Saturday July 28 - Gay Pride

June 28, 2014, 3:00 am

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Gay Pride weekend this weekend. We begin by drawing your attention to this important posting. 

We celebrate today with Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg's 1984 documentary,Before Stonewall.  (Allen and poetAudre Lorde are among those featured). 

Also hats-off to Kate Davis and David Hellbroner's 2010 doc, Stonewall Uprising (based on David Carter's exhaustive research).

45 years on from Stonewall - the pivotal moment in America for the establishmen of gay civil rights.  


Here's a profile of Allen on Dutch tv  ( from OUTtv):



Here's the gay-themed "Jimmy Berman" (Gay Lib Rag)"



Here's the cover of the wide-ranging Gay Sunshine interview with Allen Young, (originally published, in 1974, by Grey Fox Press) in the 1996 Czech Republic edition


Here's the American edition (with a suitably exuberant inscription!)


  
Here's the text for our Spanish readers (translated into Spanish). The original text in English (too long to include here) is included and available in David Carter's edition of Spontaneous Mind - Selected Interviews 1958-1966  (yes, the same David Carter!) - David's extraordinary (and definitive) work about Stonewall, Stonewall - The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution is essential reading. 

Here's Allen, in 1994, on right-wing gay yearning



Saluting Gay Pride!

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Interview in Galway 1995 - Getting to Ginsberg

June 29, 2014, 4:00 pm

≫ Next: Expansive Poetics - 75 (Nikolay Klyuev)

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Allen Ginsberg in Ireland -  (Allen filmed in Galway, when he was over for the Cúirt Literary Festival, in 1995).  Local "character", Mark Kennedy(of Streetcorner Productions) recently put up on You Tube a curious half-hour documentary (from 2007), perhaps more revealing of him than it is about Allen, but we thought, nonetheless, we would share. 
"Getting To Ginsberg" is the title, focusing, as it does on the frisson - a tired and harrassed Allen is, at one point, quite explicitly, telling Kennedy "You're being irritating".."You taking advantage of me to talk about yourself on..camera, and then talk about me in stereotypes". Kennedy's, likewise explicitly-announced, hero-worship  ("he was, to me, the embodiment of everything that was brave and free of careerism and self-interest. He took risks that very few men would take", he says, regarding Allen's participation in 'Sixties activism - he was "the King of the Hippies") is seriously countered by a bruised ego, spilling into vituperativeness and anger ( "how dare he correct me in that manner and accuse me of trying to fuck with his head")

The first half  (a full eleven-and-a-half minutes), prior to the Ginsberg-Kennedy encounter, consists of unedited footage of Allen at a book-signing, spotlighting Ginsberg's on-the-road patience (he even compliments one of those seeking an autograph for his patience, at one point) though the fractious tone is immediately set - "I can't agree with you because you're not loud enough and you're not enunciating either"..""..not unless you speak loud enough for me to hear, come on!"
One highlight (beginning approximately six minutes in), self-confessed "Bob Dylan fanatic", George Moynahan
GM: Did you see the film Renaldo And Clara?
AG: Yeah
GM: It's been withdrawn, I believe
AG: It was so badly received in America that Dylan withdrew it temporarily, until he..until it would be..
GM: ..appreciated
AG: .. a time..
GM: Personally, it's one of my inspiring documentaries
AG: I thought it was pretty good
GM: Yeah, me too.
AG: I like it because I have a nice big role in it.
GM: You did, yeah. Your (part was) particularly memorable.
AG: The fourth-largest, I think. And he had a very nice intention, trying to present me to his audience..
GM: Yeah
AG: ..very consciously.
GM: Yeah he did..

Another notable encounter occurs (at approximately ten minutes in) when Allen is generously presented with a present of drug paraphernalia ("Well, you know, I don't smoke very much".."Who made all these?" (it was a set of pipes, hand-crafted, hand-made) - Noticing drug residue on one of the pipes, Allen politely refuses - "You have no idea, they've tried to get me any number of times" - "I thought they'd sort of leave you alone" - "No way. I'm much too paranoid to carry these things around"... "actually, I get strip-searched.." - "Still?" - "Not so often, but there's the old (records)… from 1965 on..'

Starting approximately twelve-and-a-half minutes in, Kennedy accompanies Ginsberg to the Galway Atlantic (school).  

MK: I'll tell you a little story. This building next to here, which is now redolent of the Galway new big wave of destruction..
AG: Which building?
MK: This building..here. The curbstone is still left, as you can see, and the path is rather low, wouldn't you think? It used to be an asylum for gentle folk..
AG: Uh-huh
MK: ..when I was a child, I lived down here, and, as children, we used to come and stand outside to hear the screams and the travail of people in there. And now it's left an indelible impression on me, you know, as a boy, I sort of became a voyeur, emotionally, in some way. How are you enjoying Galway?
AG: No, but what was the..  what happened to the building?
MK: Well, it became..  it fell into disuse because genteel people disappeared from Galway, as far as I know
AG: Well "genteel", "mad" people. What happens to all the people now? Where do they go?  What sort of problem  do they have now?
MK: Oh well…Ballinasloe, which is on a par about with Bellevue Hospital in New York
AG: Bellevue is not so bad now 
MK: Well I'm happy to hear that, Allen. Were you ever in there?
AG: Oh yes, many times..
MK: Were you? Were you really?
AG: ..with my mother, visiting, other people, visiting, Peter Orlovsky, visiting, 
MK: How marvelous!
AG: ...oh god, any number of people.
MK: But you were in there as a visitor, I hope?
AG: Yes. I spent eight months as an in-patient in another hospital, much earlier, 1948, yes..
MK: Did you?
AG: ...but I had a good time
MK: Oh wonderful! But you've always been such a wonderful..
AG: I met interesting people, and, since I wasn't really in a bad state, I was able to use it as a rest hotel and write a lot of poetry. 
MK: Splendid, splendid.
AG: I met Carl Solomon there
MK: Yes, yes. Well, when I met you, in 1974, you were at the height of what I would call, if I may, your "rant" period.
AG: I don't know if that's correct.  
MK: Is it?
AG: In 1974 I was writing..  No, I had done a lot of Buddhist meditation (by then).
MK: Yes, that's true, and when I saw you at the Troubador.. (Los Angeles)
AG: I think you're stereotyping me there.
MK: No I'm not Allen, I don't mean to do that at all.
AG: At the Troubador I was singing "all the hills echo-ed", I remember.
MK: Well what image do you think that young people have of you now?
AG: Well  I hope a mixed self-image.. I don't know what I am.. What am I supposed to do? One fixed image?
MK: Splendid, splendid.  I was talking to the little  receptionist in the hotel today.. Catherine..
AG: Young girl?
MK: Yes. And I asked her if she knew who you were..
AG: Oh, please!
MK: Do you know what I mean?
AG: Well you could spare me that now. 
MK: Well give me a break, Allen 
AG: You could really spare me that.
MK: You have a public persona
AG: You're being irritating.
MK: Sorry, Allen.
AG: You're being irritating, It's like.. you know, when they say, "don't point, it's bad manners"!
MK: I'm afraid of you, that's all. 
AG: No, fuck you, you're not afraid of me, you're taking advantage of me.
MK: I'm sorry.
AG: You're taking advantage of me to talk about yourself on the camera - and then talk about me in  stereotypes on top of that.
MK: Yes, alright.
AG:  Now, what is your actual social business?
MK: My actual social business?
AG:You're clearly talking to me for your reasons, you have your reasons, but (the) appropriate reason was that you were doing some work documenting.. interviews or, documenting civil liberties.
MK: That's right, that's right
AG: So what sort of thing is that?
MK: Well, for instance, we have in this country the travellers, you've heard about them, have you?
AG:Yes, I know.
MK:Alright
AG: I've been reading about them
MK: Sorry?
AG: I've been reading about them
MK: Good.
AG: It's a very interesting aim.. compared to the gypsies, who, a few years ago, in this country.. more dignified..
MK: Yes, in any event, this [hands Allen a video-cassette] is a documentary which we made (Forced Land) and we, Niall Hughes and I,
AG: Niall is the one on the camera?
MK: Yes, sorry Niall. We are unemployed people (well, we are unwaged, but we are busily employed with this work).. Now, I don't know what impression you've gotten of Galway? 
AG:  ..So far?MK: Yes. Well,  I wonder if you have seen the Galway that we are struggling to alter
AG: No, I haven't
MK: Well.. there's
AG: What part of town is that?
MK: Well What area? what ethnic area? This area..this area is..Hillside, it's called, where the traveler people live, four hundred families, four hundred persons, who have one faucet for cold water, Up to their ankles in mud, etcetera, etcetera, rats and what have you.
AG: Are they forced there by the state?
MK: Well no, they're not actually forced there by the state. They are a separate cultural entity, they insist on their nomadic rights. What the authorities are saying is break up the clans, disperse them throughout settled neighborhoods...
AG: Right
MK: ...which means break up the culture.
AG: Yes, I've seen some argument about that in the newspaper..as being an imposition of a ..society culture on the minority and the minority culture has long virtues, dating back centuries actually, of  coherence and cohesiveness  and community values
MK: Yes
(NH): They actually tried to establish that they are a seperate ethnic culture
AG: Well they obviously are.
(NH) But they have to establish it in fact before they get any kind of recognition as a separate people. otherwise they're not accorded any special status..
AG: I hereby accord them any special status I have power to accord them
MK: Thank you
(NH): Can we impose on you..
AG: .but.. I'm not very much of an empowered.. type. 
MK: Well, we also need mention too, before you leave this country, that in July of last year [1994], there was a public order act passed, which made it possible for any policeman who didn't like the looks of you, or me, gathered here, having a conversation. We are four, the law states, that if the policeman, in his opinion, thinks that we're engaged in conversation which might - repeat might - later lead to..later lead to a breach of public order, he can take all four of us down there
AG: Yeah they have a new law.. there are currently laws  in America like that.
MK: Yes
AG: But Britain has those kind of Constitutional Courts and we don't.. 
MK: Yes
AG:  .. so that maybe there's some prohibition, except that they.. The Supreme Court now is so right-wing that you never know what to think about this.. 
MK: I know, I know
AG: The only way out of that, so far as I know, is some kind of coherent, non-aggressive, cheerful, public..
(NH): Resistance?
AG:  Resistance is (too close to) beaten
(NH): It's already been done?
AG: No, no, it already implies defeat..There's got to be more more energetic, more urgent..
(NH): Any gesture taken in anger..
AG: You wanna put words in my mouth? - great!
(NH): Excuse me, sorry, Allen.
AG: Any gesture taken in anxiety creates more anxiety. Any gesture taken in anger creates more anger. Any grand gesture taken agressively creates counter-aggression. Any gesture taken in calm and equanimity creates calm and equanimity. Lucidity creates lucidity. So what lucid form is there of appealing to others, except..poetry?..  
(NH):..music, and film
AG: Film, I think, but you have to do it without..
(NH): Rancor
AG: Rancor yes.. I want  to go in and enjoy myself
(NH). Yes.  Thanks for that statement/ 
MK: Allen, if I offended you, I'm glad because at least I got to you. 
AG:  No, no, I was jut talking.
MK: Thank you Allen. 
Will you take "Forced Land" as a gift, it's an American..American  edition. Thank you Allen.

The door closes (at approximately twenty-five-and-a-quarter minutes in and Allen is left to his privacy. Niall Hughes keeps the camera rolling, to allow Kennedy to deliver a coda  

MK:  We have Mr Allen Ginsberg at last, in the heat of the hunt. Now I don't know what anybody else expected but I know I don't know what I expected,  but my memory of Ginsberg was that he was in a rant on that day - I don't care what he says - and he was playing at the Troubador Hotel, not the hotel, but the nightclub, on Santa Monica Boulevard, in Los Angeles. (I strolled in there by accident one night and, just for you celebrity-lovers, it was the nightclub in Hollywood that had the distinction of barring John Lennon)., So I went in - I'd never seen Ginsberg before (I'd read a great deal about him, I'd read about his influence on the Berrigan Brothers, the two Jesuits who were active in the Catonsville Nine, and I don't need to go through all that history) - but he, to me, was, to use a literary word, "seminal" (I mean, he was always talking about semen, anyway), and he was a man who greatly impressed me, because he was the polar opposite of myself. He was a burl.. well, at that time, was a burlesque-ing street- theatre lunatic hooked on the ecstasy of the 'Sixties, and I don't mean the pill, I mean the ecstacy of the awakening of that time. Now, whereas Ginsberg, who is a man of probably twelve years older than myself, he must be approaching seventy.
(NH): Sixty-nine.
MK:  Or whatever he is, whatever he is , he made me angry
(NH): He made you angry?
MK: ..and I might counter-attack him with a .. he's a bit too fuckin' cosy, for my liking, anyway  - how dare he correct me in that manner and accuse me of trying to fuck with his head!.. anyway, that aside, he was, to me, the embodiment of everything that was brave and free of careerism and self-interest. He took risks that very few men would take, and any man who rushes into the Chicago police, who, at that time, were rioting, in 1967, at the Rubin trials (sic), and all that, anybody who rushes in with nothing to offer but his moral outrage and anger is a brave man, regardless of what he might be otherwise. Now what I'm trying to lead up to here is that I was living a completely different life to him. I was on a remote island, by myself, trying to live the Zen life -and I was.. around Buddhism too, if he puts me to it - but I won't, I have to be nice! - Now my immediate reaction was, if he walks away from me and leaves me here, I'll attack him in no uncertain terms on the business of his approval of homosexuality with minors. By the grace of god (and presumably Buddha!), he had the grace to take me by the arm and take me after him. 
Now, the positive thing he did was that he forced me not to ask him cliched questions
(NH):  This is tonight now, yeah?
MK:  Now. When did I.?. ! - No, fuck it!. Now..
(NH): You started off talking about..
MK: Now.. The story that I was going to tell him, and I'm going to tell it here was this - that I went into that hotel today and the young girl that was inside the thing was a very sweet child, no more than sixteen, you know child-slave, like they have in these places, and I said to her, she.. she gave me another note that was for Allen Ginsberg, because she thought I was Allen Ginsberg. Now that was the first thing. The second thing was, I told her I'm not Allen Ginsberg, I want to leave a note for him, which I left, and, just as a matter of course, I said to her, "Do you know who he is?" - And she said, "No, no I don't" - She was all misty for it - and I said, "Well, he's a hippie, he's the King of the hippies, you know, just like that. She said "Was he?". I said, "Yeah, he was". She said, "You mean, all that flower.." I said, "Yeah, that thing". And she lit up like a Christmas tree, man, and she said "Gee, I don't.. I didn't know that". Now, she knew about the enlightenment movement that went on in the 'Sixties, she knew about the awakening of the 'Sixties, and I wanted to know if she did (because she was only about fifteen) and, whether he likes it or not, Ginsberg is an iconic name.

The film is dedicated to the late camera-man, and co-producer,  Niall "River" Hughes, who speaks on camera on a number of occasions.  The film is also dedicated to Allen, whose name is, unfortunately, mis-spelt - Alan Ginsberg (sic).

Expansive Poetics - 75 (Nikolay Klyuev)

June 30, 2014, 6:00 am

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[Nikolay Klyuev (1884-1937)]

August 4, 1981 Naropa Institute, Allen continues his lecture(s) on Expansive Poetics

AG: Well, I thought this time to cover somebody that we had mentioned before, which (is Sergei) Esenin, and to cover Esenin, we also have to cover a little bit of (Nikolay) Klyuev. Those of you who are in Peter (Orlovsky)'s class have heard a lot ofKlyuev, but a lot of you haven't been in that class. So I just want to touch on him. He was a friend of Esenin. [to Peter Orlovsky] - can you pick up on Klyuev a bit? 

Peter Orlovsky: Friend of Esenin, and I guess he was the arch.. archetype kulak that (Leon) Trotsky…

AG: Kulak?

Peter Orlovsky: .. kulak.. ..thatTrotsky was picking up on, because Trotsky didn't… and a kulak.. (they made a new definition with Klyuev on mind, because he was a peasant poet, so, "a well-to-do peasant"). "Klyuevhad studied..", this is what Trotsky wrote, "Klyuev had studied, what and where we don't know, but he had managed to horde up a lot of superficial knowledge. He is like a well-to-do peasant who accidentally brings home a telephone receiver and attaches it in a prominent area of the room next to the icon shelf. This Klyuev decorates all the prominent corners of his verse with India, the Congo, Mont Blanc, Tibet, for Klyuev loves to decorate. A peasant owns a simple unpainted shaft bow only if he's poor. A good owner has an engraved shaft bow painted in several colors. Klyuev is a good owner of verse. Everywhere he has engravings - cinnabar, blue-gold, a fancy roof-top and more - brocades, satin, silver, and all sorts of precious stones." -  So, it's sort of… he goes around travelling a lot and he brings these different things back, and he's being criticized for it, as if he's only supposed to have… you're supposed to give up your land and your house and your garden and work in a huge, gigantic field, and the tractor's about to come, and you're going to give up everything you own for the collective.

AG: What was his basic philosophy, or approach? - It was like the "back-to-the-land" movement. Can you describe that all, and the religion connected with it.

Peter Orlovsky: No, I don't know anything about it.

AG: You know something about the religion?.

Peter Orlovsky: Well, the religion was just what's in this book, that he was.. at fifteen, he sang songs for a religious sect that would burn their.. that sometimes the boys would be "Christ", and they would have to cut off their genitals  [!] , and the girls would have to cut off their nipples [!] - And then..

AG: And this is, like, an old, old..

Peter Orlovsky: … they'd have big.. 

AG: It was called "the Old Believers"

Peter Orlovsky;  "The Old Believers" (or some sects of the Old Believers), and they'd have a big religious gathering with no sex at all. Then, at the end of the religious gathering, they'd have a big, wild, incestuous, orgy.

AG: This was connected with what kind of.. ? what were kulaks, does anybody know?

Student: It was a big peasant, yeah.

AG: What kind of peasant?

Student: A free peasant, I think, a non-serving peasant.

AG: Yeah

Student: He owned his land.

AG: So, a small land-owner. He came from that group and he was in favor of that, actually. His angle was similar to the "Back-to-the-land" Movement now, in some respects, (maybe somewhat of a Manson-esque aspect to it?), but, anyway, it was back-to-the-land, Holy Mother Russia, holy land, emnity for the machine civilization 

Peter Orlovsky: There wasn't like (Charles) Manson - there were no drugs involved (there were, maybe, mushrooms…

AG: Yeah

Peter Orlovsky: .. but he didn't smoke, he didn't drink.

