Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 175

May 2, 2014, 4:00 am

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[Allen Ginsberg throwing out the first ball at the San Francisco Giants game at Candlestick Park, June 2, 1994 - Photo courtesy Steve Silberman]

Our friend, Chris Funkhouser has a must-read piece (part of a 4-part series) in Jacket 2
on his experiences with audio recording (and in this case, in particular, the recording of Allen Ginsberg). "I studied with Allen..at Naropa in 1986", he writes. "He was my teacher and friend from then onward. There's no question my sense that poetry could (if not should) be an electrified-multimedia performance came from (him). With so many years of practice he had great stage presence (and) was extremely focused when it came to using language and a microphone. His energy was seemingly always in demand from one quarter or another. His literary life transpired around-the-clock with endless requests for interviews, and he was amazingly responsive to those who made contact with him. I learned much from Ginsberg (particularly about tolerance), and have a few (several) memorable experiences that involve the audio/recording realm."

He goes on to recount memories of backing-up Allen on "Birdbrain", on being a "poetry roadie" on the 1989 Lion For Real recording sessions, on overseeing more personal projects ("a 1991 We Press/Gargoyle Mechanique benefit in New York where he read then-recently-unearthed (Jack) Kerouac poems, "the Poetry Project's 1993 Valentine's Day reading, where Ginsberg reads a poem", "a late-night conversation and tuning of (Thomas) Campion..captured in Boulder in the summer of 1987", and, "a tremendous performance of singing and poetry (one hundred minutes on stage), spanning all periods of his work", recorded in April 1994, up-state at Hudson -  Allen's equally stunning workshop on that occasion was, similarly, recorded, and can be found on Chris'"Soundbox" collection here (an invaluable trove that includes, alongside the aforementioned Kerouac reading, recordings of Amiri Baraka, Cecil Taylor, Ed Sanders,Andy Clausen, Anne Waldman, and so much more).  


[Anne Waldman and Chris Funkhouser backing-up Allen on "Birdbrain," at The Turnverein, Denver, c.1986] 

Elise Cowen, whom we wrote about a few weeks back, is revisited here in Megan Keeling's note - "Elise Cowen - The Female Beat Poet You've Never Heard Of"

Elise Cowen died over fifty years ago - 


[Elise Cowen (1933-1962)]

- but what of ruth weiss? - eighty-six years old and still going great! - Can't Stop The Beat. 

We would point you to the extensive interview with her (by Thomas Antonic) on the current European Beat Studies Network ... 


[ruth weiss]

and while we're on the subject of "women beats" - Joanna McClure

- only a year late in getting around to reviewing her Collected Poems - Catching Light, lovingly assembled by North Atlantic Books (same folks that brought you theCollected Poemsof Lenore Kandel). 
Here's Joanna on Lenore Kandel. 
Here's Joanna (introduced by Gerald Nicosia) sharing some thoughts and recollections about Jack Kerouac. 

Here's Joanne Kyger on Joanna McClure - "Joanna McClure writes with a delightful and charming authenticity. Fresh, direct, and observant, her honesty and intelligence shine through the decades.." 











































 &, not a Collected but a Selected -  Pagan by Kaye McDonough

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Poetry In Motion

May 3, 2014, 3:30 am

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Ron Mann's groundbreaking 1982 film, Poetry In Motion, (we have featured, in the past, snippets, including Allen's enthusiastic "Capitol Air" performance) is now available, in its entirety, on the incomparable UbuWeb. 

From their informative notes:
 "It was re-released in 1994 in an innovative format on CD-Rom..and, in 2002, as a DVD. Poetry In Motion 25was also made available ("a one-hour television special featuring outtakes from Poetry In Motion with many of the artists featured in the original film", (different poems, different settings), "plus a bunch of new faces (including Peter Orlovsky, Alice Notley, Jerome Rothenberg, Philip Whalen and others - original participants included Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Amiri Baraka,Ed Sanders,Ted Berrigan,Anne Waldman, Helen Adam)"). 

Director, Ron Mann is interviewed about the film by Daniel Nesterhere, a couple of years back, on the web-site for The Poetry Foundation.

Our earlier (2011) posting about the film can be accessed here 

Expansive Poetics - 47 (Mayakovsky - 4)

April 10, 2014, 3:30 am

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

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

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

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

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

Student: Sounds like (William) Blake?

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

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

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

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

AG:  (Anatoly) Lunacharsky..?

Student:(Was it popular?)

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


[Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933)] 

AG: Who's Lunacharsky?

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

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

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

AG: Anti-capitalist cartoons.




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

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



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

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

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

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

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

AG: You've got to..

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

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

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

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

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




AG: "150 Million!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AG: Lunacharsky's work

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

AG: It's amazingly generous too

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

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

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

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

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

tape ends here 


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

Expansive Poetry - 60 - (A Quick Review)

May 5, 2014, 3:30 am

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AG (looking back on "Expansive Poetics", so far): We had started with a few early precursors. I started, (since this was an international shot  - or, at least, a Western shot), I started with a couple of poems of (Alexander) Pushkin, which were prophetic, about the poet putting burning coals on his tongue, or the poet meeting a seraphin the middle of the desert who pressed burning coals into his heart. And (then) we had, for expansive rhythm, an early nineteenth-century sample of high vibration in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells”. Then we went through this last session with some of Walt Whitman, who is, in a way, the innovator and expansive master, the one who first let his imagination completely loose to wander round the universe and empathize and sympathize with anything he could think of. Then we checked-out, I think, Christopher Smart,who was an early English precursor also, who wrote in long lines in the mad-house in England in the time of Doctor Samuel Johnson, eighteenth century. We went over some poems written in Europe inspired by Walt Whitman – by a friend and visitor,Edward Carpenter, who wrote in Whitmanic lines (So we were using Whitman as the great innovator for American-style expansiveness. Then we switched over to the children of Whitman and read Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Oda a Walt Whitman” (Ode to Walt Whitman) – “Not for one moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman,/have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies/and your corduroy shoulder worn by the moon/…your voice like a pillar of ashes – ancient and beautiful as mist” – Then we went to a Portuguese (1907 or (19)10), Fernando Pessoa, who also had an ode to Walt Whitman, saying that walking down Gold Street (the Wall Street of Lisbon) he too, with his pince-nez and his business-suit, was a child of Whitman, and he defied everybody, including God, to prevent him from leaping right into Walt Whitman’s arms on the very moment, right in the middle of Lisbon.!  So all these samples are in this anthology (Fernando Pessoa being the great modernist poet of Portugal). Then we went on to.. what other children of Whitman did we get into?.. does anybody remember what the next shot was?

Student: Hart Crane

AG: Hart Crane. Hart Crane also had an apostrophe to Whitman in his poem “The Bridge” (which is printed in here (also)). Then Ann Charters.. Then Robert Duncan..

Student: Oh Allen, excuse me a moment, this might be inappropriate

AG: Well if it’s inappropriate, let’s wait, yes? – or is it appropriate?

Student: It might be appropriate

AG: Oh, oh, appropriate, ok

Student: Do you like Hart Crane?

AG: Yeah

Student: Like?

AG: Yeah

Student: Okay.

AG: Sure. I wouldn’t put him in the anthology unless I liked him.

Student: Well you might have been (trying to be) fair.

AG: No, no, I only put things in here that I liked.

Student: No, it seemed as though..  that’s why I’ve been asking about Hart Crane..

AG: Yeah, I like Hart Crane, sure.

Student: Okay.

AG: Yeah, I identify with him. He was a great homosexual poet in the tradition of Whitman.  - As I am.

Student; There were a lot of them.

AG: Yeah. As I am. So, therefore, it’s right up the same alley. And I might say that it may be that the very notion of expansive, tearful, weeping, inspired poetry may be just the hysterical faggot fix that you get in poetry coming up from, (or) coming through, Whitman to (Sergei) Esenin, to some of the hysterical homosexuals, up through Lorca, who was gay, up through Edward Carpenter, who was gay, up through Hart Crane, who was gay, up through me, (who (is) gay). So it may be actually a very specific thing that I’m talking about , but, actually, most ordinary people have responded to Whitman and to Hart Crane and to Esenin and to Carpenter, as just straight inspired language. (though some of the emotion, or feeling of deprivation and longing, that you find in Whitman and Hart Crane and the others is, maybe, just a solitary homosexual yearning (in Lorca, particularly, Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman”)

If you get ahold of this anthology that we’ve put together, you can look up these texts, because I don’t want to go over them. We already did that. And I want to go on..

Then Ann Charters, who is Whitman’s biographer, came visiting.

Student: Whitman’s biographer?  Mayakovsky’s?

AG: Yeah, who is Whitman’s biographer, Mayakovsky’s biographer, (Jack) Kerouac’s biographer – who was Kerouac’s first biographer – and then wrote a history of the love affair between Lili Brik and Maakovsky (who came and stayed for ten days) and so we switched over, right in time, to Russian poetry, and touched a little bit on the Futurists of 1905 (that is, the people who broke through into the modern temperament, twentieth-century, and began writing about, (as was mentioned), taxi-cabs, dynamos, ferris-wheels, subways, trains, tram-cars, bringing twentieth-century furniture into the poem.

And then we went over Mayakovsky’s political set-up and began digging what was happening to the Russian Futurists after they made their breakthrough and after they called for  revolution and they got their revolution. And half of them got shot, sent to concentration camps, or kept under surveillance by (Joseph) Stalin. We touched on that at the beginning, in and out, particularly with Mayakovsky, who finally wound up committing suicide in 1930, caught in the squeeze of love-affairs, as well as the beginning of (the) erosion of his political  heroic stature as the bureaucrats around him under Stalin began closing in on him and closed down his play, “TheBedbug” and his girlfriend was out-of-town –Lili Brik..

So Ann Charters covered some of that. So now what I want to do is go back to the Futurists and their breakthrough in the twentieth-century, and start with Russian poetry other than Mayakovsky, cover a little bit more of (Velimir) Khlebnikov,(Nikolai) Gumilev, and maybe Anna Akhmatova. To do that we have to go back to theStray Dog Café or the Wandering Dog Café in St. Petersburg.

