Another Student Assignment Poem - After "Lyke Wake Dirge"

February 3, 2016, 3:00 am

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Another Student Assignment Poem - After "Lyke Wake Dirge"

Allen's January, 1980 Naropa class. Allen begins with a spontaneous couplet

AG: "Turn in your homework this or next hour /and mark them with paradigms if it is in your power"

"And if you haven’t got it to turn it in now/ mark it up with your accents and I’ll pick it up Thursday, anyhow"

Next..what was it? –there were some paradigms, some imitations of “This ae night” (Lyke Wake Dirge). [to Student] - You got that one? want to try it?

Student: Okay. It’s called "Boulderado’s Blue Brew"– [Student begins reading]
- One round will do will do/As we drink a brew/a shot of booze one or two/ and damned to be are you/ /Sing so sweet, sing so sweet,/ as we drink a brew/Home to Mom to suck her teat/ and damned to be are you.."

AG: And damp? are what?

Student: "And damned to be are you" - [continues] - "..Tip the glass, enrich the soul/As we drink a brew/Smash smash, bang the bowls/ and damned to be are you/O, I hear them calling blue/ as we drink a brew/a shot of booze/a slimy screw/And damned to be are you/Take the knife, cut the tongue/ as we drink a brew/(cool here young, cool here young)/ but damned to be are you/So place your feet most fast/while we drink a brew/Until the time has come to pass/ that damned to be are you/One round will do, will do/ As we drink a brew/ A shot of booze one or two/ and damned to be are you"

AG: That's pretty good. Actually, that’s interesting. I never had any.. I never worked in community with people trying to write rhythmic verse, rhythmic rhymed verse, so.. I'm sort of aghast…

Student: It’s fun.

AG: ..to find sometimes, when people don’t have a clear picture in mind, at least they can swing - which is nice.

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

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Frank Lima

February 3, 2016, 1:13 pm

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From his long poem, and the title poem to his new (posthumously-published) book, "Incidents of Travel in Poetry" - Frank Lima:

"…We move the sun to South/America. Neruda had become an organic poet writing about/ the fulcra of yes and no. He wasn't at home when we got there,/so we went over to Allen's for some microbiotic poetry. As/usual, Allen was rolling incense and howling at America. Allen/was always mystical and beautiful when he walked on the/Lower East Side. When he stepped into the old Jewish/pavement, he mystified the habitués. David Shapiro, the Djinn/of subatomic poetry, asked Allen what was the future of poetry/in the borough of Queens? Allen placed the palm of his right/hand on David's glittering forehead and said: "David, don't you/know? The future has no future. It is very old and doesn't worry about its future anymore, because it has so little left of/ it". Allen made suicide exhilarating when he wrote Kaddish./Finally, suicide could talk about the pain of living with/unbearable beauty.."

and the poem, "Homenaje"(from his 1997 collection, Inventory - New & Selected Poems ("One decade of Suffering City Withdrawal Pains is focused here", wrote Allen, "in the few poems a young man finds in his head by Art Miracle and offers Futurity, a little free Joy from Frank Lima") - written March 29, 1995, a full two years before Allen's passing:

[Inventory- New & Selected Poems, 1997]

HOMENAJE

like God
Allen will be taken away from us
to the slaughterhouse of dear God

what will happen to
Allen's great eyes

will he give them to my son
the new poet of life

will Allen become the pieces of the past
the little quiet feast

who will collect
his glasses
who will haunt poetry in memphis
in the vending machines

we the little children of his soul
are the prostitution tourists
the four dimensional fleas
and our poetry revenant helices

because poets do not sleep
they die like bread

like the id
underneath the tree of secrets
like the dust
underneath the tree of secrets
like the sacred dust of the soul
sounds to a cassette

you are the devastating force
of an old poem
the voice of burning hair
the sarcoma of a minor poet

like me

the idiot in Allen's heart
eating
america tell me poems
writing kiss me with your round dream poems

From aSpring 2001 interview with Guillermo Parra:

GP: Your poem "Homenaje" is dedicated to Ginsberg. How much of an influence did his work have on you as a young writer, and in recent years, as fellow poets?

FL: In the beginning there was Allen. Allen was the second poet I read. The first was Robert Lowell. Both were the ultimate influences in my early writing career. Allen gave a sense of current life and immediacy. Lowell had the elegance and education I did not have. I benefited greatly from both at the time. My Homenaje, or tribute, to Allen, is an honest and open acknowledgement of how important he was to my early writings.

   [Angel, 1976]

Parra's obituary note in 2013 - "This is the sorrow of poetry in America" is well worth reading
Wendy Xu's note in Fanzine - "Remembering Frank Lima (1939-2013)" is another heart-felt testament and can be found here
Nico Alvarado in The Boston Review further provides insight and context
Here's Tom Clark's review of Inventory (the earlier Selected Poems) in theSan Francisco Chronicle(and Richard Silberg inPoetry Flash)

Here's a hugely-revealing interview Lima gave (Q & A), in 1999, to the Poetry Society of America.

"Frank Lima", David Shapiro boldly declares, "is an American Villon", a singular force.
"After enduring a difficult and violent childhood, he discovered poetry as an inmate of a juvenile drug treatment center under the tutelage of the painter Sherman Drexler who introduced him to his poet friends."
Protege of Kenneth Kochand Frank O'Hara, as well as Allen, "the only Latino member of the New York School during its historical hey-day", he was/is, without question, (also)
"a major Latino poet" (though, as Garrett Caples, this new book's editor, points out, "throughout his life (he) rejected both labels (New York School, Latino) in relation to his poetry, and this rejection is one reason why his work remains little known.")

Another, even more "damaging" perhaps, factor to his poetic reputation, was his prolonged hiatus. In the late 1970's, Lima left the poetry world to pursue a successful parallel career as a professional chef . For twenty years, from the publication of Angel in 1976 till his "re-discovery" in Inventory in 1997, (and indeed, for less laudable reasons, before), he was essentially "off the radar". That book triumphantly announced his return to the fold, but, regrettably, his follow-up volume, The Beatitudes, was stalled, persistently stalled, and did not find publication, dissipating all the momentum.

Caples, in his comprehensive and illuminating introduction ( a must-read) writes:

"The failure of Beatitudes to appear was a source of great bitterness to Lima, destroying the momentum of his comeback in the poetry world. This combined with an unsuccesful attempt to stage a libretto he wrote about the king and queen if Mexico, led him to abandon further attempts at publication, though he remained willing to contribute poems and give readings when asked."

However, if publication passed him by, owing to an inspirational death-bed encounter with his mentor, Kenneth Koch, Lima, as it happened, "only grew more prolific in the last decade of his life" - Koch had suggested he discipline himself to write a poem a day, and, "as a result, there are hundreds - more likely thousands - of pages of poetry from the last decade of his life.""Even allowing for his inevitable culling of inferior pieces and perhaps an occasional day off", Caples writes, "he would have composed in excess of 3,500 poems. Given the small number of previous collections…it's safe to say the bulk of Lima's poetry remains unpublished".

The new volume features a generous selection of that previously-unpublished work, since,

"it is with this late work that we can ultimately support the claim that Lima is a major poet. For here Lima developed a distinctive mode that accomodated everything from the quotidian to the literary and historical to the most exalted displays of surrealist imagination..The world has yet to experience the extent of his poetic genius."

Bob Holman, author of the 2000 profile/investigative poem, "The Resurrection of Frank Lima", writes:

"This is what we've been waiting for, a grand selection of Frank Lima's poetry with immersive additional material that tells his stories and contextualizes him as the unique, uniquely connected, poet and person that he was. From his first contact with poetry while incarcerated as a juvenile offender in Harlem, through his meetings withLangston Hughes [sic] and Frank O'Hara, his years with (Bill) Berkson, (Ron) Padgett and (Ted) Berrigan, his stint as a chef, and his years of livibg his Vow to Poetry when he wrote at least a poem a day in total obscurity - Lima's life is an epic of contradictions. Frank Lima is a poet the world has been waiting to discover, Now we can."

Here's a gem. Frank Lima, late in his career (in 2010) reading poems at Woodland Patternin Milwaukee

"Ginsberg was an early admirer and Lima counted both Ginsberg and Gregory Corso as influences on his work. But, as (David) Shapiro also reports, Lima was critical of the Beat Generation's exaltation of street life: "He said to me, you know, I've tried as much as possible to get away from the Beat Generation. I tried to get away from violence and the old drug habits, and they want to push me back in…Allen always wants to get back to Harlem, I want to get out of Harlem."

(from Garrett Caples' Introduction to Frank Lima - Incidents of Travel in Poetry - New and Selected Poems (2016))

Further Caples notes on the City Lights blogspot

Jake Marmer's review in the Chicago Tribune - here

Buy this book!

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One More on "..Mayden" (Mayden via Pound)

February 4, 2016, 3:00 am

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AG: (Ezra) Pound’s analysis of poetry, which I mentioned some time before included melopoeia, which is what we’re dealing with now, the melody, rhythmic melody, phanopoeia, which I started with in the first class which was the casting of a picture on the mind’s eye, the moving-picture part of the poem, or the still picture, and then logopoeia - did anybody.. does anybody remember what logopoeia is? anybody? define logopoeia, as in Ezra Pound? - I think I mentioned it. Somebody must know?, figure it out? Melopoeia's music, Phanopoeia's picture - Logopoeia?

Student: The poetry of the idea
Peter Orlovsky: The sense of the poem?
Student: The poetry of the the idea
AG; Yeah? Well, what does logo(s) mean?
Student: The image?
AG: Word. Words, yes. So, you know, so the playfulness of language of the words in "I Syng of A Mayden That Is Makeles", (you have fantastic rhythmic delicacy, so you got
melopoeia) - Do we have much phanapoeia in there? - Yeah, '"As dew in Aprille/
That fallith on the gras", as real green, you, immediately, you know, that casts a very definite picture in the mind's eye - "that fallith on the gras" - "that fallith on the flower"- "that fallith on the spray". So there is a single repeated picture-image in there that takes care of the phanopoeic movie part. Right? Is that clear?. So you got.. you got the rhythm, you got the phanopoeia, but also there is a logopoeia here, like ""I Syng of A Mayden That Is Makeles" (I sing of a maiden that is mate-less - that is "without a match", being a pun on - "without a match, without an equal", also "without a mate". So there's a kind of pun there and also it's the... as Pound described it - quote - "the dance of the intellect among words" - unquote (that's his definition for logopoeia), "dance of the intellect among words", and the subtlety among words - "King of all kings/for her son she chose" [ "to here sone che ches"] - so there's a… in addition to the melody there, there being no picture particularly (except, unless you can picture a "King of..kings", or a "son"? - but that's a very vague picture) . But what the.. the beauty there is the playfulness of the language - "King of alle kinges/for her son she chose" (she chose for her son the King of all the kings). So.. all through the poem (including "as dew in April/that falls on the grass..that falls on the flower..that falls on the spray"), the little playfulness, not only musically but with the idea or the words - "And mother and maiden/were never none but she""Moder and maiden/Was never non but che" is pretty funny - I mean, (it) gets in your ear after a while - "Was never non but che" - So that's all the subtlety of the simple words themselves (is that clear?) is appreciable. I mean, appreciable in the sense that everyone can see how sweet the little play of words is in here - the double-negative - Was never non but che" -
Just the idea of a mother and a maiden, or a maiden that is without a mate is, in itself, a play of idea and a play of words - maiden/makeless [maiden/makeles] - there's music there but there's also kind of funny punning. "The dance of intellect among words", or playfulness and wit of words. Word-wit. Word-music, Word-wit, Word-picture. Logopoeia, Melpoeia (melody), (and) Phanopoeia.

