a representation of our own imaginations, of what we see in the world, and how we interpret it. Ronald Reagan getting up and reading from a script in the White House is pronouncing his own prose-poetry, (written, scripted for him, presumably by a Mr (Pat) Buchanan, or someone else, another script-writer), So that’s their imaginative version of reality, and we all have our own. But the government, ultimately, is of words. You know, you get up and pronounce words, and they’re made into laws, or they’re made into speeches, and they influence people. And in the long run, poetry has a (the) longest influence. The projection of the poet’s imagination, the statements of the world, or the description of the world that the poet gives, in the long run, lasts much longer than the politician who's trying just to manipulate your mind. The poet is trying to give a candid account of how he really sees the world. The politician is trying to give a non-candid, somewhat deceptive, version of how he wants you to think he sees it, which might be different from the way he (actually) sees it. So, if the politician’s poetry is self-contradictory, you find his cover-story, or his imaginal story, falling apart in mid-air, like a snake uncoiling himself in mid-air, as we see happening now [1987] in the White House, with the contradictory images of tall-in-the-saddle simultaneous with pay-off-the-hostages, pay-off-of-the-hostages, the contradictory image of not one cent tribute, but everything for defense and the alternative image of we’re-actually-cowards -"why-don’t-we buy-them-off- and-get-our-hostages-back”, the contradictory image of “we’re living by the rule of law” and then the alternative image - "we’re secretly doing deals with the Contras", the contradictory image of “we don’t believe in building up the national debt” and the alternative image of spending and spending and taxing and taxing in order to buy a huge military-industrial complex, located in.. Dallas Texas, probably! So, where does it all wind up? If you want, not the objective truth but the subjective truth, you gotta ask the poet. If you want a subjective lie, you gotta ask the politician.
BS: Granted, You’ve released all of these books and you’re putting out these books, but aside from you, and maybe one or two other people, where are today’ s poets? Why aren’t we hearing more of them?
AG: I think you probably hear more poetry in the airwaves today than you ever heard through the voice of Bob Dylan or the replays of old John Lennon, or some younger poets, like I heard a little folk-singer named “King”today, who was singing songs that sounded like Woody Guthrie, topical songs. But if you listen to Dylan, or, even say, The Talking Heads or Blondie(Chris Stein, those people), Joe Strummer (The Clash)..
BS: Lou Reed
AG: Lou Reed..you get some legitimate poetry. I ‘ve even put out a record withJohn Hammond Senior, the old producer, put out an album called First Blues a couple of years ago, already out of print [recently (2013 re-released by Ginsberg Recordings] and the poetry I’m singing on that, Airplane Blues, this local, made-up-in-Texas album that we just put out, that's in ..the text of that I thought good enough to put in this new book of poems White Shroud. So, there’s lots of poetry. The classic poetry which is lyric poetry, (lyric, with a lyre, stringed instrument plus words), lyric poetry flourishes now in.. tv-world, as well as a kind of a pictorial poetry when you have a video-music, when you get collage, or jump-cut, or montage, picture..pictographs (of course that's not verbal, but), there’s lots of good lyric (and there’s lots of lousy lyric, and soap-opera lyric, and dumb lyric, and sadistic lyric, and jerky lyric, and dopey lyric) - and (but) there’s also some really sharp lyric (if you listen to Leonard Cohen and others)
BS: Is there a danger that perhaps poetry or the poet who we think traditionally reads his work has been co-opted by this world of music and rock n roll and this whole commercial world?
AG: Well you’ll remember there was.., people worried about the danger of the poet who just writes it and doesn’t read it being co-opted by the reader (the poet who’s good at reading it) .Then there’s the worry that the poet who’s good at reading it is going to be co-opted by the poet who gets up and sings it - but I don’t think Dylan has done anything except enrich(ed) the whole field, and turned people on to look at the words more - and more acutely. Dylan has made everybody smarter about words, I think, you know, just raised the whole level of consciousness of language among younger generations, for the last twenty years. Before that, nobody actually listened to the words of songs, or knew how to examine carefully double-entendre and symbolic meaning, and interpret (like you interpret the Bible?), interpreting the words of lyrics. Now people do that. So I think that there is more of an awareness
BS: You talked a moment ago about how it’s the role of the poet to give a subjective view of the world and also you talked about the fact that, in your view at least, it’s the human being that must be the person that we measure things against. What do you think about the popular attacks on this philosophy, the philosophy of humanism, that are so pervasive now, coming especially from the Christian right and those people. What do you think of those attacks?
AG: Well, they’re a lot like the old Stalinist view - that there’s one truth and Stalin is their leader and he tells them, or the Communist Party is the leader, and you go along with that ideology, and any other view is, like, un-patriotic, or un-natural. So you have the new Right, and the patriotic Right, wrapping themselves in the flag, like scoundrels (remember that old saying, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”?) In Russia or America, it’s the same thing, you have these guys saying that they have the one and only authoritative view and that comes from the voice of God and they’re talking for God (they’ve got the nerve to say that they’re talking for God!) while never defining who that "God" is, except by their interpretation of an old book. And so it’s the same mirror-image of Stalinism, and that’s why they’re involved in this Anti-Communist crusade. It’s like they’re looking into their own mirror-image and (are) scared of the devil! (they believe in "the devil", and they believe in absolute evil, and, the worst part is, they believe that they are absolutely good). And so it’s that same kind of polarization - black and white - that you get under the Communists. So I would say it’s another form of what we dislike in Communism. What we dislike in Communism is that authoritarian flavor – book-burning, moralist hypocrisy, double-talk about patriotism, making use of the flag to wrap their own subjective mania in. The worst part however is this egocentric assumption of divine authority. You know, there may be something sacred in this world, and there may be something divine in this world, but for any singular person to assert that he’s got a direct line from God, and to talk as if he’s the voice of God is, in a sense, the worst pride and the worst sin.
BS: We only have a couple of minutes left. I’d like to get you to assess, if you could, very briefly, the work that you’ve done. What have you done that you are most proud of and what should we look for out of Allen Ginsberg in the future?
AG: Well I would say being able to reproduce in a flash the actual texture of my own mind and maybe communicate that in single lines or mages or dreams. Like, I was working on little 17 syllable one-line declarative sentence-poems. [Allen proceeds to read a few - "136 Syllables At Rocky Mountain Dharma Center"] - "Caught shoplifting ran out of the department store at sunrise and woke up." - So that gets the whole transition from dream-state to waking to realization to relief - or “At 4 a.m. the two middle-aged men sleeping together holding hands” – Surprise ending! - or “A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitos" - or "Tail turned to red sunset on a juniper crown a lone magpie cawks" - or "In the half-light of dawn, a few birds warble under the Pleiades" - No, it’s getting in a flash, a huge space of time, or a little natural event, like the cool air rising above marsh-grass that would sustain a dandelion-seed among the mosquitos flitting around, or the space-gap between the little bird, warbling at dawn, and the vast Pleiades above - getting that glimpse of the sense of, the sensation of, space.
Also being able to record frankly what’s going on in my mind and setting, maybe, a touchstone for candor, or clarity of, what do you really think when you’re alone at night in the dark, talking to yourself, nobody listening, what do you really say to yourself? I’d like to hear what Jerry Fallwell really says to himself? I’d like to hear what Ronald Reagan really says to himself. Well at least you can hear what I say to myself, what any great poet says to himself. As Bob Dylan once said “To live outside the law you must be honest”. And you might apply that to the White House - "Even the President of the United States must someday stand naked". [the exact quotation - from Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" - is, of course "But even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked"]
BS: Very briefly, what are your goals for the future?
AG: To stand naked to my death bed. And to continue singing, continue taking images for the photographic eye, so that people in the future can look back into their telescope, into this time now, or past time, see in a picture what was going on, and to make a telescope out of poetry, so that people can look into my heart and the heart of the later part of the twentieth-century, so that young kids in the twenty-first century will be inspired to be candid and frank and genius-like in their generosity towards others.
BS: There are a thousand more questions I’d love to ask of you, but, unfortunately, we’re out of time. Allen Ginsberg. Thanks a lot for joining me today...
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Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 116
There's going to be a big new William Burroughs show opening next week in Hamburg, at the Deichtorhallen (from March 15 - August 18), curated by Udo Breger and Axel Heil- "The exhibition's goal is to make tangible, in review, and for the first time within Europe on such a scale, the visionary volatility of William S. Burroughs' literary output, while at the same time showing the impact of his ideas and philosophy on a wider network of authors, musicians, composers, painters, photographers, video artists and film-makers. The curators (and the Director of the Deichtorhallen, Dirk Luckow) will be speaking (introducing the show) on Friday night.
This, hot on the heels of (last year's) Austrian show, Cut-ups, Cut-ins, Cut-outs (see this recently-posted video). That exhibition (which opened on February 7) is currently on view at The International Center of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Andrew O"Hagen's piece on the Beats(principally, Kerouac - it's a nominal review of Joyce Johnson's new memoir and the On The Road movie), in the New York Review of Books , is a must-read. "Kerouac and the Beats", he writes, "more than any other school or group or tradition in American letters have spawned a miasma of retellings in every genre"..."the Beats..were..part of the process by which fictionality became entwined with everyday selfhood...with the Beats it was always about their lives". He goes on to make some pretty trenchant remarks about that old saw - the Beat Generation and sexism - "We might put the male chauvinism down to the times, but what of the Women Beware Women aspect (?)", he asks (and) "We don't judge writers, even very holy, freewheeling, ones, on how they treat their wives and children, or how they cheat on their girlfriends. We look at the work and accept what miracles we can, on their own account mainly, but also in lieu of moral perfection..." Ronald L Collins and David M Skover, in their new book, "Mania - The Story of the Outraged and Outrageous Lives that Launched a Cultural Revolution", put it more succinctly - "It was a world where, by and large, men were verbs and women objects".
