John Skelton's "To Mistress Margaret Hussey"

February 24, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: John Skelton & Skeltonics continues

≪ Previous: Skelton - Masculine & Feminine Rhymes

$

0

0

AG: So how does this sound in Skelton -  ["To Mistress Margaret Hussey"] - "Merry  Margaret/  As Midsummer flower/Gentle as a falcon.." (well, that's (page) seventy-six, back to (page) seventy-six). This is his classic poem. This is like the warhorse that is in every anthology, "Merry Margaret.." - on page seventy-six - "To Mistress Margaret Hussey" - [Allen reads the poem in its entirety]

Merry Margaret,

          As midsummer flower,

      Gentle as a falcon

      Or hawk of the tower:

With solace and gladness,

Much mirth and no madness,

All good and no badness;

          So joyously,

          So maidenly,

          So womanly

          Her demeaning

          In every thing,

          Far, far passing

          That I can indite,

          Or suffice to write

Of Merry Margaret

      As midsummer flower,

Gentle as falcon

Or hawk of the tower.

      As patient and still

And as full of good will

As fair Isaphill,

Coriander,

Sweet pomander,

Good Cassander,

Steadfast of thought,

Well made, well wrought,

Far may be sought 

Ere that ye can find

So courteous, so kind

As Merry Margaret,

      This midsummer flower,

Gentle as falcon

Or hawk of the tower.

That's really pretty, that's like a really nice piece of music and rhymes and rhythmics. So I guess what it is, it's like doggerel, almost (you know doggerel?) . That is to say, doggeral is.. the bad poetr(y) ("Doggerel"is a word for bad poetry, which is  the kind that you just sort of make up all on the spot, over a bottle of beer, saying, like that, and "I'm gonna get you, or bet you",  or, if it's extended out to, like, bad poetry, like Robert Service (supposedly bad poetry), Robert Service, or Barrack-Room Ballads, where the rhymes are obvious, where it's more or less stereotyped, or where there's a funny kind of home-made effect  - the funny home-made effect here, now this is a little bit like doggerel, when it gets to "Far, far passing/That I can indite/Or suffice to write", I mean, just repeating himself there - "I can indite/Or suffice to write" - "indite" means "write down", anyway. So he's just saying "I can write or I can write" - "Or suffice to write" - "That I can indite/Or suffice to write" - (How do you pronounce "suffice"? - "surfice" or "suffice"? - Who knows? - Is it "surfice" or "suffice"? - Suffice.

AG So how many here have read Skelton ever before (raise your hand)?
Student:  Red Skelton !! 
AG: Well, I didn't say you.. ..how many here had read Skelton? - Tell me - one-two-three.. raise your hands higher. I can't count them if you...
Student: I read him and forgot.
AG: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, say, out of…  so under half. Under half of this class has read Skelton. But Skelton is so great that they have a whole form of poetry named after him - Skeltonics. So he's obviously a big stepping-stone in English poetry. He must've invented it himself. I bet he got it out of vernacular, you know, rhyming, rhyming games, you know village rhyming games and people drunk at a tavern. I haven't read a great deal of his work so I really don't know much about him. Yeah?
Student: I just have a question. Line three and four, it says she's as "gentle as a falcon" or a hawk. Are falcons and hawks gentle?
AG: Well, we've got a footnote - "A hawk trained to fly…"
Student: Trained hawk, then.  
Anne Waldman: Also, there's a footnote in here that says a "gentle falcon" is a young falcon, is a kind of falcon.
AG: Uh-huh. A hawk of the tower is one, you know, who's obviously the pet hawk. Of course that's what the whole point is - Mistress Margaret is.. pretty far-out, but with her, she's gentle - with him, with him, she's…
Anne Waldman(reading) : "..of excellent breed or spirit, here also an epithet defining the species falcon-gentle, the female and young of the.. goshawk"?
Student: Goshawk 
AG: Goshawk.What's a goshawk? Anybody know?
Student: It's a kind of hawk
AG: A kind of falcon… baby falcon maybe?  small falcon...

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

---

John Skelton & Skeltonics continues

February 25, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 257

≪ Previous: John Skelton's "To Mistress Margaret Hussey"

$

0

0

                                      ["With solace and gladness/Much mirth and no madness"]

AG: Well, (John) Skelton is really interesting.  (W.H.) Auden got on to Skelton also. In much of Auden's writing, there's a little Skeltonics. I've been using Skeltonics for rhymed poems that I write fast on the instant, usually a series of the same rhymes or rhymes repeated, for a series of love poems that I've been working on over the last couple of years and two samples are at the end of a book called Mind Breaths, the last book I wrote. There are two love poems which are quasi-Skeltonics, that is done fast, on the spot, more or less untouched, the whole point getting the idea across with fast rhyme rapping. Generally, two accents to the line, and the real interesting thing about Skeltonics is that the… you shift your accents around real funny so that you can stumble around trying to read it but when you do read it the right way it sounds just right - like "Mistress (Margaret)", like this. You know, it's a little awkward to get "With solace and gladness/Much mirth and no madness", but actually "With solace and gladness/Much mirth and no madness" (you say "much mirth" - that's what you say - "much mirth" - No-one would ever say "much mirth" ("You've got much mirth"), you'd say, "She's got much mirth". So, "With solace and gladness/Much mirth and no madness" ("no" would also be accented slightly) but still "solace and gladness" and "mirth and madness". So the heavy accent in that line is basically a two accent line. That clear? or is all this confusing? Is anybody being confused by discussing these accents in detail? - or feel that it's out of.. out of.. off the wall to think about it?  The reason it's not off the wall to think about it is..it's actually pretty simple. What's not simple or what's interesting or funny is that you see in these great classic poems how the basic rule is constantly broken in funny ways, and how funny these guys are in breaking the rule, because their ears are so human - "Much mirth and no madness" - "..solace and gladness/Much mirth and no madness" - so that it doesn't get too metronomic, so that it doesn't get too dumbly repetitive, but, instead you've got all the prettiness of , like, a good jazz musician making..  making little variations every time he has a mind for it. The variations forced on you by the fact that you've got something to say like "Much mirth..""mirth and no madness" . It would be boring if it said - "Much mirth.."""With solace and gladness/Much mirth and madness",  or something,  "With solace and gladness/With mirth and madness"? - "With solace and gladness/And mirth and no madness"? - It still wouldn't be any good - "With solace and gladness/And mirth and no madness" (that'd be interesting,, you see, doubling up on "And mirth and no madness", that little kink would be funny, but, when you get "With solace and gladness/Much mirth and no madness" - da da-da da da-da, dat-da-da de-da-da - then it gets to a funny little gallop, horse gallop, much more   da da-da, da da-da. Da da-da Da da-da, Da da-da-da, Da-da. Instead of the da-da-da-da-da da  da-da-da-da-da, Da-da da da-da, da da-da, da da-da. Are you following that? So anybody with any kind of  heart-beat.. heart-ear, heart-ear rhythm get that funny skipping in his… just as a matter of humor, in talk, just to keep it going, just to keep it alive. Also because the mind keeps intruding funny extra ideas that you've got to squeeze them in somehow. That's the real reason that.. Other ideas come up that have got to be squeezed in fast without breaking the gallop, without breaking the march ahead of the rhythm. So, instead of eliminating your thoughts as they rise when you're writing in rhyme, you include them in such a funny way that they can be..included (so that they can be included in this funny way that will syncopate the line). My own theory is that variation and syncopation in lines comes from having a rich brain, where lots of thoughts rise, and have to be squosen into the line
Student: Squosen?
AG: Squosen.  Squosen. Sure. Because you got to do it fast, that's why they're "squosen"! It's why they're not squeezed properly, they're never squeezed properly just squosen in! - Yeah?

Student: When you first started (working with short lines and then started rhyming, did you know then that you were working in Skeltonics - or did you find out that that was called that later?

AG: No. I'd known Skelton's poetry for a long time and I'd read enough of it to get it in my bloodstream, bones, or something, into my nervous system. In.. I think I thought of it while I was writing. But the rhythm itself is more basic than the name of the rhythm. So you hear a run-along on the rhythm and you say, "oh yeah, that's the Skelton, good ol' Skelton, he's back", or, "he did it" - or, you know, while writing, you remember it, you remember the name, while writing. I mean, you might be running and remember, "Oh, I'm running". You might be walking along the road fast and start going after the bus a little faster but not quite running. And as you're running, you may remember, "Oh this is called a trot, I'm trotting". In other words, you don't think of Skelton, think of the name and then apply it. You think of the rhythm and then you remember that's what it is. In other words, if you read this enough, aloud, say four or five times, you've got the rhythm. It's like a pill you take, again, that permenantly leaves an impression on the nervous system and that rises up again, so you hear it. I mean, just like any number of times in your life "Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells", some rhythm relating to "Jingle Bells" will arise  or "Jack and Jill went up the…" - da da da-da, da da da-da, da-da da-da da-da - "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water" - that just comes. You might not even remember it was "Jack and Jill.." but you get that rhythm. So the Skeltonic rhythm is really useful if you want to do fast modern rapping writing .

Now for that kind of thing, for fast modern rhyming rapping Skeltonics, the temptation would be to do this funny, childish, television-commercial, ironic, whatever, dopey, stuff. The interesting thing is to take a serious subject and do it that way . That, in a way, was.. some of the poems in the imitations of "I Syng of A Mayden" that I got were tainted a little bit with that kind of a humor (which is basically sort of sophomoric) . I mean, in other words, the rhyme gives rise to satire and humor and goofiness, however, to have to keep a straight mind and use that mind to say something serious, is really interesting (because then it goes right through the heart). But if you're trying to say something really serious with that kind of doggerel bad rhymes.. So if you're doing these exercises, try not to make them funny. I mean, that's easy. You know,  in other words, you can make it funny by burlesquing the idea of rhyming and then just rhyme things silly anyway, but that.. sort of..the idea is…And also, try not to make them in archaic  "where're's" and ors, and inversions, using archaic inversions. The thing to do is modern American serious vernacular speech fitted to these rhymes, or hearing the rhythms of vernacular speech that fit these rhymes (because some of these poems I got were making fun of writing the poem, rather than, you know, forgetting about you writing a poem but, you know, just actually write about something real and use that form. That's one where it gets.. That's where you can go into the anthologies and look at... (you can be immortal if you do that!) - get serious - to get serious, you could be immortal! - you could do (be in) the Norton Anthology!)

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

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 257

February 26, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Allen Ginsberg 1969 University of Arizona Reading

≪ Previous: John Skelton & Skeltonics continues

$

0

0

   [Cadets read "Howl", February 19, 1991, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia. Photo Copyright © Gordon Ball, 2006.]