What does - "poeia" - mean, anyway? Anyone know Greek? - P-O-E-I-A

Student: From poesis?
AG: Right, Poesis. What does poesis mean? Making?
Student: Making
AG:. Making. Poesis, in Greek, making..ah, makeles..making. So the ancient word for poetry is constructing, or making, or building, or, making,..what is making
Student: Makeles?
AG: Establishing?, affirming?
Student: Weaving?
AG: Weaving? - But is that built into the etymology of "make" ? - Quite interesting, because, don't forget, the (William) Dunbarpoem that we're going to read is (a) "Lament for the Makers" ("Lament for the Makaris"). In case anybody wondered what makeles (makeris) meant, (what) "makers" was.

And so, Melody-making,. Picture-making, Word-wit-making (or Wordsworth-making!)
So Pound's theory of poetry is you make up pictures, and you make up music, and you make up funny words, which, if you put it right down like that is pretty easy, then it's just child's play - making up pictures, making up tunes, and making up pretty words. So, in other words, poetry really is like child's play in that way. If you take it... if you get lost in vague ideas and forget that there's any kind of melody and rhythm and forget how funny words can be, and forget to make even a picture then naturally the poetry gets boring. or, you know, nobody wants to read it but if you stick with the picture and some music and some intelligence about the words then naturally there's something to interest, like a little toy puzzle, to interest anyone. And if you do it in your own language, that is with your own rhythms, the way you speak, vernacular, then it's like regular speech of everyday, but all of a sudden heightened by your own intelligence of speech and mindfulness that you're putting into it - extra-picture, extra-pretty-music, and extra-sense to the words. So it's just ordinary mind heightened by a little more awareness, or intelligence, or energy, that you put into it (even more energy that you put into it)

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

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Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 254

February 5, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: A William Burroughs Weekend

≪ Previous: One More on "..Mayden" (Mayden via Pound)

Important breaking-news (regarding an earlier posting) - a Saudi court earlier this week overturned the death-sentence on poet Ashraf Fayadh - but hardly proposing leniency!
His new punishment? - He's sentenced to eight years in prison and eight hundred lashes, (to be carried out on sixteen separate occasions), and must formally renounce his poetry on Saudi state media.
Needless to say, the campaign for his freedom and full exoneration vigorously continues.

[William Burroughs Photograph(s) & Allen Ginsberg - Photographs © The Estate of Allen Ginsberg] -

William Burroughs birthday today (fitting news following such grotesquerie?) A shout-out today and we'll be celebrating all weekend.

& it's Neal Cassady's birthday, incidentally, on Monday.

Here is the poster from last weekend's Cassady Birthday Bash

Wait Till I'm Dead, Allen's new book, was officially released on Tuesday

"New York to San Fran", the longest poem in the book, excerpted in the current Poetry magazine, may be read here

Our posting on another poem, "Amnesiac Thirst For Fame", may be accessed here

(and see here, for excerpts fromRachel Zucker's lively introduction)

All through the month of February, in celebration of its 75th birthday, the CVA (Centro Venezolano Americano) in Caracas (in collaboration with the bookstore, “El Buscón” & under the aegis of actor-producer, Rodolfo Alonzo), will be hosting a series of readings, accompanied by jazz and performance, focusing on the Beat Generation

Allen Ginsberg in the Netherlands 1983 Revisited - the hommage show featuring the Mondriaan Quartet, Han Buhrsinterpretating"Howl", and more (see here) - plays Rotterdam's Arminius space this coming Thursday

The annual Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award Winners Reading in Paterson, New Jersey is tomorrow

Marcia Resnik's photo show, Punks, Poets and Provocateurs (see also her book of the same name) opened last night in New York at the Howl Happening space. That show will be up till March 2nd.

[Allen Ginsberg - Photograph by by Marcia Resnik - from Punks, Poets and Provocateurs]

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A William Burroughs Weekend

February 6, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Alliterative Verse (The Kalevala - 1)

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 254

[William S Burroughs - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg - © The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

It's a William Burroughsweekend this weekend on The Allen Ginsberg Project. Our all-time most popular post here on the Ginsberg Project (sadly with little or no Ginsberg content) is this one (perhaps because of the abiding interest in Jim Morrison?) - William Burroughs music collaborations - But what about this one? - and this? - and this?

William Burroughs' distinctive Naropareadings have often featured in this space - from 1975 (with Gregory Corso) from 1976 (with Allen, Anne Waldman, and Chogyam Rinpoche), from 1978 (with Ken Kesey) - and again in 1980, 1981, and from 1985.

Hereand here'sa two-part reading from 1989

Here's Burroughs on Jack Kerouacfrom the 1981 Naropa Jack Kerouaccelebrations

Here's Burroughs reading Junky

Here's more on Junky

Here's Burroughs (from back in 201o andour posting on the Yage Letters)

Here's from way back in 1961,Burroughs interviewed by Allen and Gregoryfor theCity Lightsanthology,The Journal For The Protection of All Beings

Here's Allen interviewing Burroughs in 1980- andagain(two interviews) - here

Here's Kathy Acker interviewing Burroughs

Here's a posting on Burroughs'Cut-Ups

Here's a posting on Burroughs' home movies

William and Allen

William Burroughs' biography

A portfolio of photographs

William Burroughs on Thanksgiving

William Burroughs on Christmas

Each year we salute El Hombre Invisible and this year is no different. Previous birthday shout-outs from the Ginsberg blog - hereandhereand here andhere

Happy 102nd birthday, William Burroughs!

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Alliterative Verse (The Kalevala - 1)

February 8, 2016, 3:00 am

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[Inside front title page of the "Old"Kalevala, Finnish, national epic, collection of old Finnish poems, by Elias Lonnrot. First edition - Volume 2, 1835. Page text reads "Kalevala or the old Karelian poems about the ancient times of the Finnish people, 1st part in Helsinki 1835 Printed J.C.Frenckellin Son's & Co.]

[Allen's January 1980 class continues]

AG: Before we get onto "A Lament for the Makers",William Dunbar’s “Howl” of the 15^th Century, I wanted to give out one more sample of alliterative verse. From the Kalevala?..who’ll pronouce it correctly for me? – Kavela? Kavela? Kavela? – Actually, the accent is on the first and last syllable – Kalevala- Kalevala….

“So this is a Contest of Bards between an old poet in the Kalevala district, old Väinämöinen Old Väinämöinen his name is, and there’s a young, younger poet, Joukahainen, young punk poet who challenges this older bearded tired-out bard. And this is a Contest of Bards, which is a traditional form in almost all the world’s poetries but this is one of the funniest I’ve heard. There is… this is poem three of the Kalevala which is a Finnish national epic, which was accumulated orally over the centuries and written down in the nineteenth century by, or compiled by Elias Lönnrot, and translated by Francis Peabody Magoun, Harvard University Press, 1963. A great translation, I originally said that the alliterative verse form was not just English but Scandinavian. So this is like a modern version of an ancient Scandinavian form. So there’s a first statement in the first half of the line and then a counter-statement (in this case, partly repeating the first statement) because a lot of this was oral improvisation, so they’d lay out a theme and then repeat it slightly differently while they were waiting and thinking the next theme, the next line) The…

Student: Allen?

AG: Yes

Student: (Does this involve two people?)

AG: Yeah. Yes. I think there’s a picture of it in here – of the traditional form (which

is) two guys sit on a bench, holding hands crossways, or directly, rocking back and forth to get the rhythm up, and then cap each other with lines. One will sing a line and the other will.. rephrase it, echo it, repeat it, or answer it. So it’s like musicians capping each other. The photograph’s.. maybe you can see from a distance, I don’t know, different, modern and ancient (sic). [Allen displays the photograph] - Is that visible to anybody? – sitting on a bench – sometimes on a bench, sometimes at a table. It’s almost like a variety of...what do you call that?

Student: Arm wrestling

AG: Arm wrestling, Mind wrestling. Poem three, the plot – "Väinämöinen grows in knowledge and becomes famous. Joukahainen sets out to defeat him in a contest of wisdom and when he does not win challenges him to dual with the swords. At this the old Väinämöinen gets angry and sinks young Joukahainen down into a fen" - ("fen", you know, "bog"?) - “In the fen Joukahainen, gets sorely distressed and finally promises Väinämöinen, if he lets him go, his sister as his wife. Väinämöinen is apppeased by this and releases him from the fen".

So, they are talking, or, rather, there’s a description of them. The young kid leaves his father and mother who forbid him to go challenge the old Väinämöinen… warns him he’ll bewitch you, watch out , but (he’s so vain) and he set(s) out and on the third day he reaches Väinämöinen’ s district, and so, into the middle of the thing….

[Allen begins reading (starting from approximately fifty-five minutes in) from Francis Peabody Magoun's translation of The Kalevala.]

[Editorial note - Much of this extensive quotation has already appeared on The Allen Ginsberg Project - see here]

"..Steadfast old Väinämöinen, eternal sage,/ was driving on his way, covering ground/ on those clearings of Väinämöinen's district, the heaths of Kalevala District./ Young Joukahainen came along, he was driving on the road in the opposite direction./ Shaft caught in shaft, trace got tangled in trace,/ hames became fast in hames, shaft-bow in butt of shaft-bow./ Therefore they then stop, stop deliberate;/ water poured from shaft-bow, vapor steamed from the shafts."

"..Old Väinämöinen asked: "Of what clan are you/ to come along foolishly, recklessly onward./ You break the bent-wood hames, the sapling shaft-bows./ you splinter my sleigh to pieces, my poor sleigh to bits."/ Then young Joukahainen/ uttered a word, spoke thus: "I am young Joukahainen/ but name your own clan;/ of what clan are you, of what crew, miserable creature?"/ . Then steadfast old Väinämöinen now told his name./ Then he managed to say: If you are young Joukahainen,/ pull over to the side. You are younger than I"

"Then young Joukahainen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "A man's youth is small matter, his youth, his age./ Whichever of two men is better in knowledge, the stronger in memory,/ let him indeed stay on the road, let the other get off the road./ If you are old Väinämöinen, eternal singer,/ let us begin to sing, start to recite magic./ one man to test the other, one to defeat the other"/. Steadfast old Väinämöinen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ - "What can I really do as a singer, as an expert!/ I have always lived my life just on these clearings,/ on the edges of the home field, again and again have listened to the cuckoo by the house./ But, be this as it may, speak, so that I may hear with my ears:/ what do you know about most about, understand beyond other people?"/ Young Joukahainen said: "I indeed know something!/ This I know clearly, understand precisely: [Joukahainen’s maxims] -

"A smoke hole is near a ceiling, a flame is near a fireplace./ It is pleasant for a seal to live, for a pike, dog of the water, to roll about;/ it eats the salmon around it, the whitefish beside it./ A whitefish has smooth fields, the salmon a level ceiling./ A pike spawns in the chill of night, the slobberer in bitter cold weather./ Autumns the timid, obstinate perch, swims deep./ summers it spawns on dry land, flaps about on shores./ "If this may be not enough, I have still another bit of knowledge,/ understand a certain thing:/ "The North ploughs with a reindeer,/ the South with a mare, remotest Lapland with an elk./ I know the trees of Pisa's Hill, the tall evergreens on Goblin's Crag,/ tall are the trees on Pisa's Hill, the evergreens on Goblin's Crag/. There are three strong rapids, three great lakes,/ three high mountains under the vault of this sky./ In Hame is Halla-whirlpool, in Karelia Loon Rapids./ none exceed the Vuoksi rapids (which) surpass those of Imatra" . Old Väinämöinen said: "A child's knowledge, a woman's power of memory! / It is neither that of a bearded man nor indeed of a married man./ Speak of profound origins, of unique matters."/