Collins and Skover, both University law-professors (and co-authors of 2002's "The Trials of Lenny Bruce"), obviously focus a good deal on the legal issues (the "Howl" trial, Naked Lunch, the interface between legislation and morality, questions of personal responsibility, free speech). Their book (just out) has had some enthusiastic early reviews. From Kirkus Review - "A balanced history, sometimes admiring, sometimes blistering.." (and) Karl Woolf, at CCLaP (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography) - "This is an outstanding book for those curious about the Beats, but (who) don't know where to start" (Woolf also notes that it features "a comprehensive bibliography of novels, poetry, biography, newspaper articles and academic criticism"). Some may be put off by the book's easy "novelistic" form and the initial focus on Beat "scandal" (Lucien Carr-David Kammerer (inevitably!), Joan Burroughs (likewise, pertinent to the case), "death, drugs and depravity" - the "mania" of the title) - but that's doubtless what will sell copies. "The madcap savage world of the Beats is laid out in spades", Publisher's Weekly, somewhat breathlessly, crows. The authors will be appearing in Washington D.C., March 10, New York City, March 14 and Charlottesville, Virginia, March 23rd.
Early word on Richard Hell's memoir (due out March 12) - "I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp" - looking back to 1976 - "Allen Ginsberg once liked my looks on the street and invited me over..I declined without hesitation, automatically, never having felt much rapport with Ginsberg from his writings, and because it wasn't in my range to give encouragement to a gay guy trying to pick me up, though it didn't bother me." Richard would soon become Allen's upstairs neighbor (in the legendary "poets building" at 437 East 12th Street). This dismissal here should not be taken too simplistically. We've already charted the connection from the "Blank Generation" to the "Beats" - here - (here's Daniel Kane's scholarly article on "Hell's roles in the late sixties and early seventies as a small-magazine publisher and poet") and Richard speaks eloquently about his relation to Beat culture in Maria Beatty's 1989 documentary, Gang of Souls.
He will be reading from the book at City Lights, March 25.
Robert Johnson (had he lived) would have been 101 today, by the way!
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UMass Kerouac Tapes & Lowell Portfolio
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| [Jack Kerouac in Fred W. McDarrah's apartment, Dec. 10, 1959. Copyright: Fred McDarrah/Getty Images] |
University of Massachusetts, Lowell, is increasingly becoming an important Kerouac nexus, and a visit to their Kerouac Center For Public Humanities web-site is well worth the time, not the least for the invaluable streaming-audio clippings there-contained (William S Burroughs on "Jack's French" and (on) "Outcast Migrations" - Allen, with at least 8 clippings, including this (transcription of which follows) - Allen on Jack and.. "Visions" -
(see also Allen-on-Jack here, at the 1973 Salem State Kerouac Conference)
AG: ...The one thing I got.. he (Kerouac) went through phases of.. let us say, (with using the word) “visions”.. he wanted different visions each season, the visions of each season (that didn’t mean the supernatural visions, it meant the new insight or the new empathy or the new revelation, for him of each season, what new depth of.. he specialized in the thing in.) I kept being amazed by how, year-after-year, or even week after week, he would return, say, from his own household, with some new symbol –symbol – he was a symbolist in that way.. early.. and his first symbolic (symbolist) book was The Sea Is My Brother, or whatever, so there was a lot of... you could say he was a symbolist, there was a lot of influence of symbolism in his personal view of life, that certain things became symbols to him, certain, like colors, or persons, or events, or notions - like the word “fellaheen”, or “golden ash”, or the word “bleak” - or people, certain people, would become symbols that he would use as a sort of vocabulary in talking to me and others (and, in his novels, extended).
And it was.. and he used the word “visions” for that, likeVisions of Gerard, Visions of Cody, the symbolic moments, or moments of greatest poignancy.
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Yeah, no I think he speaks somewhere..He’s spoken of.. (either in letters or books).. of his “vision” (quote unquote) of Bull Lee (Burroughs), as someone on an infinite plain, staring off into the horizon.. (I’ve) forgotten exactly what it was.. but..it was just the posture and attitude and gesture of Burroughs, staring off into the infinite horizon that.. ..That’s the type of vision he would have. And that conception of Burroughs would last for years – the last of the Faustianmen with his hands in this great desert, looking out towards these.. (toward) horizon. So that would be the… So he did have these symbols, or visions, what he called visions, (assuredly) ,which might, in another literary context, be called symbols, or archetypes, or apercus - A-P-E-R-C-U - or poems, or lyric thoughts, or concept(ion)s. (It was) Burroughs version of the "routine”, Burroughs’ mental working-term of the routine, say
Well, no I think it meant.. Jack meant, in his Visions of Cody.. It wasn’t.. I remember talking with him about this - (that) the trouble with On The Road was that he had to follow chronological sequence, but he.. what he really wanted to do was to get into describing certain moments – it was the moments (like in Proust’s tea madeleine), so it was those moments of intense vision that he wanted to poet-ize. So the whole point of Visions of Cody then was.. to go from one high-point to another high-point, one vision to another, or one apercu to another, one classic moment with Neal (Cody) to another classic moment - and then string them along and let them form the structure of the book.
Further audio observations include - "Death in Jack's Writing" ( "Ginsberg believes that Kerouac's experience, watching his father suffer and die permenantly affected his writing"), "Jack And The Question of Sexuality" ("Ginsberg believes that Kerouac's entire way of being in the world rejects (simplistic) labels"), "American Vision Quests And Neal Cassady" ("Ginsberg responds to a critique by William S Burroughs"), "Mexico City Blues and "Memorial Cello Time" ("Allen Ginsberg dissects the meaning of "Memorial Cello Time" in Kerouac's novel, "Mexico City Blues"), "The Town and the City" and Consciousness" ("Ginsberg interprets Kerouac's passage about the football stadium in his novel, "The Town and the City"), and, "Jack's Prose" ("Ginsberg discusses Jack's prose style and suggests its relationship to the technologies of film").
Elsewhere on the site, John Suiter has published an excellent photo-portfolio and essay -" Kerouac's Lowell: A Life on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers". there's images of the On The Road scroll, there's images of Kerouac book covers, there's...
Garrett Caples review of John Suiter's portfolio may be read here.
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Jack Kerouac Peggy Lee and Billie Holiday
Jack Kerouac's Birthday tomorrow.
We thought we'd begin the celebrations with this.
Jack, goofy and happy, singing a pretty free-form (actually, a seriously free-form!) rendition of (the "Roaring Twenties" classic) "Ain't We Got Fun"
("the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" - "the rich get richer and the poor get laid off" - "the rich get richer and the poor get.. children"!)
We thought it'd be interesting to trace the song (music by Richard Whiting, lyrics by Gus Kahn and Raymond Egar) through it's various manifestations - from this and this and this (all 1921 versions) to this (Doris Day and Danny Thomas in 1952) to this ("the incomparable Miss Peggy Lee")
"Jack Kerouac is dedicating this number to lovely and beautiful, skinny, shapely Sue Evans, with the beautiful box"!
And, heck, from the same source (Rykodisc's 1999 CD - Jack Kerouac Reads On The Road)
here's another - "When A Woman Loves A Man"
Here's Peggy Lee (pretty different, right?)
and (from 1938), the legendary "Lady Day", Billie Holiday
See/speak with you tomorrow, Jack!
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Jack Kerouac's Birthday
[Jack Kerouac - 1942 Naval Reserve photograph - courtesy The Archive - Sketches on Kerouac]
[Jack Kerouac - Staten Island Ferry Dock, New York City 1953 (Photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate)
Jack Kerouac's birthday today! - Happy Birthday, Jack! - Had he lived, he would have been (strange vision!) 91 years old.
Here are some of our more choice Jack Kerouac posts from the Allen Ginsberg Project:
Here's Allen reading from Dharma Bums, here's Kerouac reading from American Haiku (for more vintage Kerouac recordings, check out these resources here). Here and here are the (video) record of the first Kerouac conference (in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1973), here's a little interesting addenda.
Two essential Kerouac movies have returned, temporarily, to You Tube - How long will they be up? - it's anybody's guess, but, right now, you can access them here and here. (notes/transcription from John Antonelli's 1985 documentary may be found here)
Herménégilde Chiasson looks at the French connection (as does Joyce Johnson).
Henry Ferrini looks at Kerouac in Lowell (see also this past weekend's posting)
Here are observations on Mexico City Blues, and, more recently, the Collected Poems
Our 2010 birthday salute featured Jack's extraordinary phantom baseball imagination, (and), in 2012, a portfolio of Allen's photos of his sweet face.
[Jack Kerouac's proposed design for a paperback cover for his novel, On The Road. (1952)]
[Jack Kerouac interviewed by Fernand Seguin, 1967, Radio-Canada (Montreal) tv]
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Spontaneous Poetics - 48 ( Shelley and Hart Crane 2)
June 23, 1976, (Naropa Institute), a new class. Allen picks up from the previous class, with a discussion on Hart Crane and Shelley and a poetry that might be life-affirming and "speakable".
AG: I guess I'll begin. There's going to be a poetry reading tonight - John Ashbery and Dick Gallup. That'll be after this class. And tomorrow night, there's going to be (a) (Chogyam) Trungpa discourse - "Sutra" (which will be open, free, to all members of the student body). So if anybody hasn't picked up on Trungpa's taste or vibration, tomorrow night everybody's invited. It's a general mass-meeting for the entire school, partly to discuss problems with the school, whether the school can survive, and partly so there be some kind of a complete mass-meeting, where everybody's present, in their plasmic bodies, in one spot, to hear dharma, or to check out Trungpa (for) those who haven't checked out Trungpa. Do you know about that? You heard about that?
Student: No, I hadn't heard about that.
AG: Yeah, that's supposed to be announced in all the classes
Student: What time?
AG: Well, people generally begin assembling 8.30-ish and do sitting for an hour or so, and he generally comes in anywhere between 9.00 and 10.00. It's an Agora, like a Forum, or a meeting-place on the outside and a meditation on the inside, and everyone's invited.
My own situation is that I'm not sure where I am or how long I'll be anywhere, so I was thinking if I dropped dead, or had to disappear overnight, what would I want to teach? In two hours? Where we left off was Hart Crane groaning and screaming and rhapsodizing to the absolute and (Percy Bysshe) Shelley having said, "Make me thy lyre even as the forest is". And, after the class, someone came up to me and said, "Hart Crane sounds as if he was.."..Someone came up..who was it that asked me about whether Hart Crane's poetry was, such as it was, total suicide (suicidal)?
Student: It was me
AG: What did you say?