Gordon Ball's iconic photograph of cadets at Virginia Military Institutereading copies of Howl  has, of course, a back-story. Occasioned by Iain Sinclair's review-article, "Retro-Selfies" in a recent London Review of Books and Alan Baragona's letters-to-the-editor reply, John May in The Generalist tracks the tale. Quoting Baragona ('the guy who.. arranged for Ginsberg to visit the Academy"), he writes: "Iain Sinclair is within his rights to scorn the co-opting of Beat Generation rebelliousness as a way to defang it but he is mistaken in using Allen Ginsberg's visit to the Virginia Military Institute in 1991 and my friend Gordon Ball's well-known photograph of cadets reading Howl to make his point…It's true that some cadets, administrators, alumni, and faculty were unhappy about it, though not because of Ginsberg's homosexuality or drug use so much as for his pacifism during the first Gulf War. But there were also many people in all those categories who were excited by the visit, and the administration supported us, even requiring the entire corps to attend (his) poetry reading. Ginsberg was aware of this and at the intermission told the cadets that as far as he was concerned they had fulfilled their obligation and were free to leave. Roughly two-thirds of the corps stayed for the second half. Afterwards, cadets crowded around Ginsberg to speak with him and later lined up at the bookstore to get their copies of Howl autographed…. What you see in Gordon's photo is not frowning, but concentration, weariness, and some confusion as Ginsberg walked students through this challenging poem. This is a class of freshmen, few, if any, are English majors. How do you expect them to look?"
Baragoma notes that Allen stayed for a whole week, recited "Howl" publicly for the first time in ten years, and, aside from the public reading, conducted a workshop, for any  students who might be interested, in transcendental meditation. 
Far from staged, or a study in contempt, Ball's photo registers a very touching and very thoughtful and sincere moment in "meeting of the minds"

Hilary Holiday (Herbert Huncke's biographer) interviews maverick journalist and all-around Beat-o-phile Jan Hermanthis month in International Times
HH: How would you sum up the significance of the Beats as writers rather than personalities?
JH: Kerouac has had a huge influence on readers worldwide. I'm sure more people have read On The Roadthan ever read "Howl". But Ginsberg may be more significant a writer than Kerouac in terms of literary impact because of what I believe is the long-lasting influence of "Howl" on poets and poetry itself. I don't think On The Road has had an equivalent influence on novelists, notwithstanding its popularity"
For more of the interview - see here

From the new collection, Wait Till I'm Dead - UnCollected Poems, theLA Timesfeatures the poem, "Spring night, at four a.m.", a poem from May 1976 ("Spring night four a.m./Garbage lurks by the glass windows/Two guys light a match…") 
- and Craig Morgan Teicher, reviewing the book - "One doesn't read this book because these poems in particular are important, but because it's Ginsberg, whose importance is unquestionable. Among his many roles in 20th century culture - '60's protest jokester [sic], Zen ambassador, literary lion - he was also, for many, the gateway poet.""These", Teicher goes on, "are not unlike other Ginsberg poems - fierce, funny, libidinous, subversive - but here they afford a fresh chronological tour of Ginsberg's life, which is also one version of the story of the second half of the 20th century."
And - "Ginsberg made his own meaning of the present tense: His poems are set insistently in the now; their power isn't in particular lines so much as the whole aesthetic, the continuous decision to return, again and again, to his own mind and perceptions, like a meditator to his breathing. He treats everything with an utterly absorbing present-tense vividness, which this book lets us view through grown-up eyes".

For a less "grown-up" review, a curmudgeon counterpoint, there's the predictably sour response from oneMicah Mattix,"assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University", in the right-wing Washington Free Beacon- 
Under the provocative headline, "Allen Ginsberg-Bore", he writes:

 "...one thing Ginsberg isn't is original, or to put it more accurately. he is original but almost always in the same way…his work as a whole is surprisingly predictable…(and) it's not just Ginsberg's syntax that is repetitive….Sometimes the metaphors make sense. Other times they are an end in themselves, and, freed of any obligation to be meaningful, they are the easiest things to create…The accumulated effect of all this…is not shock but a numbing boredom…Every writer has a limited bag of tricks….the problem with Ginsberg's tricks is that they don't work,, or not anymore, or, if they still do, only partially…There is a Ginsberg that is worth reading, but what he needs is a volume of poems about half the size of the current 480-pageSelected Poems. In other words, a very selective selected poems and not more uncollected poetry…" 

Has not the reviewer heard of The Essential Ginsberg? (indeed, the now still-troubling reviewer-neglect for that particular book) - 
Here's some valuable notesif you're using that as a teaching tool. 

The upcoming planned Pompidou Center Beat exhibition in Paris continues to develop. Here's further word on it.

Billy Woodberry'sBob Kaufman movie, When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead, premiered in New York last week. Stephen Meisel in The Cornell Daily Sun addresses the marginalization of Kaufman.
Here's the cover of Kaufman's Pocket Poets City Lights volume (from 1967):

and Kaufman in French translation:

Huerga & Fierronext month in Spain, will publish the first ever (bilingual - English-Spanish) edition of Kaufman's poetry.

An account of last weekend's Wichita Vortex Sutra celebrations -here

Bert Stratton, looking back to college days too, recalls (fondly) "How Allen Ginsberg Messed Me Up" (in the Ann Arbor Observer)  

More book news (and great book news):

Just out (just reprinted byNew York Review of Books), Bob Rosenthal (Allen's long-time secretary)'s "70's Cult Classic', Cleaning Up New York. Richard Hell writes "I first read Cleaning Up New York when it was published in the 1970's and I've been recommending it to people  ever since. It's one of those great, rare works the style of which - immaculate, with unexpected descriptor glints, and funny,low-key frankness - perfectly embodies its subject, namely the revelation of soft shine in humble corners of New York. It's a miracle and you don't have to be clean to appreciate it. And Luc Sante writes, "Bob Rosenthal's Cleaning Up New York is a perfect little gem of a book. There is not one wasted or misplaced word in this chronicle, which manages to contain an awful lot of the world in its few pages. It's not only about the city and its range of denizens, but also about the art of living, the satisfaction of humble work, the way poetry arises from daily experience, and if that weren't enough, it also includes really useful advice about cleaning!" 

and, "keeping it in the family", Aliah Rosenthal (Bob's son and Allen's godson) has a book out - a book of poems - "Son of A…". For more information on that see here  

Allen Ginsberg 1969 University of Arizona Reading

February 27, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: More Skelton - ("Phyllp Sparowe")

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 257

$

0

0

Allen Ginsberg Reading At the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, Spring Reading Series, April 30, 1969

A real archival treasure this weekend. From the University of Arizona Poetry Center's voluminous archives. Not the greatest of audio quality, but worthy enough. This 1969 reading features, among other things, an important and sizeable rendition of a selection (chosen by Allen) of "Kaddish". 



The entire reading has been segmented (allowing for more clearer identification, but, perhaps, obstructing, a little, the flow). It also seems to be partial (since the last segment, following "Sather Gate Illumination" appears to be an introduction to a missing sequence of unpublished work - "From now on, everything that I'll be reading is unpublished work from about 1961 on....I haven't revised it entirely properly, I haven't preserved it, presented it, collected it, decided what it is, so I will be discovering what this is and there may be false notes here and there, (for) which you'll have to forgive me." 

There is no introduction. The recording begins with a recording of Allen reading Sunflower Sutra  -"Here I began to attempt to combine the early newspaper-ese journalistic preoccupation with facts and William Carlos Williams, with (Jack) Kerouac's idea of fast emotive writing, with my own Hebrew soul - ("I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive…")

"In The Baggage Room of The Greyhound" - "I was writing about .. in more mystical vocabulary something about sunflowers. At that point I ran into Ron Loewinsohn, who was a younger poet, who had..  I had talked to before and was trying to explain Williams' conception, (or what I thought was Williams' conception), of Imagism, to him. So he had  come back from a hitch-hiking trip and written a poem about a diner in Oklahoma (or a waitress in a diner in Oklahoma) which was so natural that I realized that I was not actually writing about my immediate surroundings.  At the time I was working in the baggage room at the Greyhound, so I tried to compose out of the elements there, but going back, in a sense, to (the) 1930's proletarian, to Williams'Paterson-esque detail, (and) simply to look around where I was (in a circumstance that was, at that time, in my mind, not particularly poetic). And then I realized (that) it was poetic and I hadn't realized it really to write about - ("In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal/sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky….."…"Farewell ye Greyhound where I suffered so much,/hurt my knee and scraped my hand and built/my pectral muscles nig as a vagina")

"A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley" ("All afternoon.." in "a strange new cottage in Berkeley…") -  [Allen pauses] -  No I'll read two..since they're both written on the same day part of the same poem - [begins first with "A Strange New Cottage..", following it with "Psalm III"  ("All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries of a tottering brown fence.."… "...an angel thoughtful of my stomach and my dry and lovelorn tongue') 

"Psalm III"- The other I wrote was Psalm II, the other I read was Psalm II . This (next is) maybe eight years later -  Psalm III - ("To God" - I was using that then  -"To illuminate all men,. Beginning with Skid Road..." - "I feed on your Name like a cockroach on a crumb but this cockroach is holy")

"Tears"- (I think) this about as low as I got  -  ("I'm crying all the time now."…. "..God appearing to be seen and cried over. Overflowing heart of Paterson")

"Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square"- ("Let some sad trumpeter stand/on the empty streets at dawn/and blow a silver chorus.."…"We are a legend, invisible but/ legendary as prophesied")

"My Sad Self" - "A poem called "My Sad Self" (1958)  ("Sometimes when my eyes are red I go up on top of the RCA building.." "all Manahattan that I've seen must disappear")

"To An Old Poet in Peru" - I mention the names of various cities which are pre-Inca, pre-Inca, pre-Inca-ic(cultures of coastal desert Peru), where there are many relics whichare foundby grave-robbers who open thesands in the desert (and the) necropolises and  take out the pots and skulls..hair - Cahuachi, Pachacamac, Nazca - they're all clustered aroundLima, Peru  - I (saw) an old poet named Martin Adan, who was a,like, a little reprobate poet, not exactly a Maxwell Bodenheim, he was a very great connoisseur actually, now an old lush, who didn't hang around with theliterary crowd but who made it in a bar next door to thePresidential Palace, which was just seized two months ago by the Peruvian military.. ("Because we met at dusk/Under the shadow of the railroad station/clock.."…"Agh, I am tired of insisting! Goodbye,/I'm going to Pucallpa/to have Visions/Your clean sonnets??I want to read your dirtiest /secret scribblings/your Hope,/in His most Obscene Magnificence. My God!") 

[The highlight of this reading is, perhaps, Allen reading from "Kaddish". He begins at the beginning but then breaks off, only to resume with a section from later on in the poem]

- "Kaddish"-  ["About the same year as the last poem",he notes]  - "Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets and eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.…"... "looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city/a flash away, and the great dream of  Me or China... " - [He breaks off at this point - I don't want to read this either... I'm not making that... There's a portion I'd like to read tho'... (it's) a portion in the center that I'm interested in.. (from the center of the narrative section, towards the end of the narrative section)] - He continues - "Or thru Elanor or the Workman's Circle, where she worked addressing envelopes…" …through to " - Nor Elanor be gone,/ nor Max await his specter - nor Louis retire from this High-School - " 

The last poem Allen's heard reading is "Sather Gate Illumination"  - [This segment begins with a brief clip of an unidentified voice - "Kenny welcome", "a friend of mine""do you want to read this?") before Allen's voice resumes]   - "What I read in the last reading follows, one poem to another, in the development and illustrating the development of a peculiar, personal kind of awareness or consciousness that was growing on me but that I think is more or less common to all. At one point in 1956, I did some scribbling, writing, and read a poem in San Francisco which, after I had given a reading there, Robert Duncanhad signed to me that he thought it was the right way, so now I will read that  - "Sather Gate Illumination" ("Why do I deny manna to another?/Because I deny it to myself.."…"Seeing in people the visible evidence of inner self /thought by their treatment of me: who loves himself loves me/ who love myself")

"Then I went through a period of difficulty, and didn't love myself and my poetry went back up to my mind to some extent and I began working on.. to get out of that I began working on association, trying to search around my mind, find where was the…how I could get out of that box. So these are,  this is..notes. From now on, everything that I'll be reading is unpublished work from about 1961 on. I wish also to say. I have not published anything because, before I came here or totally saw, I had no idea whether this was..what it was I was writing, and I was very depressed. In fact, said that. I didn't know who I was or what I was and this scratching around. Some evidence comes through now to me.I begin to discover what I was doing. And this is the first time I've been able.. I've read this..aloud.. so I have.. I must apologize for the fact that I haven't revised it entirely properly, I haven't preserved it, presented it, collected it, decided what it is, so I will be discovering what this is and there may be false notes here and there (for) which you'll have to forgive me." 

