Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 172

April 11, 2014, 12:00 am

≫ Next: "Aint No Sin To Take Off Your Skin..." (from The Black Rider)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 47 (Mayakovsky - 4)

$

0

0

A  rare (rarely-seen) Ginsberg item (that didn't meet its estimated price in their last big Beat-related auction) - If Not Forever - A Letter to Jack Kerouac(Sore Dove Press, San Francisco, 2008) - went up again on the auction block at the PBA Galleries in San Francisco yesterday (alongside a number of other Ginsberg and Beat-related pieces, the residue, second culling, (third culling, actually) from Rick Synchev's fabled "Beats, Counter-Culture, and the Avant-Garde" collection.

A couple more highlights - (likewise from Sore Dove, 2011),  Poem ("Prophecy" ("Prophecy if I shall find/What I miss..") (first publication, with original art by Soheyl Dahl) 



a miscellaneous collection of Ginsberg books



 &Bill Morgan (and Bob Rosenthal's) hommage volume (from 1986) Best Minds 




On Wednesday in Berkeley at Mrs Dalloway's bookstore, poet and actor, Ian Hirsch recited all of Howl Part 1 from memory. 


Speaking of San Francisco, here's Allen Ginsberg performing in San Francisco in November of 1981 (alongside Marc Olmsted, Dan Rielly, Gary Schwantes, Bruce Slesinger and Tom Latta - "The Job")  - his ever-timely classic, "Birdbrain"

[Allen Ginsberg and Marc Olmsted (of "The Job"), San Francisco, 1981 - Photograph by Marc Geller] 

Tomorrow night in New York atThe Stone, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein
sometime editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazinepresent a B=U=R=R=O=U=G=H=S  tribute. 
More Burroughs NYC celebrations in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, in the National Museum in Wales...


[Allen reading from "Wales Visitation" (September, 1968, on the William Buckley "Firing Line" t.v. programme) - installation, part of the exhibition, "Wales Visitation - Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art", currently at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff -  on through to September 7 - Photograph - Alex Martin]

---

"Aint No Sin To Take Off Your Skin..." (from The Black Rider)

April 12, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 48 (A Reminder - Meditation as Counterpoint)

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 172

$

0

0

[Robert Wilson, Tom Waits& William Burroughs - co-creators of The Black Rider]



"When you hear sweet syncopation and the music softly moans/'t ain't no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones/When it gets too hot for comfort, and you can't get an ice-cream cone/t'ain't no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones/Just like those bamboo babies, down in the South Sea tropic zone/ t'aint no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones."

William Burroughs, Robert Wilson and Tom Waits' remarkable collaborative work -The Black Rider - The Casting of the Magic Bullets, a so-called "musical fable", first performed in 1990 in Hamburg, Germany, was an extraordinary and legendary theatrical event. Burroughs wrote the book (the libretti), Waits, the music and most of the lyrics, and Wilson was responsible for design and overall direction. 

 Waits' 1993 album,The Black Rider, features Burroughs' rendition (of 'Taint No Sin..')

Here's George Olsen's 1929 recording ("vocal refrain" by Dick Gardner)



Here's the delightfully-named Billy Miltonand The Four Bright Sparks doing their (very English) version. 
Here's a female voice (Lee Morse) singing it  

Expansive Poetics - 48 (A Reminder - Meditation as Counterpoint)

April 14, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 49 (Akhmatova & Mayakovsky)

≪ Previous: "Aint No Sin To Take Off Your Skin..." (from The Black Rider)

$

0

0

Allen Ginsberg, Boulder Colorado, June 1994. photo c. Steve Miles]

Allen's  1981 Expansive Poetics class transcripts continue.

Allen speaks out, noting Naropa's current (1981) financial difficulties, but, "whether or not Naropa survives"...

AG: I think one thing we have succeeded in doing [here atthe Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute] is carrying on something that started with Black Mountain (College), which was that practicing poets teach poetry in a community of poets. The idea here was to add on practicing poets in a community of poets and meditators, which I thought was doubling the consciousness, or doubling the treasury, doubling the richness.




And while we're at it, I wonder, has everybody here taken advantage of the free meditationinstruction, yet? (because we've been here weeks). You ought to do it - get it on. You don't have to meditate for the rest of your life, but at least you should find out the classical traditional Buddhist method, since that's practiced here, and it's famous, and it's old, and it's a big footnote, as I said, to twentieth-century American poetry. If you want to understand (Gary) Snyder, (Philip) Whalen, (Diane) di Prima,(Joanne) Kyger, myself, (Peter) Orlovsky, many others - (Jerome) Rothenberg, I believe, Armand Schwerner. A good many poets relate to meditation practice, which is a unique thing in the history of any national poetry. And it's a wave of intimacy with a classic practice that's been central to one branch of American poetry for the last twenty to thirty years. If you really want to understand American poetry, even as a dry, clipped, scholar, it would pay to experience meditation instruction and then sit for at least an hour out of your four-score years. So at least you know that much about it. You'll have one hour's understanding of it. If it becomes addicting, then, that's your problem, but in any case, just as a taste is important, just so you know what people are talking about when they're talking about breath, spirit, in terms of watching the breath.

Also, it seemed to me (that) last night's poetry party [sic] was a little bit drunk and raucous and slobbish, I must say, with lots of unresolved aggression and people not knowing how to take care of themselves and leaving clean-up for other people. I had to get up in the morning and wash the dishes. Some lack of mindfulness maybe? - I think meditation practice does cultivate that [cultivate mindfulness].

See, the tendency in the Beatnik poetry scene is to get increasingly disharmonious, drunken, and aggressive and sloppy, in certain respects. Among the faculty here.. we have a funny faculty, you know. We have Peter (Orlovsky), who is, in certain respects, an idiot, although very clear what he's doing, Gregory (Corso), who is a velvet genius, but, in other respects, a monster who creates a lot of chaos, as last night. Then there are people who come in on the scene, hanging on, like this Beatnik guy with the beard last night who started to hit Gregory, and was screaming about God, and wanting violence!

Now in order to maintain some sense of community stability, awareness and clearness and sanity and cleanliness and order, which is necessary to balance against the wild freedom, wild mouth, imaginative, expansive, heroic, romantic-al temperament that's been cultivated by the (Jack) Kerouac School, hopefully, that is, heart, heart expansion, then it really is necessary to develop clarity - clarity of awareness and sanity and balance and moderation, on another level, so that when you do leap off the balcony, you know you have a net under you. You've prepared a net.      

Expansive Poetics - 49 (Akhmatova & Mayakovsky)

April 15, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 50 (Mayakovsky on Esenin)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 48 (A Reminder - Meditation as Counterpoint)

$

0

0

[Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), in 1924, aged 35]

June 9 1981 - Allen Ginsberg's Expansive Poetics class continuesat Naropa Institute. On this day, Ann Charters, who, two years earlier, in collaboration with her husband Sam, had publishedI Love - The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik, is the class's special guest. The emphasis therefore is on Mayakovsky and twentieth-century Russian literature.

AG: ....in the Russian section...  (Anna) Akhmatova is after (Nikolay) Gumilev (1886-1921) [in the Expansive Poetics Anthology] , a poem called "Requiem".  Okay? Everybody got it?

Student: That's the very first poem in her section.

AG: Yeah. In the Russian section, after (Nikolay) Gumilev and before (Osip) Mandelstam...

Okay, (so), where we left off was (Vladimir) Mayakovsky's poem, "150, ooo, ooo"  - What year was that?  What  year was that? Okay, 1920 - (a) performance at the Arts House in Petrograd, December 5th, 1920, according to Ann Charters book. He read his new poem, "150, ooo, ooo" before a group of other writers including (Yevgeny) Zamyatin and (Vladimir) Mayakovsky, whom we'll hear from later, a long propaganda poem - "150,ooo,ooo is the creator of this poem./ It's rhythms, bullets, it's rhymes, fires from buildings/150,ooo,ooo speak with my lips. Who can/tell the name of the earth's creator? Surely a/ genius. And so of this my poem noone is the author" 

Years later, after all the poets had been starved, shot. or arrested or exiled, or threatened or intimidated, or made to kiss (Josef) Stalin's ass - March 1940, so that would be twenty years later, there's this great poem by Anna Akhmatova called "Requiem", composed of fragments which she wrote over a period of years, from 1935 to (19)40,  up to (19)61, and not published complete in Russia until after 1965, I think (if  then, published complete) - Do you know if that's in Russian?

Ann Charters: No, it's never been (fully available) in Russia.

AG: It's never been published in Russia. It was published outside Russia in Russian, (in Munich, originally, I think, actually)

So, the end of the poem,  the epilogue, is a retrospect view of all the bitter experiences she'd had. The translations [by Stanley Kunitz and Max Haywood] are not particularly great, but you get some of the gist or substance of what she's saying. You've got to realize that under the various terrors and purges almost all of her friends (were killed), like Mandelstam died in 1937 to 1940 (nobody knows exactly when). He was exiled to Siberia by Stalin for a joke poem he wrote about Stalin. And Akhmatova was there in a town called Voronezh, Voronezh, when the cops came to pick him up and busted into the room and grabbed his manuscripts and took them away. So she says [Allen begins reading from Akhmatova's "Requiem"] - "I have learned how faces fell to bone,/how under the eyelid terror lurks,/how suffering inscribes on cheeks/the hard line of its cuneiform texts/ how glossy black or ash-fair locks/turn overnight to tarnished silver,/how smiles fade on submissive lips,/and fear quavers in a dry titter./And I pray not for myself alone.../for all who stood outside the jail,/In bitter cold or summer's blaze/ With me under that blind red wall." - She had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in a queue outside the jail to see her son who had been arrested by Stalin and had been kept by him, as a cat playing with a mouse, till the (19)40's. He asked her to write a few poems to him and Stalin had her son in jail. So Stalin "had her by the balls", so to speak.

This is the conclusion of the poem - [Allen reads from "Requiem"] - "Remembrance hour returns with the turning year./I see, I hear, I touch you drawing near:/the one we tried to help to the sentry's booth,/and who no longer walks this precious earth,/ and that one who would toss her pretty mane/ and say, "It's just like coming home again."/ I want to name the names of all that host,/but they snatched up the list and now it's lost./ I've woven them a garment that's prepared/out of poor words, those that I overheard,/ and will hold fast to every word and glance/all of my days, even in new mischance,/ and if a gag should bind my tortured mouth,/through which a hundred million people shout/ then let them pray for me, as I do pray/for them, this even of my remembrance day./ And if my country ever should assent/ to casting in my name a monument,/ I should be proud to have my memory graced,/ but only if the monument be placed/ not near the sea on which my eyes first opened -/ my last link with the sea has long been broken -/ nor in the Tsar's garden near the sacred stump,/ where a grieved shadow hants my body's warmth,/ but here, where I endured three hundred hours/in line before the implacable iron bars./ Because even in blissful death I fear/ to lose the clangor of the Black Marias/ to lose the banging of that odious gate,/ and the old crone howling like a wounded beast./ And from my motionless bronze-lidded sockets/ may the melting snow, like teardrops, slowly trickle/and a prison dove coo somewhere, over and over,/as the ships sail softly down the flowing Neva"
  - So, twenty years later, she is saying, "and if a gag should bind my tortured mouth,/through which a hundred million people shout", which is really a colossal claim (even I never could claim I was speaking for a hundred million people all at once! - prophetic). (Vladimir) Mayakovsky said a hundred-and-fifty million ("150,000,000") and I wonder if that's a reference?

Ann Charters: It probably is. Although there are fifty million who supported the regime and two-thirds who did not.
This is a good point also to consider, that Akhmatova's poem is written after the horrors of Stalin, and this is also after Mayakovsky's suicide. We think about Mayakovsky, (and) the perspective in which we hold (him), of course, is the perspective of Akhmatova, basically, which is after the realization of theGulags - (Aleksandr) Solzhenitsyn's account of the forced labor-camp system which sent twenty million people to their deaths. We're trying to get our minds back, however, to.. remember, Mayakovsky was writing his poems in, for example, 1920, 1922, before all of this, while (Vladimir Ilyich) Lenin was still alive, and he didn't have the sense of failure in the Revolution to the extent that Akhmatova did, obviously, because historical events had not yet moved on.
But yes, remember the two voices speaking for the Russian people - Mayakovsky's first, and then Akhmatova's.


[Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) in 1928, aged 35 - photo by Alexander Rodchenko]  

(Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at the beginning and continuing to approximately eight-and-a-half minutes in)  




to be continued

Expansive Poetics - 50 (Mayakovsky on Esenin)

April 16, 2014, 2:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 51 (Mayakovsky and the Revolution)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 49 (Akhmatova & Mayakovsky)

$

0

0

     [Sergei Esenin (1895-1925)]

AG (to Ann Charters): I did want to interject this (Sergei) Eseninthing, because in that there's also [as with Akhmatova's "Requiem"] a reference to the bronze-lidded statue

Ann Charters: Yeah

AG: So they're all.. This is Mayakovsky's elegy on the suicide of Esenin, 
Mayakovsky's comment on Esenin's suicide

Ann Charters: This is 1925

AG: (19)25, probably. Esenin, as you remember, his last line, written in blood, is "In this life, to die is nothing new. But, of course to live is nothing new either"- "In this life, to die is nothing. But, of course to live is nothing newer"  - That's actually pretty sharp. They're sharp last comments. 
[Allen begins to read Mayakovsky (in English translation - an alternative translation by way of comparison may be read here)]  - "You have passed, as they say, to worlds elsewhere/ Emptiness.../ Fly, cutting your way into starry/dubeity. No advances, no publications for you there./Sobriety. Ah, Esenin, this is not deridingly,/- in my throat not laughter but sorrow racks/I see your cut-open hand lingeringly,/swings your very own bones like a sack./Stop it, chuck it! isn't it really absurd?/Allowing cheeks to flush with deathly hue?/You who could do such things with words/ that no one else on earth could do./ Why? For what? Perplexity appalls./ Critics mutter,"The main fault we find/ there was hardly any working-class contact at all,/ and the result? Too much beer and wine". /So to say, if you had swapped bohemianism for class struggle/, there'd have been no bust-up/ Class would have influenced/ your thinking/. But does class quench its thirst with kvass?..."
- "Kvass" is a cabbage cider, alcoholic cider - "But does class quench its thirst with kvass?/Class, too, is no fool when it comes to drinking./They'd have attached to you someone from On Guard.." (On Literary Guard, Na literaturnom postu, a monthly journal of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) - "They'd have attached to you someone from On Guard magazine/The main accent would have been on content;/a hundred lines a day you'd have written hard./as tedious and long-winded as Doronin's attempts.." - ("Doronin", a footnote says, "A contemporary, now forgotten") - "To my mind, before I'd utter such nonsensical stink/ I'd have choked in my very own breath./ Better far to die in drink/ than be bored to death!/ Neither the noose nor the penknife there/will reveal the true cause of this loss. But,/ maybe, if there had been ink in the Angleterre Hotel/ there'd be no reasons for veins to be cut.." - (Because Esenin wrote his last poem in the Angleterre Hotel, cutting his own veins to make ink) - "Encore!", imitators coo in delight./ Nearly a platoon has gone down the sink./ Why increase the number of suicides?/ Better to increase the output of ink!/ It's grevious and misplaced to be mystery-propagators./ For ever now your tongue by teeth's locked tight./ Of all the people, the language creators/, a sonorous, good-for-nothing master has died./ And as condolences, poetic junk they gave/unrehashed hangovers from funerals of the past,/Blunted rhymes are shoved in to exorcise your grave -/is that how a poet is honored at last?/A monument for you hasn't yet been cast.." - This is where Akhmatova's line comes in - "A monument for you hasn't yet been cast -/ what is it, bronze, reverberant,or granite-grand?/ But there, already, by memory's bars,/ dedications and memoirs of rubbish stand./ Your name into handkerchiefs they're snivelling,/ your words by Sobinov.." - (Sobinov (Leonid Sobinov) was a Wagnerian tenor who sang some poems of Esenin) - "your words by Sobinov are lisped here/, and they'll wind up under a phony birch tree quivering./ "Not a word, my friend, not a wh-i-s-p-e-r" - [Allen quotes from some forgotten poem] - "Ah, to quite a different tune I'd switch/ and just tell Leonid Lohnegrinich!/ I'd rise up here a thundering scandalist./ "I won't allow my poems to be mangled by nuts..." - [Allen corrects himself - "mutts! - "mangled by mutts"] - "I'd deafen them with a double-barreled whistle./They can stick 'em where the monkey stuck his nuts!"./And so disperse such talentless filth,/ blowing away jacket-sails, engendered darkness,/ so that helter-skelter run Kogan and his ilk.." - (Petr (Semionvich) Kogan, a (strict Marxist)  literary critic [and president of the Academy of Literary Science]) - "mutilating oncomers with spears of his moustaches./ The ranks of rubbish meanwhile hasn't grown any thinner./ There's so much to do - just to catch up with things yet./ Life must be changed to begin with./ And having changed it - then one can sing it./These days are difficult for the pen./ But tell me, you crooks and wheezy criminals,/ what great ones ever chose where and when?/ A path already trodden, smooth and easy?/ The word is the C-in-C of human powers.." - (What's "C-in-C"?  Communist?, I don't know, Communists in Communism?, I don't know [editorial note: "C in C", "Commander-in-Chief", surely?] - oh, Committee?, (it's) "Central Committee", I bet. The word (language) is the Central Committee of the Communist Power of human powers - "The word is the C-in-C of human powers./ Forward march!, That time may whistle by like rockets,/ So that the wind shall carry to the past of ours/ only the ruffling of our hair./ Our planet is poorly equipped for delight./ One must snatch gladness from the days that are./In this life/ it's not difficult to die./ To make life/ is more difficult by far." - (So he reverses Esenin's couplet - "In this life to die is nothing new. But, of course, to live is nothing newer" -  ["V etoi zhizni umirat' ne novo,/No i zhit' konechno, ne novei"] -  ("There's nothing new in dying now/Though living is no newer." - or, in an alternative translation, "In this life there's nothing new in dying/But nor of course is living any newer")]
 - I don't know which was smarter.  Actually, Esenin's, in a way. 


[Vladimir Mayakovsky statue in Moscow Square [installed in 1958] - sculpture by A.P.Kibalnikov] 

Ann Charters: This emphasis on statues in Akhmatova' s poem ("Requiem") - she wants a statue, if they're going to put it up, not in the town where she was born, but where she stood in line in Stalin's... before Stalin's prison. And in "To Esenin", Mayakovsky (is) saying, "If they're going to make a great statue... (because Russia loves to make statues to its poets, you know - it's like Boulder, Colorado, is going to have a statue of, maybe, like, the four, you know, people on Mount Rushmore, after some years have passed..) At any rate, Mayakovsky has a statue (in fact, there are many statues to Mayakovsky). This is the irony of ironies, because where do you suppose they put up the big statue in Moscow to Mayakovsky? Has anybody been there? Does anybody..?

AG: Yeah, I've been there.

Ann Charters: ..Yeah. Well, remember where they put it up?

AG: By a subway station or something.

Ann Charters: Well, the subway station is called  (the) Mayakovsky stop, also (they really do things in a big way in Moscow!). And (so) there's this magnificent bronze statue in the center of Moscow, down-town, which is a very heroic figure of Mayakovsky reading, with (wearing) a beautiful European suit. But the irony of ironies is that the statue has been located right across the street from a theatre where I went to see a Tchaikovsky concert one night in Moscow and I was talking about this - "Why is the statue there?" - It's almost as if Mayakovsky with his hand out is trying to reach the theatre. And they laughed at me, the people I spoke to, and said, "Now, it's a concert hall, but in Mayakovsky's day it was the Meyerhold Theatre, where productions of, among other plays, "The Bedbug" took place, with the very famous director, (Vsevolod) Meyerhold, (who was a Stalin victim in the camps in the middle (19)30's). And they changed the name, obviously, after he disappeared. Ironically, there's Mayakovsky listening to what's coming from the music hall, you know, the concert hall, classical music - but the memory, perhaps, in his mind is of the Meyerhold and the production of Mayakovsky's last plays in that very theatre.

[Dmitri Shostakovitch, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Vladimir Mayakovskyand Alexander Rodchenko, 1929, at a rehearsal for Mayakovsky's"The Bed Bug" at the Meyerhold Theatre] 

AG: And his last play was stopped, finally.

Ann Charters: Yes, yes.

AG: They closed the doors of the theatre on him.

Annn Charters: Yeah, yeah.

(Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately eight-and-a-half minutes in  and continuing to approximately sixteen-and-a-half minutes in) 

Expansive Poetics - 51 (Mayakovsky and the Revolution)

April 17, 2014, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 173

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 50 (Mayakovsky on Esenin)

$

0

0

[Vladimir Mayakovsky, detail of a poster design, 1921. - Translation of the title: “Comrades! Beware of falling into those jaws. Let us close ranks to escape such a miserable fate—Strengthen Soviet Rule!”]

Ann Charters' (July 9 1981) Russian Poetry class continues.

Ann Charters: Well, let's talk about Mayakovsky as a political poet now for a while, because he was most famous for a poem called"Lenin", which he wrote in 1924, as a eulogy for the dear departed leader, who had made the Revolution and the victory of the Bolsheviks an actuality. As you could hear from the Esenin poem, Mayakovsky was very good with elegies. He really got into it - like the classical tradition of "Adonais". Mayakovsky really could write with great, great grandeur and eloquence about the past, in addition to his interest in the new revolution for the future. But the poem about Lenin is a much longer poem, and it was a poem that made Mayakovsky famous - if you had to say which one poem did it - took him from the ranks of the hurly-burly, Beat, kind of Futurists into the ranks where everyone was saying, "Wow, that's Mayakovsky". It was this poem on Lenin, which he read on every possible occasion, before the Party, or before members in camps, youth camps, factories, you name it, Mayakovsky was there reading this great poem. And, of course, this was very useful to the people who were steering the government.

AG: This is after Lenin's death

Ann Charters: Yeah, of course. Lenin died in 1923, and the poem was written a few months later. And Mayakovsky worked very hard on the poem, he just didn't toss it off, he believed in it. Everything he did he believed in in the long poem. And "Lenin" is a poem (I'll tell you a little bit about it) that, unequivocably, declares Mayakovsky's political loyalties to the Communist Party - 1924
Now, if you know anything about the Revolution, you know that it was a very confused time in 1917, that the Bolsheviks sort of snuck in there and got power. And Mayakovsky was a dedicated Communist from the very beginning, but he was not a dedicated Bolshevik until 1924, and that's a very important distinction.

AG: What's the difference?

Ann Charters: Well, the Communists - you could be a Trotsky Communist.

AG: Uh-huh

Ann Charters: Yeah, you could be a Marxist. You could just be a World Socialist. But a Bolshevik, swearing complete loyalty to the Central Committee's declarations.

AG: Oh, so that's the difference.

Ann Charters: Yes.. And this was..

Student: (Could you, perhaps) explain some more. What's the difference?
AG: Communists, you can be a Socialist, or a Trotskyite or a Communalist..
Ann Charters: Yeah. Right.
AG:  ..(a) Cooperativist...
Ann Charters: Communist with a small "c"
Student: Oh, okay.
AG: The Bolshevik then is the...
Ann Charters: Absolutely
AG: ... Soviet...
Ann Charters:  Is what's going on now
AG: ..Central Commitee of the Communist Party.
Ann Charters: Yes, that's the government.
Student (Can you tell me what) "Bolshevik" means?
Ann Charters: It means "the great"
Student: Okay
Ann Charters: And this is.. oh, you've got a...
AG: Bolshoi Theatre
Ann Charters: That's "the Big Theatre", and theMaly Theatre..
AG: Bolshoi Ballet 
Ann Charters: The Bolshoi Ballet is the Big Ballet. And the Maly Theatre is the Little Ballet - or Theatre. And the Maly Ballet is the Little Ballet.

Student: (What do you mean), politically, when you say "Bolshevik"?
AG: The Big Party, I guess.
Ann Charters: It means "the Big Party".
Student: Big?
AG: Yeah. Exactly.
Student: When you say "Bolshoi Ballet", does that mean...
AG: "The Big Ballet".
Ann Charters: No, no, it has no... 
AG: No, it means "big"
Ann Charters: It just means big
Student: Big?
AG: "Bolshoi" means "big"
Ann Charters: It's an adjective
Student: Okay. Got it.

Ann Charters: I have a daughter. My oldest one's fourteen, and her name is Maly (until I went to the Soviet Union, I didn't know that word meant "small", just like "Bolshevik" means "big", you know - or "Bolshoi") 
AG: So "Bolshevik" would be then like "Beat-nik", would be "Big-it", "Biggest"
Ann Charters: Yeah
AG: Remember a "Big-ite"?
Student: Big-ite?
AG: Big-ite - that's someone who's a Big-nik (from the Big Party), rather than a Small-nik!

Ann Charters: Yeah. Interesting to see poetry in a political context. In this country we are not usually exposed to this reality of the world, which is, in Russia, the main, the big, reality, the Bolshoi reality. In this country, in America, we tend to separate politics and poetry, but in Russia they are completely intertwined.
Okay. Yes?

Student: I have another question. Was that true before Mayakovsky? Because I remember that poem that one of you read last session, and he went to Mayakovsky Street, you know, he went to his old street and now it was called Mayakovsky Street.

AG: Oh, "A Cloud in Trousers", yeah..

Student: Yeah, right, right. Does that mean that it's always been like that - that Russians always had really memorialized its poets in that way?

Ann Charters: Yeah

Student: Or was he being funny?

Ann Charters: No, no, no. He wasn't being..

AG: Some tradition.

Ann Charters: There is a great tradition..

AG: Under the Tsarists, too.

Ann Charters: Yeah. ..of honoring the poets publically, with statues and with street names.

AG: Or fighting them. I think (Alexander) Pushkin had a lot of  trouble with the Tsar over his poetry. One of the early poems I read was Pushkin making poisonous remarks about the Tsar ["The Upas Tree"]

Ann Charters: Yeah

AG: Like the poet's writing some really mean thing about the leader (which is what (Osip) Mandelstam did to (Joseph) Stalin, or what Pushkin did to the Tsar) that gets him in trouble.. is a tradition..

