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Anselm Hollo on Fragments


[Sappho, fragments of  poems, Graeco-Roman Egypt, 2nd Century AD, in the collection of the Bodleian Library, Oxford]


                                          [Anselm Hollo (1934-2013) teaching at Naropa]

The following is a transcription of a class, given on June 25 1986, at Naropa, by the late much-missed poet-translator, polymath  Anselm Hollo, nominally on "The Greek Anthology" but, more specifically, on the poem as "fragment".   In this first half, he addresses the notion, particularly with reference toSappho (in Guy Davenport's translation). In the second half (tomorrow), he gives several instances of where his contemporaries have "used the idea of the fragment or something, done something related to that" 

AH:  Okay. To make it seem more like a real class, we've got hand-outs, to talk about,  and/or around, tonight  ( - handed an ashtray - wonderful, a Dutch-shoe ashtray! - maybe we should talk about this!)  It's basically a word, one word - "fragment" F-R-A-G-M-E-N-T ( - turns to the blackboard - I don't see any way to whiten that blackboard, so I think I'll leave the prayers on there - we can all use them!) -  "Fragment",  which comes from (I looked it up in a dictionary).. comes from "frangere" (Latin) - to break. So it's.. Well, I'll read you the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of it:

"Fragment - A part broken off or otherwise detatched from the whole, a broken piece, a comparatively small detached portion of anything , a detached, isolated or incomplete part, a comparatively small portion of anything, a part remaining or still preserved when the whole is lost or destroyed, an extant portion of the writing or composition which as a whole is lost, also a portion of a work left uncompleted  by its author (hence a part of any unfinished whole or uncompleted design) - obsolete: applied to a person as a term of contempt  (as in Shakespeare - Troilus and Cressida' [Achilles:]"From whence, Fragment?")' -  (I think that should be re-instituted, it's great..instead of calling people "flakes", you can can call them fragments!" - "I think she's rather a fragment!") - and the other obsolete example is (from) Corinthians [Paul's Letter to the Corinthians]  [Anselm, actually misreads, it's Coriolanus, Shakespeare's Coriolanus]  -"Go,  get you home, you fragments!" -  (sounds like St. Paul, alright!).
  
So, "fragment". I got to thinking about it and I think it's a word around which you can really hang a whole big cluster of things. First of all, I remembered (that) one of the first literary magazines in Europe, (more specifically, Germany, after World War II)  that.. (well, it was one of the first that really got going as an independent literary magazine,  but also one that first introduced certain American poets to a German-speaking, and possibly even generally European, audience - people like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley), I think - it only came out for about two issues but, (featuring) a whole lot of stuff by poets associated with the Black Mountain andBeat movements, was a magazine called Fragmente(Fragments) (and was) edited by Rainer Maria Gerhardt, a poet and translator himself.  And I think he took as his motto for the..  mottos for the magazine, the various references in both (Ezra) Pound and (T.S.) Eliot on the fragmented state of the world after..after World War I . Many of you, probably, are familiar with "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and..what's the other one? ("The Love Song of J. Alfred) Prufrock"..I mean, both of them, there are.. there's a lot of reference to shards, shattered books, fragments. And I was also reminded of, thinking about.. (having got on this magazine track), that one of the vigorous first rebellious little literary reviews in England after World War I was Wyndam Lewis's magazineBlast. And there's a connection there, obviously. When you have a blast, you have fragments. Then I thought about the wars.. wars of the 'Sixties, and I thought of the expression "to blow one's mind". I also thought about "fragging", which I gather was a practice.. well, it denoted the practice of  getting rid of unpopular Commanding Officers...

And then I thought about the thing in terms of poetry, finally. And some of the most beautiful and earliest poetry we have in the Western tradition, we have only in fragment(s) -Sappho, a great poet of circa the 7th Century BC, Archilechos, who was a little earlier, all the lyric Greek poets, there's very few whole poems that have come down to us. They've come down to us in these bits and pieces, where , a couple..(well, there's probably more than a couple), there's maybe about ten poems of Sappho that can be regarded as intact. Well, they were quoted, someone actually quoted them in their entirety, but if you go and look at, say, some critical magazine or book review, book-review-review, today, you'll rarely find that any critic or reviewer quotes a whole poem. I mean, they quote a couple of lines. So, in a sense, if all books disappeared today that's all we would have of our contemporary poets, you know. We would have the lines that some more-or-less brilliant critic had happened to quote in his work. And, I mean, the Greek ones weren't necessarily quoted as poetry, but they were quoted as things said, you know. So, hence, over the years, people confronted with, for instance, the task of translating or presenting Sappho in English, or in any other modern language, were confronted with this problem of having a text in which there was, you know, very large parts missing, very large holes in it. So what do you do? The.. until about the.. (well, this century [the twentieth-century], actually,) the accepted mode for poets or translators trying to do that was for them to fill in the blanks. Like, take a wall, a wall with big holes in it, and just try to sort of.. put the bricks back in, or something. But, I mean, you don't know what the bricks were, so you make them up, you make new ones. And.. which is very similar, or very parallel, to what happened with the excavations made in the nineteenth-century of great sites of antiquity. Who was that English guy?  I remember(Heinrich) Schliemann, but Schliemann was the guy who discovered Troy, then there was a great Victorian English person [Sir Arthur Evans] who proceeded to... now this was on Crete, this wasn't Troy, but, proceeded to build sort of Disneyland additions tothe Minoan palaces in Crete which - you know, they were (of) good solid Victorian workmanship, so they'll be there (and) we won't be able to read, (or) deconstruct, it, you know.  And I think the one reason that we now have.. for instance, Guy Davenport's translations of Sappho, which are.. which you have a sample or two in front of you, are.. The reason he is able to be totally honest, in a sense, in that he won't add anything ,(he leaves the blanks, he leaves the lacunae where they are) is that we have, in this century, I think, early in this century, developed a taste for fragments, and it's there in all the arts. I think it's inherited from the Romantics, who, back in the late eighteenth-century loved ruins. Their favorite fragments were ruins, to the extent that in the late seventeen hundreds, people would actually.. people who had big estates, would build ruins, sort of, in their park somewhere, so they had a nice little romantic ruined castle, yeah? - or walls that didn't go anywhere and crumbled into the ground!  This weird sense of that being… I'm sure, to some people at that time, that must have seemed as weird as punk hairstyles, you know - "How come these people like these ruins?" "What is this?", I mean - but, anyway, I think it sort of hearkens back to that, and we'll.. yeah..I'll try to talk about why that is, why, why we have this sense of a fragment, possibly, being just as good and, possibly, even maybe better than whatever whole it came from.

So, yeah, looking at the Sappho here, what we have in the fragments sometimes comes out in, as in Fragment #142, comes out in..You know that's a perfect little poem. I mean, there's nothing really.. well, we don't know what we're missing because it's not there! but "Those discords,/ I don't think,/ will reach the sky" - I don't know, it's fairly easy to create a context around that. It's like someone listening to their neighbors arguing or something, something -  "Those discords,/ I don't think,/ will reach the sky" - or, you know, you supply your own scenario - or Fragment #144says "Pretty/ Artemis" - Well, that's probably, that's probably what's left of a long hymn to Artemis, you know, possibly, or it's possibly just a reference to "pretty Artemis" in some text dealing with something totally different, something else - but it's worth contemplating. And (Fragment) #146, I think is the interesting one on this first spread:
                 ] called you
                ] filled your mouth with plenty  
                ] girls, fine girls
               ] lovesong, the keen-toned harp
               ] an old woman's flesh
               ] hair that used to be black
               ] knees will not hold
               ] stand like dappled fawns
                  ] but what could I do?
               ] no longer able to begin again
                   ] rosy armed Dawn
                     ] bearing to the ends of the earth
                       ] nevertheless seized
                        ] the cherished wife
                        ] withering in conmon to all
                        ] may that girl come and be my lover
I have loved all graceful things [    ] and this
Eros has given me beauty and the light of the sun

Yeah, so in what sense, do we miss anything?, you know - We don't miss anything. I love this poem the way it is. I wish I'd written it! - just the way it is. Yeah? - So there's something that I think happens in art, in poetry for sure (I can't speak with any authority for the other arts but..) that a part, a part contains the whole, the little bit..  the way we now think our memory is constructed that way. It's like, like a hologram.We get hold of one little corner of it and then we can see the whole. So there is a difference, in a way, between that kind of a fragment that gives you the whole and one that is obviously just a splinter, you know, or shard, (or) piece. 
(And) I think both.. I'm not saying that the latter is, in any sense, inferior.  Whole aesthetics (have emerged).. I mean what we tend to think of as the Japanese aesthetic, Japanese Buddhist aesthetic, which leaves things out, endlessly, while describing them very well.  I think that relates to the idea of fragments, or fragment, parts standing for the whole.

Let's look at the.. well, there's another page, there's another page of these. Again (Fragment) #151 - God knows is perfect - "To die is evil./The gods think so,/Else they would die - That's really the complete thought.  (Fragment) #153 is a little tantalizing - ("More harmonious than lyres").  One wishes, one would like to know what is "more harmonious than lyres"?  - "Weaker than water"(Fragment #158), "Whiter than milk"(Fragment #161)- "More harmonious than lyres", yeah, in a way. You could put these together too. You could rearrange them and make your own poems out of them..which, since, has been done..I mean to move from..to take a fairly radical leap from..(well, actually, it's not really that radical a leap) -  I mean these may be poems by Sappho but they're translated by contemporary poets who are right here.

Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning approximately half-a-minute in and concluding at approximately seventeen-and-a-quarter minutes in]

tomorrow - Anselm Hollo on fragmentation and modern poetry

Anselm Hollo on Some Modern Poets Fragmentation



 Anselm Hollo on Modern Fragmentation   June 25 1986

Continuing his remarks on fragmentation, poet-translator, Anselm Hollo looks at the concept in the work of seven of his contemporaries - Armand Schwerner, Ronald Johnson, Tom Phillips,Ted Berrigan, Larry Eigner, Tom Raworth, andPhilip Whalen 



AH: I sort of went through my tattered memory to think about instances where contemporaries have used the idea of the fragment, or..something, done something related to that, and one very obvious example that came to mind is the American poet, Armand Schwerner, whose.. I would say his main interest outside of literature, outside of poetry, has always been anthropology and history. And he decided at some point (I'm trying to think, well, going on fifteen years ago) go see whether he could write a work, make a work, that would use the form provided by transcriptions of ancient, let's say, Babylonian clay tablets and such, to take that and, in a sense, create, create a whole mythology and culture, by means if these Tablets that he would make himself, you know. I mean Armand didn't go so far as to actually make the clay tablets, he used the typewriter, I think, but.. In a sense, that might have seemed a novel idea, except that it has a great tradition in this country - the fake-mythology, religious ritual text, I guess. Old-time in a way is the Book of Mormon (I mean that is just my opinion, I hope I'm not offending anybody! - but that was one guy's work, who sat down and really dug the Old Testament, and said "Boy, I wish I could…", "I wish there was more of this", you know. I mean, it's such a good read! ("Shit, I've read it many times over now, there's got to be more". So he sat down and wrote the Book of Mormon - he just invented the whole other mythology that.. played to this Continent [America] to a large extent).
Well, Armand (Schwerner) wasn't about to study religion. So I have here one example of his work, it's a part..it's long, it's a book-length work, called The Tablets, and this is Tablet #4, where, complete with..scientific apparatus, you know, legend - "simple dots mean untranslatable, little crosses mean missing section, brackets with a question-mark inside them is variant readings" - you might read it this way - and, "whatever is in brackets has been supplied by the scholar-translator" - A little note - "Most large fragments  are the results of horizontal breaks. This tablet.. however is vertically fractured" -  and so forth

Student: What does he mean by that?

AH: Well, if you think.. what does he mean by what?

Student:  When he says "these",  is he referring to these fragments, as these on the page here?

AH: Yeah - yeah, well, these are..  this is a tablet essentially, but it's broken. So, broken in two and we get these two halves, I think is basically what it says formally . So it says, I mean, actually, what it ends up being is not so much a parody as, in a way, actually a recreation. It's sort of like a venture into science fiction in a way, if you wish. You give.. not long, quite a while after Schwerner actually Ursula Le Guin - 
Ursula K Le Guin, who some of you science-fiction fans may have read, has created things, has done things like create a language, a consistent language, in some of her books, and also created music, with the insistence of a composer friend, and so forth. So, I don't know, what we end up having here is obviously a classical litany - questions - when? does? is? like then like - long litany - and it ends up being entertaining, in its own way, especially if you've ever dealt with these texts, these, Armand's things, are even funnier, because they are, like, a tongue-in-cheek parody, saying "why on earth are we thinking that this is actually very significant?", you know, I mean, "When does the man sacrifice his hands?..""Does the man wipe his belly with sperm?…" Does the man put good leaves under his testicles..?" - You know, I mean, it's no funnier than a lot of the original texts, but..  So it is an exercise in creating a little parallel universe and the little lacunae, the missing things, are cleverly inserted too… "Like the world, a five-year-old's bloody [     ]" - bloody what? - "Like a frog stops with small stones, small white stones…"


So, in this case, Schwerner makes a work out of invented fragments. Another thing, which is maybe a little similar to those Romantic period fake ruins in conceptual terms has been an exercise (which, again, any of you could try) that consists in taking a text, any text, you know, a text that interests you, and editing it., taking things out, changing it, altering it. Ronald Johnson, a poet who lives in San Francisco took, very ambitiously,  (John) Milton's Paradise Lost and made a new book-length poem called Radi os  - (R-A-D-I -space-O-S, which is, you now "radi" as in paradise, "os" as in "lost" - "radios") and what you get there, I mean, every word in that is basically Milton's, although Milton never put them in that particular order and may have had many other words between them, between words that now are next to each other, but, he does an interesting thing (I couldn't.. I didn't have a xerox one of those to show you), he left the spaces resulting from the white-out or black-out (whatever color he used to take out what he didn't think was so interesting) so that the page has this incredible air in it, I mean it looks like it was shot through with, I don't know, empty space, and these words hover in it. So that's worth checking out. It's sort of laborious.

We'll skip one of the pages here (in the classroom  hand-out) and get (on) to Larry Eigner, but (before we do) there is two pages of work by the English.. he's basically a painter, (but he's a painter who's always been very interested in literature, in fact, he translated Dante's Inferno and illustrated it at one point) - (Tom Phillips  - A Humament -



hich is a book [Anselm displays the book] - there it is - that is constructed from a very bad Victorian novel, called A Human Document,by some author [W.H. Mallock] , you know (It's like one of those books that you find when you check out the Goodwill store[the charity shop] books section - you know, old, mouldy hardcovers, falling apart - You may find A Human Document by whoever-it-was one day, but it was..)  Phillips found a copy that was in good shape and was so struck by the sort of brilliant awfulness of it that he thought, "Well, maybe it would be an interesting thing to do to see, you know, if someone could make something out of this?". He thought of it as an object, you know, as just "a book", and also as an object containing words. So what he did is spend, I think a couple of years going over the book page-by-page and making each page ino a little painting. In other words, not just knocking out words, you know, or taking out phrases, or.. telescoping words into one another, but, actually, making each page work as a picture, and leaving the words in, and, furthermore, trying to preserve some kind of.. It's a very weird story-line - and the main character, for some reason, because those four letters occur a lot in the text, the main character's name ends up being Toge, T-O-G-E. So it's like The Adventures of Toge, but, actually, you can read it, it's very interesting - it's dazzling (in color it's so dazzling that one tends to get lost in contemplation of the page just looking at it, and it's hard to go on, so it's really…) I think the book costs something like eighteen dollars 
[Editorial note - in 1986!]  but it's certainly.. it's likehardtack, you can read it forever! - I haven't (entirely) "read" it yet! - it's almost as good as Finnegans Wake - (and) it's prettier, visually! - Yeah, so what we have here then are these pages that. Page number 12 here - On the left in the image (which you don't really get in this xerox now, but…it's like a meadow, there's flowers, and the text says,"Condemned to Life. This good book book for nobody" - So that's like a little pidgin-English poem, and then it says "Meaning losing its meaning, when it follows any picture of  the part of a half of a picture. Details are not representation. Question whether the book is this. It is as if it is and exist in the purposes it does" - Or, the facing page says, "Moral moral moral moral moral. Good people have not been surpressed or altered .Moral moral moral moral moral moral". I mean, think of the fact, I'm sure that not one of these "moral''s is doctored, I mean, it didn't say.. Maybe it said "amoral" at some point.. but it's a lot of "moral"s on a page, boy!  - And there's one that deals with poetry somewhat, that has little explosions in the sky - "Feel, confide, enjoy, Spring, teach, laugh, express, poet, happy - I published one small volume and they have now forgotten it"- "Charm, read, think, understand, sky, realize, look", But your eye is inevitably drawn back to that little box in the center, you know. "I published one small volume and they have now forgotten it" - (There's a life in there!)

And then, also, some of it, some of it verges on Dada(again Dadaists were totally interested in fragments and fragmentation. Tristan Tzara's idea that anybody can write a poem by taking a newspaper and cutting it into strips and putting the strips in a hat, and then pulling them out at random and copying them down, which is the precursor to the Cut-Up method now, first formalized, more recently by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Sure, that's like working with fragments. There was a movement in Russia contemporary with Dada, right after World War I and shortly thereafter, the Zaum  movement, which was the sort of radical wing of poetry at the time, led by Velimir Khlebnikov. Certainly also Khlebnikov's synthetic language consisted of deconstructed Russian, German, French, whatever he could…yeah, I mean, he was quite a linguist, whatever he could think of, and deconstructing it quite a bit further than (James) Joyce did later in Finnegans Wake, So yeah this one Phillips page goes into some kind of Zaum language for a bit there - "She getting laden with gvalk, and frunk, and painful interest" - Pardon me?

Student: (How does he do that? -  because those words...)

AH: Well, no, so we are suddenly somewhere else, obviously, it's a little..


Student: (He wasn't the person writing things out. He didn't actually do the writing) 

AH: Oh no, no.  Oh, I see..how did these (these Zaum words) come out? I think they're parts of names, they're parts of names  - Ringvolk - Mr Ring - Herr Ringvolk - something like that, you know (It was probably irresistable too to do that, for that reason)




Ted Berrigan wrote a novel called Clear The Range, which was, originally… I mean, it's not originally written. It was written. There was a novel, there was a book by, I think, Luke Short, called Clearing The Range that Ted took and read and found to be just sort of average and run-of-the-mill and vastly improved by taking out things and maybe here and there putting in another thing. It's a very…it's a great surreal Western, actually. One could say, I think, fairly, that Ted's Sonnets were constructed to a large extent by means of a, like, fragment composition, quotes, either from literature or other people or from himself, interwoven and rewoven into new verbal structures and repeated but never repeated in the same context. So, in a sense, the Sonnets is not, is certainly not a very whole work but it is made with an awareness of the  fragmentary-ness and the various ways you can replace things with other things and get a new thing.