Student: I thought he was headed for a nervous breakdown in some of those lines
AG: Yes
Student: Suicidal
AG: Yeah, and I think I replied that he did actually jump off the back of a boat...
Student: Yeah
AG: ..a few years later. So, in a sense, you could (say) it's a search for the Absolute (like in (Herman) Melville's "Moby Dick" - Captain Ahab finally destroying himself, looking for the pure white spotless home-in-honeyland - or, as any apocalyptic acid-head might jump off a cliff trying to realize the Absolute Genius of his Imagination, when he's not high on acid - by walking naked in the park, or jumping off the Empire State Building, to prove that matter doesn't exist - or that you can penetrate space (if you just have faith) - or that you can walk through walls (if you eat the right vegetables!). If you're pure of heart you can practice magic on the universe. So by sheer desire, Hart Crane was trying to get to God. And he imagined a God that was "Unspeakable (Thou Bridge) to Thee, O Love".
So, in a sense then, the question is "Well, that's alright, and it sure is pretty music, and it's a powerful sound, that Shelley (who died at 30) and that Hart Crane (who died at 34), but what about a poetry we can live with, instead of die with?" - A poetry to live with. Something you can survive on - or something that will take you through old-age (or, at least middle-age, if not old-age). What happens if you don't die? Is all poetry so you've got to die? Is there any kind of poetry that goes beyond apocalyptic breakthrough? What is all this about the "unspeakable"? - "Migrations that will cobblestone the heart, inventions that must needs void memory" [Allen slightly misquotes Hart Crane. It is "Migrations that must needs void memory, Inventions that cobblestone the heart"] - Are we going to be stuck with a poetic invention that's going to wipe out memory, so that we're just going to be plunged in the void?
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Spontaneous Poetics - 49 - A Brief Survey of Haiku
This [Allen hands out a home-made xerox-ed collection] is a little anthology of choice haiku taken from the four-volume set of haiku in the library collected by R.H.Blyth - Spring, Summer, Winter, Autumn. How many have looked into that, or know that collection? It's a collection that (Jack) Kerouac used and Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen all used as a sort of poetics reference encyclopedia handbook inspiration text around 1955. I was reading haiku, then, in those books and chose the best ones, or the ones that stuck in my head, about twenty or thirty, so I'll read them off.The point is that they are related to the activities of Ezra Pound and Willam Carlos Williams and the Imagists and the Objectivists in the American tradition. At least, they are trying to notate what's seen where the eye hits an object - sight, which is where (the eye) hits an object, at least trying to work with material that's palpable, not eliminating the impalpable or subjective sensation but making use of palpable images to suggest "Unspeakable (Thou Bridge) to Thee, O Love", or at least (the) "unspeakable". Or maybe not bothering to worry whether it's "unspeakable" or not, but they're accepting the evidence of their senses and working with what's there (which is a problem for many of the poets here also, of working with the evidence of the senses, or working with direct perception. So these are pretty good exercises."On the low-tide beach/ Everything we pick up/ Moves" - "Tilling the field/ The cloud that never moved/ Is gone" - Buson - "Bringing them up/ They call the silk-worms/ Master" - That's Issa. Issa's very similar to William Carlos Williams in subjective personal humoresque style.
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The uguisu. The uguisu is very traditional in Japanese haiku furniture. It has a familiar cry and is a familiar image in almost all traditional haiku - "Its first note/ The uguisu/ Is upside-down" - "The uguisu/ Poops on the/ Slender plum-branch" -Matsuo - "Ah! the uguisu pooped/On the rice-cake/On the veranda" - or "Ah! the sparrow shat/On the rice-cake/ On the veranda" would be the equivalent. That's Basho, celebrated classicist. "It was such a fine first dream" - this is for New Year's day, a genre of New Year's Day haiku - "It was such a fine first dream/ They said/ I'd made it up" - "The first drink of the year/ I kept it secret/ And smiled to myself" - "A swallow/ Flew out of the nose/ Of the Great Buddha" - that's Issa again - Then, here's a whole series - "Taking the field/ He wipes his snotty hand/ On the plum flowers" - that's also Issa. And Basho's presentation of the same - "The sound of someone/Blowing his nose with his hand/ The plum blossoms at their best" - I guess to wipe off your snot! -"The moon and flowers/ Forty-nine years walking about/ Wasting time" - Issa again - "A frog/ Floating in the water-jar/ Summer rain" - Outside on the porch, a big jar of water, a frog got in by mistake, floating around, can't get out. It was presumably dry and then it got rained on - "Frog/ Floating in the water-jar/ Rains of Summer" - "Summer rain/ A crab crawling out/ Of the stone wash-basin" - "Rains of May/ Here's a paper parcel/ Entrusted to me long ago"
![Japanese Woodblock, Rain Storm Premium Poster]( "Japanese Woodblock, Rain Storm Premium Poster")
My idea of haiku is, actually, ""Rains of May/ Here's a paper parcel" - two disparate images, or two separated images, or two images that wouldn't necessarily have any logical connection, except that they're both noticed one after another, and the haiku artist noticed his mind noticing both in that sequence and wrote it down, not necessarily knowing why they were linked, or why they had a mysterious perfume when linked, or why they made a little flash in the mind when they were linked, but it's like setting up two - a positive and a negative - poles, and (observing) a little spark, (a) lightning-flash between. "Lightning flash/ flint spark" - that's Philip Whalen- "Lightning flash/ flint spark". The "Rains of May" - so, rainy day, somebody sitting brooding about time. "Here's a paper parcel/ Entrusted to me long ago" - somebody's old Kerouac novel, or his mother's autobiography, or the bills of landing for an old opium deal that everyone got busted for - "Rains of May/ Here's a paper parcel/ Entrusted to me long ago" The uguisu. The uguisu is very traditional in Japanese haiku furniture. It has a familiar cry and is a familiar image in almost all traditional haiku - "Its first note/ The uguisu/ Is upside-down" - "The uguisu/ Poops on the/ Slender plum-branch" -Matsuo - "Ah! the uguisu pooped/On the rice-cake/On the veranda" - or "Ah! the sparrow shat/On the rice-cake/ On the veranda" would be the equivalent. That's Basho, celebrated classicist. "It was such a fine first dream" - this is for New Year's day, a genre of New Year's Day haiku - "It was such a fine first dream/ They said/ I'd made it up" - "The first drink of the year/ I kept it secret/ And smiled to myself" - "A swallow/ Flew out of the nose/ Of the Great Buddha" - that's Issa again - Then, here's a whole series - "Taking the field/ He wipes his snotty hand/ On the plum flowers" - that's also Issa. And Basho's presentation of the same - "The sound of someone/Blowing his nose with his hand/ The plum blossoms at their best" - I guess to wipe off your snot! -"The moon and flowers/ Forty-nine years walking about/ Wasting time" - Issa again - "A frog/ Floating in the water-jar/ Summer rain" - Outside on the porch, a big jar of water, a frog got in by mistake, floating around, can't get out. It was presumably dry and then it got rained on - "Frog/ Floating in the water-jar/ Rains of Summer" - "Summer rain/ A crab crawling out/ Of the stone wash-basin" - "Rains of May/ Here's a paper parcel/ Entrusted to me long ago"
Student: Did you write that?
AG: No, no, that'sSampu - "On rainy days/ The monk Ryokan/Feels sorry for himself" -So your own subjective can also be part of the subject-matter objectively. In other words, if you see your thoughts or your moods as an object, like "Rains of May" - "I'm feeling sorry for myself" - then you can include that in the poem too. It isn't that you are eliminating subjectivity by taking an objective look at all phenomena and putting two details together - a detail of the entire field - "The monk Ryokan/ I'm feeling sorry for myself on a rainy day". He's looking at himself as an object - "The monk Ryokan feels sorry for himself" - by Ryokan - "Naked/On a naked horse/ Through the summer rain" - At that time, (19)55, I wrote a little comment on that - "On my porch/ In my shorts/Auto-lights in the rain" - What I got out of that was porch in the shorts/auto-lights in the rain, there's a creation of space, actually.
