Harold Norse 1980 Naropa Reading

December 6, 2015, 3:00 am

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                                                         [Harold Norse (1916-2009)]

[continuing from yesterday]

AG: Okay -  Are we about ready for Chapter two of the evening ? – Shall we go on now? -  Harold Norse is a classic Bohemian figure on the (North) American and European poetry scene, We first met, myself and Harold, in.. on the New York subway, around 34^thStreet, in 1944, around Christmas-time, when I came down from Columbia University to visit Greenwich Village all by myself for the first time with a copy of Rimbaud and a red handkerchief tied around my neck. I think I had just met William Burroughs, maybe a few nights before, and this was my first foray into the Village, and there was a young guy sitting across the subway from me and it turned out to be Harold Norse, who, seeing my copy of Rimbaud and my red neckerchief and me reciting poetry in a lonesome subway car with him as the only auditor, introduced himself. And then we walked in Greenwich Village and he showed me where Hart Crane had lived, and told me all sorts of gossip about (W.H.) Auden . In 1939 when Auden first came to America, he was met at the boat by Harold Norse and Chester Kallman (who became Auden’s lover, and with Auden was Christopher Isherwood, who struck up acquaintance with Harold, who then lived a sort of bohemian life and knewthe Brooklyn Heights apartment where Gypsy Rose Lee, (where) Auden lived with a large literary company, the bohemia of pre-War Europe recorded in Auden’s poem“I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street/ Uncertain and afraid…”, “September 1^st, 1939”…Harold had sent him to that gay bar and that was the dive of that celebrated poem. Harold continued writing, was living in Greenwich Village all during the early (19)40’s and mid (19)40s, visited Europe and lived a long time (in) Italy (and) France, traveling around, Greece later on. He translated the Roman Sonnets of  G.G.Belli  (a brilliant book, published by Jonathan Williams and Jargon Press, which received a great deal of favorable comment by William Carlos Williams, who said of his translations of the vernacular Roman dialect of Belli into vernacular Americanese – “You have breached a new lead, shown a new power of language which makes theories of composition so much blah” No one can do this kind of translation without genius for native language which you have shown, our American speech”.  So that was Williams’ early praise for Harold Norse’s demotic English (he was a student of Williams and one of the followers of that great school  - also knew the American Surrealists when they were in New York, was friends with Charles Henri Ford). Over the years, published, here in Denver, his first book, 1953, Allan Swallow – The Undersea Mountain.  Then, 1960, was the translations from Belli, Jargon Press. Macmillan, big-time, New York,1962, a book called The Dancing Beasts - Poems, Karma Circuit, done by Nothing Doing Press, London, 1967, Hotel Nirvana(which was selected poems, put out, belatedly, by City Lights, 1974). And then a huge collection of all of his work, put out by Gay Sunshine Press, Carnivorous Saint – Poems 1941-1976.  He edited the magazine from San Francisco  Bastard Angel– and by (the) Gay, Advocate, one of the..  in a critical review, was termed a "Catullan American", one of the few Amerians who had some of the spark of Catullus’ hardness in dealing with erotic themes. Harold Norse. 

                                                 [Harold Norse - Photograph by Nina Glaser]

HN: Just like to make a few little corrections in this summation. I didn’t go to meet Auden at the boat, I..my friend Chester Kallman who was at Brooklyn College with me came over and said that Auden and Isherwood are coming and they’re going to read in New York. Let’s go and sit in the front row and wink at them! – and that’s how we met.

Where was this? -  The hall? – the name of it I can’t remember but in the currentbiography of Auden that’s described, the biography of W.H.Auden by a man called Osborne[Charles Osborne], which I haven’t read fully, but I looked my name up in the index and found out that I had been quoted without my knowledge or permission about that, and I was also described as a blonde (Chester was a blonde and I wasn’t, but..)

When I saw Allen in the subway, Allen was seventeen at that time and there was nobody else in the subway and  it was about four o’clock in the morning , I heard him reciting and as the train  stopped and the roar ceased,  I recognized that it was French and that it was Rimbaud, but I don’t remember seeing a copy of Rimbaud in your hand (Allen), and I said to him when the train stopped again- “Rimbaud!” – and he said, “You’re a poet”, and that's how we ended up in Green-wich Village in my apartment….

The latest book is called Carnivorous Saint, which is not a  collection of all my work but it is a  collection of all the  poems that center around the gay theme, and I thought I had something like twenty-four or five of them, I kept finding more and more, and, going back to 1941 to 1976, and it turned out to be several hundred,

I believe  however that I’ll start this reading from some poems from Hotel Nirvana

The first one is called “For the Jewish Saint Teresa of Avila”– A scholar and a friend of mine called Gerald Brenan, who was about ninety years old and is an Anglo-Irish scholar of Spanish history (and lives in Spain) ,discovered that Saint Teresa of Avila, the patron saint of Spain, was a full-blooded Jewess, that her parents or her grandparents had converted, having been persuaded by the Inquisition to do (so).  “Saint Teresa, I love your witty sanctity..”…”… report the second coming on Flight 666” –

[Is this…? [Norse addresses the microphone] - it’s popping, yeah… can you hear me now? …no? ..how’s that..? can you hear that? ..ok…more distant?  (AG – no, (as you were), maybe six inches..] - [oh, that’s about enough – eight - that’ll stop the popping] – ok thank you)] 
     

I believe it was the same scholar Gerald Brenan who discovered the real reason why Garcia Lorca was killed by the Fascists. Most of us assume or believe that he was shot because he was a Communist but Brenan unearthed the facts that have been published in a book, Death in Grenada, in 1973 [were they?] - [Editorial note - Brenan was undoubtedly a pioneer in the investigation of the death of Lorca and deserves much credit but mention should also be made then of Ian Gibson and his exhaustive research] - The fact of the matter was that he (Garcia Lorca) was in love with the son of the police chief of Grenada and was making it with him. Now that’s why he was shot, And I tell the story in the first person of one of the Fascists who shot him and the names involved in it are those who participated. The facts are all true in the poem – “We bumped off your friend, the poet with the big fat head this morning…””…was a disastrous event…” [poem ends in media res] – 

“This poem is called “These Fears Are Real Not Paranoid”(I’m walking in silent spring, I do not feel like a million…”..”O Zen masters, quick! do something!’ –

next – a two-part poem, “You must have been a sensational baby “ (I love your eyebrows, said one, the distribution of your body hair is sensational..” …”The whole place trembled with lust”)

and this is a poem called “In November” which was written, I believe in November of (19)72….when I’d just come to San Francisco, I’d been out of the country fifteen years and I hadn’t had a book published in America for ten years, and.. this is what happened –  Norse reads “In November” -  (“In November, I lost my food stamps, the computer said I did not exist..”….”…  “…fifty-nine cents, a hundred-and-forty-five pounds and two good balls”)

This is a poem called “Remembering Paul Goodman”,in five sections, and the last section actually has a stanza in it about meeting Allen in the subway, this is a poem about the (19)40’s experience with Paul Goodman -  (“As I cross a windy street corner waiting for a bus…” ….[“Ginsberg high in the subway red kerchief around his neck recited Rimbaud in eerie dawn of  1944 drowned by the IRT. the flood of words across the isle from me and then departed for mad  mindmusic after we greeted the future”]……..”I do not eulogize dead men, he said, I find that fitting.”

I’d like to read a poem that is not necessarily autobiographical. Every time I read this poem, people ask me if the details are true and I have to tell them now, in advance rather than afterwards, that the vital statistics in tis poem are not autobiographical, it is a composite.  Norse reads “I’m Not A Man” ( I’m not a man, I can’t earn a living, buy new things for my family..”..”I’m not a man, I don’t want to destroy you”)   

“I am fighting on the lone front”(“I am fighting on a lone front, fighting propaganda with poetry..”…” I am fighting on the pubic front for my ever-loving sexuality”

Do you want to hear something dirty?  [Yeah] – Peter (Orlovsky) wants to hear something dirty. I’ve got a lot of it but I can’t find it . I must have cut out the dirty ones today.. hmm, well, Peter, I’ll have to read one that isn’t (dirty) – oh – I thought the whole book was dirty, now I don’t seem to be able to find anything. It’s weird. It’s extraordinary… jesus! – well, I don’t want to disappoint Peter or the audience, but..oh…hmm.. this is weird, maybe it isn’t a dirty book after all, I always thought it was..

I can read you a couple of dirty translations from..Catullus..

I’ll probably find all the dirty ones when I go back tonight, but..  ah, yes

[Norse reads from his translations of Catullus] - (“I am entrusting to you, Aurelius, all I love most in the world, this boy..”…”..his poems are under no such strict necessity”).

[and one more] - The one..my favorite among those..this is a… this one.. - (“O slickest thieves at the public baths…”…”...your ass-boy is too hairy to sell”).

(keeps looking for "something dirty") - I don’t seem to be able to find these dirty poems of mine – huh?.. I know, it’s impossible to find anything I look for -  no, it’s not dirty enough…

This is a cut-up of a picture poem [displays text], some of it has very small print, which I hope I can see, but it has illustrations of bar-bell, boys who are using bar-bells and doing body-building, and… which is part of the poem. You don’t have to see the whole thing, but I hope I can see these words.   I’m afraid I really can’t, in this light – oh..oh jesus! – sorry, I can’t see it, it’s done in different-sized print, that’s too bad. I see if I can put some light on this subject.

well, actually, I  would like (then) to close with a poem written about twenty-five years ago, which was called, it is..a ballad and it’s called  “The Ballad of Beautiful Boys”(“Whatever became of Hans, the German, tall and pale and hard as an oar/And where is Bruce, the college freshman, who made a javelin look small/And the Irish boy in the merchant marine.....”… “Where are the beautiful boys I knew once whose greatest dread was the touch of cunts?’)

                                            [Thannis in Hydra, 1964 - Photograph by Harold Norse]

[AG: Thank you Harold Norse. Peter Orlovsky will be the next reader, but first lets take a ten minute break. It’s now ten five we’ll begin again at ten fifteen] - [Editorial note - Peter Orlovsky's reading on this occasion can be found - here]

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

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Man Ray (1890-1976)

December 7, 2015, 3:00 am

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              [Man Ray and Allen Ginsberg at the English Bookshop, Paris, 1961 - Photograph by Loomis Dean]

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890-1976)) and Allen Ginsberg in conversation (Peter Orlovsky) there in the background. The date, we're surmising, is, on the second of Allen's sustained Paris visits, in 1961. The location - the cellar of the English Bookshop (42 rue de Seine, Paris), where, as Jean Jacques Lebel, organizer, co-ordinator and provocateur,  points out, "we held many a bilingual reading in the 'Fifties and 'Sixties."

Here's Jean Paul Fargier's 1998 tv documentary film on Man Ray - Man Ray monsieur machine à coudre (Man Ray - Mr Sewing-Machine) 


  
Here's one of Man Ray's own films, Les Mystères du Château de Dé ( The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice) from 1929, and, from the previous year, L'Étoile de mer (The Sea Star), featuring the poet Robert Desnos and the legendary Kiki de Montparnasse

A little insight into Man Ray - his home-movies - (from the 'Twenties and the "Thirties) - see here and here



Here'sa portfolio of Man Ray photographs, by Francisco Mundo

Adonism (sic) - Here's a rare item - Some poems from Man Ray - see here 

We have the opportunity of hearing Man Ray's own speaking voice. Here he is interviewed in 1972:



Questioner: I always have the feeling that the 'Twenties and the 'Thirties and the Dada movement and the Surrealist movement were..they were..it was a great deal of fun?

Man Ray: "No, not at the time. People look back to it, they think this was a marvelous period, romantic and all sorts of things but, no, it was very tense, it was very bitter, and there was no humor in it, but what we did was, really, to upset things, you know, but, subconsciously, to clear the way, as I said before, for something new which we didn't know yet what it might be."