Larry Eigner's work  has to me always seemed beautifully reminiscent of, say, Sappho infragments, or as we have her, while never ever seeming "fragmentary", in a bad way at all, in this lovely continuum of words that goes on there, but, looked at with a tradsitionalist eye in  poetry, certainly would seem fragmentary, and would seem.."Say, what's..there's a lot, missing?" - Well, I don't think there's anything missing - ["Anselm Hollo reads "Small flightless birds" from  Larry Eigner'Air The Trees] "Small flightless birds/ the voice/ far tinkling bells/ /museum/ of sorts the rats destroyed moving ashore/  Midway/slow is the poem flat wall of the sea and sky each island rose farther than any whale fins breathing above the waves. the mirrors. heat/ past sunshine. /vibrations of air/ spiders, then birds settle/ reflexive/ man/ menageries/ bringing what he can/ from the bottom. interest/ in/ the quickening run-through/ one thing at a time/ tides/ a large motion/ small waves give boats / rock crumbles to earth/ under rain/ the seasclouds mulct the moon/  flats/  the whale is still hunted/ in certain parts/ prodigal/ the deep light/  The Confederacy, you have to/ repeat,/ was real/  suddenly/ to be denied/ lines there down the map/ if you recognize yourself/ still/ roads/ colors of your state/to make a noise in/the sheer slavery/ of abstruse thought/ full of the sky  rough  river/ dirt   the captured ordnance/ made gain (to puff/ in imagination  (useless  with the real/    shot/ crater  powder-kegs/ strewing the ground/ now then/ behind grass   the/ slope of cloud   house/ bed and emptiness besides/ returning the sun/ shown everywhere/ the full-decked.." -  In the first one, the one on the left-hand side, there's obviously no very clear indication there.  I mean, I read it one way and you could read it a couple of different ways. You know, you could read it across - "reflexive man/ menageries/ bringing what he can/ from the bottom/ interest", and so on, you know. I mean, that's there, and when we read it to ourselves , we can read it either way (we can read it both ways at once).
So, yeah, I don't think.. I don"t know.. I'm not aware of any studies of Larry Eigner's work that really go heavily into the structure of it. or try to discuss particularly how these thing are made. [Editorial note - subsequent to Anselm's class, there emerged the detailed scholarly work of Michael Davidson]  - I think they're just made, more or less. The're made very meticulously. I know Larry's method of composition, in a sense that.. he's very concerned about where whatever sits on the page. He says, "No no, that should go over here!". So, he looks at the page. and that is a big part of it, how it's seen on the page, as well as heard as a vocal performance..

[Anselm continues, surveying the class hand-out] - Yeah, I don't think we have to read all these necesarily but there's instances from Tom Raworth, a British poet who..   the two pages here are from..sort of a diary, diary-poem, it's a parody essentially of a diary poem, the kind of thing where you sit down and say. "Well, I'll write something every day" (which you all should do! - it's not as easy to do sometimes as it sounds and, so you get these entries, they're entries and in that sense they're not fragmentary, I mean, that's all there was for that day. "You call that a fragment? That's all the words I was able to write today. Come on!" - So, as, for instance, [from "Stag Skull Mounted"] on the 3rd of June, 1970 - "this is my handwriting" -  Right, I mean, it's a truthful and noble statement and who would want more actually?)

Student: (Saying it right..) 

AH: Well, no.. Well, (yes), that may be what makes it interesting. Contemplate the fact of, you know, what happens when you read that out loud. Right. 
June 5th was even sort of more purer in a way, just (the word) - "word", and June 6th elaborates a little bit on that. It says "word a/ a the/the the/ in/adequate   language/ i love you". And then two entries for the 10th which, you know, that "8.06 PM, it seemed that the word "poem" would suffice but then, about an hour and a half later, it became apparent that this would be much better if it read "poem/ poem" And nineteen days passed before the word "organic" found its place in this work. And it goes on..

And then the other one is not a longer piece too, it's the end of the longer piece ["Describing the In on the Crest of a Wave"], but it doesn't have dates. It has these little titles, however, that are not indicated as such but they're over to the right, so that we get "try and remember/ the past   education", which sort of stops the sentence back to the left side again. I see, that's true, that's what education is - try and remember the past, try at least! - [he continues] "power of the memory/ of first feeling -  myth" - "I have created a myth/ only a little myth/ but it could grow if you""I had forgotten the object of my lesson should be there. "yes, I'm right"/ should only have given me freedom   but the mirror had flipped up i/ organized as much of the direction as I could and started off" - quote - "not skimming like old-fashioned speed-readers  as a graduate,  you'll be/ able to read a book in less than an hour" - unquote - "the best/ in history -  road sign" _ "disappearing hemispheres/ surrounded the grey balloon" "surface clear?/ unloose/ re lease""nothing is know" sang all the animals trying to get clear/""dear/   page     I feel so useless/ but triumphantly sad". "(use/ smaller paper) -   advice" -

Again a form whose.. one of his masters, I think, contemporary masters, is Philip Whalen, (whose works I strongly recommend for everybody).  So that you get..  you get these works that proceed by takes, as it were, that may, at first, seem unrelated, or not particularly related, except that they were all.. you know, they were written by the same guy, or something or they were noticed by the same person, but, as.. as the structures expand, create their own figure and their own gestalt.  So that is.. that is, in a way, an acknowledgement of the discontinuousness of consciousness. 

I mean we're both performing super-human feats here right now, by sitting (I mean, you guys have been listening to me for almost an hour! - and, my god! - I mean, I've been talking for almost an hour! - I mean, that's unnatural! People don't naturally do that.) So we can do that, but, on the other hand, someone once said, "No one speaks in complete sentences, except for politicians and English professors". You know, we do, we do train ourselves to these feats of continuousness and to these conventions of wholeness, you know. But they are, basically all they are, are conventions. I mean we do think that a.. that, for some reason we've decided, culturally and historically, we've decided, that a sonnet is a complete thing.
I mean, if it does, if a poem runs for fourteen lines and observes certain rules, then it's complete, then that's regarded as complete, closed, you know. This is a - uno - sonnet , you know. There it is. It's marketable too that way, you know ("You wanna buy a sonnet?"), whereas...

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning a approximately seventeen-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximaely forty-seven minutes in]

Horace - 3




Picking up again on Allen's 1980 "Sapphics" class, going through his classoom anthology 

AG: So that was..  [Horace and Thomas Wyatt (bemoaning wasted opportunity)]  Okay..also, there's a great poem by Francois Villon  about an old.. It's called "Ballade de la belle  Heaumière  aux filles de joie" ( "The Complaint of the Fair Helm-Maker Grown Old")It's a real meticulous description, like her lacking her teeth, and the rheum matter of her eye, and the sagging belly collapsed -  a really horrific description!  This also refers a little bit to the Catullus that we just passed by, that we have all these translations of  - So, "Furius and Aurelius..",  "Tell her of..."  just the page (in your anthologies) before that, if you look"Furius and Aurelius, True Comrades" (Catullus # 11)   You got that there?

Student:  (In the) Robert Fitzgerald translation?


AG: Yeah, and there are a couple of other translations of that before, but the angle, or idea, is that - three-quarters of the way down -  (Allen begins reading) - "Take a little bulletin to my girl friend,/ Brief but not dulcet:/ Let her live and thrive with her fornicators/Of whom she hugs three hundred in an evening/ With no true love for any, leaving them broken-/Winded the same way./She need not look, as once she did, for my love./By her own fault it died, like a tumbling flower/ At the field's edge, after the passing harrow/ Clipped it and left it." 


and if we go back a little more to the Catullus, we'll find some other versions of that ..

James Cranstoun has a terrible Victorian post-Victorian translation  - page twenty-two.. twelve pages beyond, twelve pages back..see page twenty two -  "The Poet Travels …" - You see that? Anybody not? Anybody can't find it? It's just a few pages

Student: The Poet Travels?


AG: Yea, above that, right above "The Poet Travels..." - two stanzas - (Allen reads from Cranstoun's translation) - "Still let her revel with her godless train,/ still clasp her hundred slaves to passion's thrall,/ Still  truly love not one but ever drain/The life-blood of them all"-    Not very good. That guy tried to..


Student: (One of the better ones..)

AG:  (No, there are ten better ones than that!

Student: Is that the same one?

AG: It's the same one, but he tries to translate it into ten-ten-ten-six, quatrains, ABAB, ten syllables, ten syllables, ten syllables, six syllables. You know, just an approximation o that isn't anywhere near approximate . So that's the trouble with that kind of rhyme. There is.. And then (if) we go back further, you'll find.. how many pages back?, oh, about..
Isn't that bad! - See how bad it can get!

If you go back to the Loeb, there's this little tiny-type Latin on one side, English on the other. [Allen displays] - "This is the way the page looks" - Go back to those. Another ten (pages) back, (eight back, I don't know). It begins "Furius Aurelius.." - on the the right hand side of the page - "Furius Aurelius" - Got it? - Right hand side of the page - "Furius Aurelius"

Student: Oh, there's the original Latin.

AG: Yeah, there's the original Latin. 

Furi et Aurelicomites Catulli,
sive in extremos penetrabit Indos,
litus ut longe resonante Eoa
tunditur unda,



And this is the Loeb library literal translation."Bid her go and be happy with her paramours, three hundred of whom she holds at once in her embrace, not loving one of them really, but again and again, draining the strength of all."

And a translation by Horace Gregory - I don't think you've got it here..let me see.. (going) further back…

Student:  No, below, right below (it).

AG: Really? By Horace Gregory? - No, this, of that same poem .. Well, it's a couple back, two back, you'll find the (Roy Arthur) Swansonversion One page.. page eleven (it says page eleven on the top), it's just a couple down… Find it? - "Furius, Aurelius, friends of Catullus.." and, on the right, "That fellow seems to be the same as God"' [a translation of Sappho]/ Yes? You've got that?

"Furius Aurelius, friends of Catullus" (says one). So it says -"..tell her to live with her rakes and be well,/ hugging three hundred or more at a time,/ loving not one but, in favor to all,/ pumping their loins." 

And then there is a translation, another translation around, let's see if I can find it.

Student: There's the Michie one in there.

AG: Yeah, that's what we just.. where's the Michie?, yeah… Do we have the Michie translation of that tho'? - Yeah - ((a) couple (of pages) before, you'll find Michie - "Good luck to her.." - It's about three from the top, three or four from the top . It's right after the Latin, right after the Greek, right after the Greek stuff,  three from the top - "Furius Aurelius, loyal comrades".. - "translated", at the bottom, "by James Michie". Got that? Three from the very top. Got it? - 

So the line there is  "Good luck to her, let her enjoy her lovers,/ the whole three hundred that she hugs together,/ loving none truly, by grim repetition/Wringing them all sperm-dry" - I think I read that one before

and in Horace Gregory's transation of that is "Live well and sleep with adulterous lovers./ Three hundred men between your thighs embracing all love turned false again, again and breaking their strength, now sterile..." 

Well, I think, "wringing them all sperm-dry" is pretty good. What the… I don't know what the (word) "rumpens means - break?  ilia rumpens - the Latin means breaking, I think.

Okay, lets see going on what else have we got here? -  Why don't we do another one, a nice Sapphic. Is there a nice Sapphic there that might...? - By Horace? - (yes) -  A little bit more of Horace now, something different.


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

Horace - 4



Student: (Did John Burnett [a Naropa student] do [read out loud] any Horace?)
AG: Pardon me?
Student:  John Burnett?
AG: No, he didn't do any Horace. (So), let's see, okay, yeah…

Student (begins reading) [Horace Book 2 - Ode XIV]  "Ah, how they glide by, Postumus, Postumus,/ The years, the swift years!/ Wrinkles and imminent/ Old age and death, whom no one conquers -/ Piety cannot delay their onward/ March; no, my friend, not were you to sacrifice/Three hundred bulls each day to inflexible/ Pluto whose grim moat holds the triple/ Geryon jailed with his fellow giants/ Death's lake that all we sons of mortality/Who have the good earth's fruits for the picking are/Foredoomed to cross, no matter whether/Rulers of kingdoms or needy peasants/.In vain we stay unscratched by the bloody wars,/in vain escape tumultous Hadria's/Storm-waves, in vain each autumn dread the/ Southern sirocco, our health's destroyer./We must at last set eyes on the scenery/Of Hell; the ill-famed daughters of Danaus,/Cocytus' dark, slow, winding river,/Sisyphus damned to his endlesss labour./ Farewell to lands, home dear and affectionate,/Wife then. Of all those trees that you tended well/Not one, a true friend , save the hated/Cypress shall follow its short-lived master./An heir shall
 drain those cellars of  Caecuban/You treble-locked (indeed he deserves it more)/And drench the stone-flagged floor with prouder/Wine than is drunk at the pontiff's banquet>"


Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume
labuntur anni, nec pietas moram
    rugis et instanti senectae
        adferet indomitaeque morti;


non, si trecenis, quotquot eunt dies,
amice, places inlacrimabilem
    Plutona tauris, qui ter amplum
        Geryonen Tityonque tristi


compescit unda, scilicet omnibus,
quicumque terrae munere vescimur,
    enaviganda, sive reges
        sive inopes erimus coloni.

rustra cruento Marte carebimus
fractisque rauci fluctibus Hadriae,
    frustra per autumnos nocentem
        corporibus metuemus Austrum:

visendus ater flumine languido
Cocytos errans et Danai genus
    infame damnatusque longi
        Sisyphus Aeolides laboris

linquenda tellus et domus et placens
uxor, neque harum, quas colis, arborum
    te praeter invisas cupressos
        ulla brevem dominum sequetur.

absumet heres Caecuba dignior
servata centum clavibus et mero
    tinguet pavimentum superbo
        pontificum potiore cenis.



AG: Does that have any.. anywhere? Is that done in Sapphics in English? 
Student: Yeah
AG; Can you read the adonic lines? - the little (tags) , just the adonic lines..
Student: (Well, I ...)  "Piety cannot delay their onward.."..(but)...
AG: Ah, it's not translated into.. ?
Student: Well, no, like, it's real irregular.
AG: That's really interesting
Student: (Some, but).. I don't know
AG: Are there are any good ones, short, brief sharp ones that are..really.. that have some rhythm?  The point is to get some rhythm, not just to listen to.. words..
Student: Yes, ok
AG: (But) rhythmic words!
Student: Here's one.  (but)  It's not all that short  tho'), with...
AG:  Er.. I don't want to get too hung up..
Student: (Well..)
AG: Is it interesting?  Because we've only got another fifteen minutes..

The reason Horace is important here is that the later European Renaissance poets (Petrarch, particularly, precursor of Dante - Petrarch was a precursor of Dante, right?) picked up not so much from Sappho or Catullus but from Horace. And it was Horace who influenced them - (John) Milton and (Andrew) Marvell - Milton translated an Horatian Ode - Marvell wrote a Horatian Ode,


[Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approxomately forty-two-and-three-quarter minutes in, and ending at approximately forty-five-and-a-quarter minutes in]

Horace - 5



[Allen continues with his review of his classroom anthology]

AG: And the Sapphic Catullan form was picked up by, as we have in here [in this xerox anthology],  Sir Walter) Raleigh and (Sir Philip) Sidney. So, if you continue turning (the pages of the anthology), you'll get up to Raleigh. (If you can find that, it's about three-quarters of the way - okay, let's find the Raleigh first, then we can pay undivided attention) - about two-thirds down - It was called the perfect Sapphic! … here was are - the perfect Sapphic in English) -  about two-thirds of the way down, at the bottom...

Student: Did you read this, Monday?
AG: What?
Student: Did you read this, Monday?
AG: Yes, I read it . I just want to get us.. you know, get us all on the same set of papers. Got it?  Now you want to.. When you're all settled, we can do that…ok.. shoot.. now which one is that and what's it called?
Student: Ode Five. Book One.
AG: Aha!

Student:  (reads the entire poem (of Horace - (Book I - Ode V)) in James Michie's translation)  "What slim youngster, his hair dripping with fragrant oil/ makes hot love to you now, Pyrrha, ensconced in a/ snug cave curtained with roses?/Who lays claim to that casually/ Chic blond hair in a braid? Soon he'll be scolding the/Gods, whose promise, like yours, failed him, and gaping at/Black winds making his ocean's/ Fair face unrecognizable./ He's still credulous, though, hugging the prize he thinks/Pure gold, shining and fond, his for eternity./Ah, poor fool, but the breeze plays/ Tricks. Doomed, all who would venture to/ Sail that glittering sea. Fixed to the temple wall,/My plaque tells of an old sailor who foundered and,/Half-drowned, hung up his clothes to/Neptune, lord of the element." 

AG: That's not a Sapphic.

Student: Yes it is.

AG: Let's see.. I don't believe it . I think it's…

Student: (It's a bit irregular, but..)

AG: It's an ode… (an example of the) ode-form, which…  (John) Milton translated that particular poem. Do we have..? We don't have that, do we, here in the anthology? -  A fragment of it is actually printed in one of these...on one of these sheets, just a little fragment of it, the last half. I'll bring it in another time. It's the same form that Milton used and (Andrew) Marvell used for his.. Marvell's ode on Cromwell, - ("An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland")  ("As if his highest plot/To plant the bergamot")

[John Milton's translation of Horace Book I - Ode V)

"What slender Youth bedewed with liquid odours/Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave,/Pyrrha for whom bind’st thou/In wreaths thy golden Hair,/Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he/On Faith and changed Gods complain: and Seas/Rough with black winds and storms/Unwonted shall admire:/Who now enjoys thee credulous, all Gold,/Who always vacant, always amiable/Hopes thee; of flattering gales/ Unmindfull. Hapless they/To whom thou untri’d seems’t fair. Me in my vowd/Picture the sacred wall declares t’ have hung/My dank and dropping weeds/To the stern God of Sea."

Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa/perfusus liquidis urget odoribus/grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?/Cui flavam religas comam,/  simplex munditiis? Heu quotiens fidem/mutatosque deos flebit et aspera/nigris aequora ventis/emirabitur insolens/  qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea,/qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem/sperat, nescius aurae/ fallacis. Miseri, quibus/ intemptata nites. Me tabula sacer/ votiva paries indicat uvida/ suspendisse potenti/vestimenta maris deo.

[Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approximately forty-five-and-a-quarter minutes in, and ending at approximately forty-seven-and-three-quarter minutes  in]

William Blake's Cottage


Wonderful news!  - the campaign by the William Blake Society to buy back William Blake's cottage in Felpham for the nation, to keep it from again falling into private hands, has been successful

Tim Heath, Chair of the Blake Society,  writes:


"We are delighted to announce that yesterday, 21 September 2015, the sale of Blake’s Cottage was completed by the lawyers and the building is now held in trust for the nation in perpetuity.
Our thanks to everyone in the Blake community who have given their work, time and savings to the project. Over half a million pounds was raised, a new charitable trust set up, and for the very first time there is now a home for William Blake.
The story began long ago on a summers day in 1993 when I was having tea in the garden of the Cottage with Heather Howell, whose family had owned the building since 1928. Our talk turned to the future of the Cottage and how her wish was that one day her home should go into trust for all those who are inspired by Blake.
It took twenty two years.
As you may imagine, the process of raising over half a million pounds from the Blake community – many of whom eschew money – would never be easy. Many doubted it could ever be achieved, but with the individual gifts of many hundreds of donors and the extraordinary generosity of one anonymous trust, the Cottage has been purchased.
William Blake lived in nine houses during his lifetime and only two survive – the house at 17 South Molton Street in London and the cottage in Felpham on the Sussex coast. The Cottage is where Blake wrote the poem ‘And Did Those Feet …’ while he was awaiting his trial for Treason, and so there is a special irony in how this radical poem Jerusalem has become a national anthem, a hymn to dissent and a song that challenges both the Singer and the State.

Mr Blake thanks you."

and Allen, of course, would be cheered by this news too, and grateful for the preservation.



Sapphics continued - (Tennyson)


                                [Alfred, Lord Tennyson ( 1809-1892)- Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron]

Allen continues with his survey of Sapphics, going through further pages of his xerox-compiled classroom anthology 

AG:  [to another late-comer] - You can take one of those that says"Sapphic anthology, two bucks"…and then the bag.. not two bucks for one paper.. And we're about two thirds down the bottom..to...(Edmund) Spenser

Okay, We're on that Spenser page? - Sidney? - (the) (Philip) Sidney and the (Walter) Raleigh? Ok? - So we read those, then I read you aloud Raleigh's notes on Quantitative Verse. So then the next page would be (Thomas) Campion Campion's excellent translation, on the left, of  a little ode by Horace (and the Latin is on the bottom, and you see what he did, making it into quatrains) - and Campion himself also wrote Latin Sapphics. So you get that next. Got it?. See, I'll just tell you what's in here. The next page would be Campion's explanation of the Sapphics that I read aloud. Got that?. And then the next page, Isaac Watts, a piece of Isaac Watts, and then (William) Cowper's poem . Then, the next page, typed out, from Saintsbury'sHistory (of English Prosody).., a few little fragments that I  mentioned. Tennyson's one thing (which is interesting  - we'll read the Tennyson aloud) - "Faded every violet, all the roses/Gone the glorious promise and the victim/Broken in this anger of Aphrodite/Yields to the victor" - He had that run-on there which is very interesting, the best part of that verse form, how the lines run on from one line to another without a break> "and the victim…"

Student: (Not all on the) same line..