Ann Charters: Now..

AG: But, I think, in the Bolshevik situation, since there was an official union, anybody in the official union who was published officially, therefore anything he says is within the bounds of officialdom...So, if you get up and say you don't like the country, you can't say,"I don't like the government where I live", or  "America.. go fuck yourself with your atom bomb!" ("Russia, why don't you stick Stalin up your ass!), then you'd be saying that officially, and you can't say that officially because that would be a a government statement. It's like our (USA's) television. If it gets on our television, then it means that it's part of (our) popular conception of reality, it means it's real. If you say something on television it means it's within the bounds of reality, not just a flake lunatic-fringe paranoia.
So same thing there, and so (Yevgeny) Yevtushenko's view - because he sticks with the government, he says - in other words, he's still an official poet, he hasn't fled and he's not underground...(that) is, "Although I compromise, I'm sitting on this fence and my role is to move the government one millioneth of an inch left every time I open my mouth...to open things up. Because I say the most extreme left things that anybody will say as a poet. But still it's official. So if I say it and it's published in Pravda, like the New York Times, then that means that's official reality. So I can dare a little bit. And then the bureaucrats will fight me and we'll have to compromise, but it'll still be left of what they want. So, therefore, my function is... that's why I'm sticking here, (in the middle of the mass murder), basically."

Ann Charters: This is very important. We're coming at it like a postscript with what Allen just said. We were on our way to talk about "Lenin", but this is a very very important point - that if you are, as Mayakovsky did in "Lenin", speaking as an official poet, whatever you say in Russia is the word of the government, and therefore you are really always being carefully, carefully monitored, and carefully, carefully watched. Mayakovsky's view (and that poem that you just read, the Esenin) is that the word is the Central Committee - not people, you know, powers. Not Stalin or Lenin, but the word. And this is anarchy, really, in terms of poetry. This is poetry - the word as the highest freedom.

AG: Authority

Ann Charters: Authority, authority. Whereas what Mayakovsky didn't understand (and, perhaps this is also a clue to his depression at the very end with the difficulty having his plays performed, and he slowly began to learn it), is that, in the Soviet Union, that wasn't true - that the Party was the supreme authority, not the word.

AG: Yeah, so this is an heretical statement.

Ann Charters: Totally. And theFuturists, including [Mayakovsky's married girlfriend], (Lili)) Brik and Mayakovsky, had no practical smarts about how to deal after the Revolution, truly, thinking that the word would still be free. And it just isn't. It just isn't.



(Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately sixteen-and-a-half minutes in  and continuing to approximately twenty-four-and-a-half minutes in 
and http://cdm16621.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p16621coll1/id/1016/rec/1)

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 173

April 18, 2014, 3:30 am

≫ Next: William Burroughs - Last Words of Hassan Sabbah

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 51 (Mayakovsky and the Revolution)

$

0

0

[Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) & Kathy Acker (1947-1997)]

April 18 - Bob Kaufman's and Kathy Acker's birthday today. For our postings on Kaufman - see here and here. For our posting on Kathy Acker see here

Women of the Beat Generation,a perennially significant topic, gets another airing next week in Randolph, New Jersey. Joyce Johnson and Hettie Joneswill be speaking on the subject.
Hopefully, there's been some significant progress since this:



Sociologically and cinematographically of interest, the full movie - "Beat Girl" (sic - "Wild For Kicks" in its 1960 US manifestation), well, all but approximately ten minutes of it - is available here. 


Next week - a big week in New York - celebrating William Burroughs. WSB100 is the New York chapter of the centennial celebrations, guided by James Ilgenfritz. On Monday at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Elliott Sharp& Steve Buscemi. On Tuesday at Incubator Arts Project, Lydia Lunch& Quintan Ana Wikswo. On Wednesday a big marathon William Burroughs reading at the Poetry Project at St Mark's, featuring Anne Waldman,Bob Holman, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge,Penny Arcade, J.G.Thirlwell,  amongst a host of others. Friday, at theCUNY (City University of New York) Grad Center, an all-day Burroughs symposium (featuring Barry Miles, Oliver Harris,Ann Douglas,Regina Weinreich,Jed Birmingham, to, again, just give a partial list). 



Saturday,Oliver Harris and curators on Restoring the Cut-Up Trilogy, at the New York Public Library.  Saturday evening. John Zorn and Bill Laswellduet at The Stone and Bill Laswell presents his "The Road to the Western Lands". The following day, Bill Frisell on guitar, Eyvind Kang on viola and Lenny Pickett on sax combine with Hal Willner presenting Burroughs audio-tapes. 

And there's more. 

A full schedule may be found here. 

Kathy Acker's 1988 interview with Burroughs (previously featured here on the Allen Ginsberg Project) - we remind you - may be accessed here

[Michael Stipe (of REM), and Kurt Cobain (1967-1994) (of Nirvana) - & Allen Ginsberg]

"..(T)he echo-chamber of that collective "Howl".." - (and) "..Allen Ginsberg would've been very proud here.." -  Michael Stipereferences Allen Ginsbergin his keynote speech inductingKurt Cobain and Nirvana into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, just last week
(fittingly, perhaps, on the twentieth-anniversary of Cobain's untimely passing)

His (Cobain's) 1993 collaboration with Burroughs (including a written request for collaboration and a subsequent thank you note [sic!] - "I really enjoyed the opportunity to do the record" [""The Priest" They Called Him"])  appeared this past Monday on Dangerous Minds (one of our favorite blogs) - and is well worth checking out
(for a little of the "back story").

We'll be featuring more on this - the Stipe-Cobain-Burroughs connection this coming weekend.

and - big news!  a new book of Peter Orlovsky's writings,Peter Orlovsky - A Life In Words - Intimate Chronicles of A Beat Writer(edited by Bill Morgan)  is scheduled for publication by Paradigm Publishers (out of Herndon, Vermont) in a couple of months time. More word on that too in the weeks ahead - "This is the "Orlovsky Reader"", the publishers declare, "(which Ginsberg always wanted to publish), offering poetry, prose and journal entries, created by the man who was the muse of the Beat Generation".  


[Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, Paris 1957 - Photograph by Harold Chapman] 

The forty-year anniversary of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa is this year. There'll be a celebration this Sunday at City Lights, led by Naropa Assistan Professor of English, Andrea Rexilius. A further celebratory reading will take place, at the St Mark's Poetry Project, in November.

William Burroughs - Last Words of Hassan Sabbah

April 19, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: William Burroughs - Star Me Kitten & The Priest They Called Him

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 173

$

0

0

[Hassan-i-Sabbah, "The Old Man of the Mountain"]

Burroughs-month, Burroughs-year, Burroughs-century. Here's yet another posting on William.

Initially in a letter to Allen, written June 21 1960, and appearing in The Yage Letters, and redacted to appear as part of the first chapter of Nova Express, the spoken version (from which the following transcription is taken) appeared on the 1981 Industrial Records release (spearheaded by Genesis P. Orridge, now Genesis Breyer P.Orridge), "Nothing Here Now But The Recordings" - The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah (you all know who Hassan-i-Sabbah was, right?)

The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah 

 Oiga amigos! Oiga amigos! Paco! Enrique! 
 Last words of Hassan Sabbah, 
 The Old Man of the Mountain! 
 Listen to my last words, anywhere! 
 Listen all you boards, governments, syndicates, nations of the world,
 And you, powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory,
 To take what is not yours, 
 To sell out your sons forever! To sell the ground from unborn feet 
 forever.

 I bear no sick words junk words love words forgive words from Jesus.
 I have not come to explain or tidy up.
 What am I doing over here with the workers, the gooks, the apes, the
 dogs, the errand boys, the human animals? 
 Why don't I come over with the board, and drink coca-cola and make it?

 Explain how the blood, and bones, and brains of a hundred million

 more or less gooks went down the drain in green piss! 
 so you on the boards could use bodies, and minds, and souls that
 were not yours, are not yours, and never will be yours. 
 You have the wrong name and the wrong number! 
 Mr Luce Getty Lee Rockefeller

"Don't let them see us, don't tell them what we are doing! "

Not the cancer deal with the Venusians, not the green deal -

don't let that out,

disaster, automatic disaster.

Crab men! Tape-worms! Intestinal parasites! 

Like Burroughs, that proud American name? 
Proud of what exactly? Would you all like to see exactly what
Burroughs has to be proud of? 
The Mayan Caper, the Centipede Hype,
Short-time racket, the Heavy-metal gimmick? 
All right, Mister Burroughs, who bears my name and my words buried
all the way 
for all to see, 

in Times Square, in Piccadilly, 

Play it all, play it all, play it all back! 
Pay it all, pay it all, pay it all back!

Listen to my last word, any word

Listen, if you value the bodies which you would sell

all souls forever, short time,

minutes to go, blue heavy-metal people -

don't let that out, 

don't show them the blues. 

Are these the words of the all powerful boards, syndicates,

cartels of the earth?

The great banking families, French, English, American,

squeezing the air.

You want Hassan Sabbah to explain that,

to tidy that up.

You have the wrong name and the wrong number.

Look, 

for this you have sold your sons forever? 

the ground from unborn feet forever

And you want the name of Hassan Sabbah on your filth deals 
To sell out the unborn? 

I rub out all the formulaes and directives of the Elders of Minraud forever
I rub out the word forever.

---

William Burroughs - Star Me Kitten & The Priest They Called Him

April 20, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 52 (Mayakovsky and Mandelstam)

≪ Previous: William Burroughs - Last Words of Hassan Sabbah

$

0

0

[Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Michael Stipe (REM) and William Burroughs]

[William Burroughs and Kurt Cobain] 




More Burroughs for the weekend - collaborations with Michael Stipe and Kurt Cobain (REM and Nirvana) -"Star Me Kitten" and "The Priest They Called Him".

Beginning with "Star Me.." (yes, "Star Me" - the allusion is to the Rolling Stones'"Starfucker" ("Star Star"). The source, is the 1996 collection,  "Songs in the Key of X - Music From And Inspired By "The X-Files") 

Burroughs: "All right. Just something I picked up. A knack of going along with someone else's song, putting myself into it. It evolved from "Lili Marlene", Marlene Dietrich, not one of my favorite people but, that's where it came from"

"He's got three for the price of one./Nothing's free but guarenteed for a lifetime's use./ I've changed the locks/and you can't have one/You, you know the other two./The breaks have worn so thin that you could hear -/ I hear them screeching through the door from your driveway./ Hey love, look into your glove-box heart./What is there for me inside? This love is tired./ I've changed the locks. Have I misplaced you?/ Have we lost our minds?/ Will this never end?/It could depend on your take./You. Me. We used to be on fire/ If keys are all that stand between,/Can I throw in the ring?/No gasoline./Just fuck me kitten./You are wild and I'm in your possession/Nothing's free so, fuck me kitten/I'm in your possession/So fuck me kitten."

The Kurt Cobain and William Burroughs connection is given, in some detail, here (and also here) - "The Priest They Called Him". Cobain, apparently, contacted his hero, Burroughs, in 1992, and sounded him out about the possibility of them, perhaps, doing something together. Burroughs sent him a tape of a reading he'd done of a short story, originally published in the early (19)70's in the collection, Exterminator. Cobain added some guitar backing, (based, loosely, on "Silent Night" and"To Anacreon in Heaven") and the piece was released (as a limited-edition 1o-inch EP picture disc - it was subsequently re-released on CD and 10-inch vinyl).



At the time of the collaboration, the two had not met. They met in October 1993, in Lawrence, Kansas, during the first week of Nirvana's "Nevermind" tour. Burroughs describes the meeting: "I waited and Kurt got out with another man. Cobain was very shy, very polite and obviously enjoyed the fact that I wasn't awestruck at meeting him. There was something about him fragile and engagingly lost. He smoked cigarettes but didn't drink. There were no drugs. I never showed him my gun collection". 
In Charles Cross's biography of Cobain, Heavier than Heaven, there's a further revealing note concerning this brief encounter - "They chatted for several hours…As Kurt drove away, Burroughs remarked to his assistant (James Grauerholz), "There's something wrong with that boy; he frowns for no good reason". 

and here, as an extra, as a bonus, William S Burroughs and Gus Van Sant   

Expansive Poetics - 52 (Mayakovsky and Mandelstam)

April 21, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 53 - (Mayakovsky and Lili Brik)

≪ Previous: William Burroughs - Star Me Kitten & The Priest They Called Him

$

0

0

[Vladimir Ilych Lenin (1870-1924)]

transcription from Allen Ginsberg's "Expansive Poetics" Naropa Class continues

Ann Charters:  So okay. And with this poem of “Lenin”,  Mayakovsky (this is first read on October 18^th, 1924) pledges his loyalty to the Bolsheviks with this poem eulogizing a great man – and Lenin was a great man. I mean, the camps hadn’t yet begun, and so forth. And he decided, or he said to the world in this poem,”Lenin”, that he was turning away from personal lyricism – you remember that line in “ At the Top of My Voice”..