More Skelton - ("Phyllp Sparowe")

February 29, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: More Skelton - (Mistress Isabell & Mistress Gertrude)

≪ Previous: Allen Ginsberg 1969 University of Arizona Reading

$

0

0

           
AG: So - has anybody got any..? What other..  Some more..some more (John) Skelton
Anne Waldman: There's a wonderful.. Do you know "Phyllp Sparowe"?
AG: What part of it is good?
Anne Waldman: The part with the list of the birds, which you could probably...
AG: Could you read it? Do you know it well enough to read it?
Anne Waldman: Well, I don't know if I could do it,  maybe..
AG: Does anybody knows Skelton well enough to read aloud? 
Anne Waldman: I can read this part.. This is a poem about a dead bird, and there's a mass and all the other birds come... 

[Anne begins reading, with occasional corrections from Allen - " soft warbelynge" (Allen  corrects to "softly warbelynge")  ("The dotterel, that folyshe foolish pek")    (partyche) ("whystell")  -  (chowgh) - ("To weep with me like that ye come,/All manner of byrdes in your kind/Se none be left behind"…"The mauys with her whystell…"

Anne Waldman (following correction) : Maybe you should read it, Allen 
AG: Yeah, no, I just follow along. I never read it before, it's very pretty.
Anne Waldman  (resumes reading ) : "...Shal rede there the pystell/ But with a large and a longe/To kepe iust playne songe"… "May there abyde/Of cokoldry syde/Or els phylosophy/Maketh a great lye"  -  Very beautiful!

AG: Pretty, isn't it - I'd never read that. I have that here in the Auden anthology too.
Student: Who's the author of that?
AG: That's Skelton. All Skeleton. These are all Skeltonics.
Anne Waldman: To Phyllp Sparowe
AG: It's a long poem called "Phyllp Sparowe" by Skelton
Peter Orlovsky: What is "cokoldry"? cokoldry? - cookery or colkery? - what is that? - The last line? - "cokoldry maketh no lie"?
AG: "Or els phylosophy/Maketh a great lye"
Anne Waldman: "Or els phylosophy/Maketh a great lye"
AG:  Or else Philosophy maketh a great Lee - Philosophy Maketh A Great Lie 

Student: The title again?
AG: The title. It's a long poem. The one I have.. the version I have here called "Phyllp Sparowe" takes up about.. god, about from page three-seventy-one to four-thirteen in this anthology, done in that rhyme, a really great thing, done in that rhyme. I've never read that through, actually but...
Anne Waldman: Killed by a cat.. The sparrow's been killed by a cat
AG: Uh-huh
Anne Waldman: An elegy about a sparrow. It belonged to.. I've forgotten the name of the woman it belongs to…
AG: The next long poem of Skelton's he has in here is called "Speke, Parrot!" ..Skelton. Very birdy. Lots of birds in Skelton. Bird-chirpings.. 

from "Phyllp Sparowe"

To wepe with me loke that ye come, All manner of byrdes in your kynd ; Se none be left behynde. To mornynge loke that ye fall With dolorous songes funerall, Some to synge, and some to say, Some to wepe, and some to pray, Euery byrde in his laye. The goldfynche, the wagtayle ; The ianglynge iay to rayle, The fleckyd pye to chatter Of this dolorous mater ; And robyn redbrest, He shall be the preest The requiem masse to synge, Softly warbelynge, With helpe of the red sparow, And the chattrynge swallow, This herse for to halow ; The larke with his longe to ; The spynke, and the martynet also ; The shouelar with his brode bek ; The doterell, that folyshe pek, And also the mad coote, With a balde face to toote ; The feldefare, and the snyte ; The crowe, and the kyte ; The rauyn, called Rolfe, His playne songe to solfe ; The partryche, the quayle ; The plouer with vs to wayle ; The woodhacke, that syngeth chur Horsly, as he had the mur ; The lusty chauntyng nyghtyngale ; The popyngay to tell her tale, That toteth oft in a glasse, Shal rede the Gospell at masse ; The mauys with her whystell Shal rede there the pystell. But with a large and a longe To kepe iust playne songe, Our chaunters shalbe the cuckoue, The culuer, the stockedowue, With puwyt the lapwyng, The versycles shall syng.

The bitter with his bump
The crane with his trumpe,
The swan of Menander,
The gose and the gander,
The ducke and the drake,
Shall watch at this wake;
The peacock so prowde,
Bycause his voyce is lowde,
And hath a glorious tayle,
He shall syng the grayle;
The owle, that is so foul,
Must helpe va to houle;
The heron so gaunce,
And the cormoraunce,
With the fessaunte,
And the gaglynge gaunter
And the churlish chowgh;
The route and the kowgh
The barnacle, the bussarde,
With the wilde mallard;
The dyuendop to slepe;
The water hen to weep;
The puffin and the tele
Money they shall dele
To poore folke at large,
That shall bw theyr charge;
The semewe and the titmouse;
The wodcocke with the longe nose;
The therestyl with her warblyng;
The starlyng with her brablyng;
The roke,  with the osprey
That putteth fysshes to a fraye;
And the denty curlewe 
With the turtyll most trew
  At this Placebo
We may not well forgo
The countrynge of the coe:
The storke also,
That maketh his nest
In chymneyes to rest
Within those walles
No broken galles
May there abyde
Of cokoldry syde
Or els phyylosophy
Maketh a great lye."

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

More Skelton - (Mistress Isabell & Mistress Gertrude)

March 1, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Wyatt 1 - ("Whoso List to Hunt.." )

≪ Previous: More Skelton - ("Phyllp Sparowe")

$

0

0

                           [John Skelton ( c.1460-1529)]

AG: There's another one here [of John Skelton's] that we can have a look-see, there's a nice easy one - "To Mistress Isabell Pennell" - It's not in the.. I think it is.. it's not in the Norton, "not in the Norton" - it's not in the Norton (anthology)..
[Allen reads the poem in its entirety] - "By Saint Mary, my lady…" 

By Saint Mary, my lady,
Your mammy and your dady
Brought forth a goodly baby !
    My maiden Isabel,
Reflaring rosabell,
The flagrant camamell,
    The ruddy rosary,
The sovereign rosemary,
The pretty strawberry,
    The columbine, the nepte,
The jeloffer well set,
The proper violet ;
    Ennewëd your colowre
Is like the daisy flower
After the April shower ;
    Star of the morrow gray,
The blossom on the spray,
The freshest flower of May :
    Maidenly demure,
Of womanhood the lure ;
Wherefore I make you sure
    It were an heavenly health,
It were and endless wealth,
A life for God himself,
    To hear this nightingale
Among the birdës smale
Warbeling in the vale,—
Dug, dug, jug, jug,
Good year and good luck,
With chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck !

(and reads the whole last part of the stanza again  (from "It were an heavenly health..")

AG: It's really good - lines nine hundred and seventy three to one-thousand-and-three of this poem from "The Garland of Laurel". There really must be an enormous… Is that a complete Skelton or..?
Anne Waldman: No, that was just a Selected
AG: Where did  you get it?
Anne Waldman: In England…in Cambridge
AG: Who published that one?
Anne Waldman; Oxford University Press
AG: Oxford? How much?
Anne Waldman: One pound twenty five pence  [sic - 1980]
AG: About three bucks..That's good. So Skelton is really worth reading and most sophisticated poets, like,you know, really good poets who know the scene, have read through Skelton a lot and love Skelton because Skelton turns them on and Skelton was really simple and Skelton knows what's what - and Skelton trips along/ and with Skelton you can't go wrong!/ With Skelton, you can go back/ (you know, like go right on the track,/ where you were as a kid/ - and no-one will forbid/ you to go on with Skelton/ and make the merry mel-tones,

So Skelton just comes to mind, Skeltonics come to mind automatic. It's a natural form that kids use, I guess. You recognize it, don't you? Is there anybody who hasn't.. doesn't recognize that as some archetype, but it's like an archetype that's..  It's weird. Skelton is famous among poets. They don't read him really, except five or six pieces. (W.H.) Auden was really into Skelton and he's got these long, long sections of Skelton in this big anthology that I've been using (you know, you've seen it, Poets of the English Language, I've mentioned it a number of times - I don't know if we've got that in the library, we ought to get it ) , But I guess it's getting back to early ear, you know to childhood ear. And then, again, filling it with mature intelligence. So if you take the childish ear and childish rhythm and put important things in it, then you can get through to other people in some kind of memorable form, rememberable form. 

So I guess Skelton is worth absorbing, all the way. There must be an awful lot.. (there's a lot of Skelton I don't know, actually) there must be an awful lot that's really good. It would be interesting to have a, like a really great short course on Skelton. Yeah?... have a short course on Skelton that really did cover his high spots. Probably the anthologies have them -  some - like if you.., They'll come up in various anthologies, What have they got? Here's The Oxford Book of English Poetry, let's see what they've got of Skelton [Allen searches through the book]- You know, these two, and another one, yeah - They have "To Mistress Isabell Pennell" which I read,"To Mistress Margaret Hussey", which you've got in your book, and they have a third  - "To Mistress Gertrude Statham"  ("Though ye were hard-hearted…"…"With virtue well-renewed") 

Though ye were hard hearted.
And I with you thwarted
With words that smarted,
Yet now doubtless ye give me cause
To write of this goodly clause
Mistress Gertrude, 
With womanhood endured, 
With virtue well renewed, 
  I will that ye shall be
In all benignity
Like to Dame Pasiphe;
For now doubtless ye give me cause
To write of this goodly clause

Mistress Gertrude,
With womanhood endured, 
With virtue well renewed, 
  Partly by your counsel.
Garnished with laurel
Was my fresh coronel;
Wherefore doubtless ye give me cause 
To write of this goodly clause

Gad, He's  got these funny repeat cycles. Okay, then, Skelton - 1460 to 1529, or, what do they say here? - yeah, 1460 to 1529.  And then I'll..  there's Wyatt…where does Wyatt come? (rifling through) - We've got the popular ballads here. Wyatt is actually 1503 to 1542, so, roughly contemporary, so, before we get into the ballads, maybe a couple more Wyatt…. 