AG: "And the victim/ Broken in the anger of Aphrodite""


Student: It's usually always been in the second line.


AG: No, sometimes it'll be broken in  (the very last line) -  "Aphrodite/ Yields to the victor". In fact, I (myself)  wrote a Sapphic stanza that I'm very proud of, that I read the other day, which has that run-on line - "Still love escapes my grasping for an ideal body/One friend Tuesday visits me.." -"Still love escapes my grasping for an ideal body/One friend Tuesday visits me Tuesday/sleeping bag/big cocked, older, mustached, crooked-mouthed, not the same teen-/ager I sucked off" - "teen-/ager I sucked off" (so I just broke it between "teen" and "ager"). And that's really exactly the way this… the.. Greek and the Latin Sapphics do go, with that run-on (even breaking words in the middle, as John (Burnett) mentioned before). Tennyson did this experiment in Sapphic meter, contributing to Professor Jebb's primer of Greek Literature, as an example, presumably as a formal example of English Sapphics


Then the next page, some of Tennyson's"Hendecasyllabics"andalcaics. There was a sample of the alcaic before..at the top (we went through it, I read it before). There's this weird little attempt to just write hendecasyllabics, not exactly the same as.. not this ..not exactly the same, it's called "Milton", it's, from Tennyson. It's Tennyson on (John) Milton. (Just) a sample. The Swinburne's "Sapphics" (which I read) (are) next - (you should) probably reverse (the) pages - and Swinburne's "Hendecasyllabics" too. You see those?  And I was reading.. did I read that aloud here? any of the hendecasyllabics?  Anyone remember? Swinburne? Because I would like to do a little of that in this course.


[Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approximately forty-seven-and-three-quarter  minutes in, and ending at approximately  fifty one minutes in]

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 237



                                                      [Herschel Silverman  (1926-2015) - Photo by Jeffrey Weinberg]

Herschel Silverman, New Jersey "Beat" legend passed away last Saturday, aged 89, "The Candystore Man".
Allen immortalized him in his poem, "Television Was A Baby Crawling Toward That Death Chamber" - "candystore emperor Hersch Silverman, dreaming of telling the Truth, but his Karma is selling jellybeans & being kind"
Here's a 2000 New York Times article on him
Allen on his poems:
"There is an inventive energy, New Jersey beauty and charm in his compositions . This writing is marked by soulful perception of life around him and language as it falls from his mouth, it includes the complete comedy of his particular obsessions."
Allen, in 1992, (from his "Homage to Hersch"):
"Herschel Silverman's memoir of early days [late 1950s] introduction to the New York poetry bohemian beat Lower East Side Village Cedar Bar&  Seven Arts Coffee Shopscene or community is touching - his faithfulness to an idea of art & excitement he projects on others tho' he half denies it to himself. I'm glad he enjoyed the better part of both worlds, householder, candystore owner in W.C. Williams' Jerseyprovince as well as active believer & observer & Poet in the now-historic yet still-developing poetic scene in pre-millenial megalopolis America."
Allen strikes just one down note - but first Silverman and his own recollection:
"Hypnotised by reading Allen's "Howl & Other Poems" over and over and applying them as Great Poetry Truths, in comparison with most other "modern" poetry taught in schools, I viewed Allen as Holy American Prophet, almost two thousand years in making. seeing him as Yeats' Creature slowly moving towards Jerusalem to proclaim Second Coming. I was sure that near end of twentieth-century, Allen's words would be recognized as Herald of New Man, a breakthru in civilization's march toward Enlightenment. I was seeking a guru through poetry and now I'd found him."
Allen:  "He makes too much of me as poetry messiah or macher & I'm a little uncomfortable in that role, either he's found out my vanity or laid on me a stereotype.
But his sincerity and the pleasure his life's taken in the poetry world encourages us all to realize that poetry does serve humankind well, in giving pleasure & empowerment to people of sensitive spirit, domestic folk, enlightening their lives and relieving some of the suffering of earthly existence."

More press on Silverman - here (from 2010) and from here (2012)
Levi Asher's obituary note - here  - and the Hudson Reporter (local paper) - here 

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
[Jack Kerouac at the Seven Arts Coffee Gallery, NYC,  1959 - Photograph by Burt Glinn © The Estate of Burt Glinn] 















[Frank O'Hara and crowd at the Cedar Tavern, NYC, 1963 -
 Photograph by Fred W McDarrah © The Estate of Fred W McDarrah]


Kianna Carlisle has an interesting project - digitizing the printed poem (no audio, just the words coming up). Here's her digitization of a selection from Allen's Journals made forEd Sanders legendary Fuck You magazine



We particularly like the slow "real-time" unfolding of all this.

(Ed Sanders, incidentally, was interviewed last week on Rag Radio)



Tomorrow, as part of the on-going show (on loan from the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco at The Berkeley Public Library (North Branch)), and part of the celebration of Banned Books Week  - Eric Drooker

and same day, on the East Coast, as part of the Buffalo Humanities Festival, Professor Jonathan Katzwill give a lecture entitled "Allen Ginsberg Isn't Gay" (in the Ketchum Hall in the Burchfield Penney Art Center- Don't worry, there's intentional provocation and irony in that title. 

Allen makes it as nude centerfold in the current issue of the St Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter
Editor, Betsy Fagin and poet Elinor Nauen:

BF: The reason I wanted to talk to you about this [male centerfolds] is that as soon as I got the gig for the newsletter. I knew I wanted a naked centerfold. People thought I was kidding.
EN: What was behind your idea to do that?
BF: I thought it would be funny.
EN: That's it. See! And how did you come up with that idea?.
BF: Because of the Ginsberg line on the Project website:"The Poetry Project burns like a red-hot coal…" ["The Poetry Project burns like red hot coal in New York's snow"] I'm interested in exploring the attachment to the past and the impulse to glorifying what used to be at the expense of what's happening now and the directions the Project has been moving in. There's a whole world of people who worship at the altar of Ginsberg like nothing else ever happened or ever will happen...

Elinor Nauen notes: "I feel like Allen would want to have a new naked picture of himself taken".  
Meanwhile...

[Ginsberg caption: "Odalesque, my bedroom, young naked friend took my picture 437 East 12th Street, N.Y. March22, 1985" - © Allen Ginsberg Estate  - courtesy the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Allen Ginsberg Collection)]

Ginsberg-Koch-Waldman reading




From the incomporable Naropa University Archives, another vintage audio tape this weekend - (from June 25, 1979)  a reading that took place in Denver, (Colorado), featuring Allen, alongside Kenneth Koch and Anne Waldman

Anne's voice (a brief excerpt from a poem and a brief note of introduction) begins the tape, before Allen speaks) 

AG: Thank you Anne, thank you everyone for coming.  When I speak..  The sound-system here is real good, so when I speak, you can hear? everybody?  Justin [sic] you can hear?    every syllable?, every consonant? - Okay. What I'm going to do is mostly read poems of the last year or so. However, I wanted to go back to a poem typed-up only this year for the first time, a composition from 1958 by Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and myself, called "Nixon"(from 1958) - and the footnote - I found this in my papers this year - says "This poem was written in a bar on Broadway, New York on 110th Street, Manhattan, over beers, during a visit to town by Kerouac, likely after the Vice-President's celebrated"Checkers Speech", [Editorial note - the "Checkers Speech" dates from several years earlier, September 1952]  at a time when Kerouac was besieged by Esquire, Vogue, or other slick magazines, to write "timely" articles on subjects that the editor then thought modish. On this visit, he had refused to write a - quote "critique of American women" - unquote - and the transcript ends with his wry world-weary cry - "We ought to make fifteen-hundred dollars right now, write a big attack on American women!". That's what the big gay editors, or the faggot editors, of Esquire of those days wanted (or the macho editors, they were, actually). In other words, it was modish at that time - "Let's have an article on American women?  What's wrong with American women, Jack?" . That's the way magazines are run. I guess you know. Sells copies.



[Allen reads  "Nixon" in its entirety] -"Nixon has a pillow in his mouth in the kitchen. Nixon has chickenfeathers coming out of his fly…."…"Nixon doesn't know Lafcadio." 
That was all we had to say about Nixon. It was nice because it was 1958 and high-hearted, friendly

"Lack Love"..This is.. these are poems, beginning  February 1978, so, it's the last fifteen months - "Lack Love" - [Allen begins reading his erotic poem] "Love wears down to bare truth/ My heart hurt me much in youth"… "Hear my heart beat red in bed/Thick and living, love rejected"

"All The Things I Got To Do" - [This is followed by Allen's long litany of distractions] This is May 1978 -  "All The Things I Got To Do" - "I remembered when I sat down to meditate after weeks wandering streets of iron thoughts, I have to go back to my own universe, Buddha-imagination… "…."...edit the Shambhala Talking Poetics and read up on my file on nuclear poison."

"A Pleasant Afternoon" - June 18, 1978 - "One day three poets and sixty pairs of ears were sitting under a green striped Chautauqua tent in Aurora listening to black spirituals, tapping their feet, appreciating the words flying by…"and the tent flapped open-hearted and spacious and didn't fall down"

"What' s Dead"- or "What's Dead   "Clouds- dead, movies, dead shadows…."…."shadows left behind. These were the musings of the Buddhist student, Allen Ginsberg"





Next, (starting at approximately twelve minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-three-and a quarter minutes in)  Allen reads Plutonian Ode 
   - "writtten at the night before, at.. about a year ago, written about a year ago the night before an arrestsitting meditation at Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility.
"What new element"..  "gone beyond me into wakened space - So - AH!'

[Allen follows this with a few brief related poems]

This is..  (these are).. area poems… a few poems of this area. A month later, after we were upat Rocky Flats - Nagasaki Day [August 9] , last year (which will be coming around (again) in August - and I think there'll be more demonstrations there, (and) I'll probably get busted again, and others will be meditating on the tracks, so, any of you who are particularly sensitive to this kind of social meditation are invited up. I guess the Rocky Flats Truth Force will be announcing that.). These are haiku or one-shot perceptions, while being arrested
"Cumulus clouds float across blue sky/ over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory /am I gonna stop that?"
"Rocky Mountains rising behind us/ Denver shining in morning light/Led away from the crowd by police and photographers."
"Middleaged Ginsberg and Ellsberg taken down the road/ to the greyhaired Sheriff''s van - What about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey Einsein, come back!"
"In Golden Courthouse" - (Kerouac has a line in Mexico City Blues -"I want to go to golden" - very abstract - written here - "I want to go to golden" - and I wound up going to Golden Courthouse!) - "Waiting for the Judge, breathing silent/Prisoners, witnesses, Police -/the stenographer yawns into her palms'
And, later, we went to visit the manager of the Rocky Flats Plutonium Plant, and we found out that the basic mantra of those who were creating the plutonium is - quote "Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves" - unquote - "Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves"/the bareheaded guard lifts a flyswatter above his desk/...whap!"
A green-letter'd shield on the pressboard wall/ "Life is fragile, handle with care" -/My Goodness!  this is where they make the nuclear bomb triggers!"

September (19)78 - "Fake Saint"- I left…Summers, generally, I teach, as now, at Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. (for those of you who don't know the occasion of this reading, because.. Kenneth Koch is teaching there for this week, and Anne Waldman is co-director, and I'm co-director) - And in September, last year [1977],  I left Boulder and went out to the West Coast and stayed with Gary Snyder. And this is a poem written in a notebook, riding along the road, up into the Sierra Mountains, a couple of hundred miles north of San Francisco, or coming down from his mountain retreat -  "Fake Saint" - "I am Fake Saint, magazine saint , Ram Dass, who's not a fake saint consciousness?- Nobody…...  ""uncertain as incense"..


"And I'll finish with one.. (with) two poems, relatively brief. I had a series of love poems. This was the most recent series of adventures, that were all put in Skelton-like, Skeltonic-like, stanzas - "Love Returned" - "Love returned with smiles three thousand miles to keep a years promise".."Some nights are left free and love's patient with me".


And I'll finish with a brief poem, (from) this Spring, Brooklyn College, I went to teach, substituting for a poet I like,John Ashbery, in a writing class. And it was the first time I'd ever taught in a formal university, with a tie and a coat - "At Brooklyn College" - ("You used to wear dungerees and blue work-shirt, sneakers, or cloth-topped shoes, and ride alone on subways, young and elegant, unofficial bastard of nature, sneaking sweetness into Brooklyn./ Now tweed jacket and  your father's tie on your breast…."…"have a good time workshopping brain-mind in the Avery room in the student office building." 


The next poet will be Kenneth Koch. Anne, will you introduce Kenneth?




AW: Kenneth Koch reading next. Kenneth is the author of many books of poems including The Art of Love, Thank You and Other Poems, The Duplications. Also the author of the novel,The Red Robins(which is coming out as a play as well, and appeared in..was presented in New York last year) and books on the teaching of poetry-writing, Wishes, Lies & Dreams, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?and"I Never Told Anybody - Teaching Poetry-Writing In A Nursing Home). We're very pleased to have Kenneth Koch visiting this week at the Kerouac school in Boulder and he'll also be reading Wednesday night at the Public Service Building with three younger poets, so that's Wednesday night at 8 o'clock if any of you are interested in that. Kenneth has a wonderful sense of humor and beauty. It's as big as the sky. Please welcome Kenneth Koch

KK:  Thank you Anne. After I read there'll be a five-minute intermission and then Anne will read. 


The first poem is called "The Magic of Numbers" ("The Magic of Numbers - 1 - How strange it was to hear the furnitue being moved around in the apartment upstairs!…"…"The magic of Numbers - 7 - I was twenty-nine and so were you. We had a very passionate time./Everything I read turned into a story about you and me, and everything I/ did was turned into a poem")


The next poem is called "The Circus". It refers to a poem I wrote about thirteen or fifteen years earlier called "The Circus'. I wrote the first poem… well, this poem explains the circumstances of writing the first poem. The people in this poem are all real - "The Circus" ("I remember when I wrote The Circus/I was living in Paris, or rather we were living in Paris.."… "And this is not as good a poem as The Circus/ And I wonder if any good will come of either of them all the same") 


"The next poem is called "The Boiling Water"("A serious moment for the water is when it boils.."…."That is enough. For the germ when it enters or leaves a body, for the fly when it lifts its little wings")


I have..  I have one more poem I'm going to read, it's called "Our Hearts" . It's in nine parts, each as long as a sonnet, fourteen-lines long, they're not at all sonnets) - "Our Hearts" - ( I - "All hearts should beat when Cho Fu's orchestra plays "Love"…."…but usually without the time/Or power to change anything  (sometimes - maybe a fraction - if so it's amazing!)  then off we go.")


AG: We'll have a ten-minute intermission then Anne Waldman will be on. And so those of you who have never heard her, I would suggest, stay, she's a great orator, fantastic voice. So, ten minutes.

                         [Dual-portrait of Anne Waldman - from "Face of A Poet" (1972) by Alex Katz

This reading (with the second half), the Anne Waldman half) will continue tomorrow

[Audio for the above may be heard  here, beginning at the beginning and concluding approximately sixty-three-and-a-half minutes in]


Ginsberg-Koch-Waldman part 2 - (Anne Waldman)


                 [Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, New Years Eve, 1979 - Photo by Louis Cartwright]



                                                                              [Anne Waldman]

continuing from yesterday's transcription -Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, andAnne Waldman reading in Denver, Colorado, 1979.

Today (introduced by Allen Ginsberg) - Anne Waldman reading

Allen Ginsberg: Some of the audience are students from Naropa and some are old friends from Denver and some are strangers. So for the strangers and old friends from Denver, some background here. Actually, all three of us, Anne Waldman, Kenneth Koch, and myself, were in England just a couple of weeks ago and we all read together at Cambridge. And I was coming from a tour of the Continent with Peter Orlovsky - Italy, France - and Anne Waldman and Kenneth Koch went on to.. Glasgow and Durham andrread. So, actually, we've been wandering around reading, and just got back in the United States a week or two ago, and Anne and I, the day after tomorrow, are taking off and flying to Rome [Castelporziano] to give a big reading with William Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso and about fifty other poets, sponsored by the Communist commune government elected in Rome, who were interested in having an international poetry conference. So, in between all these flights and European fantasies, we're having this little reading here. And some of you know Anne Waldman and some of you don't, so I'll introduce her.

She is the co-director of theJack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at NaropaInstitute, a Buddhist meditation center in Boulder. She's had a number of books published (one by City Lights, called Fast Speaking Woman - and she has a book of Journals and Dreams, and a long poem called"Shaman" aboutBob Dylan, (whom she knows quite well, because she traveled with the Rolling Thunder Revue, and was featured in the movie Renaldo and Clara, which probably passed through here, like a flittering ghost, within the year - I think it showed here, but nobody went to see it and it got really attacked, viciously attacked in the Denver Post).

So, Anne was, for many years, the director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York in the Lower East Side, (for) almost a decade. She was born in the Lower East Side.. born in Greenwich Village in a classic.. Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village.. and grew up, and saw Gregory Corso when she was a young lady (going to high school, I guess), she saw Corso on the street and she grew up with all the bohemians as neighbors in Greenwich Village, and some, actually.. she knows the literary scene..down..totally..(it) comes in her family [sic]. She was a great executrix editor ofAngel Hair books and the co-ordinator of  the Poetry Project in Nw York (as she's been up here) . And she's also the editor of a really interesting compilation of lectures made in Naropa called Talking Poetics, where John Cage, Robert Duncan, myself, Ted Berrigan, many many others who visited over the last few years - we recorded what they had to say to the students and published it as a book this year [1979] called Talking Poetics, and Anne edited that. She's also a very great orator (which is to say, given the right mood, and the right text, and the right situation, she certainly can swing and the wind comes through her bones with great subtlety and violence. So, Anne Waldman, poet. 

Anne Waldman: That's a lot to live up to! - This first work is for all the ladies out there and it's a poem addressed to the Madonna - (is this better without the sound-system? - no? - ok) - inspired by reading some ofDante's love poems (and there are a couple of lines in here stolen from Dante) and it's called "My Lady" ("I wish to speak to you about My Lady.."…"...I love her tragedies and the way she undoes me, My Lady, My Lady").

She follows this with "Plutonium Poem" ("This was a Plutonium chant for a Rocky Flats demonstration" ("Fuck Plutonium! Love it? Hate it?…"…"poor, sad, monster eyeballs, reincarnated for a quarter of a million years!") 

Next, a poem incorporating found language - "This poem was wriitten on a limousine ride from the Stapleton International Airport to Boulder. It's mostly a cut-up of the overheard conversation (actually, it's more direct than that') - "May 10th, moon's nearly full, this is a great time for Scorpios…."…"what a silly town, what silly people, but they do good business, but.." 

"I've been preparing for this class (that) I'm going to do a second session, on, sort of, shamanistic poetry. It's quite fascinating, and I don't know what that means exactly, but I'm trying to figure it out. And this (next) is "Shaman Song", sort of based on some compilation of texts - ("I'm throwing words around..something is forming.."…"..to me to me to me to heal me up again" (and) this is called  "Alphabetico Sudamericano". It's about trying to learn Spanish - "Alphabetico Sudamericano" - ("I am young, studying language in the high striped mountains, 0 South America…" .." looking for the sign of a shoe-maker, a zapatería ")" 


"I was making my class write, this last winter, write sestinas. So I'd like to read an old sestina and then a newer sestina. This is a sestina from the 'Sixties - it's called "How The Sestina Yawn Works". Sestina is basically a six-verse poem with six end-words that you repeat in a varying form. The words for this poem are "yawn","revolution", "television""poetry", "methadrine" and "personally". So if you want to follow those words through their permutations and then there's actually a little three-line coda at the end where you use all six, all six of the words." - "How The Sestina Yawn Works"- ("I open this poem with a yawn, thinking how tired I am…"… "..war, strike, starvation, revolution."