AG: Yeah, Puritannical. Back-t0-the-land, like our post-Hippie scene of "rucksack revolution", in the sense of the fear of the Machine Age, fear of Industrialization, conservatism, in the sense of wanting to conserve peasant traditions and peasant technology, preserve nineteenth-century technology, pickling and kvass vodka, haying, direct relationship to the soil, a fanaticalHoly Russia attitude based on backwoods and provincial  redneck Russian values, which in Russia at the time had a lot of worthwhile associations. He was from that Old Believers sect, which was a weird sect, though. What else about him? [to Peter Orlovsky] (Can you) say anything else about him (there)?

Peter Orlovsky:"The kettles gleam with a hundred years fat"

AG: The kettles?

Peter Orlovsky: "The kettles gleam with a hundred years fat"

AG: In England, in the eighteenth century, they had similar poets (and even nineteenth- and twentieth- century - same thing). It's a constant theme in poetry from (William) Blakeon, a resentment of the Industrial Revolution and a "back-to-the-land" Movement, and it comes to a climax in America in the (19)60's with people going back and making communes (and also having connected with worship in the land associated with the American Indian - sacred, sacramental, land value - and retention of old tribal traditions connected with the land). Actually, it's a world/universal neolithic idea, in a way, as Gary Snyder says, world/universal neolithic consciousness - a direct relationship to the land and to the village - the village economics, village  work, village morals, village aesthetics, handicraft, hand crafts (weaving), such as, in (the) nineteenth century, you had William Morris and (John) Ruskin and people who were realizing that the Industrial Revolution was destroying all the arts and crafts and direct knowledge of the countryside that had accumulated for a thousand years. What's that? - "A hundred years of fat in the kettle"? 

Peter Orlovsky: On the outside

AG: Yeah

Peter Orlovsky: Well, there's two religious groups - the Khlysts- K-H-L-Y-S-T-S - and the Skoptsy sect. "Skoptsy practiced self-castration, in the belief that this custom helped to achieve self-perfection. And the Khlysts believed in… (They were) persecuted by the official Orthodox Church (since there appeared (with them) figures who claimed to be Christ, (coming from their divine mothers), who (challenging the orthodoxy) enjoyed a large following. There were massive trials of persons suspected of (holding) membership in the Khlysts sect, in the nineteenth century, which resulted in hundreds of people being imprisoned in monasteries, while others were beheaded".


[Nikolai Klyuev and Sergei Esenin]


AG: So what was his relationship with Esenin?

Peter Orlovsky: With Esenin? - [Peter reads from his book] - "He (Klyuev) completely dominated Sergei. He tied his belt for him, stroked his hair, followed him with his eyes. When Sergei returned from his first trip to Moscow, he told how Klyuev was jealous of (the) attention (given) to a woman, with whom he, Sergei, had his first city romance - "As soon as I would pick up my hat he would sit on it in the middle of the room and sob like a woman at the top of his voice, "Don't go to her, don't you dare!". He was particularly indignant that the sick man who was constantly fussing with all sorts of ointments and medicines dared to bother him." - "Ointments and medicines"..

AG: Well, since there's an element of homosexual mysticism related to the peasant back-to-the-land Movement  (which Klyuev was inviolved in, and he was the teacher for Esenin). He was Esenin's first big-time poet-friend, and, apparently, they had a big affair, and Klyuev dominated Esenin - very strictly and cruelly, actually. (So) they knew each other.  But still..(and)  they were good friends, until Esenin's suicide, so, until 1924… Yes?

Student: What is "homosexual mysticism"?

AG: I guess it's a yearning (like you hear inGustav Mahler) for some kind of union which can't take place. So, more and more heartbroken yearning (like you get in (Richard) Wagner, or Mahler), that endless series of passionate heart-beat…breathings.. and almost to a climax, but that climax never comes.

Student: So it's never… it's non-experiential maybe, or ..

AG: No, it's experience of lack love more than anything else - a yearning for love but a lack of consummation. In certain cases, like his, because he's also a moralist and a Puritan.. He isn't a pagan homosexual, he's God-dominated, so there's always, maybe, some kind of guilt connected to it, I guess - and aestheticism - and cutting off their own genitals, actually! -
It's not a universal form of homosexuality, but it's a particularly Russian kind of self-flagellation (well, it's, like, (the) Russian Christianity also includes flagellation). 

Student: Yeah

AG: Heterosexual Christianity in Russian also included flagellating yourself  - (like in Mexico).



["The Flagellation of Christ" - late 15th Century Russian icon 24 x 19 cms - Museum of Architecture and Ancient Monument, Novgorod, Russia]

So, anyway, they had a big affair, and Esenin came from a little village which he wrote about, and grounded himself in (St.) Petersburg and Moscow and in the cafes as a peasant poet, and, wandering around with Klyluev, he wore peasant clothes. But then it got pretty theatrical, because they made up their own peasant clothes, and it got totally exaggerated. Everybody looked on Klyuev as some kind of con-man, or a peasant con-man, sometimes a genius, of a kind,  sort of Svengali, of a kind, dominating people by (sheer) will-power and loud mouth and brilliance, and he had some good arguments - that the Mechanical Age was going to ruin mankind, and would certainly ruin Holy Mother Russia, particularly a  Machine Age connected to a Communist bureauracy - between the two of them, he thought it would be kind of poison - because the new economic plans of Lenin and others wanted to communize the land, and communize it and break up the holdings of the kulaks, or the small landholders, and break up their traditions, and start up a whole different sense of a different family system. And then there's all these whisperings of free love and everything, coming from the Jewish Communists and the International Anarchist Communists. It was a whole big mix-up.  There's a guy named (Nestor) Makhno - Do you remember anything about him, Peter? - anything?

Peter Orlovsky: He was a…

[Nestor Mahkno]

AG: He looks like (Arthur) Rimbaud, actually. From..

Peter Orlovsky: Georgian

AG: Georgia. 

Peter Orlovsky: Yeah, he was a horseman and a leader, and was he an Anarchist?

AG: Yeah. he represented the local Anarchism (in the sense of provincial Anarchism, or..what do you call it?… individualized, broken-up, decentralized Anarchism.

Peter Orlovsky:He got trapped in a battle.

AG: Yeah, well, he resisted the authority of the Bolsheviks. First, he fought the White Russians, right?

Peter Orlovsky: Right

AG:  And beat them. So, fighting with the Communists against the White Russians or the old Czarist armies. Then he didn't want to come under the rule of the Central Committee (CCCP). And so Trotsky went out with an army and beat Makhno. Makhno was this beautiful-looking guy…if you ever see a picture of him - an anarchist -  so that's kind of interesting (except, it's also said that he was kind of an egotist, and…

Peter Orlovsky: ..an alcoholic...

AG: An alcoholic

Peter Orlovsky: ..ended up in Paris…

AG: Yeah, he died in Paris, in exile, of alcoholism, drank himself to death in Paris after he got kicked out of Georgia.

But this attack on Makhno was, finally, the crucial thing, politically, because the Bolsheviks  had to consolidate their power and they had all these people (what would be like The Living Theatre today, or radical anarchists, orthe Rainbow Family, or Woodstocktribes), all resisting the central authority, and, finally, Trotsky had to take an army and knock them off, kill them, or drive them out.   

Peter Orlovsky: Did they like...

AG: Esenin, kind of liked Klyuev, Makhno also. He mentions him a lot. I don't know if he met him but he did like him.   So what else about Klyuev, anything (else) to say?

Peter Orlovsky: His famous poem is "The Burned Ruins"(Pogoret'shehma) (of  (the) village - Zhelvachevo - he's got a long poem about that).

AG: Any interesting lines?

Peter Orlovsky: He was sent to Siberia, and left in (19)45 with two suitcases of poems, and never…

AG: 1945?

Peter Orlovsky. Oh, thirty-five.. Came back in (19)35,  he was freed in (19)35, and was heading out on a train to Siberia, and was never seen again (with his two suitcases of poems - which may have been used for toilet-paper, because there was no toilet-paper in those days)

AG: Yeah, he was exiled to Siberia, and he had a tough time, (but) apparently didn't die, though, survived it. But on the way back, it is rumored, he was shot by the police because they didn't want him back anyway, because he was a thorn-in-the-side to Stalin and the whole bureaucracy then, because he was so obviously out-of-step with what they thought was the times and what they wanted. He was still friends, even at that late date, with Esenin, though (they first met (in) 1910 or so - 1912).


[Audio for the above can be heardhere , from the beginning until approxiately fourteen-and-half minutes in] 

Expansive Poetics - 76 (Sergei Esenin - 1)

July 1, 2014, 3:00 am

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AG: I  think, first of all, to get now into (Sergei) Esenin, (we should) hear his voice. I played it last term. There's a record I brought back from Prague, given to me by Esenin's Czech translator in 1965. Could we hear that? The most powerful voice of all the Russians, I think, physically.

[Sergei Esenin reading from "Confession of A Hooligan"]

Исповедь хулигана

Не каждый умеет петь,
Не каждому дано яблоком
Падать к чужим ногам.

Сие есть самая великая исповедь,
Которой исповедуется хулиган.

Я нарочно иду нечёсаным,
С головой, как керосиновая лампа, на плечах.
Ваших душ безлиственную осень
Мне нравится в потёмках освещать.
Мне нравится, когда каменья брани
Летят в меня, как град рыгающей грозы,
Я только крепче жму тогда руками
Моих волос качнувшийся пузырь.

Так хорошо тогда мне вспоминать
Заросший пруд и хриплый звон ольхи,
Что где-то у меня живут отец и мать,
Которым наплевать на все мои стихи,
Которым дорог я, как поле и как плоть,
Как дождик, что весной взрыхляет зеленя.
Они бы вилами пришли вас заколоть
За каждый крик ваш, брошенный в меня.

Бедные, бедные крестьяне!
Вы, наверно, стали некрасивыми,
Так же боитесь бога и болотных недр.
О, если б вы понимали,
Что сын ваш в России
Самый лучший поэт!
Вы ль за жизнь его сердцем не индевели,
Когда босые ноги он в лужах осенних макал?
А теперь он ходит в цилиндре
И лакированных башмаках.

Но живёт в нём задор прежней вправки
Деревенского озорника.
Каждой корове с вывески мясной лавки
Он кланяется издалека.
И, встречаясь с извозчиками на площади,
Вспоминая запах навоза с родных полей,
Он готов нести хвост каждой лошади,
Как венчального платья шлейф.

Я люблю родину.
Я очень люблю родину!
Хоть есть в ней грусти ивовая ржавь.
Приятны мне свиней испачканные морды
И в тишине ночной звенящий голос жаб.
Я нежно болен вспоминаньем детства,
Апрельских вечеров мне снится хмарь и сырь.
Как будто бы на корточки погреться
Присел наш клён перед костром зари.
О, сколько я на нём яиц из гнёзд вороньих,
Карабкаясь по сучьям, воровал!
Все тот же ль он теперь, с верхушкою зелёной?
По-прежнему ль крепка его кора?

А ты, любимый,
Верный пегий пёс?!
От старости ты стал визглив и слеп
И бродишь по двору, влача обвисший хвост,
Забыв чутьём, где двери и где хлев.
О, как мне дороги все те проказы,
Когда, у матери стянув краюху хлеба,
Кусали мы с тобой её по разу,
Ни капельки друг другом не погребав.

Я всё такой же.
Сердцем я все такой же.
Как васильки во ржи, цветут в лице глаза.
Стеля стихов злачёные рогожи,
Мне хочется вам нежное сказать.

Спокойной ночи!
Всем вам спокойной ночи!
Отзвенела по траве сумерек зари коса…
Мне сегодня хочется очень
Из окошка луну обоссать

Синий свет, свет такой синий!
В эту синь даже умереть не жаль.
Ну так что ж, что кажусь я циником,
Прицепившим к заднице фонарь!
Старый, добрый, заезженный Пегас,
Мне ль нужна твоя мягкая рысь?
Я пришёл, как суровый мастер,
Воспеть и прославить крыс.
Башка моя, словно август,
Льётся бурливых волос вином.

Я хочу быть жёлтым парусом
В ту страну, куда мы плывём.

[Sergei Esenin reading "Wake Me Early Tomorrow']

Разбуди меня завтра рано,
О моя терпеливая мать!
Я пойду за дорожным курганом
Дорогого гостя встречать.

Я сегодня увидел в пуще
След широких колес на лугу.
Треплет ветер под облачной кущей
Золотую его дугу.

На рассвете он завтра промчится,
Шапку-месяц пригнув под кустом,
И игриво взмахнет кобылица
Над равниною красным хвостом.

Разбуди меня завтра рано,
Засвети в нашей горнице свет.
Говорят, что я скоро стану
Знаменитый русский поэт.

Воспою я тебя и гостя,
Нашу печь, петуха и кров…
И на песни мои прольется
Молоко твоих рыжих коров.

["Wake me early tomorrow/O my patient mother!/I will go to the mound /To meet our precious guest/ In the dense forest I saw today /wheel-tracks in the meadow/Under the canopy of cloud/The wind fires a golden arrow/ He will rush at dawn tomorrow/Once the moon ducks under the bushes/And the little mare will  swish her red tail/Playfully,on the plain/  Wake me early tomorrow/Light the lamp in our front room/They say that I am soon to be/ The famous Russian poet/  I’ll sing my love for you and of a guest/ our hearth/a rooster/and our home/and over my songs will spill your red cows' milk."]

[Audio for the above may also be heard here, (Allen playing recordings of the voice of Sergei Esenin), beginning at approximately fourteen and three-quarter minutes in]

Expansive Poetics - 77 (Sergei Esenin - 2)

July 2, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Sergei Esenin (1895-1925)]

.. So, Esenin broke loose from (Nikolay) Klyuev, who was very demanding (sexually, I imagine, as well as morally). He didn't want Esenin to be running around Russia as a big intelligent poet, handsome, on his own, making out with everybody else. So there is another poetic cafe that's described in (Gordon) McVay's biography of Esenin - (an interesting book - Esenin - A  Life by Gordon McVay, also Ardis, Ann Arbor).

Student: Let me see the photographs. Can I see?

AG: Well, there's lots of photographs of Esenin. I think you've seen some but I'll get a big one if I can. He was the greatest looking poet after Rimbaud, probably. So  Klyuev had himself a good thing going. Well, there's a picture of Klyuev and Esenin, in the lower-right, over there. I don't know if you can see very much of it. Well, Klyuev is the older guy

[Sergei Esenin and Nikolai Kluyev]

(and then) Esenin himself, a little bit later - really a movie-actor! -  totally the best! - the best piece of poetic meat in Russia in 1910! - Powdered his hair, occasionally. He had a fantastic career.


[Isadora Duncan and Sergei Esenin]

Here, with Isadora Duncan, whom he married.. He married Isadora Duncan (there's a movie about it, even) - [Editorial note - more than one] . They were stars in their own day. They had a stormy career. I can read you something about that..

Student: Please do.

AG: Yeah, when we get to that. First of all, what I wanted to get to was - we had the Stray Dog Cafe, now - the Pegasus Stall, in Moscow, 1919 (this is after the Revolution)  - "The chief Imaginist.." (there was a group called the Imaginists, which was Esenin and his friends, (Anatoly Mariengof…) - "The chief Imaginist cafe-tavern" [writes Gordon McVay] "was..virtually their own  property - the Pegasus Stall ("Stoilo Pegasa"). This home ground of the Bohemian Imaginists inspired many (a) virulent attack, and seems, by some accounts, to have been a den of vice. An "Old Writer" in the Herald of Literature cast a jaundiced eye on "the new poetic stall" in 1919 - "And now there is a new cafe, the Pegasus Stall. It is led by two recent pillars of the Poets Cafe and Russian Imaginism - Sergei Esenin and (Anatoly) Mariengof. In the new cafe, everything is, as in the previous cafes - bad coffee, dinners at high prices, a stage, mediocre verse, maxims on the walls and beneath the glass on the tables, pearls of wisdom and inspiration of the poets in charge. And yet are there (perhaps) too many poetic stalls in Russia?". A couple of years later, in (19)21, Dmitry Furmanov went there to hear Mariengof recite and was not favorably impressed - "The Pegasus Stall is, in essence, nothing more than a stall of bourgeois spoiled children. Here people congregate who play absolutely no part in the movement of society - painted, shrill, and stupid young ladies, whose tiny hands are kissed in the old-style by their poet admirers. Here people throw away tens of thousands of rubles for a light breakfast, as if it were a mere kopek. That is, the public is no stranger to speculation. Here you will see polished bourgeois kiddies, excellently dressed, smoothly shaved, sleek, fashionable, foppish. In short, all the same riffraff who formerly reveled in obscene salon anecdotes and ditties, and, for that matter, still do. Mariengof himself is a typical glossy dandy. He creates the most repulsive impression, that is, by his openly bourgeois essence".


[Anatoly Mariengof]

The Pegasus Stall (the former Cafe Bim-Bom), situated on the corner of Maly Gnezdnikovsky Pereulok and Tverskaya Street, present-day Gorky Street, and here, while the customers ate and drank, a kind of orchestra played, and the Imaginists recited - O(saf) Litovsky [journalist and theatre critic] recalls Esenin acting as a waiter in the cafe, dressed in a dinner jacket, with a napkin under his arm. It remained open from 1919 until late 1924, and, unlike the other cafes, only Imaginist poetry was recited there. A number of women came visiting (including Isadora Duncan). The Stall (Pegasus's Stall) became Esenin's residence. He, literally, lived there. 