[Audio for the above is available here, starting at approximately two-and-three-quarter minutes in and  continuing until approximately ten-and-a-half minutes in]  

Expansive Poetics - 61 (The Stray Dog Cafe)

May 6, 2014, 3:30 am

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[Stray Dog Cafe, St Petersburg  (1912 logo)]

AG: The Stray Dog Café – There’s a little tiny footnote on it in a Russian literary quarterly, which also has  translation of a poem by Anna Akhmatova of the (19)40’s,(19)50’s, and (19)60’s, which she compiled secretly, and was published outside of Russia, her major poem. “Poem Without A Hero”. - "The dog that she mentions is a vagabond dog, a bohemian St Petersburg cafe, decorated in part by Olga, Sergei Sudeikina's husband, habituated by most of the writers and the artists of the period, 1912-1915. Before the Revolution, it was named The Cellar of Comedians, or Actors. Akhmatova, who was.. (Anna Akhmatova was a great Russian poetess who survived from that period up till (19)65).. “Akhmatova was a regular visitor. Her friend, an actress Olga (Glebova) Sudeikina performed there, as did (Mikhail) Kuzmin, another actor (and poet), Alexander Blok (who was a great Russian Symbolist poet) also went there, however, he disapproved of his wife’s being there - "dead people performed there" - Kuzmin and Olga Sudeikina. Akhmataova wrote a little decadent poem called “Cabaret Artistique” (“Artistic Cabaret”) in 1930, the Russian playwright, (Vsevolod) Meyerhold put on little playlets there, Mayakovsky declaimed there, (Sergei) Esenin (who was also a great Russian poet) came, (Boris) Pasternakvisited, (Osip) Mandelstam visited..” – So it was a place like..it was the central bohemian spot - St Petersburg, just before the Revolution - where all the poets were getting up on stage, calling for revolution, calling for Futurism, calling for the advent of the machine into poetry , calling for supernaturalism, starting movements, starting magazines, meeting together and having a literary ferment, which was actually one of the great world moments in poetry - sort of,  the rise of Futurism. What there had been before was one great poet – (Alexander) Blok, whose poem , “The Twelve”we went over also before [editorial note - did we? - Allen must here be referring to another, earlier, Naropa class here] – Blok was called a Symbolist.


[Alexander Blok (1880-1921), aged 27]

How many have heard of Symbolism as a poetic school? So that’s 1890-1910. As it looks now by hindsight and under the criticism of Ezra Pound and others, the trouble.. what Symbolism tried to do was gather impressions, basically, using symbols for actual events. So that it would transfer over to the reader some impression of the mood or emotion, but not definitely name it.
The gang of poets who came to the Stray Dog Café were beginning to revolt against that, because this was an era of realism and they wanted to introduce taxi-cabs and trolley-cars into their poetry, which hadn’t been in the symbolic Symbolist poetry. Symbolist poetry is more like the New Age, granny-dress, 1960’s posters which show LSD characters wandering through fairy lands with little.. big starry flowers in their eyeballs and birds singing on the trees, and romantic vampirish girls with long flower-print granny-dresses wandering over meadows. In other words, something of an other-worldly idealism

The group that followed it, both in America and in Russia, and in France, was more realistic. They wanted to modernize it and bring it up to the twentieth-century. So, in America, we had the Imagists, and the Objectivists(who were led by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and others) who really tried to update and modernize the language, the diction, the rhythms. They said that we should write in the language that we actually talk rather than in a literary and artificial synthetic language. That’s what Pound and Williams said in America.

And in Russia(n) – the Acmeistsand Imaginists. The Imaginists were picking up from the American Imagists, actually. There was a Russian movement called “Imagism” which came from American Imagism, which was Pound and Williams. And the Acmeists also said that what they had to do was get back to really basic practical reality in diction (which is the language, the talk they used, the words they used) so that you could talk the way you were talking actually  on the street, think the way you were thinking on the street. And compose your poem, of elements of that reality of your own life.


[Nikolay Gumilev (1886-1921)]

The great Acmeist, and Acmeist theoretician was a man named (Nikolay) Gumilev who was married to Akhmatova, the great Russian lady poet. Gumilev wrote a poem called “The Lost Tram Car”, which it might be interesting to check out . We have it in our anthologyhere in various versions. I’ll bring that up and start with that, because it’s the one poem that actually begins to introduce a tram-car into the scene  - “The Lost Tram” – This is 1886, in the anthology (the way this anthology is set up is chronologically, so you can find people by their birth-date. And there are several versions of it, so I’ll read you a couple (of) different versions. One is called "The Tram That Lost Its Way”, another is “The Streetcar Gone Astray”, another is “The Lost Tram” [another, "The Streetcar That Lost Its Way"] 

[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately ten-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately seventeen minutes in] 

Expansive Poetics - 62 - Nikolay Gumilev)

May 7, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Nikolay Gumilev (1886-1921)]


Allen reads Russian poet, Nikolai Gumilev's poem "The Lost Tram-Car"

Заблудившийся трамвай

Шел я по улице незнакомой
И вдруг услышал вороний грай,
И звоны лютни, и дальние громы,
Передо мною летел трамвай.

Как я вскочил на его подножку,
Было загадкою для меня,
В воздухе огненную дорожку
Он оставлял и при свете дня.

Мчался он бурей темной, крылатой,
Он заблудился в бездне времен…
Остановите, вагоновожатый,
Остановите сейчас вагон.

Поздно. Уж мы обогнули стену,
Мы проскочили сквозь рощу пальм,
Через Неву, через Нил и Сену
Мы прогремели по трем мостам.

И, промелькнув у оконной рамы,
Бросил нам вслед пытливый взгляд
Нищий старик, — конечно тот самый,
Что умер в Бейруте год назад.

Где я? Так томно и так тревожно
Сердце мое стучит в ответ:
Видишь вокзал, на котором можно
В Индию Духа купить билет?

Вывеска… кровью налитые буквы
Гласят — зеленная, — знаю, тут
Вместо капусты и вместо брюквы
Мертвые головы продают.

В красной рубашке, с лицом, как вымя,
Голову срезал палач и мне,
Она лежала вместе с другими
Здесь, в ящике скользком, на самом дне.

А в переулке забор дощатый,
Дом в три окна и серый газон…
Остановите, вагоновожатый,
Остановите сейчас вагон!

Машенька, ты здесь жила и пела,
Мне, жениху, ковер ткала,
Где же теперь твой голос и тело,
Может ли быть, что ты умерла!

Как ты стонала в своей светлице,
Я же с напудренною косой
Шел представляться Императрице
И не увиделся вновь с тобой.

Понял теперь я: наша свобода
Только оттуда бьющий свет,
Люди и тени стоят у входа
В зоологический сад планет.

И сразу ветер знакомый и сладкий,
И за мостом летит на меня
Всадника длань в железной перчатке
И два копыта его коня.

Верной твердынею православья
Врезан Исакий в вышине,
Там отслужу молебен о здравьи
Машеньки и панихиду по мне.

И всё ж навеки сердце угрюмо,
И трудно дышать, и больно жить…
Машенька, я никогда не думал,
Что можно так любить и грустить.

"A strange street, then crows/croaking then the sound of a lute/and thunder crawling slow/from a distance - then a train at my feet/ And I leaped, somehow and the railing/ held, and I stood, dazed/stupidly watching a trail/of fire streaking like sunrays./ Rushing like a storm with dark wings/the tram blundered and was lost/in time's pit…"Driver, off!/Stop! This minute - listen!/ No we'd run round the wall, ploughed a palm grove, clattered a Neva.." (Petersburg) "..bridge, a Nile/ bridge, a bridge on the Seine/ And seen for a second a beggar/watching with knowing eyes -/ the beggar from Beirut, right,/ the same - he died/ Last year. Where am I? My heart/pumps languid fear - "Did you miss/ the station? They sell tickets there/ for the India of the spirit."/ A sign…Bloody letters/ spelling Grocer - better than turnips or beets they sell /bleeding heads severed./  The butcher with a face like an udder/ and a red shirt takes my hand/ too and slops it in a box of head, at the bottom./  A side street, house with three windows,/wooden fence, a lawn.../ "Driver, I need to get down/ here, stop, this minute!"/ Mashsenka, you lived here and sang,/ and wove me a rug and promised/ to marry me. Bodies and voice/ Where are you?  Not dead?  not you?/You moaned in your room when I powdered/my hair to present myself/to the Empress. I never /saw you again./ I see freedom for us/ is light from another world -/ men and shadows wait/ at the gate of the planets' zoo/  And the a sweet familiar/ wind, and over that bridge/ an iron glove and two hooves/ rush towards me./ Saint Isaac's dome on the sky/like God's true hand -/ let them sing for Mashsenka/ and mourn for me./ How can I breathe? It hurts/ to live. My heart tears/ itself Mashsenka, I never knew/ how much love and sorrow we can bear" ("We could bear") 

That's from a gigantic book of poems, (translated) byBurton Raffel, called Complete Poems of Osip Mandelstam[sic!]  - and then there is a little tiny book available - (the) Penguin Book of Russian Verse,which had a prose translation of that. Could you check that out, I wonder…

Student: You said that was by (Nikolay) Gumilev (so) is that by Mandelstam?

AG: I'm sorry. I meant Gumilev. I don't have it here. There's a large Gumilev around, there's a CollectedGumilev around [in English]. The people that produce all this stuff is (are) called Ardis House, who print up all the twentieth-century Russian poetry, and they've put out a Collected Gumilev poetry. [editorial note - did they? - Allen is perhaps referring here to the 1977 volume "On Russian Poetry", an earlier, Selected [sic] Gumilev in English (translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago) appeared from the State University of New York Press in 1972]  

I'm sorry.. Where I got that from was from the Ardis HouseRussian Literature Tri-Quarterly, actually.  And this was.. what year was that? - Nineteen twenty-one?  So that was published in 1921, after the Revolution, and so the street-car gone crazy, or the street-car gone astray, is probably his commentary on the Revolution. Two years later, he was shot for counter-revolutionary activity. He was an aristocrat and he was elegant and he opposed the Bolshevik steam-roller, or what he thought was a Bolshevik steam-roller over the arts, as well as other political and economic moves, like the campaign against the kulaks, which came later ( the kulaks being the small land-owners).
He was marrried to (Anna) Akhmatova, but if you can imagine what was going on then in the minds of all those writers who had been in favor of revolution, just as the writers of the (19)60's, (19)70's and (19)80's are in favor of a revolution. But when the actual revolution came, and was taken over by non-poetic activists, there arose a huge conflict between the imaginative writers and the leaders who had to run the tram-cars and claimed to have a monopoly on the actual practical problems of reality.
Gumilev was very proud in opposition and was fast in opposition and got shot faster than almost anyone.

Although an even greater poet, (Velimir) Khlebnikov, died a year later, who was much more wild-minded and more pixie-like?  (In American poetry, I would say somewhere as a cross between (Gregory) Corso and (Peter) Orlovsky as a poet, in style) - (He -   Khlebnikov) died of starvation in 1922, after having been arrested by the White Russians and then by the Red Russians, and then sent out to do propaganda work in Turkey and in provincial towns, then came back to Moscow to see if he could save his situation and get some money publishing a book so he'd have something to eat, and starved and died then). We'll get to Khlebnikov soon.

[Audio from the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately seventeen minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-two-and-three-quarters minutes in]

ADDENDA: A recording of  Yevgeny Yevtushenko reading Gumilev's "The Lost Tram Car" 
may be accessed here

Expansive Poetics 63 (Osip Mandelstam)

May 8, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938)]

AG: Another funny little poem, 1920, by (Osip) Mandelstam, who looked like this as a young man…[Allen shows photograph of Mandelstam] -   Let's see.. where am I? I've got these people mixed up. No, no…

Student: (Nikolay) Gumilev?