I was talking about haiku earlier with..(friends), going through these. A lot of the haiku seem to parallel the aesthetic intention of Paul Cezanne, painter, who spoke in his letters, (to Emile BernardI think), of, by means of triangles, cubes, squares (pre-Cubistmethod) creating planes on the canvases that he painted by means of hot colors advancing and cold colors receding optically, creating what he called "petite sensation", the little sensation, of space, which he defined as none other than Pater Omnipotens Aeterne. So, space as God, space itself as God and Father Omnipotent, Eternal God. Cezanne said, "I've got my little sensation. I'm getting older and older but I'm not like those other coarse people who haven't refined their senses. I'm refining my senses till I get a clearer and clearer realization of my petite sensation (my little sensation) of space which is none other than God." And he does on his canvas, if you look at them - there's a space created by the geometrical forms set next to each other with the colors advancing and receding without a narrative reliance on perspective lines. In other words, to get space he didn't use perspective lines, he just used colors advancing and receding, and brush-strokes, and building up his forms with geometrical solid figures and making the geometric solids out of the hot and cold colors advancing and retreating. So, in that sense, the haiku also creates the impression of the "little sensation" of vast space. "One end hanging/Over the mountain/The Milky Way" (that'sShiki). Another Shiki - "A flash of lightning/ Between the trees of the forest/ Water appears. Also Shiki - "Coming out of the water/ The wind blows on the nipples/ Cooling on the veranda" - "The wind blows on the nipples" - well, that's not space, that's just Vipassana detail - "Fleas lice/ The horse pissing/Near my pillow" - So he's got a whole novel there. He's traveling. He's going through poetic situations as a beatnik in Japan - the horse pissing near his pillow, sleeping out in the stable, out on a voyage - "In the corner of the old wall/ Motionless/ The pregnant spider" - Shiki - which reminds me of (Jack) Kerouac's great haiku - "In my medicine cabinet/ The Winter fly/ Has died of old age" - "How admirable!/ He who doesn't think "Life is fleeting"/ When he sees the lightning-flash" - "How admirable!/ He who doesn't think "Life is fleeting"/ When he sees the lightning-flash" - So that actually creates a funny space. By removing language, by suggesting a space without language and without mirrored self-conscious comment, it conjures up an odd actual lightning-flash space - "I am in Kyoto/ Yet at the voice of hotogisu/ Longing for Kyoto - "hotogisu", another traditional haiku bird. So I wrote a poem following that - "Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square" - "Everything is going well in the world/ Let another fly/ Come on the rice" - Issa again. Now that's Williams-esque - sort of. That's a little bit like Williams' poem going up his front porch and seeing his children smiling and happy to see him, on the stoop, and his heart sinking, and he says, "Why is it I want to kill my children?!" - Objectifying his mood. Yeah, that is, seeing the humor of his mood, seeing his mood as an object
- "Oh snail/ Climb Mount Fuji/ But slowly, slowly!" - Issa again. That was almost the best exemplification of one object set beside another object to create space. That little snail onMount Fuji- Fuji's giant curve - Here's a kind of a weird one [to student] - I thought your little poem about the chrome..Student: GreenAG: ..chrome-green glint of the..Student: "The cat's eyes/ Flash/ Chrome-green"AG: "The cat's eyes/ Flash/ Chrome-green" - "The snake slid away/ But the eyes that glared at me/ Remained in the grass" - That's kind of mysterious - "Through the back door/ The bamboo-grove is reflected/ In the cold broth" - He's holding a cup of cold broth, stillness. So it's still enough. He must have been holding it a little while for the surface to settle, and thinking, and thinking of drinking it, and then came into present consciousness of the space in which he was sitting, still and silent, then maybe looked back at the broth and saw the bamboo-grove reflected in the surface of the cold broth through the door behind him. "Through the back door" - through the back door, no less. You get more than enough detail for an entire hut, for an entire universe - "Through the back door/ The bamboo-grove is reflected/ In the cold broth' - "The old man/ Has a marvelous sickle/ For cutting barley" - which is like a good Gary Snyder naturalistic line, or Ezra Pound appreciation of non-usurious arts and crafts. What you have there is just a little noticing - "That guy has a marvelous sickle. He's been working at it for years. He's got the sickle perfect. He's a real barley-cutting champion" - "The old man/ Has a marvelous sickle/ For cutting barley" - "The old man/ Has a marvelous cock/ In bed" is my 1955 comment on that - Buson - "Weeping over my umbilical cord/ In my natal place/ At the end of the year" - Like a New Year's haiku, or a year-end haiku - "This dew-drop world/ It may be a dew-drop/ And yet, and yet" - Issa - "The moon in the water/ Turned a somersault/ And floated away" - That's unfair. Because he's turned a littleSurrealist trick there - "The bright moon.." (this is a 20th Century one, I think) - "The bright moon/ No dark place/ to empty the ashtray" - (which is a real good comment on consciousness. Last night (Chogyam) Trungpa was talking about the painfulness of an awareness that has no hiding place, where everything is revealed, where there are no corners cut, and where there are no shadows unseen, where no events (go) unnoticed - "The bright moon/ No dark place/ To empty the ashtray"
- Basho... ah yes, and the one that I thought the greatest Basho, creating space again. The famous one of Basho - "An old pond/Kerplunk!" (or, the Japanese word would be the sound of a frog jumping in(to) water, like the English "kerplunk" might be) - An old frog. The sound of water jumped into by a frog, but "an old frog/ kerplunk", is considered the most famous of all haiku, because it suggests an entire situation of someone meditating, practicing zazen, total silence, sitting by an old frog-bordered pond, old frog-bordered pond, complete silence, everything at rest, complete stillness, all of a sudden, "splash!" (either in the mind or in the phenomenal world) - creation - Also by Basho - the one I thought was best for space, for the creation of the petit sensation of space - "A wild sea/ And stretching out towards the island of Sado/ The Milky Way" - So you've got a fantastic panoramic, visionary Japanese painting there - "A wild sea/ And stretching out towards the island of Sado/ The Milky Way"
- "A full moon/ A man-servant/ Leaving the puppy to die" - "The bright Autumn moon/ Crying in the saucepan/ The pond snails" - "Crying in the saucepan", that's nice - "The autumn wind/ There are thoughts/ In the mind of Issa" - And back again. I thought that was the best you could get, in a way, as far as reconciling subjective and objective. Reconciling the big argument - "How subjective can you get in poetry?" - Issa there is referring to himself directly and using himself as a subject, but in doing so, by treating himself as if he was a puppy left out to die in the moonlight - "These are thoughts/ In the mind of Issa" - It gets romantic - Basho - "Shake oh tomb/My weeping voice/ Is the wind of autumn" - that's very operatic! - "The bright autumn moon/ Sea lice/ Running over the stones" - "Baby mice in their nest/ Squeak in response. To the young sparrows" - So you have baby mice down on the floor in their nest and sparrows cheeping in their nest above, (presumably in the eaves), squeak, squeak, and the little mice answering, and a man silent enough to hear both and notice both. "Baby mice in their nest/ Squeak in response. To the young sparrows" - That may be the most perfect in terms of disparate noticings, or two images, or two separate facts, set side-by-side to conjure up (the) usually "unspeakable", but nonetheless logical, relationship. In this case, a direct communication between the mice and the sparrows, except there's also a gap in there. There's a gap of space, like the sunyata void gap, because, do the sparrows hear the mice? The mice are mistakenly thinking it's other mice maybe? Or, at any rate, it's something to figure out - whether the mice are communicating to the sparrows, or whether they're just squawking in the void, hearing another sound from the other end of the void (but there's a lot of void-space in-between the two of them, and a great desolation, actually) - "The festival of the weaver/ One is writing a poem/ The other leans toward him" - Two guys writing poems and watching each other. It's like a painting, that - "Harvest sparrows/ Shot by the arrow of the scarcecrow/ They fall into the sea" - "Picked up on a pilgrimage/ And put together/ A scarecrow" - "In this fleeting world/ The scarecrow also/ Has eyes and a nose" - That's a good one. Actually, that does conjure up the empty space of the skull (or, comparing the scarecrow's anatman, lack of identity, lack of self, or, comparing human lack of identity, lack of soul, lack of a self, ultimately). "In this fleeting world", the scarecrow also has an appearance of identity - "The scarecrow also/ Has eyes and a nose" - "The autumn tempest/ Blows along even/Wild boars" - So he didn't say "Big strong mighty autumn tempest", he actually gave a demonstration of the autumn tempest - "The autumn tempest/ Blows along even/Wild boars" - "The morning glows/ In the faces of men/ There are faults" - Issa - "Issa alone I said/ He wrote it down in the register/ How chilly the autumn night" - "The maiden flower/ Stands there/ Vacantly" - More Issa, that was.. "Not a single stone/ To throw at the dog./ The Winter moon" - So frozen the ground that not even a single stone could be picked up - "A hundred different gourds/ From the mind/ Of one vine" - That would be an earlier Buddhist notion - Yogacara Buddhism believed in one mind. That was before Madhyamaka Buddhismwhich destroyed the notion of any kind of mind at all. Second century A.D. they got hip to that fact, that it was completely empty - "The maiden flower/ Stands there/ Vacantly" - Issa - "Night/ Biting the frozen brush/ With the remaining tooth" - Buson, that - "Examining/Three-thousand haiku/ Two persimmons" - A persimmon puckers your mouth, as a haiku might pucker your mind. "Examing/ Three-thousand haiku.." - he's a judge in a haiku contest - Shiki - This is a haiku by a judge in a haiku contest - "Examining/Three-thousand haiku/ Two persimmons" - "Ill on a journey/ My dreams wander/Over a withered moor" - That's Basho's death-verse, his last haiku - "Ill on a journey/ My dreams wander/Over a withered moor" - "The tern alights.." - a bird - "The tern alights.." - I guess it's a boat, a moon-viewing party or something, they're out on the lake. This is Issa again - "The tern alights/ Various sorts of nitwits/ On a moonlit evening" - That's like Kerouac a little, that humor - Issa. My favorite haiku of Issa is in Japanese - "naki haha ya umi miru tabi ni miru tabi ni" - "naki haha ya umi miru tabi ni miru tabi ni" (and (a) literal translation - "Dead momma/ Oh/ Ocean see time at" - and the Blyth translation - "Whenever I see the ocean/ Whenever I see it/ Oh, my mother" - or "Oh momma/ Whenever I see the ocean/ Whenever I see the ocean" - "naki haha ya umi miru tabi ni miru tabi ni" - There was one that created a great deal of space that I missed somewhere here. Like that one (that) end(s) "hanging over the mountain/ The Milky Way"...let's see if I can find the exact one here.. [Allen consults his selection of haiku] - Oh, the cow! - More Issa - "The cow comes/Moo-moo/ Out of the mists" - That's like a movie, the beginning of a movie, the cow coming "Moo-moo" - Issa - Just three short lines - "The cow comes/Moo-moo/ Out of the mists" - Basho - "The octopuses in the jars/ Transient dreams/ Under the summer moon"
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Friday Weekly Round-Up - 117
The Line Has Shattered Robert McTavish's hour-long documentary onthe legendary 1963Vancouver Poetry Conference premieres next Thursday in Vancouver at the Djavad Mowafaghian World Arts Center (Simon Fraser University). The film, narrated by poet Phyllis Webb, will be introduced by original conference participant (and Canada's current Poet Laureate), Fred Wah.
Allen's famous group-shot of several of the key participants (with him at the center, and, significantly, absent Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan) may be viewed below:
[Jerry Heiserman (later Sufi "Hassan"), the late "Red" a poet, Allen Ginsberg, Bobbie Louise Hawkins Creeley, Warren Tallman, Robert Creeley above Charles Olson, left to right top rows; seated left Thomas Jackrell then student poet, Philip Whalen & Don Allen anthologist & Postmodern Poetics editor, last days of Vancouver Poetry Conference late July 1963, car parked in front of host professor Tallman's house -- he'd sent me a ticket to come back from a year and half in India for the assembly -- which included Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. (c. Allen Ginsberg Estate)]
Here's another snap, from that occasion, of Allen (with, in the background, in profile, Charles Olson).
Poet George Bowering recalls Allen as exuding at this time "some kind of spiritual aura. The air shone around him".
Recordings of the Conference are available and can be listened to here (an extraordinary trove!).