AG: Yeah

Ann Charters: ..”Putting your foot on your own throat” -["But I/ subdued/ myself/ setting my heel/ on the throat/ of my own song"]  -  (his) turning away, and his role as a poet was to infuse – I’m quoting now –“ I  want to infuse/New glitter/ Into the most glorious word,/ “Party”” – whoops!  There’s a problem there. And he dedicated the poem..

AG: That’s two years after (Anna) Akhmatova’s husband (or ex-husband) (Nikoly) Gumilev, 1923, had been shot already.

Ann Charters: Sure, yeah, Mayakovsky

AG: Nineteen twenty-three!

Ann Charters: …Mayakovsky was, as I said,  very slow to learn in that sense, yeah.   Anyway, he dedicates the poem to the Russian Communist Party and he uses a lot of Lenin’s speeches when he makes up the poem, which is another reason why it became so popular – because, just as poets echoing other poets are a tradition in poetry, so in political poetry you try to echo the words of the politicians that you are eulogizing. And so seventy-five printed pages of this poem – it’s a long, long, long…

Student: Wow!

Ann Charters:  ..poem. You brought a lunch, kind of, if you wanted to hear it. Seventy-five printed pages later, it ends: “Long live the Revolution, joyful and fast./This is the only great war of all that history has known.” Yeah. Okay.

So, you say, how can he reconcile his feelings as a poet  or his feelings as a private person with his public role? His argument would run, I think, that at the time these finer points about freedom, the word having power over, you know, humankind or whatever are futile. What we have to do is all get together in one concerted group and we will, you know, have.. get ahead. He says, for example…

AG: These are from the poems, then?

Ann Charters: Yeah, this is from “Lenin”

AG: How long is the whole thing?

Ann Charters: Seventy-five printed pages. I don’t know how many lines. Thousands, you know.

AG: And he read it aloud as a performance piece?

Ann Charters: As a performance. Yeah. “Could in such a time, the word “democrat” ever enter a stupid head” (in his troubled times). “If one should hit then hit so that the sidewalk gets wet”. “The clue to victory is in iron dictatorship” – It’s words like this that made people like (Aleksandr) Solzhenitsyn(who) quote(s) him in The Gulag Archipelago, despise Mayakovsky. Remember, this is 1924, and the Gulag hadn’t… but it was beginning. He just wasn’t too swift. Yeah.

Okay, Mayakovsky justified everything that he’d done in the seven years since 1917 – all of the wars, all of the suffering, the beginnings of persecution – by his vision of the new society that was being created. Despite his own difficulties, he should have known about (Nikolay) Gumilev, because he himself had been under attack by Party officials for not towing the line. He himself had been individual, buthe asserts in the “Lenin” poem that the individual is of no importance to the future. And he says, “An individual, Who needs him?!/ The voice of an individual is thinner than a chirp./ Who’ll hear it? - the wife perhaps!/ And only if she’s around, and not out shopping.” Various..various contemptual (sic) dismissals of the private person in the poem are very difficult to understand, because Mayakovsky himself is an individualist, as we shall soon see.

A year after this poem, he starts one of his private poems again. There is this spirit in him, you know. He says something in one poem and he’s.. well, like what’s that lady’s name – Sandy O’Connor, who’s now the woman.. first woman Chief Justice. And when she’s doing her legal work in Arizona she’s for abortion, and when she has a little talk with (President Ronald) Reagan, “Would you like to be on the Supreme Court?”, and she says, “Absolutely. Abortion is abhorrent to me”.

AG: There’s a good..

Ann Charters:  You know, like which way is the wind blowing? People who are in public life and who are ambitious and so forth. And this is the same kind of situation, if you want to look at it that way...

AG: What’s his line about the individual there again?

Ann Charters:, “An individual!, Who needs him?!/ The voice of an individual is thinner than a chirp./ Who’ll hear it? - the  wife perhaps!/  And only if she’s around, and not out shopping.”

AG: Okay, so in contrast with that is (Osip) Mandelstam, who was constantly shut up and persecuted, (and) directly persecuted by Stalin, keeping track of him, having police follow him around, and, whenever he moved, having a policeman go live next door, and even, policemen would come into his house and say, "Well, what are you writing these days?". You "can't tell the difference between a turkey and a provocateur" in that situation. 

Ann Charters: There's a..

AG:  In 1936, 1937, a quatrain by Mandelstam - "Hillocks of human heads into the horizon,/and I am diminished - they won't notice me,/(but I'll come back) resurrected in tender books and/children's games, saying, "See? The sun is shining" - or, alternative translation - "Into the distance go the mounds of people's heads./ I am growing smaller here - no one notices me any more" - (just as Mayakovsky said) -  "I am growing smaller here - no one notices me any more/but in caressing books and children's games/I will rise from the dead to say the sun is shining." - but that "Hillocks of human heads into the horizon"!

Ann Charters: Right. The hillocks and the image of the sun there, and then the image of the sun, which is poetry, (out)lasting wars, (out)lasting revolutions. In other words, he still felt that the word was the Central Committee - that's Mandelstam.


[Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938)]

AG: A little bit more of Mandelstam on..

Ann Charters: Whatever you say.

AG: ..on this, right on this, to contrast it.

Student: Can I say something?

AG: Yeah.

Student: Yeah, I think the main problem (is the problem) we all have anyway, everywhere, is this sort of thing (which is) individual identity and the...

AG: Except that, in the case of both the Buddhists...the Christians, and the Communists (or the Bolsheviks), there is this tendency toward internalization of the attack on the individual ego… and so, in a misunderstanding… (at least amongst the Buddhists), very often a misunderstanding (or among the American Freudians or Marxists, as well as the upper-middle-class American problem of self-depreciation), a misunderstanding of the role of the individual, or the individual ego, and an attempt, after (Arthur) Rimbaud particularly, to take the ego and wring its neck, by violence, or force, or suicide, or submergence into the sea of mass culture, or submission to the Central Committee of the Communist Party diktat on what the actual accurate Party line on reality is, to submit to the central authority's conception of what reality itself is.

Student: Well, I see what the problem is.

AG: Everybody's got that..

Student: I don't see how we're going to work it out. That's..

Ann Charters: Well..

AG: But in this case, however, with Mayakovsky's statement, it's an outright statement that the individual has absolutely no..role, except a single chirp of a cricket to be heard by his wife, and is actually of no social importance. Whereas in Mandelstam, there's a realization that the whisper of the individual's voice is louder and more powerful than the hallucinatory publicist('s) voice of Mayakovsky and the entire television network of Russia or America roaring all at once in itsTower of Babel, that the perception of the individual that the whole thing is a hallucinatory Tower of Babel, which will fall, is more accurate as an estimation of reality than all the trumpets of the brass bands of the Pentagon.

Student: Well, it depends on who's doing the roaring, you know.

AG: Yeah, that's the point. The roaring.... that's what it's saying. The roaring is being done by the Pentagon. The whisper is being done by the individual. And the individual's voice, in the long run, lasts longer (Sappho's voice)

Student: No, it's..

AG:  ...and cadences last longer than the structure of the Pyramids and the entire city of Rome.

Student: Oh, I don't think it's the Pentagon versus the individual voice or anything.

AG: No, in this case, it was the Central Committee of the Commnist Party versus the individual voice.

Student: Well, it was...

AG: No, no, this is what he's saying..

Student: Yeah

AG: .. that the Central Committee of the Communist Party is more important than the individual's voice. And what Mandelstam is saying is that the individual voice is going to outlast and is more important. It's just as simple as that. They're talking about the Central Committee of The Communist Party, nothing else, nothing else, right at this point. Mandelstam's further argument on that is, "I'm not dead, I'm not alone/ While I'm still happy with my beggar-girl delighting/ in these great plains/ in twilight-shadow, in hunger.." - (delighting in hunger!) - "and snowstorms./ I live alone in beautiful poverty, in sumptuous/misery - peaceful, consoled,/ blessed day, blessed nights/and sinless sweet-singing labor"/ Whoever's frightened by barking and by his shadows, who's mowed/ by the wind - he's really unlucky, /Whoever's half-alive and begging/alms from shadows - he's really poor" - This is from Voronezh, January 1937, where he had been banished into exile by Stalin, from which he was then arrested. This is where the turnkey came in to sit down at his table and say, "What are you writing?". He got visited every day, and that's when he got taken away. And then he disappeared into the camps and wasn't heard from. Presumably died by 1940.


[Osip Mandelstam - Photograph made by the NKVD in 1938, after his arrest]

Ann Charters: Now you can ask how a poet as great as Mayakovsky was (I mean, he was a great poet, there's no question about it) could serve the Party so faithfully? I mean, what would motivate him?
We talked before in the other class about Mayakovsky's belief that the 1917 Revolution was not the final revolution - that he wanted another one to come, which he called the "revolution of the spirit" [from the 1922 fragment, "The Fourth Internationale" - "another revolution/Rising in the ages/That would shake heads in an explosion of ideas,/That would let loose the artillery of hearts/The third revolution of the spirit"]. And he really felt, as a poet, that he could move the people by his verses closer and closer to this third Revolution. And he felt his role was to write political poems at the time and he took upon himself the writing of these poems as a duty - Yeah? - That's what he said.

And here's the poem..the section of "Lenin" that explains that. He says, "I'm anxious lest processions in mausoleums, the established statue of worship, should drown in oily unction Lenin's simplicity" - "oily unction" should destroy Lenin's simplicity - And he goes on -  (this is) Mayakovsky - "I shudder for him as for the apple of my eye lest he be falsified by tinselled beauty./My heart votes. I am compelled to write by the mandate of duty". "Duty" - (that's what makes him write these poems, the duty to, as I've said, move the people along).



[Lili Brik( 1891-1978)]

But, as you know, as all of you know, even (from) the basic study of Freud, when you are forced to do something (a sense of duty, not coming out of free will always), there are bound to be psychological repercussions. And always with Mayakovsky, when he wrote one of these great public poems, a month or so later he started writing (and, sometimes, simultaneously, he was writing almost as if with two different hands), a private poem, a poem about his loves. And this is true with the case with "Lenin" also. The parallel poem, (to compare the Mayakovsky poems, very often, to show this operating in his work), was a poem to Lili Brik, called "About This" - and what "this" was was his love for this lady, because, somewhere deep inside him, never really imagined.. Mayakovsky was aware that the way to the third Revolution was probably through individual relationships, and if they weren't good, the third Revolution would never be good. In other words, if people couldn't love each other on a one-to-one basis even, how could we all love each other?
And the test, of course, is his love-affairs, and his love for women in his life. And Lili Brik was this main love of his life, and he wrote a poem about the difficulties of this love,  the difficulties, as he would put it, of starting a family. He said, "To make a revolution is easy", He said.. (Mayakovsky wrote this to a friend) - He said, "To make a revolution is easy. What is difficult afterwards is to make a family". And he never quite saw that happen either.  

(Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately twenty-four-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-eight-and-a-quarter minutes in)

Expansive Poetics - 53 - (Mayakovsky and Lili Brik)

April 22, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics 54 - (Mayakovsky - Public Poetry)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 52 (Mayakovsky and Mandelstam)

$

0

0

 [Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik]


[Lili Brik, drawn by her lover Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1916,one year after their meeting] 

Ann Charters: So about this, this is a long, long, poem, which, is in my feeling one of his (Mayakovsky's) masterpieces - to Lili (Brik) - it's a Surrealistic poem, (it's a poem like the "Backbone Flute", by the way, the poem about his suicide..)

AG: "Spine Flute" or "Backbone Flute" - weird title!

Ann Charters: Yeah, right - not"A Cloud in Trousers" but a "Backbone Flute", the one we talked about..

AG: Uh-huh

Ann Charters: But the poem to Lili about this, in 1924, was interesting in our discussion of his work, because like the "Backbone Flute", and like "Man", he talks about his suicide - that because she doesn't love him, he kills himself. And, as a man of the future, Mayakovsky looks to science (remember, we talked about the technological factories and marvels of  science?) to resurrect him in the thirtieth-century ( in the future -sic). And when he is resurrected, you know, "Chemists put new life in my veins", he says. Everybody's putting slabs in the morgue and he says, "Inject me with your magic serum so I can come back to earth.."

AG: Cryonics

Ann Charters: Yeah, he was reading in science about this also, the magic of science, and he says, "And what I want to do is, of course, to go back to my love", but, rather than go back to the apartment house where she lives and meet her in bed, he decides (he's a little more grown-up) he'd like to see her outside in the park. But how to be sure that she'll come to see him? - "Ah", Mayakovsky says about this, "If I get a job" (because every citizen should work), "If I get a job in the glorious future of our state in the thirtieth century, the job being in a zoo, raking the paths, then she's sure to come, because she loves animals and she loves zoos and she'll come visit the zoo and I'll see her there, and we'll be reunited" - 

And the marvelous ending of the poem is the.. being reunited with his love, you know, at the zoo, in the thirtieth century - a little fantastic but, nevertheless, positive. (That image of resurrection will come back in his best play, "The Bedbug", a year before his  suicide). 

And I want to.. I hope we have time to talk about this change in the image from a very positive one of resurrection to a much more complex political realization, a true blending of his private and public lives in that image of that zoo animal in "The Bedbug". Well, we'll come to that..

AG: Do you have any of that poem ["About This"] that you want to read?

Ann Charters: I'd rather say that it's there, go find it.