AG: (Osip) Mandelstam now. I'm interleaving them. (Mandelstam and Gumilev). This, being Mandelstam now as a young man

Student: Let's see that picture.



AG: Very elegant, with big, big, satin cravat. Already Mandelstam had begun digging that it was going to be death to all the poets. Mandelstam himself died in a prison camp in 1937. (He was) a friend of (Anna) Akhmatova - Akhmatova was actually there when Mandelstam was arrested - Several times he was arrested, but (for) the first big arrest, in (19)34, she was right (there) in the room. Already Mandelstam, by 1920, was nostalgic for the Stray Dog Cafe. So there's a kind of interesting little poem…

[Allen reads Osip Mandelstam's poem "B Петербурге мы сойдемся снова", ("We shall gather again in Petersburg")] 
"We shall gather again in Petersburg/ As though we'd buried the sun there/And newly speak the blissful meaningless word./ In black velvet Soviet night,/ the velvet of universal Emptiness/ they sing of kindred eyes/ Of blessed, blissful matrons./ And deathless flowers bloom./ The city humps its catback bridges/where centuries come to a halt/ And a single angry motorcar/ goes cuckooing into the gloom./ I have no need of a night pass/ For I'm not afraid of the sentries./ I'll bless the Soviet night, the meaningless, blissful word./ At the theater I hear/ A gentle rustling and a girlish "oh!"/ And Venus holds an armful of deathless roses./ Bored, we warm ourselves by the bonfire./ Perhaps the centuries will pass/ And blessed matrons' kindred hands/ Will gather in the gentle ash./ Somewhere sweet choirs of Orpheus sound./ The singers' kindred pupils shine darkly./Playbill doves come fluttering down/From the galleries to the stalls./ So go ahead/ And snuff our candles out/ In the world's black velvet emptiness,/ blissful matrons' sloping shoulders sing,/ And the night's sun glows unnoticed." - So it's already a nostalgic recollection of the old days of the theatre - "Playbill doves come fluttering down/From the galleries to the stalls./ So go ahead/ And snuff candles out.." - He's talking to the political people. 

B Петербурге мы сойдемся снова,/ Словно солнце мы похоронили в нем,/ И блаженное, бессмысленное слово/ В первый раз произнесем./ B черном бархате советской ночи,/ В бархате всемирной пустоты,/Все поют блаженных жен родные очи,/ Bсе цветут бессмертные цветы. 
Дикой кошкой горбится столица,/На мосту патруль стоит,/ Только злой мотор во мгле промчится/ И кукушкой прокричит./ Мне не надо пропуска ночного,/ Часовых я не боюсь: /За блаженное, бессмысленное слово/ Я в ночи советской помолюсь. 
Слышу легкий театральный шорох/ И девическое "ах"- /И бессмертных роз огромный ворох/ У Киприды на руках./ У костра мы греемся от скуки,/ Может быть, века пройдут,/И блаженных жен родные руки/Легкий пепел соберут./ 
Где-то грядки красные партера,/ Пышно взбиты шифоньерки лож,/ Заводная кукла офицера/Не для черных дум и низменных святош/ B черном бархате всемирной пустоты,/ Все поют блаженных жен крутые плечи,/ И ночного солнца не заметишь ты.

That motif of "We'll gather again in Petersburg" is, actually,  one of the most haunting to all (the) later Soviet (poets). And there are some of the exiled poets in Paris in the (19)30's, who wrote poems looking back to 192o and to Mandelstam's "We'll gather together in Petersburg", knowing that it's not going to happen again. It was really totally decimated and torn apart and reduced to ashes. So that line, "We'll gather again in Petersburg" is a slogan, or a key line, to all of the artists and poets in Russia since 1920 - of a lost paradise, a lost revolution, or betrayed revolution, or betrayed hope, or, actually, finally, beyond the politics of it, as William Carlos Williamswrote, that "not one leaf will rise from the ground and attach itself to the branch again", when Williams was old - "And you may be assured that not one leaf will rise from the ground and attach itself to the branch again" - [editorial note - the actual quote -"And you may be sure/not one leaf will lift itself/from the ground/and become fast to a twig again" (from the poem "The Hunter" in Sour Grapes, published, relatively early, in 1921)] -  ("We'll gather together in Petersburg". There are other poems by later poets, which we'll come to, that repeat that motif. 

(Audio for the above can be heard here at approximately twenty-two-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-six-and-three-quarter minutes in)

Addenda: Osip Mandelstam may be heard reading his own poems, "Gypsy Girl" ("Цыганка. В исполнении автора") and "No, I was never anyone's contemporary" ("Нет, никогда ничей я не был современник. В исполнении автора")  (from a recording circa  1927) -  here and here

Gary Snyder's Birthday

May 8, 2014, 9:00 am

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This past February, as part, (part two), of the Tales From Two Cities - Writing From California Conference, (held at the Los Angeles Public Library, under the auspices of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West), Gary Snyder (following an enthusiastic introduction by LA Times book critic, David Ulin, and with the assistance of, and with deep gratitude to, poet and environmentalist, Lewis MacAdams) spoke and read to a large and engaged predominantly local audience. 

The full reading (including MacAdams (instigator of the exemplary (LA) River Project, 

FoLAR (Friends of the Los Angeles River) concluding the reading, reading from his book-length poem,"The River", "The Voice of The River") is available here .  

A recent appearance.  Today is Gary Snyder's  84th  birthday

and here's Gary, from a few years back, remembering his old pal, Jack Kerouac.   

"I only knew Jack (Kerouac) personally, in an intimate way, for those few months from the Fall of (19)55 to May of 1956 when I set sail for Japan. I never saw him again, and it was like a brief camp-out together when we shared that cabin in Marin County through the Spring of that year, practiced meditation together, talked Buddhists texts, wrote poetry and drank a lot of Tokaj - and then I left. At that time, all that Jack and I were doing together were practicing mountains, practicing wood-cutting, practicing flowers and birds and practicing Buddhist studies.

Interviewer:Does The Dharma Bums..Is that a really accurate story or is a lot of it made up?

GS: Some of it's a novel, some of it reflects things things that happened, but even the reflection is novel too, like (William) Burroughs would say. 

Interviewer: Did you know he was going to write a book about you?

GS: Yeah, he told me, towards the end. He said, "I'm going to write a book about you, Gary, you're going to be really famous!" - "Really?"

Interviewer: Do you think he had a sense of himself as being a major novelist. I mean as like a..

GS: Yes. I do, at that time even.

Interviewer: In what sense..?

GS: The clear sense of his skill, his power, his vocation, and his energy, and that there was something that he was going to be saying 

Interviewer: In a way, there's a funny kind of worship, you know, of what you represented.

GS: Well, he does that in the novel. He plays that in some of the other novels too, where he makes his first person singular into kind of a naive character that elicits information from people by pretending not to know (and he didn't do that much with me in person, although, it's true, he was real naive about some things.

Interviewer: What was.. what was..

GS: He didn't really know what was involved in going back-packing and hiking and climbing. It was all new to him, but he was a quick learner. And he didn't know much about nature, or that you could know about nature really, in its specific way. And so, spending some time on the Spring bird migrations and the many species that were coming through Marin County that year- five hundred a year come through Marin County on a Pacific fly-way - so we were checking off species as they came through that little shack and Jack really appreciated all that information.

...Like we were cutting some eucalyptus and splitting eucalyptus for fire-wood the stove and he was like a kid - learning how to start a chain-saw, how to handle a maul - same way as when we went back-packing. Oh, I was going to say, we did another trip too (besides to the High Sierra). We did a.. two-night maybe? camping trip, hiking right from Homestead Valleyover Mount Tam. and camping out on the drainages on the north side ofMount Tamalpais..local places..and swinging around and coming back...

Interviewer: Was Kerouac really as frightened... there's a thing where he..

GS: (shaking his head): Mm-mm

Interviewer: Oh, interesting.

GS: Well, that's part of his story-telling.

Interviewer: Because he says "I was a coward" - He says"I was the Buddha known as the coward. At least I have joy", or something like that [ editorial note - Kerouac's actual line -"I realized I have no guts anyway, which I've long known. But I have joy."]

GS: He likes to play with that. He's an athlete.

Interviewer: Did you think of him as an intellectual?

GS: No. But well-read, to make the distinction. A very well-read person and a very sharp person with a critical acuity when he wished to employ it, but not like a practicing intellectual, which is a style, (that) is all it is...

GS: The Buddhist metaphor?

Interviewer: Yes

GS: Suffering, Impermenance, the First Noble Truth - everything is impermenant and we must find our joy and our freedom in suffering - finally. He swung around through that, to the Buddhist understanding of that - and it's all through his writing - and then settled back into, maybe, the more familiar comfort of Catholic metaphors...

Now you asked me "Did he seem very American?" and I said "Yes", and you said "Why?", and I was ruminating on how to answer that. He was in his physical health and strength, in his unconscious grace, in his child-like-ness, (which was real a lot of the time), in his openness to experiencing new things and learning new things, his paradoxical joy in a kind of freshness in the world (paradoxical, because at the same time he was aware of suffering and impermenance), and maybe all of that is sort of American - And a total absence in Jack of anything elite, or yuppie, or academic, or intellectual, or any of that posturing at all that we associate with learned people, middle-class white people. He was more like your aunt, you know, sitting at a table in the kitchen, or your grandma, sitting at a table in the kitchen, speaking in common-sense truths about orderliness and kindness, basic instructions, and so, very much like my old aunt from Texas, and easy to be with. 

Happy Birthday, Gary - and thanks   

---

Allen Ginsberg, James Franco &"Selfies"

May 9, 2014, 3:00 am

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≪ Previous: Gary Snyder's Birthday

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The "selfie" (word of the moment), the ubiquitous "selfie" - As Paul Gallagher noted recently, on one of our all-time favorite blogs, Dangerous Minds - "Along with being a poet, Beat writer, radical, teacher, diarist, singer, musician, photographer and Buddhist, Allen Ginsberg was also the pioneer of the selfie. Long before everyone was posting their self-portraits on social media, Ginsberg was out there taking snaps of himself in front of every hotel mirror. He snapped himself cross-legged, naked, half-dressed, fully-dressed, vulnerable, confident, unwashed, washed, smiling, squinting, happy-face, ugly-face, old-man-tired-and-going-to-bed face - the Ginsberg selfie captured it all".

Here's a few more Ginsberg "selfies" - 












And a show-down this week onInstagram- James Franco (who played Allen, of course, in 2010's Howl movie)  and Allen - "Who Did It Better?" -  Word-on-the-street says Allen. What do you think?