 & here he is from an undated (audio) interview): 

"An object is the result of looking at something which, in itself, has no quality or charm. I pick something which in itself has no meaning at all. I disregard completely the aesthetic quality of the object. I'm against craftsmanship. I say the world is full of wonderful craftsmen but there are very few practical dreamers. In the early days in Paris, when I first came over, and I passed by a hardware shop and I saw a flatiron in the window, I said, there's an object that's almost invisible, maybe I could do something with that?", what could I do to add something in it that was provocative. So I got a box of tacks and glued on a roll of tacks to (it) to make it useless, as I thought, but nothing is really useless, you can always find a use even for the most extravagent object"

[Man Ray, Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg - Photograph by Loomis Dean]

Berenice Abbott (!898-1991)

December 8, 2015, 3:00 am

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                         [Allen Ginsbergand Berenice Abbott - Photograph by Hank O'Neal]

From an interview, in 1991, with Thomas Gladysz

TG: In your book, Berenice Abbott is credited for her "off-hand direction"

AG: "Occasionally, I used to visit her up in Maine where she lives. A mutual friend, Hank O'Neal- who edited her last book -  took me to her, and I learned something. I told Robert Frank and he said with a wry smile, "maybe I could show you something too" . She was quite old but quite sharp and alert. She knew people I admired, like Hart Crane, the poet and Marsden Hartley, the painter-poet. And she knew William Carlos Williamsin the (19)20's. From her I heard a lot of gossip about people I had read about. It was a pleasure to connect with that lineage and have that sense of old bohemia. It was good to see  someone who had survived as an individual with her particularity of gender. Berenice herself liked ladies and, since I am gay, it was nice to reinforce the fact that uyou could live a full life."

"Also what was quite interesting was her devotion to her elders - her lineage. She had rescued the glass plates of (Eugene) Atget and kept them for many years - all those delicate glass plates she brought from Paris. And of her admiration for younger generations she said, "I love that Robert Frank. I've never met him, but of all of the younger photographers, he's just marvelous". She had enthusiasm for a younger person and respect for an older person. That seems like the real missing link in American society.." 


"I was in New York at an art gallery where Berenice Abbott was showing some of her older photos. I approached her, pointed my camera at her, and she said, "Oh, don't be a shutterbug!" Then she said, "Forgive me. If you're going to take my picture, back a way a little. You don't want to get too close otherwise my forehead will bulge or the cheek will bulge and it will be all out of proportion. Give a little space around the subject, so you can see where it is and what the context is" 

In an article on Robert Frank, he cites further advice: "All these young photographers with little cameras click click click think they can get something….You need to take time and prepare a photograph, and use big frame to get that tiny detail in panoramic scope."

Allen to Berenice Abbott  circa January 18, 1984

"Dear Miss Abbott,
Our visit last August (with Hank O"Neal andShelley Skier and young scholar Jonathan Robbins) catalyzed some memory of 1930s and my mother, and I had a dream, a  sort of epilogue twenty-five years later to a long poem I once wrote - "Kaddish". In dream I met my long-dead mother as an old shopping-bag lady in an alleyway in the Bronx, and your figure and your photographs were part of the background scene. There's a  composite description (with many details clear but dream-wrong) of some of your photos which had stuck in my mind and which I return to look at often in book-edit of your pictures. Particularly the frontispiece, "hundred thousand windows shining electric lit" [ "New York at Night, 1932"] , the "Fifth Avenue Coach" (which in dreams I confused with "Tramcar in September Sun"),

                         [Fifth Avene Bus, Washington Square, 1936 - Photograph by Berenice Abbott]

                              [Fifth Avenue Coach Company, 1932 - Photograph by Berenice Abbott]

      

 the "General View from Manhattan Bridge" and "Herald Square" with straw hats I recomposed in the dream, described in the new poem, "White Shroud"

                      ["White Shroud" - title poem of the collection, "White Shroud - Poems 1980-1985]

I tried to stick to the Breughel-likeprinciple you stated - universal panorama and maximum fine detail (by means of large negative) in the poem. I hope you have time to read it or find someone to read it to you….
I would like to buy from you prints of several of the photographs I mentioned above. Do you have any for sale, or could they be printed and what would it cost ? Particularly the "thousands of windows electric lit at midnite midtown" and "Herald Square" because some versions of them entered my dream of my mother…
I learned a lot from the brief visit and want to thank you for your hospitality then. What I learned? Mainly old art-life attitude, and that one specific notion of large negative for maximum detail in a panoramic perspective. Thank you, I hope your energy and health stay spry till we can meet again
Respectfully yours
Allen Ginsberg  

[New York at Night, 1932 - Photograph by Berenice Abbott]

[Herald Square, 34th and Broadway, Manhattan, 1935 -  Berenice Abbott - via "Changing New York" - from the collection at the New York Public Library]

The Seafarer - 1

December 9, 2015, 3:00 am

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(Allen Ginsberg on Basic Poetics continues. Allen continues today with alliterative meter and (Ezra) Pound's translation of the old Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Seafarer")

AG: So what else is there ?  Now I want to go back in time, (with (Ezra) Pound(also)), who’s a good time-traveler, poetically, to thealliterative meter that was practiced by... well, actually it’s... the origin is old Scandanavian, old German, Finnish, and Old English. There’s Old Englishand then there’sMedieval English alliterative. I’m not an expert in either but Pound has done some of the research for us and translated some of the alliterative Old English poetry into his twentieth-century English and done a fantastic condensed job, so the great poem - that I read in college, actually, and always stuck in my head, altered my nervous system, like I said – I’m quite serious about that – altering the nervous system - There is a line of Antonin Artaud, (twentieth-century French poet), which says certain pitches or tones, (speaking of music or vocalization of poetry ), certain pitches or tones have such a penetrant nature or vibration that they do enter into the nervous system and permenantly alter its functioning, slightly – like “Each outcry of the haunted hare/A fibre from the Brain doth tear” says William Blake– “Each outcry of  the hunted hare (rabbit), a fibre from the Brain doth tear". So certain sounds have such vibration that they permanently enter the nervous system and perhaps, you know, damage a brain cell if it’s a panicking scream – or, if it’s a very subtle rhythm, delicatize and subtle-ize the entire nervous system and brain pan, perhaps.

Here’s a... what this is.. what alliterative rhythm is.. old-fashioned for oral recitation, way back, fifteen hundred years now, eighteen hundred years, this is probably 500 AD, maybe - The Seafarer- has anybody ever seen it? The Seafarer? no? – [Student raises hand] - 

AG: Where did you run into it?

Student: In anthologies

AG: Yeah. You know Pound’s version?

Student: (In college..)

AG: Yeah. It’s actually his own youthful prophecy, what was going to happen to him. It’s “On the Road”, except On the Ocean, so, like, the great voyage into life. It’s also an accurate down-home description of the difficulties of being a sailor, and also the glories and sufferings of ocean. I’ll read it and then we’ll talk about the structure or the sound. So this is from Anglo-Saxon - [Allen, starting from approximately thirty-seven minutes in, through to approximately forty-three-and-a-half minutes in, reads in its entirety Ezra Pound's "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 abided,

Known on my keel many a care's hold,

And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent

Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head

While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

My feet were by frost benumbed.

Chill its chains are; chafing sighs

Hew my heart round and hunger begot

Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not

That he on dry land loveliest liveth,

List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,

Weathered the winter, wretched outcast

Deprived of my kinsmen;

Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,

There I heard naught save the harsh sea

And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,

Did for my games the gannet's clamour,

Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,

The mews' singing all my mead-drink.

Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern

In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed

With spray on his pinion.

                     Not any protector

May make merry man faring needy.

This he little believes, who aye in winsome life

Abides 'mid burghers some heavy business,

Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft

Must bide above brine.

Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,

Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then

Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now

The heart's thought that I on high streams

The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.

Moaneth alway my mind's lust

That I fare forth, that I afar hence

Seek out a foreign fastness.

For this there's no mood-lofty man over earth's midst,

Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;

Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful

But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare

Whatever his lord will.

He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having

Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world's delight

Nor any whit else save the wave's slash,

Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.

Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,

Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,

All this admonisheth man eager of mood,

The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks

On flood-ways to be far departing.

Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,

He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,

The bitter heart's blood. Burgher knows not —

He the prosperous man — what some perform

Where wandering them widest draweth.

So that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock,

My mood 'mid the mere-flood,

Over the whale's acre, would wander wide.

On earth's shelter cometh oft to me,

Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,

Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,

O'er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow

My lord deems to me this dead life

On loan and on land, I believe not

That any earth-weal eternal standeth

Save there be somewhat calamitous

That, ere a man's tide go, turn it to twain.

Disease or oldness or sword-hate

Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body.

And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after —

Laud of the living, boasteth some last word,

That he will work ere he pass onward,

Frame on the fair earth 'gainst foes his malice,

Daring ado, ...

So that all men shall honour him after

And his laud beyond them remain 'mid the English,

Aye, for ever, a lasting life's-blast,

Delight mid the doughty.

                     Days little durable,

And all arrogance of earthen riches,

There come now no kings nor Cæsars

Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.

Howe'er in mirth most magnified,

Whoe'er lived in life most lordliest,

Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!

Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.

Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.

Earthly glory ageth and seareth.

No man at all going the earth's gait,

But age fares against him, his face paleth,

Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,

Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven,

Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,

Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,

Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,

And though he strew the grave with gold,

His born brothers, their buried bodies

Be an unlikely treasure hoard.

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

Ezra Pound - The Seafarer - 2

December 10, 2015, 3:00 am

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(Allen continues with his observations on  alliterative meter, and (Ezra Pound's translation of) the classic Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Seafarer")

AG: Well,  that’s good solid sound that [referring to "The Seafarer"] -  So the principle of the meter is two parts to the line(“Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry", “Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven") - two parts to the line, or a caesura in the middle of the line. This is, of course, not Old English, or old Anglo-Saxon exact alliterative meter, this is Pound’s adaptation so you get it in the modern language ear (We’ll get to the original in a minute). The basis, however, is two sides to the line, likely two beats to each side (so it’s a four-beat line) - “Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven”, “Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry” – so there’s two sides to the line, cut by a blank spot on the page (or a caesura, as it is called), a cut for the breath, or a cut for the rhythm, then any number of syllables in between, any number of syllables scattered on each side. In other words, you have two main beats (“Nor eat the sweet”, “nor feel the sorry”, “And his laud beyond them remain 'mid the English”). In other words, you can have just the two beats, you have those two beats on either.. a four-beat line, right? ("“Nor eat the sweet”, “nor feel the sorry”). But then you can have lots of other syllables scattered in it and you can extend your line on, and get lots and lots of syllabic syncopation, by squeezing and (planting) in more syllables between the two heavy beats – “Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world's delight”,  “Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry”  - “Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world's delight?”

So – "Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries" -  So, on top of the fact that it’s got two beats on each side, the first side of it, they’ve got to have  the same consonant (“nor eat the…”)  In this case, it would be “Bosque taketh blossom”  ("b" is blossom) – The accented syllable also has an initial rhyme ("Bosque taketh blossom") – or the same consonant - (Peter Piper.. picked a peck.. of pickled peppers... prayed he, perfectly?)  - Okay? -  So, the first half of the line… (does this need illustration on the blackboard, or is it clear?

Student: ("The Seafarer" is in the anthology)  

AG Pardon me?

Student: "The Seafarer" is in the anthology

AG: Yeah, I forgot. It is. That’s right..  Excuse me, I spaced out on that. It is in the anthology [Norton anthology] on page nine nine four…yeah, nine nine four. I’m sorry, I was reading it out of… It originally appears in his book, Persona [sic] - Personae[Editorial Note - original edition, 19o9 - It was, actually, first published in A.R. Orage's magazine, New Age, on November 30, 1911 - tho', in a subsequent note in his 1920 volume, Umbra, Pound did indeed define it as a "major personae"] - (different personages, different masks, different personae of the poet),  and it is over here. That’s good – Okay, well, you’ve got it... Turning to page…

Oh, did you find out anything about…?  [There begins here a brief discursion regarding the procedure of ordering copies of  books from the (local) bookstores]…
(AG: "Would it be simpler if we just made out a blank cheque and got them all brought down here or something?… Ok, I’ll give you a cheque tonight... Just go get them and bring them down, and then..where will they be? how will we distribute them?… how about leaving them in the the library at Naropa"….Okay, (so) we’ll get the books, they’ll be down there tomorrow.. yes, afternoon..)