AG: You got a couple of lines so (that) we can get some sense? .."About This", yeah, a poem, "About This". Where is it available?

Ann Charters: Well, that's the thing

AG: What texts are available?

Ann Charters: It's almost... I don't thnk it's been translated in its completion.

AG: (Is it) in thebig (Herbert) Marshall book?

Ann Charters: I think it might.. no, that's not in that Marshall book

AG: Yeah

Ann Charters: It's hard to find these texts [1981]. I'm using for this..the Progress Press, this is a Moscow book in English of Mayakovsky's poems, which is sold in Moscow and Soviet Union bookstores for tourists who come, who want to read Mayakovsky in English.



Student: Wow!

Ann Charters: This is published by.. it's a Dorian Rottenberg translation done many, many years ago, and it has the "Lenin" poem in its completion (in it), of course, and it also has "It" (it's called "It" in this volume), which is..



AG: "It" - "About This" as "It"

Ann Charters: "About This" is "It" , which means love, the..

AG: Yeah

Ann Charters: ...private situation. "It" - and it's interesting. It questions.. It's interesting for a lot of reasons, among which..

AG: How long is that?

Ann Charters: It's a long poem. Again, it's about..well, how many pages?..one-hundred.. and..it starts on page one-hundred-and-nineteen, and goes until one-hundred-and-seventy-six. It's another sixty-page one. It's like "Lenin", a very long printed poem.

AG: Same year?

Ann Charters: Okay, yeah. Here it is. When he's back in the zoo and he's resurrected - "And then perhaps someday down pathways that I'll sweep, she too loved beasts, she'll come to see the zoo, smiling the same as on the photo that I'll keep. They'll bring her back to life, she's nice enough, she'll do. Your umpteenth century will leave them all behind, trifles that stung one's heart in a buzzing storm" - (that's the byt that we talked of, the everyday reality, the "trifles") - "And then we'll make up for these loveless times through countless midnights starry sweet and warm. Revive me, if for nothing else because I, poet, cast off daily trash to wait for you. Revive me, chemist, never mind under what clause.." (He's saying (that) in the thirtieth century, the Communist world (it will all be a Communist world, he predicts, in the thirtieth century) will have a lot of bureaucracy, and the chemists will have to get the right kind of applications in order to pick that particular corpse to revivify) - "Revive me, chemist, never mind under what clause. Revive me really. Let me live my due, to love. With love no more a sorry servant of matrimony, lust, and daily bread" - (He doesn't want to get married, he doesn't want, you know, to be loving for sex, he doesn't want to have to do the regular grind of supporting a family, he wants love. [Ann Charters quotes Mayakovsky's poem] - "spreading out throughout the universe and further, forsaking sofas, cursing the boudoir and the bed.." - (What an idealist, huh?) - "No more to beg for one day as a dole, and then to age in endless sorrow, drown" - (That's a private love, you know, you just fall in love when you're twenty and then you get married and you have to make your living and you drown in sorrow) - [Ann Charters continues] - "But to see all the glow united in love. At the first call of "Comrade" turn in glad response around. No more a martyr to that hole one calls one's hearth, but to call everybody sister, brother. To see your closest kin in all the earth. I, all the world, to be your father and your mother." - So he ends it, in other words, not privately but publicly again - love, for him, is "the third Revolution", "Love of Spirit", and we're all a family, one family. Well…

(Audio for the above is available here, starting at approximately thirty-eight-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-four-and-three-quarter minutes in) 



 [The voice of Lili Brik reading Vladmir Mayakovsky]

Expansive Poetics 54 - (Mayakovsky - Public Poetry)

April 23, 2014, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 55 - (Mayakovsky and Tatiana)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 53 - (Mayakovsky and Lili Brik)

$

0

0

AG: What did we have? What is the next thing we were going to do? Because I have an idea.

Ann Charters; Well, I was going to talk (next) about his (Mayakovsky's) work for the Party. I mean, what does a poet do who's taken up by the Communist Party?

AG: Okay

Ann Charters: Yeah?

AG: That'd be interesting,  yeah.

Ann Charters: Interesting? No kidding! Very interesting! - I mean, before he kills himself, right?.  In 1926.. okay, I'm skipping over the part where Mayakovsky has his trip to America, because we're going to have a talk about that..

AG: At the library

Ann Charters: On Wednesday night at the library

AG: "Mayakovsky in America" 

Ann Charters: Yeah

AG: What he did here..

Ann Charters: And that comes in..

AG: Meeting William Carlos Williams, no less!

Student: Wow!

Ann Charters: But I skip over that and go on to 1926 (Remember, he commits suicide in 1930). The only way that Mayakovsky could survive, given his temperament and his genius was obviously to travel a lot. You know you just can't sit still in Moscow and work in an office turning out these poems. So he became a correspondent, after he'd done the work for ROSTA during the civil war

AG: ROSTA is?

Ann Charters: The Russian telegraph agency, making the posters. And then he takes a job during the time of the New Economic Policy, Lenin's time of having a little bit more capitalism enter the country as it's slowly been starving to death -  he had a period called the New Economic Policy, which means you could travel...you could operate private businesses for a brief time - three years - And during this time, Mayakovsky takes a job as a publicist for the State Communist Store, the department store, because they have now competition for a few brief years after the Revolution... [tape ends here and continues] - There was a whole wall of advertisements that he did and the packaging (he was into packaging). This was before the generic brand, you know, things. He, for example, would package state bubble-gum, and he would say, "Chew our bubble-gum, the bubbles last longer and they..", you know,"give a greater high", something like that. And this is all printed as verse, it's all rhymed. I remember the one..what is it?..well, there used to be dirty lyrics too, but we won't do that right now (because, needless to say, the Futurists who had to do this kind of work were having fun with it privately as well, and there's some funny things).

AG: We read some of those slogans yesterday...

Ann Charters: Yes, but these are...

AG: ..as poetry.

Ann Charters:  ..and these are not for slogans to exhort people to work harder and to accept fair increases, but these are, at this point, slogans to buy stuff, you know, for merchandise. Like you see big ad(vertisement)s all over. Okay.
He couldn't take that after a while, needless to say. It's a difficult job. And he then became a correspondent for various magazines, (which got him out of the country on travels). And when he was back in the country, he made his living as a reader, as I told you, giving these readings all over the Soviet Union - a grueling, grueling task. I mean, he was, like, traveling and giving readings, maybe a hundred, a hundred-and-fifty readings a year, and then traveling maybe on these primitive trains. You know, like..  and poor Mayakovsky was a bug on sanitation, so he had to boil his water everywhere. He was afraid he'd get typhoid fever. He was in very, very very primitive conditions.
So he really worked very hard and he loved his trips out of the country - to Germany, to Berlin or to Paris, and then finally, to South America, Mexico and America. He loved his trips - his ways to get.. well, some relief from the strain.

AG: The same thing's going on now [1981] with (Andrei) Voznesensky, …Voznesensky and(Yevgeny) Yevtushenko

Ann Charters: So

AG: To get out and take a vacation.

Ann Charters: Yes

AG: Take a breather, get laid

Ann Charters: But...

AG: Smoke some grass,then go back and go to work again

Ann Charters: But there was also, of course, hassle when he came back, Because he'd come back in beautiful European suits. Once he came back with a Renault car, you know, a very beautiful old 1927 car, which in its day was new, of course. And he had a chauffeur. He had lots of money from his readings and his.. he had a lot of attack

[Aleksandr Rodchenko- cover design for  Vladimir Mayakovsky's"Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry]

And one of his most funny poems, which illustrates what it's like to work for the government as a poet, is a poem called "Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry" - "Conversation with a Tax Collector" - and this is in Patricia Blake's book -"Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry". In other words, he had been asked to pay his taxes, like every Soviet citizen, and there isn't any money. He spent it, or it's gone already, alright? - And he says ((in) "Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry") - "Citizen tax collector,/ forgive my bothering you./Thank you, /don't worry,/ I'll stand." ["Гражданин фининспектор!/Простите за беспокойство./Спасибо.../не тревожтесь.../я постою.."] - (He pretends that he's visiting the office. He's been called in by the IRS.) - "My business/ is of a delicate nature/ about the place/ of the poet/ in the workers' ranks" [ "У меня к вам/ дело деликатного свойства:/о месте/поэта/в рабочем строю"] - (Okay? - Not an intellectual, as we think of a poet, or a Bohemian poet - but a working poet, a worker poet. There's an attempt, of course, to make it a proletariat situation, because this is the proleteriat revolution, so how does a poet become a worker?) - "Along with/ owners of stores and property,/ I am made subject to/ taxes and penalties./ You demand I pay/ five hundred for the half year/ and twenty-five late-payment/ for failing to send in/ my returns./ Now my work/ is like any other work./ Look here, how much I've lost,/ what/ expenses/ I have in my production/ and how much I spend/ on materials./ You/ know of course/ about rhyme. /Suppose a line ends with the word "day"/and then, repeating/ the syllables/ in the third line/ we insert/ something like  "ta-ra-boom-di-ay!"/. In your idiom,/ rhyme is/ a bill/ of exchange to be honored/ in the third line/ - that's the rule./ And so you hunt/ for the small change of suffixes and flexations/ in the depleted cashbox/ of conjugations and declensions./ You start/ shoving/ a word into the line/ but it's a tight fit" [В ряду/имеющих/лабазы и угодья/и я обложен/и должен караться./Вы требуете/ с меня/пятьсот в полугодие/и двадцать пять/за неподачу деклараций./Труд мой/любому/труду/родствен./Взгляните —/сколько я потерял,/какие/издержки/в моем производстве/и сколько тратится/на материал./Вам,/конечно,/известно/явление «рифмы»./Скажем,/строчка/окончилась словом/«отца»,/и тогда/через строчку,/слога повторив, мы/ставим/какое-нибудь:/ламцадрица-ца́./Говоря по-вашему,/рифма —/вексель. Учесть через строчку! —/ вот распоряжение./И ищешь/мелочишку суффиксов и флексий в пустующей кассе/склонений/и спряжений./Начнешь это/слово/в строчку всовывать,/а оно не лезет"] — "You press and it breaks. Citizen tax collector,/ honestly,/ the poet spends a fortune on words./ In our idiom,/ rhyme is a keg -/ a keg of dynamite./ The line is a fuse,/ the light burns to the end/ and explodes/ and the town/ is blown sky-high/ in a strophe." - ["Гражданин фининспектор,/честное слово,/поэту/в копеечку влетают слова./Говоря по-нашему,/рифма —/бочка."]  - (You don't get the flavor of the rhyme because this is not a rhymed translation - oops! - That's one of the incongruities of reading Mayakovsky in English - every line was "ta-ra-boom-dee-ay" and "they" - in Mayakovsky, it was rhymed, you know. And he's saying (that) it's hard to do it - "Where can you find, and at what price, rhymes that take aim and kill on the spot?" [ Где найдешь,/на какой тариф,/рифмы,/чтоб враз убивали, нацелясь?- "] (In other words, rhyme and meaning and sense and sound) - "Suppose/ only a half-dozen/ unheard-of rhymes/ were left/, in, say, Venezuela./ So I'm/ drawn/ to the north and the south./ I rush around/ entangled in advances and loans" ["Может,/пяток/небывалых рифм/только и остался/что в Венецуэле./И тянет/меня/в холода и в зной./Бросаюсь,/опутан в авансы и в займы я."] 

AG: "I'm plunged in advances/ and loans./ So look at my transport expenses/ I must meet"
[опутан в авансы и в займы я./Гражданин,/учтите билет проездной!/— Поэзия/— вся! —"]

Ann Charters; Right

AG: He goes searching for a rhyme.