"At first, [Nikolai Poletaevnotes] I think, Esenin drank little, (and I never saw his friends drink at all). Esenin's temperament was such that if he drank but a small amount he'd begin to shout and act rowdily. The poet's fame grew and grew. People knew and loved him. Young people were crazy about his verse. And it must be said that for Esenin fame was everything. Obscurity and insignificance were synonymous in his vocabulary." It stayed open until two a.m. and it seems that the poets began to recite around eleven-thirty p.m. Until the period of the New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin, it was, in the words of one Ivan Startsev, "the only place in Moscow where there were gatherings of Bohemians and the unbridled cafe public until two or three in the morning". Even Mariengiof, who read there and revelled in the trappings of Bohemianism, had to describe the milieu there as one of  "shrill foxtrots, an empty-hearted, red-lipped crowd, reeking of wine, powder, and cheap little passions from  Tverskoy Boulevard" - [which is where the whores lived, mostly]

There's a meeting between (Velimir) Khlebnikov and Esenin and his group. There's a food shortage in Moscow and Esenin knew somebody who was in charge of relief shipments on the railroads, and so he wrangled a private railroad car to go around Russia reciting poetry and buying up black market goods to bring back to Moscow to sell. So they decide to give a poetry reading in Kharkov, before a large audience.

"One aspect of that much-described evening has appeared to many as a particularly shameful blot on the Imaginist record. (Aleksey) Chapygin recalls, "Mariengof pushed out onto the stage the emaciated Velimir Khlebnikov. But the latter, resisting and cowering, had no wish to come out. When he was pushed out, he came but he declaimed in such a way that nobody could hear him. Khlebnikov, Futurist poet of fantastic neologisms and quasi-scientific calculations, was noted for his impracticability and otherworldliness.Mariengof describes the incident without any compunction, beginning by establishing Khlebnikov's strangeness. He shook hands holding a shoe he was repairing. He had eyes like a saint's on an icon and he had spent the previous night writing illegibly in the dark, according to Mariengof…" - [These are the guys who had to stand up against (Joseph) Stalin and (Leon) Trotsky and all of the theologians and Communist theoreticians].

Peter Orlovsky: He was probably very poor...

AG: Yeah.. He starved to death within a few years

Peter Orlovsky: He was fixing his own shoes and he was.. no light in the room..

AG: According to Marion Goff, Esenin had suggested that they should crown Khlebnikov as "President of the Terrestrial Globe" -  (if you remember those texts we went over earlier) -"President of the Terrestrial Globe in the City Theatre, and Khlebnikov had gratefully agreed. A week later, before a packed auditorium, Khlebnikov stoof bare-footed in a cloth surplice as Esenin amd Mariengof proclaimed him President. After every quatrain of mock praise, Khlebnikov quietly answered, "I believe". And finally, as the symbol of the Terrestrial Globe, a borrowed ring was placed on his finger. When the owner wanted the ring back after the ceremony, Khlebnikov grew afraid and hid his hand behind his back, saying, "It's…it's…it's the globe, the symbol of the terrestrial globe, and I.. you see.. Esenin and Mariengof made me President." Esenin roared with laughter. The owner pulled the ring from Khlebnikov's finger, and Khlebnikov "wept bright tears as large as those of a horse".  The Futurist poet, N(ikolai) Aseev, upon hearing of the episode, felt indignant, especially as "Khlebnikov had only just then recovered from typhus."

Travelling then, just after the Revolution, there's the peasant poet, Esenin, beginning to have his doubts about the Revolution, but still wants to be a good Communist. But, on the other hand, although he's broken with Klyuev, he still has (a) romantic notion about back-to-the-land and about pre-Industrial Revolutionary sincerity. So, from a letter by Esenin to a girlfriend, to give an example, to illustrate his sorrow for the departed, beloved, familiar, animal quality (which he contrasts with the immovable power of what is dead and mechanical) 

"We were travelling from Tikhoretskaya to Pyatigorsk, when suddenly we hear shouts., look out the window and what do we see? We see a small foal galloping with all its might after the railway engine. It was galloping in such a way that we realized at once that for some reason it decided to outstrip the train. It ran for a very long time but in the end it began to tire, and at one station it was captured. The episode may strike others as insignificant, but for me it tells a very great deal…"

[tape ends here but then resumes on the next side]

 "…The steel horse has conquered the living horse.." - [It's the old John Henry story, actually] - "And this small foal was for me a graphic, dear, dying image of the face of (Nestor) Makhno. The village and (Nestor) Makhno in our revolution are terribly like this foal in the competition of a living force with one of iron. I am very sad at present that history is living through a very painful epic of killing off the living personality, for you know that the Socialism that is developing is not at all what I expected but a deliberate, definite, kind, like a sort of island of St.Helena without glory and without dreams. In this Socialism, there is little room for living, for a person building a bridge into the invisible world, as these bridges are hacked down and blown up beneath the feet of future generations". 

"By 192o, therefore, Esenin sympathized more with the anarchic revolt of the anti-Bolshevik leader Makhno than with the disciplined iron will of (the) Bolsheviks. The incident of the horse, mainly pursuing a train, acquired a symbolic importance (and Mariengof described it at some length also). It became the central episode of Esenin's famous poem, "Sorokous" [Сорокоус,] which was written in the train on the way to Baku. The contest between the living and the steel horse must have appealed especially to the Imaginists.

So we have that poem in translation. Brief(ly) - "The Colt and the Train" (from Prayers For The Dead), or "Sorokous" - "Did you see/ the train on its cast-iron feet,/ rushing through the Steppes,/ hiding in the mist of lakes,/ snorting through its iron nostrils? / [Видели ли вы,/Как бежит по степям,/В туманах озерных кроясь,/Железной ноздрей храпя,/На лапах чугунных поезд?] - "And in its wake, as though in a desperate race at a gymkhana" - ["gymkhana"? - What is gymkhana? gymkhana? - Do you know?" - Horse-meet?] - "a red-maned colt is galloping over the high growing grass, flinging its slender legs as high as its head." ["А за ним/ По большой траве,/ Как на празднике отчаянных гонок,/Тонкие ноги закидывая к голове,/ Скачет красногривый жеребенок?"] - "The dear, dear, funny little fool,/ where is he racing to like this?/ Doesn't he know that live horses/ have been vanquished by steel cavalry?/ Doesn't he know that his gallop in the somber plain/ will not bring back the days/ when the Pechenegs would give a couple of beautiful Russian girls of the Steppes/ in exchange for a horse?/ Fate and the markets have altered the face of our deep and quiet waters./ awakened by the grinding noise of the trains./ And now you buy a railway engine/ for tons of horses' flesh and skin" - [Милый, милый, смешной дуралей,/ Ну куда он, куда он гонится?/ Неужель он не знает, что живых коней/ Победила стальная конница?/ Неужель он не знает, что в полях бессиянных/Той поры не вернет его бег,/ Когда пару красивых степных россиянок/ Отдавал за коня печенег?/По-иному судьба на торгах перекрасила/ Наш разбуженный скрежетом плес,/ И за тысчи пудов конской кожи и мяса /Покупают теперь паровоз"].

So most of his poetry then is a mixture of nostalgia for his youth, beauty, past, villages, his peasant civilization in connection with the land and some kind of living romance, or living romantic animal quality. And the slow alcoholism that overtook him, or that he took on. And the slow grind with the Communist Party - and  (now) with a new cult, another school, (which was a proletarian cult), which said that everything should be political, radical, revolutionary, pro-Communist, pro-government, decided by the workers, and (that) there should be workers' poetry, and (that) poetry should be simplified, and (that) all these schools,j of  Symbolism,Futurism, Acmeism, Imaginism, were just a bunch of whores, running around, hanging around cafes and having a good time while the workers sweated and were suffering - (which was, in a sense, quite true,  because Esenin was a cut-up, totally, and getting drunker and drunker between 1919 and 1925, when he committed suicide, another example of the poète maudit, or "ill-spoken", or "cursed" variety (of poet) that we had with (Arthur) Rimbaud, (Paul) Verlaine,(Francois) Villon, (and) which we narrowly escaped having with Gregory Corso, someone who's drinking was so terrific that it actually drove the world away, although everybody loved him and adored him and realized he was perhaps the greatest poet around, but he became intolerable to almost everybody. There are lots of stories about that, which we can get to.

    

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning  approximately twenty-one minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-five minutes in]  

Expansive Poetics - 78 (Sergei Esenin - 3)

July 3, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Sergei Esenin (1895-1925)]

AG: First thing we ought to do is get to some of his (Sergei Esenin's) texts, some of the poetry, before we get onto the gossip (which is kind of poetically interesting (too), I think)
- "Letter To His Mother" 

He'd abandoned not only the village, he'd gone out to Moscow, and (Nikolay) Klyuev got really mad because he was wandering around now in delicate shoes and top hats and evening clothes, and looking like a dandy, and collecting clothes. Then he married Isadora Duncan and collected vast wardrobes in Paris and Berlin and the United States and brought them all back to Moscow, and wabdered around like a dandy. (He) drank a great deal, smashed mirrors in hotels, destroyed hotel rooms from Berlin through Paris, through New York City, beat up Isadora Duncan, gave her black eyes, screamed at her, was surly, resented being her side-kick (because she was more famous than he on their trip around America), wanted to go back to his peasant village in Russia (but he didn't want to go back there either) , came back after several nervous breakdowns and winding up in jails and hospitals all over Europe, taken care of by all sorts of pretty little Russian girls who were very intelligent and very literary (knowing he was doomed, but trying to keep him going for a while), wrote a little lettter to his mother, a poem called "Letter To My Mother", which is, like, a sober, nostalgic, moment.



Are you stilll alive old lady?/ I, too am alive. Greetings, greetings to you./ May that ineffable evening light/ flow over your little house./ They write to tell me that though you hide your anxiety,/ you're pining for me ever so much/ and that you often come out onto the road/ in your worn old-fashioned coat/ And that in the blue darkness of evening/ you often imagine the same thing,/ someone you fancy has stuck a knife/ into me beneath the heart during a tavern brawl./ It's nothing, my dearest, calm yourself./ There's only a harassing play of fancy./ I'm not such a confirmed drunkard/ that I should die without seeing you first./ I'm just as loving as before. /My own dream is to escape from my restless misery/ and return to our little house. /I'll return when our white garden/ spreads its branches in Springtime. /But you mustn't wake me at dawn/ as you did eight years ago./ Don't awake the dreams that have vanished./ Don't disturb that which didn't come true./ Too early in life it fell my life to suffer/ weariness, bereavement./ And don't try to teach me to pray, don't do that./ There's no returning to the past/. You alone are my help and comfort,/ my ineffable light./ So forget your anxiety. /Don't pine for me so much./ Don't come out on the road so often/ in your worn old-fashioned coat".

[" Ты жива еще, моя старушка?/ Жив и я. Привет тебе, привет!/ Пусть струится над твоей избушкой/ Тот вечерний несказанный свет./  Пишут мне, что ты, тая тревогу,/Загрустила шибко обо мне,/ Что ты часто ходишь на дорогу/ В старомодном ветхом шушуне./  И тебе в вечернем синем мраке/ Часто видится одно и то ж:/ Будто кто-то мне в кабацкой драке/ Саданул под сердце финский нож./  Ничего, родная! Успокойся./ Это только тягостная бредь./Не такой уж горький я пропойца,/ Чтоб, тебя не видя, умереть./  Я по-прежнему такой же нежный/ И мечтаю только лишь о том,/ Чтоб скорее от тоски мятежной/ Воротиться в низенький наш дом./  Я вернусь, когда раскинет ветви/ По-весеннему наш белый сад./ Только ты меня уж на рассвете/ Не буди, как восемь лет назад./Не буди того, что отмечталось,/Не волнуй того, что не сбылось,—/ Слишком раннюю утрату и усталость/ Испытать мне в жизни привелось./ И молиться не учи меня. Не надо!/  К старому возврата больше нет./Ты одна мне помощь и отрада,/ Ты одна мне несказанный свет./ Так забудь же про свою тревогу,/ Не грусти так шибко обо мне./ Не ходи так часто на дорогу/ В старомодном ветхом шушуне."]

Actually he felt it, and it's pretty direct, simple (simpler than most of the Russian poets, and emotionally more direct).

And so, actually, he was the best-loved poet of all the peasant girls and workers in the factories (espite the fact of his being an enormous beautiful drunkard and being totally out-of-step with thr commissars of literature. Madame Mandelstam (Nadezhda Mandelstam), in her memoirs, recalls that, when she was working in a factory, way off in the sticks in Russia, the one poet that all her working girlfriends would talk about at lunch-time, the one they knew by heart, was Esenin 

There are some great poems of his about taverns, I think. Let's see.. Well, the one that was most popular is about a little lady dog or "A Song About a Bitch".

"In the morning, in a barn for storing rye,/ where bast mats gleam golden in a row,/ a bitch gave birth to/ seven red-brown puppies./  She fondled them until the evening/, licking them smooth with her tongue/ while the melting snow flowed/ beneath her warm belly./ But in the evening when the hens/ bespatter their perch with their droppings,/ the grim-faced master came out/ and bundled all seven into a sack./ She raced over snowdrifts,/ keeping pace with him,/ and for a long, long time shudders ran across/ the smooth surface of the unfrozen water./ But when she dragged herself wearily back,/ licking the sweat from her sides,/ she thought the moon above the cottage was/ one of her puppies. /She gazed up into the dark blue sky/ whining loudly./ But the slender moon slid on/ and disappeared in the fields behind the hill./ And softly, as though/ someone had thrown a stone in jest,/ tears rolled from the bitch's eyes,/ like golden stars into the snow."

["Утром в ржаном закуте,/ Где златятся рогожи в ряд,/ Семерых ощенила сука,/ Рыжих семерых щенят./  До вечера она их ласкала,/ Причесывая языком,/ И струился снежок подталый/ Под теплым ее животом./  А вечером, когда куры/ Обсиживают шесток,/ Вышел хозяин хмурый,/ Семерых всех поклал в мешок./  По сугробам она бежала,/  Поспевая за ним бежать.../ И так долго, долго дрожала/ Воды незамерзшей гладь/  .А когда чуть плелась обратно,/ Слизывая пот с боков,/ Показался ей месяц над хатой/ Одним из ее щенков./  В синюю высь звонко/ Глядела она, скуля,/ А месяц скользил тонкий/ И скрылся за холм в полях./ И глухо, как от подачки,/ Когда бросят ей камень в смех,/Покатились глаза собачьи/ Золотыми звездами в снег."]

Really pretty.   ..That's (the) sort of shop-girl poetry in a way, but everybody in Russia liked that one. You could hear the straightforward…  Another one.. There's another version of it. I'll read another translation. 

This is an interesting book, [Allen points to the book he has with him] Modern Russian Poetry, An Anthology, (edited) by (Vladimir) Markov and Merrill Sparks, (Bobbs Merrill, (19)66-) (19)67, England)



Student: That poem is in a form of Russian so-called skazka[Сказка] folk stories.

AG: Folk. Folk ballad(s). Yeah..

Student: Skazka

AG: Yeah, he used a lot, because, coming from that ideological tradition, then he also made use of old peasant ballad forms. Somewhat, in a way, as (Bob) Dylan returned to old ballad forms and got American poetry back in that same line of popular ballad. [to Student] Do you know any more? What is it called in Russian - Skufska?

Student: Skazka

AG: Skazka. And what's the form? Four lines?

Student; Oh, I don't know exactly, but the essence.. is that… (like it is) here…

AG: Here (in Markov and Sparks),  it's a rhymed version.

"In the morning and in the rye bin where the rows of gold mats were spread,/ a dog littered seven puppies brownish-red./ She fondled them until evening and combed them smooth with her tongue,/while the light snow melted beneath her where her warm belly hung,/ But when night came and the chickens were speckling their roosting rack,/ out came her grim-faced owner who put all seven in a sack./ She went out running over the snowdrifts trying to match his pace…" - [It's the same story as the pony with the train, actually] - " She went out running over the snowdrifts trying to match his pace, /and for a long, long time shudders shook the unfrozen water's smooth face./ When she wearily dragged her feet, licking the wet from her side,/ she thought the moon over the cottage was one of her pups that had died/ and, gazing high, whining loudly, she stared at the blue sky until/ the thin moon slid on and vanished in the fields behind the hill./And softly, as if someone while jesting had thrown her a stone,/ even so, tears rolled down from her dog eyes like golden stars in the snow." - [It (has) really beautiful little touches -  like "golden stars", tears,  "like golden stars in the snow.", or like "now you can buy a railroad train. It costs me hundreds of horses' skins and meat for one railroad train" - real sharp images, but totally direct, (and a) popular subject. 

Here's a poem now beginnng as a regret for his youthful beauty:

"I have no regrets, retreats, or weepings./ Smoke from white apple trees, all will go./ Gripped as I am by the gold, autumnal gold of withering. /I won't be young again, I know./ Heart of mine, touched by the chill already,/ you will not be beating any more. The calico birch trees/ will never coax me to walk barefoot as before./ Less and less the spirit of a gypsy/ stirs my lips into some flaming fire./ Oh, all gone, my lost-forever freshness. /Wild eyes, floods of feelings and desires. /Now I grow more tame in my ambitions./ Life, will you dream and no other thing?/, where I galloped by on a pink stallion/ through the echo-filled mornings of Spring./ We are transitory in this world./ Copper leaves from maple trees drift by./ So let all of us be blessed forever,/ all things that come here to gloom and die."

A more direct translation of that is

"Little by little we are now departing to the land where there's peace and happiness./ Perhaps for me too it will be time to pack my perishable belongings for the journey./ Dear birch woods, you earth, and you sands of the plains/, I can't hide my anguish at this crowd of departing fellow men./ In this world I have loved too much everything that closed the soul of flesh./ Peace be to the aspens which have spread their branches and are gazing into the pink waters./ I cherished many thoughts in silence. I composed many songs in my mind. /I'm happy to have breathed and lived upon this gloomy earth". - [ It's very Russian!] - "I'm happy at the thought that I've kissed women,/ crumpled flowers, lain around on the grass, and never struck animals, our lesser bretheren, on the head./ I know that thickets don't flower there, nor do the rye stalks jingle their swan-like necks./ That's why I always tremble at the crowd of departing fellow men." - [This was written, incidentally, after the death of a provincial poet, who he thought was a great young poet] - "I know that in that land there will not be those cornfields, gleaming golden in the haze./ It is because they live with me upon the earth that men are dear to me." 

"Не жалею, не зову, не плачу,/Все пройдет, как с белых яблонь дым,/Увяданья золотом охваченный,/Я не буду больше молодым./ Ты теперь не так уж будешь биться,/Сердце, тронутое холодком,/И страна березового ситца/Не заманит шляться босиком./ Дух бродяжий, ты все реже, реже/Расшевеливаешь пламень уст./О моя утраченная свежесть,/Буйство глаз и половодье чувств!/ Я теперь скупее стал в желаньях,/Жизнь моя? иль ты приснилась мне?/Словно я весенней гулкой ранью/Проскакал на розовом коне./ Все мы, все мы в этом мире тленны,/Тихо льется с кленов листьев медь…/Будь же ты вовек благословенно,/Что пришло процвесть и умереть."