Young Joukahainen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "I know the origin of the tomtit, I know the tom-tit is a bird,/ the hissing adder a snake, the roach a fish of the water/, I know iron is brittle, black soil sour,/ boiling-hot water painful, being burned by fire bad./ Water is the oldest of ointments, foam of a rapids oldest of magic nostrums,/ the Creator himself is the oldest of magicians, God the oldest of healers./ The source of water is from a mountain, the source of fire is from the heavens/, the origin of iron is from rust, the basis of copper is a crag./ A wet tussock is the oldest land, the willow the first tree,/ the foot of a tall evergreen the first habitation, a flat stone the first wretched cooking vessel."/ Steadfast old Väinämöinen uttered these words:/ "Do you remember anything more or has your foolish talk now come to an end?"/

Young Joukahainen spoke: "I remember a little more. /I remember indeed that time when I was plowing the sea,/ hoeing out the hollows of the sea, digging deep spots for fish,/ deepening the deep places in the water, putting the lily ponds in place./ overturning hills, heaping up blocks of stone./ I was already the sixth man, seventh person/, when they were creating this Earth, fashioning the sky/, erecting the pillars of the sky, bringing the rainbow,/ guiding the moon, helping the sun,/ arranging the Great Bear, studding the heavens with stars"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "You are certainly lying about this./ No one saw you when they were ploughing the sea,/ hoeing out the hollows of the sea, digging deep spots for fish,/ deepening the deep places in the water, putting the lily ponds in place./ overturning hills, heaping up blocks of stone,/ Nor were you probably seen, /probably neither seen nor heard,/ when the earth was being created, the sky fashioned,/ the pillars of the sky erected, the rainbow brought,/ the moon guided, the sun helped,/ the Great Bear arranged, the heavens studded with stars."/

Young Joukahainen then uttered these words: "If I do not happen to have intelligence, I will ask for intelligence from my sword./ O old Väinämöinen, big-mouthed singer!/ Proceed to measure off our swords, set out to fight a duel"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "I don't think I'm very much afraid/ of those sword of yours, your intelligence, your ice-picks, your thoughts./ But be that as it may, I will not proceed to measure swords/ with you, wretch,/ with you, miserable fellow"./ Then young Joukahainen screwed up his mouth, twisted his head around,/ clawed at his black beard. He uttered these words:/ "Whoever does not proceed to measure swords nor set out to fight a duel,/ him I will sing into a swine, change into a pig with lowered snout./ Such men I enchant, one thus, the other so. /strike dead onto a dunghill, jam into the corner of a cattle shed"./ Old Väinämöinen got angry, then got angry and felt shamed./ He began to sing, got to reciting,/ the magic songs are not children's songs, not children's songs, women's jokes;/ they are a bearded man's which not all children sing,/ nor half the boys indeed, nor one bachelor in three/ in this dreadful time, in this fleeting final age"./ Old Väinämöinen sang. Lakes splashed over, Earth shook/, copper mountains trembled, solid slabs of rock split,/ the crags flew apart, stones on the shore cracked./ He bewitched young Joukahainen. He sang sprouts onto his shaft-bow,/ a willow bush onto his hames, sallows onto the ends of his traces./ He bewitched the lovely basket sleigh. he sang it into a pond as fallen trees./ He sang the whip with the beaded lash into shore reed of the sea./ He sang the horse with the blaze to the bank of the rapid as a rock./ He sang the gold-hilted sword to the sky as flashes of lightning;/ then he sang the ornamented shaft of the crossbow into a rainbow over the waters/ then his feathered arrows into speeding hawks, / then the dog with the undershot jaw, it he sang onto the ground as rocks./ He sang the cap off the man's head into the peak of a cloudbank./ he sang the mittens off his hands into pond lilies./then his blue broadcloth coat to the heavens as a cloud patch/ the soft woolen belt from his waist into stars throughou the heavens/ He bewitched Joukahainen himself,/ sang him into a fen up to his loins,/ into a grassy meadow up to his groin, into a heath up to his arm-pits./

Now young Joukahainen indeed knew and realized./ he knew that he had got on the way, got on the route to a contest,/ a contest in magic singing with old Väinämöinen. /He keeps trying to get a foot free; he could not lift his foot./ However, he tried the other; here his shoe was of stone./ The young Joukahainen indeed becomes anguished,/gets into a more precarious situation. He uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "O wise Väinämöinen, eternal sage!/ Reverse your magic charm, revoke your enchantment,/ Free me from this predicament, get me out of this situation./ I will indeed make the best payment, pay the most substantial ransom"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "Well, what will you give me/ if I reverse my magic charm, revoke my enchantment,/ free you from this predicament, get you out of this situation?"/ Joukahainen spoke, "I have two vessels, two lovely boats. /One is swift in race the other transports much. Take either of these. / Old Väinämöinen spoke, "I do not really care about your vessels. I will not select any of your boats./ These I too have with every rower hauled up, every cove piled full,/ one steady in a high wind, the other that goes into a head wind".. He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in./ Young Joukahainen said, "I have two stallions, two lovely steeds./ One is better for racing, the other lively in the traces. Take either of these"./ Old Väinämöinen said, "I don't care about your horses. Don't bother me about white fetlocked horses./ These too I have, with every stall hitched full, every stable full,/ with fat as clear as water on their backbones, a pound of fat on their cruppers"./ He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in."

(Then Joukahainen offers stallions, a hatful of gold pieces, a felt hat full of silver pieces)

"Young Joukahainen said, "Old Väinämöinen, reverse your magic words, revoke your enchantment./ I'll give you a high-peaked hat full of gold pieces, a felt hat full of silver pieces got by my father in the war, brought in from battle"./Old Väinämöinen said, "I don't care (I care nothing) about your silver pieces. I have no need, wretch, for your gold pieces./ These too I have with every storehouse crammed, every little box fully stocked./ They are gold pieces as old as the moon, silver pieces the age of the sun". /He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in. /Young Joukahainen said, "O old Väinämöinen , free me from this predicament, release me from this situation."

to be continued

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty minutes in and concluding at approximately sixty-five-and-three-quarter minutes in]

↧

Alliterative Verse (The Kalevala - 2)

February 9, 2016, 3:00 am

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[ Väinämöinen (1866) - Robert Wilheim Ekman (1808-1873)]

[Allen continues his reading from Francis Peabody Magoun's translation of The Kalevala.]

AG: Then he (Joukahainen)’s going to give him his lands from home, “fields of sandy soil” Väinämöinen refuses those, says he’s got better fields than that-“ fields in every direction, windrose in every clearing.”

"I'll give you my windrose back home, surrender my fields of sandy soil to free my own head, to random myself". / Old Väinämöinen spoke, "I don't want your wind rose, useless person, nor your fields of sandy soil./ These too I have, fields in every direction, windrose in every clearing./My own are better fields, my own windrose finer"./ He bewitched young Joukahainen, kept bewitching him further down./

The(n) young Joukahainen at last, however, grew desperate when he was up to his chin in the mud, up to his beard in a bad place./up to his mouth in a fen, in mossy places, up to his teeth behind a rotten tree-trunk. /Young Joukahainen said, "O wise Väinämöinen, eternal sage, now sing your song backward./ Grant me yet my feeble life. Set me free from here./ The current is already dragging at my feet, the sand scratching my eyes./ If you will reverse your magic words, leave off your magic spell, I'll give you my sister, Aino, to rinse out the wooden firkins, to wash the blankets,/ to weave fine stuff, to bake sweet bread."/ Then Väinämöinen was exceedingly delighted when he got Joukahainen's girl to provide for his old age./ He sits down on a song stone, sits himself on a song rock./ He sang once, he sang twice, he sang a third time too./He took back his magic words, revoked his spell completely/Young Joukahainen got free, got his chin free of the mud,/his beard from a bad place, his horse from being a rock in the rapids,/ his sleigh on the shore from being a rotten tree-trunk in the water, his whip from being a shore reed./ He climbed slowly into his basket sleigh./ He flung himself limply into a shed/ He set out in a sorry state of mind with heavy heart to his dear mother's, to his esteemed parents."

That’s really a great contest. "(sank) up to his teeth behind (an old) rotten tree-trunk”,

I thought that was the best of it, and he found that his shoe become a stone, or his hat a stone, (hat into a cloud, shoe into a stone, reminded me of Gregory Corso’s sort of fast trickery)

Student: (Well, he wrote a poem, Gregory Corso wrote a poem called "Contest of Bards")?

AG: “Two poets on a highway” ("Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway"), which was similar, but I don’t think either of us had ever seen this. He (Corso) might have because he was pretty sophisticated with this epic meter.
Student: It's amazingly similar.

AG: Yeah. Well I think it’s an old basic theme, you know, a contest of magic words, but, actually, the thing is, anthropologically, or, culturally, basic - the “dirty dozens” ..is a similar thing.. which blacks (sic) do, which probably is an old Afric ritual, where two blacks contest to see who can say the most filthy, insulting, degrading, degenerate, thing, like - “Your father eats pussy out of your mother’s cunt, and I don’t give a shit but your grandma also (eats) of your grandfather’s crotch!” – And then, the answer - “Well, I know, but I saw your sister eating out of your ass the other night, and, anyway, it didn’t matter, because you already ate out of her armpit!” - You know, it would get worse and worse, who could capp each other – the more imaginative, the more imaginative personal-magical.. personal magical put-down. You know, the psychological war, in a sense, using language, and trying finally to get a little thunderbolt of language that would get into somebody’s heart, you know, and really get them where they don’t want to be touched. And then if you get… and then if you lose heart and get mad, then you lose the game. Whereas if you gain heart...

Student: (Like the Italians play..)

AG: Pardon me?

Student: (There's an Italian game that the Italians play in the villages in the bars)

AG: Yeah. What do they call it?

Student: (I've forgotten but it's just like that)

AG: Well, the phrase that I used before – “capping each other”, which musicians used, probably comes from that. So it’s a classic form. In this case, the alliterative aspect of the verse wasn’t obvious because of the English translation but that’s part of the..that was part of the scheme – and part of the inspirational formula. If you have a formula which involves alliteration and repeated phrasing – “Fair fields ful of folk”?, you know - then it’s easier to make up things, because you’re just following the.. following along the sound of the mind. You don’t have to think up the words, you just follow the sound of the mind and the first thought, best thought, that pops into your mind, you can use...

Student: Who is that by?

AG: This is by.. I’ll give you the circumstance agai. It’s Kalevala (Kalevala? Kalevala?) Kalevala - Kalevala – Kalevala - Kalevala - Kalevala

or Poems of the Kalevala district, compiled by Elias Lönnrot, (L-O-N-N-R-O-T) Prose translation by Francis Peabody M-A-G-O-U-N Mr Magoun,, M-A-G… 1963, Harvard Press, Cambridge, Mass – Great funny book!

Okay, why don’t we… Is there any other left-over thought because we can end on that, we can stop (while we have a little time). We’ve got the class business to do and, I think, maybe take the roll(call), could you do that?

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

↧

William Dunbar's Lament For The Makers - 1

February 10, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: William Dunbar's Lament For The Makers - 2

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[William Dunbar (1460-1520)]

AG: (searching through his anthology) (Is (Robert) Creeley ….in the Norton book?… yeah, one-two-two-five..yeah, I think that might be… One-two-two-five, that might’ve been it?…No. I’ll find it, there is some poem of his that’s like that.