And what's this? who's this? why, it's American photographic pioneer Robert Cornelius and a daguerrotype taken in 1839 - according to Wikipedia, "the first known selfie"!






















Here's James Franco again.  Okay, enough of this - moving along...



Here's James Franco reading his poetry (courtesy another of our favorite blogs, Open Culture) - James Franco Reads Six Short Poems From His New Collection



Here's James Franco reading Allen 

Conrad Rooks - Chappaqua

May 10, 2014, 5:30 am

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Chappaqua, the legendary 1966 film, written and directed by Conrad Rooks(Rooks not Brooks - sic), now available, in its entirety, on You Tube, is this weekend's Allen Ginsberg Project focus.  

As Jack Sargeant, in his essential account inNaked Lens - Beat Cinema points out: 

"Rooks began to experiment with alcohol in his teens and later with drugs [a variety of drugs], to which he became addicted" [as he declares quite explicitly in the opening credits]. "As a result of his father's sudden death in 1962 [his father was millionaire, Russel Rooks, one of the founders of the hugely-successful Avon cosmetics company], "(he) was "shocked into the futility of an existence dependent on alcohol and drugs". (He) undertook a thirty-day sleep-cure at a clinic in Zurich, Switzerland [in the film, transposed to Paris], in order to free himself of his addictions. The experiences of this cure inform(s) the "narrative" of his film..while the possibility of relapsing into drug addiction create(s) an urgency which motivated (his) desire to finish (it), partly in order to avoid a possible regression. Chappaqua was financed primarily with Rooks' inheritance and money borrowed from his family and friends and the final budget was estimated at $450,000" 
- "a particularly expensive piece of occupational therapy", as the New York Times reviewer at the time wryly pointed out, but, apparently, a successful one ("Its author today [1967] is dry, straight and happy"). 

It is, then, semi-autobiographical (altho' the blurring of reality and fantasy is very much at the heart of what's happening here - psychedelic "flashback"). Rooks plays (not too professionally, it has to be pointed out), his thinly-veiled alter-ego, "Russel Harwick". The "plot", in so far as there is a "plot", is Harwick's journey to the sanatorium, his terrors and his hallucinations and his experience of the (finally successful) cure. What saves the film, in fact, makes it transcendent (one critic has called it "an underground jewel in film history"), is the ravishing cinematography (especially the black-and-white photography - altho' a whole smorgasbord of filmic techniques, notably multiple super-impositions, are used - the New York Times reviewer saw this, oddly, as one of the film's shortcomings - "the film's fatal technical virtuosity"). 

The two geniuses behind the film are Harry Smith and Robert Frank. The latter, (talking with Jack Sargeant about the idiosyncracy of Rooks and the experience of working with
(or rather, for) him):
"..the guy (Rooks) was interesting, he was a real... Yeah, he was a real nut ..but at least he was…he was completely out of everything, he had so much money to spend. It could have been a good film, a really strong film, but he wouldn't use the footage I shot of him and he was the story"… "he took out, you know, really strong scenes with him, which showed hin as a.. this extraordinay insane man that he really was."…" (it) was easy because I had, really, freedom to do what I wanted to do. I mean, he just said. "let's go and rent a chateau and get women in there and ice that steams up and makes "smoke", you know, pretty free. He would go.. every time it was over, he would go to Jamaica or India and he would always say afterwards "okay" and take out his big fountain pen and he'd write me a check and say: "You're a bastard! I'll never work with you again". Then he'd call me up after a month and he'd show up in India and say, "let's go to Ceylon", something like that.. He was a very unhappy man, he couldn't concentrate and pursue a thought. He'd open up a magazine and start to say, "oh, lets go to Oregon where the big trees are and get a bambi running around the trees".. he had this.. he was an interesting guy.. many people like that movie. I don't know…" 

The other hook of the film (it won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1966) was the stellar "counter-cultural" cast - cameos by Allen (dubbed "the Messiah", he and Peter (Orlovsky) are seen chanting at the very beginning of the film), William Burroughs ("Opium Jones", a richly ironic part), Ed Sanders andThe Fugs (the memorable sugar cubes LSD opening scene - no coincidence that the song they're playing is "I Couldn't Get High") - not to mention,  Moondog (snatched from the streets of New York and flown out to Montana),Swami Satchidananda, (Rooks' subsequent guru, a pacifying figure, a figure of exemplary transcendent calm, in the movie), Ornette Coleman and Ravi Shankar 
        
The film's soundtrack, originally a commission for Ornette Coleman, proved to be so beautiful and stimulating  Rooks feared it might overpower/overwhelm the visuals and it
was jettisoned and released independently as a seperate album (a taste of that may be had here). The original soundtrack was composed by another of his mentors, spiritual guides and close friends, Ravi Shankar (that original soundtrack may be listened to here). 

Carl Abrahamsson's "Conrad Rooks - Chappaqua and Beyond" (incorporating a long and revealing interview with the filmmaker (first published in 2007, revised in 2011) should, on no account, be missed, (extraordinary tales, an extraordinary life), and is, in fact, essential reading,  

Ornette leads us out

Allen by Naomi - A Mother's Day Posting

May 11, 2014, 8:12 am

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[Allen Ginsberg by Naomi Ginsberg - A mother's portrait painting of her son  
c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]
- thanks to Jacqueline Gens& Steve Silberman. & The Allen Ginsberg Estate for reproduction of this image

Allen By Naomi - A Mother's Day Posting

May 11, 2014, 4:17 am

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[Allen Ginsberg by Naomi Ginsberg] - A mother's portrait of her son.  

c. Allen Ginsberg Estate - thanks to Jacqueline Gens &  The Allen Ginsberg Estate for permission to reproduce this image.

Expansive Poetics - 64 ("A Slap In The Face of Public Taste")

May 12, 2014, 3:00 am

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["A Slap In The Face of Public Taste" from the Museum of Modern Art Collection]

AG: So what was lost, or what was the energy that's lost, it'll be interesting to read, going back eight years earlier (from 1920) (to) the (Russian) Futurist Manifesto. I think that was the last thing  (or one of the last things) I read in the last term's class. Let's see if I can find it.

Student: Yes, that was the last thing.

AG: Let me see if I can get it. It was called "A Slap In The Face of Public Taste" 

Student: Uh-huh

AG: "Full of piss and vinegar"!  Let's see where I had it. Wait a minute.. let's see. .where did I put it?  - Give me a minute to find it and check it out. It's in this big book on Futurism.. [Allen keeps searching] -  Yeah, that (that manifesto) was issued in Moscow, in December 1912, signed by (Vladimir) Mayakovsky, (Velimir) Khlebnikov - and by David Burliuk (who was a great painter, who was smart, and got out of Russia around 1920 and went to the United States, and lived out on Long Island, where, at one point or another, in the (19)30's or (19)40's, he ran into Peter Orlovsky's mother! (and hung around in America with Raphael Soyer) -  Alexander Kruchenykh also signed it. 

[David Burliuk (in 1914, aged 32)   &  Marie, Lafcadio & Kate Orlovsky,Peter's mother, 1989, &  Vladimir Mayakovsky]

So this is typical of the Futurist,Dadaist, Surrealist manifestos of that era. What I was going to do was to read that and then compare that with the Dadaist manifestos (of) around the same time, written in Zurich by Tristan Tzara  

A SLAP IN THE FACE OF PUBLIC TASTE

To those who read our first new unexpected.

We alone are the face of our time. The horn of time blows through us and the art of words.

The past constricts, the Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics.

He who does not forget his first love will not recognize his last 

But who will be so gullible as to turn his last love to the perfumed lechery of  a Balmont?
[Balmont was a Romantic Symbolist of the time]

Will he find a reflection of today's virile soul there?

Who will be so cowardly not to dare to tear the paper armor from warriorBryusov's black tuxedo? Will he find the dawn of an unknown beauty there?

Wash your hands which have touched the filthy slime of the books written by countless Leonid Andrayevs

All thoseMaxim Gorkys, Krupines, Bloks, Sologubs, Remizovs, Averchenkos, Chornys, Kuzmins, Bubins, etc, etc.  They only need villas on a river - that's the way fate rewards tailors.

From the height of skyscrapers we look at their insignificance.

We decree that the following rights of poets be respected:

1)  To enlarge the scope of the poet's vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words.

2) To feel insuperable hatred for the language that existed before them.

3) To tear with horror from our proud foreheads the wreath of cheap fame which you have made from bathhouse switches…

AG: "bathhouse switches"? - I guess for…

Students: (For..)

AG: ….not light-switches, but…. branches - [Allen continues]

4)  To stand on the rock of the word "we"amid a sea of cat-calls and outrage from the bourgeoisie.

And if for the time being the filthy marks of your common sense and good taste remain in our lines, nevertheless, for the first time, the lightning flashes of the new future beauty of the self-sufficient world are already on them.   

Signed…"   etc etc..

(Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-six-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-one-and-a-half minutes in)

Expansive Poetics - 65 ((Rimbaud)

May 13, 2014, 3:00 am

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Allen's 1981  "Expansive Poetics" lecture continues...

AG: Yes. If you want to see where that came from we would go back to the French precursors, the heroic precursors, and check out (Arthur) Rimbaud's letters to his teacher. Does everybody know Rimbaud's letters to his teacher, (Paul Demeny)  Are people familiar with Rimbaud's early letters here? Raise your hand if you are. Well, how many here have read Rimbaud? [ Allen is presented with a show of hands]  So everybody knows a little Rimbaud, and who he is historically. For those who don't, he was considered the greatest French poet of the nineteenth-century. (He) emerged into literary prominence in 1871, when he was (only) fifteen years old.

The text I'll read you is when he was fifteen years old, which has some of the same tone as the Russian Futurist Manifesto. This is a letter to (Paul Demeny) in Douai, who was his high-school teacher, telling his high-school teacher the great prophetic future of Rimbaud and what was going to happen to literature, (from) Charleville, his home-town, in his mother's house.    [the translation is by Louise Varese]

"Charleville,  May 13, 1871 -  I have decided to give you an hour of new literature. I begin at once with a psalm of current interest.  
Poem Enclosed: "Parisian War Song" ("Chant de guerre parisian")
And now follows a discourse on the future of poetry - All ancient poetry culminated in Greek poetry, harmonious life. From Greece to the Romantic movement - Middle Ages - there are men of letters, versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, nothing but rhymed prose, a game, fatty degeneration and glory of countless idiotic generations: Racine is the pure, the strong, the great man. Had his rhyme been effaced, his hemistiches got mixed up, today the Divine Imbecile would be unknown as any old author of Origins. After Racine, the game gets moldy. It lasted for two thousand years! 
Neither a joke nor a paradox. Reason inspires me with more certainties on this subject than any Young France ever had angers. Besides, newcomers have a right to condemn ther ancestors; one is at home and there is plenty of time" - [That’s really smart, actually] – "Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!! The Romantics? who proved so clearly that the song is very seldom the work, that is, the idea sung and understood by the singer.  For, I is another.." - [Le moi est un autre– The “I” is another – or, as Carl Solomontranslated it, “I’s another” – for the “I”, the “moi est un autre. - he’s actually making an interesting commentary on the nature of ego. “I” – the “I” – “is another” – for “I is someone else”, (here it’s translated - Le moi est un autre – “I is another”, “The I is another person”) - [Allen continues] - “If brass wakes up a trumpet it isn’t to blame. To me this is evident: I witness the birth of my thought. I look at it, I listen to it. I give it a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths or comes bursting onto the stage. If the old fools had not hit upon the false significance of the Ego only, we should not now have to sweep away those millions of skeletons who, since time immemorial, have been accumulating the products of these cockeyed intellects claiming themselves to be the authors. In Greece, I have said, verses and lyres, rhythms: Action. After that, music and rhymes are games, pastimes. The study of this past charms the curious, many delight in reviving these antiquities – the pleasure is theirs.
 Universal Mind has always thrown out its ideas naturally; men would pick up part of these fruits of the brain; they acted through, wrote books with them: and so things went along, since man did not work on himself, not being yet awake, or not yet in the fullness of his dream. Writers were functionaries. Author, creator, poet – that man had never existed!