"This was written in a train station in Dimitrovgrad (it's a long way from "methadrine"!). It's called  "Trains and Clouds" and the words in this one - "Dimitrovgrad", "1949", "about", "me", "ambassador", and "clouds" - ("We have just arrived in Dimitrovgrad…"…"..but I love exotic trains and clouds').  

and this is.. "Skin Meat Bones" - Anne reads "Skin Meat Bones" in its entirety - ("I've come to tell you of the things dear to me/& what I've discovered of the skin/Meat/bones…")

This is another little formal poem. It's a cantilena [sic], which is a dispute or dialogue between a man and a woman, between a lover and his lady, and this is written with a Boulder poet named Reed Bye - "Cantilena"- (the lady speaks first) ("Lady: I like elegance in dress, in men, the display and play in the phenomenal world…"… "…a poet's choices lie in his closet, he can pick from there what ain't too moth-bit") 

Just a few more here. This is by request - "Silver E"("I'm a mischievous woman, whose heart expires…"… "…we'll lock gaze rock fire love")

This is "After the Copper Eskimo", a sort of shamanistic song, song to expel hesitation ("I'm quite unable, I am quite unable…"……."I am quite unable to wince more pain).

"There's one other here I'm supposed to read if I can find it - [Anne rifles through her papers] - It's not here, sorry. I'll close with..  Ah! here it is - I'll read this one and then I'll close with a shorter one. This is called  "Swami", a little travel story ("And I had written the Swami, and I had rented a bungalow a little above the town and waited.."…"..sat by the river, locked in meditation") 



Anne concludes with a brief excerpt from "Fast Speaking Woman" - "I want to read a few lines.. these were lines, that were added to this second edition of Fast Speaking Woman, that I've never read before, so I'll just.. it's just a few phrases, and this..also comes from..(is) partially inspired by a Mazateca Indian chant, the shaman-ess, Maria Sabana, who takes people on an all-night..mostly, it's an initiation for women, a sort of all-night..it's a vigil" - "I'm the hieratic woman/I'm the hermetic woman/I'm the harvesting woman…."…"The woman inspired inside her house" -  

Swinburne, Pound and Bridges

                                                      [Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)]


AG: Did I do that last time? [Swinburne's Hendecasyllabics]. If you listen to the way he handles it, it's a direct transmission from him up to Ezra Pound up to modern days and into this classroom - "In the month of the long decline of roses/I, beholding the summer dead before me,/Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent,/Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark/Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions/Half-divided the islands of the sunset;/Till I heard as it were a noise of waters/Moving tremulous under feet of angels/Multitudinous, out of all the heavens; /Knew the fluttering wind, the  fluttered foliage,/Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow…"

(The) two tricks Swinburne does here in English that Pound takes over, and that passes through (Charles) Olson, (Robert) Duncan and a little bit of my work. First of all is that "da-da" at the end - if you notice the paradigms at the end, the end of the adonic line and the end of the hendecasyllabic line when it's in the Sapphic mode, very often ends with two long, or two accented (stresses)  - or, some special emphasis on the last syllable, if it's a two-syllable word like "shadow", "ending", "sea-mark", "lions". Pound takes that"sea-mark", "sea-surge", ear for the "sea-surge", the rustle.. the rattle of old men's voices", ear for the sea-surge, and there's a funny kind of crooning thing that he does with that that gives a weight to the last syllable - even if it's "and the girls sing-ing" - Has anybody.. you've all heard Pound's poems on records? - has anybody not? - anybody not heard Ezra Pound on record? Is this recognizeable for those who have heard it? Do you recognize what I'm talking about? Next time, I'll bring in some Pound. We'll get ahold of Pound reading The Pisan Cantos, I guess - (do we have one (of them) in here (in the clasroom anthology)?…toward the end.. with Pound...Pound...okay..if you look toward the end... I'll find it.. [Allen keeps searching] - no..well, no, never mind).

What you can get is... You get it more in his handling of "The Seafarer"  ("May I for my own self song's truth reckon,/Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days/Hardship endured oft/Bitter breast-cares have I abideth.." - "Known on my keel many a care's hold,/And dire sea-surge…"). You hear that little thing that he's doing with the "sea-surge"?, "cares hold"? "harsh days"?, "hail scur"?, "clamour"?, "mead-drink"?, "ring-having"?, "wave's slash"? -  You know what I'm talking about? - two long vowels..two long vowels (or two accented vowels, however you want to count them) at the end of the line - or, an unaccented vowel, like "singing", pronouncing it "sing-ing", when you put a little bit of emphasis on the end of the…on the second vowel. That ear went, I believe, from Swinburne to (W.B.) Yeats to Ezra Pound, probably, because Pound said that he didn't get to see Swinburne when he went to London, Swinburne was the one man he missed.   


                                                                      [Ezra Pound (1885-1972)]

The other thing he does is - "Set myself to the sea and journeyed silent". Instead of saying "I'.. well, he had "I, beholding the summer dead before me/Set myself to the sea and journeyed silent" - there is a thing where you cut.. he cuts..  (he) cuts out the subject - "And then (we) went down to the sea in ships" - If you look at the Canto we have here by Pound [Canto 1], I think that he's cut out that subject - "went down to the sea in ships"..(where is (the) Pound here? (in the Norton Anthology) - page 1007) - "And then went down to the ship,/Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly seas, and/We set up mast and  sail on that swart ship/Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also" - Is that sounding familiar? - "Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also" - It's a hendecasyllabic line - "Bore-sheep-a-board her-and-our-bod-ies-also" So, throughout The Cantos, you'll find Pound making use of the rhythms of the hendecasyllabic line, the double.. the molossus, as it is called,  the double.. at the end, where we have a.. [Allen  moves to the blackboard to demonstrate the line] - it could be either, interchangeably, either light or heavy, the last one (last syllable).. I've forgot where the other one.. yeah, the fourth and the eleventh, can be interchangeably long syllables or short syllables, that's why I… You following what I'm saying? - "sea-surge"...

So you find it in the Hendecasyllabics of Swinburne. So we'll go on (because we did that already) from Swinburne to..  I think you got Swinburne's Sapphics broken up into several pages, with the Hendecasyllabics sandwiched in-between. So if you put the Hendecasyllabics  first - 202, then 204, then, 206….


                                                            [Robert Bridges (1884-1930)]

Robert Bridges is the next. Bridges was a Georgian poet, a kind of conservative, not a very exciting poet at all. It's called "Povre Ame Amoureuse" (You can't quite see it, but it is Robert Bridges, down there, labelled) . It's a trans(lation) - Louise Labé  translated the Sapphic-style poem into French in the Sixteenth Century and here is Bridges' translation of Louis Labe, so there's further lineage - "When to my lone soft bed at eve returning/Sweet desir'd sleep already stealeth o'er me/My spirit flieth to the fairy-land of her tyrannous love/Him then I think fondly to kiss to hold him/Frankly then to my bosom, I that all day/Have looked for him suffering, repining, yea many long days/ O blessed sleep, with flatteries beguile me;/So, if I ne'er may  of a surety have him/Grant to my poor soul amorous the dark gift of this illusion." - Can you find that? It's at the end of the Sapphics (section). It looks like this [Allen displays the xerox anthology once again]

[Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approximately fifty-one minutes in, and ending at approximately fifty-seven-and- three-quarter minutes in]

Ginsberg on Late Auden

                                                              [W.H.Auden (1907-1973)]  

[Allen (at Naropa in 1980) continues his survey through a xeroxed classroom anthology of the Sapphic form, paying particular attention today to the late work of W.H.Auden]

AG: So from that (from Robert Bridges),  we get into, I think you have the Vernon Watkins and the..

Student: Auden

AG: There's Auden (W.H.Auden), and then from the front, mixed up in the front there's Vernon Watkins and Louis MacNeice .. had rough Sapphics - (it's way up front, we don't need it now). Auden, however, is.. funny. So I think I'll taketwo brief Auden Sapphics - "Circe" (page 54 ) - and the next page on the left -  "(For) Orlon Fox" - (I'll be done in a minute, has anybody got to run?) . The Sapphic poem was basic to Auden's practice - and to MacNeice and that whole group of English poets of before the war, the new poets, the modern poets who followed after the great generation of (Ezra) Poundand (T.S.) Eliot . There was Stephen Spender,Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Isherwood, and then a younger group, David Gascoyne,Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas (younger than Auden, actually). So, Watkins, we have a sample of.

Of Auden, his last book leaned very heavily on Sapphics and very boring statements of boring everyday thoughts (actually, a little bit dumb in that way, except brilliantly written, very witty, but sort of negative). Here, in the introduction (for Orlon Fox) if you've got it - the next page - "For Orlon Fox- "Each year brings new poems of Form and Content,/ new foes to tug with: At Twenty, I tried to/ vex my elders., Past sixty, it's the young whom/ I hope to bother" - So that's a little cantankerous, actually - "the young" (very preoccupied with "age-ism", so..  - and it's an attack on the young in "Circe" - it's an attack on the Hippies of the "Sixties

Student: on Women

AG: ..On the Hippies of the 'Sixties  - Well, maybe. On women too, but.. You know the story of Circe in The Odyssey is that she turns men into pigs. You know, because of sheer lust, and she refuses their lust, and they turn into pigs, they slobber and grovel in a swineyard. Meanwhile, Odysseus is not turned into a pig but he enjoys Circe's bed - "Her Telepathic-Station transmits thought-waves/the second-rate, the bored, the disappointed/and any of us when tired or uneasy/are tuned to receive/ So, tough unlisted in atlas or phone-book/Her Garden is easy to find. In no time/one reaches the gate over which is written/ large: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR" - "large:MAKE LOVE NOT WAR" - If you notice, he's not paying any attention at all to the rhythm of that hendecasyllable and adonic. It's all… He's just counting syllables - Eleven and five.. Eleven, eleven, eleven, and five. And you'll find that's mostly.. They'll either do.. The way that the British, twentieth-century British, are so lax, but are still interesting - they all went to Oxford or Cambridge, and they all studied Greek and Latin, and so they're all studied, - and they're all fairies, so they've all read Catullus and Sappho. So there are two ways they handle it. One is to have a mixed line that has hendecasyllables that aren't eleven but ten, thirteen, twelve, sometimes eleven, coming back to eleven, and adonics that are maybe four, five, six (four, five, or six), but not really sharp. 

Auden, I think, will, generally, try to stay to eleven and five -  "large:MAKE LOVE NOT WAR" is five - "pinks-and-blues-and-reds" - but I.. you know, it reduces the rhythms to "pinks and blues and reds", da-da, da-da, da - "the rendering, schmaltz", "splintered main-mast/ of the Ship of Fools". Why did Auden do that? That was because Marianne Moore, earlier in the century, had decided that because the problem of American rhythm (and English rhythm) is so complicated  and insuperable that (William Carlos) Williams' idea of trying to pay attention to little cadences of American speech,  (or) (Ezra) Pound's idea of trying to adapt to approximate classical quantity is just hopelessly self-conscious. So what she said was "I'll write it as brilliantly, concisely as I can, sticking to the facts, and I'll just snip the lines off, arbitrarily, according to a fixed count of syllables. So, she fabricated stanza-forms of arbitrary.. say eleven syllables, seven syllables,thirteen syllables, five syllables.. And the next stanza would have to be the same. And there would be a run-on line completely. But there was no interest..not no interest, there was no count, for the verse. There was no count of the cadence, no accounting of the cadence. The angle was to have the strict carpentry of the number of syllables counted (arithmetic-like) and then the rhythms of the speech would run slightly counter to that and syncopate. Auden picked it up from Marianne Moore and does the same thing - he's just talking like he's talking - " So, although unlisted in atlas or phone-book/Her Garden is easy to find. In no time/one reaches the gate over which is written large: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR."- So that the cadences of speech contradict  the artificial snipping of the lines  counting the syllables of the lines just by arithmetic. That has.. If you get to do that, that has a funny ear. If you can develop an ear that way. And other poets that do that - Kenneth Rexroth is one, famously. I do it, as I mentioned, in some early poems 

Student; With that kind of stanza would you pause at the end of the line?

AG: No. If you hear Auden, he doesn't pause, doesn't pause, but then he can. See, you notice the way John (Burnett) read. It wasn't very dramatic, but he didn't pause at all, so you couldn't tell where one line began and another line ended As distinct from Ed (Sanders). Now Ed was pausing at the end of each line, which is probably wrong. The way the original would go, I imagine, is that the rhythmic.. that the tones, pitch, tones, melody, the melos, melody, and the length make the rhythm (which was repeated line-by-line so you could hear the variations very clearly, but you didn't have to pause to know it, see - because they are run-on lines in Greek - just like in Auden and in Marianne Moore). So it's the run-on of an actual speech that goes on by the breath, and then within that there are the repeated cadences that we're beginning to get familiar with of   [Allen sounds them out - "da-da, da-da   da-da-da, da-da da - da - da-dum da-da" -  So probably "da-da, da-da,  da,  da-da-da-da  da-da da-da - da da da-da-da, da da, da-da, da-da ,da, da-da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da"without a pause for the lines that you'd have to know it because they repeat the surge of the cadence repeat - That make sense?

So the perfect poem would be where the surge of the cadence repeats but where the cadence in itself is a single continuous thing throughout the whole stanza of someone saying something without realizing it's going to be lines, or without intending a breath-stop for lines. In other words, you wouldn't know it was poetry, except it has this repeated cadence, wouldn't know it was poetry by the fact that they stopped at the end of the line, that is to say. That make sense?  That would be the ideal poetry where you wouldn't have to stop at the end of the line to hear the rhythm, if the rhythm was strong enough.  

Well, [returning to Auden] - "Inside…" (inside the gate) - "Inside it is warm and still like a drowsy/September day though the leaves show no sign of/turning. All around one notes the usual/pinks and blues and reds,"/  A shade over-emphasized - [in other words, the day-glo colors] - "..the rose-bushes/have no thorns. An invisible orchestra/plays the Great Masters: the technique is flawless/the rendering, schmaltz./ Of Herself, no sign. But, just as the pilgrim/is starting to wonder, "Have I been hoaxed by/a myth?" He feels her hand in his his and hears Her/murmuring: "At last!"/ With me, mistaught one, you shall learn the answers./What is conscience but a nattering fish-wife,/ the Tree of Knowledge but the splintered main-mast/ of the Ship of Fools?"/Consent, you poor alien, to my arms where/sequence is conquered, division abolished:/soon, soon, in the perfect [Reich-ian] orgasm, you shall, pet,/be one with the All/ She does not brutalize Her victims (beasts could/ bite or bolt). She simplifies them to flowers,/sessile fatalists who don't mind and only/can talk to themselves - (that's very much like Chogyam Trungpa's view of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, you know, poking fun at the…what's the phrase he uses? the… "idiot compassion" - poking fun at idiot compassion - "you shall, pet,/be one with the All" (there's that line of Hart Crane - "O answerer of all" - and then he jumped off of the ship and committed suicide!) - "She simplifies them to flowers,/sessile fatalists who don't mind and only/can talk to themselves/All but a privileged Few, the elite She/guides to Her secret citadel, the Tower/where a laugh is forbidden and DO HARM AS/ THOU WILT  is the Law" - [that must be (Charles) Manson] - "Dear little not-so-innocents, beware of/Old Grandmother Spider; rump her endearments - [turn your ass on her endearments] - "She's not quite as nice as She looks, nor you quite/as tough as you think."


Well, that was Auden..  Then finally, (Bob Dylan)  "William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll", ("The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"),  which I would… If you look at it you can compare it to the (other texts)..  And on the next page, there's a little thing on how you can…three different arrangements of hendecasyllables.. and the rest is...you'll find them.. and (find) ways of getting in and out of it. Alright, I think we'll move on from the Sapphics… 




[Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approximately fifty-seven-and-three-quarter minutes in and ending at approximately sixty-six-and-a-half minutes in]

Czeslaw Milosz


Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg, courtesy the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Allen Ginsberg Collection]


TO ALLEN GINSBERG

Allen, you  good man, great poet of the murderous century, who
persisting in folly attained wisdom

I confess to you, my life was not as I would have liked it to be 

And now, when it has passed, is lying like a discarded tire by the road

It was no different from the life of millions from which you rebelled
in the name of poetry and an omnipresent God

It was submitted to customs in full awareness that they are absurd, to the
necessity of getting up in the morning and going to work.

With unfulfilled desires, even the unfulfilled desire to scream and
beat one's head against the wall, repeating to myself the command, "it is
forbidden." 

It is forbidden to indulge yourself, to allow yourself idleness, it is
forbidden to think of your past, to look for the help of a psychiatrist or
a clinic.

Forbidden from a sense of duty but also because of the fear of unleashing
forces that would reveal one to be a clown.

And I lived in the America of Moloch, short-haired, clean-shaven, tying
neckties and drinking bourbon before the TV set every evening.

Diabolic dwarves of temptations somersaulted in me, I was aware of their
presence and I shrugged: It will pass together with life.

Dread was lurking close, I had to pretend it was never there and that I 
was united with others in a blessed normalcy,

Such schooling in vision is also, after all, possible, without drugs,
without the cut-off ear of Van Gogh, without the brotherhood of the
best minds behind the bars of psychiatric wards.

I was an instrument, I listened. snatching voices out of a babbling
chorus, translating them into sentences with commas and periods.

As if the poverty of my fate were necessary so that the flora of my
memory could luxuriate, a home for the breath and for the presence of 
bygone people

I envy your courage of absolute defiance, words inflamed, the fierce
maledictions of a prophet.

The demure smiles of ironists are preserved in the museums, not as 
everlasting art, just as a memento of unbelief.

While your blasphemous howl still resounds in a neon desert where the 
human tribe wanders, sentenced to unreality.

Walt Whitman listens and says, "Yes, that's the way to talk, in order to
conduct men and women to where everything is fulfillment. Where
they would live in a transubstantiated moment."

And your journalistic cliches, your beard and beads and dress of a 
rebel of another epoch are forgiven.

As we do not look for what is perfect, we look for what remains of 
incessant striving.  

Keeping in mind how much is owed to luck, to a coincidence of words 
and things, to a morning with white clouds, which later seems
inevitable. 

I do not ask from you a monumental oeuvre that would rise like a
medieval cathedral over a French flatland.

I myself had such a hope, yet half knowing already that the unusual 
changes into the common.

That in the planetary mixture of languages and religions we are no more 
remembered than the inventors of the spinning wheel or of the
transistor,

Accept this tribute from me, who was so different, yet in the same 
unnamed service.

For lack of a better term letting it pass as the practice of composing 
verses

 [translated from the Polish by the author (Czeslaw Milosz) and Robert Hass]


(for a translation of this poem into Spanish by Adam Gai - see here)  - 
    

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Elegy to Allen Ginsberg



The Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti Letters, "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career", published this past summer by City Lights, concludes with a reprint of Lawrence's moving elegy to his friend (from 1997) - "Allen Ginsberg Dying". 

We reprint it once again here

ALLEN GINSBERG DYING

Allen Ginsberg is dying
It's all in the papers
It's on the evening news
A great poet is dying
But his voice
won't die
His voice is on the land
In Lower Manhattan
in his own bed
he is dying
There is nothing
to do about it
He is dying the death that everyone dies
He is dying the death of a poet
He has a telephone in his hand
and he calls everyone
from his bed in Lower Manhattan
All around the world
late at night
the telephone is ringing
"This is Allen"
The voice says
"Allen Ginsberg calling"
How many times have they heard it
over the long great years
He doesn't have to say Ginsberg
All around the world
in the world of poets
There is only one Allen
"I wanted to tell you" he says
He tells them what's happening
what's coming down
on him
Death the dark lover
going down on him
His voice goes by satellite
over the land
over the Sea of Japam
where he once stood naked
trident in hand
like a young Neptune
a young man with black beard
standing on a stone beach
It is high tide and the seabirds cry
The waves break over him now
and the seabirds cry
on the San Francisco waterfront
There is a high wind
There are great white caps
lashing the Embarcadero
Allen is on the telephone
His voice is on the waves
I am reading Greek poetry
The sea is in it
Horses weep in it
The horses of Achilles
weep in it
here by the sea
in San Francisco
where the waves weep
they make a sibilant sound
a sibylline sound
Allen
they whisper
Allen


- Lawrence Ferlinghetti,  April 4, 1997  (Allen died the following day, April 5 1997)

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 238


Next Wednesday October 7  is the  60th Anniversary of the legendary Gallery Six reading, the first public performance of"Howl", the pioneering reading-event (Kerouac in the audience, carrying that jug of wine) that got the whole thing going

Celebratory events are being planned in Australia, London, Paris, Boulder, San Francisco, New York City, and elsewhere…

Here's one in Kingston, Ontario (Canada)  (Eric Folsom hosts local poets Mary Cameron, Jennifer Londry and Bruce Kauffman



At King's Books in  Tacoma, Washington, poet Michael Haeflinger. joined by cellist Micaela Cooley will perform the poem in its entirety
In Salt Lake City, Alex Caldiero takes center-stage
In Cheltenham (UK) on Wednesday night, Steve Tromans & the Howl Band, biographer Barry Miles and poet Cecilia Knapp join host, David Freeman to celebrate this iconic event.