A brief taste of Robert McTavish's film may be had here.
Iain Sinclair's writings on the Beats, we've noted here before (his account of his visit to Gary Snyder in Kitkitdizze is well worth a read - here's his talk on Charles Olson)
- and here's, (a preliminary draft), an account of visiting William Burroughs in Lawrence, Kansas. His next book, American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (we're very much looking forward to reading it) is due out (in England) at the end of the year.
The Jay DeFeo Retrospective (that opened last year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) is currently on exhibit in New York at the Whitney. Who was Jay DeFeo, you may ask? - As Peter Schjeldahl notes in the current New Yorker, one might reasonably speak of an "empathetic cult", (a central figure in San Francisco's North Beach in the '50's,, her epic painting-construction piece, "The Rose" was one of the centerpieces of the Whitney's landmark 1995 show, Beat Culture and the New America). She was in attendence, as Schjeldahl points out, at Allen's first public reading of "Howl" (at the Six Gallery, in 1955 - organized (the gallery was indeed co-founded) by her husband, Wally Hedrick), and works of hers were up and hanging in that same gallery.
Michael Minzer of Paris Records (Allen's producer for 1987's The Lion For Real) is interviewed on Michalis Limnios' exemplary Blues@Greece site this week. Another must-read.
(By now, we've kinda lost count of just how many extraordinary (Ginsberg-related, Beat-related) interviews may be found there!)
[Allen Ginsberg and Michael Minzer in 1987, during "The Lion For Real" recording sessions]
and...
"The iconic songwriter joins Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, Duke Ellingtonand Martin Scorsese", trumpets USA Today. Congratulations, Bob Dylan, on induction to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
(Allen was, it might be remembered, extraordinarily proud of his own membership and petitioned frequently (tho' not always successfully!) to get his friends in).
[Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at Albert Grossman's house, Woodstock, NY, 1964 - photograph by Douglas Gilbert]
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Allen Ginsberg - Haiku
From Allen's Journals(Fall, 1955):
"1) All conversation - "I need a spoon to eat soup" - is bridging
Ellipse, all my talk is haiku
2) The Western image (metaphor the apt relation of dissimilars -
Aristotle) is compressed haiku
3) Study of primary forms of ellipse, naked haiku, useful for
advancement of practice of western metaphor
4) Haiku = objective images written down outside mind the result is
inevitable mind sensation of relations. Never try to write of relations
themselves, just the images which are all that can be written down
on the subject (conversation w/ [Peter] Du peru.)"
Fresh, in time for the Twitter-verse (sic!), 21 "Haiku", "composed in the backyard cottage at 1624 Milvia Street, Berkeley, 1955, while reading R.H.Blyth's 4 volumes, Haiku":
Drinking my tea/Without sugar -/ No difference.
The sparrow shits/ upside down/ - ah! my brains & eggs!
Mayan head in a/Pacific driftwood bole/ - Someday I'll live in N.Y.
Looking over my shoulder/my behind was covered/ with cherry blossoms.
![nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect]( "nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect")
(Winter Haiku) - I didn't know the names/ of the flowers - now/my garden is gone.
I slapped the mosquito/ and missed/ What made me do that?
Reading haiku/I am unhappy/longing for the Nameless.
A frog floating/ in the Drugstore jar:/summer rain on grey pavements (after Shiki)
On the porch/in my shorts/auto lights in the rain
Another year/has past - the world/is no different.
The first thing I looked for/in my old garden was/The Cherry Tree.
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My old desk:/the first thing I looked for/in my house.
My early journal:/the first thing I found/ in my old desk.
My mother's ghost:/the first thing I found/ in the living room.
I quit shaving/but the eyes that glanced at me/remained in the mirror.
The madman/ emerges from the movies:/the street at lunchtime.
Cities of boys/are in their graves,/and in this town...
Lying on my side/in the void/The breath in my nose.
On the fiftteenth floor/the dog chews a bone - /Screech of taxicabs.
A hard-on in New York,/a boy/in San Francisco.
The moon over the roof,/worms in the garden/ I rent this house.
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& here they are translated into French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.
We've already mentioned Sabine Sommerkamp's perceptive essay, "The Function of Haiku in the Development of Ginsberg's "Howl" [these haiku were written "sometime between the end of July and the middle of September, 1955", the same time as his masterpiece, "Howl"].
"1) All conversation - "I need a spoon to eat soup" - is bridging
Ellipse, all my talk is haiku
2) The Western image (metaphor the apt relation of dissimilars -
Aristotle) is compressed haiku
3) Study of primary forms of ellipse, naked haiku, useful for
advancement of practice of western metaphor
4) Haiku = objective images written down outside mind the result is
inevitable mind sensation of relations. Never try to write of relations
themselves, just the images which are all that can be written down
on the subject (conversation w/ [Peter] Du peru.)"
Fresh, in time for the Twitter-verse (sic!), 21 "Haiku", "composed in the backyard cottage at 1624 Milvia Street, Berkeley, 1955, while reading R.H.Blyth's 4 volumes, Haiku":
Drinking my tea/Without sugar -/ No difference.
The sparrow shits/ upside down/ - ah! my brains & eggs!
Mayan head in a/Pacific driftwood bole/ - Someday I'll live in N.Y.
Looking over my shoulder/my behind was covered/ with cherry blossoms.
(Winter Haiku) - I didn't know the names/ of the flowers - now/my garden is gone.
I slapped the mosquito/ and missed/ What made me do that?
Reading haiku/I am unhappy/longing for the Nameless.
A frog floating/ in the Drugstore jar:/summer rain on grey pavements (after Shiki)
On the porch/in my shorts/auto lights in the rain
Another year/has past - the world/is no different.
The first thing I looked for/in my old garden was/The Cherry Tree.
My old desk:/the first thing I looked for/in my house.
My early journal:/the first thing I found/ in my old desk.
My mother's ghost:/the first thing I found/ in the living room.
I quit shaving/but the eyes that glanced at me/remained in the mirror.
The madman/ emerges from the movies:/the street at lunchtime.
Cities of boys/are in their graves,/and in this town...
Lying on my side/in the void/The breath in my nose.
On the fiftteenth floor/the dog chews a bone - /Screech of taxicabs.
A hard-on in New York,/a boy/in San Francisco.
The moon over the roof,/worms in the garden/ I rent this house.
& here they are translated into French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.
We've already mentioned Sabine Sommerkamp's perceptive essay, "The Function of Haiku in the Development of Ginsberg's "Howl" [these haiku were written "sometime between the end of July and the middle of September, 1955", the same time as his masterpiece, "Howl"].
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Spontaneous Poetics - 50 (Revisiting Reznikoff - 1)
[Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976)]
We continue with our transcription of Allen's June 23 1976 Naropa class. He moves on from haiku (see here) to a discussion of one of his favorite '"close attention" poets, the Objectivist,Charles Reznikoff. We've featured Allen on Reznikoff extensively before (here, here, here and here), but (duplication notwithstanding) feel absolutely no compunction in featuring him again.
AG: Well, that concentration of perception in Japan, or in that kind of meditative Oriental style, we have an equivalent of that in English, and so, fast, skipping through, a couple (sic) of Americans who are as concentrated in their focus, or are as clear in their focus, sharp in their focus, visually often, as the Japanese.
"The winter afternoon darkens/ The shoemaker bends close to the shoe, his hammer raps faster"
..I am going to begin to read a whole series of brief poems from Charles Reznikoff - Volume 1 Poems 1918-1936 [at the time of Allen's lecture Reznikoff's poems were published by Black Sparrow in two volumes - they had yet to be gathered together in a single volume] - and most of these poems are from 1918 to 1925, published by (19)27, at a time when (Ezra) Pound..(and other contemporaries) were all beginning to read and translate Chinese and Japanese poetry, because they were interested in "phanopoeia", "the casting of an image on the mind's eye", and they were also experimenting with American Imagism, trying to focus Western consciousness on the real world, on actuality, usually visual, in these exercises.
Vaudeville - "I leave the theatre/ Keeping step, keeping step to the music/It sticks to my feet/stepped into dung..."
Scrubwoman - "One shoulder lower/ with unsure step like a bear erect,/ the smell of the wet black rags that she cleans with about her/ Scratching with four stiff fingers her half-bald head, smiling."
The Idiot - "With green stagnant eyes,/ arms and legs/ loose ends of string in the wind,/ keep smiling at your father"
"The imperious dawn comes/ to the clink of milk bottles/ and round-shouldered sparrows twittering." - "Round-shouldered sparrows"!
"Old men and boys search the wet garbage with fingers/ and slip pieces in bags. This fat old man has found the hard end of a bread/ and bites it. - This is from Poems in 1920.
"The girls outshout the machines/ and she strains for their words, blushing./ Soon she too will speak/ their speech glibly."
"The pedlar who goes from shop to shop,/ has seated himself on the stairs on the dim hallway/ and the basket of apples upon his knees, breathes the odor."
"They have built red factories along Lake Michigan,/ and the purple refuse coils like congers... what are "congers"?
Student: Eels
AG: Lake Michigan eels.. o.k. .."They have built red factories along Lake Michigan,/ and the purple refuse coils like congers in the green depths".
And then, he can work it up into something longer and into entire life-stories in half-a-page, using that clear, sharp, spoken speech, non-poetic, but absolutely realistic, grounded language.
Ghetto Funeral - "Followed by his lodge, shabby men stumbling over the/ cobblestones/ and his children, faces red and ugly with tears, eyes and/ eyelids red,/ in the black coffin in the black hearse the old man./ No longer secretly grieving/ that his children are not strong enough to go the way he/ wanted to go/ and was not strong enough." - So that's like a whole Balzacvolume, like two generations. He can (get) generations into a brief thing like that. And another little short poem:
"Showing a torn sleeve, with stiff and shaking fingers the old/ man/ pulls off a bit of the baked apple, shiny with sugar,/ eating with reverence food, the great comforter."