The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it: it seems simple: In every brain a natural development is accomplished; so many egoists proclaim themselves authors; others attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! But the soul has to be made monstrous, that’s the point – like Comprachicos,if you like. Imagine a man planting and cultivating the warts on his face. 
One must, I say, be a visionary, make oneself a visionary. The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. Ineffable torture in which he will need all his faith and superhuman strength, the great criminal, the great sick man, the accursed – and the supreme Savant!…"

AG: Knower                                                                

Student: Sage                                                                     

AG: Savant                                                                          

Student: Sage                                                                     

AG: Sage, yes. Good - [continues]: “For he arrives at the unknown! Since he has cultivated his soul – richer to begin with than any other! He arrives at the unknown, and even if, half-crazed, in the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them! Let him be destroyed in his leap by those unnamable, unutterable and innumerable things: there will come other horrible workers; they will be in at the horizon where he has succumbed.

- continued in six minutes – 

Here, I interpolate a second psalm outside the text: kindly lend a friendly ear and everybody will be charmed. I hold the bow in my hand, I begin:

Poem enclosed: “My Little Sweethearts” (“Mes Petites Amoureuses”)

That's  that. And if I weren't afraid of making you spend over sixty centimes for postage - I, poor waif - [Varese notes Rimbaud's poem, "Les Effares" ("The Waifs") "describing haggard street urchins gazing through a cellar vent at bread in a baker's oven"] - without a red cent to my name the last seven months! - I would offer you my "Paris Lovers" ("Amants de Paris"), one hundred hexameters,  dear Sir, and my "Death of Paris" ("Mort de Paris"), two hundred hexameters! -" [Varese notes these two particular poems have never been found - Allen continues..] - " I say:

So then, the poet is truly a thief of fire.  



Humanity is his responsibility, even the animals; he must see to it that his inventions can be smelled.

If what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form, if it is formless, he gives it formlessness. A language must be found; as a matter of fact, all speech being an idea, the time of a universal language shall come! One has to be an academician - deader than a fossil - to finish a dictionary of any language at all. The weak-minded, beginning with the first letter of the alphabet, would soon be raving mad!

This harangue would be of the soul for the soul, summing up everything, perfumes, sounds, colors, thought grappling thought, and pulling. The poet would define the amount of unknown arising in his time in the universal soul" - [ - That's an interesting line - ] 

Student: Say that again..?

AG: "The poet would define the amount of unknown arising in his time in the universal soul" … "He would give more than the formula of his thought, more than the annotation of his march towards Progress! Enormity become norm, absorbed by everyone , he would truly be the multiplier of progress!

This future, as you see, will be materialistic. Always full of Number and Harmony, these poems would be made to last. As a matter of fact, it will still be Greek poetry in a way,

This eternal art will have its functions since poets are citizens. Poetry will no longer accompany action but will lead it." - ["Of course, this was the desire of the (Russian) Futurists, also. Well, of course, it's the same conception that (Percy Bysshe) Shelley had,  that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world", and it's a very common conception, and it's true, in the sense that before you can take an action, you have to have a thought, and before you have a thought, the poet'll have it before you (I mean, any major thought, the poet will have first). (So) in that sense, "antennae of the race"] .

[Allen continues] - "These poets are going to exist! When the infinite servitude of women shall have ended, when she will be able to live by and for herself , then man, hitherto abominable, having given her her freedom, she too will be a poet.."

Student: Hear hear!

AG: ".. Woman will discover the unknown. Will her world be different from ours? She will discover strange unfathomable things, repulsive, delicious. We shall take them, we shall understand them.
Meantime ask the poet for the new - ideas and forms. All the bright boys will imagine they have satisfied this demand: it isn't that at all!"

"The first Romantics were visionaries without quite realizing it. The cultivation of their souls began accidentally, abandoned locomotives still burning, that go on running along the rails for a while. Lamartine is at times a visionary, but strangled by the old form. Hugo, too much of a ham, has really vision in his last works: Les Miserables is a true poem. I haveLes Chatiments at hand; "Stella" shows the limits of Hugo's visionary powers. Too muchBelmontetand Lamennais, too many Jehovah's and columns, old, dead, enormities.

Musset is fourteen times execrable for us, suffering generations carried away by visions - to whom his angel's sloth is an insult! Oh! the insipid Tales and Proverbs! O the Nights!, O "Rolla", O Namouna!, O the Chalice!. It's all so French, that is, detestable to the last degree; French not Parisian! Again the work of the evil genius that inspired Rabelais, Voltaire,Jean LeFontaine with commentary by Mr Taine! Spring-like de Musset's wit! Charming, his love!  Regular enamel painting, solid poetry! French poetry will long be enjoyed - but in France. Every grocer-boy can reel off a Rolla-esque apostrophe, every budding priest has the five hundred rhymes hidden away in a secret notebook. At fifteen, these flights of passion make boys ruttish; at sixteen, they are already satisfied to recite them with feeling; at eighteen, even seventeen, every schoolboy who has the chance, acts like Rolla" - [The Romantic hero] - "..writes a "Rolla"! Perhaps some may still even die of it. Musset achieved nothing. There were visions behind the gauze curtains; he closed his eyes. Dragged from cafe to school-room, French and driveling, the fine corpse is dead, and from now on let's not even take the trouble to wake him with our execrations!

The second Romantics are really visionaries: Theophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Theodore de Banville. But, expecting the invisible and hearing the unheard being entirely different from recapturing the spirit of dead things, Baudelaire is the first visionary, king of poets, a real God! Unfortunately he lived in too artistic a milieu. and his much-vaunted style is trivial. Inventions of the unknown demand new forms.

Trained in the old forms:  among the simpletons, A.Renaud (has done his Rolla); L.Grandet (has done his Rolla), theGauloisand theMussets, G. Lafenestre.." - 

[These are all relatively forgotten poets, except for (de) Musset, and.. actually I hear a roll call of now-almost-completely-forgotten poets, from Rimbaud, (1871), who, actually, were sort of hacks, as he was denouncing them at the age of fifteen, and whose names will be unrecognizeable to most people in this class] - "…Coran, C-L, Popelin, Soulary, L.Salles, the schoolboys, Marc, Aicard;  the dead and the imbeciles, Antran, Barbier, L.Pichat, Lemoyne, the Deschamps, the des Essarts; the Bohemians; the women; the talents, Leon Dierx and Sully Prudhomme, Coppee. The new school, called Parnassian, has two visionaries, Albert Merat andPaul Verlaine, a true poet. And there you are.

So I am working to make myself a visionary.

And now let us close with a pious chant.  
Poem enclosed: "Squattings" ("Accroupissements")

You will be damnable if you don't answer: quickly, for in a week I shall be in Paris perhaps .

Goodbye.

A.Rimbaud."

[Arthur Rimbaud - Fantin-Latour, 1872]

Charleville, 15 mai 1871.

J'ai résolu de vous donner une heure de littérature nouvelle. Je commence de suite par un psaume d'actualité :  ["Chant de guerre parisien"]

- Voici de la prose sur l'avenir de la poésie.
- Toute poésie antique aboutit à la poésie grecque ; Vie harmonieuse. - De la Grèce au mouvement romantique, - moyen âge, - il y a des lettrés, des versificateurs. D'Ennius à Théroldus, de Théroldus à Casimir Delavigne, tout est prose rimée, un jeu, avachissement et gloire d'innombrables générations idiotes : Racine est le pur, le fort, le grand. - On eût soufflé sur ses rimes, brouillé ses hémistiches, que le Divin Sot serait aujoud'hui aussi ignoré que le premier auteur d'Origines. - Après Racine, le jeu moisit. Il a duré deux mille ans !

Ni plaisanterie, ni paradoxe. La raison m'inspire plus de certitudes sur le sujet que n'aurait jamais eu de colères un jeune-France. Du reste, libre aux nouveaux ! d'exécrer les ancêtres : on est chez soi et l'on a le temps.

On n'a jamais bien jugé le romantisme; qui l'aurait jugé ? Les critiques ! ! Les romantiques, qui prouvent si bien que la chanson est si peu souvent l'oeuvre, c'est-à-dire la pensée chantée et comprise du chanteur ?

Car Je est un autre. Si le cuivre s'éveille clairon, il n'y a rien de sa faute. Cela m'est évident: j'assiste à l'éclosion de ma pensée : je la regarde, je l'écoute : je lance un coup d'archet : la symphonie fait son remuement dans les profondeurs, ou vient d'un bond sur la scène.

Si les vieux imbéciles n'avaient pas trouvé du Moi que la signification fausse, nous n'aurions pas à balayer ces millions de squelettes qui, depuis un temps infini, ! ont accumulé les produits de leur intelligence borgnesse, en s'en clamant les auteurs !

En Grèce, ai-je dit, vers et lyres rythment l'Action. Après, musique et rimes sont jeux, délassements. L'étude de ce passé charme les curieux : plusieurs s'éjouissent à renouveler ces antiquités : - c'est pour eux. L'intelligence universelle a toujours jeté ses idées, naturellement ; les hommes ramassaient une partie de ces fruits du cerveau : on agissait par, on en écrivait des livres : telle allait la marche, I'homme ne se travaillant pas, n'étant pas encore éveillé, ou pas encore dans la plénitude du grand songe. Des fonctionnaires, des écrivains : auteur, créateur, poète, cet homme n'a jamais existé !

La première étude de l'homme qui veut être poète est sa propre connaissance, entière ; il cherche son âme, il l'inspecte, Il la tente, I'apprend. Dès qu'il la sait, il doit la cultiver ; cela semble simple : en tout cerveau s'accomplit un développement naturel ; tant d'égoistes se proclament auteurs ; il en est bien d'autres qui s'attribuent leur progrès intellectuel ! - Mais il s'agit de faire l'âme monstrueuse : à l'instar des comprachicos, quoi ! Imaginez un homme s'implantant et se cultivant des verrues sur le visage.