The following day (Thursday the 8th) - and through the coming weekend - it's, once again, the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac celebrations in Kerouac's New England home-town. David Amram, Andy Clausen,Pamela Twiningand four days of activities. A full schedule of events can be found here

Emory in Atlanta just acquired a trove of rare Jack Kerouac materials, including "manuscripts and correspondence dating from the 1940s to the 1960s".  This (from an August 11, 1954 note) - Jack:
  "Cher Allen, Pourquoi tu n'ecrit pas?". You seem to be writing to every Tom Dick N Harry except me. You betray your ambition - but please remember, Sage, a useless tree is never cut up into a coffin. Enuff nonsense, I'm just 'pulling your leg" like Neal, [sic] uck, uck, uck."




Michael McClure(one of the original readers at the Gallery Six reading) will be in town (Lowell) earlier in the week and will be reading, Monday October 5th,  at the UMass Lowell  (seehere) - (He'll also be presenting  the Charles Olson lecture for The Gloucester Writers Center tomorrow evening at the Cape Ann Museum)

[Michael McClure]

Patti Smith launches her new book, M Train, (Tuesday the 6th), atthe New York Public Library
And yes, Just Kids  is to become a tv mini-series(more info about that here


Here's an excerpt from the book ( M Train) that ran this week in The Guardian

more on Patti Smith's itinerary

also from Patti Smith -Collected Lyrics (1970-2015) due out later this month.

Bob Dylan's got a huge new album -The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 - The Bootleg Series Volume 12- coming soon - the deluxe edition promises "20 alternate takes" (!) of his classic "Like A Rolling Stone"  - "...a 379-track collection (sic) across 18 CDs (and) nine mono 45 rpm singles, includ(ing), it is claimed, absolutely everything Dylan recorded in the two year period when he released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde"(!)




[Harry Smith (1923-1991]

Coming soon - fromJ & L Books (in collaboration with Anthology Film Archives) - Paper Airplanes - The Collections of Harry Smith Catalogue Raisonne - Volume 1

Here's Andrea Denhoed in The New Yorker about this other aspect of Smith - anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker.. (his epic film,Film #18 Mahagonny will, incidentally, be among those shown, in New York (Oct 16-18), as part of a three-day festival - "Paper & String - Celebrating Harry Smith")

Volume 2 of the Catalogue Raisonne will be Harry's String Figures 





There'll be a choral reading of "Howl" at MSVU Art Gallery (Nova Scotia) on Saturday
(followed by a tour by co-creator, John Shoesmith of the Ginsberg photo-exhibit there 

…and, looking ahead at things,  don't forget too - a week from Saturday, a week from tomorrow (Oct 10) Manchester, England's exciting Howl-at-60 event - "Still Howling" -




Kenneth Koch's 1979 Naropa Class


                                                               [Kenneth Koch (1925-2002]

Kenneth Koch last week - Here's transcription of Kenneth's (Summer Academy of Practicing Writers) May 26, 1979 Naropa class

KK: [on being confronted with a tape-recorder] -  Am I registering alright on the future? - ”nothing must be lost” - I don’t know when anybody’s going to find time to listen to all the things that are being recorded in the present. They’ll be wasting their lives doing (catch-up)..

My name is Kenneth Koch, and I’m sorry I was late, and I ‘m sorry we had to change rooms. It seemed very gloomy and dark and hot down there, and scattered. I like the idea of these classes at Naropa, but I don’t exactly know what I’m going to say, because I didn’t know who’d be in the room and I didn’t know what you’d be interested in. Also, I believe it’s impossible to teach anybody anything in a two-hour lecture (or even in four hours). One can excite people, confirm an idea they’ve already had, give them the idea to go on and do something else, but, as far as really teaching anybody something about writing  (or reading literature), I think it takes longer. Therefore, it didn’t seem to make any sense to bring in any texts and to teach them, or even to have you write a lot (tho' I’m going to have you write a little bit) . It’s also a lot easier to teach than it is to lecture, and is much more satisfying. Lecturing is rather peculiar. I mean, all this, that’s supposed to be a class, is kind of a lecture, because I don’t know you, and we’ll spend very little time together. I wonder if there’s some way I could find out who you all are? How many of you are at Naropa for the first time this summer? [show of hands] and how many of you altogether are full-time students, somewhere ? [further show of hands] - Very few -  How many of you write poetry? – Oh dear, really few! -  (Hmm, what do I know now that I didn’t know before?)  -How many of you.. how many of you have studied at Naropa last year, as well as (for) the summer?

See, when I started to teach writing  (which I did rather early on, in my early thirties, I think), it was immensely enjoyable  to me and I really had a feeling that I was accomplishing something, because the other people who were teaching writing were doing it, I thought, very badly. The poetry that I wrote (and the poetry that Frank O’Hara wrote and thatJohn Ashbery wrote (we were all friends and influenced each other a lot) - this poetry was completely unknown, to almost everybody (except about twelve people, maybe fifteen). Nobody even recognized that what we were doing was really poetry at all, and it was a great pleasure to reveal to people whether or not they had yet been prejudiced by, ruined by, infected by, the going academic idea of poetry at that time - I’m talking  about the early (19)50’s early-to-middle (19)50’s -  (is that right? – no, it’s not 1950, let’s see..where the hell am I? – the late (19)50's). 
The general idea of a poem at the time I started teaching writing, which was in the late (19)50’s, 1960, the general idea was that a poem was something in quatrains and it rhymed and it was something full of strict wit . You can get an idea of it by reading copies of the Partisan Reviewor theSewanee Reviewor theKenyon Review, theHudson Review, from those years. The..  All the great experimentation that had taken place in American poetry before, during and after World War I, that was all over. The general idea was that the people who edited magazines and anthologies and were sort of the bosses of the poetry world... It was wonderful what (Ezra) Pound and (William Carlos) Williams and (Wallace) Stevens, and so on, had done, but now is the time to get serious and to really make structures that worked, to really write what really was some kind of… one could call it academic poetry, or one could call it, as I said in my poem,Fresh Air”, poetry written "with their eyes on the myth/..the Missus and the midterms”, (since those seemed to be the subjects of those.. at least, the poems of the younger poets who were in that awful anthology called… which you probably haven’t ever seen, because it died a deserved death –New Poets of America and England - [Editorial note - it was actually titled  The New Poets of England and America] - edited by Donald Hall and Louis Simpson. You should look it up).  The..  Everybody was writing these very safe quatrains about, oh, getting married, or separating, or what-it-was-like-to-teach-in-a-University-in-Iowa, Illinois, or something.   
In any case, nobody had read, or had seemingly been influenced by, the French poets between the wars. Nobody seemed to have been influenced by Walt Whitmanin any radical kind of way. (Walt Whitman, I think, seemed kind of unhealthy and floppy). Nobody ever seemed to go to the ballet or seemed to go to opera. Nobody seemed to know much about painting. In other words, people were, there was..  (I’m generalizing, of course, and this was all in my little prejudiced head). It just seemed to me, from the poetry that got published, that it was.. it was very narrow, and it was all written by people who were just thinking about what other people said about what other people said about what other people said.  And, so it was a great pleasure to come into a class.  Like, if I had come into thisclass twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, I’d’ve said, “Why don’t you…”  I’d have had you all write a little stream of consciousness,  or I’d have made you all buy a book of William Carlos Williams and read him and write three poems imitating his style. 

I’d have told you to go home and dream, then to write a poem about your dream and also to write a prose account of your dream. And then I would have discovered that the prose accounts were better poems than the poems, because, in the poems, you would have interpreted the dreams, and put them in quatrains, and generalized;  in the prose account, you would have actually written about the details. There’d still be a hole in the screen on the porch in the summerhouse. Whereas, in the poem, it would have turned into “the dark mystery of summer”, or something! 
But you’ve all probably read William Carlos Williams, you’ve probably all written what comes into your head and you’ve all probably used whatever it is that’s not in your mind now and out of your mind, your unconscious,  in your poetry, so you don’t need any of that.

I was.. it was very enjoyable to help people to write, when I started, because I could free them. They would.. all these people came into my poetry  workshop at the New School (that’s where I started to teach – about 1960 – it was an adult workshop) – and they.. they were all playing about three keys on the piano, you know, and I wanted to show them that there was a whole keyboard. In general, the girls were writing quatrains about lost love and the guys were writing free verse poems about how terrible America was! - and, they wanted to go on doing this,  and they wanted me to help them get published – And I didn’t want to do this. because I knew I could make them much happier by having them write other things, like having them write sestinas, having them write poems with one word in each line, having them do translation, and having them write poems that made no sense, having them write bad poems (And that was one of the most successful assignments I ever gave - If I had.. if I had a week or two with you, it’s certainly an assignment I’d still give you, because that’s always a good one) . The idea is you tell someone to write the worst poem they can possibly write, just absolutely worst. And.. there’s a prize given at the New School - there used to be - called the Dylan ThomasPoetry Award, and it was given for the best poem written in any writing class. And one of my students won it with this bad poem which was really a good poem, and it was (a) very sensuous, sexy, and really nice Romantic poem - it was really good - and this guy had always written terribly dry things, sort of like  “The clipped edge of the board now.. [sic]”, and this poem was terrific, it sallied and all that stuff.  Anyway, it was very nice. So I said, "Didn’t you realize at a certain point (that) this poem is good?” - And he said, “You know, half way through, it begins to get kind of good”.  See, the reason that writing a bad poem can be inspiring is that it completely gets you away from what you think you have to do, like “I’m real good at writing clipped poems” – Well, there’s nobody in the world that wants a clipped poem that I know of, and, maybe that’s not what you’re good at..sometimes. It’s the kind of thing that turns ones ideas upside down. It allows one to try something one hasn’t tried before. 

In any case, this whole process of freeing people from academic constraints seems to me pretty unnecessary at Naropa, where people have probably been over-freed (no, you can’t really be "over-freed", but you can go on being freed after there’s no more need for it), and one wonders, then, what to do. Certainly in a couple of hours, I can’t... (oh, I could, probably)  teach you how to write ottavo rima (I really could!),  but it might take two weeks - that is, an iambic pentameter stanza which runs ABABABCC, (like (Lord) Byron used in Don Juan), but the utility of that I don’t quite know, except it would enable you to see that you could do it - you could imitate Byron, and then you’d like Byron more. 

However, I still.. there… I don’t know, I was trying to think what I would like to.. the kind of things that poets said, that I  liked to hear. One of the main things was..  I was amazed to see anybody, dressed up in regular clothes, and who is allowed to appear in a public place, and who is a poet - (but that was back.. that was back in the (19)50's, when it was practically a crime to be a poet - which it’s not really anymore, and you’re used to having poets around here).  I remember Archibald MacLeish, whose poetry I don’t like particularly, came to the University of Cincinnati, when I was eighteen years old, and every word he said seemed so wonderful to me because he was standing right up there with all these regular people and talking about poetry, this peculiar thing which was sort of a secret between me and my typewriter. And…  But you’ve all had a lot of that. 
So.. I thought maybe.. (this is in keeping with Naropa, I guess - it would be very Zen if I just went on for two hours and told you (only) what I was not going to do! - However, that might not be the absolutely best thing to do) . I had a couple of ideas..  (Oh, as I said before, I don’t think one can really teach anybody anything in a short time. So I thought, maybe, I could give you a few ideas, or suggest a few things that would at least indicate some things that I and other poets  found it useful to do - that is, I can give you some advice). Advice is a real comical thing to give people, right? – One becomes a poet so that one doesn’t have to listen to anybody’s advice. Larry Rivers, the painter, and I have been great friends for many many years and when we were very young in New York we used to have these self-congratulatory conversations about why we were artists (and it made us feel real good to think about the fact that we really were artists), and the best answer that Larry gave was,  one day I said, (I don’t know how many times I'd asked him) - “Larry, how come you became a painter?”, and he said , "I wanted to be sitting in my room, and when my mother knocked on the door, I wanted to be able to say,”Go away, I’m doing something important!” – And so that, in a way, in a way if one’s a poet, one doesn’t want any advice. (But if you come to this class, perhaps) –





I’ll start off just by telling you some random things that I think are a good idea, a good way for you to spend the next ten years, or ten days, or something. I think that it’s a.. one of the most important things for a poet to do..(Bob Creeley's theorem!) - the most important thing for a poet to do - is to read a lot of other poets  and to imitate them, steal anything that’s good  in them. I mean really read a lot of poetry of poetry and be influenced by it. (It’s not the most important thing, but it’s one of the two or three most important things). Now, some poets have a problem about doing this, and I understand the problem because, at certain times in my life, I’ve had the problem. (There were) certain times in my life, when I couldn’t read enough novels because it made me too anxious. I was too envious of the happiness of the characters. And there have been times in my life when.. there’ve been times in my life when I didn’t, I felt I just couldn’t, imitate other poets (sometimes I was too envious of other poets to read them and sometimes I just felt like I couldn’t imitate them or I’d lose myself, I’d lose my own talent). Your own talent and your own voice, it is impossible to lose to it. It’s absolutely not possible. If it’s possible to lose it, (then) I assure you, it doesn’t matter. There are a lot of other good things to do in life besides your writing poetry. I mean, there really are, (and if you… ).  There’s absolutely no way, (that) I can see, to be corrupted, or to lose your talent, (unless you have radical brain surgery! - or.. unless you’d really rather be doing something else - I never thought it was a tragedy if somebody said, “I’m so worried. I’d rather sell cars than write poetry” - I don’t know, that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with selling cars - somebody has to sell them, and, you know, if you like it... You only live once..). 

Anyway, what was I saying? oh god oh, about reading poetry..yeah it’s a.. I don’t think it’s possible to be original unless you read a tremendous amount and are influenced by lots of people  - the idea is arguable but years old but I’m quite sure it’s true. I think you have a chance to be original if you’re. .if you’re living out in the mountains somewhere, and you never come near a place like this [Naropa], and you never come near much evidence of contemporary culture. I think you really might find something original without going through the culture, but, once you’ve been here for a week, you’re finished - or, once you’ve, practically, just gone to the movies and read a few books of poetry, you..the only path for you to originality (and of course it’s a much better path) is, of course, (since there are no people like the person I describe, they don’t write poetry usually, because really what mainly inspires people to write poetry is not falling in love but other poetry), and it’s.. if you’re not influenced by other poets you’re likely to think you’re original when you’re just working on something that Wallace Stevens solved a long time before and got to do terribly well. Why not take the ultimate result of Wallace Stevens ? Why not take what Wallace Stevens can do in “Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction” or “To the One of Fictive Music” or “Sunday Morning”  or “The Comedian as the Letter C” ? – Why not just start there? – I mean, nobody in science ever thinks of starting back at (Isaac) Newton. It simply doesn’t make any sense. I mean, you might as well absorb what the greatest poets have done. (It’s a little different in science because in science, it’s sort of all there and there’s new equipment - there’s a machine that’ll do it for you, like the computers there and you’re certainly not going to go back, adding two and two and all that stuff , because the computer’s already there). It’s not that way in poetry, because in order to really  do what Wallace Stevens can do, you have to read him, read him hard, and probably you have to imitate him. I mean it’s probably the best way to really take into yourself what somebody else can do is to do it with your own body and your own feelings and your own mind.  Stevens said in a letter to a friend – this friend wrote to him and said,  “Are you reading a lot?’, and Stevens wrote back and said, "No, I haven’t had time to read, but I’ve been writing a lot of poetry and writing has always seemed to me a superior form of reading”. And it really is for us poets, it’s a great way to read. I don’t think that poets read the way other people do.  I mean there are certain poets at certain times in my life, I’ve never been able to read more than two pages without running to the typewriter, because you know you can’t.. one sort of.. if there’s something exiting on a page it’s quite natural to want to try it. So that often, a very bright person, a very talented person, a person with genius for writing poetry, will not have the same kind of knowledge of a poets work as a rather mediocre academic person will,  because the poet won’t be able to finish the poem!, because he’ll be writing his own, for one thing, and changing what the other poet did, and for another reason, because the poet will be finding something else in the poetry. Maybe some of you have come to Naropa because you’re not doing well in school elsewhere because you have that funny kind of mind. It’s not necessarily bad. I had a lot of trouble with literature in college because.. I mean, I finally figured it out, but I avoided a lot of courses I should have taken because what I really wanted to get from poetry was inspiration. I went to Harvard, and I remember I went to the Chairman of the English Department, and he said, ”Well you’re an English Major, you should take this course in Milton”. And I was stupid at the time I thought I wouldn't like Milton, I said “I don’t think it’ll stimulate me". He said,  “You’re not here to be stimulated, Mr Koch, you’re here to be educated”.  And, it seems to me that Naropa is a place where there’s a hope at least of akind of education where stimulation is a part of being educated, that one needs both parts.  

Anyway, it’s very good to read a lot. Probably a good way to begin is to read contemporary poetry. It’s the easiest..it’s the easiest to get – There are all its famous difficulties. Delmore Schwartz, who was my teacher at Harvard said that it.. it’s about as hard to read modern poetry as it is to learn to play bridge. He said he found it more rewarding, (but then he was a poet and not a bridge-player). It..  You really can’t lose your own voice because.. what happens.. the whole stuff about your way of saying things and expressing yourself - in the first place, the “you” in your poem isn’t really you, in my opinion - It is in a way. I believe what Paul Valerysaid, he said, “a poem is something from someone who is not the poet, addressed to someone who is not the reader”, that is to say, you’re… you know..When I’m writing poetry, I can be in France in one line and Rome in the next and underground in a copper mine in the next, and I can be.. I can be speaking three different languages at the same time, I can be dreaming and awake. I don’t have these powers except when I’m writing. So that the.. Also, my concerns when I write poetry aren’t exactly the same  as those I have when I’m not writing. During the Vietnam War for example, I was very concerned about the war and moderately active against it (even went to jail once) . I never could write a poem about it. I finally did manage to write a poem called “The Pleasures of Peace”, a long poem, but all the parts about the horrors of the war and the sufferings of the people in Vietnam.. I couldn’t keep them in the poem because they were lousy poetry, or at least they didn’t come up to my standards. And.. So the poem ended up being a poem in praise of peace, which, is about as close as I could get. And this didn’t have anything to do with, you know, the way I acted when I wasn’t writing. So it really is a different person who writes the poem, and I don’t think one can entirely choose exactly what that person is going to be like. I think it’s worth trying.  I mean, I thought it was worth trying to write a very serious political poem and I’m glad I did it. My relative lack of success is.. I mean, in a certain way I like the poem, it's alright, and that experience, but anyway, I was saying that one, one has a different voice as a poet at different . I think it’s true, and a number of poets have noticed it,  you find a style, maybe you find the style when you’re twenty-five-years-old, twenty-seven-years-old, and you can say anything in it, you're very happy, it's what it’s like falling in love – great! – and you can write ..you can write a lot of poems. And you try writing the same poem when you’re twenty-nine, and you can’t do it.  That.. that’s just.. you can’t use the same style , and there’s something about your voice that’s changed, about your person that’s changed. I mean, one would expect that somebody would change in such a sensitive place - the place in which one writes poetry. One would expect.. one would expect that to change. You certainly wouldn’t expect a poet to be like a monolith who.. I mean, imagine feeling the same way about love now that you did ten years ago? – you’d be a funny person – or even feeling the same way about sleeping, or taking a walk, or… And when you get into these very rareified things (poetry’s more rareified than experience) the.. your… the associations of words that are connected with your body, with your walking and with your sleeping, they’ll probably have changed even more. So I think one should be ready to.. for that kind of change. It’s very discouraging, I found it discouraging. I think I found, let’s see, one.. oh, I don’t know, I found about four styles that were my own, completely my own, they weren’t like anybody else really, I was perfectly happy in them, I could say anything I felt in them - and I don’t (have) any of them anymore. I mean, I had some for two years, I had some for four years. Anyway, what presumably I was talking about was how you should read a lot of poets. You can’t lose anything of yourself by being influenced by a poet, no matter how strong (he is). All you can do is learn from him [or her] how to do it. Just like by imitating the hand movements of great pianists, I presume, one could get a kind of knowledge in one’s body about, about..  which would enable one to play the piano in an original way, because the impulses that would come from one’s mind or heart or whatever to the piano would not be the same as (Arthur) Rubinstein, but your hands would at least be able to do what he could do. 