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

Wyatt 1 - ("Whoso List to Hunt.." )

March 2, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The Bob Dylan Archive at The University of Oklahoma

≪ Previous: More Skelton - (Mistress Isabell & Mistress Gertrude)

$

0

0

[Anne Boleyn- by Unknown artist - oil on panel, late 16th century (circa 1533-1536), 21 3/8 in. x 16 3/8 in. (543 mm x 416 mm), from the Collection in the National Portrait Gallery, London]

AG: .. Maybe a couple more Wyatt  [Allen looks through the (Norton) anthology] - Where is that Wyatt? - (page) seventy..?
Peter Orlovsky: Seventy-seven?    
Student: Seventy-five?
Student (2): Thomas WyattOne-twenty
AG: Yeah, Thomas Wyatt, we had him before - Sir Thomas Wyatt - One-fifteen. Just to cover a little Wyatt because we've got five minutes. There's one very famous dirty pun in Wyatt's sonnet "Whoso List to Hunt..." - "I know where there's a hind" [where is a hind"] - (I know where there's a behind!) - "Hind" means... "Hind" is a deer, is it not? Masculine or feminine? - I don't know, but, anyway. When I studied this poem back in 1945 it was considered to be a witty dirty pun - "Whoever wants to go out and get laid, I know where  there is an ass" (Whoso list to hunt/I know where is a hind")

Whoso list to hunt? I know where is an hind
But as for me, alas!, I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore;
I am of them that furthest come behind
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer; but she fleet afore
Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore, 
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt 
As well as I may spend his time in vain!
And graven in diamonds, in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about;
Noli me tangere; for Caesar's I am
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

What's that all about? Well, you figure it out.  (See?)  Touch me not, I am Caesar's - So this could actually be the hunt for fame, the hunt for power, the hunt for political power. 'Don't touch me, I'm Caesar's" - or it may be a little poem to some really great whore that was the King's mistress, that was making it out with everybody, and Wyatt had tried it but had been beaten in the various court contests to see if he could make out with her. There's one famous line - "Since in the net I seek to hold the wind" ["Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind"]- Pardon me?
Student: Money. Isn't the poem about money too?
AG:  Ah, yes.
Student: ("In vain" may I spend time with her, "and graven in diamonds", around the court..)
AG: Yes
Student:  "And graven with diamonds, in letters plain"
AG: Yeah - And graven with diamonds", yeah.  So  "and graven.." means.. so diamonds were the cutting stone? -  Or diamonds set in the ear?
Student: I guess, I don't know. It seems to make sense
AG: Yeah, It's also renunciation. So this is a renunciation of either sex or money or power or competition. And there's a kind of uncanny statement by the object of the search, the object of desire - "Noli me tangere for Caesar's I am,/And wild for to hold though I seem tame." 

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

The Bob Dylan Archive at The University of Oklahoma

March 2, 2016, 4:53 pm

≫ Next: Wyatt - 2 - ("They flee from me..")

≪ Previous: Wyatt 1 - ("Whoso List to Hunt.." )

$

0

0

"I like Allen Ginsberg and not Bob Dylan" wrote a reader a while back on our Facebook page, and another wrote accurately and swiftly back, "They're joined at the hip."

Allen loved.. no, Allen revered Bob Dylan 

We announced a few weeks back the immanent sale, (or, right now, proposed sale, University librarians, please note), of the "Holy Grail of Archives" - the Ed Sanders Archive, 

but that, monumentous as it is, fades in comparison to the news announced today
 (in an exclusive to the New York Times) -  

the sale to the University of Oklahoma  of The Bob Dylan Archive

Ben Sisario's extensive article for The New York Times is here

"The Bob Dylan Archive has been acquired by the George Kaiser Family Foundation", (the same Foundation that secured the Woody Guthrie Archives), and the University of Tulsa and will be permanently housed in Tulsa, under the stewardship of TU's Helmerich Center for American Research…"..The archive comprises "more than 6,000 items spanning nearly 60 years…decades of never-before-seen handwritten manuscripts, notebooks and correspondence, films, videos, photographs and artwork, memorabilia and ephemera, personal documents and effects, unreleased studio and concert recordings, musical instruments and many other items…Nearly 1,000 items from The Bob Dylan Archive have already been brought to the Hardesty Archival Center inside the Helmerich Center…where they are being digitized and preserved by a digital curation team for eventual public exhibition and academic access. The process of physically acquiring the complete archive will span two years, as the individual components are gathered from their numerous locations, inventoried and carefully shipped to Tulsa."

Dylan himself is quoted in the official announcement: "I'm glad that my archives, which have been collected all these years have finally found a home and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie and especially alongside all the valuable artifacts from the Native America Nations. To me, it makes a lot of sense, and it's a great honor"

                                  [Bob Dylan's notebooks - Courtesy of the University of Tulsa]

---

Wyatt - 2 - ("They flee from me..")

March 3, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: "For School KIds In New Jersey" (& Other Wait Till I'm Dead typescripts)

≪ Previous: The Bob Dylan Archive at The University of Oklahoma

$

0

0

[Sir Thomas Wyatt - "They flee from me.." ("Theye fle from me..)" - (from the Devonshire Manuscript (circa 1530-1540)]

AG: And there was another great, strange one, whose rhythm is very odd, "They flee from me that sometime did me seek". We've got one minute, so I'll read it, then finish. That's (on) page one (hundred and) sixteen. So you've got to figure out who are "they" that flee from him, and what kind of situation is he describing? - because it's very mysterious. And I never figured it out, after thirty years!  - I'm still puzzling over it. I don't know if anybody does know what this is about, except it's a mystery, like a mysterious movie.  

[Allen reads the poem in its entirety]

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
 With naked foot stalking within my chamber:
Once have I seen them gentle, tame, amd meek
 That now are wild and do not once remember
 That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with continual change
Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
 Twenty times better; but once especial - 
In thin array: after a pleasant guise,
 When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
 And she caught me in her arms long and small,
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, 'Dear heart, how like you this?'
It was no dream, I lay broad waking
 But all is turn'd now, through my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
 And I have leave to go of her goodness
 And she also to use new-fangleness
But since that I so kindly am served
I fain would know what she hath deserved

I've never been able to get those last two lines rhythmically correct - "But since that I so kindly am served/I fain would know what.. I fain...

Student: It's phrased entirely differently in the Oxford anthology
AG: So how is the ..
Student: "But since that I unkindly so am served,/"How like you this?" - what hath she now deserved?"
AG: Well, let me see. I've got the Oxford anthology. Are you talking about the Fifteenth Century?
Student: No. no
AG: Okay, I 've got it here. so, let's see (I bet they didn't even put it in, oh, they haven't got it in here in this one, oh yeah, here it is) - "But since that I unkindly so am served" - Right. You're right.
Student: And isn't it different about line four, doesn't that line read...
AG: Well, let me read those two lines "But since that I unkindly so am served/"How like you this" - what has she now deserved". That's from Tottel's Songes and Sonetts, but I seem to remember, they may have smoothed it out for the Oxford book. They may have altered, I think, because I remember many many years ago. This is.. this Oxford book that I've got here is 1935 or (193)6 - but I rememember at Columbia (this is a 1947 version - and I remember 1947 at Columbia, Raymond Weaver, who was a great scholar, who taught this poem, taught the form that you have in the Norton (anthology) . "But since that I so kindly am served/I fain would know what she hath deserved" - There might be a caesura after "know" - "But since that I so kindily am served/I fain would know what she hath deserved"  - It might make it fit. The old way that I learned was the Norton. Do you have any way.. do you have any Oxford books that might check it out?
Student: I've got a (copy of Tottel's Miscellany)
AG: You do? Okay. Want to look it up?. What is it..a..modernized or..
Student: No, the text is (pretty authentic)
AG: Check it out because.. the Oxford Book says from Tottel's Miscellany (well, it would have to come from there, anyway). Do you have.. do you have Percy's Reliques? 
Student: Yeah
AG: Okay. When we get to.. I'd like to get to  the versions of Tom o' Bedlam and Mad Maudlin - do you know those? Tom o'Bedlam lyrics and Mad Maudlin? - I've got mine in New York. What was it "Merry Tom" or "Mad Tom"? - the Mad Tom lyrics - when we get around to it - Or maybe xerox all those pages that have the variants of Mad Tom and Mad Maudlin - or bring in the book and we'll look it over, bring it in the next time we'll look it over and figure which... 

[Student breaks in to take roll call -  AG (remembers): Oh, attendance, attendance, I'm sorry! ..begins roll call - tape ends ]

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

"For School KIds In New Jersey" (& Other Wait Till I'm Dead typescripts)

March 3, 2016, 9:18 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 258

≪ Previous: Wyatt - 2 - ("They flee from me..")

$

0

0

["Birds are twittering on the Church Steeple" - Mary Help of Christians Roman Catholic Church on New York's Lower East Side (East 12th Street, across from his bedroom window) photographed  by Allen Ginsberg in 1985 . Despite community protest, in 2014, the church, was demolished, to make way for large-scale condominium construction (currently in progress)]

FOR SCHOOL KIDS IN NEW JERSEY

Dawn, I've been up all night answering letters
- Now to write a Poem for 360 Child Poets:
Don't Grow up like me, you never get enough sleep;
It's 6 AM, my friends are arguing, Crying in the kitchen
Sausages are smoking on the stove, the poor pigs,
Taxis are passing down Avenue A to Work
Busses are grinding down the street empty
Birds are twittering on the Church Steeple, Cats
                                                    yowling in the Alley.
Punk Rock's already playing on the phonograph 
- It's Thursday October 4'th, time to go to bed.

Allen Ginsberg, 1979

Over at Literary Hub - Inside the Unpublished World of Allen Ginsberg - "poems, proofs, mimeos, and more" 

- Bill Morgan comments on the above poem: "As the title suggests, Ginsberg wrote this poem in response to a request for a poem from a school in New Jersey. It was published in their high-school magazine and is a good example of Allen's generosity to anyone who wrote asking him for poems".

See here at Literary Hub for more original pages
 (the opening page of "New York To San Fran", the long poem that appeared last month in Poetry magazine, a short poem, "Wyoming" that appeared inThe St Marks Poetry Project Newsletter; vintage poems,"What's buzzing" ("written while Ginsberg was living in San Jose with Neal and Carolyn Cassady during the mid-1950's"), "Tokyo Tower" (from 1963), and, more observations and notations from Bill Morgan (including an excerpt from his introduction to the recently-published Wait Till I'm Dead - UnCollected Poems)

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 258

March 4, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Montreal, 1969, Kaddish

≪ Previous: "For School KIds In New Jersey" (& Other Wait Till I'm Dead typescripts)

$

0

0

[Allen Ginsberg in China, 1984  - Allen Ginsberg caption: "Downtown Baoding, Hebei University English Language school student guide that afternoon, November 1984, he was a friend of the young translator-student who rendered "Homework" poem into Chinese" - Photograph © The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

Another poem from the UnCollected - Wait Till I'm Dead- "Poem ("3'd day down Yangtze River, yesterday"):

3'd day down Yangtze River, yesterday
passed vast mountain gorges and hairpin
river-bends, mist sun and cement factory
soft coal dust everywhere, all China
got a big allergic cold. Literary dele-
gation homebound after 3 weeks, now I'm
traveling separately like I used to — except
everywhere omnipresent kindly Chinese
Bureaucracy meets me at airports & boats
& takes me to tourist hotels & orders meals. I'm
trying to figure a way out — envious of 2
bearded hippies traveling 4th class in
steerage eating tangerines & bananas —
sleepers in passageways on mats, Chinese
voyagers playing checkers. Saw Beijing,
Great Wall, tombs & palaces, Suchow's
Tang gardens, Hangchow's West Lake walkway
dyke to hold the giant water in years of drought
built up by governors Tsu-Tung-Po and Po-Chu-I.
Saw Cold Mt. Temple w/ Snyder who'd
heard its bell echo across ocean.

- China, November 11, 1984

David Copegives a little of the background: "Allen's poem began as the prose script of  a November 11, 1984 postcard he sent me from China, but I noted how tightly it was written, the complexity of what it expressed, and I suggested to him that I could publish it as a poem in Big Scream #20. He agreed and it was published in the 1985 issue….it occurred to me that this poem is a superb tightly-written late example of Allen's use of Objectivist focus, containing ecological and community health observations, Chinese government thought-control bureaucrats, landscape appreciation, older famous man's envy of freer hippies, travelogue & completion of life circle dream of Han Shanwith Gary Snyder.