Je dis qu'il faut être voyant, se faire voyant.

Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. Toutes les formes d'amour, de souffrance, de folie ; il cherche lui-même, il épuise en lui tous les poisons, pour n'en garder que les quintessences. Ineffable torture où il a besoin de toute la foi, de toute la force surhumaine, où il devient entre tous le grand malade, le grand criminel, le grand maudit, - et le suprême Savant ! - Car il arrive à l'inconnu ! Puisqu'il a cultivé son âme, déjà riche, plus qu'aucun ! Il arrive à l'inconnu, et quand, affolé, il finirait par perdre l'intelligence de ses visions, il les a vues ! Qu'il crève dans son bondissement par les choses inouïes et innombrables : viendront d'autres horribles travailleurs ; ils commenceront par les horizons où l'autre s'est affaissé !

- la suite à six minutes -

Ici j'intercale un second psaume, hors du texte : veuillez tendre une oreille complaisante, et tout le monde sera charmé. - J'ai l'archet en main, je commence; ["Mes Petites Amoureuses"]

Voilà. Et remarquez bien que, si je ne craignais de vous faire débourser plus de 60 c. de port, - moi pauvre effaré qui, depuis sept mois, n'ai pas tenu un seul rond de bronze ! - je vous livrerais encore mes Amants de Paris, cent hexamètres, Monsieur, et ma Mort de Paris, deux cents hexamètres ! - Je reprends :

Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu.

Il est chargé de l'humanité, des animaux même ; il devra faire sentir, palper, écouter ses inventions ; si ce qu'il rapporte de là-bas a forme, il donne forme si c'est informe, il donne de l'informe. Trouver une langue ; - Du reste, toute parole étant idée, le temps d'un langage universel viendra ! Il faut être académicien, - plus mort qu'un fossile, - pour parfaire un dictionnaire, de quelque langue que ce soit. Des faibles se mettraient à penser sur la première lettre de l'alphabet, qui pourraient vite ruer dans la folie ! -

Cette langue sera de l'âme pour l'âme, résumant tout, parfums, sons, couleurs, de la pensée accrochant la pensée et tirant. Le poète définirait la quantité d'inconnu s"éveillant en son temps dans l'âme universelle : il donnerait plus - que la formule de sa pensée, que la notation de sa marche au Progrès ! Enormité devenant norme, absorbée par tous, il serait vraiment un multiplicateur de progrès !

Cet avenir sera matérialiste, vous le voyez ; - Toujours pleins du Nombre et de l'Harmonie ces poèmes seront fait pour rester. - Au fond, ce serait encore un peu la Poésie grecque. L'art éternel aurait ses fonctions ; comme les poètes sont des citoyens. La Poésie ne rythmera plus l'action : elle sera en avant.

Ces poètes seront ! Quand sera brisé l'infini servage de la femme, quand elle vivra pour elle et par elle, l'homme, jusqu'ici abominable, - lui ayant donné son renvoi, elle sera poète, elle aussi! La femme trouvera de l'inconnu ! Ses mondes d'idées différeront-ils des nôtres ? - Elle trouvera des choses étranges, insondables, repoussantes, délicieuses ; nous les prendrons, nous les comprendrons.
En attendant, demandons aux poètes du nouveau, - idées et formes. Tous les habiles croiraient bientôt avoir satisfait à cette demande : - ce n'est pas cela !

Les premiers romantiques ont été voyants sans trop bien s'en rendre compte : la culture de leurs âmes s'est commencée aux accidents : locomotives abandonnées, mais brûlantes, que prennent quelque temps les rails. - Lamartine est quelquefois voyant, mais étranglé par la forme vieille. - Hugo, trop cabochard, a bien du Vu dans les derniers volumes : Les Misérables sont un vrai poème. J'ai Les Châtiments sous main ; Stella donne à peu près la mesure de la vue de Hugo. Trop de Belmontet et de Lamennais, de Jehovahs et de colonnes, vieilles énormités crevées.

Musset est quatorze fois exécrable pour nous, générations douloureuses et prises de visions, - que sa paresse d'ange a insultées ! O ! les contes et les proverbes fadasses ! O les Nuits ! O Rolla ! ô Namouna ! ô la Coupe ! tout est français, c'est-à-dire haïssable au suprême degré ; français, pas parisien ! Encore une œuvre de cet odieux génie qui a inspiré Rabelais, Voltaire, Jean La Fontaine, commenté par M. Taine ! Printanier, l'esprit de Musset ! Charmant, son amour ! En voilà, de la peinture à l'émail, de la poésie solide ! On savourera longtemps la poésie française, mais en France. Tout garçon épicier est en mesure de débobiner une apostrophe Rollaque ; tout séminariste en porte les cinq cents rimes dans le secret d'un carnet. A quinze ans, ces élans de passion mettent les jeunes en rut ; à seize ans, ils se contentent déjà de les réciter avec cœur ; à dix-huit ans, à dix-sept même, tout collégien qui a le moyen fait le Rolla, écrit un Rolla ! Quelques-uns en meurent peut-être encore. Musset n'a rien su faire. Il y avait des visions derrière la gaze des rideaux : il a fermé les yeux. Français, panadif, traîné de l'estaminet au pupitre du collège, le beau mort est mort, et, désormais, ne nous donnons même plus la peine de le réveiller par nos abominations !

Les seconds romantiques sont très voyants : Théophile Gauthier, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville. Mais inspecter l'invisible et entendre l'inouï étant autre chose que reprendre l'esprit des choses mortes, Baudelaire est le premier voyant, roi des poètes, un vrai Dieu. Encore a-t-il vécu dans un milieu trop artiste ; et la forme si vantée en lui est mesquine. Les inventions d'inconnu réclament des formes nouvelles.

Rompus aux formes vieilles : parmi les innocents, A. Renaud, - a fait son Rolla, - L. Grandet, - a fait son Rolla ; - les gaulois et les Musset, G. Lafenestre, Coran, C. L. Popelin, Soulary, L. Salles. Les écoliers, Marc, Aicard, Theuriet ; les morts et les imbéciles, Autran, Barbier, L. Pichat, Lemoyne, les Deschamps, les Des Essarts ; les journalistes, L. Cladel, Robert Luzarches, X. de Ricard ; les fantaisistes, C. Mendès ; les bohèmes ; les femmes ; les talents, Léon Dierx et Sully-Prudhomme, Coppée; -la nouvelle école, dite parnassienne, a deux voyants, Albert Mérat et Paul Verlaine, un vrai poète. - Voilà. - Ainsi je travaille à me rendre voyant. -

Et finissons par un chant pieux. ["Accroupissements']

 Vous seriez exécrable de ne pas répondre : vite car dans huit jours je serai à Paris, peut-être.

Au revoir.

A. Rimbaud.

AG: So that's actually pretty terrific.

Student: (A) manifesto?

AG: Well, it's like a manifesto. It's like any of the great manifestos of that time, but then compare it then to the "Slap in the Face of Public Taste", the elegant, insistent pride in…spunk!

Student: Is there a response to that letter?

AG: It hasn't been preserved that I know of, though, if you're interested in Rimbaud, you can get an excellent biography, history, novel-like biography of him by Enid Starkiecalled Arthur Rimbaud - a biography



 - and, after he abandoned poetry at the age of nineteen, and abandoned his old lover, (Paul) Verlaine, and ran off with various other poets (Germaine Nouveau among them), taking a ship to Java and then coming back, walking across the Alps in the winter-time to join a circus in Bavaria, and then returninig home to Charleville, he finally took off for Africa and became a gun-runner to Prince Menelikin Abyssinia, and lived to the age of.. what? thirty-eight?

Student: Forty-three  [Editorial note - actually, thirty-seven]

AG: Forty-three, dying of carcinoma or cancer of the knee in a hospital in Marseilles, babbling visionary phrases which his sister Isabel, come down from Charlesville to take care of him, failed to notate. So there's a second book by (Enid) Starkie, Rimbaud in Abyssinia. [Editorial note - Starkie's 1937 book actually pre-dates her 1947 biography - for Rimbaud in Abyssinia see also Alain Borer - Rimbaud in Abyssinia (1991) and Charles Nicholl - Somebody Else - Rimbaud in Africa 1880-1891]. And there are collections of his letters from Abyssinia and from Marseilles, from the hospital, which are as poignant as his prose-poems. And his great prose-poem is (of course) A Season in Hell. And his flashes of visionary perception that he spoke of are to be found in Illuminations. We have some of those in our anthology. 

(Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately thirty-one-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-seven minutes in)   

Expansive Poetics - 66 (Dada Manifestos)

May 14, 2014, 3:00 am

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AG: I just referred back to  (Arthur) Rimbaud to check out the tone of the manifesto, of rejecting the old. And here is a Dada manifesto(I don't know what year that would be? Does anybody know?  [Editorial note - it's 1918] -  It might have been probably written during World War I, a little bit later than the Futurist manifestos of Italy and Russia.

These were composed by Tristan Tzarawho was a Roumanian, who went to Paris and then wound up in Zurich during World War I with Hans Arp, Hugo Ball (Arp, the sculptor, Hugo Ball also a poet, a sound poet),Francis Picabia, a friend of (Pablo) Picasso and a painter and poet, on Mirror Street, or Spiegelgasse Street, in Zurich, two blocks down from where (Vladimir) Lenin was living, writing The State and Revolution. Four blocks from the cafe where (James) Joyce was writing Ulysses, and in the same town where a couple of years before, (Albert) Einstein had either taught, or taught his theory of relativity. (In that period of, say, 1910 to 1920, you'll find Einstein changing the theory of the material universe with the theory of relativity, Joyce terminating the old history of the Western novel with Ulysses and getting into the cyclical framework - the Einstein-ian cyclical framework, of Finnegans Wake, the Dadaists proclaiming the end of civilization and the beginning of a new visionary real, and Lenin preparing manifestos and living in a room on Mirror Street (Spiegelgasse), from which he left, financed by a rich German, in the sealed train to go to Russia and take over the Revolution.
,

Student: Tom Stoppard has a very funny play..
AG: Yes
Student: ..about that period.
AG: Yeah. I haven't read that. What is it called?
Student: I saw it.. it's calledTravesties. I just saw it at C.U. (Colorado University) Theatre last.. 
AG: Yeah
Student: …(no) this spring. Very funny
AG: Travesties?
Student: Yeah
AG: Yeah, I've heard about that
Student: (Zurich)
AG: Does it put them all together?
Student: Yeah
AG: All the characters?
Student; Lenin and Tristan (Tzara) and Joyce 
AG: Lenin, Tzara and Joyce
Student: Yeah

AG: Einstein was around also at the same time. A lot of other people were involved there because  Zurich was neutral in the war. Actually, what happened was that a lot of the French, Roumanian, Germans (Hugo Ball, German, Richard Huelsenbeck, also - who's now still alive [1981] as a psychiatrist on Central Park West in New York), all gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire to put on little poetry readings and shows (just like at the Stray Dog Cafe, 1912) - so, five years later, in Zurich, another group of mad poets got together. And Tzara wrote manifestos. Dada prose. 