Ann Charters: He says, "Consider my travelling expenses. Poetry, all of it,/is a journey to the unknown" ["учтите билет проездной!/— Поэзия/— вся! —/езда в незнаемое.."] - So he says, "Don't..don't tax me the rates you tax everybody else, because my travel expenses are not only to get to Paris, but also in my mind to travel out to the unknown." - (It's supposed to be a funny poem. You understand? He's trying to talk to a tax collector and teach him what poets go through in order to write poetry)- "Poetry/ is like mining radium/ - for every gram/ you work a year./ For the sake of a single word/ you waste/ a thousand tons/of verbal ore." [ Поэзия —/та же добыча радия./В грамм добыча,/в год труды./Изводишь/единого слова ради/тысячи тонн/ словесной руды. It's hard work.." (he says), "..But how incendiary the burning of these words compared with the smoldering of the raw material" - (In other words, (a) poet's work is just as valuable, if not more valuable, than people who.. iron, you know, mine for iron ore) - "These words will move millions of hearts for thousands of years" - (whereas you'll use something that's made out of iron and it will get old and have to be replaced). 
So then he puts down the other poets who do not do any work for the State, and then he says, "You've got to remember that my overhead expenses are real high, so I'd like you to knock off some of this tax". He says "Strike out a wheeling zero from the balance. Instead of one hundred cigarettes or rubles ninety, your form has a mass of questions - "Have you travelled on business or not?" [ Скиньте/ с обложенья/нуля колесо!/Рубль девяносто/сотня папирос,/рубль шестьдесят/столовая соль./В вашей анкете/вопросов масса:/— Были выезды?/Или выездов нет? —"] - (In other words, they have the same problems with the IRS  over there that we have over here, with tax-deductions, itemized expenses, and so forth. And he's saying a question is "Have you travelled on business or not?") - Mayakovsky - "But suppose/ I've ridden to death/ a hundred Pegusae/[horses]/ in the last fifteen years?/ What if I am simultaneously a leader and a servant of the people./ The working-class speaks through my mouth/ and we proletarians are drivers of the pen. ["А что, если я/ десяток пегасов/ загнал/за последние лет?!У вас —/в мое положение войдите —/ про слуг/и имущество/с этого угла."]
 "As the years go by/ you wear out/ the machinery of the soul./ People say/ a back-number/ - he's written-out,/ he's through. /What do you do about/ poets who are fashionable,/ and people say,/ "Ah, I've heard Mayakovsky read that poem/ a hundred times,/ I'm not going to/ pay money to/ hear him read it again"? - (Yeah, so he says you get old, and people say he's "a back number", "he's written-out, he's through".  Besides, there's a personal risk, he says, in getting old. "There's less and less love and less and less daring." - "Time is a battering-ram against my head" - (Mayakovsky did not want to grow old) - "And when the sun/ like a fattened hog/ rises on a future/ without beggars and cripples,/ I will be/ a petrified corpse/ under a fence/ together with a dozen/ of my colleagues," - (he says) - "I'm always in debt./ I'm not telling you a lie./ Our duty is/ to blare/ like brass-throated horns/ in the fogs/ of bourgeois vulgarity./ A poet/ is always indebted/ to the unniverse,. paying, alas, interest and fines./ I am indebted to /the lights of Broadway/ and to the skies of Baghdadi [Mayakovsky's birth-place],/ to the Red Army,/ to the Cherry Trees of Japan" - (he says) - [ в долгу/перед Бродвейской лампионией,/перед вами,/багдадские небеса,/перед Красной Армией,/перед вишнями Японии —/перед всем,/про что/не успел написать."] -  "You think I owe you money?,/ well, how do I owe?/, I owe my travels/ for the visions/ I've seen of Broadway,/ I owe for where I open my eyes/ in my native village of Baghdadi. Ah!.. - (he says)  - who needs all this stuff, who needs poetry anyway? "A poet's word/ is your resurrection and your immortality,/ Citizen official." - [Слово поэта —/ваше воскресение,/ваше бессмертие,/гражданин канцелярист./Через столетья] - (And here are the famous lines) - "Citizen sense, take a verse from its paper frame and bring back time. And this day with its tax collectors and aura of miracles and stench of ink will dawn again." [ гражданин канцелярист./Через столетья/260 в бумажной раме/возьми строку/и время верни!/И встанет/день этот/с фининспекторами,] - (he says) - in other words, (that) you have to remember that our words will last longer than your day-to-day Politburo thing. 

AG: The (Herbert) Marshall translation. 

Ann Charters: Hmm

AG: "The word of a poet/ is your resurrection, your immortality,/ Citizen clerk./ From its paper frame/ in a hundred years/ pick out a stanza/ and bring back time extinct./ And this day,/ with the tax inspector,/ it will reappear/ with a lustre of wonder/ and the stink of ink."

Ann Charters: Yeah.  You're going to get this much better said, actually in"At The Top of My Voice"

AG: Yeah

Ann Charters: You have it in your book

AG:  Yes

Ann Charters: Later on, the last poem..

I'll just finish the last lines to this poem to the tax collector, which is, of course, the ultimate challenge that any poet can lay down to anybody who questions what he does and the worth of what he does. And that is, "if", tax collector,  "if/ you think/ that all I have to do/ is to profit/ by people's words,/ then Comrade,/ here's my pen, /take a crack at it yourselves."
["А если/вам кажется,/ что всего дело́в —/это пользоваться/чужими словесами,/то вот вам,/товарищи,/мое стило́,/и можете/писать/сами!"]

(Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately forty-four-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately fifty-seven-and-a-half minutes) 

Expansive Poetics - 55 - (Mayakovsky and Tatiana)

April 24, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 174

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics 54 - (Mayakovsky - Public Poetry)

$

0

0

[Tatiana Yacovieff du Plessix Liberman (1906-1991)]

Ann Charters:  Well, again, with Mayakovsky, this his public declaration - "Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry"["Разговор с фининспектором о поэзии"] - was followed shortly on by another private experience that actually marks the end, or the beginning of the end, of his life.  On a trip to Paris he fell in love with another lady, the first lady he truly loved afterLili Brik. And what this meant was not necessarily the end of Mayakovsky, except that the woman he chose to fall in love with.. (he always chose difficult women - he first chose a woman who was.. he always chose other people's wives, or women who don't want him - rejection is always in the picture there) .. but the woman he chose in Paris, on a trip to Paris, whose name is Tatiana (and she's now [1981] an American citizen, living in New York, and her daughter is Francine du Plessix Gray, who's a woman novelist, a fine writer..)  

AG: Tatiana hangs around with (Andrei) Voznesensky when he comes..to America.

Ann Charters: Her name is Tatiana Liberman and she has been here (in the US) for many years. But when she was eighteen years old, she was introduced to Mayakovsky in Paris and she was in exile from the Soviet Union (she was a White Russian, not a Red Russian, and she had left Russia to go to Paris, and Mayakovsky meets her and falls desperately in love with her, wants to marry her and bring her back to Russia).

AG: How old is then?

Ann Charters: At this point, in 1928, he would be, what? thirty-five?

AG: And she's eighteen.

Ann Charters: And she's eighteen. And that is a very romantic notion -  number one, because she's just got out of there (and that was not easy), and, number two, what happens if he, "the official poet" brings back a girl, you know, who has already left because she hasn't accepted the government? Intolerable. It could not be done. How about Mayakovsky (think about all of the alternatives as a chess game), how about Mayakovsky then deciding to live forever in Paris with his great love, Tatiana? Impossible. Mayakovsky could only speak Russian. He never learned another language, and to write, as an exile, after his public work for the Communist Party, to wait for the third Revolution (of the Spirit) in Paris - it's not possible (as you can clearly understand for yourself). So this caused a further darkening, as well as some wonderful love poetry written to Tatiana.

The one that I would recommend to you is a poem called "The Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the Nature of Love" [ Письмо товарищу Кострову из Парижа о сущности любви] And this is Mayakovsky, blind out of his mind with love for this new lady, and deciding that, as part of his quota of lines, as a correspondent for a Communist Youth magazine (you know, he had to go to Paris, to describe what it was like for the kids reading the Party magazine) he would write this Comrade Kostrov, who was the leader, no, the editor-in-chief, a poem about what it was like to fall in love in Paris, thinking, naively, that this Boys Life magazine would like to print such a thing, yeah?  Well, it didn't go over too well, And that was another aspect of his hassle..

AG: Is any fragment of that..

Ann Charters:  ..being hassled and humiliated. Absolutely.

AG: A little fragment..

Ann Charters: A little fragment of this will get you an idea. My favorite part of it, this poem to Tatiana, it's on the nature of love. Notice, it isn't about how I love, but it's "on love", for everybody, "you know what, listen boys, this is what love is like, yeah? And so he tells you in this what love does. He defines it. Okay..wonderful. I'm going to start in this (in) the middle of the poem - "Love's sense lies not/ in boiling hotter/ or in being burnt by live coals" [ Любовь/ не в том,/чтоб кипеть крутей,/не в том,/что жгут у́гольями,] - (In other words, the Romantic idea of suffering and rapture) - (he says) - "Love's sense/ lies in what rises/ behind hilly breasts/, above the jungles of hair. [ в том,/ что встает за горами грудей/над/волосами-джунглями."]  "To love/ means this:/ to run/ into the depths of a yard/ and, till the rook-black night," - ("the bird-black night") - [ Любить —/это значит:/в глубь двора/ вбежать/ и до ночи грачьей,] "..chop wood/ with a shiny axe,/ giving full play /to one's strength" [ блестя топором,/рубить дрова,/силой/своей/играючи./Любить"] - (Love that, love that, you know -  a young guy, just oomph, with a shining axe)

AG: You go into the back yard at night...where it's totally black and chop wood?

Ann Charters: That's right, Just out of your mind, you know. Like, what do you do with this energy? - He says, "Love/ for us/ is no paradise of arbors -/to us/ love/ tells us, humming,/ that the stalled motor/ of the heart/ has started to work/ again." -  ["любовь/
не рай да кущи,/нам/ любовь/ гудит про то,/что опять/в работу пущен/сердца/выстывший мотор"](That's a Futurist image - "that the stalled motor/ of the heart/ has started to work/ again."  Umm. Go on, you have to read that yourself, it's a terrific, terrific poem.
Lili Brik heard this poem and she wept, the first (time) she'd ever responded negatively to a poem. She says, not only because he felt this for another lady, but because, "I realized the trouble he was soon going to find himself in". 












[Tatiana]

And trouble it was, because Mayakovsky planned with Tatiana to get married in Paris, and then, he said, "I'll bring you back. After a nice honeymoon in Paris, we'll go back to the Soviet Union and you can be my bride". She sort of agreed to it, but, then again, she was eighteen, and it's a pretty whirlwind time, you know. And she had other fellows too (which he didn't know about that much, I suppose).

So he made plans to go back to Paris to marry her after he went back to the Soviet Union for a good stay, and after he read these poems and people were aware of what he planned to do, he, as always, applied to get back to Paris for a visa (you know, you can't just go, you have to, even today, make very special preparations to travel). He was a lucky Russian, he had a passport. (there's a great poem about his Soviet passport). Anyway, the point is that, for the first time, Mayakovsky's visa to travel abroad was denied, and he was locked in the Soviet Union. For the first time he might have felt what Mandelstam and Akhmatova felt (they didn't have passports, you know (to) so easily get in and out). He might have felt how powerful the government was - really powerful - and that was a few months before his suicide also.

Well, what did he do while he languished in Moscow? He wrote a play, and that play is "The Bedbug", and that's the play that I think is one of his greatest works. It's in the book called The Bedbug and Selected Poetry. It's in print, you know [in 1981]. You can buy it and read it. And this, as I told you, has an image of the future that completely goes beyond what his image of  the positive victory of love was in the poem to Lili about the world of lovers in the Revolution. This is a vision of a very different world of the thirtieth [sic] century.

(Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty-seven-and-a-half minutes in  and concluding at approximately sixty-four-and-a-half minutes in) 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 174

April 25, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: More Burroughs Music Collaborations

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 55 - (Mayakovsky and Tatiana)

$

0

0

Wild in Denver - Neal Cassady's Teen Years by Charlie Hailer

News from New York - it seems that this summer's regular Howl! Festival won't be happening this year.  More on that story here - and here 




In memoriam -  here is a group reading of "Howl" (from the 2010 Howl! Fest)



and here is "Plutonian Ode" (from the following year, likewise ensemble).



Amanda Petrusich (from a forthcoming book) on Harry Smith and the legendary American Folk Music anthology




Next Thursday, Thursday May 1st, at London's Horse Hospital, a book launch for Joe Ambrose and A.D.Hitchin's recently-published "Cut Up" anthology 



Allen, the great correspondent -  The American Reader has occasionally spotlighted several particularly engaging examples. This (from 1947) to Lionel Trilling,this (from 1952) to Neal Cassady, and now this (from 1956 - that seminal moment), a note to his father. Louis Ginsberg. 

Another important letter (to Diane di Prima, from 1981, in which he admits, "..I guess communism just doesn't work (tho') Socialist Austria seems pretty free and independent-minded..") goes up on the auction block next Tuesday. More information about that particular Ginsberg communication here   (and also here) 

More Ginsberg recollections. Here's Chuck E Weiss, in an interview, recalling attending to him in a record store, in Denver, sometime in the mid (19)70's - "I developed a particular hatred for Allen Ginsberg", he declares, "because he used to come in and I'd have to wait on him and he'd mispronounce (the) names of artists that I liked and (so) I started to resent him. Once he came in and asked, "Do you have an Shen-yah?". I said, "Oh, ah, Clifton Chenier, you mean, man". Then he pulled out a Ma Rainey album and said, "You know, she was a lesbian". I didn't care. So the great Allen Ginsberg, I hated to wait on."

Bob Ingram at Broad Street Review remembers his editorship of the Philadelphia underground newspaper, The Drummer - and Allen's awareness of posterity, Allen's tenacity -  "I was just typing Allen Ginsberg's name when the phone rang and it was Allen Ginsberg himself. "Allen! Jesus! I was just typing your name! Honest!""Look", he said, "I haven't got time for any metaphysical bullshit about cosmic confidences. Bockris-Wylie had some mistakes in that story (that you're about to print about me) and I want them corrected in the next issue so that literary scholars fifty years from now will have the right information."

Here's Charles Simicin the wonderfully titled "The Great Poets' Brawl of '68", in the blog for the New York Review of Books - A poetry punch-up? - "As soon as the fight started, Allen Ginsberg went down on his knees and began chanting some Buddhist prayer for peace and harmony among all living creatures, which not only distracted those fighting, but also startled a few puzzled couples who had discreetly retreated into the bushes during the party and were now returning in a hurry with their clothes in disarray."
  