Speaking of Snyder, Keith Abbbott , "Charter Member of the New Black Bart Poetry Society", has unearthed a terrific December 1957 letter thatJack Kerouac wrote to him (on the back of a letter from Allen!). Abbott explains: "The letter reprises what Kerouac did that summer to go up to the Lookout in Washington (State). Snyder was on board the ship Sappa Creek, since August-April 1957 and he only received the letter when he returned to Japan and then left for the United Stats to live in Marin County, California….Kerouac's letter to Snyder scattered some brilliat haikuthroughout his crammed version of hitch-hiking up to Skagit Valley and its adventures.." (many of which, but not all appeared in "Desolation Pops"). The full letter and Abbott's annotation can be read here    

[Han Shan ("Rough and dark…")  - Calligraphy & brushwork by Keith Abbott] 

Paul Bowles' Moroccan music anthology (noted here a couple of weeks ago) is written up by Amanda Petrusich,"The Sheltering Sound",  in last week's New Yorker
For a taste (of these extraordinary field recordings, from back in 1959), listen to  Si Mohammed Bel Hassan Soudani  ( "Fulani  Iresa") -here - and also here and here

 [Si Mohammed Bel Hassan Soudani, Marrakesch, 1982 - Photograph by Alberto Rainolter]

Brion Gysin. Brion Gysin - "Here To Go & Back Again: The Lives and Arts of Brion Gysin" by Matthew Levi Stevens appears over at our friends at Beatdom - here

Soon-to-be ninety-seven-year-old Lawrence Ferlinghetti is interviewed by the Italian media (la Repubblica) here - "Non vado in pensione scrivero finche posso" ( "I won't retire, I will write as long as I can")

Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady (in Spanish) - Jack Kerouac y Neal Cassady en San Miguel de Allende 

Hot news of the week - the discovery and sale of the Bob Dylan Archive - (letters between Allen and Bob are among the many treasures in the collection) 

Now here's a rare item - (from Five Seasons Press, from 1979, one of only 350 copies - the poem itself, was, of course, written more than a decade earlier, in situ, in 1967)  (the image and a photo inside are by Tom Maschler)

and, following the recent 50-year celebration,

KPTS, The Kansas Public Telecommunications Service, have produced, on its anniversary, a fine documentary honoring Allen's epic poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra"  . 
Watch it here

Montreal, 1969, Kaddish

March 5, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Bill Morgan's City Lights Pocket Guides (The Beats Abroad)

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 258

$

0

0

Last week we featured a recording of  (some selections from) "Kaddish"from a recording made back in 1969 at the University of Arizona. The recording featured today is from that same year, 1969, and was recorded at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal,  (and remastered and restored by the Yiddish Book Center, Francis Brandt Yiddish Audio Library)

It begins with the cymbals clash and a few moments of Hare Krishna and ritual chanting before..preliminary announcements are made - ("Can we rearrange..? Why don’t you relax for a moment while we rearrange the stage..

At approximately two-and-a-half minutes in (second segment), an announcement is made:

Student Announcer""We would like to ask you to do something for the Free Health Clinic on Jean Masse. The Free Heath clinic is a volunteer non-profit organization whose main point is to serve students who need medical and other types of health in the Montreal area, especially around McGill. Now the Free Health Clinic is in desperate need of money or else they may have to cut off their operations and those students who use the Free Health Clinic will not be able to do so. So I would ask, very much that, as you file out today, if you could give just a quarter, or fifty cents, or a dollar. And if everyone in this room would do that it would go a hell of a long way to seeing to it that the Free Health Clinic does not fold. Now, Allen, would you lift the bucket please?  If you'd just, as you walk out, dump whatever you want to give into that bucket, I hope you can fill up the bucket, I know that Allen would really appreciate that as well - for the Free Health Clinic

Now is that the closed-circuit tv back there? over there? Is it working? Alright, anyone in the back who wants to go downstairs into the cafeteria area they can watch the performance on closed-circuit tv instead of standing way back and not seeing anything….   

                                            [Allen Ginsberg, October 1969 - Photograph by Cecil Lockard]

At approximately four minutes in, Allen is introduced (with, it has to be said, a somewhat equivocal introduction)

 Introducer: “I don’t suppose Mr Ginsberg really needs all that much of an introduction. I think he's provided quite a one already, Tonight he’s going to be reading his poetry and then afterwards hopefully he'll field some sort of a rap session in which he’ll entertain questions from the audience. It’s rather incongruous I suppose for a (the) debating union – and Hillel to sponsor Mr Ginsberg, but we decided that despite the fact that he’s probably not much of a debater, perhaps even less of a Jew, we decided to bring him in anyway, so I give you Mr Allen Ginsberg

AG Can you hear me in the back, There’s a lot of people here. My voice is a little bit cut from shouting into the microphone. Since I was invited here partly by Hillel, I’d like you go back in time to 1961 and read a piece of Kaddish, written in  (19)58 actually, read a piece of Kaddish, written ten years ago (sic), Kaddish, which is a Hebrew synagogue lament or requium for the dead, in this case, my mother Naomi Ginsberg – and, on this occasion, for Jack Kerouac. [Editorial note: Jack Kerouac, it should be pointed out, had died a few days earlier]  
Can you hear me in the back? is the sound system adequate for you? Will you raise your hands in the back if you can hear – ok. I’ll try to speak articulately syllable by syllable  …(If the sound people can keep track of these, I can’t entirely…well I guess it would be best over here, wouldn’t it?…

 

Approximately six-and-a-quarter minutes in (on this second segment of the tape) , Allen begins with the opening section of "Kaddish" -  

Section I - (“Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village…."Last change of mine and Naomi - to God's perfect Darkness - Death, stay thy phantoms!")
followed by
Section  III ("Only to have remembered/Only to have not forgotten the beginning in which she drunk cheap sodas in the morgues of Newark…"…."Creation glistening backwards to the same grave, size of universe, size of the tick of the hospital's clock on the archway over the white door.")
followed by

Section IV ("O mother/what have I left ou/O mother/what have I forgotten.."…"with your eyes/with your eyes/with your Death full of Flowers")     
Then, Hymnnn - ("In the world that he has created according to his will Blessed Praised.."….""Blessed be Thee Naomi in Death! Blessed be Death! Blessed be Death!/Blessed be He Who leads all sorrow to Heaven! Blessed be He in the end!/ Blessed be He who builds Heaven in Darkness! Blessed Blessed Blessed be He! Blessed be/He! Blessed be Death on us All")

AG: (I'll read for about) half an hour then, maybe at nine o’clock or so. we take a break, stretch, those who want to (press on) can and I can read for another half hour or so, or do some chants of Buddhist mantras, sing some of (William) Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience,and read poems up to the last few days, up to last night, say…

to be continued...

[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at the beginning and continuing to approximately twenty-four-and-three-quarter minutes in into the second segment]

Bill Morgan's City Lights Pocket Guides (The Beats Abroad)

March 6, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Montreal reading continues - (from The Fall of America)

≪ Previous: Montreal, 1969, Kaddish

$

0

0

Bill Morgan's indispensible series of Beat pocket-guides (see our note here on the previous Beat Atlas) have always been a unique and invaluable resource.City Lights has just this past month gifted us with a fourth (title) -  The Beats Abroad - A Global Guide to the Beat Generation 

From the City Lights promo': 

"In The Beats Abroad, renowned Beat scholar Bill Morgan documents that international phase of the Beat Generation's story. He delves deep into epicenters like Paris, Tangier, and Mexico City, and tracks down more remote locales from Siberia to Columbia. Entries contain specific addresses for the globetrotting reader to visit on every continent, and are loaded with fascinating stories that illuminate the lives and works of Ginsberg, Burroughs,Corso, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and others…"

Each of the volumes is a treasure-trove of Bill's encyclopedic Beat lore (Beat location), boiled down, accurately (and lovingly) notated.

As he has previously observed:

"They" (the Beat writers) "always wrote about what they were experiencing…When the Beats went places, that's what they wrote about…When (Jack) Kerouac went to Saint Patrick's Cathedral (in New York City) for example, he wrote about that and you can go there and the curtains that are in one of the little chapels in Saint Patrick's are the same curtains as he describes in his writing fifty years ago. As far as travel writing, there's nothing better. And almost all of the Beats were that way, writing about what they saw."

This new volume, fittingly, widens the scope, stressing (as the major Beat show upcoming this summer at Paris' Pompidou Center promises to) the Beats undeniable internationalism)

The Beats Abroad(2016),Beat Atlas(2011),The Beat Generation in San Francisco(2003), and the original, The Beat Generation in New York (1997) 

Montreal reading continues - (from The Fall of America)

March 7, 2016, 3:30 am

≫ Next: Montreal reading continues - (Blake and Kerouac)

≪ Previous: Bill Morgan's City Lights Pocket Guides (The Beats Abroad)

$

0

0

                            

Allen Ginsberg’s October 31 (Halloween) 1969 Montreal reading(begun here)  continues with a reading of his poem"Car Crash!" - [dated 1:30 AM, Jan 1. 1969, subsequently included in The Fall of America - Poems of These States 1965-1971 (1972)] - "I’m starting off a year ago, that is poetry of the last year"– (“Snow blizzard sowing/ice-powder drifts on stone fenced/gardens near grey woods”…”..Rimbaud/age 16 adolescent sneers tight-lipt/ green eyed oval in old time gravure/-1869 his vevet tie askew, hair/mussed & ruffled by the policeman's rape") 

At approximately thirty-one-and-a-half minutes in, Allen continues with "Continuation of A Long Poem on These States"– "Imaginary Universes"  [also later included in The Fall of America] – "It’s part of a long poem, written, like transcriptions of my consciousness during war-time US last year or two, since 1965 to now" -  "Imaginary Universes" -  (“Under order to shoot a spy, I discharged/ my pistol into his mouth./He fell face down from the position life/left his body kneeling blindfold…..""On account of my best friend &/my brother I killed both Gooks."/That was true, yes.") 

Allen comments momentarily on the audio -  "The incense broke an ashtray! - that was what that little clink was all about") - before continuing:

By Air Abany, New York, to Baltimore – which is where Edgar Allan Poe died, so“To Poe” ["To Poe Over The Planet Albany-Baltimore"]– (“Albany throned in snow Hudson ribboned North ice white flats/New England's blue sky…"…"..Poe/ Died kidnapped by phantoms/conspiring to win elections/in the Deathly Gutter of 19th Century")

followed by
"Falling Asleep in America" - ("We’re in the Great Place, Fable Place Beulah, Man wedded to Earth, Planet of green Grass.."…"…flickering grass green returns me to/Nashville."

followed by

July 4th 1969 ["Independence Day"] - "(Orange hawk eye stronger than thought, winking above a thousand thin grassblades…"…"Independence Day! the Cow's deep moo's an Aum!" - [and the additional lines (not included in the published version)]
"Cut my backbone, unstring my eyes and fingers/a million insects eat the body,  soul empty as -/grass bends trembling in the breezy warble")

Then,  A continuation of "A Poem on These States", April 1969  - ["Northwest Passage"] – Northwest, going from the Columbia River in the USA Northwest, through the Snake..of the Snake Gorge..where the Snake River meets the Columbia Rivera at a place called Lake Wallula, which is where Lewis and Clark went through to get the Northwest Passage, aided by an Indian lady, Sacagawea - ("Incense over Horse Heaven  Hills/Empty logger trucks speed/Lake Wallula's flatness shimmering.."…"Drive down valley to Main Street/Seattle First National Motor/next to Everybody's Bank.")   

At approximately fifty-one minutes in, Allen declares - "I’ll read one more poem to finish this.. side.. to finish this..hour. I’m reading more or less in a chronological order."