So we have (William) Dunbar’s "Lament for the Poets" or "Lament for theMakers"– You rememberpoesiswas making, making - “makeles” here – 15^th-16^th century. It’s (this poem's) like my own poem, "Howl", in theme and subject . It’s a lament for all the poets that he knew that lived and died, that he knew of.

So, actually, it’s his.. it’s a recitation of his lineage, an outline of who the poets were that influenced him, William Dunbar.

Is Pat O’Brien here ? – [to Pat O'Brien - Student] - (You want to try to read it? You have a good.. you got a good.. is this a good text? I have a couple of texts here that.. maybe the one we have in the Oxford bookis better?

Pat O’Brien: (.. (Norton) - page seventy-two)

AG: I’ll be up here tho’ – Can you help out (since you know the language)?

Student (P O'B) I can just do this in common Middle English. I’m not very good at Middle Scots

AG: Well, is it Middle Scots?

Student (P O'B) Yeah, you've got to give it the Scots, roll the "r"s and so forth, and I can't do any of that.

AG: Okay

Student (P O'B): “Lament to the Makers"

AG: Is that makers and not muckers?

Student (P O'B): Yeah

AG: Makers?

Student (P O'B): Right, well, you might say mucker

AG: Muckers?

Student (P O'B): But in general, you don’t pronounce the “i-s” after a vowel in Middle Scots (except when you feel it!)

AG: Okay ..and it’s "while he was sek?"– right?
Student (P O'B): Right
AG: In our book, we don’t have that. The full title is "Lament to the Makers When He Was Sek” - Q-W-H-E-N - "Qwhen he was Sek" (S-E-K} – You might write that in - Q-W-H-E-N… Q-W-H-..
Student (PO'B): Q-U?
AG: I have “Q-W” here in the.. What do you have? Do they have that one?
Student (PO'B): Q-U-H-E..
AG: Q-U-H-E-N – he has Q-U-H-E-N, I have Q-W-H-E-N, so we take a choice – "Whan he was sek"– S-E-K

Student – S-E-I-K

AG: S-E-I-K? – I have S-E-K here. What have you got?

Student (PO'B): - S-E-I-K

AG: Do it strong, oratorical

Student: Oratorical?

AG: Yeah

[P O'B (Pat O'Brien) begins reading Dunbar's poem approximately three-and-a-half minutes in]

I THAT in heill was and gladnèss
Am trublit now with great sickness
And feblit with infirmitie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesh is bruckle, the Feynd is slee:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

The state of man does change and vary,
Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary,
Now dansand mirry, now like to die:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

No state in Erd here standis sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker
So wannis this world's vanitie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Unto the Death gois all Estatis,
Princis, Prelatis, and Potestatis,
Baith rich and poor of all degree:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

He takis the knichtis in to the field
Enarmit under helm and scheild;
Victor he is at all mellie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

That strong unmerciful tyrand
Takis, on the motheris breast sowkand,
The babe full of benignitie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

He takis the campion in the stour,
The captain closit in the tour,
The lady in bour full of bewtie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

He spairis no lord for his piscence,
Na clerk for his intelligence;
His awful straik may no man flee:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Art-magicianis and astrologgis,
Rethoris, logicianis, and theologgis,
Them helpis no conclusionis slee:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

In medecine the most practicianis,
Leechis, surrigianis, and physicianis,
Themself from Death may not supplee:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

I see that makaris amang the lave
Playis here their padyanis, syne gois to grave;
Sparit is nocht their facultie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

He has done petuously devour
The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,
The Monk of Bury, and Gower, all three:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

The good Sir Hew of Eglintoun,
Ettrick, Heriot, and Wintoun,
He has tane out of this cuntrie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

That scorpion fell has done infeck
Maister John Clerk, and James Afflek,
Fra ballat-making and tragedie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Holland and Barbour he has berevit;
Alas! that he not with us levit
Sir Mungo Lockart of the Lee:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Clerk of Tranent eke he has tane,
That made the anteris of Gawaine;
Sir Gilbert Hay endit has he:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

He has Blind Harry and Sandy Traill
Slain with his schour of mortal hail,
Quhilk Patrick Johnstoun might nought flee:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

He has reft Merseir his endite,
That did in luve so lively write,
So short, so quick, of sentence hie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

He has tane Rowll of Aberdene,
And gentill Rowll of Corstorphine;
Two better fallowis did no man see:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

In Dunfermline he has tane Broun
With Maister Robert Henrysoun;
Sir John the Ross enbrast has he:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

And he has now tane, last of a,
Good gentil Stobo and Quintin Shaw,
Of quhom all wichtis hes pitie:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Good Maister Walter Kennedy
In point of Death lies verily;
Great ruth it were that so suld be:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Sen he has all my brether tane,
He will naught let me live alane;
Of force I man his next prey be:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Since for the Death remeid is none,
Best is that we for Death dispone,
After our death that live may we:—
Timor Mortis conturbat me.

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at the beginning of the tape and continuing to approximately eight-and-a-half minutes in]

↧

William Dunbar's Lament For The Makers - 2

February 11, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 255

≪ Previous: William Dunbar's Lament For The Makers - 1

[detail from "The Triumph of Death" (c.1562) - Pieter Bruegel, the Elder (1525-1569), in the collection of the Museo del Prado, Madrid]

continuing from yesterday

AG: Well there are two things I wanted to derive from this. Did everybody follow along the sense of the poem [William Dunbar's "Lament For The Makers"]? Did… For the complicated words, Middle English words, there were obviously little footnotes on the bottom of the page and on the side of the page so you can look those up. The only one, rare one, that I noticed that was not noted – “That Scorpion fell has done infeck/Maister John Clerk, and James Afflek”– "infect" or "poison" (so that was in line fifty-seven or so, page seventy-three) - And a better translation than we have here - on the fourth line of page seventy-three, third line - "Themself from Death may not supplee" - "Themself from Death may not deliver" - "Death may not help" ('help" or "deliver" my be better, or sound better anyway). And then in the second stanza, line eight, "The flesh is bruckle", they have "pale" - or "The flesh is brittle" also - "bruckle"/"brittle" was the suggestion, I think, from the old Oxford anthology. "As with the wynd wavis the wicker" - the "wicker" is a willow twig, a willow branch (willow tree), as when the wind waves the twigs in a.. What else is there? Those are the main.. Well, also, on line forty-five, "I see that makaris.." - "I see that makaris amang the lave" - the rest ("lave" is "rest", "remainder" or "rest" we could translate it as, I guess. And "facultie", in the third line of that stanza - "Spirit".."Sparit is nocht their facultie" - "faculty" there would be "profession", their vocation or profession (that is, the poets aren't spared, those of that profession aren't spared, or that work - it's not translated here that's why I was noting that).

So there were two things I wanted to derive from this. First, that the poem is really personal, because he's just talking about his old friends, or old teachers, or writers that he liked, or writers that he heard of through manuscripts. So that, in that sene, it's a little bit like the modern poet Frank O'Hara's poetry in that the poem is personal and he's talking about his own personal life and his own personal influences. He's also tracing a lineage of who his teachers were, but it's very home-made, in the sense that it's local (these are all people that have written things that are in specialized anthologies and they're not like big Shakespeares or anything like that but they are his friend-poets, or people he's read about, people he's heard of. Like "Blind Harry and Sandy Traill" (whoever they are! - of course somebody knows who they are) - Blind Harry, Sandy Traill,Patrick Johnstoun, John Clerk, and James Afflek". So, actually, you could write a lament for all your, your old friends who, you know, O-D'd, or stumbled off the Brooklyn Bridge (which is what I did). In other words, to have the chutzpah (nerve) to write about my own friends as if they were the immortal makers of Dunbar, or the names in the Bible (you know, the books of lineage in the Bible, all the generations in the Bible. So you can.. actually.. if you take the names of your own friends, or streets, or details of your own existence, anonymous though they be, un-immortal and unhallowed as they be, not even..not even stars on television, or even the comic books, but just stars in your own brain, the stars of your own consciousness, you can write then romantic poems about the heros of your own soul. You don't have to wait for public approval of your street, your house, your own body (your own toes), your own friends or your friends' poetry, but, you've got to be smart that the names and persons that you choose do have some kind of resonance in them in some corner of the universe, you know, that's not too stupid a corner. There's got to be some smarts about it some way or other - oh..a witty name for a street, likeRoot Street - "I went down to Root Street/sucking on my lollipop", or something like that. It has to have.. there has to have some kind of resonance, some kind of internal evidence of genius.

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately eight and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately fifteen-and-a-half minutes in]

↧

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 255

February 12, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Ginsberg-Orlovsky-Taylor, Wuppertal, Germany, 1983

≪ Previous: William Dunbar's Lament For The Makers - 2

[Bernie Sanders and Allen Ginsberg, Burlington Vermont, 1983 - Photograph ©Phyllis Segura.1983]

This week, do we need to run again the Ginsberg Bernie Sanders poem? (see above a picture of their 1983 face-to-face)

Allan M Jalon discusses the meeting of their two minds (and interviews Eliot Katz and Bill Morgan) today in the Jewish Daily Forward

Here's an earlier (vintage) picture of Allen (from the remarkable SUNY Buffalo University Archives)

[Allen Ginsberg at the State University of New York at Buffalo, 1966 - Photograph © University of Buffalo Archives]

And here (for no particular reason) another Allen snap

[Allen Ginsberg at Gemini G.E.L artists studio, Los Angeles, 1996]

Le Tympan Marteau, formed by actor and performer Franck Andrieux, is an organization based in Lille (France).
Last year, he combined with Benjamin Duboc on double bass and Christian Pruvost on trumpet to produce "Allen Ginsberg's Dances". The digital album is available here. Video-clips of the work in performance just this week appeared on You Tube and are available here, here, here and here.

Simon Warner, author of the essential compilation Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll - The Beats and Rock Culture, and one of the organizers of the upcoming European Beat Studies Conference in Manchester, England, this summer, is profiled on Michalis Limnios' continuingly exhaustive Blues@Greece space, we're happy to report - see here

Allen Ginsberg Visiting Fellow at the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa this year is Hoa Nguyen. She read and spoke this past Monday at the Performance Art Center on the Arapahoe Campus. More on that occasion here

[Hoa Nguyen]

No major reviews yet of the new Ginsberg book, Wait Till I’m Dead but check out this early word from Forever Lost in Literature - here

Marcia Resnick's show, Poets, Punks and Provacateurs continues at the Howl Happening space in New York. We featured Allen last week. Here's Gregory Corso

[Gregory Corso - Photograph by Marcia Resnick - from Poets, Punks and Provacateurs]

& here's another image from that collection:

[Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corsoand William Burroughs - Photograph by Marcia Resnick - from Poets, Punks and Provacateurs]

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Ginsberg-Orlovsky-Taylor, Wuppertal, Germany, 1983

February 13, 2016, 3:00 am

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Allen Ginsberg Back to Wuppertal 1983

"Back to Wuppertal" is the title of the poem Allen Ginsberg scribbled into the guest-book of the Forum for International Poetry one hour after his arrival in Wuppertal, Germany, on February 16, 1983, where the final performance of a three-month tour through Northern Europe was to take place. Joachim Ortmanns & Wolfgang Mohrhenn's video records a few select moments from that visit.

"Back to Wuppertal in a car through snowy forest, Belgium to Köln / and the highway filled with trans-European trucks,/ Peter bare-footed, toes on the dashboard/ I was humming bass thump part for "Airplane Blues",/Steven reading Lennon's last conversation in a book,/Jurgen Schmidt in his silk foulard sparkled with sequins, driving/ and thinking "Netherland fields pass by, I stay/I pass by, and Netherland fields remain" - and threw up his right hand, remembering - "I just thought that!"