Okay, getting back to the alliterative meter. So what it is, on the left hand side you have two accents with two repeated alliterative sounds ("P-P" - "Peter-Piper"). Then, theoretically, or, by old practice, by the old rigid accurate practice, on the second half of the line, the first consonant which has an accent also has the same.. is the same consonant - hence “Peter Piper picked a peck”, or in this case here, it would be - ((I’ll) see if I can find a proper line now) – “Nor winsomeness to wife nor world's delight" - “Nor winsomeness to wife nor world's delight’ – got it? – “nor winsomeness to wife”, so those are the two heavy-accented consonants there ("winsomeness to wife”) – I guess it’s consonants? – on the first.. on the left-handside,  then you have the caesura – "nor world’s delight"– “W” – that’s line forty-five on page nine nine five

The line above – “He hath not harp for harping nor in ring-having"– so the “H’s are the one, and the second half of the line has a "having” – “But  shall have his sorrow for sea-fare"– Pound is translating and he does not have complete lines..so..because he’s translatng and condensing and doing it into condensed English, rather than long-winded English, so he’ll kill half of a line just to make it accurate clear to some rhythmic sound, rather than extending it on just to have the rhyme, to have the alliterative rhyme.

But it might be interesting, I think, why don’t we try a unison recitation from line eighty on – from “Delight mid the doughty./Days little durable.."– see what it sounds like?Actually, we did that.. it’s the first time we did it, the other day in the class, and I thought  that was a fantastic idea for getting into the sound of poetry as..as just mass…mass unison repetition, or recital, of it, because, you see, when I was a kid, my father taught poetry in high school and in those days they taught really great things (they taught "Macbeth”, they taughtPoe’s "Bells", they taught ”The Raven”, (they taught a lot of crap – some interesting crap like,  “Tell me not in mournful numbers/Life is but an empty dream!/ For the soul is dead that slumbers/ And things are not what they seem”  (Longfellow), but they taught "The Bells” by Poe, they taught Vachel Lindsay’s“Congo"and Shelley’s"Ode To The West Wind” and “Epipsychidion" and Wordsworth – and I just heard it all so… in my bones..in my ear ..and it.. got (for me) a permanent sense of the strong accent, stronge rhythm and long vowel. And I think that’s the key. It may be too late to teach that now. It may be that you have to get it when you’re in childhood for it to become permenantly part of your nervous system so that you do it by yourself whenever you want. But I think, actually, just like any kind of music, once you learn it, learn the tune, it sticks with you. So it may be of use when we come to real heavy things, really interesting things, to do it unison, see what it sounds like

So.. [class begins unison recitation] - "Delight mid the doughty./Days little durable,/And all arrogance of earthern riches,/There come now no kings or Ceasars/Nor gold-giving lords like those gone./Howe'er in mirth most magnified,/Who'ere lived in life most lordliest/Drear all this excellence, delights, undurable!/ Waneth the watch but the world holdeth./Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is laid low./Earthly glory ageth and seareth./ No man at all going the earth's gait,/But age fares against him, his face paleth,/Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,/Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven,/Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,/Nor eat the sweet nor feel the  sorry/Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,/And though he strew the grave with gold,/His born brothers, their buried bodies/Be an unlikely treasure hoard."

So…."His born brothers, their buried bodies/Be an unlikely treasure hoard" (that last line is really interesting because the other.. most of them have… mostly it does have that  “born brothers their buried bodies”, but at the end – bom-da-da da-da da-da-da – "..Be an unlikely treasure hoard"..it’s just one.. well it’s  "Be/an unlikely treasure/hoard", it’s more like that – “Be an unlikely treaure hord” is such a definite heavy-hearted ending – “unlikely..” – their buried bodies would be unlikely to be a treasure hord. You get the sense he’s saying – it would be an unlikely treasure hoard. I mean, it’s like somebody is talking to you in a bar – “Your buried body’s going to be an unlikely treasure-hoard, Joe” – “their buried bodies/ Be an unlikely treasure hoard’ - the irony’s sad  So..  

However,  that’s the older English, and I don’t know how to pronounce proper Old English… I hear it's very guttural….

[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately forty-three-and-a-half  minutes in and continuing to approximately fifty-six minutes in] 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 248

December 11, 2015, 3:00 am

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     [Allen Ginsberg, June 1959 - Photograph by Joe Rosenthal]

Peter Hartlaub's engaging article for the San Francisco Chronicle's sesquicentennial history project, (on the Beat Generation), is well worth reading, (as are the photographs (like the one above) worth perusing) - Allen reading Doctor Sax. 

Here's a posting from earlier in the year on the Ginsberg Project (Robert Creeley's 1982 remarks on that book)

Open Culture features the Jack Kerouac recordings

                                                        [Jack Kerouac on The Beat Generation - Verve LP, 1960]


Here's, on the subject of Kerouac, the Ginsberg Project posting of Allen reading from Kerouac's The Dharma Bums


  Typescript scroll of On The Road

Peripherally-related information - Jim Irsay owner of "the scroll" [the On The Road scroll] just paid two-point-two million dollars for Ringo Starr's drum set! - Two-point-two million dollars! (Two-point-four-three million dollars was the price he paid for the scroll, back in 2001)

More vintage Ginsberg (and Beat) photographs. John Suiter writes for the Poetry Foundation this week on the newly-established Walter Lehrman Beat Generation Photo Collection at the Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University in Logan, Utah 

[Allen Ginsberg at Walter Lehrman’s Hillegass Avenue apartment. © Walter Lehrman and the Walter Lehrman Beat Generation Photo Collection at the Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University, Logan, Utah] 

"Lehrman took the first photograph ever of Ginsberg reading "Howl", Suiter notes, "at an event sponsored by San Francisco State College." (In one image) "We see Ginsberg, in sports coat and tie, reading from an early typescript of the poem, his right arm raised high in an anarchic flourish"

[Allen Ginsberg - Poetry Center reading of "Howl", San Francisco, November, 1955 -  © Walter Lehrman and the Walter Lehrman Beat Generation Photo Collection at the Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University, Logan, Utah] 

Also included in the collection are images of Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure.. As Michael McClure declared (regarding another image fromthat legendary (second) Six Gallery reading) - "No one ever took a photograph of any of us that is more sensitive and true to life."

[Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure & Gary Snyder - Town Hall Theater, Berkeley, March 18, 1956 - -  © Walter Lehrman and the Walter Lehrman Beat Generation Photo Collection at the Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University, Logan, Utah] 

Howard Brookner's classic movie, Burroughs - The Movie, is now out on DVD (see Andrew Marzoni's review in this month's ArtNewshere). The DVD package (from Critereon includes the usual tantalizing "extras" - rare outtakes (including footage of the Nova Convention), an audio interview with Brookner conducted by Burroughs biographer, Ted Morgan, and a new audio commentary by Jim Jarmusch, who worked as sound recordist on the film.
Jarmusch is also the executive producer of a new film, Uncle Howard, made by his nephew, Aaron Brookner and scheduled to premiere at Sundance early next year.  

                                                                              [William S Burroughs (1914-1997)]

Burroughs presentation copy to Allen of his 1975  The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, incidentally ("For Allen Ginsberg, all the best from the Dutchman, William S Burroughs") just went on sale - Asking price? -  four-thousand-two-hundred-and-fifty pounds (approximately six-thousand-five-hundred dollars) 

Sinclair Beiles, another "forgotten" Beat (co-author of Minutes To Go) is resurrected by Bart De Paepe's Sloow Tapes (another of his great limited editions) - see here 

Drummond Hadley's passing (noted here last week) - Here's a further obituary notice (from the Arizona Daily Star) 

Allen's 1958 "Poem Rocket" (Poema Cohere) translated into Spanish (by Franco Bordino) on the buenosaires poetry site - here
Here's another Bordino translation - a fragment from "Kaddish"

Allen in Peru in 1960 -  Martín Adán and Allen Ginsberg - next Tuesday in Lima (at the Casa de la Literatura Peruana) a symposium. Read more about it (continuing in Spanish) here  

                                                                 [Martin Adan (1908-1985)]


Tomorrow in New York at the Medicine Show Theatre, the second annual Medicine Show reading of Howl and Other Poems featuring Martin Espada, Eliot Katz, Hettie Jones, and ten other readers

                                              [Medicine Show poster designed by Joe Brainard]

Gary Snyder 1983 Naropa Reading - 1

December 12, 2015, 3:00 am

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Gary Snyder's reading at the Naropa Institute, on the occasion of the 1983 publication of his collection Axe Handles is this weekend's feature. 

The transcription of the reading will appear in two sections. 

The reading begins with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg  

AG: (This will be) the first reading by Gary Snyder in Boulder since 1972, when there was a reading up at the University with the Japanese poet, Nanao Sakaki, myself, Robert Bly,Chogyam Trungpa and Gary. And this month [August 1983] there’s been a great series of poetry readings in the town, with Anne Waldman, as part of the month-long poetics workshop that Naropahas held, where the poet and students have read. Anne Waldman led it off,Michael Brownstein,Pat Donegan, Peter Orlovsky, Larry Fagin, Sidney Goldfarb, myself, Drummond Hadley, Robert Creeley, the last reader was William Burroughs, this last Tuesday, and now, as the last of the poetry readings for the tenth year, or tenth anniversary, of the founding of the Naropa Poetics Institute named after Jack Kerouac, we’ll have Gary Snyder return to Boulder to read, present, with a distinguished audience, including various teachers for cultures and generations, like Gary, some of whom are present, who’ll also, incidentally, be giving workshops this weekend – Timothy Leary is here in the room and will be teaching at the Boulder Inn on “Evolution of Intelligence in Species and Individuals” and his workshop will be from ten to five, Saturday and Sunday - and William Burroughs will be over at Naropa, also giving a workshop on “Immortality”, likely enough, and his workshop will be four to six p.m tomorrow, and then Sunday, eleven to one.  Som actually, if you are either sane or schizophrenic, you can split and see both at once because they are concurrent, but there are edges that you can get in and out.

Gary Snyder, as most of you know, I’m sure, has been, an archetypal folk hero, intellectual working-man poet, an inspiration for many poets, Buddhists, ecologists, anthropologists, save-the-whale intellegensia, back-to-the-roots, back-to-the-land new age thinking and reconsideration for our hyper-industrialized civilization, has written a great many books regarding his preoccupations and studies, which have gone from linguistics and anthropology to high poetics and personal orgy, as well as meditation. His books include  Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Myths and Texts,Six Sections From Mountains and Rivers Without End, The Back Country,Regarding Wave, The Fudo Trilogy, Turtle Island (which won the Pulitzer Prizein the (19)70’s),Earth House Hold,Passage Through India (a record of a trip taken by Gary, the poet Joanne Kyger,myself and Peter Orlovsky to India in 1962), The Old Ways, his senior thesis at Reed College - He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village (an examination of an American Indian  myth) , The Real Work (a compilation of essays on neolithic civilization and its comparison with our own developing, speedy, evolving, metallic, heavy-metal mind),Songs For Gaia, and a new book, Axe Handles, which he has the proofs of and which he will read from tonight – new work – Axe Handles, which will be issued by North Point Press this year. So, it gives me great delight…

Gary Snyder comes to the podium approximately five minutes in

GS: Thank you, thank you. How’s the sound system?

Peter Orlovsky: Good

GS: Good. Well, I’m very pleased to be back in Boulder. I came over this time, driving all the way, with Masa [Masa Uehara, his then wife], and Kai and Gen, my two boys. Useful to see from the ground the unfolding and linking across the Great Basin, and I just want to share with you my increasing delight in the deserts of Nevada. From the time I first went there, when I was about seventeen and could see nothing of it, saw it as empty and bleak and barren, each time I have gone back I have seen increasing complexities and subtlety and beauty in it. So that this last trip, across the Great Basin, we came eastward on (Route) 50, rather than Interstate 80, out through Eli?  then down south on 21, actually, to Beaver, in Utah. Delicate mosaic of many subtle colored desert plants and a wonderful rhythm of basin and range, basin and range, with each range, geologically, subtly different. It’s a marvelous province, and the last really empty place here in the lower 48.