Anyway, so, after that long parenthesis, the first thing I suggest to everybody when I teach writing at Columbia is that they read a lot of modern poetry and be influenced by.. I also think that one has to learn to read the poetry of the past and be influenced by that too. I mean, there are lots of people around who only read modern poetry and, I don’t know, that’slike just knowng about fashion instead of knowing about clothes. The.. There ‘s some people, there’s some modern poets, who might not tell you that you have to be able to be influenced by Dante and John Donne and Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, just as much as you’re influenced by people around now, they might just forget to tell you that, or they might not want you to be as good as they are, but, if they’re good poets, if they’re good poets, they haven’t just been influenced by contemporary poetry. Now the poetry of the past is a little harder. Probably you have to study it. It’s one of the good reasons for going to a college. I mean, I think one can really question the whole thing, like “Why go to school, if you want to write poetry?" One good reason is to learn how to read the poetry of the past and the fiction of the past. It’s a little bit of a . There are..  If you take a.. say, a poem by ShelleyorKeats, I think there are two ways that you can read it, you know, sort of two extremes. You can read, well, let’s take “Ode to the West Wind” which Allen makes everybody read, which begins.. (I don’t remember much of it, I only..) - “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being" Well, I read that one way when I was fifteen years old and I got something out of it, I got, I got a big rush-y feeling about words, I got a feeling that I could talk to nature (and it was pretty good all that, that I could say “O", and I could use “thou”, and I could say things like .. that I could say , “O windows, opening thy breath, through which this night..”, I could do that, But I didn’t know what Shelley was talking about, and I didn’t, I didn’t really..I couldn’t really be Shelley..I didn’t.. I couldn’t feel the way he did. I could feel the way a modern person does responding to Shelley (which is pretty good, I mean, it kept me going for quite a few years, reading poetry that way), but there’s something else you get when you can really hear Hamletsaying, “To be or not to be, that is the question”. You can hear that as, “Jesus, I wonder if I should knock myself off”. because it doesn’t sound like that, See, “To be or not to be, that is the question”, Hamlet is a young guy, a successful guy, who’s a prince, a prince in a nice clean cold country and everything, everything is terrific, except, you know, your father.. (you think maybe your mother killed your father, and so you..), but ..you’re thinking, like, you’re very rich and everything, and you think, “Jesus Christ, I really think I’ve got to kill myself”, and… 
But you hear “To be or not to be, that is the question.." -  And what that meant to me, for years, was.. (what) that suggested to me.. there’s all this patina on it, you know that stuff you get on old jars -  “Renaissance”, “Nobility of Man”, “The Compleat Man”, "Hamlet”,”Shakespeare”, “Stratford”,  I never thought of anybody wanting to kill themselves when I read that line. It’s worth going to school to be able to hear Hamlet saying, “I wonder if I should kill myself” -  and, it’s not easy. Because all that, all the "thee"s and "thou"s and the funny words and everything, really get in the way. I think you can be quite inspired by just reading it flat, as though it were written yesterday, and I wouldn’t say no to that at all, even..

and I.. I wouldn’t say there's no point in reading a poem in a foreign language that you don’t understand, either. I mean you read Jadis, si je me souviens bien…",  if you read it, 'Jah-dees see jee me sou-vienns bee-enn”, it might maks you think about, “Janis, let’s go and visit Uncle Ben”, and that’s a fine line, you know, that’s alright, I mean, but you won’t be getting that sort of sweet dark sexy nostalgia that Rimbaud put in those words.  "Once, if I remember rightly, my life was a…" - "Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient" – my life was a party, at which all the wines were flowing" [from "Une Saison en Enfer" ("A Season in Hell") 
It’s really good to be able to read  (John) Donne and (William) Shakespeare and all those people as though they were talking to you, as though they wereWilliam Carlos Williams or Allen Ginsberg, or Frank O’Hara. You really hear them in a certain way..  I.. anyway, I suggest that.  I suggest also that you learn a foreign language.



I don’t suppose too many people come to Naropa because they want to be told to do a lot of work, but there’s no way to be a good poet without doing a lot of . It’s all very pleasant because you keep getting better and better. It’s like.. I mean, you never have to wait. You don’t have to wait till you speak French like Paul Claudel to be influenced by learning Fremch, as soon as you pick up a language book and it says, ””It’s raining. It’s snowing. The sun is shining, How long have you been in Paris? How long have you been in Madrid? I like  France, I hate France,”, you've practically got a poem.  I mean, right away, when you started to say, like,  je suis content (I’m happy), you’re thinking about the difference between the word  “happy” and  “content”, and “contentment” and “happiness”,  and…it’s inspiring, instantly.  So it’s.. I would never propose to people.. I think it’s too punishing to say,“You’ve got a lot of work to do in the next three years, and then you can write a poem” – I’ve never had students write an exercise in the twenty years I’ve been teaching, they’re always writing poetry. I mean, you don’t learn anything from doing exercises I don’t think. You don’t learn as much . It’s very boring, like, “Why don’t you all pretend to be friends?” – and then there's all that yucky stuff they do - you know, touch each other!” – I mean that exercise -  (faking) affection. I  don’t think it makes any sense. I think you should really like somebody or really..really write a poem. The reason it’s great to know a foreign language is that, in the first place, just with as in the poetry of the past,  then you can read all these things that would otherwise be completely closed off to you. Also, it gives one a very nice.. it gives one a very nice and true sense about words, like… let’s see.. [Koch looks around for an object] - this thing here - this isn’t really the same as the sound “glasses”, right?, nor is it the same as the sound lunette”, which it is in French, "little moon:", "lune".. let’s see and in Italian it’s.. what is the Italian?

Student : Spectaculo?
KK: I don’t think it is.
Student: That's  Spanish [anteojos
KK: "Spectaculo" in Italian is... - what?
Student: Occhiali

KK: Occhiali - that’s it –Occhialiyeah, that's the eye, and it’s sort of.. it sort of gives you this nice free space feeling about language, (that) you really realize, in a good way, that words aren’t the same as things, (they’re)  sort of  floating around and you would sort of attach them to things, and it was really inspiring to me. Even in the first stages of my learning French, I remember when I learned the word… Also, if you learn a lot about what the words mean it’s very interesting – I remember when I first said the word in French , “apartement”, which is the word for apartment, I never knew where that word came from and, as soon as it was separated by that little "a-", it’s a way to live to keep people apart - apartement  - there’s this part, and then there’s this part of you apart.  I was also very astonished also by désastre", which is the French word for disaster – "astre", means planets and ""means from – disaster is something that’s - boom! lightning strikes you.It’s.. It’s also nice just…It gives one a nice feeling for the sound of words. And it also..it’s terrific because it enables you to do translation. And translations are one of the best things in the world to do when you’re feeling uninspired, when you’re feeling dry, and you feel you can’t say anything, or you're stuck on some subject, translations are really good because you realize, when you’re doing translations, that.. that what poetry’s all about is language (and this is what sculpture’s all about - it's stone and clay, and music is all about sound).
 I mean, you can make meaning with language, but you gotta.. it's language. And translation always reminds one of that and it’s something one can do when one is not particularly inspired. One gets very involved in it. 
Another nice thing about translation is, you know how you’re influenced and inspired by the poems that you’ve written yourself, how, like, some line that you’ve written in another poem will come back in another form, or in the same form, and you’ll feel really inspired and use it in a better way? - Well, see, if you translate a poem by Rimbaud or Baudelaire or Pasternak, or anybody, if you work hard on it, it becomes one of your poems, as far as your unconscious is concerned, and it, it becomes part of what you've done, it becomes part of what's liable to happen when you write so it's a really dramatic deep way of being influenced is  to translate. 




Let’s see, what have I recommended?  Reading a lot of modern poetry, and Studying the poetry of the past and being influenced by that, and Learning a Foreign Language...  

It’s very good to have a couple of friends that are really good poets, who are good enough to make you envy them, and who know what you’re doing, and... I found that the most valuable thing in my life as a poet, that I was friends with John Ashbery and Frank O”Hara. I didn’t need, when I was in my twenties, I didn’t need to be published  (I would have liked it. I wasn’t though). I didn’t need to be published, I didn’t need to be applauded with readings (I didn’t get any readings!). I didn’t get many readers (I think I had about twenty). 
I needed.. I needed something.. I mean, John and Frank reached.. were worth.. , I mean, they were worth more than a hundred thousand readers each. You just.. One needs,one needs people to make the world of writing poetry real for you, and to keep you going. 
I don’t think it’s good to be the only poet in the little town, where everybody admires you and thinks you’re great because you’re a poet, and lets you get drunk, and you give radio programs, and you write for the newspaper, and you get to make out with everybody. It doesn't do your poetry any good. You may get a happy life but it’s not good for your poetry because there’s no competition. Competition’s really good. I recommend places where there are a lot of good poets. New York’s an awful place to live, but it’s a great place to be a poet. It used to be anyway. I presume it still is.  I still lived there – but I think I’m already formed.. It’s annoying, in order to be a good poet but I really do recommend it

Let’s see.. oh, I think it’s a good idea to write a lot, really write a lot. Many, many young poets are working very hard at one or two little things, and I think that if you haven’t….I think it’s good to try a lot of different things. I think, among these things, different ways of revising (which I'll talk about in a minute,  because that’s kind of interesting). It’s a problem to make revision as interesting as the first time, but it can be done. It can make it easier for you to try lots of different kinds of writing , if you can find a good poetry-teacher. I see one function of my poetry workshop, which I teach at Columbia, as making it easier for people to try things that they’re not good at. People who aren’t writing don’t know how humiliating it is to write something that’s bad, that’s stupid and clumsy (even when nobody ever sees it), but, you know, anybody that’s a poet knows how awful it makes you feel. It’s like… I don’t know, it’s like failing at a conversation, or in love, or something, it’s just awful, even if nobody knows about it. And if you..if you get pretty good writing ironic poems about the city in free verse, you know, you write that, and, "that’s a good one of yours, Kenny", and you don’t.. Someone says. “Why don’t you try writing.. why don’t you write a couple of sestinas and just…or why don’t you write a poem with a city and an item of clothing and a color in every line?..see what.. not really stupid..
But in the class I take, they do that – Because everbody’s doing it, you don’t risk any humiliation, the teacher doesn’t expect a masterpiece, so you can try things you wouldn't normally do. So.. I imagine you can find some pretty good writing teachers around here at various times. Different writing teachers are good for different people. I don’t think it’s a good idea to spend your life in a writing workshop… there are people who get a heavy dependence. I think it’s alright to try a couple, but I’d suggest taking a year off after you have a good one, you know. It would be terrific.. It’s wonderful, if you can find a good teacher of literature, if you could find somebody who could teach Romantic Poetry so that it’s really alive and it’s connected to things you care about, you’re so lucky. But even, even if you find somebody who just respects the literature but isn’t quite as alive as you are, it’s alright. At least you’ll get to read  the work and you won’t be forced into a lot of bad ideas. I think that, as a poet.. being a poet has a certain… one learns but one has to defend onself a little bit against academic types, and.. I’ll talk about that a little bit. 

Most people  I know, I mean,  not people that I associate with..but I travel a lot.. because I did this thing – teaching kids to write poetry and..(I) meet a lot of teachers and all kinds of people who never read poetry. Most people in the United States, as far as I know, either dislike, or are indifferent to it, or a lot even hate poetry. And the reason they do is.. and these are people, notstupid people , they are people who wouldn’t think their life was worth..really worthwhileunless they went to concerts sometimes, unless they went to good movies, unless they went to the opera if it came to town, unless they traveled, you know, and went to Europe, unless they saw good paintings, but you talk to them about poetry and they say, ”Oh poetry?I don't know what to say, I don't know, I don’t get it, I guess.” And you look at them,  and it’s like somebody says, “Yeah, I don’t know, I see a lot of things, I hear a lot of things, I see a lot of things, even my nose smells a lot of things…" You’re missing a lot - And it’s very hard to convince them. 
And here’s where they don’t like it. I think it’s fairly simple -  The way most people that I know were taught poetry in high school and in college is  briefly, this – a poem is something created by a very clever sadist, who hides a lot of.. who hides a symbol in a lot of onamatopoeia and alliteration and all that stuff. So.. The point of reading a poem is - you pick up a poem and you’re supposed to find what it really means. So somebody said, “I’m going to take a walk today” – Is it Christ? – You know, it can’t be just a guy taking a walk! – and….so, you’ve got to find what it really means, so a poem, it doesn’t mean what’s there.
 (I mean, the whole idea of what language means in general is too much to.. go into today – lets assume it means something, but, at least, let’s assume if the guy says “I’m going to take a walk, it doesn’t mean "Oh, God", alright, otherwise that psychosis is going to take over completely. Alright, so, you look at the poem and you say, (you’re a kid, you're in high school), you say, “Yeah, the poet says he’s going to take a walk", (and) the teacher says,  (No), really read that line, come on - stupid!"– And so you read it and you read it, and jesus! – and even if you think..even if you find the secret meaning, you won’t know it as well as the teacher. That’s why teachers.. it’s part of the teaching industry to teach this way because you really know something, you know. It got to be very important when all the money was going for science so we could get ahead of the Russians. I had an English teacher say “Well, what am I doing?” – But if he knows thesymbolism that nobody else does then they need you. It's really hard to do worthwhile work if you’re an English teacher. 

And even the poor teacher, though, can’t know it as well as the poetwho must be picturedassomeone insane sitting in a tower, chuckling over a poem that nobody will ever enjoy or understand. Now, since you’ve all written poems, you know that that’s not the way poets feel, and you should never let anybody tell you that, it’s utterly stupid. I don’t know how this industry got started. It’s like then.. I mean.. (thinking about McDonalds, and  stuff)  I mean, you know, you can’t tell what’s going to really catch on. But that something like that should catch on in the intellectual world is very strange. But I would say that ninety-nine percent of professors, probably, probably teach poetry wrong. They’re probably… they’ve probably been too influenced by this.. (not ninety-nine percent, that’s silly because I don’t know enough of them, I hate to jump to generalize (especially for the tape-recorder) but an awful lot of teachers that I’ve known and listened to make that mistake of thinking). So this means that when people graduate from school they pick up a book of poems as an unpleasant experience, it’s kind of humiliating. You pick up a poem and say. “Oh gosh, I’m probably not getting it” and you feel humiliated. Well, you’re making, I don’t know, you’re making twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars a year, your kids love you, you’re an attractive man or woman, and you’re.. you know, you go to the movies, and you like to smoke and drink and… why should  you be humiliated? - why should you pick up one of these awful pills, and..  So you don’t read poetry. And that’s what happens to almost everybody. Like being invited to a party when you don’t have any nice clothes.  "Can’t really understand the poem". So everybody hates poetry. So, one does what one can, you know, to do something about that. I mean, I wrote a couple of books about how to teach poetry to little kids and stuff  [Wishes, Lies and Dreams& Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?] - (it's done a little bit of good).



There are..there are other reasons why people look for deep meanings in poetry, and that’s because.. I mean it’s perfectly natural to do it. It’s just, you have to control the process. I mean, you can’t teach poetry  so that all that's there is the deep meaning. I mean graduate students come to me at Columbia (University)  some time, they want me to be.. to help them work on their dissertation, “What are you writing about?” – “The deep meaning of Joseph Conrad” – “No”. I say “no”, they say, “why not?”, I say “Because the deep meaning of Joseph Conrad is the same as the deep meaning of every other writer who lived. There are about five deep meanings which I will now tell you – Life is not worth living, Life seems not worth living but is worth living after all..” You know. There are very few deep meanings. I said, “Why don’t you, why don’t you read some of Conrad’s Letters and read a couple of his novels and think about the difference between his epistolary style and his novel-writing style. I’d love to know about that.It’s very interesting the difference between the way people write letters and write novels.  “That’s  not deep enough” – Uh – uh – anyway…It’s quite natural – I’m getting a bit off the subject . The reason it’s natural to find deep meanings in poetry and the reason this whole critical and professorial mistake started, I think, is this – The almost.. The intention of almost all language is either to just keep life moving along on a jolly way (instead of, like, rubbing and touching and stuff) - "How you doing?" -" I'm great" - "Terrific, that's great" - "That's a lie, you son of a bitch", I mean that just all,  that's, you know, pushing and touching . Then, an awful lot of it is given information – "How do you get to the ladies room?"– "You go down the hall, turn to the left." Paul Valery said the function of prose is to perish. [ "The essence of prose ois to perish - to be dissolved and replaced by the image it denotes'] That is, you find out how to go to the ladies room, you don’t go through life with the words ringing in your head, “down the hall, turn to the left”. Poetry, poetry is different, because it.. the words would be said, arranged, in a certain way, so that they would stay in your head, and the meaning would not be so precise. Poetry’s a very strange kind of communication. It’s a very strange way of using language, which looks like the regular way of.. [Koch starts reading from the local newspaper] -   “Fairview Barton Financialput on an eleventh hour rally Saturday night to score a narrow six to five victory over Colorado Springs Michelle (hey, the school’s have long names here!) ..victory over Colorado Springs, Michelle Realty,atScott Carpenter Park”. Now the intention of that is to give information. And poetry looks like that. But it’s not quite like that. It’s sort of like“Fairview put on.." let’s see.."Fairview put on an eleventh hour Saturday night dress toscore a narrow Colorado Springs toScott’s Reality’– You know, you could have.. It’s a..it deliberately distorts the ordinary use of language so that it invites dreaming, instead of...  opens up, it opens up a fissure, like an earthquake, opens up something, so that all of this rich material one’s not conscious of (except in dream and sometime under the influence of certain stupefying things, sometimes in moments of great passion), one is usually not aware of all of these things that one has seen and forgotten. Like at this moment, (I’m not talking about Freud’s idea of the subconscious as painful things that are repressed). But, at this moment, some part of me, for some time, has been looking at the (green) of what seems to be a car and what seems to be a plastic box with slats out there. In back of it is a breast-like green mountain (part) and there are Venetian blinds which remind me of newsprint and I’m aware of about twenty-five of your faces in this room. I’ve had random thoughts about all of you. All of this will be gone now,  unless one of you becomes my friend, or unless I go live on that mountain, or buy that car, you know, but that’s.. this is happening constantly. And all of this stuff is there somewhere. And one is in possession of a tremendous amount of information, of sensation, and it’s like all the keys on the piano. If you have all of these things to compare things to, like all these connections, degrees of consciousness and all different kinds of things, you’re mch more likely to be able to write something powerful and beautiful and new. And poetry sort of deliberately sort of distorts language so that these other associations can appear, so that one can dream, so that one can see in a more powerful way than one ordinarily does. Therefore, since poetry is so rare, hence almost all of what we read is not poetry but it's this other intention – it’s quite natural if you read a poem and the poet says, “The tree against the window afternoon”  (which is not in ordinary prose, but is understandable enough) – it.. that properly makes one think of more trees, more windows, more afternoons, and more weather, more light, than the statement would be, “ I found it of interest to regard the tree through the window in the afternoon", which makes it just the experience of the person who’s talking and doesn’t give you any chance to associate with it. But, so, since poetry is so odd, in being not information-giving, not direct in that way, it’s quite natural to want to find all kind of deep meanings in it because one is going around with all these deep meanings that (could) define the text. I may generalize, and say, we don’t know why we’re alive, we don’t know anything about death, we don’t understand beauty, we don’t understand love, we don’t understand passion. We understand almost nothing. And yet we care passionately about all these things that not only do we not understand but which modern philosophy has shown us are not real questions. That doesn’t matter to people emotionally at all. We go around with this great mystery. As Walt Whitman said, “I and this mystery, here we we stand”and the mystery is always looking for a text, it’s looking for a.. it’s looking for a statue it’s looking for a painting, it’s looking for some music, it’s looking for a poem, it’s looking for some words, so that it can say, “that’s me, that’s it, that’s the answer, that’s it! ”  And I think that is particularly true when one is in one’s late teens and twenties, that one is… the mystery is almost overwhelming, because it hasn’t been.. it hasn’t been used much. It hasn’t been used much in one’s life yet, it’s just.. and so it’s very very natural for people in college of that age to look for all kinds of mysteries in poetry. I think it doesn’t do you any good to read all poemsas of they were all the same poem that defined the same mystery in “Corinna’s going a-Maying” as you'd find in “The Waste Land”. I mean, then you might as well just read one poem all the time. In any case, that was a good parenthesis but it was something I wanted to say - Resist your professors a little, and read poetry, get with what’s good and.. you don’t have to get mad at them if they say, you know, that it really means something else, just read it for yourself.