Here's another novel-in-ten-lines:
"She sat by the window opening into the airshaft/ and looked across the parapet/ at the new moon./ She would have taken the hairpins out of her carefully coiled/ hair/ and thrown herself on the bed in tears,/ but he was coming and her mouth had to be pinned into a smile./ If he would have her, she would marry whatever he was./ A knock. She lit the gas and opened the door./ Her aunt and the man - skin loose under his eyes, the face/ slashed with wrinkles./ "Come in", she said as gently as she could and smiled." - I think that's one of the great narrative poems of the 20th Century. It's so powerful because it's got a complete lifetime, but also a complete moral lifetime in a way, a complete emotional growth, indicated.
Student: What are you reading from?
AG: Oh, I'm reading from Poems 1918-1936, Volume 1 (of ) the complete works of Charles Reznikoff [complete poems - sic], which we have in the library, which I think is on the compulsory required reading list. And the reason I'm zero-ing in on Reznikoff is I think he's the least poetic of poets, so that with Reznikoff there's no longer any need to write poetry, but there is the need, or there is the practice, of focusing clearly on what's happening around us, and seeing clearly the facts of life, seeing the detailed facts, transcribing the sharpest stickiest-into-the-mind details, telling it naturally, as if you were telling a story - as if your grandmother was telling a story to you, or if you were telling a story to your grandmother (but, seemingly, with the experience of several generations of observation, so that you can condense whole cycles of generations into five or six lines that tell a complete story of the development), or a complete presentation of an economic-social situation, living situation ("sat by the window opening into the airshaft"), family situation, her aunt and the man, and, ultimately, what do you call it? love? psychological? psychological love situation, loneliness situation - ""Come in", she said as gently as she could and smiled." - sounds like some sort of saint.
Student: What's that called?
AG: That's Number 11 in Poems, 1920. But that's just the beginning, because he has lots of poems like that. There are about thirty poems in a row of complete life histories. So I'll read a couple of them.
But I started off with haiku, remember? We started today (referring to) Crane, Shelley, poetry to die with, now Reznikoff, also poetry to die with, because he died, October, last year [1975]
Student: How old?
AG: Age 82. In New York.
Student: Allen (let me turn the tape over) before you read any more.
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↧
Spontaneous Poetics - 51 (Revisiting Reznikoff - 2)
[Charles Reznikoff, circa 1975, reading as part of the New York City "Poetry In the Parks" Program, courtesy the Archives of The Academy of American Poets]
AG: [surveying The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff] - I'd like to read through a lot of these actually, because they're so good. There are too many to read, because I (also) want to go from him to (William Carlos) Williams, and then from Williams, retrospectively, back to (William) Wordsworth, and see Wordsworth's sharp focus of perception, if we have time.
"The shoemaker sat in the cellar's dusk beside his bench and/ sewing machine, his large blackened hands, finger tips/ flattened and broad, busy./ Through the grating in the sidewalk over his window, paper/ and dust were falling year by year,/ At evening Passover would begin. The sunny street was/ crowded. The shoemaker could see the feet of those who/ walked over the grating./ He had one pair of shoes to finish and he would be through./ His friend came in, a man with a long, black beard, in shabby,/dirty clothes, but with shoes newly cobbled, and blacked./ "Beautiful outside, really the world is beautiful."/ A pot of fish was boiling on the stove. Sometimes the water/bubbled over and hissed. The smell of the fish filled the / cellar./ "It must be beautiful in the park now. After our fish we'll take/ a walk in the park". The shoemaker nodded./ The shoemaker hurried his work on the last shoe. The pot on/ the stove bubbled and hissed. His friend walked up and/down the cellar in shoes newly cobbled and blacked."
AG: I always thought that was the acme of American poetry. "The smell of the fish filled the/ cellar". Having broken through a false notion of beauty, or an automatic stereotyped ideal of what beauty is, and come to some American-esque notion of truth as beauty, let us say, or direct observation and presence and grounding in clarity, and acceptance of existence in detail, in microscopic, accurate, insightful, noticing detail, then you could actually come to a point of view where "The smell of the fish filled the cellar", because of the pungency suggested, the nasal phanopoeia invoked, that is conjuring up that smell, becomes a really beautiful line - "The smell of the fish filled the cellar" - Actually, vocally, it's quite good - "The smell of thr fish filled the cellar" - It actually has all the hissing of the fish on the stove.
Student: What page is that on?
AG: That's on page 64 of the Collected Poems (Complete Poems, Volume 1), and it's at the end of a series that begins with Poems, 1920.
I'll go back a little (now) and read a few more of the short (poems)
Kitten - just a few, short, haiku-like again:
"Kitten, pressed into a rude shape by cart wheels.." - Kitten, pressed into a rude shape by cart wheels - "..an end to your slinking away and trying to hide behind ash-cans."
"The baby woke with curved, confiding fingers/ The gas had been turned down until it was only a yellow/ glimmer./ a rat walked slowly from under the washtub." - Dracula! -
Here's a short poem that I also used as a warning-notice to print in the rock 'n roll Rolling Thunder Dylan Tour newspaper, for all the heroic coke-heads:
"Suddenly we noticed that we were in darkness/ so we went into the house and lit the lamp/ The talk fell apart and bit by bit slid into a lake..."
This is a Jewish middle-class voice. It's very funny actually. It's just sort of this completely "everyday" (tone). He was a law clerk actually. He did legal research for a living and walked up and down New York City streets, walked several miles every day, between his apartment and his law office to do legal research. And his wife was a professor of English (later at Brandeis). Totally anonymous. He knew a number of great-friend poets, like William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting. (They) all knew his work, but he printed all these books by himself. He didn't have any books published until, maybe 1940, by New Directions, or 1950. His first New Directions book came out, a collection, a selection, of these poems, but, year-after-year, he printed his own books, including novels. He's got a lot of interesting work, most of it unobtainable, but (much of it) now coming out from Black Sparrow Press. I'm beginning to dig his work more and more for teaching - grounded, focus - because it seems one of the largest bodies of concrete imagistic objective writing that anybody in America's accumulated -Williams has, maybe, a slightly larger accumulation of direct perceptions articulated clearly, visually, on the page. I don't know what other poets do have those isolated exact, precise, images - except (there's) a young kid, David Cope. (I'll) interrupt (just) a moment..
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Spontaneous Poetics - 52 (David Cope)
 |
[David Cope, Ann Arbor, Michigan, February 1995 - photograph by Allen Ginsberg c. Allen Ginsberg Estate] |
AG: [Allen reads from the then freshly-published poetry-collection, "The Stars" by David Cope] - "Nada Press, Big Scream, 698 48th Street, South East, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49508 - The Stars by David Cope, copyright 1976. All rights reserved for the author. Acknowledgements - Some of these poems have appeared in Big Scream, Windows in the Stone, Delirium, and in two previous collections - "Neon Eyes" and "The Clouds"." - So this is, like, coming out of the sidewalks of...
"Walking, driving, everything is business, nothing is still. Across the river/ the city gleams. Voices roar in the metal traffic./ This is an American poem, accept no substitutes. No Surrealism or/ Symbolism. This is the asphalt under your feet."
Monday Morning - "But two old friends appear out of the crowd and were standing in the /rain, yacking. Still I gotta go, and going up the hill wave them good-bye,/ turning to see faces on a city bus staring blankly into the misty city."
Baseball - "The farmboy's proud of his white uniform with a red trim. Under the/ white lights he and another play baseball. They're dazzling on the green./ A hit! The crowd stands up, mouths full of popcorn. The ball goes high/ over the lights at the field's edge into the/ dark river beyond."
"An old woman leans against a tree, alone in the cemetery, the wind at/ her back. Now she turns back to her car, the highway, home, coffee with/ friends."
Crash! - "The cars lie, one on its side, a rear-wheel still spinning and the other/ upside-down. The bodies are scattered across the cornfield, bent and/ broken on the frozen ground. Two ambulances pull up. The attendants/ arrange and cover the dead.Cars pull over to the side of the road./ Everyone shuffles, eager to help, hands in pockets."
"Lines of headlights extend to the horizon. Horns honking, flashing lights/, and overhead the high thin poles are silhouetted before the lavender/ sky."
American Dream - sort of like an Objectivist poem drawn from the newspapers, maybe?. This is the 1970's - American Dream - "The house was all in flames, orange billows bursting up into the sunlight./ F.B.I. agents and police were laid up behind walls, sheds, and other/ buildings, armed with MI6's and rocket-launchers. The firemen were kept/ back. The battle had gone on for some time when the first exploded/ throughout the house. One of the bodies could be seen inside the house,/ loaded with ammunition belts, the bullets exploding from the heat." - I think that's the Los Angeles Patty Hearst shoot-out/ Donald DeFreeze shoot-out. But it's an interesting treatment of the newspaper phenomena - the reduction of that to a series of clear, precise, images.
"The evening streets are full of ghosts pleading for mercy. Sunset washes/ the windows red and they flash over the river. The night comes on, all sirens and bowling tournaments."
Detroit - "Twilight. A white bar-owner thinking a black dude's breaking into his car/ shoots him down on the asphalt lot. The bar's in flames. Patrons scatter./ The sirens begin. Police arrive and the crowds all over the street/ chanting. Gas masks, electric megaphones, rifles, bottles, swinging clubs." - A complete riot in ten lines!
Lunch Hour - "Waiting for a bus, some laid-off workers shoot craps. This one's won./ He's dancing around, slapping at the losers." - The weirdest language, but absolutely perfect speech - "He's dancing around, slapping at the losers."
"Two men are shouting outside the courtroom, waving their arms,/ pointing to sheafs of paper clutched in their fists. Police appear and/ escort them out, still shouting, half dragged down the marble steps."
"If I turn out the light it will be dreams tonight."
The Line Up - "Arriving customers take a number. There is the expression of permanent/ boredom, shuffling feet. Children are given dimes to start up the hobby/horse. Yawns. Everyone stares at the floor or at the clerks. There are no/ conversations. A man walks off with a package. The jostling for his/ counter-space begins."
"Going to see friends, all the lights are out on the expressway. A semi-/ files into our lane, not seeing us and we're skidding, slamming on the/ brakes." - That was fast for getting into that situation, getting into that nightmare - four lines!
Well, back to (Charles) Reznikoff. So, you see, it's still being done. Or, what we have, really, is a universal system of notation, in a way. Merely trust your senses. Mindfulness of what you actually see. "Direct treatment of the object", as (Ezra) Pound said in his "How To Read", an essay called "How To Read", which I guess..where would that appear? "How To Read"?