[Gary begins with the inscription toAxe Handles]

"How do you shape an axe handle?/Without an axe it can't be done./How do you take a wife?/ Without a go-between you can't get one/Shape a handle, shape a handle, the pattern is not far off./And here's a girl I know,/The wine and food in rows"

That’s a 5^th Century BC  or earlier folk song from the country, the territory, of Pin, in Ancient China, and that’s a little poem from the Shih-ching, or the Book of Songs, or the Book of Odes, my own translation.

[Gary then reads the title poem of his new collection] - "Axe Handles"– “One afternoon the last week in April/Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet.."…"To be shaping again, model/And tool, craft of culture,/ How we go on")

[This is followed by"For/From Lew"] – “This is for Lew Welch, whom many of you know, a life-time comrade and friend, poet, and fellow-worker, who disappeared while camping with us, early in the years when we were living in the Sierra Nevada, leaving behind a suicide note, 1972. We searched for him for five days in the canyons and cliffs and then said, Anyone who wishes so clearly to disappear should be allowed to disappear. And never a trace has since been seen. Lew Welch successfully vanished, but, some years later, in the sauna, taking a sweat, Lew came into my mind, and gave me this instruction."

 - "For/From Lew" – ( “Lew Welch just turned up one day,/  live as you and me."Damn, Lew", I said,/"you didn't shoot yourself after all."/"Yes I did" he said…."  "What I came to say was,/teach the children about the cycles/ The life cycles. All other cycles./ That’s what it’s all about and it’s all forgot."")

So…   "River in the Valley"–  (“We cross the Sacramento River at Colusa,/follow the road on the levee south and east…."…."One boy asks, "where do rivers start?"/ in threads in hills, and gather down to here - / but the river/ is all of it everywhere/ all flowing at once, all one place.")

“Among” – (This is personal contact with a forty-year cycle) - ("Few Douglas fir grow in these pine woods/ but one fir is there among south-facing Ponderosa Pine…"….  “This year, with roots down deep, two live./A Douglas fir will be among these pines.”

And I checked that out with a forester, a man, a friend of mine in forestry, and he said, “Yes, that’s precisely it. The twice-a-century July rainfall in the summer..  the summer drought of the Sierra Nevada  is what allows the continued presence of a few Douglas firs in an otherwise predominantly Ponderosa Pine forest habitat.

A couple other examples, because it’s fun to unravel these, and, following on the instructions I was given by Lew (Welch) in that dream poem, I pursued, on a materialistic and literal level for a while, the study of cycles.

1959 or (19)60, there was a great flood year in Northern California  and theEel River overflowed, washed out a number of small towns along its banks, and in the following Spring, downstream, and in some of the side branches of the Eel, they found countless redwood seedlings sprouting from cone seed (which was astonishing because very seldom (is) ever seen redwood reproducing from seed, usually they seem to reproduce from red runners) So, experimenting a little bit with that, (I) kept cones, little tiny redwood cones in cold water in a refrigerator for six months, at about forty degrees. Then took it (them) out and found it (they) would germinate. And that’s how they discovered how to make redwood germinate. The conclusion was that the cone-reproduction cycle of redwood was tied to a flood that comes only twice in a millennium, because that was a five-hundred year flood that came through that year.

"River in the Valley"– The water cycle.. The water cycle is this - All of the molecules of water in the ocean are up and out of the ocean, through the atmosphere and back down into the ocean in a cycle of once every two million years ( which isn’t very long! ) - 

[Gary continues]

“Changing Diapers” -  (“How intelligent he looks!/on his back/both feet caught in my one hand/his glance set sideways,/on a giant poster of Geronimo"…“you and me and Geronimo/ are men.”)

.

[then] - This little lyric called “All in the Family”. I must honestly confess I did not know there was a television program by that name at the time I wrote it. In fact, I didn’t find out for some years. I’m a really odd kind of bird, I guess. I’ve only seen television a total of probably forty-five minutes in my whole life – I don’t take any credit for it, it’s just that I never lived in a house with a television set . And the forty-five minutes I did see it was in a bar -  (“For the first time in memory/ heavy rain in August/tuning up the chainsaw/begin to cut oak.…”…."Oregano, lavender, the salvia sage/wild pennyroyal/ from the  Yuba River bank/all in the family/ of Mint.”)

“So Old” -  ("Oregon Creek reaches far back into the hills/Burned over twice the pines are returning again/Old roads twist deep into canyons..”…. “Back to our own dirt road, iron stove, and the chickens to close in the dusk/And the nightly stroll of raccoons.") 

“Soy Sauce"… This first section of poems I’m reading from, I should have probably mentioned, the whole first section is titled “Loops"  - This is dedicated to Bruce Boyd and Holly Turnheim at whose house it transpired – “Standing on a step-ladder under a hot ceiling..”..”I know how it tastes- to lick those window-frames in the dark..”

A few of these poems are reflecting… The poem I just read reflected an earlier spell of time in the (19)60’s, (19)50’s and (19)60’s, ten years, that I spent in Japan. A few of them now, turning up, are reflecting a visit back in the Summer of (19)81.  Myoshin-ji  - This is titled “Walking Through Myoshin-ji” -  Myoshin-ji is in Kyoto.  It might be interesting for you to hear this scale, because, I was at a littleZen studies center recently, doing a little practice, and one of the students there said to me, “Well, I hear Zen is dead in Japan”. And I said, “What do you mean?”. He said, “Well, nobody practices it, there’s just nothing there. I hear that the center of Zen has moved to America”.  (And) I said, "Yeah? Really?". I said “What about Myoshin-ji?”. And he said, “Well, what about Myoshin-ji?”. I said, “Well, Myoshin-ji’ is on the west side of Kyoto and it’s the headquarters temple, full of the Myoshin-ji branch, lineage. It has, oh, about seventy acres, with thirty-five sizable temples in it, including one really huge complex which is the Hanazono, the main mountain, the headquarters, temple of the whole thing, and there are, scattered through the Japanese countryside, thirty thousand temples that are connected with Myoshin-ji that are all functioning and alive”. His face dropped. Then there’s Daitokuji with fifteen thousand temples andNanzenji with five thousand temples and Kenninji with a thousand temples and Tofukuji with about nine thousand also. Zen is alive and well somehow with all that..

[Gary reads “Walking Through Myoshin-ji”] -  (“Straight stone walks up lanes between mud walls…   needless lumber ash”)

[Myoshin-ji, the largest head temple in the Japanese Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism, with approximately 3,500 temples under it]

“Sierra Nevada, August of (19)82), Coit Peak , 15,000 foot peak , just above Mono Lake – “Strategic Air Command” is the title of this – Kai and I were out climbing together, just the two of us, up on Coit Peak, summer, a year ago – (“The hiss and flashing lights of a jet/Pass near Jupiter in Virgo…”…”This little air in between/ Belongs to the twentieth-century and its wars.")

[Audience applauds]

I dote on applause but lets save it to the end because I like to sometimes just swim on.

“Working on the ’58 Willys Pickup Truck”– wow, the '58 Willys was still in that generation of Willys trucks that were built like little tanks.. American Motors.. Willys was sold out to American Motors in 1961, and the patterns for the old tank-like trucks went to Argentina, where they still make them, I found out. Anyway, this truck is still running today, it’s still in good use - "Working on the ’58 Willys Pickup Truck”  - This poem is dedicated to the eleventh-century Chinese poet  Lu You who was the most prolific poet who ever lived possibly  - over ten thousand poems are known to have come from his brush and about three thousand of those were concerned with gardening - (“The year this truck was made I sat in early morning darkness/ Chanting sutras in Kyoto..”I fix truck and lock eyebrows/ With tough-handed men of the past”

“Getting in the Wood”  ("The sour smell,/blue stain/water squirts out round the wedge…"...  - ".. death-topple of elderly ok./ Four cords." ) - (What I liked about that poem was that I gave me the opportunity to use the verb “peen”. ["the poll of the sledge a bit peened over"] - Every once in a while you get a chance to use something – (peening on the back of the ball-peen hammer) -  to "peen" is to round over, like rounding down a rivet...

to be continued tomorrow

[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at the beginning of the tape and concluding atapproximately thirty-two-and-three-quarter minutes in]

Gary Snyder 1983 Naropa Reading - 2

December 13, 2015, 3:00 am

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 [Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg - Photograph by Christopher Felver]

[Gary Snyder in the Sierras, 1994 - Photograph by Christopher Felver]

Gary Snyder reading at Naropa, 1983 - continues from yesterday 

GS: We live at the three-thousand-foot elevation on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada in the Yuba River Watershed, which is north of Sacramento and eastward into the mountains. It’s all Mediterranean climate, which is to say, summer-dry, five-month to six-month drought, and very hot (although, you know, not as hot as here [Colorado] -  I’m surprised, I expected coming over here that we would get some cooler weather, but you’re hotter here right now than it’s been in the Sierra this summer, I don’t know why that is.

So the California Indians lived outdoors and without a stitch of cloths, except a little jewellery, six months of the year. We live outdoors a good part of the year during that hot summer season. You don’t want to fire up a wood-burning range in the kitchen in the summer, right? You move out. And so we have our outdoor kitchen ramada-shade-shelter-complex (and) everything else moves out too. We sleep out under an oak tree and so forth and.. used to go naked, but, I don’t know, everybody getting conservative!  At any rate, the fact of the matter is you don’t have to wear clothes in California in the summertime, except for the air-conditioning, which is so chilly when you go inside. So everything about that pattern is workable except for the extraordinary vulnerability that an outdoor kitchen has to raccoons! - and that’s what this next little poem starts with. It’s called “True Night”  - [Snyder reads "True Night"] - (“Sheath of sleep in the back of the bed:/From outside this dream womb/ Comes a clatter/Comes a clatter/And finally the mind rises up to a fact/Like a fish to a hook/A racoon at the kitchen!"…. "Dusy feet, hair tangling/I stoop and slip back to the/Sheath, for the sleep I still need/ For the waking that comes/ Every day/ With the dawn")

I’m going to read now from a series.. a little series of poems, little small poems, as guys I used to work with on ships would say, “hand over that small little one” – These are called “Little Songs For Gaia” – I’m only going to read a few of them. Gaia is the reference to the Earth Goddess – "Ge"- or "Gaia" in Greek mythology - (hence “Ge-ology”- the study of the Earth  (if you properly pronounce the “g” hard) – it was in Greek, “Gaia-ology”) – but (has since been) brought back to currency by James Lovelock,the biochemist and Lynn Margulis in the so-called Gaia hypothesis – the notion that all of the biosphere is, I guess in some almost literal sense, one organism, and that we are all but tiny tiny parts of that larger structure and strategy . The last CoEvolution Quarterly[sic]has an article, an updated article by James Lovelock called “Daisyworld”, in which Lovelock presents a very simple, elegant, what he considers, proof that the Gaia hypothesis is accurate. 

Anyway, working with that scale or notion, I did some of these little poems , just trying to find a way to talk about a perspective like that, or presences like that - [Snyder reads (several)  “Little Songs For Gaia”]–

 (“Red-shafted/ Flicker -/ sharp cool call…"…"..the droppings of oak-moth caterpillars/nibbling spring leaves/High in the oak limbs above."  
" Hear bucks skirmishing in the night"…"open the door to go out/to the chickencoop for eggs,""

Log trucks go by at four in the morning…  "as we think, dream and play/of the world that is carried away"

"Dead doe lying in the rain/on the shoulder/in the gravel  I see youe stiff leg/In the headlights/by the roadside/ Dead doe lying in the rain"

"Snowflakes slip into the pond/no regrets/Thin shoots of new-sprouted grass/it grows spring evening snow."

"THE FLICKERS sharp clear call/ –THIS! THIS! THIS/ in the cool pine breeze"

"Hers was not a/ Sheath/ It  was A Quiver."

(I sent that to Wendell Berry when I first wrote it. Next time I saw him, he said, “Gary, that little poem did me a world of good!”) –

“I am sorry I disturbed you./ I broke into your house last night/ To use the library./ There were some things I had to look up./ A large book fell/ and knocked over others./ Afraid you’d wake and find me /and be truly alarmed/, I left/ Without picking up./ I got your name from the mailbox/ As I fled, to write you and explain.”