AG  reads "Please Master" (! - tape cuts off last few lines) (Please Master can I touch your cheek?"…."Go moan O please master do fuck me like that…")

[& then chants - (at approximately fifty-six minutes in - more cymbals and ambient sound – Allen accompanying himself on  harmonium]–   "Hare-om-namah-shivaya"
“To Shiva” - (an insight) into divine nature,regarding change, birth, death, the dance of creation, the dance of  destruction (hatred), (jealousy), from tired yogis (and holy men)  who worship by smokingganja,or cannabis sativa, in India. So, a mantra to the Canadian Commission who will be here next week to investigate the possibility of  legalizing marijuana..    Hare-om-namah-shivaya... 

to be continued

[Audio for the above can be heard here (beginning at approximately twenty-five-and-a-half minutes in (the second segment) and continuing until approximately sixty five minutes in quarter minutes in [i.e. at the end of the second segment of the tape] (and also  one-and-a-half minutes into the third segment] 

Montreal reading continues - (Blake and Kerouac)

March 8, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Montreal reading continues - (Fall of America & Mantra)

≪ Previous: Montreal reading continues - (from The Fall of America)

$

0

0

Allen's 1969 Montreal reading continues (see here and here) 

with a (harmonium-accompanied) rendition of  (William Blake's) "Piping Down the valleys wild..." - (Introduction to "The Songs of Innocence") - ("Piping down the valleys wild…"…"And I wrote my happy songs/Every child may joy to hear') 
[Editorial note - the harmonium is much much too strong and overwhelms the voice in this mix]

This is followed (approximately three minutes in) by a rendition of  Blake's  "The Shepherd" -  ("How sweet the shepherd's sweet lot!/From the morn to the evening he strays/He shall follow his sheep all the day…"…."He is watchful while they are at peace/For they know when their shepherd is nigh")
and then, "The Nurses Song" - "TheNurses Songfrom "Innocence and Experience" -

(Can you hear the singing in a low voice?, can you hear the words if I mic this up close?) -
("When the voices of children are heard on the green…"….."And all the hills echo-ed") 

 At approximately ten minutes in, Allen turns to Kerouac 

AG: This time what I would like to do is read a  couple of short poems by Jack Kerouac 
from Mexico City Blues (since these texts are not known to you, mostly, nor do you probably remember any echo of his living voice talking them. So the book isMexico City Blues, written in 1953, talking about his Canuck French family in Lowell, Massachusetts, talking about his childhood

["96th Chorus"] - (“I tumbled down the street/ On a tricycle, very fast/I coulda kept going/And wound up in the river…"…."In a coffin./But I raced my bike safely.")  

["97th Chorus"] - ( "Meanwhile, there’s my Pa., alone in street,/Coming for supper, under heaven bleak/The trees of March black twigs/Against the red & gory sundown…"…."Doomed to mortal destiny/"And my poor lil Ti Pousse", /he thinks of me, "He'll get it too".) 

["98th Chorus"] - ("My father loves me/,my mother too,/I am all safe,/and so are you."…."...I got to watch my dollars/Pretty soon the poorhouse" -/ ("Wish I was God", he adds to think)")

["99th Chorus"] - ("My father, Leo Alcide Kerouac/Comes in the door of the porch/On the way out to downtown red,/ (where Neons Redly Brownly Flash/An aura over the city center…."….."My father shoots 2quick glances/ Into all hearts of the box/No mail, you see the flash of his anxious/Head looking in the void for nothing")  

I'm going to read about five of these… [he reads, actually, four more]

["217th Chorus"] - ("Sooladat smarty pines prappin down/My line of least Prapoopooty/And whattaya think Old Father Time.."…"Perss o
monnix/twab/twab/twabble/all day")

["230th Chorus"] - ("Love’s multitiudinous boneyard/ of decay,/The spilled milk of heroes/Destruction of silk kerchiefs/by dust storm.."…."Like kissing my kitten in the belly/The softness of our reward.") 

["211th Chorus"] -( "The wheel of  the quivering meat/conception/Turns in the void expelling human beings…."…"…I wish I was free/ of that slaving meat wheel/and safe in heaven dead")

The last Chorus of 242 Choruses, written high on grass ["242nd Chorus"] ...which is the method of his poetry and the method of my composition also – ("The  sound in your mind/is the first sound/that you could sing…"…."Stop the murder anf the suicide!/All's well!/I am the Guard"    

[Audio for the above can be heard here (approximately one-and-a-quarter minutes in in segment three), continuing until approximately eighteen-and-a-half minutes in]

---

Montreal reading continues - (Fall of America & Mantra)

March 9, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Montreal Reading continues - (Sunflower Sutra & Mantra)

≪ Previous: Montreal reading continues - (Blake and Kerouac)

$

0

0

The 1969 Montreal reading continues today (with more poems from The Fall of America and, as conclusion, the chanting of  a Buddhist mantra)

Allen continues his reading, first, with a poem entitled  "Violence"– “Mexcity drugstore table giant/ sexfiend in black spats/Sticks knife in a plump faggot's sportscoat seam.."…."chic fairy gangsters with bloody hands/hustle after midnight to cut my throat from/ its beard")

Next,  “Flying to Chicago – oh this August, 1968 on the way to the Convention  ("Going To Chicago" - "("22,000 feet over Hazed square Vegetable planet Floor/Approaching Chicago to Die  or flying over earth another/40 years…"…"Fire_Heaven Descending 22,000 Years End th' Atomic Aeon.." - [Allen is distracted - "Can you get settled, sir, I wonder" - continues..] - "The Lake's blue again, Sky's the same, baby.."..…"Scream in despair over Meat and Metal Microphone")

[This is foilowed by  "Grant Park, August 28, 1968"]  - Grant Park, after about the third day at the Convention Center, Humprey had been nominated - (“Green air, children sat under trees with the old,/bodies bare, eyes open to eyes under the hotel wall.."…"Who wants to be President of the/ Garden of Eden?")

(Then), Aug 2 1969 – I’ll try and bring it up to this week  [Oct  1969] -  (“Rain-wet asphalt heat, garbage curbed, cans overflowing"("I hauled down lifeless mattresses to sidewalk refuse-piles/old rugs stept on from Paterson to Lower East Side filled with/bed-bugs…"… "…a glance behind/and sudden farewell to the bedbug-ridden mattresses piled/ soggy in dark rain")

and (approximately twenty-six and-half minutes in (in the third segment) -  “Death on All Fronts"–"Half the blue globe's germ popuation more than enough to keep the cloudy lung from stinking pneumonia" (“A new moon looks down on our sick sweet planet/Orion's chased the Immovable Bear halfway across the sky"…."Mind fragmented - and still abstract - Pain in/left temple living death.")

(Finally), October 24th to 26^th ..Returning from Kerouac's funeral –  (from "Memory Gardens" - cemetery ("covered with yellow leaves/in morning rain…."…"artificial  trees, robots sofas,/Ignorant cars -/One Way Street to Heaven/Dark institutes Redbrick facades" -  (and) - (October 29th flying New York into Maine) - "Flying into a trail of black smoke/Kerouac's obituary conserves Time's/Front Paragraphs"…"…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.") 

(At approximately thirty-three-and-a-quarter minutes in (third segment), Allen continues)

AG: (You can) stay and talk if you want after... but I’d like to finish with a Buddhistmantra. Both songs we have sung so far have been Gnostic- (William) Blake, Western Christian Gnostic, and Hindu – SriKrishna and Shiva. So, for.. for finishing the with (Jack) Kerouac - the first mantra I ever heard was from Kerouac, who did bring a consciousness of Oriental bliss to the West, recently in Pop form. First mantra I ever heard was a thing called the Three Vows of Buddhism  [the Three Jewels]  - “In Buddha I take my refuge , in dharma(the nature or law of cause-and-effect orkarma), I take my refuge (in the nature of maya, or relation to an illusion, that we are void), and in sangha, the company of fellow  Buddhists,  I take my refuge - Buddhaṃ śaraṇaṃ gacchāmi/ Dharmaṃ śaraṇaṃ gacchami,/ Sanghaṃ śaraṇaṃ gacchāmi - and that’s repeated three times –Dutiyam-pi buddhaṃ (the second time) and Tatiyam-pi (third time) 

Allen proceeds (from thirty-three-and-three-quarter minutes in to forty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in) to chant with harmonium accompaniment

[Audio for the above begins here, beginning at approximately eighteen-and-a-half minutes in (third segment) and comtinuing until approximatelyforty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in] 

Montreal Reading continues - (Sunflower Sutra & Mantra)

March 10, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Ginsberg Yearbook on "Antiques Road Show"

≪ Previous: Montreal reading continues - (Fall of America & Mantra)

$

0

0

Following Allen's Montreal 1969 reading:

Moderator: Allen says he wouldn’t mind answering any questions….

AG: Or a conversation or something..

Moderator: ..rapping with anyone who wants to pass on anything to Allen, so anybody go  ahead.  Alright [to audience member], stand up, go ahead..

Q: Will you read “Sunflower Sutra”?

AG: Yes..Sure. The question was would I read “Sunflower Sutra. I think I’ll read that and then quit because some are restless… Can we settle here? – (and) also I wanted to say..[to Student] ..what is your name? ..there are, as you know, people taking money for a  free health clinictonight which will (treat) aid, people who have indulged too delightfully in sexual communication or dropped too much acid and found themselves in and out of bardo thodol, so there's a few doctors who have offered their services togive aid to the children who’ve gone too far out into the cosmos .. If you have any money, you could help the doctorswith it, that would be appreciated.  That's outside the door…black cylinder…

[At approximately forty-three-and-three-quarter minutes in (third segment), 

Allen begins reading from  "Sunflower Sutra"] - ("I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade/of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset  over the box house hills and/ cry"… "…no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-/eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.." - [Allen breaks off] -  "Actually, I'm having trouble because there's so much  movement there. Can I wait a minute till everybody gets a little more settled? Is this thing [the sound-system] working consistently? (because it sounded like it was going on and off this morning. Is it alright?(A few) minutes to compose myself? - It's just too difficult now (because everybody's unsettled now), so I'd like to finish with a (William) Blake song, which is easier to sing when there's this much movement. Or better still, there's a Buddhist mantra for calming children, which is useful - Tibetan.. (but I haven't done any Tibetan so far (and won't) till everybody gets a ground)

[Allen chanta a mantra to settle the audience - Om A Ra Pa Ca Na Dhih -Sri Manjushri, god of discriminating wisdom, book in one hand and lightning sword of intelligence in the other, that symbolizes Buddhist ventures - and then, starting at approximately fifty minutes in, reads "Sunflower Sutra" again (this time in its entirety -( "I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock…"…  "spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank/sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision."

Moderator: Allen's a bit tired.

AG: No, I don’t know what to do now. See if I can…  I mean, We might have an orgy?

Moderator: We just want you to talk. Why not tell us what you think?
AG: Well, I'll tell them.
Moderator: We just want you to talk Unless you are too tired?

AG: No, It’s just talk about what? – see. Somebody propose a subject (otherwise I’ll get too freaked out andparanoid to deal with all the assembled ….

to be continued (the Montreal Q & A  to follow)

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately forty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in (in the third segment) and including at approximately fifty-six-and-a-half minutes in]

Ginsberg Yearbook on "Antiques Road Show"

March 10, 2016, 8:40 am

≫ Next: Friday's Weekly Round Up - 259

≪ Previous: Montreal Reading continues - (Sunflower Sutra & Mantra)

$

0

0

A quaint item - and a very early item, Allen Ginsberg's 1943 high-school yearbook. 
It  appears on a segment of the popular PBS tv showAntiques Road Showlater this month.
Its owner, his classmate, the charming and self-effacing Mr Katz, takes it to the expert Jason Preston for appraisal, and discovers, to his evident surprise and delight, that, signed and inscribed (and with "an original poem" as inscription) it's worth money - close to $10,000!