Herb Gold, the legendary Herb Gold, "elder statesman of the Beat Generation" was interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle this week ("Allen was a good friend. He was serious - about being gay, about love, about poetry, of course. But he also had a good sense of humor") 

&, pretty much contemporaneous to the record-store story, mid (19)70's, here's Dan Nielsen's account of  "An Evening With Allen". 

More Burroughs Music Collaborations

April 26, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: What Keeps Mankind Alive?

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 174

$

0

0

Last weekend we featured a couple ofWilliam Burroughs' rock collaborations. Here's a few more, starting with his rendition of a poem by Jim Morrison (from the tribute album, Stoned Immaculate - The Music of The Doors) - "Is Anybody In?"






















[Jim Morrison (1943-1971]

Turning the heat up (more than) a little, there's his collaboration with Ministry on what is now a bona-fide "heavy-metal" classic - "Just One Fix"  (The more immediate, more palatable, more obvious Ministry-Burroughs collab, A Quick Fix - can be heard here - or here)

"Life keeps slipping away/Silence of desperation/Trying to find a highway in vein [sic]/Trying to find a destination/ Just One Fix/ Clock keeps ticking away/Banging on the walls of frustration/Organs keep grinding away/Monkey is the only solution/ Just One Fix/ Monkey starts driving the train/Tries to take out the station/Trying to find a highway in vein/ Monkey kills without hesitation/ Just One Fix"


[cover-design by William S Burroughs]


  



[Al Jourgensen (of Ministry) and William Burroughs]

Finally,Laurie Anderson (from "Mister Heartbreak" (1994))

"Sun's Going Down. Like a big bald head/Disappearing behind the boulevard. (Oooee). It's Sharkey's night/Yeah. It's Sharkey's night tonight. And the manager says: "Sharkey?/ He's not at his desk right now (oh yeah). Could I take a message?"/ And Sharkey says: "Hey kemosabe! Long time no see"/ He says: "Hey sport. You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces"/ He says; "You know, I can see two tiny pictures of myself/ And there's one in each of your eyes. And they're doin' everything I do/ Every time I light a cigarette, they light up theirs./ I take a drink and I look in and they're drinkin' too./ It's drivin' me crazy. It's drivin' me nuts"./ And Sharkey says: "Deep in the heart of darkest America/ Home of the brave. He says: "Listen to my heart beat",/ Paging Mr Sharkey. What courtesy telephone please."

Tomorrow - What Keeps Mankind Alive?

---

What Keeps Mankind Alive?

April 27, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 56 (Mayakovsky-The Bedbug)

≪ Previous: More Burroughs Music Collaborations

$

0

0

What Keeps Mankind Alive?

The text - Ralph Manheimand John Willett's translation, from Bertolt Brecht's original German, of the second finale of Brecht-Weill's classic "Threepenny Opera" (Die Dreigroschenoper) (1928):


[Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) & Kurt Weill (1900-1950)]

"You gentlemen who think you have a mission/To purge us of the seven deadly sins/Should first sort out the basic food position/Then start your preaching, that's where it begins/ You lot, who preach restraint and watch your waist as well/Should learn, for once, the way the world is run/However much you twist, or whatever lies that you tell/Food is the first thing, morals follow on/  So first make sure that those who are now starving/get proper helpings, when we all start carving/What keeps mankind alive?/ What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed/Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance/in keeping its humanity repressed/And for once you must try not to shirk the facts/Mankind is kept alive/by bestial acts!"

[Ihr Herrn, die ihr uns lehrt, wie man brav leben/Und Sünd und Missetat vermeiden kann
Zuerst müßt ihr uns was zu fressen geben/Dann könnt ihr reden: damit fängt es an./ Ihr, die ihr euren Wanst und unsre Bravheit liebt/Das eine wisset ein für allemal:/Wie ihr es immer dreht und wie ihr's immer schiebt/Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral./Erst muß es möglich sein auch armen Leuten/Vom großen Brotlaib sich ihr Teil zu schneiden./ Denn wovon lebt der Mensch?/ Denn wovon lebt der Mensch? Indem er stündlich/Den Menschen peinigt, auszieht, anfällt, abwürgt und frißt./Nur dadurch lebt der Mensch, daß er so gründlich/Vergessen kann, daß er ein Mensch doch ist./Ihr Herren, bildet euch nur da nichts ein:/Der Mensch lebt nur von Missetat allein!]

The memorable William Burroughs version first appears in 1994 in Larry Weinstein and David Mortin's "September Songs - The Music of Kurt Weill" video 
(a Hal Willner-produced audio version, a soundtrack of the film, appeared some three years later).  



Here's the, perhaps, more familiar Tom Waits version (from the album Orphans, Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards (2006)) 



and here's the soundtrack (auf Deutsch) (and another translation)  from the 1931 film made byG(eorg) W(ilhelm) Pabst.



Here's Lotte Lenya singing (not "What Keeps Mankind Alive", but several other songs from a (recorded December 193o) original cast recording.

Expansive Poetics - 56 (Mayakovsky-The Bedbug)

April 28, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics- 57 (Mayakovsky - At The Top of My Voice)

≪ Previous: What Keeps Mankind Alive?

$

0

0

Ann Charters: How much time do we have?

AG: We actually have have half an hour, but what I would like to do is get a piece of that ["The Bedbug"]  then go to "..At The Top of My Voice"(which Richard Poe has prepared in Russian, and we have in English). Then, if we have time, I'd like to get three short poems of (Osip) Mandelstam which comment on Mayakovsky's themes..and then I'd like Peter (Orlovsky) to read (Sergei) Esenin's "Confessions of A Bum" (because we talked about Esenin, but nobody has heard any of his poetry).

Ann Charters; Okay, okay. Here's what we're going to do then,

AG: So we have half an hour...

Ann Charters: We have half an hour..

AG: ... to do that,

Ann Charters:..and we're going to give..

AG: For time

Ann Charters:  ..just one minute...

AG: Till five (o'clock).

Ann Charters:  ..for the end of "The Bedbug", because these other things are more important than... you can find "The Bedbug" for yourself. The situation in "The Bedbug", very briefly said, (and I can't tell the story quickly, but I'll do my best), is that a man, a Soviet man, who is a former Party member, a former worker and a bum, an alcoholic bum (the hero of this play) dies at his own wedding, which is because of alcohol. Everybody gets totally, totally wasted at this wedding, in the Russian style, in vodka, and the whole place catches fire and it burns to the ground. And it's, like, caved over, like the Soviets, you know. 
And everything is exactly as it was, and, years later, (the) thirtieth century (sic) or something, they do an excavation, you know, like archaeology, and they find everything  all, you know, intact. And what they get excited about, in the future, with the perfect state, you know, (because the perfect state is not just love, the perfect state is now a place where hygeine prevails, and control). Science, in other words, after his trip to America becomes something to be played with and honored. And so he has "the thirtieth century" like an antiseptic place, where everybody goes around wearing the same white coats and you're all slaves of this higher power of scientists.
So what interests the scientists in the relic is not the human relic or the cultural artifact, but, as scientists, they're interested in the phenomena of a bedbug that has survived on the body of this man who was the bridegroom, the bum.
So they take the man, realizing that the host needs the thing to... the bedbug...

AG: The parasite needs the host.

Ann Charters: The parasite needs the host. They, therefore, take him.. leave him, you know, that's worthless, (a) human being's nothing,  just keep the scientific curiosity. But because they know the bug needs his host, they bring the whole thing and put it in a cage, alright?. And they let the man do whatever he wants (after all, he has to survive so the bedbug can keep alive). And they bring in tours of people to see this miracle, this scientific curiosity. And what happens, of course, is that the man is as degenerate as ever (he loves love-songs, he loves to play the phonograph, he loves to drink, he loves to play the guitar, he wants to screw, he's absolutely a beast, you know). And the man is very foggy, you know, like he finally gets to understand that this is the thirtieth century, he is alive - it takes a little while. 
And the last scene of the poem, when he finally realizes, when all the tourist bus is coming, and the director of the museum, here's the famous thing. Here's the director - "Comrades" - [He says to the visitors] - "Come closer, don't be frightened, it's quite tame. Come, come, don't be alarmed. On the inside of the cage there are four filters to trap all the dirty words" - [because he likes to swear] - "Only a few words come out and they're quite decent" - [notice censorship of the word is the first thing mentioned] - "The filters are cleaned every day by a apecial squad of attendants in gas masks. Look now, it's going to have what they call "a smoke"' - [I mean, he smokes cigarettes] - 

[Allen takes up the reading] - Voice from the crowd says, "Oh, how horrible!"..
Ann Charters (collaborating on the reading): "Don't be frightened. Now it's going to have a swig, as they say. Drink" - [and he orders the beast to drink] - [Allen : "Prisypkin, drink!" (Ivan Prisypkin, the protagonist)] - and Prisypkin reaches for a bottle of vodka. (and)  A voice from the crowd says... - 
[Allen, again - "Oh, don't, don't, don't torment the poor animal"] - 
Ann Charters (continuing): "..and the director, "Comrades, there's nothing to worry about, it's tame. Look, I am now going to bring it out of the cage". He goes to the cage, he puts on gloves, he checks his revolver, he opens the door, brings up Prisypkin into the platform, turns him around to face the guest-of-honor in the grandstand. "Now then, say a few words. show how well you can imitate the human language, voice and expression". - [treats him like an ape] - "And the guy stands obediently, clears his throat..
AG: (continuing): .. raises his guitar, suddenly turns around, looks at the audience, "Citizens, brothers, my own people, darlings, how did you get here? So many of you.When were you unfrozen? why am I alone in a cage? Darlings. friends, come and join me, why am I suffering, Citizens?"
Ann Charters: [then, the voice of the guests] - "Children, remove the children, muzzle it, muzzle it, how horrible, Professor, stop it, stop it." - [ AG:"Oh, don't shoot it."]  - Don't shoot it, don't shoot it". - [And the Professor holds an electric fan and he runs on the stage and the attendants drag off the bum, the director ventilates the platform quickly with a fan, and the musicians are playing a march, the attendants cover the cage with a cloth, and the director says..]
AG: - "My apologies, comrades, my apologies. The insect is tired. The noise and the bright lights give it hallucinations. Please be calm. It is nothing at all, it will recover tomorrow. Disperse quietly, citizens. Until tomorrow, music. Let's have a march." - 
Ann Charters: [And the curtain comes down] - It should be put on, it should be put on

AG: Well, they wouldn't put it on in Russia, though, that's the thing. They closed the theatre on him?


[Meyerhold's staging of Mayakovsky's "The Bedbug", Moscow, 1929] 

Ann Charters:  They did at the time. It was not a critical success. I mean, how do you take such a thing? It's a terrible criticism of the regime. And this is difficult. The point is of course that recognition. This was a (Vsevolod) Meyerhold production, it was... he was a forerunner of the modern theory, the open-stage concepts of Bertolt Brecht, for example, so it was not a conventional production at all. And the remarkable thing is that when the man who became the anti-hero, the bum who then becomes all of us in his suffering from the regime and his oppression by the tyranny above him, turns round and looks at the audience (and now the audience of course is a few people on the stage but it's also the audience, people who come to see the play). And so when he addresses, he addresses the theatre to say, you knowm "Why, I didn't know you were here, how..we're all suffering together". And there's a sense of community in the theatre, which I gather was present at the time and comes out in the production. (A) truly marvelous, marvelous thing.
So that was "The Bedbug", written when he couldn't get to Paris to marry his Tatiana.

AG: I think there is some note that he wrote to the people in the Writer's Union, or were directing the theatre that they should not have closed the door on him
Ann Charters: Oh yes
AG: Because they closed the doors without telling him
Ann Charters: Yes
AG: As part of  a general shut-down on him.
Ann Charters: Yes
AG: When he was slowly being encircled.
Ann Charters: Yeah
AG: ..didn't he have...

(Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately sixty-four-and-three-quarters minues in and concluding at approximately seventy-two-and-a-half minutes in)
also: 
http://cdm16621.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p16621coll1/id/1016/rec/1 concluding at approximately twenty-two minutes in & next tape: http://cdm16621.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p16621coll1/id/1024/rec/5

Expansive Poetics- 57 (Mayakovsky - At The Top of My Voice)

April 29, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 58 (Mayakovsky - Conclusion)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 56 (Mayakovsky-The Bedbug)

$

0

0

[Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)]

Ann Charters: So we'd like to do a few more things before we end, and the poem which you have in your anthology, "At The Top of My Voice", which was written a few months before the suicide, in January 1930.

AG: Should we have that in Russian first?
Ann Charters:  Yeah
AG: You want me to read it in English first? - or do you want to do it in Russian first? Richard Poe has prepared the Russian.
Student (RP): Can I go first?
AG: Pardon me?
Student (RP): Can I go first?
AG: Want to come over here to do it? Standing. Want to sit down? Yeah..
Student (RP): I'll stand
AG: Stand, better, you'll get more breath.

[Student, Richard Poe, reads Mayakovsky's "At The Top of My Voice" in its entirety in Russian  ["Vo ves' galos"]] 

Ann Charters: Thank you.

AG: You were great.