The final cycle of poems here [in Axe Handles] is called “Nets”

"Geese Gone Beyond" - ("In the cedar canoe, gliding and paddling on mirror-smooth lake;/ a carpet of canada geese/ afloat on the water…” …"A touch across/the trigger/ The one who is the first to feel to go” – Seeley Lake, Montana X, 79"

“Three Deer One Coyote, Running in the Snow” –  (“First three deer bounding and then coyote streaks right after tail flat out…   “to study how that news all got put down”) - 

- (That’s how you learn tracking, really. That isyou put yourself out there enough to see things happen from some quiet vantage point. After seeing it happen, you go and study how to read the tracks, even if it’s just squirrels and lizards – watch what the lizard is doing and then go and see what the traces are, watch two lizards come together and go apart, study how that reads,  (then) graduate to squirrels. Dogs and cats are just fine. Even kids. Tire-tracks. And then when you get a chance, especially after a fresh snow, after an overnight snow, like, get out early in the morning when the snow’s still clear and see what you can see happening – And that’s how you learn to read. And the little pointer in that is how much of our education is wrong in that we are asked to read without ever having seen it happen – backwards. One of the most elegant little things I saw was, in Montana, rabbit-tracks coming along, (then) two great swoops in the snow – da-da-da-da-da, like that - On both sides - no more rabbit tracks. A big hawk or eagle, golden eagle (had) just picked him up.

Some short poems from the first of June 1977  

Ceanothus blossoms/ and the radiator boiling over/smelling as if Spring"

Fat rear haunches/toes, tail/half a mouse/ at the door at dawn/ our loving cat."

This year, the third/ of the bullfrog,/ he rarely speaks/Is it drouth and low water/or age?"

Kid coming out of the outhouse /at dusk in pajamas/ still tucking them in/ (says) "how many eggs?"

Last night, the first time,/ raccoons opened/ the refrigerator/ You can’t slow down/progress"

[GS continues]
In the rodeo world, there is something called “the grand entry”. During the bicentennial year (1976), they had quite a pageant at the Nevada County Fair for the grand entry into the rodeo. They had all of the cowgirls in the county, practically, riding in patterns, carrying American flags (each one of the flags being one of the different flags, you know, from the thirteen-star flag, up to the fifty-star flag. So this poem is called “The Grand Entry" - Year of the Bicentennial, Nevada County Rodeo -  (“The many American flags, whipped around on horseback  carried by cowgirls…”…”hamburger offerings all over America, red white and blue”)

A couple of… I’m going to read a couple of what I’m forced to call “public service poems”, reflecting the four years I was on the California Arts Council  during the administration of Jerry Brown.The first year I was Chairperson of the California Arts Council living in a remote place in the country without a telephone. Well, I tell you, I swore after that, never again will I be head of a government agency without a phone. At any rate, I had to go twelve miles to get to a pay-phone to conduct state business. That was out on Highway 49. A log-truck thoroughfare, a little town called North San Juan, where an Okinawan lady married to a G.I had come back, and she had opened a little Okinawan noodle shop by the side of Highway 49 so log-truck drivers could have Okinawan noodles and milk-shake(s) for lunches. And so.. It was also a bait shop!..  So that was where I conducted business. on this little pay-phone, (which was not with a roof on it, it was just one of those pay-phones just bolted to a pipe) - So this is called“Under the Sign of Toki's” (that was her name – "Toki") – The people in our community didn’t like her husband at all. He was kind of.. something of a bully, you know, with a .357 magnum around and all kind of threats.But she was just wonderful. So they actually made a little local bumper-sticker, vernacular to just that part of the countryside, (and) all it said was “Poor Toki” –(It) drove her husband up the wall! – “ Under The Sign of Toki's” ( “Is this Palo Alto?’ “No, Wisconsin… so gentle…” – “… “at Tokis ice, worms”)

People ask me what is Jerry Brown doing right now [1983]? As far as I can figure out, he’s doing this - (and when you think about it, this is exactly what he should be doing, as  quixotic as it might seem) - he’s not doing anything else, except (sitting) in a little office with a phone and some workers going, and waiting and watching to see if, by any chance, all of the Democratic nominees fumble and stumble and at the last minute they ask him to come in. - That’s politics!

“Talking Late with the Governor about the Budget” – This poem is dedicated to Jerry Brown (“Entering the midnight/ Halls of the capitol…”…”Is it raining tonight at home?"

                                         [Governor Jerry Brown - Photograph © by Peter B Choka]

“Arts Councils (For Jacques Barzhagi)"– “Because there is no art/ There are artists/Because there are no artists/ We need money/ Because there is no money/We give/Because there is no we/There is art”

Some friends in the mountains got married, a young couple (this is an occasional poem) asked us to come to a party, and I asked him, Bill, Bill Crosby, “What would you like as a wedding present?”, you know, wanting to be useful. And he said, “a splitting maul" – So I said, “Good, do you want an eight-pound or a ten-pound?’ – He said, “I want a ten-pound” -  I knew he was serious – So I got him a splitting maul the next time I was down in town at the hardware (store) and then, on the way to the party, bouncing along in my old truck with this maul on the seat beside me, I was thinking, “I just can’t give a nice young couple a maul for a wedding present, like that” – and pulled over to the side of the road and wrote this little poem down (and) put it around the handle with a rubber band and gave it to them. And then, about a week later, I was thinking about it after the party and all, and I thought, “nah, that wasn’t such a bad poem”. So I went back to his place and said, “Do you still have that poem that came with the maul?”. And he said, “Sure”. So I wrote it down, and here it is  - “A Maul for Bill and Cindy’s Wedding“  (“Swung from the toes out… as the maul splits all/ may you two stay together”)

I’ve been getting to Alaska every year-and-a-half or so, doing some work up there with poetry, and some work with communities. This is from Dillingham, out in western Alaska, south-western Alaska, ahead of theBristol Bay area – “Dillingham. Alaska, the Willow Tree Bar”– (I should say I put in several years in logging camps and working on tankers and freighters and have had a pretty good sampling of the bars of the world. So I know whereby I speak in this poem) - “Dillingham. Alaska, The Willow Tree Bar” – ("Drills chatter full of mud and compressed air”… “the pain of the work of wrecking the world”)

A little poem –“Removing the Plate of the Pump  on the Hydraulic System of the Backhoe" - "for Burt Hybart" , (who’s now dead, a wizard with heavy equipment, an elderly wizard) - (“Through mud, fouled nuts, black grime,/it opens, a dream of spotless steel…”… machine-fit perfect/swirl of intake and output/ relentless clarity/ at the heart/ of work”)

Now this next poem I’m going to read has a different flavor.  In the fall of (19)81, Nanao Sakaki and I spent a month, spent six weeks, in Australia, at the invitation of the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australian Arts Council – a very interesting, wonderful connection that happened. Australia is strangely enlightened in some quarters, and one of the strange reasons for their enlightenment is that the Arts Council of Australia, which has, percentage-wise, a gigantic budget for a population of only fourteen million, gives to the Aboriginal people a discriminatory budget of their own, which they can use in any way they wish without any interference from any white administrators  and so the Aborigines invited Nanao and me to come to Australia to spend time in the Central Desert with them to discuss the critique of civilization. and the long-range prospect for the survival and ultimate predominance of hunting-an-gathering cultures. Getting up into Central Australian desert country then. we visited, of course, Ayers Rock, that great red sandstone dome that’s out there in the center, miles from anywhere, and it’s called in Pitjantjatjara language – it’s called Uluru. So this is called the "Uluru Wild Fig Song” - [Snyder reads a
five-part poem] - "Soft earth turns straight up/curls out and away from its base/hard and red - a dome - five miles around/Ayers Rock, Uluru…"……"Sit down in the sand/skin to the ground,/a thousand miles of open gritty land/white cockatoo on a salt pan/ hard wild fig on the tongue./this wild fig song."

I’ll tell you a little story, just one little story. Those people still are.. in the interior desert areas..are the predominant population and still follow the religion. So the boys still are all getting initiated and one tooth is knocked out and a series of scars are cut in the chest and rubbed with charcoal so they become raised and a number of other little things are done. And so you recognize people right away. You’re either initiated or uninitiated. And the girls go through little initiation ceremonies too. And within one group, the women, as part of their initiation, get a little series of scars right here [GS points tothe torso] –like a chevron, at an angle ofsix or seven raised scars. And so.. Of course, nowadays, whenever they’re in town, they all wear clothes (although out in the desert they don’t). So whenever people of this Pitjantjatjara group meet each other,  (it's a) very slow, gentle, warm, (langorous almost), way of moving and talking all the time. The greeting-gesture of an adult man to an adult woman is to stroke her scars - She’s a woman, and of his group – Just like that (GS gestures) just touch the scars, through the dress, intimate.

The last section of “Nets":

“Breasts”  (“That which makes milk can’t/ help but concentrate..”….”And the glittering eyes/Old mother,/ Old father,/ are gay."

“For a Fifty-Year-Old Woman in Stockholm” – (I wrote this in Sweden last Fall  (“Your firm chin, straight brow, tilt of the head.. knees up in an easy squat..”..”for a thousand years dead”)

This is the skeleton of a woman called the Bäckaskog woman, who was excavated at Bäckaskog – about five foot three, and she’s been put back exactly as she was excavated in the historic museum in Stockholm, with her knees up, and her elbows down, and her head tipped forward. Beautiful, delicate brow and chin features and the comment of the physical anthropologists is that the back of the pelvis shows that she gave birth about nine times and that her teeth show that she died at about the age of fifty. And the genetic statistics are that, if she gave birth nine times and four or five of the children survived, then all of us of Western and Northern European extraction carry her genes.

“The Canyon Wren”  - for James and Carol Katz – TheStanislaus River runs through central Miwokcountry and down to theSan Joaquin Valley. The twists and turns of that river, the layering, swirling, stone cliffs at the gorges, are cut into nine-million-year-old latites. For many seasons lovers of rock and water have danced in rafts and kayaks down this dragon arm of the High Sierra. Not long ago, Jim Katz and friends, river-fanatics all, asked me to shoot the river one time with them to see its face once more before it goes under the rising waters of the New Melones Dam. The song of the canyon wren stayed with us the whole voyage, and at China Camp, I wrote this poem in the dark – Two literary references – Su Shi is also Su Tung-Po– I make reference to Su Shi here and to a poem that he wrote that is called the "Hundred-Pace Rapids” in the eleventh century AD , an account of a river running triphe went on - and the other reference is Dogen, the 11th Century Zen master, who wrote an elegant poetic essay called“Mountains and Rivers Sutra”  -   Okay – “The Canyon Wren”  (“I look up at the cliffs/But we are swept on by downriver..”… “These songs that are here and gone, here and gone to purify our ears”).

“ For All”– “Ah, to be alive/ on a mid-September morn/fording a stream/barefoot, pants rolled up,/holding boots, pack on,/sunshine, ice in the shallows,/northern Rockies./  Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters/ stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes/cold nose dripping/singing inside/creek music, heart music/ smell of sun on gravel/ I pledge allegiance// I pledge allegiance to the soil/ of Turtle Island/one ecosystem/ in diversity/ under the sun/With joyful interpenetration for all”

Thank you very much.

Allen concludes the evening, thanking everyone for coming - "Hope to see you at the workshops, either Timothy Leary’s or William Burroughs’  this weekend - Leary’s at the Boulder Inn and William Burroughs’ workshop at Naropa Institute. For Naropa students who might be interested, there’s a  dance  going on at Naropa now which you can repair to. So good evening."