Then, another, lamenting the passing of the golden groves of the villages, the groves of trees, the autumn:

"The golden grove has ceased to speak/in the gay language of birches,/ and the cranes sadly flying past/ no longer regret anyone./ Who is there to regret? Isn't every man in the world a wanderer?/ He passes by, pays a visit, again leaves the house./ The hemp field together with the broad moon over the pale blue pond/ dreams of those who have gone away. /I'm standing alone in a bare plain/ while cranes are carried far away by the wind. /Full of thoughts about my gay youth/ but I regret nothing of my past./ I don't regret the years I squandered in vain./ I don't regret the lilac blossom of the soul./ The fire of rowan tree branches is burning in the garden,/ But it can't warm anyone./ The clusters of rowan berries will not be scorched,/ the grass will not grow yellow and perish./ As a tree gently lets fall its leaves,/ So I let fall sad words./ And if time, after scattering them in the wind,/ shall rake them all into one useless heap, just say that the golden grove/ has ceased to speak the language I love.

[Отговорила роща золотая/ Березовым, веселым языком,/И журавли, печально пролетая,/Уж не жалеют больше ни о ком./ Кого жалеть? Ведь каждый в мире странник —/Пройдет, зайдет и вновь оставит дом./О всех ушедших грезит коноплянник/С широким месяцем над голубым прудом./Стою один среди равнины голой,/А журавлей относит ветер в даль,/Я полон дум о юности веселой,/Но ничего в прошедшем мне не жаль./ Не жаль мне лет, растраченных напрасно,/Не жаль души сиреневую цветь./В саду горит костер рябины красной,/Но никого не может он согреть/Не обгорят рябиновые кисти,/ От желтизны не пропадет трава./Как дерево роняет тихо листья,/Так я роняю грустные слова./ И если время, ветром разметая,/Сгребет их все в один ненужный ком.../Скажите так... что роща золотая/ Отговорила милым языком."]

There's another translation of that, actually. That's one of his most famous - the conception "the golden grove has ceased to talk to me" or "ceased to speak". Let's see.. No, I don't have that.. There's a similar one, though - Well, maybe I can find it. Let's see... No..

"I've decided now to abandon my home fields which I no more shall see/. And the poplars will no longer rustle their winged foliage over me./ The low house will crouch lower without me. My old dog has been long-gone by now./ It seems God has me destined to perish on the cold, crooked, streets of Moscow./ I like this calligraphed, knitted, city, be it run-down or flimsy on sight./ Asia, all golden and dozing, lies asleep on the cupola's height,/ And wherever the moon shines at night-time when it shines, goddam, what a moon! /With head drooped I'll go into the alley of the friendly, familiar, saloon./ There's a hubbub in this hellish tavern, but I stay there as night staggers on,/ Reading prostitutes parts of my poems, guzzling vodka with bandits till the dawn/, And my heart beats still faster and faster and I already ramble and roar./ I am a lost one, like you. I'm a lost one and I can't go home any more./ The low couch will crouch lower without me. My old dog has been long gone by now./ It seems God has destined me to perish on the cold, crooked streets of Moscow."




Then, there's a lot of poems that were considered shocking. (For example,) in the middle of the Revolution he was saying:

"Play, accordion, play, or boredom, boredom./ Fingers ripple like the waves of  the street./ Drink with me, you lousy wench of a woman./ Come on and drink with me./ You're worn out from their love and their slobbers./ No patience, not a trace,/ and why are your blue eyes winking at me?/ You want a fist in your face? /You belong in a vegetable garden, a good scarecrow/. You've tormented me clear to my liver/ and you won't let go./ Play, accordion, play, my live one,/ and drink, fish, drink and sing. /I like that one there, the big titties,/ the stupid ding-a-ling./ You weren't the first one of my women./ Ah, there were many more,/ but this is the first time, believe me,/ I've ever been with such a whore./ Bravo!  The more painful, the louder,/ If here or there, so what?/ I'm not going to hang myself tonight. /Go to the devils, slut./ It's time to cold-shoulder your whole dog picketer/. I'm crying, forgive me, forgive me dear."



Well, this really was the most popular poetry in Russia. Everybody was following him at this time. What was going to happen to poor Esenin?  Because he was the most beautiful poet, and the strongest, and, as you could hear, with the most powerful voice. And he'd get up, invited formally to give speeches or poetry-readings, and get completely drunk and slobber and (be) absolutely horrible, insulting everybody.

Peter Orlovsky: I thought (Vladimir) Mayakovsky had a more powerful voice.

AG: Well, if you listen to the two voices, compare, as they come through, with all the machinery, after all (these) decades, come through on this little cassette machine, you can still hear that great hollow reverberation of Esenin's voice. And Mayakovsky's voice is not so strong on the tape. We can play that next, actually, because we should…  How many were here to hear Mayakovsky's voice (when we played it) last (semester)?  So, okay, we'll get to Mayakovsky's sound actually, but, in every case, up till the very last one or two readings, where he actually broke down crying, reading, because his poems were identical with his complete despair, and his last readings were, literally, saying farewell, that he was going to commit suicide, (that) he couldn't stand the pain of existence any more, up to those days, every reading ended in some kind of triumph, because once, sober or drunk, he got onto his texts, and began reciting his texts, the voice boomed, he was completely steady, and it was overwhelmingly true and tearful (and also, weirdly, was taken to express the actual  proletarian working people's feelings. All other pro-Soviet writing, and all the official writing was just official and it was fake, whereas the actual suffering and the actual pain and claustrophobia and drunkenness and everyday boredom and tavern intoxication and whorishness and arguing with the wives and drowning puppies, that was all the real life that people were actually leading (particularly, even, the alcoholism theme, because, as you may know, alcoholism is a major theme in Russian private life. It's an enormous problem. I'm told it's more debilitating to the Russian Army.. than… 

Student: Oh yeah

AG: …than the whole junk amphetamine heroin plague is here in America (and everyone knows, here in the big cities what a plague the junkie and amphetamine syndrome is)  But, apparently, the alcoholism is a more debilitating, deeper, universal, problem. And so he was a poet of that particular pain, and expressed it,  and expressed his own degeneration, falling apart, absolutely accurately and brilliantly. So it's this amazing paradox. Everybody loved him and, at the same time, nobody could be near him.

So there's this mixture of nostalgia for childhood, actually, as his main theme - nostalgia for innocence and childhood, and, in a sense, pre-Revolutionary peasant, or village, stability (and) fantastic experience out in the world with the wildest of the prima donnas of the stages of Europe, Isadora Duncan - with Sol Hurok. You know Sol Hurok? Anybody ever heard of him? Sol Hurok, in the (19)20's, (19)30's, (19)40's, (19)50's (up to the 'Sixties maybe? - is he still alive?) was the greatimpresario of ballets -(Sergei) Rachmaninoffs, (Vaslav) Nijinsky's- he had the Russian Ballet over. He was the one person, apparently, who could do some inter-cultural impresario work. So he was the figure of the impresario who would bring the opera here - the Moscow Ballet, or the opera, or the tumbling dancers, or the great French ballets, or giant symphony orchestras, over (to) the Metropolitan Opera or Carnegie Hall. So, the recollections of Mayakovsky (sic) by Hurok (who was a businessman, but was totally heartbrokenly impressed by Esenin, and horrified by the way he and his old lady, Isadora Duncan, were getting along - temper-tantrums in the Ritz Hotel, inthe Crillon, that brought all the waiters screaming, with all the police).



His (Esenin's) most famous poem is his declaration about being a hooligan. He even went back on the idea - in disillusionment finally, after seeing what was going on with Communism, going back home and realizing that you can't go home again to the peasant village (he even began abandoning that image, though he clung to it nostalgically, and declared war on the big cities, actually, also - the iron doom of the big cities, the iron belly).
In November 1920, he published a poem."Confessions of a Bully" [ИСПОВЕДЬ ХУЛИГАНА]- or "Hooligan-y", I guess - "The Hooligan's Confession", or "Confessions of a Bum", which is his most famous poem. He called himself a hooligan, a robber, a boor, but also the only singer of vintage Russia  - [to Peter Orlovsky] So, Peter, can you read "The Hooligan's Confession"

Peter Orlovsky: Yeah. You sure you don't want to read it?

AG: Nope. You're good at that.

Peter Orlovsky proceeds to read (in English translation) Sergei Esenin's ИСПОВЕДЬ ХУЛИГАНА  "The  Hooligan's Confession" ("The Tramp's Confession") ("Not everyone can sing…"…"Good old harassed Pegasus/who needs your easy jog?"…"I want to be the yellow sail/spread between the land/that we set sail for.")  - What is that? Peg-ass-sus?
AG: Pegasus
Peter Orlovsky: Pegasus
Students: Pegasus
Peter Orlovsky: "(W)ho needs your easy jog"?
AG: Pegasus is the horse of poetry that flies through the air and it was the Pegasus Cafe where they were hanging around.
Peter Orlovsky: "(W)ho needs your easy jog"?
AG: Well, it's too slow for him. "Jog". Who needs your slow walk?, so "jog" - jogging, jogging.
Peter Orlovsky: Then he says here, "the languor and mist of April evenings haunt my dreams"
AG: Yes, or death and the declining of the year..  Is that the end?
Peter Orlovsky: Yeah. Translated by Cid Corman

"Не каждый умеет петь,/Не каждому дано яблоком/Падать к чужим ногам./  Сие есть самая великая исповедь,/Которой исповедуется хулиган./ Я нарочно иду нечесаным,/С головой, как керосиновая лампа, на плечах./Ваших душ безлиственную осень/Мне нравится в потемках освещать./Мне нравится, когда каменья брани/Летят в меня, как град рыгающей грозы,/Я только крепче жму тогда руками/Моих волос качнувшийся пузырь./ Так хорошо тогда мне вспоминать
Заросший пруд и хриплый звон ольхи,/ Что где-то у меня живут отец и мать,/ Которым наплевать на все мои стихи,/Которым дорог я, как поле и как плоть,/Как дождик, что весной взрыхляет зеленя./Они бы вилами пришли вас заколоть/ За каждый крик ваш, брошенный в меня./ Бедные, бедные крестьяне!/ Вы, наверно, стали некрасивыми,/Так же боитесь бога и болотных недр./ О, если б вы понимали,/Что сын ваш в России/Самый лучший поэт!
Вы ль за жизнь его сердцем не индевели,/Когда босые ноги он в лужах осенних макал?/А теперь он ходит в цилиндре/ И лакированных башмаках./  Но живёт в нём задор прежней вправки/Деревенского озорника./ Каждой корове с вывески мясной лавки/ Он кланяется издалека./И, встречаясь с извозчиками на площади,/Вспоминая запах навоза с родных полей,/Он готов нести хвост каждой лошади,/Как венчального платья шлейф./  Я люблю родину./Я очень люблю родину!/ Хоть есть в ней грусти ивовая ржавь./Приятны мне свиней испачканные морды/ И в тишине ночной звенящий голос жаб./Я нежно болен вспоминаньем детства,/Апрельских вечеров мне снится хмарь и сырь./Как будто бы на корточки погреться/ Присел наш клен перед костром зари./ О, сколько я на нем яиц из гнезд вороньих,/ Карабкаясь по сучьям, воровал!/ Все тот же ль он теперь, с верхушкою зеленой?/ По-прежнему ль крепка его кора?/  А ты, любимый,/Верный пегий пес?!/От старости ты стал визглив и слеп/ И бродишь по двору, влача обвисший хвост,/Забыв чутьем, где двери и где хлев./О, как мне дороги все те проказы,/ Когда, у матери стянув краюху хлеба,/ Кусали мы с тобой ее по разу,/Ни капельки друг другом не погребав./  Я все такой же./Сердцем я все такой же./Как васильки во ржи, цветут в лице глаза./Стеля стихов злаченые рогожи,/Мне хочется вам нежное сказать/  Спокойной ночи!/Всем вам спокойной ночи!/ Отзвенела по траве сумерек зари коса.../Мне сегодня хочется очень/ Из окошка луну............/  Синий свет, свет такой синий!/В эту синь даже умереть не жаль./Ну так что ж, что кажусь я циником,/ Прицепившим к заднице фонарь!/Старый, добрый, заезженный Пегас,/ Мне ль нужна твоя мягкая рысь?/Я пришел, как суровый мастер,/Воспеть и прославить крыс./Башка моя, словно август,/Льется бурливых волос вином./  Я хочу быть желтым парусом/В ту страну, куда мы плывём"


[Angelo Branduardi - Confessioni di un Malandrino ["The Hooligan's Confession" ] - (Italian) video (with Sergey Bezrukov as Esenin)] 

AG: There's a lot more material to cover, but there's only one last poem I'd like to read, which is his suicide note. He was in the Hotel Angleterre, in (St.) Petersburg I think that is, Angleterre, oddly enough called the Hotel Angleterre, the international hotel, and he couldn't find any ink, and he got absolutely outraged, and he was drunk, so he slashed his arm and got some blood out and wrote a poem

"Goodbye, my friend, goodbye,/ My dear you're in my heart/, Predestined separation/ Promises a future meeting./ Goodbye, my friend, without handshake and words./ Don't grieve and sadden your brow./ In this life there's nothing new in dying,/ nor, of course, is living any newer."
Another translation:
"Goodbye , friend, goodbye,/ Dear friend, you're in my heart/, Our predestined parting/ holds a promise of a future meeting. /Goodbye my friend, no handclap, no words spoken./ Don't be sad. Don't knit your brows in sorrow/. In this life to die is nothing new./ But, of course, there is as little novelty in living."

До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья.
Милый мой, ты у меня в груди.
Предназначенное расставанье
Обещает встречу впереди.

До свиданья, друг мой, без руки, без слова,
Не грусти и не печаль бровей,—
В этой жизни умирать не ново,
Но и жить, конечно, не новей.

Peter Orlovsky: Who was his "dear friend"?

AG: Well, it's not known. Some people…  Ilya Ehrenberg guessed that it was (a) traditional saying goodbye in general. There was a note given to a friend who was married who was nearby and was taking care of him near the hotel. But the guy put it in his pocket and didn't read it until after he was dead, a day later. Or it might have been to a girlfriend of his that was taking care of him, too. Nobody knows.



[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-five minutes in and continuing until the end of the tape] 

July 4th and America

July 4, 2014, 3:00 am

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أمــــــــــــــــــريـــــــــكـــــــــــــا

. أمريكا لقد منحتك كل شيء وها أنا الآن لا شيء

أمريكا، دولارين وسبعة وعشرين سنتيمات،

سبعة عشر ينايرألف وتسع مائة وست وخمسين

. أنا لا أستطيع أن أحافظ على رأيي الخاص

أمريكا متى سننهي الحرب على الإنسانية؟

انكحي نفسك بقنبلتك الذرية!

أنا لا أشعر أنني بحالة جيدة

. لا تزعجني

. لن أكتب قصيدتي حتى يستقيم رأي

أمريكا متى ستصبحين بريئة؟

متى ستخلعين ملابسك؟

متى ستنظرين إلى نفسك من خلال اللحد؟

متى ستكونين جديرة بالمليون تروتسكي الذين يسكنون أرضك ؟

أمريكا لماذا تمتلئ مكتباتك بالدموع؟

أمريكا متى سترسلين بيضك إلى الهند؟

.لقدسئمت من رغباتك المخبولة

متى يمكنني الذهاب الى السوق الممتاز

لأشتري ما أحتاج اليه فقط بمحياي الجميل؟

أمريكا أنا وأنت نمثل الشيء المطلق بعد كل شىيء

. وليس العالم الأخر

. آلاتك تفوق مايلزم بالنسبة الي

. جعلتني أتوق الى أن أصبح قديسا

! يجب أن تكون هناك وسيلة أخرى لتسوية هذه المسألة

بوروز في  مدينة طنجة.

لا أعتقد أنه سوف يعود.

.الأمرأصبح مشؤوما

هل أنت مشؤوم كذلك؟

 أوأن المسألة تتعلق بشكل من أشكال النكتة الواقعية ؟

. أنا أحاول أن أصل إلى لب المسألة

. أنا أرفض أن أتخلى عن هاجسي

أمريكا توقفي عن دفعي.

أنا  أعرف ما أفعله.

. أمريكا ان أزهار البرقوق تسقط

أنا لم أقرأ الصحف منذ شهور،

. شخص ما يحكم عليه بتهمة القتل كل يوم

أمريكا أنا أتعاطف مع جماعة الوبليين                                                   

أمريكا  لقد كنت شيوعيا عندما كنت طفلا

. أنا لست آسفا

. أدخن القنب الهندي كلما أتيحت لي الفرصة

أجلس في بيتي لأيام لاتنتهي

. وأحدق في الورود داخل الغرفة

. عندما أذهب إلى الحي الصيني أسكر

لكنني لا أضاجع أحدا.

لقد اتخدت قراري

المتاعب قادمة.

. يجب أن تنظروا الي وأنا أقرء ماركس

. طبيبي النفسي يعتقد أنني تماما على حق

. لن أصلي للرب

. لدي رؤى صوفية واهتزازات كونية

أمريكا لم أخبرك بعد بما فعلته للعم ماكس

.عندما قدم من بلاد الروس

! أنا أخاطبكم

هل ستسمحون لمجلة التايم  بأن تديرحياتكم العاطفية ؟

. أنا مهووس بمجلة التايم

. أقرأها كل أسبوع

غلافها يحدق في وجهي

كلما مررت خلسة بدكان السكاكر المنزوي.

. قرأتها في الطابق السفلي لمكتبة بيركلي العامة

كانت تخبرني دائما عن المسؤولية:

رجال الأعمال جديين.

. منتجي الأفلام جديين

. كل الناس جديين باستثنائي

. يخطر لي أنني أمريكا

. أنا أتحدث لنفسي مرة أخرى

. آسيا تنتفض ضدي

. أنا لاأمتلك فرصة الرجل الصيني

. من الأفضل أن أ راجع مواردي الوطنية

مواردي الوطنية تتكون من:

 لفافتي قنب هندي،

ملايين الأعضاء التناسلية،

كتب شخصية غير خاضعة للرقابة

تسير بألف و أربع مائة ميل في الساعة.