Allen (on harmonium, accompanied by Steven Taylor on guitar, with Peter Orlovsky on back-up vocals) performs "Gospel Noble Truths" ( "Born in this world/You got to suffer...".."Die when you die") and, a little later on, "Father Death Blues" ("Hey, Father Death, I'm flying home"..."My heart is still, as time will tell") and William Blake's "Nurse's Song" ("When the voices of children are heard on the green"…" And all the hills echoèd.")

Following on from "Gospel Noble Truths", Allen recites his celebrated poem, "America", in its entirety, tweaking it occasionally, as was his practice, to include topical or geographically-resonant references (hence "German Trotskyites", "Lutheran Lord's Prayer", "Hamburg is the next to go.."). Allen here camps up the famous last line - "America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel"

Footage of Allen and Peter and Steven in the streets (Allen eating cake) - audio (and eventually video) of Allen reading (again locally-resonant) "Ruhr Gebiet" ("Zu viel industry/zu veil essen/zu viel bier/zu viele zigaretten.." - "Too much industry/too much eats/too much beer/too much cigarettes"…"All the German gold/will save the nation/Build a gold house/ to bury the Devil")

Peter performs his poem, "Good Fuck With Denise" accompanying himself with a variety of theatrical gestures (and likewise slips in a little local acknowledgement - "Good Fuck Mit Denise".."schlafen"..

Also footage here of entry and exit. The film begins with chantedmantra (against a backdrop of photos) and Allen (cigarette in mouth) signing the book, and ends with a crazy and spirited drive, post-performance, back to the airport.

[Allen Ginsberg in Wuppertal - Poems and Songs 1980 (sic) - German CD, S Press (1998)]

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Ginsberg/Podhoretz

February 14, 2016, 3:00 am

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Ginsberg/Podhoretz - Allen versus his arch-nemesis - "When Norman Podhoretz Spent The Night With Allen Ginsberg", Tabletthis month featured a lengthy excerpt from Daniel Oppenheimer's new book Exit Right, "a compelling and beautifully written work of political history", as the author Jason Sokol has described it - "By tracing the stories of six individuals [Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham,Norman Podhoretz, Ronald Reagan, David Horowitz and Christopher Hitchens] Daniel Oppenheimer not only gives us a nuanced look at America's rightward turn, he also tells a more elemental story about political action - about who we are and what we believe and how these things can seem unshakeable one moment yet so tenuous the next".

The Ginsberg-Podhoretz section is drawn, to a large degree, from Podhoretz's own highly-defensive account (from 1997 - "My War With Allen Ginsberg" - reprinted, pretty much verbatim in his 1999 memoir, pointedly titled Ex-Friends (Allen, it should be pointed out, is in good company - the full title of that book is Ex-Friends - Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling,Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer, Allen's sometime Columbia classmate, cultural-critic-turned neo-con, seems to have been extraordinarily adept at pissing people off!)

Podhoretz's most infamous sally was, of course, the essay "The Know-Nothing Bohemians" (specifically about Kerouac but extended to all of the "Beat Generation")

So, Allen here (from the Village Voice, October 1958):

"Podhoretz doesn't write prose, he doesn't know how to write prose and he isn't interested in the technical problems of prose or poetry. His criticism of Jack's spontaneous bop prosodyshows that he can't tell the difference between words as rhythm and words as in diction…(and).. The bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are "INTELLECTUALS" and there are "intellectuals", Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's just writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now - Proust,Wolfe,Faulkner,Joyce. The trouble is Podhoretz has a great ridiculous fat-bellied mind which he pats too often."

and, even more frustated, (to their Columbia classmate, John Hollander - which Podhoretz, revealingly, quotes):

"..(Podhoretz lacks) even the basic ability to tell the difference between prosody and diction (as in his…diatribes on spontaneous bop prosody confusing it with the use of hip talk, not realizing it refers to the rhythmic construction of phrases and sentences). I mean where am I going to begin a serious explanation if I have to deal with such unmitigated stupid ignorant ill-willed inept vanity as that - somebody like that wouldn't listen unless you hit him over the head with a totally new universe, but he's stuck in his own hideous world, I would try, but he scarely has enough heart to hear - etc etc - so all these objections about juvenile delinquency, vulgarity, lack of basic education, bad taste, etc, etc, no form etc, mean it's impossible to discuss things like that - finally I get to see them as so basically wrong (unscientific), so dependent on ridiculous provincial schoolboy ambitions & presuppositions and so lacking contact with practical fact - that it seems a sort of plot almost, a kind of organized mob stupidity - the final camp of its announcing itself as a representation of value or civilization or taste - I mean I give up, that's just too much fucking nasty brass."

One theory for such vindictiveness (and its perpetuation) was thwarted ambition. Paul Berman heretraces it back to Allen's editing of one of Podhoretz's poems in their college magazine, but Podhoretz vigorously denies this: ("..the truth was that my gratitude to Ginsberg for publishing my poem far outweighed my shock at his editing it, and if I was ever "taking revenge" on anything connected with him, it was not his verse but on what he himself called his "vision")

Podhoretz again:

"..I was repelled by Ginsberg's world. In the abstract he spoke of freedom from the oppression of arbitrary social constraints, but in his own work he made no bones about the concrete consequences of this freedom - they were madness, drugs, and sexual perversity. In praising him at first for not "glamorizing" these consequences, I had failed to grasp just how radical he really was.."

Oppenheimer's account (indeed Podhortez's account) focuses, in particular, on a 1958 "summit" (arranged by Ginsberg and Kerouac and warily-attended by Podhoretz)

Allen: "..."the know-nothing bohemians", this big chunk of leaden prose which people took very seriously as a statement of civilized values. It was in Partisan Review, but then the idea spread like trench mouth and finally wound up filtering down to Life magazine and the Luce empire…Kerouac's response was, "This is really too bad. That guy's article will probably wind up confusing a lot of people, and he himself is confused. Why don't we have him to tea?". So we called up Podhoretz and invited him over."

but it was not a successful event:

"The argument they had - for four hours, by Podhoretz's later reckoning - was a multi-leveled one….The argument was also very personal…. With the stakes so high, no quarter could be given, and on they went past midnight, until they ran out of things to throw at each other. As Podhoretz left, Ginsberg threw out one last sally - "We'll get you through your children!"

"We'll get you through your children" - that was the line that got through, that would profoundly haunt him ( ("A decade later (1968) that threat would prove one of the fulcrums around which Podhoretz would execute his hard pivot to the right", Oppenheimer writes).

And Allen too could never quite escape the nagging presence of his right-wing goad. As late asOctober 1996, from the New York Times:

"Sometimes the poet Allen Ginsberg still fantasizes about his old Columbia College friend Norman Podhoretz, who became the conservative editor of Commentary magazine. In Mr Ginsberg's fantasies, Mr Ginsberg is yelling at Mr Podhoretz that the CIA is selling drugs in Los Angeles and yelling that Mr Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl" cannot be read on the radio during most daylight hours because of Federal limitations on obscenity. And he is warring with Mr Podhoretz, who once called beat poets like Mr Ginsber "know-nothing bohemians", about the very nature of poetry itself."

but then, very late in his life, a beautiful revelation,

(from aninterview, with Robert Stewart and Rebekah Presson, reproduced in the Fall 1987 issue of the magazine, New Letters):

"I had a very funny experience a couple of years ago when I dropped some Ecstacy…and I suddenly remembred Norman Podhoretz. Amd I said, Gee, good old Norman, we went to college together. He wanted to be a poet and he thought he'd commit suicide when he was thirty if he didn't get to be a great poet. So that when he got to be thirty, he realized that John Hollander, who was also at college with us, was a poet, and he wasn't. So he had to go some different way for power, and he got very perverse thoughts and started taking revenge on poetry power. Like denouncing Kerouac. He's still denouncing Kerouac as a moral degenerate. And I say, Good old Norman Podhoretz . If he weren't there like a wall I can butt my head against I wouldn't have anybody to hate. And why hate him? He's part of my world, and he's sort of like the character Mr. Meanie or the Bluenose or the Blue Meanie. At the same time, he has some sense in him. And the poor guy is dying, like all of us. So, how could I pile my hatred on him anymore? But did I ever really hate him or was I just sort of fascinated by him?"

He goes further:

"I also saw him as a sort of sacred personage in my life, in a way: someone whose vision is so opposite from mine that it's provocative and interesting - just as my vision is provocative and interesting enough for him to write columns against it in the newspaper. In fact, maybe he's more honest than I am because he attacks me openly. So I should really respect him as one of the sacred personae in the drama of my own transitory existence."

"I thought of Norman. I thought how can I hate him? All those years he's had to suffer all my contumely in my head. It's served as an education, to make me think my thoughts. He's been a great help.Now, said Mr Ginsberg, Mr Podhoretz is "kind of a sacred object on my horizon ." (October, 1996, New York Times)

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Source of the Glamor

February 15, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Sing-Song in "Lament For The Makers"

≪ Previous: Ginsberg/Podhoretz

[Thirty-Fourth and Broadway (Herald Square), New York City c. 1939 - Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt]

Student: What if you live on Broadway?

AG: Well broad/ way, you've got it, you got it made! If you live on Broadway, (you write)
"I went walking down Broadway". The trouble is if you live on Twenty-Fourth Street!

Actually, I wrote a poem when I was twenty-two about living… I came down from my furnished room on Fifteenth Street - a ballad - (which is in the correspondence - I never published it other than in the correspondence - with Neal Cassady - a book called As Ever). But (And) the..second-line is, "Walking up Fifteen Street, musing, almost blind" (getting hit by cars, or something like that). So I did use "Fifteenth Street". [Editorial note - the poem, "3456 W 15th Street" - "I came home from the movies with nothing on my mind,/Trudging up 8th Avenue to 15th almost blind/Waiting for a passenger/ship to go to sea/I lived in a roominghouse attic near the Port Authority…"]

It's the mindfulness and vividness with which you pay attention to your life, or your friends' names, or your street names, when you place them in a poem, that gives it glamor, and you want the glamor. So the glamor comes from your own vivid mindfulness or the vividness in your own mind that comes from being really aware of it, and being aware of the humor of making use of your own symbols to put in place like building blocks in a poem. because maybe, only because maybe they are the names and images that rise in your only mind (they can't rise in anybody else's mind and be any good to you, but if they rise in your mind, and rise repeatedly, then those are the holy objects that you can write about).

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

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Sing-Song in "Lament For The Makers"

February 16, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Sir Thomas Wyatt's Sing-Song

≪ Previous: Source of the Glamor

Allen continues his observations on William Dunbar's "Lament For The Makers"- see also here)

AG: The other thing that I was digging in this poem (Dunbar's "Lament For The Makers") was..this is, I guess, the first that we've had of.. basically..iambic, right? - [Allen moves to the blackboard] - "No state in Erd here standis sicker" - basically, iambic (light and heavy symbols) - Is this iambic?…yes…I was picking it up as basically iambic (which is light-heavy, light-heavy, light-heavy, light-heavy) tetrameter (four beat line, four accents to the line). So this is the first time we've come onto the real big.. the big number in English lyric and ballad, which is the iambic tetrameter - totally four-square, you know, one hundred percent solid, the basic line. The only thing more basic that you could get is tending on more to conversational, or more heroic maybe, that is iambic pentameter (which is what Shakespeare used - he added one more foot) . So, we've got iambic tetrameter, and as we were saying the other day, when you've got a poem like this that has a very solidly-built structure (or, not solidly-built but let's see.. ), that has a basic rhythmic structure that is built-in, that is solid, that is fundamental to the poem, there seem to be two ways of hearing it. One, you hear in the inner ear, the..what do you call it? jingle aspect to it, the metronomic or automatic, or.. what is it? - just the square way of hearing it - da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da..