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-two-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at the end of the tape]   & 

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Intro to Piers Plowman

December 14, 2015, 3:00 am

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                                              ["Scholar and Fabulist", J.R.R.Tolkien (1892-1973)] 

(Allen continues his remarks on early English poetry, continuing fromhere)  

AG: However,  that’s the older English and I don’t know how to pronunce proper Old English…… I hear it’s very guttural ...– Has anybody here studied Old English? - Yeah? – a little bit? . You know, sort of… Do you know how to read (it)?..  I’m told there’s arecording by(J.R.R.) Tolkienof"Piers Plowman", actually -  [Editorial note - Allen appears to have been misled here, to our understanding, there is no such recording. Tolkien did  attempt to record some of his modern (sic) translation of  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as early as 1953, on very primitive technology. Perhaps that's what Allen is alluding to, He also made several recordings from hisLord of The Rings cycle but there's no evidence of recordings of Piers Plowman - see here for a link to Tolkien recordings - and here to Christina Scull and Wayne G Hammond's definitive essay, "Tolkien and the Tape Recorder"] – and we were looking around for it, but... Bruce (sic) was looking around for it. Does anybody know anything about it?

Student: A recording?

AG: Yeah, a recording by Tolkien, the great scholar and fabulist. Well, we’ll try and get ahold of it next time.  [to Student] - You’ve looked and maybe (could tell Charlie (sic) about it,),  and see what can be found.  Did you actually look anywhere?

Student: Yes. I understand I might be able to record it from Rocky Mountain (Dharma Center)

AG: From where?

Student: (Rocky Mountain (Dharma Center)  has tapes and…perhaps...)

AG: It’s not in the CU (University of Colorado)  Library? - nor  (the Boulder) Public Library? – Well, we should get it here. Someone told me… (Raymond) Federman) told me that it’s really supposed to be great and makes you weep to hear.

but - (to Student) - Do you know how to read a..(little)…?  Would you know how to read "Piers Plowman"?

Student  I've.. I’ve been looking at it, and no..

AG: Well, we can do a little, can’t we?  I can’t read it (all) but I’ll read some of it. I thought to read..to get onto… that’s Middle English, fourteenth-century, whereas what is"The Seafarer"? - I’ve forgotten what "The Seafarer" was.. let’s  see..what is "The Seafarer" date? [Allen searches in the anthology]…(page) fifty-four?).. I don’t know. It’s back in Old English with Beowulf. Does anybody have any idea when "The Seafarer" was?

Student: 1912

AG: Huh?

Student: 1912

AG: No, I meant the original – Oh yeah, I meant the Old English, the Old English "Seafarer"

Student: It says "Unknown"

AG: Well, I know, but it would go back to..well, before the tenth century, in any case. 

Well, it’s something that should be obvious, and I’m sorry I’m not a scholar enough to know that.

There is "Piers Plowman", however, (which is a later version of alliterative meter, which, incidentally, we might try something in alliterative – maybe get on fifteen, twenty lines  of alliterative verse as an assignment also. But we’ll get more, it’ll be easier if you.. you’ll see how easy it is once we start getting into it here with…) - by William Langland– What I’ll do I think is…It might be interesting. I’ll read an English translation first so that you get it really clear what it’s about and then I’ll try and vocalize the matter in the more original. 

Well, we’ll start with a little fragment of the original…..

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

Piers Plowman - 1

December 15, 2015, 3:00 am

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      [The first page of "Piers Plowman' - Facsimilie from the ms. in the Bodleian Library]

AG: We’ll start with a little fragment (from "Piers Plowman") of the original

“In a somer seson, whan soft was the sonne,/I shope me into shrouded, as I a shepe were;/In habite as an heremite unholy of works/Went wide in this world, wondres to here./Ae on a May morninge on Malverne hulles/Mi bifel a ferry, of fairy me thoughte;/I was wery forwandred and went me to rest/Under a brode banke by a bornes side,/And as I lay and lend and loked on the wateres,/I slombred in a sleeping, it sweyed so merye." 

It’s relatively understandable, isn’t it? There’s a few words not clear, yes? – but mainly you get the idea, but I’ll read.. I’ll read some in English. I’ll read a bit of it in English so that you can…because, actually, it’s kind of a magical story, and then get back to the.. some version of the Anglo-Saxon. I don’t think there’s any of this in the Norton Anthology is there? 

So..

"In a summer season, when the sun was soft/I clothed myself in rough clothes as if I were a shepherd/Appearing like a hermit among unholy works" - [he went in disguise]  - "I rode far in this world to hear and see wonders/But on a May morning on Malvern Hills/A marvel befwll me, from fairyland I thought/I had wandered until I was weary and had gone to rest/Under a broad bank by the side of a brook,/And as I lay and idled and looked upon the water/I slumbered in a sleeping, it seemed so pleasant"   

"Then I did dream a marvelous dream/that I was in a wilderness, where I didn't know./ And as I looked to the east, aloft to the sun,/ I saw a tower on a hillock most splendidly built/ And with a deep dale beneath and with a dungeon therein/, With deep ditches and dark, a dreadful sight" -  [even in the translation you get some of the alliteration going] - 

– "A fair field full of folk I saw lying between"– [that’s, like , the great memorable, piece of alliterative line that everybody knows from "Piers Plowman" - "A fair field full of folk (in a vision once I saw) - "A fair field full of folk "– (a) funny line – fair/field/full of/folk – “a”-“e"– “u” - “o” (a-e-u-o) - fair field full of folk - A fair field full of folk I saw lying between/ All manner of men, the humble and the rich/ Working and wandering  as the world required of them./ Some put themselves to the plough and played but seldom/In planting and sowing they labored full hard/And won that which wasters expend in gluttony/And some gave themselves to prideand dressed them accordingly/ In outward show of raiment all decked out they appeared/Beggars and mendicants were hurrying about, their bellies and their bag cramped full of bread/Telling falsehoods for their food and fighting at their ale/Going to bed in gluttony, as God well knows/Rising with ribaldry, these robber rascals/Sleep and sad slothfuness follow them ever….” – [This is strictly “Slow Train A Comin’”, actually. It’s a vision of pure Christ and an attack on the churches and the corruption of the day (straight out of (Bob) Dylan)]

“Hermits in the crowd with their hooked staves/ Went up to Walsingham. and their wenches came with them/All of them were great lubbers, tall and strong who hated to work/Clothing themselves in clokes to be distinguished from others/And clothed like hermits perhaps to have sweet comfort.  Parsons and parish complete…"

Well, let's see, that’s enough and (to) get on to a very funny line later..  ”Bishops and novices, masters and doctors who have a cure of souls with Christ's blessing/And a tonsure as a token of a sign that they should shrive their parishioners should preach and pray for them and feed the poor. They all lie in London during Lent and all seasons/Some serve the King and count his silver in the Exchequer and in the Chancery/Claiming his debts from wards and ward meetings, all waifs and strays.

and then there’s a funny line later – “Then a hundred folk hovered about in hoods of silk/ Law sergeants it seemed, who served at the bar, pleading the law for pennies or pounds/Not once did they loose their lips for love of  our Lord/ Thou coulds't better measure the mist on Malvern Hill than get a mumble from their mouths unless money was    shown ‘em" – [That’s pretty beautiful, even the translation's good - It sounds like (Jack) Kerouac actually..sort of.. or I read that in Kerouac’s particular rhythmic tone – “Thou could better measure the mist on Malvern Hill than get a mumble from their mouths unless money was shown 'em" – "unless money was shown ‘em"  (he would’ve said "unless money was shown em" ("unless money was shown them")  - “Thou could better measure the mist on Malvern Hill than get a mumble from their mouths unless money was shown 'em". 

Okay – So what is the older sound? It’s good enough for what it is, but what is the older sound?

to be continued

[Audio from the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty-nine-and-a-half  minutes in and concluding at approximately sixty-four-and-three-quarter minutes in]

Piers Plowman - 2

December 16, 2015, 3:00 am

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      [Page from the 14th century Luttrell Psalter, showing "en:drolleries." At the bottom is a plowman]

Allen Ginsberg on Piers Plowman continues

AG: "In the summer season.." (first, the wandering out, getting clothed like a shepherd , on a May morning on Malvern Hill, the marvel befell him)

"In a somer seson, whan soft was the sonne,/I shope me into shrouded, as I a shepe were;/In habite as an heremite unholy of works/Went wide in this world, wondres to here./Ae on a May morninge on Malverne hulles/Mi bifel a ferry, of fairy me thoughte;/I was wery forwandred and went me to rest/Under a brode banke by a bornes side,/And as I lay and lend and loked on the wateres,/I slombred in a sleeping, it sweyed so merye/Thanne gan I to meten a merveilouse swevene," - [ "sweverne" - dream] - "That I was in a wilderness, whist I never where./As I beheld into the set, an high to the sonne,/I seigh a towre on a toft, trielich ymaked,/A depe dale binethe, a dongeon therein,/With deep diches and derke, and dreadful of sight./A fair felde ful of folke fine I there between' - [that's really good - " "A fair field full of folk found I there between"] -"A fair felde ful of folke fine I there between/Of alle maner of men, the mene and the riche,/Worching and wandring as the worlde asketh,/Some putten hem to the plow, pleyed ful selde,/In setting and in sowing swonken ful harde/And wonnen that this wastours with glotonoye destroyeth,/And some putten hem to pruide, apparailed hem thereafter,/In countenance of clothing comen disgised" 

And I wonder how that Malvern Hill section.. [Allen continues searching in the book] - the one about the… you might as well be.. . the lines about the.. "on Malvern Hill mumble from their mouths".. "Hovered there…" - Let's see, I'll read the English again.

"And then a hundred folk hovered about in hoods of silk/Law sergeants it seemed, who served at the bar, pleading the law for pennies or pounds/Not once did they loose their lips for love of  our Lord/ Thou coulds't better measure the mist on Malvern Hill than get a mumble from their mouths unless money was shown ‘em"

" Yit hoved there an hondreth in houves of selke,/Serjaunts it semed that serveden atte barre,/Plededen for penies and poundes the lawe,/And nought for love of oure Lorde unlese here lippes onis;? Thou mightest better mete miste on Malverne hulles/Than gate a momme of here mouthe til money were shewed" 

 ["Thou mightest better mete miste on Malverne hulles/Than gate a momme of here mouthe til money were shewed" - "here mouthe" - her mouth -  "then get a momme of their mouth" - "a momme of their mouth - get a mumble of their mouth - "Thou mightest better mete"- ["mete" - measure - "meter the mist"] - "Thou mightest better..mete miste on Malverne hulles (H-U-L-L-E-S) - "Thou mightest better mete miste on Malverne hulles/Than gate a momme of here mouthe til money were shewed" - "than get a momme of their mouth", that's a pretty good way of saying it, than get a momme of their… (M-O-M-M-E) - they're going to get a mummy of their mouth, a mumble of their mouth, a Momme.. "get a momme of their mouth, here" (H-E-R-E)- here mouth - here mouth -  "Than gate a momme of here mouthe til money were shewed". That's pretty fine.. 