.وخمسة وعشرين ألف مؤسسة للأمراض العقلية

أنا لن أقول شيئا عن سجوني

ولا عن ملايين المحرومين

 الذين يعيشون بأصيص أزهاري

. تحت ضوء خمس مائة شمس

لقد قضيت على دورالدعارة بفرنسا،

. طنجة ستكون محطتي الثانية

طموحي هو أن أكون رئيسا

. بالرغم من أنني كاثوليكي

أمريكا كيف يمكنني

 أن أكتب صلاة قدسية

 في مزاجك السخيف؟

سأواصل مثل هنري فورد

مقطوعاتي الشعريه فريدة مثل سياراته

الى درجة تجعل منها جنسين مختلفين.

أمريكا سأبيع لك مقطوعاتي الشعرية

 بألفين و خمسمائة دولار لكل مقطوعة شعرية.

 سأحذف خمسمائة دولار من مقطوعتك القديمة.

أمريكا أطلقي سراح توم موني

أمريكا أنقدي  الموالين لإسبانيا

أميركا ساكو وفانزيتي لايجب أن يموتا.

. أمريكا أنا أمثل أبناء سكوتسبورو

أمريكا عندما كنت في السابعة من عمري

كانت أمي تصحبني إلى اجتماعات خلية الشيوعيين

كانوا يبيعوننا الحمص،

حفنة للتذكرة الواحدة

 التذكرة تكلف نيكلا

كانت الخطابات مجانية.

 كان الكل بريئا  وعاطفيا اتجاه العمال

 كان الصدق يسود كل شىء

ليست لديك أية فكرة عن طيبة الحزب

في عام 1835 كان سكوت نيرين رجلا مسنا و عظيما

كان صنديدا حقيقيا

جعلتني الأم بلورأبكي

رأيت اسرائيل أمتربسيطا ذات مرة

. من المفترض أن يكون كل شخص جاسوسا

. أمريكا أنت لا تريدين حقا أن تذهبي إلى الحرب

. أمريكا انهم هؤلاء الروس الخبثاء

. هؤلاء الروس، هؤلاء الروس وهؤلاء الصنيون

. هؤلاء الروس

روسيا تريد أن تأكلنا  ونحن على قيد الحياة.

سلطة روسيا مجنونة

تريد أن تأخذ سياراتنا  من مرائبنا

تريد اللاستيلاء على شيكاغو.

 تحتاج الى مجلة ريدرز دايدجيست حمراء.

تريد أن تنقل مصانع سياراتنا الى سيبيريا..

. البيروقراطية الكبرى تشغل محطات غازنا

هذا شيء تشمئز له النفوس!

آ آ آ آ آ  آخ!

. روسيا تريد أن تعلم الهنود الحمر القراءة

  روسيا تحتاج الى الزنوج الأقوياء.

أأأأه! تريد أن تجعلنا نعمل ستة عشر ساعة كل يوم.

النجدة!

. أمريكا هذا أمر خطير جدا

. أمريكا هذا هو الانطباع الذي أحس به من خلال مشاهدة التلفاز

أمريكا هل هذا صحيح؟

. من الأفضل لي أن أتوجه مباشرة إلى العمل

فأنا لا أريد الانضمام إلى الجيش

أو إيقاف المخارط في مصانع الأجزاء الدقيقة،

. أنا على أي حال قصرالبصر ومريض نفسيا

 أمريكا، أنا أضع كتفي العليل على العجلة.

- بيركلي، 17 يناير 1956

من ديوان 1947-1980 لألين جينسبيرج، الذي نشرته هاربر ورو

حقوق الطبع والنشر © 1984 لألين جينسبيرج

 

Knitting Factory Kaddish

July 5, 2014, 3:00 am

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A couple of weekends ago, we featured Allen's 1995 rendition of "Howl" (recorded at the Knitting Factory in New York) as part of an intensive week of performance (it was Allen's intention to read comprehensively through his entire corpus). Today, we feature another reading from that engagement - a reading of his other ("Contest of Bards", notwithstanding) major epic poem -  Kaddish. 

Once again we are indebted to the extraordinaryUbuweb

Allen's introduction to Kaddish on that occasion ishere

"So this is an extensive poem. I'm not sure about the time, probably about half an hour - and written and begun in Paris, 1957 and (195)8  a few sections, the litanies and lyric sections at the end, and the narrative, New York City, Lower East Side, 1959, (19)60. So the full title is "Kaddish - Poem, Narrative, Hymn, Lament, Litany, Fugue", and the word "Kaddish" is from the Hebrew word for any number of a variety of prayers, this particular prayer for the dead, and the rhythm of the poem is based on the rhythm of the Kaddish, governing.. actually, it's probably dactylic cadence, andyou'll.. in the midst of the poem there is a sample of the Hebrew (so you'll get the basic rhythmic thrust. So it begins with a Proem  summarizing the images and the subject-matter, then, in the writing, I realized that I hadn't particularized, so the second part is a long narrative, the actual story, and then the third part is a.. the beginning of a lyric section, the fourth part, sort of an extenuated, or graduated, litany, that gets longer and longer before it diminishes, and then the fourth part, a kind of fugue, two seperate themes merging at the end. The poem was written for my mother Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956), who died in Pilgrim State Hospital in Long Island that year."

Kaddish Parts  I and II are hereandhere
Kaddish Hymmnn (Kaddish Part III) - here
Kaddish Parts  IV and V- hereandhere  

By way of contrast, here's an earlier (1959) recitation of the poem, (the opening section of the poem) given at the San Francisco State University Poetry Center - here

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Expansive Poetics - 71 (1962 - Khruschev at the Manege Exhibition)

June 24, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Nikita Khruschev at the Moscow Union of Artists 30th Anniversary Exhibition at the Manege, Moscow, December 1, 1962]

AG: "The way of the grave straightens a hunchback" - this is a Russian proverb actually - "Only a grave can straighten a hunchback" - which the late Nikita S Khrushchev made internationally famous - [to Student] - Do you know about that, Ivana [sic]? - by quoting it to the assembled writers and artists at the Manege Exhibit in 1961 (1962) - Does anybody know about that scene? - Khruschev went to an exhibition of modern Soviet painting in 1962. In nineteen-fifty..what is it? - fifty-three - 1956, he denouncedStalin.

Student: Fifty-six

AG: Fifty-six. Then there was a thaw. Then everything was opening up, and then the artists were.. nobody knew where the authority was, everybody started painting up a storm and the Futurists came back and the Constructivists came back and the Acmeistscame back and (Kazimir) Malevich was shown again for the first time, and abstract painters were shown.

And then there was a large exhibition in the exhibition hall called "the Manege", which was part of the.. I think that's in Moscow. It's a large hall that was used maybe originally as a stable by the Czar and then turned into an exhibition hall for posters, paintings, and so forth, and there are always giant exhibitions there (just as in the Louvrein Paris - in the back, they have great garden houses, which are used for special exhibits of (Claude) Monet and the Impressionists). The Manege is right near the Kremlin. I've been there. It's on a square near the Kremlin and you go in there and you get to see big shows - the show of the month.  So there was this new show of modern Russian painting in 1961, and Khruschev, slightly drunk as usual, came in and visited it, and freaked out when he saw the sculpture of a guy named (Ernst) Neizvestny (Neizvestny, a friend of (the Russian poet, Andrei) Voznesensky and (Bella) Akhmadulina and (Yevgeny) Yevtushenko - and Voluta Ackeljova? [sic?] , a modern folk-singing poet)


[Ernst Neizvestny]

So Khruschev gave a big speech saying (that) this was not Soviet art, this was not Russian art, he wouldn't stand for it (but, actually, it was like something out of  Sinclair Lewis, out of a small town, coming and seeing an exhibition of (Pablo) Picasso and Futurism  and Cubism, saying he doesn't understand it, "What's this all about? This ain't good art". He prefers to see some…  well.. who was the last person (who) said that in America.. the guy who liked Andrew Wyeth and didn't like any other kind of painting? (President Richard) Nixon had Andrew Wyeth's painting in The White House. However, he wasn't as intolerant).


[Andrew Wyeth on the cover of Time magazine, December 27, 1963]

Anyway, Khruschev denounced these artists and, really, in such no uncertain terms, and said they were creeps and (that) they were hunchbacks, and then said - "And only a grave can straighten out a hunchback" (which is an old Russian proverb). And so all these artists shuddered because they thought maybe this was a return to State control (and it was, to some extent, because Neizvestny now has got a loft in downtown New York (and lives as) an emigre. He had to leave (Russia in), about (the) mid 'Sixties, and start all over again - a big, heavy, bear-like drinking man (like a real Russian!), constantly (clutching) giant bottles of vodka, lifted in the air for any visitor who comes by. I went to see him with Voznesensky when Voznesensky was in New York). So he was the object of Khruschev's attack. It's an interesting shot. His [Mandelstam's] was - "the way the grave straightens/a hunchback". (1937).  


[Ernst Neizvestny - Gravestone for Nikita Khrushchev (1971)]

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-eight minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-two minutes in ]   

Expansive Poetics - 79 (Sergei Esenin - 4)

July 7, 2014, 3:00 am

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from August 6 1981 at Naropa and Allen's on-going Expansive Poetics (Russian Poetry) class

AG: (So, I'll continue with Sergei Esenin) today and go on to Anna Akhmatova, and then, I think, leave Russian poetry and then go on to French Surrealists, and some Spanish..  

In 1922, by Esenin  [editorial note - 1921, actually]

"I'm not crying, I'm not calling, I'm not complaining. Everything passes. White smoke from apple trees stricken by the golden dust of fading. I'll no longer be young, it seems. So you shall no longer beat and tremble, my heart, subdued by autumn's damp. And the land of cotton-printed birch trees won't entice me back to be a tramp. Vagrant spirit, now so rarely, rarely, do your stir my lips with molten fire. My lost forever youthful freshness, my tempest eyes, my flood-tide of desire. In my longings now even I'm a miser. Life, what have you been, a dream? It's as if one noisy springtime morning I rushed by upon a rosy steed. Each man has on earth a brief span - from the maples copper leaves drift by. May you everlastingly be blessed that you came to blossom, and to die."

["Не жалею, не зову, не плачу,/ Все пройдет, как с белых яблонь дым./ Увяданья золотом охваченный,/ Я не буду больше молодым./ Ты теперь не так уж будешь биться,/ Сердце, тронутое холодком,/ И страна березового ситца/ Не заманит шляться босиком./ Дух бродяжий! ты все реже, реже/ Расшевеливаешь пламень уст/ О, моя утраченная свежесть,/ Буйство глаз и половодье чувств!/Я теперь скупее стал в желаньях,/ Жизнь моя, иль ты приснилась мне?/ Словно я весенней гулкой ранью/ Проскакал на розовом коне./ Все мы, все мы в этом мире тленны,/ Тихо льется с кленов листьев медь.../ Будь же ты вовек благословенно,/ Что пришло процвесть и умереть"]





So, 1922, drinking a lot, feeling his original inspiration fading (although stronger and stronger in his poetry actually), he begun to suffer hallucinations and got up on stages and made big scandals, like in Berlin, May 1922 (same time as this poem), he was, according to… this is (from) a book by Gordon McVay on Isadora Duncan and Esenin's life together, travelling back to Moscow from America - "He was due to give a lecture in the Schubert Hall.Esenin staggered on stage with a glass of wine in his hand, splashing in all directions. From the stage he said absurd things, roared with laughter, cursed the audience. People tried to lead him off. He refused to go. Finally he hurled his glass on the ground and began to recite "The Hooligan's Confession" to the audience, which, by now was on (their) feet and shouting at him. The poem ended in a loud ovation".

And, apparently, what he would do, both at parties and readings, was actually totally destroy the scene, or in his hotel room, smashing particularly mirrors and windows,  from the Hotel Crillon in Paris to hotels in Brussels and Berlin., and  suffering a specific hallucination (which was, apparently, recurrent), of a black man, like a devil, who came into his room and sat on his bed and stared at him and began accusing him of abusing his poetry, a messenger - the black man. He finally wrote a poem about it, which he recited very rarely and only when he was absolutely , totally, in despair and drunk, and apparently it would reduce everybody to tears.

 [McVay, again] -  "At the Hotel Creon in mid-February he had smashed all the mirrors. On May 1923 he was to swing a candelabra toward a mirror, which crashed to the floor. On one occasion toward the end of her (Isadora Duncan's) life, the poet stood in the middle of the room, weeping, sprinkled with fragments of glass from a mirror he had smashed. A close acquaintance during the last year recalls, "I found him drunk twice with top hat and walking stick in fromt of a large mirror, with an indescribable, inhuman, ironic, smile, talking to his double reflection, and then silently peering at himself".  "The Black Man", so candidly self-indicting, shows the extent of the poet's despair after the years in Moscow's bohemia and his visit to..Europe and America." And then a friend writes - "In the last two years of his life , Esenin recited this poem very rarely. He didn't like speaking of it and looked upon it with distress and pain. He recited it only in moments of extreme intoxication and when in an especially dark frame of mind".

I've never seen a translation of this poem before, which is apparently his great black poem before his suicide, and there is one in this book. It would be interesting to compare this text (which is pre-suicidal) withGregory Corso's text of (the) visit to the Muse, where he challenges the Muse back. But here, "The Black Man" challenges Esenin. 

Student: How many years ago did (Gregory)  Corso commit suicide?
AG: He didn't commit suicide. Quite the opposite! - How many years ago did you commit suicide?
Student: Well, suicide..
AG: Not physically.
Student: …is smoking cigarettes
AG: Yes, I've been smoking the last few days
Student: Yeah
AG ..myself.  So "The Black Man" ["ЧЕРНЫЙ ЧЕЛОВЕК"]  is to me, then... "My friend.." This is serious, (so) if you want to make a joke of it… [Allen proceeds to read Esenin's poem "The Black Man", in its entirety, in English translation]  - "My friend, my friend/I'm ill, I'm so very ill/I myself cannot fathom the cause of this pain." - [(talking about Isadora Duncan here)] - "Happiness, he contended/ Is quickness of hand and brain/Everone who is slow/Soon acquires a forlorn reputation./ What does it matter/ that sorrow and pain/Are caused by hypocrisy/ And affectation?/  In storms and in tempests/in daily routine/When your losses are heavy/And when you're dejected,/The knack of appearing naive and serene/is the highest of arts that the world has perfected" - [(Esenin replying)] - ""You man in black!/ Do not dare to be so hard!/ It's not your profession/To rummage in shit/What to me is the life/Of some scandalous bard?/Read to others, not me/ That poetic testament."/ The man in black/ Stares me straight in the face/And his eyes become clouded     /With pale-blue vomit/ - As if he were saying/I'm a thief and disgrace/Who has fleeced a close friend/ And slept soundly upon it./  My friend, my friend/I'm ill so very ill/I cannot fathom the cause of this pain./Is the wind whisling shrill/In a barre and desolate desert,/Or like leaves in September,/Does alcohol fall on my brain?/ A frosty night,/ The crossroads are calm, at a standstill/I'm alone by the window/Expecting no friend and no guest./All the lowlands are covered/With lime and with soft crumbly sandstone/And the trees in our garden/Have gathered like horsemen at rest/ Somewhere the bird of the night/Ill-bodingly weeps on the air./And the hoofs of the horsemen/Give out a sharp wooden note./And again that black man/Takes his seat in my chair,/Slightly raising his top hat/And casually doffing his coat./ "Listen, listen!"/ He croaks, as he peers in my face/Bending closer/And closer towards me,/ I have never seen/A man who is base/Let insomnia plague him/So untowardly./ Well suppose I'm mistaken/There's (a) full moon tonight./What else could the great man/Require in his drowsiness?/Maybe she will come furtively with her flabby thighs,/And to her you'll recite/All your lyrical cynical lousiness?/ O I love all you poets!/A comical lot./For my heart always welcomes/A story that's known to each nation --/ How a long-haired monstrosity/Lectures a girl who's all spots/On world-shattering themes/While perspiring with sexual frustration/ I don't know, I've forgotten,/In some village or other/MaybeKaluga/Or Ryazan - once I knew/A little boy lived /With a peasant, his mother,/His hair was yellow,/And his eyes were pale blue.../  And then he grew up/And (became) a poet what's more/Of limited power,/Yet ready and smart,/And he called some woman/Aged forty or more/A despicable strumpet/And the joy of his heart..." -  [- (Reply by Esenin) - ] - ""Black Man!/You are a loathsome guest/The men who first say this/ About you were wise"./I'm enraged and distraught,/And in my distress/ I hurl my walking-stick/Straight at his eyes.." - [(That's how the mirrors got broken!)] -  "…The moon is dead/ It is dawn, the dark blue of the sky/Awful night!/Night, what dreams you have dashed!/In my top hat I stand./There's no one nearby/ I'm alone.../And the mirror is smashed…" 

It's actually a pretty powerful poem. In Russian, apparently, the recitation of it was so completely heart-rendering because the poet, at that point, had become completely identical with the poem, And all the literary people and poetry-lovers and the large intelligensia that were following every step (knew about it) - and the masses also, because he was the most popular poet among the working people, (so that, (as I said), (when) Madam (Nadezhda) Mandelstamwas talking with fellow workers in a shoe-factory, or something, he was the only poet that they knew and could quote by heart). Everybody was following him. And this was a poem that was public, and that people heard about and rarely heard him speak, so everybody knew where he was at, in 1923, when this poem was written, (or (19)23 or (19)24).  