Student: Sing-song

AG; Sing-song, (yes), sing-song, the sing-song way of hearing it. Then you also hear it the vernacular way as Pat (O'Brien) [his student] was pronouncing it. So there's.. on one hand you've got the sing-song going on inside you and in the structure of the poem, (and) you also have the vernacular common-sense going on in your pronunciation of the poem and the tension between the two is kind of interesting, because, like, you've got this unheard music going along with the heard music, if you go and pronounce it aloud. And the tension..(ah, but, let's see, tension is a word I don't like, it's over-used, but).. simultaneity? of the two, or the overlay of the two (one laid on top of the other), gives a funny kind of sound fullness in the inner ear. So you would hear a great and variable melody, or great variable rhythm, with its rhythm (great variable rhythm). So what I'd like to do is try and read that for the sing-song now, more or less (though my pronunciation of the words is probably not good enough to do it exactly, but this is one of the great sing-song poems, or could be one of the great sing-song poems, for the inner ear), and, since it's the first example of iambic tetrameter that we've stumbled on, or that English poetry stumbled on, or this anthology stumbled on.
And this tetrameter gets.. is here very rough, because we don't know the pronunciation too well and maybe it's not exactly one-hundred-percent mechanical originally. But when we get further on, maybe another century or two, to Sir Thomas Wyatt, we'll get perfect sing-song, almost identical with the vernacular pronunciation. Here it is like a big gap between the sing-song paradigm, sing-song basis and the pronounced-aloud talk basis. When you move up to Wyatt you get the verse so smoothed out, so refined, so sophisticated, it's so slick, so be-boppy and so silvery, that the sing-song is like delicate to the ear, Anyone we can compare them with today maybe? - But.. I was going to try and read that, as more or less a sing-song

[Starting at approximately twenty-and-a-quarter minutes in, Allen attempts to read William Dunbar's "Lament For The Makers" in its entirety (reading concludes at approximately twenty-seven-and-three-quarter minutes in)]

So it's like really bounces along, sort of in the ear, and then, so, from that real strict bounce (then pronouncing aloud), from strict bounce to loose pronounce, you get a greater syncopation. Because the bounce is there in the pronunciation, built-in to the vernacular pronunciation of his day, but if you pronounce it a little looser, then you get what (Bob) Dylan gets when he varies the pronunciation or singing of his songs from performance to performance, according to whatever inflection or significance he wants to put on, what stress, or what word, or what accent, what syllable (he can vary it around) - he can vary it around - he can vary it around - he can vary it around. So, according to your vernacular intention, the day-by-day talk intention, you get two rhythms going at once, in a sense, or rhythm and sub-rhythms, you get back-beats, as well as the regular iambic meter march forward on the foot.

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifteen-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-nine-and-a-half minutes in]

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Sir Thomas Wyatt's Sing-Song

February 17, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Wyatt's Influence

≪ Previous: Sing-Song in "Lament For The Makers"

[Angel Playing Lute - detail from Presentation of The Temple (1510) - Vittore Carpaccio (1466-1525) at the Accademia, Venice, Italy)]

AG: So what's next? - Another funny thing.. Well, there's some (Sir Thomas) Wyatt here. Let's just take one bit - a fast-forward look at Wyatt, find something of Wyatt that sounds good, way on ahead (rustling through anthology) but Wyatt is what? seventeenth-century? - Page 150? - 115 - yeah - no, he's much earlier. We'll get to Wyatt later. I just wanted to find one sing-song poem of Wyatt's… Well, for his.. for a.. that same tetrameter, iambic tetrameter - "My Lute Awake" page 117 (which I'll read aloud in sing-song, because Wyatt is one of the most brilliant sing-song metric masters - he sort of perfected it, I think,and is, for me, almost the ideal, acme. It influenced a lot of my early poetry because it was such strong sing-song, that was like real clear to the ear, real precise and clear to the ear. So I found him immediately.. I found myself immediately attracted to his rhythms because they were so perfect and so clear, and once in a while there'd be something I would stumble on and I'd finally unravel it and figure out what accent he had, it would fall into place so smoothly, I realized what a strange genius he was for that sing-song.

My lute awake! perform the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste,
And end that I have now begun;

For when this song is sung and past,

My lute be still, for I have done.

As to be heard where ear is none,

As lead to grave in marble stone,

My song may pierce her heart as soon;

Should we then sigh or sing or moan?

No, no, my lute, for I have done.

The rocks do not so cruelly

Repulse the waves continually,

As she my suit and affection;

So that I am past remedy,

Whereby my lute and I have done.

Proud of the spoil that thou hast got

Of simple hearts thorough Love's shot,

By whom, unkind, thou hast them won,

Think not he hath his bow forgot,

Although my lute and I have done.

Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain

That makest but game on earnest pain.

Think not alone under the sun

Unquit to cause thy lovers plain,

Although my lute and I have done.

Perchance thee lie wethered and old

The winter nights that are so cold,

Plaining in vain unto the moon;

Thy wishes then dare not be told;

Care then who list, for I have done.

And then may chance thee to repent

The time that thou hast lost and spent

To cause thy lovers sigh and swoon;

Then shalt thou know beauty but lent,

And wish and want as I have done.

Now cease, my lute; this is the last

Labour that thou and I shall waste,

And ended is that we begun.

Now is this song both sung and past:

My lute be still, for I have done.

That's so pretty. That regularity (and what variations there are) and once you understand where to lay your accent .

Another similar(ly) perfect by Wyatt is "Forget Not Yet..", which I think is a variant, using.. I guess some suggestion from old Greek prosody (Sapphic or Alcaic), where you have this little tag line at the end, three lines and a tag line that echoes and repeats and isn't the complete line but just sort of like locks the rhythm in

Forget not yet the tried intent

Of such a truth as I have meant;

My great travail so gladly spent,

Forget not yet.

Forget not yet when first began

The weary life ye know, since whan

The suit, the service, none tell can;

Forget not yet.

Forget not yet the great assays,

The cruel wrong, the scornful ways;

The painful patience in delays,

Forget not yet.

Forget not yet, forget not this,

How long ago hath been and is

The mind that never meant amiss;

Forget not yet.

Forget not then thine own approved,

The which so long hath thee so loved,

Whose steadfast faith yet never moved;

Forget not this.

It's pretty funny because all the little simple syntax words - the "this", the "that", you know, going back and forth - "Forget not yet", "Forget not this", "How long ago", "and is" - just the funny little syntactical tricks he pulls, just to get.. getting right into the rhythmic perfect thing.

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-nine minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-nine minutes in]

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Wyatt's Influence

February 18, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 256

≪ Previous: Sir Thomas Wyatt's Sing-Song

[Portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt - Hans Holbein the Younger (c.1497-1543) - black and colored chalks and pen and ink on pink-primed paper , 37.3 x 27.2cm, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, England]

AG: So that's pentameter. So I guess the next thing we ought to try is an exercise in iambic pentameter quatrains
Student: Tetrameters?
AG: Pardon me
Student: Tetrameters
AG: What is? - Tetrameters, right - like four - iambic tetrameter. So we ought to try writing iambic tetrameter - and what kind of rhyme scheme? - What did (William) Dunbarhave?
Student: AABB
AG: AABB - okay, let's try AABB. So next classroom exercise - iambic tetrameter quatrains - rhyme-scheme AABB, like "intent/meant/spent" (no, it's not like that, but "last/waste.." - but these are more complicated, actually. Dunbar was AABB?
Student: I think so
AG: And these are a little funnier - "last/waste/begun/past/done" - AA.. AABAB - AABAB. Well, I'll try one or the other. For those who have never written iambic tetrameter, try AABB. For those who have and know something about it, try AABAB. If you want to see my efforts in this area, there's a.. I have a whole book of those rhymed poems called The Gates of Wrath, about half a dozen of which are modeled on "My lute awake! perform the last/Labout that thou and I shall waste", modeled on Wyatt, mostly

[Allen reads from "Stanzas Written At Night In Radio City"("If money made the mind more sane…".."Down in Arden I will die…"), and so forth.

That's a poem called "Stanzas Written At Night In Radio City", which were basically an imitation of Thomas Wyatt (I think it was AABB AABBA, or something like that, (a) somewhat complicated rhyme-scheme. You might look that up) - "Stanzas Written At Night In Radio City". If you're ever in the library, Naropa library, I have a book, Gates of Wrath, and that was my one almost-perfect (except for the last stanza, I think) almost-perfect attempt at imitating all this.

I guess the reason that I'm interested in teaching this is that these particular things that I went through for my own ear, that kind of training (both with my father at home, and in school - high-school and college). And, apparently, we.. of my own..of this…of our own generation have so destroyed education by blasting everything open with "fuck" and "shit" and "piss" amd "free-verse" and "On The Road", that education has been disrupted - Or maybe (it was) the Atom Bomb, rather than us, or maybe just the general overpopulation, decay of schools, mixed races, international wars, acid.. acid melting the brains, or just general hopelessness, I think, the coming End-of-the-Earth and Armageddon - So people have stopped reading (or maybe just television cut into all that rhythm). People don't read, they just look at the boob-tube - or play guitar! (but if you play guitar, you've got to know these rhythms, that is, if you're writing music, you've got to have that in you - because, I think, Wyatt probably did sing too (I don't know if Dunbar was sung? - I bet all those early things were - (a) "Lament".. Scotch.. I don't see how they would have any function with just writing it down without singing it a little in some form of song. But I don't know). Wyatt begins "My lute awake! - perform the last/Labour that thou and I shall waste". So, "My lute awake", it's like "I sing of the maiden.." - "My lute awake!" - "Come on, guitar!"

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

↧

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 256

February 19, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Mind Writing Slogans

≪ Previous: Wyatt's Influence

[Allen Ginsberg, photographed at Wichita State University in 1966. The Parnassus Yearbook reported that "Ginsberg caused mixed emotions on campus when he read controversial poetry to over 300 in February"]

"Wichita Vortex Sutra"'s 50th anniversary. Wichita State University Department of History, the Ulrich Museum of Art, and local radio-station KMUW, will be celebrating this Sunday the 50th anniversary of Allen's first full reading of the poem. There will be a panel featuring Dr Jay Price, WSU Professor of History, retired Professor of Philosopy and Comparative Religion (but active participant at the time), Dr Roger Irwin, and independent curator, James W Johnson. Following the discussion, KMUW commentator Jedd Beaudoin will present a reading of the poem.

(Following a chanted mantra, Allen can be heard (on an undated tape from the Robert Creeley collection) reading from the poem - here

and, in 1995 at theKnitting Factory, reading the entire poem, in four segments - here, here, here and here

reading along, with the accompaniment of Philip Glass's piano - here)

The local paper, the Wichita Eagle has a feature with video imagery of some of the locations (and lines from the poem read by videographer, John Albert) - here

For more on the Beats and Kansas , see the content-rich "Beats in Kansas - The Beat Generation In the Heartland" page (including Lee Strieff's detailed analysis - here, Allen's comments, and comments from Paul Carroll, James F Mersmann,Cary Nelson ,Paul Breslin, and Michael Davidson - here, Charles Plymell's first-hand recollections of traveling with Ginsberg - here - and Bruce Conner's revealing note to University of Kansas, now UCSD, librarian, Robert Melton, regarding the derivation of the whole concept of "Wichita Vortex", dating back to as early as 1951)

Rolf Potts' observations (first published inThe Nation, and republished in The Believer) are now ten years old, but still well worth considering - "Howl" is turning fifty [in 2006, this is]", he writes, "to much fanfare , but the less celebrated anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra" has more to tell about poetry and the state of America" - "Poetic language cannot properly commemorate the horrors of war, sure - but, more alarmingly, it has been diluted to the point where it has lost its effectiveness in preventing those horrors in the first place.."Wichita Vortex Sutra reads like a prophetic and final anti-war poem, an elegy for the power of language in an age of competing information."