Student: The ABC of Reading?
AG:...No, there's some suggestions for how to condense and present, rather than refer to things, but present directly what you see, in (the) ABC of Reading, but there's a little short pamphlet, "How To Read", I guess in Guide to Kulchur, maybe?, no, (selected) Literary Essays. At the beginning of (selected) Literary Essays in the library, see a little twenty-page essay, "How To Read".
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Spontaneous Poetics - 53 (Revisiting Reznikoff - 3)
[Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) - photograph courtesy New Directions]
AG: I do want to get back to (Charles) Reznikoffbecause, okay, we had a little haiku, and then we had a little sharp fast transcription noticings. Fast transcription. (Guy) de Maupassant. I think de Maupassant got this turn-on from (Gustav) Flaubert. Flaubert told him that if a guy was jumping out the window, he should be able to write a verbal sketch of the way that he fell out of the window (and) the way his shirt was ballooning into the air before he hit the ground, be that fast in noticing the particular detail of the situation that you could transcribe and put (it) in language.
(William Carlos) Williams instructions in the "Preface" to "Kora in Hell" for how to choose detail, or where do you go to get the exact flash, physical flash, eyeball flash, or the exact detail, the "minute particular" (to use (William) Blake's phrase), that you can describe that will conjure up the whole situation, that will conjure up the whole scene - Williams suggested that you choose that aspect, of a tree, say, which makes that tree different from all other trees. Choose that. Like, [Allen points to one of the students], over there, from where I'm standing, you got a thin face and white-frame plastic eyeglasses, (or pink plastic eyeglasses), so there's a little detail that brings your face out a little, or makes it different from other faces. So everybody's got a little particularity, (or every tree, or every object, has some particularity). If you were sketching, physically making sketches, like pictorial sketches, a horned tree with two horns at the top, you'd get the two horny branches at the top and then just fill out the mass, but it would be those two horns that characterize the tree (Williams (actually) has a poem about trees like that - does anybody know it? - "I must tell you.." - oh, I'm afraid it'll take too much time to find but there's a little poem by Williams describing a tree with two horns at the top, that begins "I must tell you.." ..you can check it out in the Collected Earlier Poems)
Back to Reznikoff. Now, more narrative. What I was trying to do was (to) suggest the basic principles of picking out detail, as Williams prescribed them - also, out of his study of "le mot juste", (the) precise word, (a) concept of the French prose-writers Flaubert (and) de Maupassant, which theImagists drew on, actually. Historically, they did read these people and were interested in their practice of accuracy - not so much to be accurate, as (it is) to be there, so you see what's there. It's not a question of being macho-accurate, it's a question of being completely present in the space where you are, so you see what's in front of you, rather than day-dreaming. So, in this sense, the study of poetics is the study of mindfulness.
(It's) related to Buddhist meditation, which is why the haiku grows out of Zen meditation practice (and it is appropriate that, as American consciousness began to realize itself, that the poetry around the turn of the century would check out the precision of focus of Buddhist poetics, through the haiku, or through (Ezra) Pound's examination of traditional Chinese poetic method - as picture language, (in "The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry" - an essay, "The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry" - which he composed from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, re-published by City Lights- a very good study of language as pictures, using Chinese as an example of a picture-language, distinct from the abstract or American-English European languages, which are sounds, but (which) don't have any pictorial content in the writing).
Alright, getting back to text examples. Well, something that's totally family-like:
"In high school she liked Latin and the balances of algebra./ Her mother had died years before and her father married again./ The new wife was solicitous for her husband. "A workingman/ - has he the means for this education of a girl?/ They took her out of school and got her a job as a bookkeeper./ A student at one of the universities whom she had met in high/school, began to call./ She herself had been reading, but evenings are too short,/besides, her reading was haphazard./ They talked of books that he knew and what was good in his/ lectures. Her stepmother and father said, "It will be years/ before he'll finish his studies and make a living. When/he'll be ready to marry, you'll be too old, He's wasting/ your time"./ It was useless talking to her, but they spoke to him and he/ stopped calling./ A salesman, professionally good-humored, introduced him-/self to her/ father. A good match, they all said. Besides,/ home was uncomfortable with a nagging stepmother."
- So, apparently, after all that, the way he indicated that he'd decided to take it was - "Besides,/ home was uncomfortable with a nagging stepmother."
Student: Who was that?
AG: We're back to (Charles) Reznikoff now.
Student: That sounded like a Henry James novel
AG: Yes. Yeah. That's the amazing thing, that these take in whole cycles of change.
Student: That's from Testimony?
AG: No, this is all from the Poems, 1920.
Student: Allen, how's that different from prose now?
AG: Well, the question is, how does it differ from prose? It doesn't differ from prose, but how does poetry differ from prose? Big question. I was talking with someone last night, D [unidentified], who's here, who said "How does this differ from prose? Isn't this just prose?", and I said, "Yeah. Now enjoy it!". Once he realized that it was ok that it was prose, then it didn't bother him anymore, and he could listen to it, but until he got satisfied that the terminology, "poem" (had) stopped nagging him, he couldn't actually hear what was on the page. Once I said "Okay, it's not poetry, it's prose", then he could hear what was on the page and began enjoying it.
This differs from prose, I think in the sense that... well (Jack) Kerouac's prose is prose-poetry, (Arthur) Rimbaud's poetry is prose-poetry (in Season in Hell and Illuminations), (James) Joyce's Finnegan's Wake is prose-poetry, or poetry, certain (William) Burroughs is as dense as any Rimbaud or prose-poetry. (Louis-Ferdinand) Celine' s prose in Journey to the End of the Night, or later books, (like) Guignol's Band, approaches the intensity, rhythmic variability and excitableness and imagistic precision of poetry. In the 20th Century, there was a notorious break-down of the distinction, especially in Gertrude Stein, beginning with Gertrude Stein, when both poetry and prose began converging on the mind itself as subject-matter. Then the distinction between prose and poetry broke down, because the forms that were suggested by observing mind functioning were interchangeable - poetry or prose. In other words, if the form in the prose or in the poem was a transcription of the jumps of mind, from little haiku, to long short-stories, to giant novels (like Finnegan's Wake, or The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein), if the form was modeled basically on the notion of the movement of the mind, and jumps from thought-form to thought-form, and gaps in-between thought-forms, and the recurred cycles of thought-forms, then the difference between haiku and epic is eclipsed, as between prose and poetry. Because you have a whole epic in these little stories, a whole novel, as you said, a whole Henry James novel, in these stories.
The little thing I noticed when I started reading this (Reznikoff piece) was, "In high school she liked Latin and the balances of algebra ". Now that's very curious, interesting, precise language. She liked "the balances of algebra"? - For a schmucky high-school girl who marries a salesman, his intelligent noticing of her aesthetic intelligence is extraordinary, and there is a very high level of intelligence dealt with here. "In high school she liked Latin and the balances of algebra" - that's very elegant (although it sounds like this grubby Jewish cat talking about a family problem, but it's really there as high poetry, sort of). You were saying?
Student: Yeah. Anne (Waldman) was telling us that Pound said that poetry should be"at least as well-written as prose".
AG: Yeah. Meaning, it is (should be) as straightforward . Well, there are distinctions we could make. It depends on how you want to make your disinctions, how you want to define it now. I would say, because of concentration of thought, concentration of history into so short a scope, condensing entire novels and cycles of generations in half a page,that makes it, by virtue of condensation (poetry). You could say it's poetry if poetry involves condensation (either of language, or of idea, or of history) into short notation space. Because of mindfulness and attention to language, it's poetry, because, although it sounds prosaic, he's actually being very mindful and attentive to a language that sounds like somebody telling a family story with (the) exact, precise, flavor of an old(er) generation's grandma's granny-wisdom story-telling, or like any grandfather's speech, condensing whole family cycles, taking decades and decades and karmas, taking decades to work themselves out into half a page, like old people do before the deathbed. Like my father telling me a story, which I think I've repeated several times [Allen re-tells this story in the poem, "Don't Grow Old", section III, prior to "Father Death Blues"] , that when he was young he lived on Boyd Street in Newark and in the backyard were bushes and green trees and a big empty lot, and he never knew what was behind the empty lot, and when he got older, he took a walk around the block, and he found out what it was - it was a glue-factory! Because I'd heard Reznikoff, I suddenly realized (that) as being the same genre of exact detail and telescoping in a few paragraphs, or a few lines, a complete samsarichistory, samsaric suffering history and suffering illusion history.
Student: Allen?
AG: Yeah
Student: (Walt) Whitman would seem to be the beginning of the breakdown between prose and poetry.
AG: Yeah, in America, Whitman. But then before him you've got (Herman) Melville's Moby Dick, which is a high-singing prose too.
Student: Was (Arthur) Rimbaud aware of Whitman?
AG: I don't think so. I don't know if Whitman was translated by then. 1890's, he was known in England, so, I don't think he was. [turning back to Reznikoff's poems] - I want to get a couple more of these in . So I'll see if I can find the most poignant - Oh, before we get into that, there's another fantastic short photograph-movie:
"Scared dogs looking backwards with patient eyes/ at windows, stooping old women, wrapped in shawls,/ old men, wrinkled as knuckles, on the stoops./ A bitch, backbone and ribs showing in the sinuous back/ sniffed for food, her swollen udder nearly rubbing along the pavement." - That's like the "fish hissing on the stove"- "her swollen udder nearly rubbing along the pavement."
"Once a toothless woman opened her door,/ chewing a slice of bacon that hung from her mouth like a tongue" - That takes the cake for absolute horrific realism. His comment on this:
"This is where I walked night after night/ This is where I walked away many years" - In that universe, I guess. In that suburb. This is called "Sunday Walks In the Suburbs". It's one of a series. I'll repeat that little section - "Once a toothless woman opened her door,/ chewing a slice of bacon that hung from her mouth like a tongue" - it's like Kafka. It's an apparition out of Kafka of actual, total, reality. So is this prose or poetry? Because of the photographic accuracy, but spareness, of detail, the whole, somehow, is more than the sum of its parts here - of the slice of bacon, the toothless woman, a door, chewing a slice of bacon, she's still chewing it. It's a little bit there like that little haiku about the old guy on the winter night chewing his brush with his remaining tooth ["Night/ biting the frozen brush/with a remaining tooth" (Buson) -sic]- But this is such a horrible picture that you know it's poetry.