["Друг мой, друг мой,/Я очень и очень болен./Сам не знаю, откуда взялась эта боль/.То ли ветер свистит/Над пустым и безлюдным полем,/То ль, как рощу в сентябрь,/Осыпает мозги алкоголь./  Голова моя машет ушами,/Как крыльями птица,/Ей на шее ноги/Маячить больше невмочь./Черный человек,/Черный, черный,/Черный человек/На кровать ко мне садится,/Черный человек/Спать не дает мне всю ночь/  Черный человек/Водит пальцем по мерзкой книге/ И, гнусавя надо мной,/Как над усопшим монах,/Читает мне жизнь/Какого-то прохвоста и забулдыги,/Нагоняя на душу тоску и страх./Черный человек,/Черный, черный.../ «Слушай, слушай, —/Бормочет он мне, —/В книге много прекраснейших/Мыслей и планов./Этот человек/Проживал в стране/Самых отвратительных/Громил и шарлатанов./  В декабре в той стране/Снег до дьявола чист,/И метели заводят/Веселые прялки./Был человек тот авантюрист,/Но самой высокой/И лучшей марки./  Был он изящен,/К тому ж поэт,/Хоть с небольшой,/Но ухватистой силою,/  И какую-то женщину,/Сорока с лишним лет,/Называл скверной девочкой/И своею милою»./  «Счастье, — говорил он, —/Есть ловкость ума и рук./Все неловкие души/За несчастных всегда известны./ Это ничего,/ Что много мук/Приносят изломанные/И лживые жесты./В грозы, в бури,/В житейскую стынь,/При тяжелых утратах/И когда тебе грустно,/Казаться улыбчивым и простым —/Самое высшее в мире искусство»./«Черный человек!/Ты не смеешь этого!/ Ты ведь не на службе/Живешь водолазовой./Что мне до жизни/Скандального поэта./Пожалуйста, другим/Читай и рассказывай»/  Черный человек/Глядит на меня в упор./ И глаза покрываются/ Голубой блевотой./Словно хочет сказать мне,/Что я жулик и вор,/Так бесстыдно и нагло/ Обокравший кого-то./.Друг мой, друг мой,/Я очень и очень болен./Сам не знаю, откуда взялась эта боль./То ли ветер свистит/ Над пустым и безлюдным полем,/То ль, как рощу в сентябрь,/Осыпает мозги алкоголь./  Ночь морозная.../Тих покой перекрестка./Я один у окошка,/Ни гостя, ни друга не жду.Вся равнина покрыта/Сыпучей и мягкой известкой,/И деревья, как всадники,/Съехались в нашем саду./ Где-то плачет/Ночная зловещая птица,/Деревянные всадники/Сеют копытливый стук./Вот опять этот черный/На кресло мое садится,/ Приподняв свой цилиндр/И откинув небрежно сюртук./  «Слушай, слушай! —/Хрипит он, смотря мне в лицо./Сам все ближе/И ближе клонится. —/Я не видел, чтоб кто-нибудь/Из подлецов/Так ненужно и глупо/Страдал бессонницей./ Ах, положим, ошибся!/Ведь нынче луна./Что же нужно еще/ Напоенному дремой мирику?/ Может, с толстыми ляжками/Тайно придет «она»,/И ты будешь читать/Свою дохлую томную лирику?/ Ах, люблю я поэтов!/Забавный народ!/В них всегда нахожу я/Историю, сердцу знакомую,/ Как прыщавой курсистке/Длинноволосый урод/Говорит о мирах,/Половой истекая истомою./Не знаю, не помню,/В одном селе,/Может, в Калуге,/А может, в Рязани,/Жил мальчик/В простой крестьянской семье,/Желтоволосый,/С голубыми глазами.../ И вот стал он взрослым,/К тому ж поэт,/Хоть с небольшой,/Но ухватистой силою,/И какую-то женщину,/Сорока с лишним лет,/Называл скверной девочкой/И своею милою»/«Черный человек!/Ты — прескверный гость!/Эта слава давно/Про тебя разносится»/.Я взбешен, разъярен,/И летит моя трость/Прямо к морде его,/В переносицу.../....Месяц умер,/ Синеет в окошко рассвет./Ах, ты, ночь!/Что ты, ночь, наковеркала!/Я в цилиндре стою./Никого со мной нет./Я один.../И — разбитое зеркало…"]

AG: I think we went over two versions of his last poem (about "to live is…"). What was that? - "To live is..

Student: Nothing new.

AG: Nothing new. "Dying is nothing new, but to live is nothing new either." 





AG: A last poem of his. A last poem, 1924, before he died:

"One by one we gradually are leaving/ for the land of quietness and bliss/. Soon maybe I  also shall be needing/ to embrace the hour of my release./ Beloved birch trees of the forest,/ Mother Earth, you sands upon the plain,/ Contemplating those who died before us/, I can't hide my longing and my pain./ I was too much in love with this world,/ Of the things that enslave our soul./ May the aspens find a peace untrammeled/ As they gaze into the rosy waves./ I pondered many thoughts in silence,/ Many songs quietly conceived./ On this dark gloomy planet,/ I am happy that I lived and breathed,/ I'm happy that I fondled women,/ Crumpled flowers, tumbled in grass,/ And that I never struck animals, our brothers./ They never felt pain from my anger./ I'm aware that we'll find no forest/ And no ringing of the swan-necked rye./ That is why all those who died before us/ Always chill my heart until I cry./ I'm aware that there won't be any meadows/ Glowing golden in that misty land. /That's why the people are so precious/ Who walk on earth with me hand-in-hand." - [(That was Esenin's mortal appreciation)]

["Мы теперь уходим понемногу/В ту страну, где тишь и благодать./Может быть, и скоро мне в дорогу/Бренные пожитки собирать/  .Милые березовые чащи!/Ты, земля! И вы, равнин пески!/Перед этим сонмом уходящих/Я не в силах скрыть моей тоски./  Слишком я любил на этом свете/Все, что душу облекает в плоть./Мир осинам, что, раскинув ветви,/Загляделись в розовую водь!  Много дум я в тишине продумал,/Много песен про себя сложил,/И на этой на земле угрюмой/Счастлив тем, что я дышал и жил./  Счастлив тем, что целовал я женщин,/Мял цветы, валялся на траве/И зверье, как братьев наших меньших,/Никогда не бил по голове./  Знаю я, что не цветут там чащи,/Не звенит лебяжьей шеей рожь./Оттого пред сонмом уходящих/Я всегда испытываю дрожь./Знаю я, что в той стране не будет/Этих нив, златящихся во мгле.../Оттого и дороги мне люди,/Что живут со мною на земле."]

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at the start of the tape and concluding, approximately fourteen-and-a-quarter minutes in]

Expansive Poetics - 80 (Anna Akhmatova - 1)

July 8, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Anna Akhmatova (1889-1996) in 1924 - Photograph by Moisei Nappelbaum]

AG: (Now) I wanted to move on to Anna Akhmatova, who lived… (Sergei) Esenin died 1925, (Vladimir) Mayakovsky (allegedly) committed suicide 1930, (Nikolay) Gumilev was shot 1923, (Velimir) Khlebnikov starved to death in 1923, (Osip) Mandelstam died of cold and starvation in a work camp in Siberia somewhere between 1937 and 1940, although nobody knows exactly when. Esenin's friend, (Nikolay) Klyuev…what year did he die?

Peter Orlovsky: (19)35.

AG: (19)35, coming back from six years exile in Siberia, with a suitcase full of poems, but then he never got back to Moscow and nobody knows what happened to him, and the rumor and supposition is that he was shot by the secret police on his way back. So his suitcase full of poems never survived.

Anna Akhmatova survived everybody. (She was) the one person that survived the whole thing, all the way through. She had married Gumilev, who was shot in 1923, but they had divorced in (19)21. She published a few books of very hard chiselled poems early and, apparently, she was the innovator of a whole new style in Acmeism - the school (which is roughly the equivalent to the same movement in American and British poetry which is coming down from the misty romanticism of Symbolism, avoiding the proletarian cult of (the) stupid simplicity of the Socialist Realist writers, trying to get hard factual images drawn from actual life). And so she's known for a kind of dignity and solemnity and straightforwardness in her poetry and in her person, and she looked like a really beautiful aristocratic lady. She was a friend of (Boris) Pasternak and Mandelstam. You remember when Mandelstam was arrested in (19)34, she was there in the room when the police came to get him. She was in constant contact withMadame Mandelstam and with the other poets. They were a very small group of beleagured, aristocratic, elite high minds who held Russian poetry in their hands, held the word of Russia in their hands (as against the fake language of "Truth" newspaper -Pravda- and as against the fake language of the accusations against them and twenty mllion other people who were taken off).
She had a son, Leo, who was arrested in the (19)30's as a way of keeping hold on her. That was a deliberate and personal shot by (Joseph) Stalin to keep her in line. And she was forbidden to publish. And she was attacked during the (19)30's.
Then with the war and with (Adolf) Hitler, there was a moment of recognition in Russia that they had to get behind themselves, they had to get behind Mother Russia, and even Stalin, weeping, went on the radio when Hitler attacked, and, instead of saying "comrades", he said "brothers and sisters", appealing to (his) fellow Russians to fight Hitler.
And so, she was brought out of obscurity and assigned the task of summoning up the Russian people with her poetry to fight Hitler. And so a little book of poems of hers was published in the (19)40's, and  she  wrote some patriotic, nationalistic poetry for radio-broadcast. She stayed a good deal of time in Stalingrad, Leningrad, Petersburg….I'm sorry, in Leningrad (or Petersburg which was renamed Leningrad), during the early (19)40's, when Hitler's armies, or the German armies, surrounded Leningrad and there was almost starvation conditions in the city. A few people, after about a year-and-a-half, were evacuated on a plane, and so she left on a plane, carrying with her (Osip) Mandelstam's manuscripts and a few other rare manuscripts of poetry that had not been published before.

[Gregory Corso arrives in the class] - There's another chair there. You can pass one (up)..

Gregory Corso: I thought one out of three died in that siege from starvation.

AG: In Leningrad.

Gregory Corso: Leningrad…

AG: It was total devastation.

Now she had grown up in Leningrad, and was one of the Leningrad circle of poets, and she had known the Stray Dog Cafeand Alexander Blok and all the great poets, pre-War and post-War - (Velimir) Khlebnikov, and everybody. So she'd survived. (Osip) Mandelstam by this time was dead - 1940. Everybody else was dead that she knew, except a few younger (poets, like Marina) Tsvetaeva (the other woman that we haven't dealt with is Tsvetaeva, who was more of an elite, aristocratic social class, who left Russia in 1919 or (1920). And then, for some patriotic reasons, I think, despite what she knew after living in Paris, Tsvetaeva came back to Russia in the late, late, late (19)30's - (19)39 or (19)40 - with her son from Paris, and, almost within a year after she came back, her son was shot by the police in jail, and so Tsvetaeva, during that same year in Leningrad, committed suicide - and she was  the big sister for Akhmatova. So, by this time there's hardly anybody left of that group of major poets, except Pasternak and Akhmatova).

In 1940, she assembled a long poem composed of fragments that she had suppressed. There was even, at one point when they were coming to get her son, that Akhmatova burned all her manuscripts that she'd saved up during the late (19)2o's, early (19)30's (I think sometime in 1936 she had to burn everything, because what she'd written, if it were found, would have been enough to hang her too). She was taken out of obscurity and put to patriotic work , and then, as soon as the War was over, there was an attack on her by (Andrei) Zhdanov (who was the mouthpiece for Stalin in literature) saying she was a rich bitch and an aristocrat and of no use to the people and that her poetry was egocentric and individualistic and didn't participate in the actual society, and (that) she was a decadent left-over from the Stray Dog Cafe in 1912, and she ought to be beaten, or put on trial, or, certainly not published.
Then her son was arrested, after a press campaign against her, because she was then, after (Osip) Mandelstam, the most popular poet, so it was necessary to destroy her in public to diminish her influence. Her son was arrested in (19)45, I think, immediately after the War, and put in jail as a way, again, of keeping her under control. And so she spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours in a line in front of the Yezhov prison - I'm sorry, a prison outside of Leningrad, and the head of the police was (Nikolai) Yezhov, I believe,  and so they're called "the Yeshov years", or something.

People whose relatives were arrested.. I think we didn't go through this, did we? There was a bureau where you could bring packages and money to people in jail - a bureau in Leningrad, or in each big city. There were twenty million in Siberia, so that meant twenty million families were going to these windows, which was like a bureau, where you had a blank wall and one window, and a line, of maybe a hundred or two hundred people, waiting to either get a letter or give a letter. Letters from Siberia were rare, letters to were allowed through and money and giftts (and) clothes were being sent. And if your person who was in Siberia was either dead or transferred, you would be told that there was no news (and you didn't know then if he was dead, but no news at the desk probably meant death, likely death rather than transfer, because, if they were transfering them, there would be some kind of paperwork that would come in a month or two - so you might be waiting a month or two to find out if your prisoner was dead )

She spent hundreds of hours on this line, and the poem takes place as recollections on this line. But it's an assembly of different poems written in (19)35, (19)39, (19)40, March 1940, and so it's a "Requiem", actually for all the dead poets and all the prisoners. You have it in your anthologies, if you can open it up to that, in the Russian section - Akhmatova (born) 1889. What I've done is taken sections from it, I haven't printted the whole poem. I've just (taken) the most startling stanzas. So we'll go through that.



[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately fourteen-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-five-and-a-half minutes in] 

Expansive Poetics - 81 (Anna Akhmatova - 2)

July 9, 2014, 3:00 am

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(Anna Akhmatova's "Requiem") was never actually published in Russia complete, (and) the manuscript was passed toSir Isaiah Berlin, an English Russophile, scholar, specialist, (who) managed to visit her just after the war, when the war was won. There was a little period of confusion when people could go in and out and see each other, and so Isaiah Berlin went and had a long conversation with her, as if it (he) were a visitor from another world, or "a visitor from the future", as she later called it, and brought back manuscripts, (or brought back her manuscripts), which she put in Oxford University, so that when she, finally, in 1965, was allowed out of Russia for the first time, she went to Oxford to look at her manuscripts and edit them for printing by Oxford University Press. And that'sthe only complete edition that there is. [editorial note - the history of "Requiem" in English translation - Allen, speaking in 1981, is presumably speaking of Amanda Haight and Peter Norman's Requiem in Anna Akhmatova - A Poetic Pilgrimage(1967) (which reprints pretty much the entirety of the poem) - D.M.Thomas'1965 translation (later revised), omitting the "Dedication", takes considerable liberties (even more so, Robert Lowell's of the previous year, subsequently included in Imitations), Richard McKane's 1969 plain prose translation in Selected Poems are at least, linguistically accurate and respectful of the original text), Herbert Marshall (praised elsewhere by Allen for his Mayakovsky translations) is, in 1972, in Russian Literature Triquarterly, the first translator to attempt to preserve the original rhyme-scheme.Stanley Kunitz and Max Haywood(presenting parallel texts) attempt to "present a new poem, sprung from the matrix of the old, drenched in memories of its former existence". More recently, and perhaps definitively, Judith Hemschemeyer's translation is available in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova - Volume 2(1990 - reissued in a revised and single volume, 2000) (see also her note "Translating Akhmatova" (1990) in Translation Review). 


[Anna Akhmatova in 1950 (aged 60)] 

So it begins - "No foreign sky protected me" - [As it protected (Marina) Tsvetaeva, Ivan Bunin, and others, who fled Russia] - "No foreign sky protected me,/no stranger's wing shielded my face./I stand as witness to the common lot/survivor of that time, that place" -  That epigraph, 1961 - Then, instead of a preface, it's a little anecdote from the prison line] - "In the terrible years of the Yezhov  terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in line/ outside the prison in Leningrad" - [for her son] - "One day somebody in the crowd identified me./ Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course,/ never heard me called by name before" - [in the line there] - "Now she started out of the torpor common to/ us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there)/ -  "Can you describe this?"/ And I said, "I can"./ Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face." - [Then, "Dedication" - let's see, there are other passages, but they're not as.. yeah.. there's  different translations to this - I'll read you one, a different translation than what we have here (in the anthology), so that you have a Cubistview of the poem] 

- "Mountains bow beneath that boundless sorrow/ And the mighty river stops its flow" - [Mountains stoop, mountains bow] - "But those prison bolts are tried and thorough,/ And beyond them every "convict's burrow"/ Tells a tale of mortal woe./ Someone, somewhere, feels the cool wind bracing,/ Sees the sun go nestling down to rest./ We know nothing, we, condemned to facing/ Still the sickening clank of keys, the pacing/ Of the sentries with their heavy steps./ We'd rise, as for early Mmass, each morning,/ Cross the calloused city, wend our way,/ Meet, more lifeless than the dead, half mourning,/ Watch the sun sink, the Neva mist forming,/ But with hope still singing far away./ Sentenced... And at once the tears come rolling,/ Cut off from the world, quite on her own,/ Heart reduced to shreds and almost falling,/ Just as if some lout had sent her sprawling./ Still... she staggers... on her way... Alone." -   [the translation (continues)..] "…That moan,/ That sudden spurt of woman's tears,/ Shows one distinguished from the rest,/ As if they'd knocked her to the ground/ And wrenched the heart out of her breast,/ Then let her go, reeling, alone." - [The traditional thing was that everybody was quiet and whispered on those lines, and there was total, supposed, discipline. Everybody was totally intimidated (as you might experience it if you go down in the Tombs in New Yorkand have to go into Court), just the heaviness of the law on everybody's soul. So nobody ever murmured, or made any kind of a scene, but, once in a while, the door would slam shut, because a lady was told (that) "No news", (or "No message", or "No record"), no record of the prisoner, after, say, being on the line for five years, all of a sudden they'd say there's no record of this prisoner any more (which meant their death-sentence, actually - the death sentence). And then, occasionally, someone would freak out (though very often, not, most of the time, not). But, occasionally, somebody  would actually start screaming and make a scene and begin banging on the window, (or the window would slam shut and then people would have to bang on the window). The others in the line would say. "Come on, don't make a scene. I'm waiting to get to my.. It's my turn. You've had your news.. You've waited and you've had your chance".  So there's a sort of situation where one person waiting was set against another, and, if something horrible happened, the others were told to buzz off  - the one to whom the tragedy had befallen was told to quit and get out and not make a scene and not disrupt and not take up other people's time because there's a line of another hundred people behind them] - "..at once, the tears  come rolling,/ Cut off from the world, quite on her own,/ Heart reduced to shreds, almost falling,/Just as if some lout had sent her sprawling./ Still... she staggers... on her way... alone" - [And if she doesn't "stagger on her way", there are guards there to drag them off] - "Where are now the friends of my misfortune,/ Those that shared my own two years of hell?" - [(the other people on he line, the "friends of (her) misfortune")] - "What do the Siberian snow-winds caution,/ What bodes the moon's circle for their fortunes?/ Theirs be this, my greetings and farewell". [To them I cry hail and farewell"] - (And the "hail and farewell is an echo of Catullus'"ave atque vale" - Horace, I suppose (editorial note - no, Catullus) - "To you, hail and farewell") 

Then, "Prologue" - "That was the time only the dead/ could smile, delivered from their wars,/and the sign, the soul, of Leningrad/dangled outside its prison house" - [ (The hung corpses)] - "..and the regiments of the condemned/herded in the railroad-yards/shrank from the engine's whistle song/Whose burden went, "Away pariahs!"/The stars of death stood over us./And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed/Under the crunch of bloodstained boots,/under the wheels of Black Marias.." -  So this is tougher than anybody else's poetry, anybody else who reacted - (Velimir) Khlebnikov made a joke out of the terror, (Osip) Mandelstam made more of an aesthetic cry (though there's a few lines in Mandelstam like this -"hillocks of human heads into the horizon", if you remember). But this is direct Imagism, almost like direct Social Realist Imagism, almost - except the reverse, rather than praising the state, it was a direct (unflinching) look at the state.