Katz on Ginsberg:
"I had no indication that he (Allen) would go on to do those wonderful things that he did, you know and become as famous as he did. He was just a nice guy to pal around with"

and, later, "There was nothing put-on about Allen"

The "original poem" (hastily-scribbled doggerel)  reads as follows - "The Katz Pajamas/our graduating now:/I wish to say that I'm a/graduate too, and bow/Now this is the point of my story:/this horrible fight for glory/of Commencement is/a lousy biz/But Katz you've conquered/I'll meet you in Yonkers/when I go to Columbia/and you go to Rongers [sic]"

There's also "the Class Poem" (signed by "A.G.") - "Ready are we to meet the challenge hurled:/To battle, conquer, and rebuild the world"

Katz and Preston discuss the find on the show and Katz fills in a little of the background

The whole segment may be viewed (in advance of its broadcast date) online -  here 

Friday's Weekly Round Up - 259

March 11, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Jack Kerouac's Birthday - A Jack Kerouac Weekend

≪ Previous: Ginsberg Yearbook on "Antiques Road Show"

$

0

0

Allen parle en français. We've previously spotlighted Allen on French radio (from 1996, on Alain Veinstein's program, and in the company of Jean-Jacques Lebel, on the occasion of the publication of the French edition of  Cosmopolitan Greetings.)  Here he (it) is again. 

And Beat international interviews. Following up our last week's notice of an Italian one, here's the ever-sprightly Lawrence Ferlinghetti interviewed in Spanish, just a few weeks back, in El Pais- "Un escritor no se retire hasta que non puede sostener el boligrafo" ("A writer doesn't retire until he can no longer hold the pen") - Ferlinghetti on Allen: "Allen Ginsberg era el mejor vendedor que haya pisado la tierra. Sin el, no habria habido Generacion Beat" ("Allen Ginsberg was the best salesman who ever walked the earth. Without him there would be no Beat Generation") 
More Beat Generation articles (Jesús Aguado) in El Paishere, here, here and here 
   

"Allen Ginsberg and the Creative Rewards of Generosity" - Adam Gee, over on Volteface provides three short extracts from his book-in-progress, When Sparks Fly.

Anne Waldman is the subject of KPFA's Jack Foley Cover to Cover - here 

                                                                        [Photograph by John Suiter]

More real-estate news (and alarming news) -Jack Kerouac's beloved Stations of the Cross locationmay be threatened . Read more about that here in the local Massachusetts paper, the Lowell Sun

Tomorrow is Jack Kerouac's birthday - Celebrations at the Beat Museum and Lowell Celebrates Kerouac 

Details of the San Francisco (Beat Museum) event - here
and the Lowell festivities - here ("special guest", David Amram) 

and on Sunday, in Saint Petersburg, Florida, Kristy Anderson screens thirty-five minutes from her ongoing Kerouac documentary, Jack Kerouac's Florida: The End of the Road  (currently in production) - Contrary to received opinion,  "Jack Kerouac's relation with Florida is a love story not a tragedy"

 & it'll be Jack Kerouac Birthday Weekend  all weekend coming up, this weekend on The Allen Ginsberg Project 

Jack Kerouac's Birthday - A Jack Kerouac Weekend

March 12, 2016, 3:00 am

≫ Next: A Jack Kerouac Weekend - 2

≪ Previous: Friday's Weekly Round Up - 259

$

0

0

Celebrating Jack Kerouac's birthday today on the Allen Ginsberg Project. 

See here for some of our earlier Kerouac birthday celebrations and Kerouac celebrations - and here - and here- and here - and here - andhere 

Today, we thought to celebrate via transcription of a hitherto untranscribed panel at the 1982 Jack Kerouac On The Road Conference.  The focus was Kerouac's Catholicism and Buddhism.

Allen introduces the proceedings:

AG: Fellow celebrants, fellow poets, fellow sentient beings. Welcome to the discussion of Kerouac, Catholicism and Buddhism, and we have an all-star cast lined up – a terrific scene actually, so, I’ll introduce the people that are a sangha on stage. On the extreme left, poetus magus, Gregory Corso(poeta magus), John Clellon Holmes(prose writer extraordinary,and friend of Kerouac). In the center, Gerald Nicosia (who’s been investigating Kerouac’s writings, symbols and life, friends, and gossip, indefatigably for the last eight years, and will have information on Kerouac as Catholic),Jose Arguelles(meditator, teacher, Buddhist, author of  works on Buddhist iconography and psychological  mandala, from Boulder). On my left, Osel Tendzin, the Regent, otherwise known as dharma heir of Chogyam Trungpa, the President of Naropa Institute, who opened the entire Kerouac Conference, I asked Ozel Tenzing, being Regent, to come and represent Buddhism from a professional point of view, since he’s an old pro’ (a meditator, an actual pro’) so it would be the equivalent then of having a meditation master commenting on our perceptions and insights. So we have a full house that way.

(And) we decided to have Gerald Nicosia open up because he has specific information on Kerouac’s Catholic background and interests 

  

GN: I’m going to be… ok.   [technician fixes mic]

AG: And we’re all going to be brief

GN: Hello..testing.. I’m going to be reading a few pages from my book, Memory Babe. Most of what I’m going to be reading takes place in 1959, 1960, and my source of information is a man named Victor GiosciaG-I-O-S-C-I-A who at the time was a sociology professor at Fordham Universityand he was Jesuit and he and Jack lived together in Northport, I mean very close together, and were very close friends for a number of years, but to start off, I want to read just a couple of brief passages from Jack’s …which is material which came from Jack’sOn The Road diary, which is in the University of Texas, which dates from the years 1948 to…

AG: Gerry – you’re getting an echo.. just a little distance from the microphone..about three inches….

GN: How's this..testing, testing,,nothing now. Hello?... Can you hear?… Okay... 
[At approximately three-and-a-half minutes in, Gerald Nicosia begins]

GN: ..because, from his On The Road journal, 1948-1949,  he discusses what his religious outlook was then, (and this is just a couple of paragraphs I’m going to read before I read about his relationship with Victor Gioscia in (19)58)

 “In 1948 Jack was writing intensely religious poems in his journal. In one poem he dealt with the powerful conflict between his desire to serve God and his desire to "see the world, which was the City of God” (and that’s his quote – which is from (St.) Augustine, of course). On the one hand, he felt he should stay home where God had “appointed him to write” (and that’s another quote). On the other hand, he knew that it was only on the  “streets” of  God that he would find the things he wanted to write about . In this poem, he resolves to see, “what I will never see again “,  even though the result be God’s anger.

Despite his assuming the persona of Lucifer, the poem ends with Jack lying in a pool of light in his own room, having passed through death to live again, a resurrected Christ.
In the first few months of 1949 his journal grew increasingly philosophical and religious, preoccupied as always with the problem of will, he concluded that man’s free will existed in his ignorance of  God’s fore-ordained plan. He hypothesized the origin of language in man’s complaint to God over human misery. Though such complaint was both ignorant and fruitless, he felt, it often produced a songof great beauty. To the psychoanalytic charge that his love of God was a death-instinct (evidently, somebody had been bugging him with that charge then), Jack responded that neurosis theory was itself a manifestation of anxiety. He felt that man could know no absolute truth only degrees of light. At present Jack himself  had to make do with a few  “tapers building in my wilderness”. The source of light he said was the eye of God towards which he was irresistibly drawn. To him the very existence of Man seemed a journey from darkness into light. Although he drew courage from the idea that he was approaching  “direct feelings with God”, his personal life was then growing desperate. He was seeking a lovely girl who could "understand his understanding ofeternity” (that’s another quote). He said that happily-married, he could go on to writeDoctor Sax, and so on. As for getting a living, he supposed he could "steal fruit" from someone else’s garden. But the mask of Satan (which again he’s using) was always just a bluff with him. He continued to worry about his mother having to work all day, Ahead he saw death for both of them, which for him was – quote “the jump to spaces?” unquote – and though he claimed to find comfort in the thought of melting into the universe, he feared to find not an Easter resurrection or paradise but only"wrathful lights"

Okay, so now I’m shifting to 1958 and to his…which really amounted to a certain flirtation with returning to the Catholic Church – “In October 1958 Jack took mescalineand had an immensely reassuring vision of the world as “One Flower”, with everybody united peacefully in a constellation of saints, whose flashing dance it was his duty to report. And he did report it, in a five-thousand word journal entry. Jealous of Anais Nin’s LSD experience, he had importuned her for some as if she were a pusher (she got a little upset about that). He was even more anxious to try the hallucinogen, LSD after Allen’s initiation into its use at Stanford in June. Since his second experience of “the Golden Eternity”in the fall of 1958, his religious visions were coming more often, and whether or not drug-induced, were taking on a hallucinatory character, He saw an image ofCardinal Giovanni Montiniwearing papal dress and painted him thus, four years before Montini became Pope Paul VI. Jack always made clear however that his visions were secondary to those of Gerard.

                                           [Jack Kerouac' painting of Cardinal Giovanni Montini (1959)]

To his friend, who was a sociologist, Frank Feminella, meeting Jack was like meeting the Pope.. He was introduced to Jack through his fellow sociologist Victor Gioscia, a close friend of Jack’s who lived in Northport. Feminella had travelled extensively and met many great men, including many Presidents, but no one had impressed him with “a sense of reality and of history” as much as Jack. They got into a discussion of the Gregorian chant, which Jack called “a “jazz Mass”. Jack explained that since the chant is unharmonized and unmeasured, you sing it as you feel it and that you have to be actually praying to get the rhythm right. When Feminella described Jack to his friend Father Joe Scheuer, a warm and unassuming Passionist priest, Scheuer asked to meet Kerouac himself. After Vic and Frank introduced the priest to Jack, Jack whipped out some Zen prayers he’d written. When those failed to rock the priest, Jack launched into an attack against institutionalized religion, asserting that the Catholic Church was not interested in spirituality but merely in organization, Scheuer agreed with everything he said. As soon as Jack saw that Scheuer wasn’t going to try to reconvert him, it was as if Jack had lost twenty years and was again an embarrassed teenager at the rectory of St Jean Baptiste,a fact all the stranger since Scheuer wasn’t wearing any priestly garb. Sensing in Jack, the little boy awestruck at his own talent, full of adolescent petulance towards the world that would infringe on its development, Scheuer relaxed Jack by drinking wine with him and showing his eagerness to learn from him. Gradually Jack became the man of letters again, and they talked of America and later of Bach.The evening ended on the front porch with them identifying the stars and speculating about life after death. On the way home Father Scheuer said, “We visited a very holy man tonight”. 

A professor at Fordham University, Gioscia was just beginning to break out of his own strictly Catholic background. Vic and Jack had met through the bookstore owner in Northport, and Vic with his Volkswagen quickly became Jack’s wheelman. Although Vic towered above Jack in height, he was like a lamb among lions in the company of Jack’s New York City friends and Jack was exceptionally kind and protective in helping Vic adapt to this new world. That is not to say that Jack in any sense corrupted him, but rather that Jack helped enlarge Vic’s world to accommodate not only St.John of the Cross andBrother Antoninus (which were both favorites of Kerouac as well) - but also the hipsters and beaten people . A man like  (Herbert) Huncke, for example, always knew “what was going down”. To survive on the street, his moves had to be as fast as the flashes of truth by which a mystic becomes one with God. Both the beat and the beatific get their revelations from intuition. Both are pushed beyond the limits of the physical and the rational by the horrors of suffering and death. In the case of the Beats, the urgency of vision was poignant with their sense that America had lost its soul. Their homeland was being sold to the colossus of industrial materialism. The holiness in America had been beaten down and covered over. It could be ransomed, Jack believed – (and this is what he told to Gioscia) – only by people who’d learned to speak not of themselves but fromthemselves, who had learned to tap those deep sources that are the font of all religion. This was why he wrote as he did, in the very same manner that St John of  the Cross had written for the salvation of his fellow men.”When God speaks”, Jack told Gioscia,”just take it down” - (It’s not always that easy!) 