Student: Allen? Is he doing the (William Carlos) Williams kind of meter also?
AG: No, he didn't seem to be so interested in the arrangement of lines on the page according to breath, according to syllable, according to balance. He was more accurately interested, I think, in diction. That is, in a diction and syntax that was an accurate reflection of his own home speech, or family speech.
Student: Don't you think that's characteristic of writers who change languages? Wasn't Melville originally Polish? or (Joseph) Conrad originally Polish?
AG: Conrad, yes.
Student: His language is pretty exact too.
AG: Yeah. Reznikoff was brought up in another language...Reznikoff came from a mixed-language family, and this is very clearly slightly affected by Yiddish, like "the balances of algebra" - it's a very Jewish-American Lower East Side talk.
"He showed me the album. "But this?" I asked, surprised at/ such beauty./ I knew his sister, her face somewhat the picture's - coarsened./ "My mother before her marriage"./ Coming in, I had met/ her shrivelled face and round shoulders./ Now, after the day's work, his father at cards with friends/ still outshouted the shop's wheels....." - So he's got a whole cycle change from "But this?" I asked, surprised at/ such beauty" - I had met her coming in - "her shrivelled face and round shoulders". And then her husband, still yelling loud, conditioned by the shop's wheels.
Well, let's see. I got some really good ones here. Okay, this is a whole long (piece). It's called "The Burden"
"The shop in which he worked was on the tenth floor. After six/ o'clock he heard the neighboring shops closing, the/ windows and iron shutters closed./ At last there was only a light here and there./ These, too. were gone/ He was alone./ He went to the stairs./Suppose he leaned over the railing./ What was to hold him back from plunging down the stairwell?/ Upon the railway platform a low railing was fencing off a drop/ to the street - a man could step over.." (that's very Jewish, "a man could step over") ... "When the train came to the bridge and the housetops sank and/ sank, his heart began to pound and he caught his breath:/ he had but to throw himself through the open window or walk/ to the train platform, no one would suspect, and jerk/ back the little gate./ He would have to ride so to and from work. His home was on/ the third floor, the shop on the tenth. He would have to/ pass windows and the stairwell always."
Another:
"He was afraid to go through the grocery store, where his/ father was still talking to customers. He went through the/ tenement hallway into the room where they ate and slept/ in the back of the store./ His little brothers and sisters were asleep along the big bed/ He/ took the book which he had bought at a pushcart to read/ just a page or two more by the dimmed gaslight./ His father stood over him ad punched his head twice,/ whispering in Yiddish "Where have you been lost all day, you louse that feeds on me, I need you to deliver orders."/ In the dawn he carried milk and rolls to the doors of customers./ At seven he was in his chum's room. "I'll stay here with/ you till I get a job."/ He worked for a printer. When he was twenty-one he set up a/ press in a basement. It was harder to pay off than he had/ thought./ He fell behind in his installments. If they took the press away,/ he would have to work for someone else all over again/ Rosh Ha Shonoh he went to his father's house. They had been/ speaking to each other again for years./ Once a friend had turned a poem of his into Hebrew. It was/ printed in a Hebrew magazine. He showed it to his father/ and his father showed it around to the neighbors./ After dinner his father said, "Business has been good, thank/ God. I have saved over a thousand dollars this year. How/ have you been doing?"/ "Well". "But I hear you need money, that you're trying to/ borrow some?" "Yes". His father paused./"I hope you get it" - Well, the thing is it cuts through to actual life. You know that's really family and who can write really family ? Who gets that close to the nose? Who gets that close to actuality, among any poet, ancient or modern? There's very few that get that cold void as well ( "Come in, she said, as gently as she could and smiled"- which covers the void too).
"Passing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign/and go on, glad that his own life had to do with books./ Now at night when he saw the grey in his parents' hair and/ heard their talk of that day's worries and the next;/ lack of orders, if orders, lack of workers, if workers, lack of/goods, if there were workers and goods, lack of orders/ again,/ for the tenth time he said, "I'm going in with you: there's more/ money in business"./ His father answered, "Since when do you care about money?/ You don't know what kind of a life you're going into -/ but you have always had your own way./ He went out selling: in the morning he read the Arrival of /Buyers in The Times; he packed half a dozen samples into/ a box and went from office to office./ Others like himself, sometimes a crowd, were waiting to thrust/ their cards through a partition opening./ When he ate, vexations were forgotten for a while. A quarter/ past eleven was the time to go down the steps to Holz's/ lunch counter/ He would mount one of the stools. The food, steaming/ fragrance, just brought from the kitchen, would be/ dumped into the trays of the steam-table/ Hamburger steak, mashed potatoes, onions and gravy, or a/ knackwurst and sauerkraut; after that, a pudding with a/ square of sugar and butter sliding from the top and red/ fruit juice dripping over the saucer./ He was growing fat."
Student: Allen? Are there any recordings of Reznikoff reading his own poetry?
AG: Yeah. Reznikoff was invited yearly to the St Marks Poetry Projectby Anne Waldman in the last few years, and I think there are at least two tapes of his readings at St Marks, casssette tapes of him reading. I went to both of them and it reduced me to tears to hear him. Because it was so elemental. No fancy-business. No ambition. No poetry. Just actuality (but actuality so reduced to such clear terms that it was moving, completely emotionally moving and yet totally objective. Yeah?
Student: How would you describe the difference between this poetry of Reznikoff and his later stuff, like Testimony?
AG: Well, later books, which we have in the library, Testimony and Holocaust. He was, as I said, a law clerk, and so Testimony was.. he was interested in this family story - family, every day, quotidian decade cycles. He picked out from 19th Century legal testimony, suits and counter-suits and law-suits having to do with people losing their hair in the machine press (etc). He picked out horrible stories, or poignant stories, and documents, little documents, and he isolated them in lines and he told them (unadorned), just picked them out, one or two paragraphs of testimony in legal trials. (In) Holocaust, he researched through all the Nuremberg trials and excerpted tiny vignette stories of these kind of details from lives and deaths in the concentration camps. So it's one of the most strikingly accurate presentations of that apocalyptic situation that exists in literary record. He's done the work for you if you want to know what went on there.
"In a month they would be married./ He sang a song to himself in which her name was the only/ word/ His mother was waiting up for him. She said, "I was told today/ that her mother died an epileptic,/ and her brother is an idiot in a home somewhere
.Why didn't/ she tell you?"/ He thought of hugging her narrow shoulders, comforting her;/ of noting their children's quirks and screeches fearfully -/ how the moonlight had been glittering in her eyes."
Here's for all poets:
"At night, after the day's work, he wrote. Year after year he/ had written, but the right words were still not all there,/ the right rhythms not always used. He corrected the old/ and added new/ While away on a business trip he died. His children playing/ about the house, left home by the widow out to work,/ found the manuscript so carefully written and rewritten./ The paper was good to scribble on. Then they tore it into bits./ At night the mother came home and swept it out." - That's Reznikoff's situation, actually.
"When at forty he went to America, the family was glad to be/ rid of him.." [Allen's reading is interrupted by a banging and whistling outside the classroom] - "The poet was reading a poem from an old Jewish patriarch./ Outside the children marched up and down./ A police whistle blew on the corner." [Allen resumes the poem] -"When at forty he went to America, the family was glad to be/ rid of him, envious and quarrelsome. All but him had/ married and were well-to-do./ The smallpox when a child had left him ugly. Because it had/ also left him sickly, he had been humored in not going to/ school, and so he could not read or cypher./ To strengthen him he had been apprenticed to a blacksmith./ When he walked he kept hitching up his shoulders and/ throwing out his hands./ He spoke indistinctly and so foolishly that when understood/ his hearers could not help smiling . Sure they did not/ understand, he would repeat what he had said until tears/ were in his eyes./ In New York he stayed with a pushcart pedlar. The pedlar had/ a daughter who had worked her way through high school/ and was in college./ The blacksmith's arm became infected and he could not work./ He stayed at home waiting for his arm to heal, silently/ watching as she moved about the house or did her lessons./ She tried not to mind his eyes always on her./ At last she insisted that he move away. So he had to take/ lodgings elsewhere./ After supper he would stand in front of the house in which she/lived, hoping that she would come out on an errand./ The boys playing in the street discovered him and searched/ the gutters for peach pits and apple cores/ to throw over their shoulders at him as they passed, intent/ upon the sky./ He would chase them in his jerky way."
Another:
"As he read, his mother sat down beside him. "Read me a little"./"You wouldn't understand, Ma". What do you care? Read me/ a little"/ When I was a little girl I wanted to study so much but who could?/ My father used to cry when I talked to him about it,/ buthe cried because he couldn't afford to educate the boys -/ even./ As he read, she listened gravely; then went back to her/ ironing./ The gaslight shone on her round, ruddy face and the white/ cotton sheets that she spread and ironed;/from the shelf the alarm-clock ticked and ticked rapidly."squabbles
The Lawyer - This is Reznikoff himself, I think.
"A man made cloaks of material furnished. The man from whom/ the cloaks were made refused them: defects in the/ material. But the material was yours. But the defects were/ shown by white strings in the selvage; your cutter should/ have avoided them./ A woman fell downstairs; no light in the hallway. There was!/ but boys stole the electric bulbs. The janitor was told; he/ should have lit the gas."/ Water from the chop-suey joint upstairs came through the/ ceiling upon our silk. The water fell on a table where it/ damaged nothing; they took their silk, gone out of style,/ and dabbled in it in the water. The silks were on the table to/ be cut./ Our union takes steam-shovel engineers only, but their union/ takes all kinds; they want to put us out of business. One/ of our men was on a job; they call out the locomotive/ engineers and make the boss - / Why was he spending his life in such?"
(One more):
"When the club met in her home, embarrassed, she asked them/ not to begin; her father wanted to speak to them./ The members whispered to each other, "Who is her father?"/ "I thank you , young men and women", he said, "for the/ honor of your visit. I suppose you would like to hear/ some of my poems". And he began to chant."
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