Student:  Er..excuse me.. was her earlier.. did she write earlier stuff on the same subject with a less harsh tone because this is… (How was the earlier stuff?)

AG: More ironic, more ironic. But here, by (19)35 to (19)40, after her son was arrested, and she'd been through this, it became tragic.. sort of heroic, tragic beyond any kind of redemption - the situation so totally black that there was no way out.  Except poetry. Except leaving a record behind, except witnessing.  It seems to be one of the major themes.. It seems to be one of the major themes in all of Russian terror poetry, and poetry from the camps, which is everybody went crazy, practically, except a few rare souls who lived only to witness it, that is to say who decided that the only thing they could do for life anymore was to bear record (because nobody knew in the cities, nobody knew the horror) -  sort of like the concentration camps in Germany..there was one camp where three million people died, actually, thirty-six degrees below where Mandelstam was sent and where he presumably died -Kolyma, a camp in Siberia called Kolyma. Three million people died in that one place over that one period, 1935 to 1953, probably. 

to be continued

[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately twenty-five-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-four-and-a-half minutes in] 

Expansive Poetics - 82 (Anna Akhmatova - 3)

July 10, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)]


Allen's discussion of Anna Akhmatova's "Requiem" continues, 

AG: This (passage) is discussing her son, I think, this next one - "At dawn they came and took you away./ You were my dead - I walked behind./ In the dark room children cried,/ The holy candle gasped for air.Your lips were chill rom the ikon's kiss/sweat bloomed on your brow - those deathless flowers!/ Like the wives of Peter's troopers in Red Square/ I'll stand and howl under the Kremlin towers." - There was a revolt among the private troops of Peter the Great- 1400 troops, so he had them all slaughtered in the Kremlin. And the wives of this little army came outside the Kremlin and screamed for days. It's like old barbaric Russian history. She's reflecting old Russian history and Russian tradition, actually.

And the next is one of my favorites, because there's one image in it that's so absolutely accurate and chilling.I mentioned it before  ['To Death" (Section VIII of Requiem]- "You will come in any case - so why not now?/How long I wait and wait.The bad times fall./I have put out the light and opened the door/for you, because you are simple and magical./Assume, then, any form that suits your wish,/take aim and blast at me with poisoned shot,/or strangle me like an efficient mugger,/or else infect me - typhus be my lot -" - [typhus and  malnutrition, starvation, were the lot of Khlebnikov] - "or spring out of the fairytale you wrote,/the one we're sick of hearing, day and night,/where the blue hatband marches up the stairs,/led by the janitor, pale with fright." - [That's the police, the police that came. I think we explained those two lines before. The police that came had that same uniform with the blue hat-band. And that's a really uncanny image - "where the blue hat-band marches up the stairs,/led by the janitor, pale with fright."… "It's all the same to me. The Yenisei swirls," - [ I guess that's a river, maybe near Moscow, Petersburg , or wherever she was living] - "the North Star shines, as it will forever,/and the blue lustre of my loved one's eyes/is clouded over by the final horror" - [So it's absolute, there's no way out.] 

The"House on the Fontanka"is the house that she lived in on the outskirts of Petersburg, which was a little aristocratic village where there was a school where (Alexander) Pushkin went to school, and which she'll recollect at greater length in a later poem, her masterpiece (which I don't have xeroxed here, because I didn't xerox it up, because I didn't understand it completely, but we have it to look at, in any case), "A Poem Without A Hero", which comes later.
"Already madness lifts its wing/to cover half my soul./That tastes of opiate wine!/Lure of the dark valley!/  Now everything is clear/I admit my defeat. The tongue/of my ravings in my ear/is the tongue of a stranger./  No use to fall down on my knees.and beg for mercy's sake./Nothing I counted mine, out of my life/is mine to take -/  not my son's terrible eyes,/not the elaborate stone flower/of grief, nor the day of the storm/not the trial of the visiting hour/  not the dear coolness of his hands,/not the lime trees agitated shade/not the thin cricket-sound/of consolation's parting word" - [Those are really accurate - "the thin cricket-sound/of consolation's parting word", " the trial(s) of the visiting hour (of the prison).]

Then, the epilogue to the poem. The earlier poems, you notice here (that) they're pretty despairing. After all the chutzpah and brass and imagination and enthusiasm and arrogance and beauty and liveliness and spriteliness and fun and bohemianism of the Stray Dog Cafe years and ofthe founding of poetic movements like Acmeism and Futurism and literary fights between them, now she, who's relatively aristocratic and elegant and stern and strong and noble-faced - "I have learned how faces fall to bone,/how under the eyelids terror lurks,/how suffering inscribes on cheeks/the hard lines of its cuneiform texts,/how glossy black or ash-fair locks/turn overnight to tarnished silver,/how smiles fade on submissive lips,/and fear quavers in a dry titter./And I pray not for myself alone.../for all who stood outside the jail,/in bitter cold or summer's blaze,/with me under that blind red wall."

 - Then, the last of the poems in this series (you don't have the whole text here, the whole text is worth looking at. there are other little parts). (This) is the most powerful of the pieces, I guess - "Remembrance hour returns with the turning year,/I see, I hear, I touch you drawing near:/ the one we tried to help to the sentry's booth/and who no longer walks this precious earth,/ and that one who would toss her pretty mane/ and say, "It's just like coming home again"/ I want to name the names of all that host,/but they snatched up the list and now it's lost." - [that's either burned manuscripts or manuscripts that were seized] - "I've woven them a garment that's prepared/out of poor words,those that I overheard,/ and will hold fast to every word and glance/ all of my days, even in new mischance/ and if a gag should blind my tortured mouth,/ through which a hundred million people shout,/ then let them pray for me, as I do pray/ for them, this even of my remembrance day/And if my country ever should assent/to casting in my name a monument,/ I should be proud to have my memory graced,/but only if the monument be placed/ not near the sea on which my eyes first opened -/ my last link with the sea has long been broken - /not in the Tsar's garden near the sacred stump,/where a grieved shadow hunts my body's warmth,/ but here where I endured three hundred hours/in line before the implacable iron bars./ Because even in blissful death I fear/to lose the clangor of the Black Marias/to lose the banging of that odious gate/and the old crone howling like a wounded beast/ And from my motionless bronze-lidded sockets/ may the melting snow, like teardrops, slowly trickle,/ And a prison dove coo somewhere, over and over,/ as the ships sail softly down the flowing Neva" - [That's pretty powerful, actually] 

So she, actually,of that whole galaxy of poets was the one that, not only survived but was able to make some kind of iron line, iron poetry out of it. And those poems, though not published [1981] are circulated. Some of "Requiem" was published, actually, after Stalin's death, I think, in the (19)50's, the mid-(19)50's. There was a book of her Collected Poems but some sections of "Requiem" were still left out. [editorial note-2014 - not any more - "Requiem" is, of course, comprehensively included in  Judith Hemschemeyer's  The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova] 

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-four-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-three minutes in] 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 181

July 11, 2014, 3:00 am

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Two weeks since the last "Friday Round-Up", so.. without further ado..

Jim Cohn's Allen-centric Napalm Health Spa (we've featured it before on the Allen Ginsberg Project), this past July 4, delivered a blockbuster 400-plus page archive edition (spanning twenty-five years of the magazine's history). Original contributions from many of Allen's dear friends and students. Begin - and continue - your weekend's reading experience here. 

There's a project we've been watching with some interest since it was first announced several years ago, Rick Shober, erstwhile of Vox Redux Press (now Tough Poets Publishing) has been preparing The Whole Shot - Collected Interviews with Gregory Corso. Word now that that book will be out in the Fall    


Speaking of interviews.. look across and scroll down on the right (you do take time to explore this site, yes?), and you'll find a whole welter of on-line Allen Ginsberg interviews (actually, comprehensive, and in chronological order), but we seem to have missed this one - Graham Duff's 1995 encounter, originally published in The Punter, can now be accessed here. 

David Greenberg continues serializing his memoirs  "Best Mind - Life With Allen Ginsberg & Company"here

Ron Scheer's account, "My Dinner With Allen Ginsberg" (in The Fall Creek Review) is available here. 

Jerome Kitzke's recently-released "The Paha Sapa Give Back" features "a freewheeling musical account" of Allen's 1953 poem,"The Green Automobile" - a unique piece - a "tour de force", "comprised of whistling, laughing and rapid-fire recitation combined with intricate piano playing" (read an interview with composer-performer Kitzke here - "I have used a lot of Allen Ginsberg's poetry, before he died I got to speak with him, and he was very generous about the use of his works")


[Elise Cowen (1933-1962)]

Late word - but there's a reading tonight in San Francisco at The Beat Museum to celebrate Tony Trigilio's recently-published collection of Elise Cowen's "Poems and Fragments". For more on that particular title, see here 





News from Brazil - Claudio Willer's "Os rebeldes - Geração Beat e anarquismo místico"("Beat Rebels - The Beat Generation and Mystical Anarchism"), recently appeared from L & PM editions. More notes on this recent publication here .

News from Spain - Rodrigo Olavarraia's translation, from Anagrama, of Kaddish (with an afterword by Bill Morgan) is also just out   



A companion volume to hisHowl translation 



See also from Anagrama here and here 

Many thanks to Dangerous Minds for alerting us to the delightful Paul Rogers illustrated On The Road

Suddenly discovering a trove of Bob Dylan acetates, Jeff Gold's story here is pretty extraordinary. You can't make this stuff up!




and, continuing with  rock and roll news

Van Morrison's lyrics are scheduled to be published this Fall by City Lights
(with an introduction by Eamonn Hughes and a forward by David Meltzer) 






"Neal Cassady drops dead/And Allen Ginsberg's tears shampoo his beard/Neal Cassady drops dead/And Allen Ginsberg's lips tighten and thin/Neal Cassady drops dead/And Allen Ginsberg's hosed down in a barn/Neal Cassady drops dead/And Allen Ginsberg's howl becomes a growl.." -  Morrissey references Allen (and Neal Cassady!) in his new album, World Peace is None of Your Business (that album will be, officially, released next week)

Summer of Love / Human Be-In

July 12, 2014, 3:00 am

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Three years ago, we presented a fairly extensive post on the January 14, 1967,  legendary San Francisco,  "Human Be-In". 
We'd like to direct your attention to it here. 

Meanwhile, fresh up on You Tube, is this "Be-In" documentary, with priceless footage of Allen, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and all the participants/celebrants who took part in that extraordinary occasion.

The event that ushered in "the Summer of Love" - (tho', yes, as early as January!) - Re-visit the Summer of 1967 in the Summer of 2014.  Peace and Love everyone!













[original (signed) posters for the 1967 Human Be-In - on the left, by Stanley Mouse and Michael Bowen, and on the right, by rock-poster artist, Rick Griffin]

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Expansive Poetics - 83 (Anna Akhmatova - 4 - A Poem Without A Hero)

July 14, 2014, 3:00 am

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Allen continues his survey of the works of Anna Akhmatova

AG: And the later, even more complicated poem. "A Poem Without A Hero", including herself, in other words, a poem in which even she is not the hero because the devastation is so total, and so devastating. I don't think that's been published in Russia yet (1981) but it's published in English. And the "..Poem Without A Hero" is her summary of everything we've been studying, actually, of the Russian poets. It was begun in August in Leningrad under siege. There's only one translation of it into English (by Carl Proffer) [editorial note - again. Allem is speaking in 1981] and I've seen it in this book (with) Akhmatova's work, (published by Ardis House), and it's also in a series of Studies in Modern Russian Literature, put out in Ann Arbor, where you have the complete poem with all the footnotes that tell it).

I don't know quite what to do because it's a big long thing. I don't want to read it all aloud. but to summarize it -  I'd like to summarize the general idea of it. She goes back to an incident in the Stray Dog Cafe, years, or a little later, actually, (19).., maybe just before the Revolution. There was a great actress that she knew that was in love… no, Akhmatova was in love, with a twenty-year-old beautiful soldier, and the soldier was in love with an actress who used to act on the Stray Dog Cafe stage, and the actress was in love with Alexander Blok, the poet who was much older than she. And so, while Akhmatova was pining for this kid, and the kid was pining for the actress, and the actress was pining for Blok, the kid, the soldier (who was on leave) would follow (the actress) home, actually, and hide out outside of her apartment, and saw her going home with Blok, and so, committed suicide (or - and committed suicide!). So this was a shock, because he was a beautiful young poet boy that all the (other) poets around dug, but, at the same time, he was kind of weak, and a little crazy, to be committing suicide like that.
But for her (Akhmatova), what it meant was the confusion of those times - the exaggerated emotions, and self-indulgencies, and irresponsibilities, and what you might call karmic entanglements, that never did get resolved. And she began to feel that out of the confusion of the literary movements of the time, and the bohemia and the intellectuals (theFuturists,Acmeists, Symbolists, Imaginists,Khlebnikov-ists, Social Realists) that their own confusion had created a situation which had caused this holocaust in Russia, so she began taking the blame (in a sense, institutionalizing the Zhdanov party-line, saying that they were, perhaps, an aristocratic elite who were irresponsible in their loves, and in their truths, and in their activities towards one another). And so the "Poem Without A Hero" is like a summing up of all the ghosts from Petersburg days. All the poets at one time or other come through in this poem like a kind of phantasmagoria. It's like an hallucination, in which, suddenly.. taking after (Wolfgang Amadeus) Mozart's "Don Juan" (Don Giovanni), where the statue comes to life. Suddenly, all the ghosts come to life and there's a hallucinatory party that she sees in Leningrad during the siege of Leningrad and recollects and then writes about.
She has a little preface - Its appearance was preceded by several petty and insignificant facts, which I can't resolve to call events. That night I wrote two sections of the first part ("1913") and the "Dedication". The beginning of January, almost unexpectedly,I wrote"Tails" and in Tashkent (in two sittings) [(where she'd gone for refuge in the airplane)] - "..wrote the "Epilogue", which became the third part of the poem. I dedicate this poem to its first listeners, my friends and countrymen who perished in Leningrad during the siege".
Then, let's see, let's see if I can get the hallucination -  "New Years Eve, the house on the Fontanka, instead of the one whom the author has been awaiting, the shades of the year, 1930, come to me as mummers. A white mirrored-ball, a lyrical digression. Guest from the future, a masquerade, a poet, a phantom. I've lit the cherished candles to make the evening shine and with you, who we have not come to meet,  I meet 1941, but Lord's power be with us. In crystal drown the flame, in the wine burst like poison. There are bursts of harsh conversation, when all the deliriums are resurrected and the clock still has not struck. My anxiety knows no measure like shade on the threshold. I find myself guard of this final cozy refuge and I hear a protracted ring at the door, and I feel a clammy cold. I turn to stone, I freeze, I burn, and, as if recalling something, turning half-way round, I say in a soft voice,/ "You've made a mistake,/ Venice of the Doges, that's near-by./ But today you will have to leave your masks in the hall,/ and your cloaks and gowns and staffs./ Today I've decided to cover you with glory,/ you New Year's Eve madcaps./ Here's one that's like Faust, there's one that's like Don Juan,/ As dappertutto, as Jochanaan,/ the most modestas the northern Glan,/ Or aDorian, the murderer,/ And all are whispering to their Dianas/ Speeches learnt by heart" - [(The names here are historical literary figures - a mask, for poets who are dead, or (were) persecuted, who she didn't want to name, for fear the manuscript would be taken)] - "..Speeches learnt by heart./ And someone with atimbrel brought a satyr-leggedbacchante,/ and the walls moved apart for them./ Lights flared on, sirens wailed,/ and the ceiling bulged like a cupola of a church./ It's not that I fear publicity,/ What areHamlet's suspenders to me? /What's the whirlwind of Salome's dance to me? What are the footsteps of the Iron Mask to me?/  I myself am more iron than all of them./ And who's turn is it to be frightened,/  to flinch, recoil, surrender, and pray/ forgiveness for an ancient sin?/ It's all clear./ If not to me, to whom then? /Not for them was the supper prepared/ and it's not for them to walk my path with me./ His tail he has hidden under the flaps of his frock./ How lame and elegant he is, the devil. However, I hope/ you didn't dare to bring the King of Darkness here/. Whether it is a mask, or skull, or face,/ the expression of malicious pain/ is one that only Goya dared convey. /Everyone's pet and mocker of all. /Next to him the vilest sinner/ is virtue personified./ If I'm to make merry, then let's make merry./ But how could it happen/ that of all of them, only I am alive?/ Tomorrow morning will wake me up./ No one will condemn me/ and the blue outside my window/ will smile into my face./ But I'm terrified./ I'll enter without removing my lacy shawl./ I'll smile to everyone and be silent before the Valley of Jehoshaphat.." - [(The Valley of Jehoshaphat is where the bones of the dead will be resurrected in the Last Judgment)] - "..before the Valley of Jehoshaphat, /I have no wish to meet myself again, myself as I once was, wearing a necklace of black agates. Are not the final deadlines near?/ I have forgotten your lessons/, rhetoriticians and false prophets,/ but you have not forgotten me. /As in the past, the future ripens,/ so, in he future, the past decays./ Terrible festival, lifeless foliage.." - [(Well, I don't know how clear any of that is. It's totally clear to me.  The rest of the poem…

Student (CC): (It's difficult)

AG: Yeah, it's difficult. It's just, simply, that she's recollecting (the ghosts are coming, or the phantoms of the past are coming, with all their sins and all their devils - and she, being the only one still alive). 
And the end - the epilogue, or the end, might be trying to get through - "

Student (CC): Yes.