I teach this modern poetry course at Columbiaand I used to teach a lot of poets a lot of poems and tell a lot of things about them, and I found, recently, the main thing I have to teach my students is they don’t know how to read a poem. It’s really valuable to know how to read a poem because then you can read all poems and then you can be in touch with all theseterrific things. And I had to recognize too that a lot of  poetry is really hard to understand. I mean, I don’t know anybody who hasn’t studied a lot who can pick up a poem by (W.B.) Yeats and understand it . And it’s real stupid ofthe professor to think you can understand a Yeats poem, even an earlier one that I’ve been reading about three times and thinking of, and they’re worth they’re worth understanding. So, I read a… I found something interesting that I think is true. I told my students.. like, I read them a poem, say by Yeats, and I have them read it, and I say, “Just tell me anything you like about this poem – because pleasure is the first sign of understanding. If that seems an odd idea, think of the analogy of music. If you listen to aMozart Quintet, if you don’t get any pleasure from it, you’re never going to understand it, because the thing is put together to cause pleasure, that’s what it’s all about. If you… I mean, it’s a construction of pleasure. You know art really teaches through pleasure, gives experience through pleasure, that’s why a work of art can’t really be ugly in the ordinary sense.. It can be.. It can use things that are ordinarily thought to be ugly so that they’re beautiful. I mean, you can take a wrecked car and arrange the parts of it so it’s beautiful, or you can.. I mean, you can take things that are even uglier than that, but.. the end-result..  I mean, there’s a kind of shock art where you just want to make a comment on art – and you bring a big pile of… you bring a horse into an art gallery and he defecates and you walk the horse out of that field, and… that’s not really art, but a comment on the history of art, I would say. Anyway , Larry (Fagin), what was I talking about?.

Larry Fagin: I don’t know
KK: You’re too good a listener!
Larry Fagin:… poetrymusic, sculpture, ballet, all those things..
KK: Oh yeah..

Student: Teaching it – was that what you were saying?

KK: Oh, teaching it,  yeah,  yes, that was it..  So I said, "Pleasure is the first sign of understanding". (If you’ve ever had to suffer through a course at college, you’re probably glad to hear that – that it’s true). Like, you listen to a Yeats poem, and I say, “Just tell me anything you like - it's impossible to understand this poem the first time you hear it. 
So people say brilliant things, if you make them believe that's true.  Some guy said, "I like the way this poet, is so.. sounds so convinced that what he’s saying is important". That’s one of the great things about Yeats. Has there ever been anybody who read a poet (solely) for the content of his poetry? What is all this stuff about meaning? I think, the meaning, it’s important to know the meaning, finally, sure it is, but that’s nor why anybody reads Yeats - his ideas are ridiculous! -  I mean, do you believe. like the poem I read was "The Rose of the World", again, a beautiful poem – “Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream “ -  “Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream / For those red lips with all their mournful pride,/Mournful that no new wonder may betide/Troy  passed away in one high funeral gleam/And Usna's children died."– "Usna's children" are.. who’s that guy who’s inlove with Deirdre, thatConchobarkilled, Naoise its spelt N-I-S-I [sic]somebody in Celtic mythology. Anyway, obviously, you don’t read that (for)... you’re not interested in that poem because you really want to believe that there was a Spirit of Beauty in the form of a Woman who stood beside God's throne at the Creation. I mean, what an idea! – except  (it's) interesting. (nice) the idea that there’s a huge white pig in the sky that makes all the clouds, but I mean… Anyway ,but..one of the reason you read Yeats is because he sounds like what he say is really so damned important, it’s that wonderful sense of urgency. It’s why I like to look at some ofPicasso’s pantings, or like to listen to certain composers, I mean, it’s a …terrific, it was a brilliant comment. I said, “that’s great”. And eventually we went around with everyone just saying what they liked, and eventually we understood the poem. That’s a good way to do it.

Okay, enough about the teaching. Lets see.. I think.. let’s see. That’s a lot of advice I gave you now. Let’s see – Reading a lot of poetry past and present, learning another language, translating, finding some good teachers, trying a lot of things in your writing, writing a lot.. I’ve probably forgotten a lot of things,  but we have another class [sic].
I’ve been talking too much about myself as a teacher. I should, maybe, talk about my experiences as a writer, which I ‘ve been doing in the parentheses, but that always seems so arrogant to me, unless you ask me questions about it.  In fact, why don’t you ask me some questions, about anything  - Yes?    
  
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at the start of the tape and concluding at approximately fifty-seven-and-a-quarter minutes in]

Basic Poetics - I - (Shakespeare)


[Lady Smocks(Cardamine pratensis) "And lady-smocks all silver white/ And cuckoo buds of yellow hue/ Do paint the meadows with delight."

We return today to Allen at Naropa teaching, and a brand new series of transcriptions.. from Jan 7 1980, the opening class from his course in "Basic Poetics - Part 1 and II'. The class begins in media res with Allen reciting a number of adages - [see "Mind Writing Slogans] -  (Editorial note - some of this material has been covered before, see for example here and here and here)  

AG: "Philosophy is not a fit activity for young men because they have not have mastered sufficient phalanx of particulars on which to draw their conclusions or make their generalization".
Student: "Pay attention to…"
AG; Yes, right, good.. It's the correct quote  [William Blake from "Jerusalem] - "Pay attention to minute particulars", comma, "take care of the little ones" [Editorial note - The exact quote - "Labor well the Minute Particulars; attend to the Little Ones"] And third?.. What was the next? 
Student:"No ideas but in things…"
AG: Well, "No ideas but in things,  No ideas but in (the) Facts"
Student: "Close to the nose" (William Carlos Williams).:
AG: Right Then what was the next?
Student; "Clamp your mnd down on objects" 
AG: What?
Student (2): "Clamp your mind down on objects"
AG: Yes. That was Williams. Those last three were Williams. Facts, things and objects...
And (Ezra) Pound - "The natural object is always the.." 
Student:  "...natural symbol"
AG: And Pound also says "Direct treatment of the object". And then, paraphrasing, I think it's (Louis) Zukofsky,"Vision.." -  Vision, i.e. sight - "is where the eye hits".  Vision i.e. sight. Vision - (parentheses) - or sight,  (in parentheses) - is where the eye hits". Sight is where the eye hits, or Vision is where the eye hits.  So, of the.. there's probably a couple more that I'll think of later..

Student: William Carlos Williams?

AG: I think that was..he was "No ideas but in things" - "No ideas but in things, Clamp the mind down on objects, No ideas but in facts, Close to the nose.." - (and also) Carl Rakosi - "By what particulars is he significant?" - "By what particulars is he significant", (talking about, talking about, you know, looking at a person, or trying to describe a person, or it could be a tree -"By what particulars is this tree significant?" - "By what particulars is he significant?"). So all these.. generalizations tend toward specificity, particularity, tangibility, corporality, actuality, as it is defined by what you can relate to with your six senses.

Student: What's the sixth sense?

AG: Mind. I almost said five but - sight, sound, smell, taste, touch - and then, assuming that the mind is like a crystal-ball, which you have five ribbons in the mind, different colored ribbons and thy reflect into the crystal ball and the mind is an empty mind  (in the mind you don't have tactile sense,but it recombines the others. It might do other things and there might be other theories, but just staying simple, staying as simple-minded as possible, what the mind can do with five senses, maybe  recombine them, make a "hydrogen jukebox" (but it's still a "hydrogen" and a "jukebox", so it's still tangible, in some sort of (way or other).

So  that's sort of the ground to begin with. Now the Shakespeare poem is on page two-hundred-and-nineteen  of the Norton Anthology. In the middle of it, there's a .. in the middle of the page line nineteen, page two hundred and nineteen, written in 1595 possibly, or 1598 - a song from a play Love's Labours Lost. And it's just in the middle of the page  where we'll start - "When icicles hang by the wall/ And Dick the Shepherd blows his nail" - (Does anybody know what that means? "Dick the Shepherd blows his nail"?) - What?


                                                         ["When icicles hang by the wall…" ]

Student: (Warms?)

AG: Yeah. It's cold. "Dick the Shepherd blows his nail" - What page was that? 

Student(s): Page nineteen

AG: "And milk comes frozen home in pail"? - No, "And Tom bears logs into the hall/And milk comes frozen home in pail,/When blood is nipped, and ways be foul, /Then nightly sings the staring owl,/To whoo./To whit, to whoo, a merry note,/While greasy Joan doth keel the pot" -  ("keel" means "stir" the pot) - "Where all around the wind doth blow,/And coughing drowns the parson's saw,/And birds sit brooding in the snow - (What a tragic line! -"Birds sit brooding in the snow" - that was Kerouac's favorite line in Shakespeare - "And birds sit brooding in the snow") - "And Marian's nose looks red and raw,/When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl…"

So, without having said it, we've got the generalization - Winter. The title is "Winter", but without having had this.. The title is probably put in by the editor of the anthology rather than by Shakespeare. So we've presented winter, with a series of tangible, corporeal, sensory, tactile, sensible, actual, directly-treated, visible, fact, minute, particular, phalanx of particular specificity facts, close to the nose, close to the nose, absolutely close to the nose - "Dick the Shepherd blows his nail" - close to the nose.


["for thus sings he/"Cuckoo;/Cuckoo, cuckoo!"]

Another exercise he does - "Spring" - "When daisies pied and violets blue/And lady-smocks all silver-white/And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue/Do paint the meadows with delight,/The cuckoo then, on every tree,/Mocks married men; for thus sings he/"Cuckoo;/Cuckoo, cuckoo!" O, word of fear,/Unpleasing to a married ear!"

Actually, even little generalization.. the generalization at the end.. I mean,"daisies pied and violets blue", that sounds obvious, the color of the flowers. "lady-smocks" for little, sort of , white flowers,"cuckoo-buds" -  he's being fanciful, but he's directly describing actual flowers - "paint the meadows with delight" - ok, there's a little generalization there. Then there's this long thing - "The cuckoo then on every tree/ Mocks married men; for thus sings he.."
The birds sing..  (The cuckoo was, apparently, in this case, symbolic of cuckoldry (lets you know someone's fucking your wife - "Unpleasing to a married ear"). Still, it's Springtime, everybody's.. Everybody gets a hard-on.  Springtime. He's still presenting a functional process, a fact, a phalanx of particulars here Rather than abstract generalization, he's talking about how sex rises in the Springtime.

And, as well, in the end, in the "Winter" - "Then nightly sings the staring owl,/To whoo./To whit, to whoo, a merry note"  - What else are you going to do at winter-time, except go upstairs and fuck? - Too whoo to whoo to whit to whoo - To wit, that is, to woo, make love, merry note. "While greasy Joan doth keel the pot" - So, in winter, go upstairs and fuck, and in summer, find somebody else's wife and meet in the meadow, or something. But, in any case.. What I meant.. The whole point of this was that the little burden, or refrain, or musical tag lines, at the end of the absolutely solid factual phalanx of particulars, are also, kind of, particular presentation, presentation of situation and fact, rather than a kooky abstract generalization. Does that make sense? (I'm pointing out the unconscious fact underneath "Too whit too whoo" and "Cuckoo, Cuckoo!" - what function they serve in presenting more fact - I just thought it up now!).  Anyway,  "The cuckoo then, on every tree,/Mocks married men for thus sings he.."


["When shepherds pipe on oaken straws,/And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks"]

"When shepherds pipe on oaken straws,/And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks" - (that's pretty good - who wakes the ploughman to get up, or tell him , presumably when he.. wakes him to get up - the lark singing at the break of day -"the lark that sings at heaven's gate" - rising - a lark of the morning - so, "merry larks are ploughmen's clocks". In other words the song of the lark, the noise of the lark, wakes up the farmer to go to his ploughing) - "When turtles tread.. ("turtle-doves tread and mate) - "and rooks and daws" ("rooks and daws also mate), "And maidens bleach their summer smocks,./The cuckoo then, on every tree"..etcetera. 
So he's presented Summer and the Winter with a phalanx of particulars, with a bunch of facts. Does that make sense?  Does anybody object to this method of writing poetry by Shakespeare? Does anybody assume that it's insufficiently poetic?  - or in the basic form,
or that it evades some divine principle of visionary insight that you alone have..? -  So it's common, so I think there's one or two in here [in the classroom] that are holding out - for something worse -  for another universe!
Shall we discuss that, or is there really an objection to what I'm saying?

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at the start of the tape and concluding at approximately eleven-and-a-half minutes in]

Basic Poetics - 2 (Kerouac, Reznikoff and Williams)




                                                  [Jack Kerouac, Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams]

Allen's 1980 Naropa Basic Poetics continues


Student: Is that the only valid poetry then, citing particulars?

AG: Well, that's a generalization.

Student: Okay 

AG: All I'm saying is there's lots of poetry like that, you know, an enormous amount of poetry is like that. For us beginning students (including me), let's begin in somewhere real where we can begin, instead of somewhere up in the air where we can't begin at all. Because, if we have nowhere we can stand, then there's no point in my standing here. I mean, if there's no place, with specific..  if there's no place, with feet on the floor and carpets  and senses, then it's hardly possible to talk.

Student: Well, since you bring the sixth sense into it..is the opposite extreme, or the opposite (thing) something like (Jack) Kerouac's mystical descriptions in Big Sur?

AG: Give me a for instance?

Student; For  instance, when he's having the d-t's, and he's tripping through sort of a Dantean level of Hell, and he's writing…

AG:  You'd have to be..  No, you'd have to get the text and bring up the text, because you'll find, especially in Kerouac..  
Oh, the other.. the other...  axiom - Kerouac - quote - "Details are the life of the novel" - unquote. "Details are the life of the novel" (and he means just "details", like we've been talking about). You'll probably find that in the more hallucinatory parts of Big Sur there are hallucinations made of very specific details (like the giant terrific hard-on on the mule, or something like that,  which is very clearly described and made you know, in such reddened… such red...

Student: He's describing a  vividly slow grinding sex act, back in the...

AG: Get the text, and we'll look, word-by-word, whether it's something way up in the air, or whether this hallucinatory vision is composed of little specific noticings.

Student: Oh yes, it's really specific and concrete, you know, as if..

AG: That's what I'm talking about. That's all I'm talking about. That's all I'm talking about, that, even if you're going to  have a vision, you have to present it in concrete terms, with "minute particulars", details, specifics, recombinations of sensory..  ok? You had your hand up?
Student: No.
AG: Something?  You were saying something?
Student:  Well, it did include our minds (as well)….
AG: I didn't mean your mind, (but), (well,)  go ahead, and say it.. 
Student: …. (No),  I was confused about what you were saying, but, you've cleared it up (now) by what you said.

AG: Oh, yeah, I said it before. Mind, the crystal ball, will recombine all the colors of the other senses. You make combinations. Mind is an immense computer. Anyone who can
take down all those details and break them down into units and bits, and reconstruct them like cut-ups, make all sorts of amazing things, but, just for sanity's sake, and for good poetry's sake.. . See, the purpose of this course is not to study literature, but.. I mean, not to study literature for a literature course, but to provide you with some useable insight into your own writing . So that's why I'm beginning to lay down at the very beginning - be.. stay real, stick with reality if you want to write some unreal poetry, start off with some reality, because there's always the.. I've found, here in Naropa, and all over, in dealing with younger poets, and older poets, (that) mediocrity is generally lack of specificity, lack of minute particular detail, lack of outline (as (William) Blake would say), outline, definite outline  

So, that was Shakespeare (Shakespeare's "minute particulars"), and we'll get back to that later. Not that all poetry's got to be just that. It's just that there's got to be that ground to begin with. Or that should be borne in mind, that basic direction, for your own writing.

Now in modern days, there was a theory of Imagism, as it was called (it was a theory called "Imagism", and (an)other, "Objectivism" American poetics, an American poetry development, that tried to get down to specifics, and tried to follow up the theories that I just mentioned). So I'll read a couple of little samples of famous, or well-known, modern poets who've written in this way, not with rhyme, just direct treatment of the object 


"The wind blows the rain into our faces as we go down the hillside upon rusted cans and old newspapers past the tree on whose bare branches the boys have hung iron hoops until we reach at last the crushed earthworms stretched and stretching on the wet sidewalk"

 - What is unusual about that is that..well, it's a good enough description of an old lot in a rain - "rusted cans and old newspapers" - pretty nearly anybody can write that..(though this was written in nineteen.. probably nineteen twenty, probably, when it was unusual to allow your mind to think about rusty cans as part of poetry. That was a big discovery). But, beyond the rusty cans, "past the tree on whose bare branches the boys have hung iron hoops" - That's pretty interesting - like a haiku - I mean, some stretch.. exercise of poetic imagination on the part of the.. 

 [(to Student) you might go, please, get some chairs - Student - Get some chairs? - AG: Yes, go get some chairs..settle in, it would be easier..]        

Student: Who's that poem by?

AG: Charles Reznikoff  - Poems 1918-1936 - Volume 1 - The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, Black Sparrow Press

Student: Would that be required text for the course?

AG: Well, if you want to learn how to write poetry I would say so, not for the course . But I would say it's one of the best handbooks you could…  I would say it's one of the best handbooks you could check out. In a previous term's courses, I've used this and William Carlos WilliamsCollected Earlier Poems just as grounding for beginners and for advanced students. It's really worth reading. (If you can't find itm it's in the library).

So, so you've got the "bare branches  (where) the boys have hung iron hoops", which is like a little stretch of imaginative noticing, it's a little beyond just "rusty cans" it's, actually, a little like a haiku,  some magical little action by the kids, where they've hung iron hoops on the bare branches and left them, and  a guy walks by on the empty lot and sees them - so there's some kind of athletic poeticism there - "until we reach at last" - what? -  "the crushed earthworms stretched and stretching on the wet sidewalk" - and that's really uncanny, because, we've all seen that, after the rain (because you remember it began "The wind blows the rain into our faces"), we've all seen that after the rain, but hardly anybody has had the poetic presence of mind to write that down, although it's (so) elemental, and it's also..it's as big as the atom bomb in terms of ecological weirdness, because, you know, this particular phenomena of earthworms on sidewalk "stretched and stretching on the wet sidewalk" is a wholly new.. a wholly new phenomena, you know.. only in the last two thousand years have people noticed that. Usually the earthworms are in their earth, or in their natural place, but there's lawns, and then there's sidewalks, and then there's (a) little grass margin by the roadside, and then there's worms lost on this path (he might have had them among precipices and rocks.. Yellowstone…  but this particular, very urban, or sub-urban..haiku ..or suburban event, miracle, whatever, poetic freak, this suburban freak of nature  - "earthworms stretched and stretching on the wet sidewalk" - crushed earthworms -  that's pretty.. it tells you all the story of the earthworm and of life itself, but it's also this whole..this particular civilization that's sketched, (like a fast Cezanne sketch - you know, like when he's got Mount Sainte Victoire in just a couple of lines, a couple of colors, Cezanne watercolors , late late late Cezanne where it's all reduced to just the… "By what particulars is this mountain significant?""By what particulars is he significant? - Do you follow me?  -By what particular stand-out optical angles, colors…. ? 