[Allen Ginsberg ft DJ Spooky- End The Vietnam War remix]

Other news? Allan M Jalon's piece, in the Jewish Daily Forward, "That Time Allen Ginsberg Wrote A Socialist Poem - About Bernie Sanders", that we featured in last Friday's Round-Up is now available on the Forward's web site (alongside a quirky cartoon image by Anya Ulinich) and is accessible - here

and he follows it up with a second article, "When Bernie Sanders Walked Out of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry Reading" (this new story, updates the first and, alongside quotingPhyllis Segura on her Ginsberg-Sanders photograph, quotes Allen's accompanist, Steven Taylor, (recalling an incident that may have happened in 1983 but may well have happened some years later)):

"What happened was we gave a show in some big municipal building…and Bernie got up and introduced Allen..,Bernie was proud to present Allen and Allen was then in the habit, if he had a new poem, he'd try it out on people..and he had a very graphic poem about anal sex. He had this kind of dirty streak, and he liked to talk dirty in public.It was partly gay activism and it was also something that he did."

Jalon's article goes on: "The poem was called "What You Up To?" and it appears in the final edition of Ginsberg's Collected Poems."Sanders", Taylor said, "stood up" from his seat as Ginsberg read, "turned and walked out. You know I thought (at the time), [Jalon quotes Taylor here] "What a nightmare for a politician". I thought, "Oh. God, he's a socialist. Already he's got problems. But now he's got Allen up here reading about anal sex!". It was not a good thing for Allen to do. He should not have done it. He should have been more careful, but he got excited. He got excited when he performed, and he was a great performer…"

[Steven Taylor and Allen Ginsberg performing together in Europe in 1986]

The Mondriaan String Quartet performing in Rotterdam earlier this month, from "September on Jessore Road", (Steven Taylor's setting), their"Allen Ginsberg in the Netherlands - 1983 Revisited"show. The footage was shot byFilip Feij (the original 1991 backdrop footage of Allen and company by Chask)

A trumpet-blast and anti-gentrification warning. What are they doing to (What have they done to) William Blake's grave?. London Mayor, Boris Johnson, despite local council and preservationist entreaties, this past month has given the green light to the destruction of buildings overlooking the famed graveyard, Bunhill Fields, and the construction of "four tower blocks, (architects epiction below) two of which will be 10 and 11 stories high". "Ironically", the local newspaper notes, "the Blake Society has itself spent several years trying unsuccessfully to get planning permission for its own "development"- a 1m headstone to mark the poet and artist's original burial spot, which is currently unmarked. His existing gravestone is in the wrong place."
A petition may still be signed here

[Architects proposed 11-story tower block by London's Bunhill Fields]

[William (and his wife Catherine) Blake's gravestone at Bunhill Fields]

Must-buy music collections. Dust to Digital have just announced this (for pre-order):

"From July to December 1959, Paul Bowles crisscrossed Morocco making recordings of traditional music under the auspices of the Library of Congress. Although thr trip accupied less than six months in a long and busy career, it was the culmination of Bowles's longstanding interest in North African music. The resulting collection remained a musical touchstone for the rest of his life and an important part of his mythology".
More notice of the Bowles collection here and here

More Paul Bowles on the Allen Ginsberg Project - here

[1961 - Paul Bowles -photographed by Allen Ginsberg]

[1966 - Allen Ginsberg debates with the students & journalists in Wichita, Kansas]

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Mind Writing Slogans

February 20, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Skeltonics & Rap

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 256

Rick and Rosemary Ardinger's Limberlost Press in Boise, Idaho, in 1994, published an edition, of 800 copies, of Allen's classic Mind Writing Slogans. There had been, as the dates at the bottom attest, previous gatherings, but this gathering may be regarded as definitive

As Allen writes in the preface there ("Definitions, A Preface"):

Chogyam Trungpa, remarked "Writing is writing the mind", thus the title. Ground, Path and Fruition are common stages of Tibetan style dharma teaching, often condensed into slogans for mind-training traditioned in Eastern thought.

Here, Ground means the situation of mind: we're all amateurs at reading our own minds, but that's all we have to work with, mutability of consciousness, appearance of chaos, our own confusion, inconsistency, awareness, humors & mental information.

Path: How to use, order and select aspects of mind, how accept and work with ordinary mind? We can only write what we know and teach same, what tricks and techniques of focus are practicable?

Fruition: What to expect, what to aim for, what result? Candor - to reveal ourselves to ourselves, reveal ourselves to others, resolve anxiety of confusion & relieve our own and others' sufferings.

Two decades' experience teaching poetics at Naropa Institute, half decade at Brooklyn College, and occasional workshops at Zen Center& Shambhala/Dharmadhatu weekends have boiled down to brief mottos from many sources found useful to guide myself and others in the experience of "writing the mind"

The gist, the distillation, of Allen's teaching practice., an invaluable resource.

Here are his "Mind Writing Slogans"

MIND WRITING SLOGANS

"First Thought is Best in Art, Second in Other Matters."
— William Blake

I Background (Situation, Or Primary Perception)

"First Thought, Best Thought"— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
"Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts."— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
"The Mind must be loose."— John Adams
"One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception."— Charles Olson, "Projective Verse"
"My writing is a picture of the mind moving."— Philip Whalen
Surprise Mind — Allen Ginsberg
"The old pond, a frog jumps in, Kerplunk!"— Basho
"Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance."— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes."––Walt Whitman
"...What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature? ... Negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."—John Keats
"Form is never more than an extension of content. — Robert Creeley to Charles Olson
"Form follows function."—Frank Lloyd Wright* (* Quoting his mentor: Louis Sullivan).
Ordinary Mind includes eternal perceptions. — A. G.
"Nothing is better for being Eternal

Nor so white as the white that dies of a day."— Louis Zukofsky

Notice what you notice. — A. G.
Catch yourself thinking. — A. G.
Observe what’s vivid. — A. G.
Vividness is self-selecting. — A. G.
"Spots of Time"— William Wordsworth
If we don’t show anyone we’re free to write anything. –– A. G.
"My mind is open to itself."— Gelek Rinpoche
"Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound."— Charles Reznikoff

II Path (Method, Or Recognition)

"No ideas but in things.""... No ideas but in the Facts."— William Carlos Williams
"Close to the nose."— William Carlos Williams
"Sight is where the eye hits."— Louis Zukofsky
"Clamp the mind down on objects."— William Carlos Williams
"Direct treatment of the thing ... (or object)."— Ezra Pound
"Presentation, not reference."— Ezra Pound
"Give me a for instance."— vernacular
"Show not tell."— vernacular
"The natural object is always the adequate symbol."— Ezra Pound
"Things are symbols of themselves."— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
"Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little ones.
He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars.
General Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and Flatterer
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars." — William Blake
"And being old she put a skin / on everything she said."— W. B. Yeats
"Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better."— Jack Kerouac
"Details are the Life of Prose."— Jack Kerouac
Intense fragments of spoken idiom best. — A. G.
"Economy of Words"— Ezra Pound
"Tailoring"—Gregory Corso
Maximum information, minimum number of syllables. –– A. G.
Syntax condensed, sound is solid. — A. G.
Savor vowels, appreciate consonants. — A. G.
"Compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome."— Ezra Pound
"... awareness ... of the tone leading of the vowels."— Ezra Pound
"... an attempt to approximate classical quantitative meters . . . — Ezra Pound
"Lower limit speech, upper limit song"— Louis Zukofsky
"Phanopoeia, Melopoeia, Logopoeia."— Ezra Pound
"Sight. Sound & Intellect."— Louis Zukofsky
"Only emotion objectified endures."— Louis Zukofsky

III Fruition (Result, Or Appreciation)

Spiritus = Breathing = Inspiration = Unobstructed Breath
"Alone with the Alone"— Plotinus
Sunyata (Sanskrit) = Ku (Japanese) = Emptiness
"What’s the sound of one hand clapping?"— Zenkoan
"What’s the face you had before you were born?"— Zen koan
Vipassana (Pali) = Clear Seeing
"Stop the world"— Carlos Castaneda
"The purpose of art is to stop time."— Bob Dylan
"the unspeakable visions of the individual — Jack Kerouac
"I am going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly."— Chuang Tzu (translated by Burton Watson)
"Candor"—Walt Whitman
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." — William Shakespeare
"Contact"— A Magazine, Nathaniel West & William Carlos Williams, editors.
"God appears & God is Light
To those poor souls who dwell in Night.
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of Day."— William Blake
"Subject is known by what she sees."— A. G.
Others can measure their visions by what we see. –– A. G.
Candor ends paranoia. — A. G.
"Willingness to be Fool."— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
"Day & Night / you’re all right."— Gregory Corso
Tyger: "Humility is Beatness."— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A. G.
Lion: "Surprise Mind"— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A. G.
Garuda: "Crazy Wisdom Outrageousness"— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
Dragon: "Unborn Inscrutability"— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
"To be men not destroyers"— Ezra Pound
Speech synchronizes mind & body — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
"The Emperor unites Heaven & Earth"— Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"—Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Make it new"— Ezra Pound
"When the music changes, the walls of the city shake"— Plato
"Every third thought shall be my grave — W. Shakespeare, The Tempest
"That in black ink my love may still shine bright."–– W. Shakespeare, Sonnets
"Only emotion endures"— Ezra Pound
"Well while I’m here I’ll
       do the work —
and what’s the Work?
     To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
     dumbshow."— A. G.
"... Kindness, sweetest of the small notes in the world’s ache, most modest & gentle of the elements entered man before history and became his daily connection, let no man tell you otherwise."— Carl Rakosi
"To diminish the mass of human and sentient sufferings."— Gelek Rinpoche

Naropa Institute, July 1992, New York, March 5, 1993, New York, June 27, 1993

Jacqueline Gens, over at Poetry Mind, in her commentary on these phrases and observations, notes their genesis in his earlier collocation, (his poem from 1986), "Cosmopolitan Greetings" (the title-poem of a subsequent volume) - "a primary political/literary manifesto of his aesthetic". Some of the observations first appeared there.

Here's that poem:

Cosmopolitan Greetings

Stand up against governments, against God.

Stay irresponsible.
Say only what we know & imagine.
Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute.
Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.
Observe what’s vivid.
Notice what you notice.
Catch yourself thinking.
Vividness is self-selecting.
If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.
Remember the future.
Freedom costs little in the U.S.
Advise only myself.
Don’t drink yourself to death.
Two molecules clanking us against each other require an observer to become
scientific data.
The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal
world (after Einstein).
The universe is subjective.
Walt Whitman celebrated Person.
We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.
Universe is Person.
Inside skull is vast as outside skull.
What’s in between thoughts?
Mind is outer space.
What do we say to ourselves in bed at night, making no sound?
“First thought, best thought.”
Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.
Maximum information, minimum number of syllables.
Syntax condensed, sound is solid.
Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.
Move with rhythm, roll with vowels.
Consonants around vowels make sense.
Savor vowels, appreciate consonants.
Subject is known by what she sees.
Others can measure their vision by what we see.
Candor ends paranoia

"During the period that I worked for Allen in his NYC office (1989-1994)", she writes, "the Mind Writing Slogans underwent considerable expansion….Towards the end of his life, Allen was in the process of creating an anthology of writing to go with each slogan."

Sadly, he didn't live to complete this.