Ann Charters: You heard the incredible.. if you were following the English, the incredible skill in which the sound..

AG: Maybe hang on to the...

Ann Charters: ..and sense went together there.

AG:... hang on to the text.

Anne Charters: He was being very brutal, (in) a brutal meaning, The word had a very very guttural.. and when he wants to fly, and tell you what poetry can do, and.. he can be like. Alexander Pope (the comparison is not an idle one). He's very very skillful. This is why Mayakovsky, even with the complications of his Party role is considered a genius by poets for what he can do. As a poet, he was an incredibly skillful and talented writer. That was very, very nice, thank you.

AG: I thought the reason for this (particular) course is "heroic" or "expansive" poetry, and the touchstone poems, or the highlight poems that I had in mind were - (Guillaume) Apollinaire's "Zone", (Federico Garcia) Lorca's "Ode To Walt Whitman", among others - and what else have we covered? - (Ezra) Pound's  "Usura" Canto (which, I think, we went over), and this poem, "At The Top Of My Voice", which is both tragic and heroic at the same time.

There is an account of his first reading of this poem in the (Herbert) Marshall book that I have - And he's having an exhibition of twenty years of his work, and he's giving a lecture and answering a lot of criticism, and so he says this was the first time it was ever read, and there was an account (or) some notes taken on the conversation at the meeting before he read the poem, and then the moment of reading the poem. And before he read it for the first time, unveiling it, (at the) premier performance, he said - "I shall now read a few things, as you can't judge by only one thing. My last word is about the exhibition as it fully explains and defines what I do, what I am working really...Very often, lately, those who are annoyed by my literary-publicist work say that I have forgotten how to write poetry and for that posterity will give it to me hot. I'm a determined fellow. I want myself to speak with my descendents, and not to wait and see what my critics in the future will tell them. Therefore, I address myself direct to posterity in my poem, "At The Top of My Voice"

So the title is "At The Top Of My Voice". So you've got to also dig it as not merely wanting to address postetrity as (Percy Bysshe) Shelley did ("Scatter my words, ashes and sparks, among mankind"), but also he's got to speak over the heads of the political critics, and over the ring of iron that was beginning to slowly close around (him).

(Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately seventy-two-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately eighty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in) 

Expansive Poetics - 58 (Mayakovsky - Conclusion)

April 30, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Expansive Poetry - 59 (Heroic Loud-Mouthed Style)

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics- 57 (Mayakovsky - At The Top of My Voice)

$

0

0

[History of the Russian Revolution - From Marx to Mayakovsky (1965) - by Larry Rivers(1925-2002)  - wood, oil, charcoal, serigraphs, and photo-mechanical reproduction on canvas, wood, paper, metal, plexiglass, glass and fiber-board, 169 1/2 x 399 1/4 inches]

AG: "First Prelude to A Poem of the Five-Year Plan" - [Allen prepares to read 

Mayakovsky's famous poem, ["ВО ВЕСЬ ГОЛОС"]  "At the Top of My Voice"] 
And what I'll do is, there's certain rhythms in here, which are interesting in English, (but) which are perfect and exact in Russian, so maybe I can stop occasionally, like (when I was reading) that (poem) for Tatiana - that Mitraikies and Kudraikies section [кудреватые Митрейки,/мудреватые Кудрейки] — at the beginning. You can follow that? - And "Mary, Mary, quite contrary.." just right before that. And there's one section in the beginning where he parodies the tinkle of rhymed verse of his contemporaries - [Allen begins reading (from the entire "At The Top of My Voice" and in the Herbert Marshall translation)] -

"At the Top of My Voice - "Most respected/comrades, heirs and descendants.." [Уважаемые/товарищи потомки!] - Excavating our contemporary petrified muck.." -[Роясь/в сегодняшнем/ окаменевшем говне..]…."..from the seigniorial horticulture/of poetry/a most capricious dame,/precious Muse that grows, like Mary, roses/ round a bungalow.." - [Allen breaks off at this point] - "Mary, Mary, quite contrary/how does your garden grow?" - Say that in Russian?  - like Mary..roses..roundabout.. yeah.. in Russian?..

Student: (Well, it's not really… so..) "..бабы капризной./Засадила садик мило,/дочка,/дачка,/водь/и гладь —/сама садик я садила,/ сама буду поливать."

AG (continues)  "Some pour verses from a sprinkler,/ some just splutter from their lips" - "curly-headed Mitraikies", (that's the next passage), "muddle-headed Kudraikies" (these are local would-be-poet whose names are forgotten, according to Marshall's (footnotes) - (now) how does that Mitraikies and Kudraikies rhyme go?

Student: "кудреватые Митрейки,/ мудреватые Кудрейки"

AG (continues) ; ".. who the devil knows which one from which/No quarantine will take them in / and those mandelins again! /"Tapa-tina tapa-tina /Teeen.." -  And of course those mandolins again..?

Student: "мандолинят из-под стен:/Тара-тина, тара-тина,/т-эн-н…"

AG: "Not much of an honor/ but from such roses /my very own statue will rise over    squares with gobs of tuberculosis/where whores, hooligans/ and syphilis/I'm fed up to the teeth/ with agit-prop" (agitation propaganda) [агитпроп]/ I'd like to scribble for you love ballads/ which are charming/ and pay quite a lot/but I/ mastered myself/ and crushed underfoot/ the throat of my very own songs [Но я/себя/смирял,/становясь/на горло/собственной песне]  …"My verse will reach across the peaks of eras/ far over the heads of/ poets and of governments" ["Мой стих дойдёт/через хребты веков/и через головы/поэтов и правительств"].."My verse will come/but come not ornate/not like an arrow's lyrical love flight from Eros,/ not like a worn-out coin comes to the numismatist/ and not like the light of a long-dead stars arrives/ My verse/ with labor/ thrusts through weighted years/ emerging/ ponderous/ rock-rough,/ age-grim,/ as when today/ an aqueduct appears/ firm-grounded once by/ the branded slaves of Rome." - I wonder what that's like in Russian. The piece that begins, "…"My verse will reach across the peaks of eras/ far over the heads of/ poets and of governments", because that's one of the most powerful heroic statements in the twentieth century as prophecy. "My verse will reach... "It's not like.. [to Student] - "It's right after (the lines about) Esenin..  

Student: Мой стих дойдёт,/но он дойдёт не так, —/не как стрела/в амурно-лировой охоте,/не как доходит/к нумизмату стёршийся пятак/и не как свет умерших звёзд доходит./Мой стих/трудом/громаду лет прорвёт/и явится/весомо,/грубо,/зримо,/как в наши дни/вошёл водопровод,/сработанный/ещё рабами Рима.

AG (continues, reading Mayakovsky's "At The Top of My Voice", triumphantly, through to the end of the poem): "You'll accidentally find/ in barrows of books" - [I guess the wheelbarrows of books that are on second-hand sale] - [В курганах книг], "wrought-iron lines/ of  long-buried poems,/ handle them with the care that respects/ ancient but terrible weapons/My words are not used to caressing ears; nor titillate with semi-obscenities maiden ears hidden in hair so innocent..["с уважением/ощупывайте их,/как старое,/но грозное оружие./Я/ухо/словом/не привык ласкать;/ушку девическому/в завиточках волоска/с полупохабщины/ не разалеться тронуту"]" .….."..Come Comrade Life:/, lets step hard on the throttle/ and roar out the Five Year Plan's remnant days./I haven't got a rouble left from my verse/the cabinet-makers didn't send my furniture home/ but my only need's a clean-laundered shirt/For the rest, I honestly don't give a damn.." ["Товарищ жизнь,/давай быстрей протопаем,/протопаем/по пятилетке/дней остаток/.Мне/и рубля/не накопили строчки,/краснодеревщики/не слали мебель на́ дом./И кроме/свежевымытой сорочки,/скажу по совести,/мне ничего не надо"].…"I'll lift up high, like a Bolshevik party-card, all the hundred books of my Comm(unist) Party poems!" ["я подыму,/как большевистский партбилет,/все сто томов/моих/ партийных книжек"].

"The poem was well-received", Mayakovsky continues, "I read to you the last and most difficult of my poetry, made most conscientiously, and the fact that it reached you is very very interesting. It means that without lowering the standard of our technique, we must concentrate on working only for reader of the working-classes.
Chairman: Mayakovsky is very tired and ought to rest we should go on with the discussions. There follows discussions and questions to which Mayakovsky rose to reply."Comrades" (this is Mayakovsky), there are many notes here but comparitively  few questions, simply many notes repeat themselves. Very often a request to read a certain piece of poetry. Then a number of questions as to why I use "dirty words". A comrade says here that you cannot built socialism in using rude words in writing if you don't use them in life. It's naive to think that I wanted to build something on these words.The comrade is right - we can't build socialism on any words. I do not use those words for that. I love it when a poet closing his eyes to all reality sweetly sings his sounds, but supposing one took him like a puppy and pushed his nose right into life - solely as a poetical technique. I've also been told off for using the word svoloch (meaning "scum") . I use that word because it's often used in life. As long as that word exists, I shall use it in verse . You can't annihilate the word "svoloch" for aesthetic reasons, and so I use it in its fullest sense". Mayakovsky then read more of his verse and finished by saying, "Maybe we'd better end on this.".. 
…My throat refuses to go on..

Ann Charters: Let me quickly say that when Mayakovsky gave his readings, he invited questions and comments from the audience, and people would pass out little slips of paper, and he would be then handed these questions from the audience, and he would reply to whatever comment the listener had, and they would often attack him in the questions, they were not praising him, they were always asking him, in low vulgar language, once they asked him why he wore a gold ring?. They said, "You're such you're a proletarian worker poet, you shouldn't have gold". And he said, "Ok, I'll wear it in my nose then, if that makes you happier!". So he took it off and never wore (his gold ring) again . But he was also, in other words, answering questions from people, on this magnificent poem, who were criticizing the words,that they were too common, that poets should have elevated words.   They actually gave him trouble at every point... The exhibition which was referred to also was something else that you might know about, because it was a collection of (about) twenty years of his work . He himself prepared  the exhibition without any official help or..

AG: A sort of self-defense shot?

Ann Charters:  A sort of self-defense.  He would show the government that he had indeed spent twenty years writing and working for the progress of the Revolution. And one of the things.. (they resurrected this exhibition in Moscow, and I saw it in 1977,  and one of the things was a whole bulletin board , like that,filled with the slips of paper that had come from the audience that had listened to Mayakovsky, all the questions (he kept them!  he didn't throw away a scrap! - Lily kept them actually), and they resurrected them and put all the people's comments from the time on the poetry on the big bulletin board. Now Mayakovsky's point was there was a lot of public response. I mean, he kept these papers to show the government that people listened to him, you know, and that's interesting. 

The last thing I'll say before I leave is, because we're running out of time, is that, getting back to what we said at the beginning of the importance of Mayakovsky as the spokesman, or the heroic figure, of the Revolution, and how it is often thought that his suicide marked the end of an era. Well, there's a painting in Washington DC , if you ever go, byLarry Rivers, who, like many people, (Peter) Orlovsky,Allen Ginsberg and Frank O"Hara, was profoundly moved by the poetry of Mayakovsky, and this painting by Larry Rivers is called "The History of the Russian Revolution From Marx to Mayakovsky". It hangs in the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and it's a mixed-media work done in 1965. It consists of planks, painting, machine-gun parts, photographs, pipes, plumbing, starting with Bismarck, Marx, Engels and ends on (Vladimir Mayakovsky).

(Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately eighty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at the end of the tape)
also
http://cdm16621.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p16621coll1/id/1016/rec/1 (concluding at approximately twenty-two minutes in)
& on next tape: http://cdm16621.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p16621coll1/id/1024/rec/5

Expansive Poetry - 59 (Heroic Loud-Mouthed Style)

May 1, 2014, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 175

≪ Previous: Expansive Poetics - 58 (Mayakovsky - Conclusion)

$

0

0

[Lili Brikin poster designed by Alexander Rodchenkoin 1924 for the Soviet publisher, Gosizdat] 

AG: ..heroic style, loud-mouthed style, hot-air style, exaggeration style, post-Surrealist style, imaginative, hyperbole, rhetorical, ecstatic , inspired, open-mouthed, oratorical, oratory, dreamy, day-dreamy, fantastical, inspired  - (meaning inspiration, meaning breath). Inspiration-exhalation-expiration. By “inspired”, I mean breath – the quality of breath, which is unobstructed breath, or that breath known when the body is a hollow reed and the mind is unobstructed and improvisation and images flow through the body without check and with abundance. Expansive imagination. It’s a state of body and a state of mind that’s not unknown – it’s an actual state that people have experienced. It’s not an intellectual state, and it’s not necessarily an angry state, it’s generally a state of complete open breathing and lightness of body. (that would be the highlight, or touchstone, or reference point). Not all the poems that we are dealing with are so elevated or so inspired or so filled with air – which is why I said “hot air”. By “hot air”, I don’t mean bullshit, I mean heated air (heated by the body, I suppose) going out into space, carrying vibrations of the body. The idea of inspiration might be a footnote to Charles Olson’s conception of the poetic line as a projection of the body itself, as a projection of physiology (for those of you who are familiar with Olson) 

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