[Audio from the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately  sixty-four-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately sixty-nine minutes in]

Anne Waldman - Napalm Health Spa's Celebration

December 16, 2015, 12:30 pm

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                                                                               [Anne Waldman]

Jim Cohn's remarkable Napalm Health Spa we've featured on The Allen Ginsberg Project  before (see, for example, here and here). Time to feature it once again, as the current issue has just appeared - a stunning, comprehensive (70th birthday) tribute to Anne Waldman

Anne's birthday was this past April (April 2nd) - See The Allen Ginsberg Project's salute to her here(and a shout-out here, here, here and here for earlier birthday celebrations)  

Here's footage (also included in the Napalm Health Spa tribute) of  Alystyre Julian and "the Fast Speaking Woman Collective" saluting her on her birthday 



The 70th birthday festschrift (edited by Jim Cohn, Eleni Sikleanos and Lisa Berman)  features plenty more video (choice performances by Anne),  as well as interviews (with Jim Cohn, Randy Roark and Marcella Durand);pages from her collaborative work,(Cry Stall Gazewith Pat Steir), Zhang Ziqing(&Ron Padgett!)on Anne in China,  and poems/memoirs/praise from a host of family and friends, including,Andy Clausen, Eliot Katz,Steven Taylor, Reed Bye,David Cope,Eileen Myles,Lewis Warsh,Bill Berkson, Joanne Kyger, Leslea Newman,Chris Tysh, Maureen Owen, Stacy Szymaszek, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Nina Zivancevic, & many others 

[from the cover of Young Manhattan by Anne Waldman & Bill Berkson, one of the many texts featured in Anne Waldman - Keeping The World Safe For Poetry - Napalm Health Spa (2015)]

[Anne Waldman "in the late 60s", "part of footage shot and edited from 1966 to 1970 and then edited to completion over a two-year period ending in July 1982" - Photograph/still - courtesy Nathaniel Dorsky] 

                                                    [Portrait of Anne Waldman by Bobbie Louise Hawkins]

                              [Anne Waldman, May 26th, 2012, early evening, Boulder.- Photograph by Laird Hunt]
                

               [Anne Waldman at People's Climate March, NYC, September 2014. Photograph by No Land (Lauren)]

["Anne Waldman, orator poet directress of Naropa Institute Poetics School at Jane Faigao's table, August 15, 1985,Robert Frank's The Americans under her wrist" - Photograph  (& caption) by Allen Ginsberg © The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

Piers Plowman - 3

December 17, 2015, 3:00 am

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["Thou mightest best measure the mist on Malvern hills.Than get a mum of their mouth till money be shown" -    "Early morning mist at the foot of the Malvern hills in Worcestershire, UK" - Photo © Andrew Fox]  

Allen Ginsberg on "Piers Plowman" continues 

AG: So, now, what can you do with that? [Piers Plowman - in the original] - So someone did something with that . Lots of people did something with it. It's been done for centuries but..there is an English translation (not bad). Here's another version of it, done in nineteen... into English.. in nineteen twelve, nineteen sixteen-seventeen. The old Riverside College classics series. (these were the standard textbooks around World War I) 

"In a summer season when soft was the sun/I clad me in rough clothing, a shepherd as I were/In habit of a hermit unholy of works/Went I wide in this world wonders to hear/But on a May morning on Malvern Hills/To me befell a marvel, a fairy thing methought/I was weary of wandering and went me to rest/Under a broad bank by a burn side;/And as I lay and leaned and looked on the waters,/I slumbered in a sleep, it sounded so pleasant/Then did I dream a marvelous dream,/That I was in a wilderness, wist I not where;/And as I beheld into the east, on high to the sun/I saw a tower on a hill-top, splendidly-fashioned/a deep dell beneath, a dungeom therein,/With a deep ditch and dark and dreadful to see./A fair field full of folk found I there between/Of all manner of men, the mean and the rich,/ Working and wandering, as the world requireth/ Some put them to the plough, and played full seldom/In plowing and sowing produced they full hardly/What many of these wasters in gluttony destroy…" - [So, it's actually.. and then it goes on to a great visionary dream of..seven deadly sins, and the pride, gluttony… 

Ah, here is the translation of"the mist on Malvern Hills" (lines) -"There hang about a hundred in hoods of silk,/Sergeants, it seems, to serve at the bar,/Plead at the law for pence and for pounds/ Not for love of our Lord unloose their lips once/Thou mightest better measure the mist on Malvern hills/ Than get a mum of their mouth till money be shown" - [That's not bad  - "Thou mightest better measure the mist on Malvern hills/ Than get a mum of their mouth till money be shown" - Then some old student has penciled - (from 1917, perhaps) - has penciled in for the word "mum" (M-U-M) - "slightest sound" - I found this in a secondhand bookshop about three days ago, it's all annotated - "Mum - slightest sound" -  "Thou mightest better measure the mist on Malvern hills/ Than get a mum of their mouth till money be shown"]   

So, it's actually a terrificly strong form of sound. I mean, kids do it."Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" did it, to some extent. It doesn't have that caesura. The alliteration is classic in our childhood ear. The measure.. have you heard before that kind of measure? - "all the May morning on Malvern Hill" - has anybody heard that as sort of part of their original archetypal, Beethoven-ian, bath-tub sounds? … Well that kind of alliteration to (a) beat, with caesura...

[Audio from the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately sixty-nine minutes in and concluding at approximately seventy-two-and-a-half minutes in]

Eliot Katz - The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg

December 17, 2015, 9:00 am

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Eliot Katz's new book,The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg is now out from David Wills'Beatdom books.  For more details, see here 

Read his earlier response - (an unpublished letter to the New York Times)  "Ginsberg Apolitical?  I don't think so" - here

More of Eliot-on-Allen here and here

Kurt Hemmer writes:

"The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg is the most engaging and rigorous analysis of 
Ginsberg's political poetry yet attempted. We find in these psges the astuteness of a literary critic, the contextualization of a social historian, the knowledge of a veteran political activist, the insights of a memoirist, and the aesthetic understanding of a poet. Eliot Katz wears all these hats simultaneously, and the finished product is a pleasure to read…" 

Bill Morgan writes:

The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg is an inspired work about one very-celebrated poet and political activist by another remarkable poet and activist, Eliot Katz. It is a serious work about the politics and social commitment behind much of Ginsberg's writings and is long overdue…."

"This is the first full-length volume", the publishers note, "focusing primarily on how Ginsberg's writing works as political poetry and on Ginsberg's extraordinary influence on political culture over the ensuing decades.."

He (Eliot) was also, in 1999, co-editor (with Andy Clausen - and Allen), it should be remembered, of this important tome

From the introduction:

"Through his groundbreaking visionary poetry and principled life, Allen Ginsberg provided inspiration to poets and activists throughout the word five decades. From his outspokenness against Eisenhower-era political and sexual repression to his protests against the Vietnam War, from his willingness to sit on Rocky Flats railroad tracks to stop plutonian manufacture to his opposition to censorship and ecological destruction, East and West. Allen always put his body and his poetry on the line. Much of his office's daily work was spent sending letters to public officials, making contacts between poets and political organizers, gathering information about social issues of Allen's concern, and making donations to activist groups that Allen felt important…Allen was [is] a prophetic poet exposing human injustice in the tradition of William Blake and extending Walt Whitman's democratic vision for America."

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 249

December 18, 2015, 4:38 am

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 [Allen Ginsberg - Photograph by Cynthia Macadams]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Reddit - on what is his favorite Allen Ginsberg poem - ""Aunt Rose" because it's a very touching, deep and profound expression of love and empathy of his old Aunt Rose. It's even more powerful than his long poem ["Kaddish'] about his mother."

Kevin Arrow on Harry Smith - (and Kevin Arrow on Jonas Mekas-on-Harry Smith) - in The Miami Rail

Harry Smith, Second Avenue and Twelfth Street (NYC), 1987 - Photograph by Brian Graham]

Justin Taylor on John Wieners at Electric Literature 

[John Wieners  (1934-2002) - Photograph by Raymond Foye]

[Joanne Kyger]

Nightboat Books in New York have just recently reprinted the previously-out-of-print (and utterly wonderful)  Japan and India Journals of Joanne Kyger. More information about that title here 

Olivia Cole ruminates  on Frank O"Hara for The Paris Review
Robert Frank in The Guardian
John Giorno, celebrated in Le Monde
Luc Sante, our good friend, celebrates William Burroughs

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Ginsberg on Dylan (from "No Direction Home")

December 19, 2015, 3:00 am

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Allen Ginsberg not Alan Ginsberg!  Some time back (January 2014) we ran part of this clip, but here it is again.

Allen's comments are, of course, from the 2005 American Masters documentary (directed by Martin Scorsese) - No Direction Home - Bob Dylan

AG: "A very famous saying among the Tibetan Buddhists - "If the student is not better than the teacher then the teacher's a failure"
 - and I was really knocked out by the eloquence (of Dylan), particularly, "I'll know my song well before I start singing…".."where all souls shall reflect it" (or, you know, "(I'll) stand on the mountain where everybody can hear") - It's sort of this Biblical prophecy. 

Poetry is words that are empowered that make your hair stand on end, that you recognize instantly as being some form of subjective truth that has an objective reality to it because somebody's realized it - Then you call it poetry later." 

AG: "When I got back from India and got to the West Coast, there's a poet,Charlie Plymell, at a party inBolinas, played me a record of this new young folk singer, and I heard.."..Hard Rain..", I think - and wept - 'cause it seemed that the torch had been passed to another generation, from earlier Bohemian or Beat illumination and self-empowerment.."

Allen's eyes welling, visibly moved (all those years on), as he makes that statement. 

An earlier Allen-on-Dylan posting can be found here

Auden's "The Age of Anxiety"

December 21, 2015, 3:00 am

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                      [W.H.Auden (1907-1973]





Allen, continuing with his "Basic Poetics" class at Naropa - January 7, 1980

AG: So Auden - W.H.Auden, the… who, incidentally, it was his anthology that I was reading from originally - the... it's the first thing in his five-volume anthology of English poetry, poetry of the English language (which we've talked about before) also, in the (19)40's, during World War II, wrote a very great poem called "Age of Anxiety" in old Germanic and Anglo-Saxon alliterative meters. So I thought I would read some of that (and there's one copy that I got out of the Boulder library which I'll put in our own (Naropa) library for a couple of weeks, and then I have my own copy here, so if anybody wants to take a look at this at leisure, do so). It's called "Age of Anxiety". I think it came out in… wait a minute, let's see..(19)44 maybe?.. [Editorial note - it was 1947] - It was a big deal. Auden around about that time was a really great poet and is, remains, a great poet. I remember, at the time, I was living with (Jack) Kerouac and with (William) Burroughs near Columbia University on 115th Street. Burroughs had known..Bill Gilmore, who was a.. stayed with Auden in a house in Brooklyn Heights in (19)39 when Auden first came over from England, and there was a brilliant, eccentric, strange guy named Alan Ansen, who, at the time.. was a big queer, who lived out in Woodmere, New York, and had huge learned correspondence with Thomas Mann about the prosody in Wagner's Ring operas (because Wagner was into prosody, as was Auden, as was Stravinsky, as was Chester Kallman, as was Alan Ansen), prosody, like the measurement of word and music together, or the music of the language or the measure of the language, the measure of the line. And Alan Ansen, who was a friend of (Jack) Kerouac's and mine,  and Neal Cassady, was Auden's secretary when he wrote this huge epic poem. "Age of Anxiety" in alliterative meters. And I was.. So we were all very familiar with it, back in the (19)40's -  mid-'Forties and late-'Forties and some early (19)50's - and I haven't looked at it since, until today  - again - (I) went over to the Boulder Library and picked up a copy (because I remembered it was written in the alliterative meter) and it really is great. So I picked out some passages that I remember from the (19)40's - to the (19)80's [present], that almost thirty-five years have stuck in my mind, so I guess they still are good.

                        [William Burroughs and Alan Ansen - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg]

The scene is.. It's during the war, and "Age of Anxiety", a really prophetic poem. "A Baroque Eclogue" (sic)  - ("Baroque", because he's using a great many fancy complicated meters). It's Auden at the height of his energy and power, and also his scholarship, also his crankiness - that he went back.. So, eccentric crankiness. There was a struggle at that time between various schools of poetics. One, to go to a more open form like (William Carlos) Williams, who was just breaking through then and writing his best work, beginning "Paterson" then, an American meter.  Auden, who was living in New York on Seventh Avenue and… I guess Seventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street, near the Chelsea Hotel. 

Later, I think, Williams sent me to see Auden. The discussion was over prosody and meter between us, open-form prosody, and.. despite the fact that Auden was using older English forms and strict counted meter, he thought, every single line of Auden was different at least, it wasn't as if they were metronomic and repetitive and boring. There was a real ear at work. So, he gave me a little note to go visit Auden, and I went to see him. Also I'd known Chester Kallman, his boyfriend, and Alan Ansen, his secretary. So Ansen typed up "Age of Anxiety" - and one of the people we're going to be trying to get here [Naropa} teaching sooner or later is Alan Ansen, because Peter saw him… [to Peter Orlovsky] - You saw him this summer?

PO: Yes, I spent (five days…)

AG: What's he doing? What's he doing now?

PO: He's teaching at the American Center college in Athens. He brings about forty books to class. It meets about two hours, once a week - makes fifty dollars, and he's teaching (Ezra) Pound, (T.S.) Eliot..

AG: Auden

PO: Auden too

AG: Any language? 

PO: Well, I only went to one class, but..