"Manifesto by Monsieur Antipyrine"."Antipyrine", that's an anti-flame killer, fire-killer. Is that right? - "pyrine"? - flame?

Student: Retardant. Flame-retardant, yes. So, anti-war manifesto, in a sense. Their conception, as it's generally taken to be, was that the entire humanity of Europe had gone mad and was involved in this monstrous war that involved England, France, America, Russia, the Italians, Austria, the Austro-Hungarian Empire - the entire civilized Western world had gone nuts (which was quite true, and which was obvious to all the great poets of the time, including Ezra Pound, who wrote specifically about it - angrily about it). These were, in a sense, draft-dodgers (like the guys who (during the Vietnam War) went off to Canada). People gathered in neutral Switzerland from all over Europe to survey… to do something active, to live, to have an artistic life outside of the war, surveying it in safety in Zurich, which was the financial center. They took over a little cabaret and they had little funny manifestos, and, in that situation, the idea of"cut-up" was born, the idea of taking texts and taking your verses and texts and cutting them up with a razor (actually, taking a newspaper, cutting it up with a razor), putting it into a hat and picking out words and then composing a poem out of the words brought by chance out of the hat (which is actually old Oriental wisdom, such as the I Ching- that is, the chance signals, given anywhere in the universe, or the chance choices, or the chances, emerging anywhere in the universe, (are one) representative of the condition of the universe at that time. It's part of the universe at that time, so in that sense there is no accident in chance. Chance is the surest and most direct way to take a core sample of the universe as it stands). Does that make sense?

Student: Um-hmm

AG: In other words, random chance will give you a pattern of the universe, perhaps more accurately than any pattern imposed by simplifying the universe to conceptions available to the human mind and to formulas available to language and abstraction, such as (the) Einstein-ian relative universe, or (a William) Blake-an slogan, like"The Eye altering alters all", or Hegelian dialectic, or Communist Manifesto, or E=MC2, or Declaration of Independence, or Immanuel Kant's generalizations. If you just pluck at random the words out of a hat, you'll probably come to a formula to express through which the universe expresses (itself), or comes through, or you come to an expression of the universe. The universe will be expressing itself that way. 



"DADA is our intensity which erects inconsequential bayonets to the Sumatral head of a German baby. Dada is without slippers or parallel, which is against and for unity and decidedly against the future. We know wisely that our brains will become downy cushions, that our anti-dogmaicism is as exclusivist as the functionary, and that we are not free and go crying, "Liberty". Severe necessity without discipline or morality and we spit on humanity." - ["A Slap on the Face of Public Taste", except this is more humorous] - "DADA remains within the frame of European weaknesses. It is all the same "e la merde" (of the shit) but it is the shits, but we wish from now to dedicate in various colors" - [it's not "defecate" but "delicate" in various colors] - "By way of adorning the zoological garden of art and all the flags of the consulates. We are circus masters and go on whistling among the winds of fairs, among the convents, prostitutions, theaters, realities, sentiments, restaurants. Ho Hi Ho Ho bang bang."

"We declare that the auto is feeling that has coddled us sufficiently in the sluggishness of its abstractions and the transatlantics and the noises and the ideas. However, we exteriorize the facility, we seek the central essence and we are happy at being able to conceal i. We do not care to count the windows of the marvelous elite for DADA does not exist for anyone and we would like for everybody to understand that. For it is the balcony of Dada, I assure you.  For where one can hear the military march to come down, cutting the air like a seraph in a popular bath. Pro pithia - to piss - and understand the parabola.

DADA is not madness - nor wisdom - nor irony look at me pretty bourgeois.  Art was a jeu noisette -  "jeu noisette"?  - Qu'est que c'est "noisette"?"

Student: Nuts  ("nut-case")

AG: Art was a nutty game? Art was a nutty plaything?  [ Allen continues] - "Art was a jeu noisette, the children assembled the words which have a set of chimes on the end" - (Rhymes, of course) - "when they wept and wailed the strophe, and they put on it the doll's boots and the strophe became to die a little and the queen became whalebone(baleine) and the children ran until they were out of breath - ( à perdre haleine) - Then came the great ambassadors of feeling who cried historically in chorus.

Psychology Psychology hihi Science Science Science vive la France we are not naive we are successive we are exclusive we are not simple and we are quite well able to discuss intelligence. But we, DADA, we are not of their persuasion, for art is not serious, I assure you.  And if we are to show the crimeto utter learnedly ventilator, it is for your pleasure, kind auditors, I love you so much and I assure you and I adore you.

If I cry: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge.Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom, I have given an exact registering of progress, law, morality, and all other fine qualities which different and highly intelligent individuals have discussed in so many books, only to say at the end that each one has danced according to his personal boom boom.

DADA DISGUST

Every product of disgust susceptible of becoming a negation of the family is dada; fistic protest with one's whole being in destructive action: DADA; familiarity with all the means rejected up to the present by the modest sex of convenient compromise and politeness: DADA, abolition of  logic, dance of creation's impotence: DADA; all the hierarchic and social equations inaugurated for the sake of values by our valets: DADA, each object, all the objects, the feelings and the obscurities, the apparitions, and the precise shock of parallel lines are means for the combat: DADA; abolition of the memory: DADA; abolition of the future; DADA; absolute undebateable belief in every god immediate product of the spontaneity: DADA; elegant and unprejudiced leap from one harmony to the other sphere, trajectory of a word hurled like a discus, sonorous shout, to respect all the individualities and their madness of the moment, serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, decided, enthusiastic, to peel one's church of every cumbersome and useless accessory, to spit out like a luminous cascade the disobliging or amorous thought, or to coddle it with the lively satisfaction that it's all one, with the same intensity in the bush, pure of insects for the blood well-born and gilded with the bodies of archangels, with its soul, freedom DADA DADA DADA; howling of shriveled colors, interlacing of contrarieties and of all the contradictions, grotesques, inconsequentials. Life. "

Then, from a later manuscript given to the editor of a book calledThe European Caravan, which is a collection of Futurist and Dadaist texts in (19)31, by Tzara: 
"Take a good look at me!/ I am absurd, I play the fool, I am a mystifier./ Take a good look at me/I'm ugly, my face is expressionless, I am small/I'm like you all!"

"But ask yourself, before you look at me, if the iris through which you send me those watery sentimental darts is not flies' dung. If your belly's eyes are not sections of rumors whose glances sometime will emerge from some part or other of your body under the form of a gonorrheal flux.
You see with your navel, why do you deprive yourself of the ridiculous spectacle which we offer you. And lower down, woman's organ with teeth which swallow everything. The poetry of eternity, love, pure love, naturally, rare steaks and oil paintings, all those who look and who comprehend readily take a stand between poetry and love, between the steak and the painting. They should be digested. They shall be digested. 
For I, chameleon change infiltration to convenient attitudes, multi-colored opinions for every occasion, dimension, and price. I do the contrary of what I propose for others.  

Further, "Dada Manifesto on Weak Love and Bitter Love" ("Dada manifeste sur l'amour fable et l'amour amer")
"Anti-Dadaism is a disease: self kleptomania, the normal state of man is DADA"
 - But the real dadas are against DADA.




HOW TO COMPOSE A DADAIST POEM 

Take a newspaper.
Take shears.
Select in the newspaper an article of the length which it is your intention that your poem should be.
Clip the article.

[I presume this would be an article on the German advance on the French or the Italian's advance at Caporetto, "America Declares War", on the sinking of the Titanic, or the Lusitania] - [Allen continues..]
Clip the article
Then cut out carefully each of the words which compose this article and put them in a bag.
Shake gently.
Then lay each clipping down in the order in which it comes out of the bag.
Copy coscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And there you are, an entirely original and charmingly sensitive writer, not yet appreciated by the mob  

Here's where you all blow up, and you are all going to blow up, I swear. The great mystery is a secret but it is known by certain persons. They will never tell you what dada is. To amuse you once more I will tell you something like:

dada is dictatorship of the mind, or
dada is dictatorship of language
or else
dada is the death of the mind
which will please many of my friends. Friends.

DADA is a virgin microbe
DADA is against the high cost of living
DADA
corporation for the exploitation of ideas
DADA has 391 different hues and poses according to the sex of the chairman
It is transformed - affirmed - states the contrary at the sme time - unimportant - shouts - goes fishing.
Dada is the chameleon of rapid and interested change.
Dada is agains tthe future. Dada is dead. Dead is absurd. Long live Dada. Dada is not a literary school, how! 

DADA is not a doctrine to put into practice: Dada - it is to lie: something that goes (qui marche bien) Dada runs into debt and does not lives on its wench. The good God created a universal language, that is why nobody takes it seriously. A language is a Utopia. God can afford not to be successful. Dada also."

Those are selections from Dada manifestos, which you'll find in The European Caravan, which I'll put in the library, which has an extended...  And, I guess, there are several other books which contain some of the basic Dadaist manifestos…

(Audio for the above can be found here, starting at approximately forty-seven minutes in and concluding at the end of the tape)

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Extended Poetics - 67 - (More Khlebnikov - 1 - Incantation By Laughter)

May 15, 2014, 3:30 am

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[Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922),  in 1908, aged 23]

AG: Now I would like to go back to 1908, a few years before that, to (Velimir) Khlebnikov, who was, for Russian Futurism, the great master of all these mad forms and breakthroughs. We had a little bit of Khlebnikov before, since, actually, you might say, after (Arthur) Rimbaud, he may be the first modern poet. I don't know who influenced who  - there were the Italian Futurists with (Filippo) Marinetti and there were (the) Russian Futurists, Khlebnikov and (Vladimir) Mayakovsky - and the Russians began their outrageous poetry (in) 1905, (19)o7, (19)08, (19)09, 1910. The Italian Futurists had similar experiments around the same time.
Is Richard Poehere?

Student: Yes, he is

AG: Ah.. Richard..  would it be possible to do… do we have the…"Incantation by Laughter" still? Mr Poe? Is that around? What book was it in? The Russian? - Ah, it was in the other one.. Okay. Maybe we can get that next time.  There are various translations of it here, but the earliest and most famous war-horse piece of that kind is - 1908 - "Incantation by Laughter", by Velimir Khlebnikov, 1885-1922:
"O laugh it out, you laughsters!/O laugh it up, you laughsters/So they laugh with laughters, so they laugherize delaughly,/O laugh it up belaughably!/O the laughingstock of laughed-upon -- the laugh of Belaughed laughsters /O laugh it out roundlaughingly, the laugh of the laughed-at Laughians!/Laugherino, laugherino,/Laughify laughicate, laugholets, laugholets,/Laughikins, laughikins,/O laugh it out, you laughsters/O laugh it up, you laughsters!" - 
or, "O guff it out you guffsters/O guff it up, you guffsters" - or, "O gig it out, you gigglers!",  "O chuck it out, you chucklers", "O chort it out, you chortlers" - or.. various translations. 