AG: "The white night of June 24, 1942, Petersburg, the city is in ruins" - [(so the grand Petersburg of her youth is now, in addition to the people, the city itself, is now completely in ruins)] - "From the Harbor to Smolny, everything is flattened and visible, Here and there old fires are burning themselves out. Lindens are blooming and the nightingales are singing in the Sheremetev Gardens. One third-floor window, in front of which there is an injured maple, is broken out, and beyond it yawns black emptiness. Thus:
 'Neath the roof of the house on Fontanka,/ Where the evening languor wandered/ With a lantern and ring of keys,/ I hallooed, with a distant echo,/ Disturbing, with my inappropriate laughter,/ The impenetrable sleep of things./ Where, witness of everything on earth at dusk and at dawn,/ The old maple looks still into the window/. And, foreseeing our parting,/ It extends its black and withered hand to me/ as if to help./ And, oh, what a star stared into my still-unabandoned house/and waited for the password./ It's somewhere there near Tobruk./It's somewhere here around the corner,/ You are not the first and not the last/ dark listener to bright nonsense./ What kind of revenge do you plan for me?/ You won't drink it up. You'll just take a sip/ of this grief from the very depths/. The news of our parting./ Don't put your hands on my head./ Let time stop forever on the watch you gave to me./ Misfortune will not pass us by/, and the cuckoo will not cuckoo, [the cuckoo clock will not cuckoo]/ in our scorched forests,/ but, behind the barbed-wire,/ in the very heart of the dense taiga/ - I don't know how many years it's been -/ Turned into a handful of prison camp dust,/ Turned into a fairy-tale from a true and terrifying tale,/ My double goes to the interrogation,/ and then he goes back from the interrogation. /Two emissaries of the noiseless wench/ are fated to guard him,/ and even from here/ I can hear (isn't that a miracle?)/ the sounds of my own voice./ I paid for you in cash./ For exactly ten years, I walked/ under the threat of a Nagant pistol" - [Stalin's pistol] - "Neither to the left nor to the right did I look,/ and behind me,/ ill fame rustled./ And without becoming my grave/, you granite hellish beloved, you grew pale, moribund and quiet./ Our separation is transient./ I am inseparable from you. /My shadow is on your walls,/ my reflection in your canals,/ the sound of my footsteps echoes in the Hermitage halls,/ where my friend wandered with me, as on old Volkovo Field,/ where I can sob at will/ over the noiselessness of fraternal graves/. All that was said in the first part/ about love, betrayal and passion,/ free verse cast from its wings/, and my city stands, mended./Heavy are the gravestones on your sleeping eyes./ It seemed to me that you were chasing me.." - [I suppose that's the kid she's talking about now, the young soldier that she was in love with that committed suicide]  - "..It seemed to me that you were chasing me/, you who stayed there to perish in the gleam of spires and reflection of waters./ Your desired lovely heralds/ didn't come. Only the series of your charmers - the white nights pass over you,/ but the happy words "at home" are not known to anyone now. /Everyone is looking in someone else's window,/ some in Tashkent, some in New York./ The bitter air of exile/ is like poisoned wine./ All of you could have admired me/ when I was saved from the evil pursuit in the belly of the flying fish.." - ["the belly of the flying fish" is the aeroplane that took her out of Leningrad] - "..Soaring over the forests full of the foe,/ as she, possessed  by the devil, soared over the Brocken at night./ And already, directly in front of me,/ was the icy, frozen Kama /and someone who said "Quo vadis?"/ but gave me no time to move my lips. before the mad Uralsresounded with their tunnels and bridges.." - [(they were fleeing to the other side of the Urals)] - "And then the road opened up before me/ along which so many had gone away,/ along which they took away my son./ And long was the funeral path/ amidst the solemn and crystal silence of Siberia./ Seized by mortal terror had turned to dust/, and, knowing the time of vengeance,/ her dry eyes lowered, and wringing her hands, Russia/ went before me to the east." - [(so this is "the east" - finished in Tashkent, August 1942 - I guess finished as she left Leningrad)]

Student (CC):  The notes at the end of that are also very..

AG: Yeah

Student (CC): … very good

AG: I'll put this in the librarty after this class so that you can look it up and read it. The notes explain a lot of the references, who all the masked figures are, and what-not. 

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at approximately forty-three minutes in and concluding at fifty-eight minutes in]

Expansive Poetics - 84 - Out-take - Nixon's Paranoia

July 15, 2014, 3:30 am

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So, a quick  "outtake" today, or "digression" (from our recent transcription (from 1981) of Allen, speaking  of the bureaucratic complicity and the institutionalized paranoia of the (Stalinist) Russian police state - "No hope Communism, No hope Capitalism" - He couldn't help but point out its the American equivalent (America in the 'Sixties - CREEP (the Committee for the Re-Election of the President), Nixon and Watergate) 

AG: (It's) just like trying to investigate the CIA now, or the FBI..I mean, you can't send people to jail! - I mean, they might have killed people, they might've caused deaths in the Black Panthers in Los Angeles, they might've been part of shooting the Black Panther leader in Chicago in 1968 and everybody knows it and it's been in the papers, but 
actually to get those guys on trial  and pin the smoking typewriter or the pistol on them in the United States would be.. would be not only inconvenient, but it would be embarrassing, and also "the good guys" wouldn't feel right, (then President) Reagan wouldn't feel right. That's why he pardoned the FBI people. So in Russia, the bureaucrats who were all involved (similarly) in this sort of national mucus membrane blood network, they wouldn't feel right, you know betraying each other……


                                              
They didn't (even) have to be involved with (the revolt) (with Trotsky) to disturb the maximum leader. Just as, when Nixon was in the White House in (19)72, there was one guy, I think I mentioned this, there was a guy across the street, who spent a year in Lafayette Park in Washington, across from The White House, carrying a sign saying "Nixon - You're A Baby-Killer", or something. And it really freaked Nixon out. And he was very upset. it was a constant aggravation to him, because that was the reminder, you know, that he might be wrong, or.. Anyway, it had a disturbing effect on him. He actually asked the Secret Service to get rid of the guy, and the Secret Service said it was illegal, the guy had a right to be there, and so there was.. there's quite a bit in the Watergate tapes about getting rid of the guy, you know, doing something illegal to get rid of him. He was getting a little freaky about it because nobody ever did anything about it but he got very upset, enough to…



In fact, the entire Watergate thing was just.. these guys got upset - so the water-supply inChicago - Abbie Hoffmanand Jerry Rubin were joking with.. (because, obviously, it was a joke, they were never going to do it, this "we'll  put LSD in the water-supply, if you don't  let us meet in Lincoln Park" - that was taken seriously by all these very heavy paranoids in the government), and so, they… according to later records, they got really hung up and began making all sorts of giant preparations to filter the water-supply, and later the Plumbers Group. CREEP group, or thePlumbers Group, Gordon Liddy, who had formerly been a persecutor of(Timothy) LearyatMillbrook. The Plumbers Group was formed to see if they could get rid of (Daniel) Ellsbergbecause Ellsberg was a critic and he had published the Pentagon Papersand he was now going around making speeches and he really knew the score (and they knew what he was saying was right) and it was a thorn in the side of war-makers (or what Nixon's conception of what the war was supposed to be about) . So they went to his psychiatrist, Dr. (Lewis J) Fielding, and broke in, to find out if there was any history of homosexuality or LSD(use) in Ellsberg. That was the reason for the break-in. Which is, like, you know, when you come to it, really, is petty cash, small change, I mean, to go in and find out if someone's dropped acid or sucked cock - really? - in order to keep your war going? - it's totally ridiculous! That was originally one of the primary functions..  That was the original.. first big job that the Plumbers did. 



So, these big guys, like Stalin, Nixon, (or anybody, me, you), are obviously disturbed by the least tremor of one single tiny voice (of Liddy!) in the corner saying "What? We're wrong!" And everybody, you know.. Immediately the dictators freak out (because they're just as vulnerable as anybody else). If one person's going around in your neighborhood gossiping about you, wouldn't you get upset? 



[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately sixty-minutes in and continuing until sixty-and-three-quarter minutes in, continuing at approximately sixty-one-and-a-half minutes in, and concluding at approximately  sixty-five minutes in]

Expansive Poetics - 85 (Guillaume Apollinaire and French Modernism)

July 16, 2014, 3:00 am

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Expansive Poetics class continues, August 11, 1981

AG: We had an enormous mental bath and blood bath with (all that) Russian poetry, and we had some comparisons with other countries, but we didn't pick up what was going on in France at that time [early twentieth-century], the only thing we got onto earlier was a little (Arthur) Rimbaud.

What (William S.) Burroughs was talking about before in his discourse about cut-ups and mental probe and making maps is reflected somewhat in the work of the French Dadaists and Surrealists and modernists. So, let's go (now) to Guillaume Apollinaire in the French section - "Zone" (it's the second thing in the French section (of our anthology)
Has anybody read this poem?  How many here? You have never.. nobody has read "Zone" before, aside from three or four people? - Ivana (sic) and Nina (sic) are from Yugoslavia? You had read that in Yugoslavia or here?

Student (1): (In Yugoslavia)
Student (2): I read it here.

AG: Yeah. And you read it here. Well, did the other people here have this anthology? How many of you don't have the anthology? - Yeah, well, I think I had assigned this some time back, to start reading through the French work. But, just as well if you haven't, we can start it all over again. We have three different translations of it.

Does anybody know who Apollinaire was at all? Has anybody got some idea? He was a friend of (Pablo) Picasso, friend of the painter (Henri) (Douanier) Rousseau, the primitive painter. He wrote a book on Cubist painters. He operated in Paris as a great impresario, and editor, and writer of pornographic anonymous novels to make a living. He visited Le Bateau Lavoir, which is the place in Montmartre where Picasso lived with (George) Braque and where there was painting experiments with Cubism - a totally modern means of visual representation. The thing that they found was that there were a lot of different angles that you could look at something at (from which you could look at something). You could look at it at ten of two, and you could look at it at two o'clock, and ten after two. And you could look at it from here, and you could look at it from here, and you could look at it from there, from above and from the middle and from below, and the right and the left. So therefore, why not try and makea  composite of all the views and vreak the object up into all sorts of angles, from above and from below, and get a collage of all the different perspectives you might have on a still life and try and paint that. This was part of Futurism. In Italy and in Russia, (particularly in Italy, if any of you have seen paintings by (Umberto) Boccioni or (Giacomo) Balla they do that). There's a very famous painting in the Museum of Modern Art (in New York) called "The City Rises"(I think, (from) 1907, or so), which actually would show one arm in many different positions going all the way down, so it's like a blur, almost, but in bright red Expressionist colors.





[La città che sale ("The City Rises") (1910) - Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), oil on canvas, (78 ins x 119 ins),
 Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York]

The Cubists, following (Paul) Cezanne, did something very similar (and similar to (William) Burroughs' cut-up(s), actually). What they did was try to take three or four different angles of a table, with a guitar and a piece of fruit and a bowl on it, and, looking at it from three or four different angles, paint it simultaneously, all at once.
So there were a lot of  different art movements. One was Creationism, which the poet Vincente Huidobro had something to do with (Huidobro, having been a friend of (F.T.) Marinetti and of Apollinaire - Marinetti, an Italian Futurist, Huidobro from Chile.
And there was Simultaneism, (in) which you tried to expand your consciousness by seeing things simultaneously from many different directions. The experiments with cut-ups with Dada-ism came on around that time, also. And some of the first Futurist experiments with interrupting thought-forms in order to juxtapose thought-forms, or newspaper-headlines, or texts, or pictures, so that you saw everything simultaneously. In other words, what would now have evolved, culturally, through acid [LSD], into mixed-media or multi-media - that is, a series of different stimuli coming from different directions all at once - began out of that seed of the Cubist(s) breaking-up an object into different views, different times, and then trying to paint it all at once.  
So you've all seen Cubist paintings, right?  Yes? No?  Is there anybody that never saw a Cubist painting and doesn't know what the fuck it is and doesn't know what I'm talking about?  Okay. Everybody has seen a Cubist painting? Because, if you haven't, we've got some here, probably. Just look around you. So, the painters actually initiated that simultaneously - simultaneous vision (which Burroughs was talking about before in the class that he just held).

The poet who introduced it most obviously in English was T.S.Eliot How many here have read "The Waste Land" by T.S.Eliot? Yes. Is there anybody who's not ever seen that text? Is there anybody who's not seen "The Waste Land"? It's alright if you raise your hand. Yeah.
So Eliot's "Waste Land" comes out of Apollinaire's "Zone". That's what Eliot and (Ezra) Pound say. So if you want to understand T.S.Eliot's "Waste Land" (which is, actually, a cultural monument in (the) English language), then you have to go back to Apollinaire's poem."Zone". To understand "Zone", all you have to do is look at some of the Cubists to realize that he was trying to put things together simultaneously that would not yet usually be put in that sequential order. 
His method  was similar to stream-of-consciousness, or similar to Burroughs' cut-up, in some ways - similar to what we know of in Eliot - juxtaposition or collage. The method is basically collage. I'm saying "similar to Burroughs' cut-up" because Burroughs' cut-up comes from collage, paste-up, juxtaposing and pasting separate views, separate places, separate times, one on top of another (a little bit like Cubism theoretically, because it's different perspectives put together in one spot), kind of an extension, or expansion, of human consciousness, or an expansion of optical consciousness, so that you see things in three different ways all at once.   Yeah?

Student: Would you then set aside the "Calligrammes" (of Apollinaire) as being, sort of, outside of the major body that Apollinaire accomplished, as being very representational? 

AG: No. That's part of the body of work he accomplished.. I'm just saying "Zone", particularly, is based on the idea of some kind of cut-up or simultaneity or juxtaposition or collage, and it's the first great example in European regular poetry of that collage method (or, it's considered to be the seed-work, from which all the other great, twentieth-century, international, collage-type, stream-of-consciousness, jump-from-one-thing-to-another, ideogrammatic, method [for example, Pound's Cantos] comes). It's the seed-work that they all come from, including the work which we know best in English as the biggest poem of the century, which is "The Waste Land". And it also affects "Howl" and a lot of my poetry. Apollinaire's "Zone" also has an influence on that too.

The "Calligrammes" that he was talking about just now are like that also. It's also some sort of collage. Same thing. ..Poems written in the forms of pyramids, or rain. I think we have one in the form of rain in our book, that one that's on Apollinaire's grave. This affected (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti's little book that (was) written out in rough…

Student: Backroads… 

AG:  Yeah, Backroads to Far Places. And also, what's the book I loaned you, the…?

Student (CC): Tyrannus Rex [Tyrannus Nix]

AG: No

Student: Wilfred Funk

AG:  Wilfred Funk, yes. His hidden masterpiece, Wilfred Funk, is written out like that. There's also little stars, drawings. I guess Apollinaire was not the first, but one of the first (with Francis Picabia and (Tristan) Tzara and the others, the Dada-ists) to experiment with visual poetry. There's more. We have one little sample of "Rain"(Il Pleut) (in the anthology). We'll get more later on, I guess, if we ever xerox up some more.

Student: He (Apollinaire) did many Calligrammes

AG: Yeah, there's one like a necktie. What's on his gravestone is "Calligramme.. renversée"". Here's one [AG points to Apollinaire calligramme in the book] that's supposed to be like a chicken or a duck or a bird with a tail. Those are called "calligrammes". I've done a couple, but a modern poet who put out a recent book specializing in that was John Hollander, who wrote a series of poems in the shape of the subject-matter.



[Audio for the above can be heardhere, starting at the beginning of the tape and continuing to approximately eleven-and-three-quarter minutes] 

Expansive Poetics - 86 - (Apollinaire's Calligrammes)

July 17, 2014, 3:00 am

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AG: This is a fountain. "The Bleeding Heart Dove and the Fountain". (La colombe poignardée et le jet d'eau) Can you see well enough to make this worthwhile to hold up? This is a boook that came out in 1980, Anne Hyde Greet's translations of Apollinaire's "Calligrammes".  I don't think it's ever been completely done before. 

"The Little Car". (La petite auto)


 The one that he has incised on his grave is one called "Calligramme.. renversée". (Mon coeur pareil à une flamme renversée)…("The heart upside-down")

Here's (the famous one)"Rain"... …. Here's "Rain". You have it in your books, but I don't think you have the translation - "It's raining women's voices as if they were dead even in my memory" - That's one line going down. "It's raining you to marvelous encounters of my life. Oh droplets./ And those clouds rear and begin to whinny. Universe of auricular cities…" [sound cities - auricular - A-U-R-I-C-U-L-A-R...]

Student: (Spoken into the ear..)


AG:  Yeah, sound cities - "Listen to it rain while regret and disdain weep an ancient music./ Listen to the fetters falling that bind you high and low" -  So  "Il Pleut".














































So, on his tombstone he has the reversed heart. Let's see. Here it is..called "Mon Coeur..  - No.. wait.. I can't find (it)… (No, here it is..).. Well, later..




[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately eleven-and-a-quarter minutes in, continuing to approximately thirteen-and-a-half minutes]  

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 182

July 18, 2014, 3:00 am

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Yishay Ben Moshe is currently performing, "The Key Is In The Window",  a theatrical interpretation of  Allen's "Kaddish" at the Gay and Lesbian Center in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Nathan Zach's translation  (a bi-lingual edition in Hebrew and English, approved by Allen) appeared, famously, in 1988




Next Thursday (July 24), celebrations of Allen in Brazil 

Burroughs Centennial and we haven't noted much here on the Ginsberg Project since a flurry of activity early in the year but here's word of the upcoming exhibition, Animals In The Wall, curated by  James Elphick and Yuri Zupančič and scheduled to premiere in London on the 27th of August

Here's a page with more Burroughs news





Naropa Summer School 2014 -  now a memory, but, well, here's one little sweet delirious moment - Steven Taylor (with Fiore Grey and Danielle Moore of the Summer Writing Program) rehearsing (well, actually performing) Steven's setting of Peter Orlovsky's "I'm Going Out To The Garden Now"(Steven, of course, collaborated and, played this song many times with Peter)