AG: He's been studying Hebrew and Arabic and Persian and Sanskrit. He knew German well in those days (and) French well enough to do… he did.. his big thesis was a thesis on the prosody, the metrical schemes and the prosody, related to music in theWagner Ring cycle. So, maybe we'll get him here sooner or later. Anyway, this ["Age of Anxiety"] is what he typed up

It is a situation during the war, late at night,  in a bar on Second Avenue, New York City. A young soldier on leave, a navy intelligence man of some sort (maybe gay but in the closet),  a Jewish woman, not-so-young anymore, but on the town, looking for someone to sleep with or talk to, and a sort of straight middle-aged man, who is, actually, sort of the hero, at the end of the evening goes home alone and has a long soliloquy which I'll read

So it's Malin, Emble, Quant and  Rosetta - various people. So they're all sitting along by the bar, thinking their own thoughts. War news on the radio. They happen to get together and start talking. They have a good time together, get a little drunk, kind of a little paradise between them that night, a "moment in eternity". They all go to Rosetta's house to have a drink. She falls in.. she has a crush on the young soldier (so has one of the guys) but she makes out with him (or thinks she's going to). They all drink to their delightful night. The two other older guys go home and leave them together. She sees them to the door, comes back and finds the young soldier drunk and asleep on her bed, (he) can't do anything! (She) has a long soliloquy over his.. corpse! (which I'll read also) - All done in this alliterative meter.

So, Emble was thinking.. (they haven't met yet - it's just, what are they thinking about, sitting alone) - Emble was thinking.. "Estranged.."  (this is the young soldier) - "Estranged, aloof,/They brood over being till the bars close,/The malcontented who might have been/The creative odd ones the average need/To suggest new goals. Self-judged they sit,/Sad haunters of Perhaps who after years/To grasp and gaze in get no further/Than their first beholding, phantoms who try/Through much drink by magic to restore/The primitive pact with pure feeling,/Their flesh as it flt before sex was /(The archaic calm without cultural sin/Which her Adam is till her Eve does),/Eyeing the door, for ever expecting/Night after night the Nameless One, the/Smiling sea-god who shall safely land/Shy and broad-shouldered on the shore at last,/Enthusiastic, of their convenient/Abd dangerous dream; while days away in/Prairie places where no person asks/What is suffered in ships, small tradesmen,/Wry relatives in rocking-chairs in/Moss-grown mansions, mothers whose causes/For right and wrong are unreal to them,/ Grieve vaguely over theirs: their vision shrinks/As their dreams darken; with dulling voice/Each calls across a colder water,/Tense, optative, interrogating/Some sighing several who sadly fades."

"But now the radio, suddenly breaking in with its banal noises upon their separate senses of themselves, by compelling them to pay attention to a common world of great slaughter and much sorrow, began, without their knowledge, to draw these four strangers closer to each other. For in response to its official doctored message:

"Now the news. Night raids on/Five cities. Fires started/Pressure applied by pincer movement/In threatening thrust. Third Division/Enlarges beachhead. Lucky charm/Saves sniper. Sabotage hinted/In steel-mill stoppage. Strong point held/By fanatical Nazis. Canal crossed/By heroic marines.Rochester barber/Fools foe. Finns ignore/Peace feeler. Pope condems/Axis excesses. Underground/Blows up bridge. Thibetan prayer wheels/Revolve for victory. Vital crossroads/Taken by tanks. Trend to the left/Forecast by Congressman. Cruiser sunk/In Valdivian Deep. Doomed sailors/Play poker.Reporter killed." -
 [ "Reporter killed" - That's pretty good, using that old Anglo-Saxon thing for the news broadcast -  You can see how it... you know, you can get a funny staccato power.

Then Rosetta muses on politics:

 "… I think too of/ The conquered condition, countries where/ Arrogant oficers, armed in cars -  [Well you get the.. you get the basic alliterative scheme - "Arrogant officers, armed in cars" - so "ah", "ah" - caesura - then the first accented consonant word begins with the same sound - "Arrogant officers, armed in cars". And there's some kind of cross-reference sound - "armed in cars" - "arrogant", "cars" - "Arrogant officers, armed in cars". So the sort of "arrogant, cars" rhyme is what is called.. the what? - assonance, I believe. Assonance. Asymmetrical sound. Asymmetrical sound - Assonance. You know  the phrase? - It's like "Him the Almighty Power/ Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky" - [Allen quotes  John Milton from the opening of his Paradise Lost here] - Assonance is like the vowelic, vowelic flow, the mirror reflection of the vowels, one to another, or the leading from vowel to vowel, aiou (A-I-O-U), but using it, and then you've got the consonants cutting it through - "Arrogant officers, armed in cars". Anyway.. See, alliteration and assonance here, right? - Assonance - the inward-rhyming of the vowels, or the correlation between the vowels, the hollowness of the vowels, the howl of the vowels ("howl of the vowels - assonance) and Alliteration - the pattern of repetition of the consonants. Yeah, actually assonance and alliteration are the two big wheels of poetic power, because, you know, one deals with the consonants ("constant consonants, clanging curiously") - and the other is - ("open vowels, howling horrificly") -You got it? - So one's the vowels and one's the consonants. So this is… Of course, you've got lots of assonantial vowels in here but you've got mainly consonants - pom pom pom-pa-ta - Bom bom bom-pa-di  - Cut-cut-cat-wap - Hic-hac-haec-hoc - You got it?  Is that clear? - Hic-hac-haec- the oak? -  Hic-hac-haec- the oak? - "Arrogant officers, armed in cars,/ Go roaring down roads on the wrong side" - It's really funny -  if it wasn't so smart] 

 "Arrogant officers, armed in cars Go roaring down roads on the wrong side/Courts martial meet at midnight with drums,/ And pudgy persons pace unsmiling/The quays and stations or cruise the nights/In vans for victims, to investigate/In sound-proof cells the Sense of Honor./While in turkish baths with towels round them/Imperilled plotters plan in outline/Definitions and norms for new lives,/Half-truths for their times. As tense as these,/Four who are famous confer in a schloss/At night on nations. They are not equal:/Three stand thoughtful on a thick carpet/Awaiting the Fourth who wills they shall/Till suddenly entering through a side-door/Quick, quiet, unquestionable as death,/Grief or guilt, he greets them  and sits down./Lord of this life. He looks natural,/Hr smiles well, he smells of the future/Odorless ages, an ordered world/Of planned pleasures and passport control,/Sentry-go, sedatives, soft drinks and/Managed money, a moral planet/Tamed by terror: his telegram sets/Grey masses moving as the mud dries./Many have perished. More will." - [ So he gets really serious, prophetic - 1944. Of course, he was then talking about the image ofRoosevelt-Churchill… Roosevelt, Churchill - Yalta, Roosevelt andStalin,De Gaulle.

[Audio from the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately seventy-two-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately eighty-seven-and-a-half minutes in]

**********************

Class concludes with brief outline of future classes, re-iteration of assignments
and brief further announcement
AG: (We) got any more time? - No, not very much but maybe..I think, maybe I'll continue with this, reading next time, read some more of the Auden . Then we'll go on to (William) Dunbar,  (John) Skelton - Skelton, Dunbar, okay, just great sound, but Skelton - Skeltonics. That is to say, Skelton is the guy who wrote a certain kind of short-line poetry that jiggles, that jiggles and rhymes and it is imitatable - Skeltonics. So that's worth checking out too. 
So we'll have Dunbar, Skelton, and then go on to.whatever ballads you might look through in the Norton Anthology -  and I'll bring in some books of ballads to supplement the ballads we have here. So, okay, our assignments so far - one litttle poem "that falleth as the dew", like "I Sing of A Mayden", one little poem, one imitation - [turns to Student - You were not here for.. okay..well, when you get the anthology, "I Sing of A  Mayden", what's the title of that poem?
Student: : "I Sing of A Mayden" , page fifty-seven
AG: Page fifty-seven - "I Sing of A Mayden" - We've still got half a minute - Don't move - Fifty-seven. Well, she wasn't here when we did it, so why don't we do that again (because Peter (Orlovsky) didn't hear that (either)) - Get your fifty-seven out -"I Sing of A Mayden" - Before we go -Page fifty-seven -  One more song before we leave - To imitate this poem, m'am, is the assignment  [Allen concludes the class by leading a group reading of the poem, the entire poem] - still sounds good - maybe next time, we ought to do a reading of  "This Ae Night.." (Lyke Wake Dirge). (Perhaps) we'll get that going next time. Yeah, look it over again, we'll do that, and then we'll get on to the alliterative…and one copy of the Auden will be in the library….

Beatnik Exploitation -1

December 22, 2015, 3:00 am

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A while back, we ran a number of posts on Beat sociology - "Beatniks"- and Beat Exploitation

Beat Kitsch -  see here and hereand here and here

This recent post, from the indefatigable catalogers/bloggers at Houghton Library, Harvard - "Beelzebub Books" (sic) (promising "an uncensored, unexpurgated expose of the Beat Generation") -  got us to pondering the subject again  - 
"More daring than any fiction"? - (Ah, but it is a fiction!)

Sex and Violence. Hypocritical Thrill-Seeking. Tabloid Sensationalism.

The second item, the New York Mirror's  April 10, 1961 edition and its unforgettable headline, "3000 Beatniks Riot In Village" (Greenwich Village, that is), 
but of course, has a back-story.

For years, weekend folksinging had been a tradition in Washington Square Park. But in the spring of 1961, the City, under pressure,  rescinded its customary permit for singing. This triggered a protest demonstration, which was put down with excessive force by the NYPD (hence the "riot") but (which) eventually resulted in the city backing down and reinstating the permits.

The Greenwich Village Society For Historic Preservation gives a short account of the events, fifty years on, here 

John Strausbaugh's account in The Village - 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues may be read here 

Here's Joel Rose's piece for NPR (also on the 50th anniversary), "How The Beatnik Riot Helped Kick Off The '60's"

and Dan Drasin's classic documentary, "Sunday" shows existing documentary footage. Drasin was, astonishingly, only 18 years old when he made this film.




The third tabloid spread  (more "tales of horror") is from across the water and refers to something else entirely, the 1960 riot at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival- "The bucolic peace of Hampshire is shattered when fighting mars a set from Acker Bilk's band" (reads The Observer's, measured, contemporary account). "Trad jazz" versus"Modern Jazz" (not to mention overcrowding and youthful exuberance).  Not so measured, the Sunday People (source of this two-page spread), a couple of weeks later, blaming it all on the Beats - 
"These four Beatnik "prophets" do not themselves preach violence" - (Well, at least, they acknowledge that!) -  "But they do infect their followers with indifference or outright hostility to established codes of condict. Nothing matters to the beatnik except the "kicks" or thrills to be enjoyed by throwing off inhibitions. If you feel any urge, no matter how outrageous, indulge in it. If the beat of jazz whips up violent emotions, why not give way to them?" 

Er..and didn't they do some crude doctoring there on the face of Allen?, "Allen, the hate merchant" (!) ? 

     

 [Police struggle with youth on the grounds of Beaulieu Palace, Hampshire, England, July 30, 1960, on the occasion of the 3rd Beaulieu Jazz Festival]

Two final clippings turn the tables. Why not  "break the social chains that chafe"? - Diploma ("Beatnik University"), Membership Card, Beret, all for just $3.98 (not even 5!) - that seems like a true bargain! 
- And for just a little bit more, an entire "Do-It-Yourself Beatnik kit"! - including, most mysteriously, "six authentic Beatnik poems" (!) and "Beatnik instructions" (what could they be?)
  
In a post about cliche's, how about a(nother) cliche, "The Beat Goes On"

More Beatnik exploitation tomorrow  

Beatnik Exploitation - 2

December 23, 2015, 3:00 am

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So yesterday's focus was on Beat sociology, Beat exploitation, Beat demonization (with a little bit of Beat co-option and shameless marketing thrown in.) Here's (those glorious lurid paperback book covers!)  just a little bit more.

Christmas Eve (Scrooge)

December 24, 2015, 3:00 am

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Seasonal fare on the Ginsberg Project today - Charles Dickens' "Scrooge", first and foremost re-interpreted by the great Lord Buckley (see our previous celebration of Lord Buckley here). 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!