Jack’s mysticism was earthy and full of contradictions. He loved the story about St.Teresawalking through a thunderstorm and being struck by a vision just as she stumbled into a mud puddle. After quivering helplessly for several minutes she got up and shook her fists at the heavens, crying, “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few!” That sensibility was very close to Jack’s own, for he too railed against God. It was clear to him that life was sacred and not his to take, and yet he wanted to be free of his immense passion. The root meaning of passion is to suffer and he suffered in both senses  - to be with things on their own terms, without judgment, and to be hurting. He was in constant pain not only about the condition of America but also of humankind and all life. As he wrote on a napkin for Gioscia, ”Every little fishy in the sea worries me like the Children’s Crusade”.

To deal with the world’s inexplicable wrongs, Jack felt that he had to live in a monastery and so he made his house a monastery with his mother, the Reverend Mother. Like disciples of St. Francis- (and these were things he really described himself) - they would carry baskets of cubed stale bread into the back yard to feed the birds and they fed their cats lamb kidneys and liver pate that both of them spent hours chopping up by hand. With Gioscia, Jack was equally gentle. When Jack talked about his visions with Vic he avoided using Catholic terms, knowing that Vic’s bitter quarrels with the Church would create a needless barrier to the experience. By the same token, when Jack shared his knowledge of Buddhism with Vic it was never as a guru attempting to change the direction of his life but always as a friend giving him new peaceful space to grow in . Furthermore, Jack related Buddhism to the Western idealism in Plato, Meister Eckhart and (Ralph Waldo) Emerson with which Vic was familiar. Jack helped hin see that there was but one experience of enlightenment, translatable into “dialects” as dissimilar as Catholicism and Zen. Jack’s point was that words make no difference, because enlightenment exists solely as an experience adding dimension to the human spirit. Curiously what Jack got from Vic was a way back into the traditional structures from which he’d been banished. Jack was always deeply aware of his responsibility to teach, in the sense that it is beholden on one to whom God’s grace has been given to share it. For one thing he believed that his experiences had genuine religious value and it pained him that he could not communicate them to the Church, having been cut off on a number of counts, and irrevocably so because of his divorce from his second wife, Joan. Part of Jack’s friendship with Vic was a flirtation with the Church, the tacit expression of a wish to be accepted back into the bosom. When Gioscia invited Jack to be interviewed on the Fordhamradio show, Dialogue, Jack seized the opportunity to confront a Jesuit campus with his heresy. Vic knew the chances he was taking. Jack was liable to expound about the Jesuits, whom he considered wise men who had been corrupted by civilization, or come out with one of his quips like, ”If Jesus ever started walking across the United States, he’d be arrested outside of Altoona, Pennsylvania!”. As it turned out, Jack’s broadcast turned out  to be even more “offensive”. He discoursed to the effect that life was gentle and God was good and that people should relax and take it easy and that he was weary with suffering and hoped everyone loved everyone. He also talked a little of Buddhism and said there was no point in trying to distinguish between religions because once you attained a sense of the beyond the way you got there was irrelevant.

Angry phone calls poured in. Both Gioscia and the priest who managed the show received sanctions.  From His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellmancame word that it was forbidden on Fordham radio to say that it didn’t matter whether one was a Buddhist or a Catholic. 
   

                                                                                   [Jose Arguelles]

AG: Thank you (Gerry). Next Jose Arguelles

[At approximately fifteen-and-three-quarter minutes in, Jose Arguelles speaks] 

JA: Okay Is this proper sound? – Okay – I’m here in the spirit of great humility to invoke Jack Kerouac, the visionary and the prophet, and, as befits my name, Jose Arguelles, I’m using as my scriptural text, the Mexico City Blues, which seems to have come naturally to me, and when I say I’m here to invoke Jack Kerouac  the prophet and the visionary, I’d like to just weave a few, a few thoughts that have come to me, plus,as they come, a few verses from the scriptures, the Mexico City Blues.

To begin, we are here, all of us, obviously, brought together by the singular presence of one human being, and we – even though he is no longer here – we are here, and we are here all together, as co-creators of the Beat and of the beatific vision, and I think it’s, particularly this afternoon, why we’re drawn here, is the beatific vision (as Gerry was saying, whether it’s in Catholicism or Buddhism, that quality of that vision is global, and what Jack struggled with, at a personal level (what he worked with at a personal level with the Catholicism and the Buddhism is also a planetary reality of East and West. He was, of course, the prophet, born in the year of the Bomb, in the Atomic Age, and here we are, thirty-seven war-awful years after Hiroshima still struggling for that fruition of that vision of that global fusion of  the beatific vision.

 He wrote in  "Number 132"– “Innumeral infinite songs,/Great suffering of the atomic/in verse/Which may or may not be/controlled/By a consciousness/Of what you & the /ripples of the waves/are a part/That's a Buddhism/That's a Universal Mind/ Pan Cosmodicy…" - So it’s like in  the spirit of"Pan Cosmodicy" that we’re continuing.  Does everybody know what "Pan Cosmodicy"  is? – It’s a good one. I’m not sure (I do)  either. I love it tho’ – Pan? – Pan-Cosmodicy?  - sounds like it’s all cosmic, - and idiocy, to boot –"Pan Cosmodicy"  – So what I’m doing here with all of you is invoking the vision and the prophecy of Kerouac as the visionary of the Immediate Eternal Reality of the Supreme Mind, of the Eternal Present, which he often spoke of, the great One Void Mind – and also of the Prophet of the Future, (of the awful-to-come, as well as the fusion).

He wrote in  (his) "119^th Chorus"– "Self be your lantern/Self be your guide - Thus Spake Tathagata/Warning of radios/That would come/Some day/And make people/Listen to automatic/Words of others/ and the general flash of noises,/ forgetting self, not self -/ Forgetting the secret” - That was Kerouac the prophet of the ..what I call the "awful-to-come", and also of the way to healing in which he sees the fusion of the East and the West- "And far over the Atlantic" -  (he sings, in the "112^th Chorus") –“Where red Amida is Shining/you'll hear the Call Trumpet/of East is Alright with the West/In the Orb of the Womb/of Tathagata/so round/so empty/so unbelievably/ false living/empty of persimonny" -  "Persimmony”  - like in persimmons? – and, also ..”Whichever..” – (in "148^th (Chorus)") -" Instrucciones/Precaucion/ Whichever way you look/you're looking East/ Same with West/ Whichever etc. way you look/you're looking West/ Thus Spake Tathagata" 

– So there’s that whole vision of where we are with that need to tie ourselves together in terms of realizing what our responsibility is, not just to a country or a continent, but to the planet itself. And the legacy of this vision of Kerouac is real simple, it’s that, that the way for us to achieve this is through..Art, through recognition of the Spirit, and through Love. This is the legacy  that art, really, finally, is the only substitute there is to politics, art is the only alternative to atom-bomb-ic death-squads, even if our art looks political, or our art looks like a political action, that, if it still springs from art as the primal expression of spirit (or what in Buddhism is called dharma) that that is what is going to fulfill what Jack saw, that the only way to salvage the planet  is through art understood as non-aggressive action, that is to say, art  is understood as the action of awakened Love. He wrote..there was one place where he describes the problem that we’re dealing with, right, dealing with the situation here. He says this – (in (the) "156^th Chorus"), he says "This tree just told me/ See eternity/ Is the other side/ Of the other part/ Of your mind/ That you ignore/Because you want to" - (You know it's) basic ignorance that we have to overcome, and then he answers that (in "the 157^th Chorus", right following that - and I said that Art and the Spirit of Art and the Spirit of Love and the Spirit of Awakened Action -)

He says, in "the 157^th Chorus"– “The Art of Kindness/Is a dream/That was foretold by prophets/Of Old, wd. be continuous/With no broken lines/Buddha after Buddha/Crashing in from Heavens/Farther than expressioning/Bringing the Single Teaching/Love Everywhere/ Being on the single teaching/It's all indeed in Love;/'Love not of Loved Object/Cause no object exists/Love of Objectlessness/When nothing exists/Save yourself and your not-self/Hung in a Moon/Of perfect O Canopy/Sorrowing Starborrowing/ Happiness Parade"– That’s the vision of  the...prophecy of Kerouac that we see, the seeds of it that I mentioned in the beginning, in terms of his own personal struggle with Catholicism and Buddhism, or how he was perceiving that in his own being, that brings us here and we’re here to feel that quality of love and awakened action, art, as our responsibility today

I wrote a few other words with which I’d like to conclude my brief invocation, presentation, whatever you wish to call this (with) – I wrote “Kerouac, ancient one, rousing , mystic planet tribe (that’s who we all are here) Kerouac, ancient one, rousing , mystic planet tribe to artful action, art and power and beauty, spirit beyond the banks and universities of Moloch materialist atomic bombing blindness more  than anti-nuke beatific vision – how to make planet earth a work of art (can we make planet earth a work of art? We are the RTA’s?? of Planet Earth – R-T-A – Resident Terrestrial Agents. We are the bees of beauty making of earth a honey-hive of infinite compassion and this is our responsibility and this is the legacy of the prophecy of Jack Kerouac who brought us all here together.

Thank you 

[At approximately twenty-five-and-a-half minutes in, Gregory Corso speaks]

                                                                             [Gregory Corso]

GC  (re microphone) Alright does that work? – yeah - On this picture I’ve been asked many times on the crucifix. Jack was posing for Madamoiselle, with Allen, myself,Philip Whalen, Peter Orlovsky, I don’t remember who else. A woman had given me this beautiful silver cross, and Jack and I had lots in common with talks on Catholicism , about Catholicism. The first shot I did to make him Beat was his hair. His hair was always well-combed back. Before they took the photograph, I mussed up his hair. That’s what I did. Then I gave him the crucifix. I came on like a John the Baptist, in a sense, to this man. I said “here, put this on”, and he put it on, and he so loved that cross. And the big deal about it, of course, is that it was wiped out many times in newspapers and what-not, (but not the hair, the hair remained)

                                          [Jack Kerouac with crucifix as he appeared in the New York Times]

Alright, that ends it all. I think that answers that one there.

Second one was, in his household, I was invited, with my first wife, before my eighteen-year-old daughter (I had here, who left here today), was born. And I was allowed to sleep in the bed with my wife because I was married to her. No one else if they went to that house and weren’t married could sleep together in that house. Mother had it so. 

And, I don’t know if my daughter was conceived while I was there or not, but it’s a good shot. Over the bed was a crucifix. [turns to Allen] – do you remember that bedroom, Al? – the  bed with the crucifix over it? in Northport? you remember?

AG: Yeah..Yes

GC: Well..okay..so..I don’t know if my daughter was conceived then, that night. So those are the only two shots that I think I’d be here to mention – the clarification of that, the addition of the hair being mussed up, and the invitation to his home (when I left I received a nice postcard from him saying thank you for blessing our home).

AG: (to John Clellon Holmes): Well, you were going to comment on us, John.

John Clellon Holmes: Well, that’s true.

to be continued tomorrow

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at the start of the tape and concluding approximately twenty-seven-and-three-quarter minutes in] 
[Some versions of some of these transcriptions can be found in Coffee House Press' s  volume, Beats and Naropa - An Anthology, edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, 2009]