These days.. the papers in the street/ leap into the air or burst across the lawns - / not a scrap but has the breath of life:/ These and a gust of wind/ play about./Those, for a moment, lie still and sun themselves (The first line was "These days the papers in the street/ leap in the air or burst across the lawns" (it's also a very modern noticing)

William Carlos Williams has a very similar poem.. does anybody know that? - "The Term", it' called -  "The Term" - "A rumpled sheet/of  brown…" -  Did everybody get the last poem? - Did anybody space out on it and miss it?.. It's about wind - I'll read it again - "These days the papers in the street/ leap into the air or burst across the lawns -/ not a scrap but has the breath of life:/ These and a gust of wind/ play about./ Those, for a moment, lie still and sun themselves" - There's a little anthropomorphic projection on it but it's a good description  -  (And) "The Term" (probably written around the same year, because they were friends, Charles Reznikoff and Williams, William Carlos Wlliams) - "A rumpled sheet/ of brown paper/about the length/ and apparent bulk/of a man was/rolling with the/wind slowly over/ and over in/the street as/a car drove down/upon it and/ crushed it to/the ground.Unlike/a man it rose/again rolling/with the wind over/and over to be as/it was before." - Pretty funny - so there were two.. but -  "those for a moment, lie still and sun themselves" - The two guys were like scientists, observing phenomena, the same phenomena (but very particular phenomena, phenomena from the descriptions).

So more Reznikoff, some more - "Walk about a subway station/ in a grove of steel pillars/how their knobs, the rivet-heads -/unlike those of oaks -/ are regularly placed/how barren the ground is/except here and there on the pllatform/ a fat black fungus/that was chewing-gum" - Has everybody seen that on pavements - the "fat black fungus/that was chewing-gum"? Has anybody here ever written about it? - or has anybody here ever read a poem about it? - And how many times have you seen that.. in your twentieth-century existence? - you know, just part of our ordinary, everyday experience, every day we see it 
Somebody did write a poem about snot under the desk!  I have seen a poem like that. One student did last year..

Well, "Coming up the subway stairs I thought the moon /only another streetlight,/ a little crooked." - "The white gulls hover above the glistening river where the sewers empty their slow ripples" - that's pretty good, because the gulls are (after) the detritus from the sewers.

Student: Can you read that one again?

AG:"The white gulls hover above the glistening river" - that's real pretty, that -  "where the sewers empty their slow ripples" - "After Rain" - "The motor cars on the shining street move in semi-circles of spray/semi-circles of spray" - (he liked it so much he repeated it) - (Has) everybody seen that at some time or other? -   "The motor cars on the shining street move in semi-circles of spray/semi-circles of spray" - "After Rain" (so the street's flooded) - "Suburb" - If a naturalist came to this hillside,/ he'd find many old newspapers among the weeds/to study." - "This smoky winter morning - /do not despize the green jewel shining among the twigs/because it is a traffic light" - "About the railway station as the taxi cabs leave/ the smoke from their exhaust pipes is murky blue./ stinking flowers, budding, unfolding over the ruts in the snow" -  This may be the best, actually - "If there is a scheme/perhaps this too is in the scheme/as when a subway car turns on a switch/the wheels screeching against the rails/and the lights go out/but are on again in a moment" - Has everybody been in the subwat and had that happen? Anybody not been in a subway? Well, it happens at subways -  "If there is a scheme/perhaps this too is in the scheme/as when a subway car turns on a switch/the wheels screeching against the rails/and the lights go out/but are on again in a moment" - that's so archetypal of an experience in New York that it's amazing it's not written about more, but this was, I guess, first notated in the (19)20's - "When the sky is blue the water over the sandy bottom is/ green/They have dropped newspapers on it, cans, a bedspring, sticks/ and stones/but these the/ patient waters corrode, those a patient moss/ covers" - that's a pretty picture of the "patient moss" - Okay, so that's a little touch of Reznikoff "clamping his mind down" on objects, being actual

And then a little, a few samples of  William Carlos Williams doing more or less the same -  actually, doing more or less the same as Shakespeare, here - "New books of poetry…" - It's called  "A Coronal" - "New books of poetry will be written/New books and unheard of manuscripts/will come wrapped in brown paper/and many and many a time/the postman will bow/and sidle down the leaf-plastered steps/thumbing over other men's business/ But we.." - (meaning poets of his time)  - "we ran ahead of it all/One coming after/could have seen her footprints/in the wet and followed us/among the stark chestnuts.." - ("her"'s Spring, the Goddess of Spring, I think - It's like the Shakespeare line)  - "Anemones sprang where she pressed/and cresses/ stood green in the slender source-/ And new books of poetry/will be written, leather-colored oak leaves/many and many a time." - (he's just saying, "Spring will come - and people will be writing. People also will be Springing. People also will have their mental, emotional, literary Spring)

Student: What was the title of that poem?

AG: "A Coronal" - C-O-R-O-N-A-L - I sent him a (little) book of poems wrapped in a brown manuscript too. That's why I noticed this poem years later (when I was thinking hard!) - ""New books of poetry will be written/New books and unheard of manuscripts/ will come wrapped in brown…"

So, just a couple of things to those who…  "To A Poor Old Woman"- "Munching on a plum on/ the street a paper bag/ of them in her hand/ They taste good to her/ They taste good/ to her. They taste/ good to her/  You can see it by/ the way she gives herself/ to the one half/ sucked out of her hand./ Comforted/ a solace of ripe plums/seeming to fill the air/They taste good to her."
"Late For Summer Weather" - He has on/ an old light grey Fedora/She a black beret/ He a dirty sweater/She an old blue coat/that fits her tight/ Grey flapping pants/Red skirt and/broken-down black pumps/ Fat  Lost  Ambling/ nowhere through/the upper town they kick/ their way through/ heaps of/ fallen maple leaves/ still green - and/ crisp as dollar bills/ Nothing to do. Hot cha!"
"Proletarian Portrait" - "A big young bareheaded woman/ in an apron/ Her hair slicked back standing/on the street/ One stockinged foot toeing/the sidewalk./ Her shoe in her hand. Looking/intently into it./ She pulls out the paper insole/ to find the nail./ That has been hurting her."

So, okay, that's (William Carlos) Williams.

[Audio for the above can be found here, beginning at approximately eleven-and-a-half  minutes and concluding at approximately thirty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in]     

October 7 - Anniversary of the Six Gallery Reading







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Image may be NSFW.
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So today is the day - the 60th Anniversary of the famous "Six Gallery reading", the ground-breaking first public performance of "Howl" (tho' we shouldn't forget the importance of the other readers who read that night -  Gary Snyder, Michael McClure,Philip Lamantia(reading John Hoffman), Philip Whalen - and Kenneth Rexrothwas master of ceremonies)

Hear Michael McClure give a first-hand account of the event and its significance, on Witness, for the BBC World Service

Here's McClure's account of that extraordinary occasion (excerpted from his Scratching The Beat Surface

" (In 1955) I (gave) my first poetry reading with Allen Ginsberg, the Zen poet Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and the American surrealist poet Philip Lamantia, The reading was in October 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. The Six Gallery was a cooperative art gallery run by young artists who centered around the San Francisco Art Institute…. On this night Kenneth Rexroth was master of ceremonies. This was the first time that Allen Ginsberg read "Howl". Though I had known Allen for some months preceding, it was my first meeting with Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. Lamantia did not read his poetry that night but instead recited works of the recently-deceased John Hoffman - beautiful poems that left orange stripes and colored visions in the air.
The world that we tremblingly stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one. But San Francisco was a special place. Rexroth said it was to the arts what Barcelona was to Spanish Anarchism. Still, there was no way, even in San Francisco, to escape the pressures of the war culture. We were locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle - the Korean War. My self-image in those years was of finding myself - young, high, a little crazed, needing a hair-cut - in an elevator with burly, crew-cutter, square-jawed eminences staring at me like I was misplaced cannon-fodder. We hated the war and the inhumanity and the coldness. The country had the feeling of martial law. An undeclared military state had leapt out of Daddy Warbucks' tanks and sprawled all over the landscape. As artists we were oppressed and indeed the people of the nation were oppressed. There were certain of us (whether we were fearful or brave) who could not help speaking out - we had to speak. We knew we were poets and we had to speak out as poets. We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead - killed by war, by academics, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life. We could see what (Ezra) Pound had done and (Walt) Whitmanand (Antonin) Artaud, and D.H.Lawrence, in his monumental poetry and prose.
The Six Gallery was a huge room that had been converted from an automobile repair shop into a gallery….A hundred and fifty enthusiastic people had come to hear us. Money was collected and jugs of wine were brouoght back for the audience. I hadn;t seen Allen for a few weeks and I had not heard "Howl" - it was new to me. Allen began in a small and intensely lucid voice. At some point Jack Kerouac began shouting "GO" in cadence as Allen read it. In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before -we had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision….
…Ginsberg read on till the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh walls of America and its supporting armies and navies and acadamies and institutions and ownership-systetms and power-support bases..
.."Howl" was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard."

 & McClure, (in a 2008 reading at UC Berkeley), recalls the Six Gallery and reads three of his poems from that night.

Here's part of Kerouac's fictionalization in The Dharma Bums


"Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six (Six Gallery) that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbrook [Allen Ginsberg] was reading his, wailing poem "Wail" ["Howl"]  drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling "Go! Go! Go!" (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes [Kenneth Rexroth] the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping tears in gladness.
Meanwhile scores of people stood around in the darkened gallery straining to hear every word of the amazing poetry reading as I wandered from group to group, facing them and facing away from the stage, urging them to slug from the jug, or wandered back and sat on the right side of the stage giving out little wows and yesses of approval and even whole sentances of comment with nobody's invitation but in the general gaiety nobody's disapproval either. It was a great night.
Among the people standing in the audience was Rosie Buchanan [Natalie Jackson], a girl with short haircut, red-haired, bony, handsome, a real gone chick and friend of everybody of any consequence on the beach, who'd been a painter's model and a writer herself and was bubbling with excitement at that time because she was in love with my old buddy Cody [Neal Cassady]"Great, hey Rosie?" I yelled, and she took a big slug from my jug and shined eyes at me. Cody just stood behind her with both arms around her waist. Between poets, Rheinhold Cacoethes, in his bow tie and shabby old coat, would get up and make a little funny speech in his snide funny voice and introduce the next reader: but as I say come eleven thirty when all the poems were read and everybody was milling around wondering what had happened and what would come next in American poetry, he was wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. And we all got together with him, the poets, and drove in several cars to Chinatown for a big fabulous dinner off the Chinese menu, with chopsticks, yelling conversation in the middle of the night in one of those free-swinging great Chinese restaurants of San Francisco."

For more on the Six Gallery reading - see here - and here

Extended notices on the occasion of the 45th - and 50th - anniversary celebrations -  here and here 



Six Gallery Reading Revisited (Rexroth-Snyder-Whalen-McClure)


[Art deco relief on the exterior of the Berkeley Community Theater, housing the Florence Schwimley Little Theater, venue of the recreation of the October 1955 recreation of the legendary Six Gallery reading]

The legendary Gallery Six reading took place on October 7 1955. The following March (March 11, to be precise), the event was recreated and presented (at the Little Theater, Berkeley) by the San Francisco Poetry Center. Here, courtesy San Francisco Poetry Center's  Digital Archive, is the audio from that night 

Kenneth Rexroth introduces Gary Snyder, Philip Whalenand Michael McClure

                                                                           [Kenneth Rexroth]

The audio begins with joyful banter, (indeed, the high-spirits and exuberance are evident throughout the occasion).
Kenneth Rexroth starts off, introducing Gary Snyder

Kenneth Rexroth:  A lady I know… There was some discussion of putting the next item on the agenda, you know, on the media, as they say - (I just heard this story, just now) - and  she is reported to have said, "Well now, is he a real poet, or is he just one of those people who objects to everything?" - like Ginsberg - Anyway, he didn't get on the media, well, so maybe he is - You know, I think it's wonderful, we're all talking about the media, the way that a little pitch of mine eliminated all the cats that dig T.S.Eliot
(But), first, will be Gary Snyder, who is a master of (what is it?  revolt against everything, and uncomplicated forma - Are the forms still that way, or is this another fad?)
Gary Snyder: I think of the trees
Kenneth Rexroth: Well there's things that a tree can't do, see.


[Gary Snyder]

Gary Snyder: "I'm going to read two simple little poems and then I'm going to read a next one that's longer -  "For a Far-out Friend"
("Because I once beat you up/Drunk, stung with weeks of torment.."…."..I thought - more grace and love/In that wild Deva life where you belong,/Than in this dress-and-girdle life/You'll ever give/or get")  - [applause] -  "I suspect dishonesty!"

Audience comments: "Hey Gary, step a little closer to the microphone" - "You want me to move it" - "You've got a haircut" (see above)

 "Song and Dance for a Lecherous Muse"
  ( "The implicit communication of woman"….. "first sunlight hitting the shades")

"Now here is a good one. Here I go into my celebrated wild life. After a reading at San Francisco State College, Rexroth says to me, "Your animals have got the loosest bowels of any animals!…" I'm sticking to trees . This is the first part of a three-part poem called "Myths and Texts", the middle part is about animals. The first part is about trees, the last part is about people, I'm going to stick to trees. It's about logging, really." 

Snyder reads "Myths and Texts" (Part 1) - "The morning star is not a star.."…" ("The brush may paint the mountains and the streams though the territory is lost")

Kenneth Rexroth [in media res] -  ".....working-class. You see what Gary was was the fourth guy in the choke. I mean he was a choke-setter. There are two things to do when you come in the woods, one is to be a choke-setter, the other is to be a whistle-punk and neither one of them are as bad as they sound. It's always best to start off with…" 

Audience comments (to Rexroth)  : "Sit in your chair"
Kenneth Rexroth: What do you mean sit in my chair?

Rexroth introduces Philp Whalen:

"You know when I first came West, cowboys would say, "Well I'll work for a dollar a day, all hours of the day, three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of the year, but, goddam it, my time's my own"!  One of the reasons I like these two cats [Snyder & Whalen] is they've lived very much the same kind of life that I have (except, I've done more of it, I guess, time being more to waste), but, the next one [Whalen], as I've said before, belongs to the same school. In addition, he is, without doubt, the best cigarette-in-the-mouth poetry reader I have met (he doesn't look like George Raft, otherwise) 
- Phil Whalen 

Audience comments: "Go, man!" - "Go, man!" - [continuing conversation] - "Hey, come on Whalen, keep it going!" 


                                                                   [Philip Whalen]

Philip Whalen: This is just kind of a quiet peaceful thing.It's just called "For K.W" (senex -  old man)

[Audience/Organizers attempt to accomodate the overflow crowd - "Excuse me, the people who are over here standing… (there are) more seats in the front…""You want to wait till that settles

Whalen reads "For K.W."

"The mirror water over a mountain….

Now this thing is called "Martyrdom of Two Pagans" ("Out on a limb and frantically sawing.."….  Love is better than hate/and stronger than hell/For we toook our shoes off/As we fell." 
This thing is called "The More It Changes, the More It's The Same Thing" ("'Plus ça Change'") -  
This a different thing, it's all about the mountains - "Sourdough Mountain Lookout" - ("I always say I won't go back to the mountains…"…"Like they say, "Four times up/Three times down". I'm still on the mountain")
  
Audience comment: "Read that one about the thunder, read that one about the lightning ,
(the one) that Williams said something about." 
Philip Whalen: Oh I don't have that one.

"I've got to quit with the a large souffle that I'm currentlycooking up. It's this much so far [Whalen shows the extent of the manuscript] and they'll probably be more later but there's this much finished anyway and it's turning out a little different  
"The Slop Barrel: Slices of the Paideuma for All Sentient Beings" ("We must see, we must know./What 's the nature of that star?"…."The bells have stopped/Flash in the wind/Dog in the pond') ….

Audience Comment: "You want to take a break" - "What? - There's no…" What?" -"Alright, then we'll keep going. "

Kenneth Rexroth:  Why don't we take a break? - Keep going?  - Keep going?
It is being debated if we should have an intermission or keep going. Keep going. Somebody's just pointed out to me that you're all in here and there's no place for you to go…  

Rexroth introduces Michael McClure:

 "Now I don't know what Mike (McClure)'s going to do. I understand that he had a sudden burst of creativity of a very high-class nature. That's what people tell me who heard him read last week - Mike McClure." 



                                                                    [Michael McClure]

Michael McClure: I'm going to read a letter from Jack Spicer first ..If somebody'll pass it up..it's back there...
Audience Comment (mockingly) - Who's Jack Spicer? -  (GS): Jack Spicer turns tricks on Mars - They've got more ping-pong tables there - 
You got the return Address? -
Michael McClure: Spicer, 32 Myrtle Street, Boston..
GS: Everybody write him!
MM: It's a lettter to Johnny Ryan [sic], I'll have to edit it. 
Audience Comment: No one else has tonight!

Michael McClure (reading Jack Spicer) reads: "You're a great bastard. You're letters have disturbed my contentment. Here I am with an excellent job, writing rarely - (handling the rare books in a library.. in (Harvard)..in Boston..) - lonely as a kangaroo in an aquarium, and then you have to write about how on the other side of the country people are really alive, thinking significantly, getting drunk significantly, fucking significantly. You've upset my cold New England dream world. (In the words of Faust, you'll never read to me, "Weh! Weh! /Du hast sie zerstört,/ Die schöne Welt" - that means, give up…  I don't know


Audience Comment: "Go on, man, Go on".

                                                                       [Jack Spicer]


Michael McClure (continues, reading from Spicer's letter)"There's nothing here, just like there is nothing in New York. I've always said that the East is empty, but I'm surprised to find this is true as a literary anti-Semite like (Robert) Duncanwould be to find that  the… (I can't read the writing..)  the world was controlled by  the Jews. There's an isolation from ..an isolation from enthusiasm. Nothing is left but manners and good will. New York lost even the good will. It is impossible to imagine just how poisonous culture without enthusiasm can be, like a perpetual educational television program. Enough of this, I would leave for San Francis.." - this is the part - "I would leave for San Francisco tomorrow if it wasn't for the horror of unemployment that those fine shattering jobless months created. I cannot live without security anymore, anymore than I can live without magic. I discovered that I don't like people well enough to allow myself to be dependent on them. I would come back for any job, but it would have to be a job I came back to. So, Mr John Allen Ryan, if you  love for me and have any friends that love me, start them searching for a place in San Francisco where I could be employed, anything from night-watchman in a museum to towel-boy in a Turkish bath. I won't come back without a job to come back to, and I won't stay here even though I love rare books, if I have a chance to come back .if I have a chance to come back to civilization.  This is a manifesto as well as a personal letter, broadcast its terms. San Francisco has a chance to regain its second poet. The other poet, Dante, is also willing to return to Florence under conditions. My "Oliver Charming" is charming. I hope I'll have a chance to show it to you personally. It's long, incoherent and sexual,  I think it's the most important thing I've written, but, of course, it's only half-finished and god knows…"

Audience Comments: "Now Michael's censoring!.." - "No no it mentions you"..

Michael McClure: It says, "Wallace Berman,  a special love to you, whose beard I don't want to…
Audience Comments:  - "He censored it!" -   "Let him read it!"
Michael McClure: So,  If anybody knows about a job
Audience Comment: "He censored it goddam it!"...
Michael McClure: ….have them tell Johnny or The Place, or any of us or.. his address is 32 Myrtle Street, Boston, Massachustts
Audience Comments:  "So - it wasn't rhymed" - "I know" - "blank verse"

McClure turns to his own poems:


Michael McClure; The first things I'm going to read are new -    

"Laid part to part, toe to knee…"…"a pale tuft of grass" - 
(and) this is called  "The Mystery of the Hunt"  ("It's the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me…)  [reading breaks off/tape concludes in media res]
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