From 1985:

"It's a question of writing your own mind on a piece of paper. Through poetry you could find your own state of mind. (And) That's precisely the concept of haiku: writing your mind" - "Pragmatism and Practice - An Interview with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche", published in the Vajradhatu Sun, June/July 1985, (and reprinted in The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa, Volume 8)

May these Mind Writing Slogans continue to be of illumination and use.

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Skeltonics & Rap

February 22, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Skelton - Masculine & Feminine Rhymes

≪ Previous: Mind Writing Slogans

AG: So then there's (John) Skelton, another funny guy - for sound. Where is Skelton here? What page have we got Skelton on?
Student: Seventy-Six
AG: Yeah, right after (William Dunbar). Seventy six-seventy seven. There is a form of poetry called Skeltonics. Does anybody know what they are? Can anybody explain Skeltonics here? - I can't - I'll have to explain it next time. I'll look it up. But I hear it anyway, so.. I wanted to read them aloud and see what they sound like. It's a short line - two, apparently two accents to the line, generally, sometimes varied, of variable line-lengths (sometimes two, sometimes three). What.. [to Student] do you have any particular understanding of Skeltonics?
Student: Well, on thirteen..page thirteen to sixteen (in our anthology), they have a little (note on it)
AG: Okay, what do they say? What have they got to say? - Oh yes, they have it under…[Allen reads - "loosely rhythmic lines of two or three accents each, rhyming on the same word for as many as six lines together, exemplified by their inventor, John Skelton". Okay, two accents or three accents, as that first poem in here, many rhymes in a row. It's kind of like.. it's nor far from… has anybody heardthe new [1980] disco rapping records?

Student: Yeah
AG: It's not too dissimilar to the new rapping style where you have many repeated rhythms (because you'r making it up as you go along and then you repeat it (and) get to stuck on one line over and over again with short lines). They're not totally dissimilar, because there's a basic form - It seems to be an archetypal form - "It's simple norm/in any dorm/without any harm" - you just go on - "keep making rhymes/any old time, if you're a student/or if you're prudent, if you're a professor/or have lesser intelligence/ you join the dance. You just do it easy/cos 'it's very please-y/ and right as the mind/instant rhymes/every time." So it's some sort of archetypal thing for the human mind - the Skeltonic form. I mean, it doesn't require a long thought, it just requires, like, the baby mind to produce babble in rhyme. The loose Skeltonics in modern rapping. You know rapping? What I'm speaking of the "dirty dozens", or negro form of standing on a street corner putting each other down in the most extravagent and brilliant possible language with rhymes. There are many different forms of that. I think I mentioned it the other day - "dirty dozens" - a number of different forms - the"signifying monkey" is one ("said the monkey to the tiger one sunny day" - or "said the monkey to the elephant one sunny day" - or - "the monkey to the lion" ("said the monkey to the lion one sunny day" - "one sunny day")

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

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Skelton - Masculine & Feminine Rhymes

February 23, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: John Skelton's "To Mistress Margaret Hussey"

≪ Previous: Skeltonics & Rap

Anne Waldman: A couple of notes here, if you want, this is in the Collected Skelton
AG: Oh, great. Where did you get it?..
Anne Waldman: In England.
AG: Well, do you have anything specific? Is there something that you particularly wanted to read?
Anne Waldman Well it just says, "Such vernacular.." - it talks about the vernacular energy of his vocabulary..
AG; Uh-huh
Anne Waldman (begins reading) - "..Such vernacular vigour releases itself in the verse form that bears his name - the "Skeltonic" or the "Skeltoniad",  readily identifiable by its mono-rhyme leashess that extend for twelve to fourteen lines at times and are eternally distinguished by two or three accents per line. The stresses are often underscored by alliteration, which in turn may link together two or three lines. The real elements of control in the Skeltonic, however, are the couplet and triplet, which provide both points of departure for, and pauses within,  the more spectacular itemization and documentation, mental excitement...
AG: Slow, slow.. So couplet..
Anne Waldman: Couplet and triplet.
AG: That's the key thing, I think, that was... What was that sentence?
Anne Waldman: "The real elements of control in the Skeltonic, however, are the couplet and triplet.."
AG: That is two lines rhymed or three lines rhymed together.
Anne Waldman: "..which provide both lines of departure for and pauses within the more spectacular itemization and documentation, mental excitement and verbal virtuosity of the rhyme leash.."
AG: "Rhyme leash". By "rhyme leash", you mean a leash that (was the) same rhyme running for five, six, seven, eight lines ..
Anne Waldman: Or sometimes fourteen lines
AG: Yes, and then that's interrupted by a triplet or doublet or triplet - double-rhyme or triple-rhyme

Student: What is a doublet (or triplet)?
AG: I mean…"So joyously/ So maidenly/ So womanly/Her demeaning/ In every thing,/Far, far passing/ That I can indite/Or suffice to write" - Those are, you know, just two..two lines rhymed…two.. See, it runs on, sometimes, six short lines in a row with the same rhyme, but every once in a while, or more often, broken up into two lines in a row with a rhyme, or three lines in a row with a rhyme - Dig? - So I just said "doublet", I just made up "doublet" (doublet is a pair of pants!)
Student: Six-lines-in-a-row rhymes, so why not a sextuplet, or a..
AG: Well, yeah
Student: Why a doublet?
AG: I just said it right out of my mouth that minute, I didn' t mean it! I was just trying to say there are.. the book there says, very interestingly, that one way you can (kind of) bring it back home, to control, one way you can bring it back home, is all of a sudden you just have two lines rhyming, or three lines rhyming, instead of a whole run of six.  So that, in other words, it's not this invariable monotonous same rhyme over and over and over, line, line, line, line, six times, seven times. All of a sudden you have "trip/trap "or "trip/skip" and "merry/cherry/berry", and then "moon/June/spoon/.. foon/ goon/ boon/oom /woom/ boom
Anne Waldman:"Pull My Daisy"
AG: - "daisy/maisy" - then "daisy/maisy"
And also, apparently, I think, from my own ear, it varies from masculine rhymes, (which are single syllables, like "find/kind", right?) - does anybody know about masculine and feminine rhymes? - The masculine rhymes are a single syllable. Feminine rhymes are two.. double or triple syllable - triple?
Anne Waldman: Can be.
AG: Yeah - "Madness/Badness" - two syllables. That's considered what is called a feminine rhyme. See, the masculine is the hard . So, "right/light", "creep/sleep" - but
"indict/rewrite".. well, that's not.. what else is there?
Student: "Flower/hour"
AG: - "flower/hour"?, - "maidenly/womanly"? (that's a three syllable line,
"maidenly/womanly" - the words are all three syllable, but "-enly" is two syllables that rhyme - "..enly/..anly" - "maidenly/womanly")
- "meaning/everything" - I guess the accent is on the first of the two syllables in the feminine rhyme - (When it's) one syllable (and) (then) the accent naturally (falls) on that one syllable - "Heart/smart" - "You're entered in my heart/That's why I got so smart". So the accent falls at the end of the line. In the feminine rhyme, apparently, the accent will fall not on the last syllable but the syllable before. So.. so.. or the... an earlier syllable in the word, like "joyously/maidenly", so it's actually "joy-ously/maid-enly". Is there any distinction between two syllables ending rhymes and three syllables ending in rhymes? does anybody know? Are there different words for those? Is anybody unclear that there's one-syllable rhymes, two-syllable rhymes, three syllable rhymes? Everybody knows about, not knows about, but everybody knows what we're talking about?

Student: I don't quite know
Peter Orlovsky [sitting in on the class]: I don't...
AG: Okay.. Peter doesn't…this..this..there is some dyslexia, occasionally, among geniuses, that can't follow one-and-one-is-two. So - "glad/bad", that's masculine and it's one syllable
Peter Orlovsky: How do you know it's masculine?
AG: It's called masculine. When it's just one syllable it's called masculine rhyme.
Peter Orlovsky: Where's the one syllable? So is one syllable?
AG: Glad
Peter Orlovsky: Glad's one syllable.
AG: Mad - "I am so glad/You are so mad" - "I think I am so glad/to find you are so mad"
Peter Orlovsky: I get it, I got it...
AG: "I think I am so glad/to find you are so mad", or "I think I am quite glad/to find you are so mad/that if we had to sit/I sure would lose my wit". So "glad/mad","wit/sit", they're one syllable..
Peter Orlovsky: That's masculine?
AG: ..and it's got one accent, and it is called"masculine" (it might be called "glump rhyme", or it might be called "hard rhyme", but it happens to be called masculine). And then "feminine" rhyme is one where there's more than one syllable - "Much mirth and no madness/All good and no badness" - "madness/badness" - "Much mirth and no madness/All good and no badness" - that's different, that's feminine form and it has two syllables, in that case, and the accent seems to fall on the first of the two syllables - "Much mirth and no madness/All good and no badness". Then there are three-syllable lines - "So joy-ous-ly/So mai-den-ly/ So wom-an-ly/Her demean-ing/ In every-thing"
Student: The rhyme there is only two syllables?
AG: Huh?
Student (2) : The rhyme is only one syllable ("-ly" and "-ly")
AG: No, well, "..endly/..anly". (It is) "joyously/maidenly". I think they're.. (we're on page seventy-six of that…)
Student: (I wonder) if all the syllables have to rhyme?
AG: They… At best they do . If they didn't all rhyme, then you would have feminine rhyme but the second syllable off-rhyme, first syllable off-rhyme (they have a thing called "off-rhymes" too - do you know "off-rhyme"? - it's only a slant rhyme or off-rhyme, they don't exactly rhyme, like, "In this room, I am a bard/I'll write on the black board" - "I'll write it up on the blackboard" - "In this room, I am a bard/I'll write it up on the blackboard". So that's off-rhyme, feminine off-rhyme - (no, "bard/board" would be another thing, you can get them mixed)...well, anyway. Well, what does it say about feminine rhyme in the… you have a dictionary at the back (of your anthology)? - Okay, on page thirteen-ten, there's more of an explanation - "Where rhyming comes from nobody knows"..anyway.."In prosody, rhyme refers to a.. (this is page thirteen-ten) close correspondence of vowel and consonant.." - [Allen breaks off reading] - I don't know what that is, it's (too hard to contemplate"- [resumes direct explanation] -  "rude/brood", "be mute/dispute""singing/springing""relation/sensation". Now.. when lines end on the accented line, like "rude/brood" it's called masculine. Otherwise ("singing/springing"), feminine". Then there's a thing there called a rime riche, which is puns, where the two word that are spelt sound alike but are spelt different, but that's, sort of, not fair! (well, it doesn't sound so good, unless you want to be a little bit sly), so that's used for sly-ness or logopoeia (logopoeia , the dance of the intellect among words), when you have rime-riche or pun rhymes rather than a real difference between the two words
Student: Sometimes it's very hard for the eye too - the sight rhyme
AG: Er.. I don't know. What is a sight-rhyme. What do you mean?
Student: Like the words are close but they don't rhyme
AG: They're not pronounced the same? They're not pronounced.. like..can you give me a instance
Student :  Like "rime" and riche"? - the "r" and "i".?  (I don't know. I thought of sight rhyme, and I thought that was...)
AG: I'm not sure. I forgot. I've heard of it. Rime riche - that would be actually, a. kind of...what's the word for that when the first syllable, where the beginning of the word rhymes rather than the end?
Student: I don't know.
AG: Okay, well there is one. They're interesting, where you'd have the beginning of the word rhyme rather than the end of the word. I/we'll check it out. It'll rise, it'll come up sooner or later in the course of these things. Anyway, I just wanted to point out the difference between masculine and feminine rhymes.

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

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