Заклятие смехом

О, рассмейтесь, смехачи!
О, засмейтесь, смехачи!
Что смеются смехами, что смеянствуют смеяльно,
О, засмейтесь усмеяльно!
О, рассмешищ надсмеяльных — смех усмейных смехачей!
О, иссмейся рассмеяльно, смех надсмейных смеячей!
Смейево, смейево!
Усмей, осмей, смешики, смешики!
Смеюнчики, смеюнчики.
О, рассмейтесь, смехачи!
О, засмейтесь, смехачи!

[Velimir Khlebnikov's "Incantation by Laughter" (Заклятие смехом) read in both the original Russian (by Ian Probstein) and in his own English translation (by Charles Bernstein)]

And later, let's see, what else of that era, of that time?. He made experiments in sound poetry - that was his speciality. This is perfect for Russia:
"We incant and recant./There incanting, here recanting,/ Now recanter, now in cantor,/Here recants, there incantist./ From recantate peers incantate./They're recantards, there incantards./And infantries! And recantries!/And recanters! And incantlers!/And incantments and recantments./Keep recanting and incanting." - (Changing your mind) - "We invoke and revoke/There invoking, here revoking/ Now revoker, now invoker,/Here revokeman, there invokeman./From relocate peers invocate./There're revocards, there're invocards./And invocries! And revocries!/And revoclers! And invoclers!/And invokements and revokements./Keep revoking and invoking."
 - Or - "We appeal and repeal..", etc. - Or "We attract and retract..", "We allure and conjure.." - One or the other.
Earlier is
Bo-be-o-bee sang the mouth/Ve-e-o-mee sang the orbs/Pee-e-e-o sang the brows/
Lee-e-e-ey sang the aspect/Gzee-gzee-gze-o sang the chain./Thus on a canvas of the would-be connections/In another dimension there lived the Face.

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at the start and through to approximately four-and-three-quarter minutes in - and also here] 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 176

May 16, 2014, 4:00 am

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[Allen Ginsberg at the Women's House of Detention, New York, March 1964 - Photograph by Benedict J Fernandez] 

Benedict J Fernandez, the photographer who snapped this iconic shot, is currently being celebrated in the Bronx (in "The 60's - Decade of Change") at the Bronx Documentary Center, till July 20.  An engaging interview with him (by Andy Prisbylla) appearshere. 
Hereare some selected photographs ("Incredible Images of 1960's Protests") on Slate. Further images may be found here.
Here is the New York Times profile of his extraordinary photographic career.

We finally got around to launching  our tumblr!  Add that to Facebook and Twitter as one more way to enjoy all the posts you find here.  

    

Peter Orlovsky's (posthumous)  book, A Life In Words, is coming out soon -  in just a couple of weeks. We, literally, can't wait. 
Here, as a "teaser", like they say - Patti Smith's back-jacket encomium: 

"Peter Orlovsky", she writes, "was the secret heart of the Beats. He wrote and roamed among them. This book [A Life In Words] contains unknown fragments of their world, the words of their orphaned angel." 

More on A Life In Words in a little while.



So the Zeitgeist - we've been holding out on this, but Mad Men (American) tv's mega-hit show took a bizarre plot-twist this week - a psychotic break-down by Ben Feldman's character "Michael Ginsberg" (sic), the fast-talking, neurotic, Jewish, copywriter, who becomes convinced that "Monolith", the enormous IBM office computer in the advertising agency, is somehow transmitting radioactive waves designed to turn everybody queer! He (Ginsberg)  presents "Peggy Olson" (played by Elizabeth Moss) with his severed nipple! (shades of Vincent Van Gogh?), before being carted away. 


and this has what to do with Allen? - or Carl Solomon?

On the more serious (i.e real world) side of mental health there's Project Ginsberg 

See you next week.

New Stanzas for Amazing Grace

May 17, 2014, 3:00 am

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"I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place/ Where I was lost alone/ Folk looked right through me into space/And passed with eyes of stone.." Allen Ginsberg's "New Stanzas for Amazing Grace", an up-dated revisioning of an old song, was composed (in April 1994) at the request of Ed Sanders for his innovative project,  "The New Amazing Grace" (new lyrics, old melody), and was performed, in November of that year, as part of an all-star gathering at the Poetry Project (St Mark's Church) in New York.

Here's Paul Simon, giving his tasteful version (of Allen's poem): 



Here's South African vocal ensemble Ladysmith Black Mambazo, sometime collaborators with Simon, doing an a cappellaversion (of the original)  live 



Here's Pete Seeger (the late Pete Seeger) leading the audience in a spirited version of the song 



(and Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, a good three decades earlier) 

Here's Johnny Cash



Here's Aretha Franklin



Here's Mahalia Jackson - 




The history and the story behind the original song is all pretty fascinating. Watch a short documentary about it here - or, for a shorter version, see here.

More Amazing Grace

May 18, 2014, 3:00 am

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Following on from yesterday, we thought, why not, why not make it an Amazing Grace weekend -  "Compare and Contrast", like they say. Here's a few more renditions of Amazing Grace 

Here's the pure unadulterated voice ofJudy Collins



Here's another pure voice, Karen Matheson (singing it in Scottish Gaelic)



and another pure voice Aaron Neville



Here's Willie Nelson.  Here's George Jones.  Here's Al Green.

Here's Jerry Garcia. Here's Elvis Presley 

Here's Ray Charles (with a full-piece orchestra)

Here's Rod Stewart 

Here's the Dropkick Murphy's memorable punk version

Expansive Poetics - 68 (More Khlebnikov - 2)

May 19, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922)]

AG: So I'll read a few more (of Velimir Khlebnikov) that are of later date

Thunderstorm in the Month Au   [('Groza v mesyatse Au')] 

Pupu-popo!  That's the thunder.
Gam gra gra rap rap.
Pee pee-pee-zee, that's him.
Bai gzo-gzee-zee. Flash of lightning.
Vei gzo gzee-va - That's you.
Goga, gago--Majestic rolling.
Gago, goga!
Zzh. Zzh.
Mn! Mn! Nm!
Meh-mo-mo-muna. All turns blue.
Moa, moa,
Me-ah svu.
Vei vai eh-vu!  That's a whirlwind.
Vzee-zo-tsern. Vey-tser-tsee.
Vra-vra, vra-vra!
Vrap, varp, vrap!
Howl howlota. Rolling rumbles.
Howlota. Gat Gakree.
Vuva veh-vo. Ring circles.
Tsee-ree-tsee!                                                                                                                                

That's 1919-1921.     Earlier, 1913:

 O the racing cloud's Dostoevskitude!

 O the melting noon's Pushkinations!

 The night is seen like Tyutchev

 Pouring immensity into transmensity.

[О, достоевскиймо бегущей тучи!/ О, пушкиноты млеющего полдня!/ Ночь смотрится, как Тютчев,/Безмерное замирным полня].

It's like he's high on grass, or something.. Tyutchev - earlier playwright, poet? That's 1913. "Immensity into transmensity". ["Безмерное замирным полня"]

(Next) his comment on the Russian Revolution, (actually, probably written 1921) - ["I and Russia" ["Я И РОССИЯ"]:

Russia gave freedom to thousands upon thousands.
A fine deed! Long will it be remembered.
But I took off my shirt,
And each hair's glinting skyscraper,
Each chink
In the city of my body,
Hung out carpets and red calico fabrics.
Citizens male and female
Of the state of Me
Crowded at the sills of the thousandsilled curls.
Olgas and Igors
On no one's orders,
Glad of the sun, looked through my skin.
Fallen is the dungeon shirt!
But I simply took of my shirt:
Gave sun to the peoples of Me!
Bare-chested I stood by the sea.
Thus I granted freedom to the peoples,
Suntan to the crowds.

[Россия тысячам тысяч свободу дала./Милое дело! Долго будут помнить про это./А я снял рубаху,/И каждый зеркальный небоскреб моего волоса,/Каждая скважина/Города тела/Вывесила ковры и кумачовые ткани./Гражданки и граждане/Меня — государства/Тысячеоконных кудрей толпились у окон./Ольги и Игори,/Не по заказу/Радуясь солнцу, смотрели сквозь кожу./Пала темница рубашки!/А я просто снял рубашку —/ Дал солнце народам Меня!/Голый стоял около моря./Так я дарил народам свободу,/Толпам загара.]

It was published in 1923. 

Student:  That's great.

AG:  Same time, 1917-1922, another little comment, called "Refusal." (отказ):  
I find it much nicer
To look at the stars
Than to sign a death sentence.
I find it much nicer
To hear flowers' voices
Whispering "it is he!"
When I pass in the garden
Than to see firearms
Slaying those who want
To slay me.
That is why I never
No, never,
Will be a ruler!

[Мне гораздо приятнее/Смотреть на звезды,/Чем подписывать/Смертный приговор./Мне гораздо приятнее/Слушать голоса цветов,/Шепчущих: «Это он!» —/Склоняя головку,/Когда я прохожу по саду,/Чем видеть темные ружья/Стражи, убивающей/Тех, кто хочет/Меня убить./Вот почему я никогда,/Нет, никогда не буду Правителем!]

Student: All rulers don't have (to sign death sentences).

AG: Well, no, they don't, but in this case, he found.. what he was saying was, that most of the people who held the Revolution wound up killing (or) beginning to kill. So he didn't think it was possible to take rulership for an actual.. well, it's very simple - "I find it much nicer/ to look at the stars/ Than to sign a death sentence."..because all the rulers claimed it was necessary to sign death sentences. They used to say that it was absolutely necessary. That was 1917-1922 (and (19)22 was probabily the year that (Nikolai) Gumilev - "The Lost Tram Car" - was shot  [editorial note - actually, it was in 1921]

Student: Could that possibly be the incident he's describing there?

AG: No, there were lots of people shot

Student: Yeah

AG: I mean there were a lot then. Actually, then, his check-out on power itself, on the tiger  power - or , say, the political power - 1923 this was published (I don't know when it was written -
 "I saw a tiger by the forest,/And he smiled and he blew in a reed stalk/His animal muscles were moving like ripples/And his gazes sparkled with mockery./With an elegant tilt of the head,/An elegant maiden was talking to him./"O lions and tigers! she said./This art you lack - you can't sing"."
I guess that would be his comment on the leaders of the Revolution at that point.  

[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting approximately five minutes in and concluding at approximatetly ten minutes in]