Allen Ginsberg class, The history of poetry, June 1975.

The History of Poetry

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The History of Poetry

 

Allen Gingsberg

June 16, 1975

AG: Was it alright? It wasn’t a total bore? - So I’m going to go back, since there is some empty space, since people don’t know some earlier poetry, I’m going to go back and do a fast shuttle through my favorite early poems, in English. Later on, we might go back further and get to Anacreon, but I want to start with "The Seafarer" Anglo-Saxon, originally. So when would that be? When was “The Seafarer”? Do you know?

W.S.Merwin (sitting in on the class): I don’t know what the original (date) was.

AG: Does anyone know when “The Seafarer” was? Anglo-Saxon, that would be 6th Century?, 7th Century?

WSM: More like about the..

AG: Ninth? Written originally in alliterative verse, with a caesura in the center of the line, which I’ll overemphasize to begin with so you hear how the verse-form goes. This was Anglo-Saxon – too difficult for me to read, and so translated into English, or American English, by Ezra Pound back in 1910-1920, probably 1910 or so, “The Seafarer”.

Another thing I wanted to find out, how many here are Buddhist? Raise your hand. Wow, yeah. Now, how many Buddhist, or non-Buddhist actually, have learned how to do some kind of formal meditation practice? Okay, now how many have not? Now for the purpose of the class, it would be useful if you'd pick up on how to do it, take a half-hour course from one of the instructors. Will you? Is that alright? Just to do the meditation, because we may be making use of it in the class. So, pretty nearly everybody knows something of it. In a way this refers to the First Noble Truth, of suffering.

The Seafarer

By Ezra Pound

 

May I for my own self song's truth reckon,

Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days

Hardship endured oft.

Bitter breast-cares have I abided,

Known on my keel many a care's hold,

And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent

Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head

While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

My feet were by frost benumbed.

Chill its chains are; chafing sighs

Hew my heart round and hunger begot

Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not

That he on dry land loveliest liveth,

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

Weathered the winter, wretched outcast

Deprived of my kinsmen;

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

There I heard naught save the harsh sea

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

Did for my games the gannet's clamour,

Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,

The mews' singing all my mead-drink.

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

In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed

With spray on his pinion.

Not any protector

May make merry man faring needy.

This he little believes, who aye in winsome life

Abides 'mid burghers some heavy business,

Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft

Must bide above brine.

Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,

Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then

Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now

The heart's thought that I on high streams

The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.

Moaneth alway my mind's lust

That I fare forth, that I afar hence

Seek out a foreign fastness.

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

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

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

But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare

Whatever his lord will.

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

Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world's delight

Nor any whit else save the wave's slash,

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

Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,

Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,

All this admonisheth man eager of mood,

The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks

On flood-ways to be far departing.

Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,

He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,

The bitter heart's blood. Burgher knows not —

He the prosperous man — what some perform

Where wandering them widest draweth.

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

My mood 'mid the mere-flood,

Over the whale's acre, would wander wide.

On earth's shelter cometh oft to me,

Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,

Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,

O'er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow

My lord deems to me this dead life

On loan and on land, I believe not

That any earth-weal eternal standeth

Save there be somewhat calamitous

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

Disease or oldness or sword-hate

Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body.

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

Laud of the living, boasteth some last word,

That he will work ere he pass onward,

Frame on the fair earth 'gainst foes his malice,

Daring ado, ...

So that all men shall honour him after

And his laud beyond them remain 'mid the English,

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

Delight mid the doughty.

Days little durable,

And all arrogance of earthen riches,

There come now no kings nor Cæsars

Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.

Howe'er in mirth most magnified,

Whoe'er lived in life most lordliest,

Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!

Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.

Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.

Earthly glory ageth and seareth.

No man at all going the earth's gait,

But age fares against him, his face paleth,

Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,

Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven,

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

Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,

Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,

And though he strew the grave with gold,

His born brothers, their buried bodies

Be an unlikely treasure hoard.

[JAB1] 

It's really interesting, given, say, our own Buddhist preoccupations, how close that is to versions of the Four Noble Truths, or versions of some of the Ngondro, or preliminary practices, preparatory prayers - "Delightful to have human body, free and well-favored, but death comes, this body will be a corpse. The laws of karma inexorable, cause-and-effect can't be escaped. Most of all, samsara, an ocean of suffering, undurable, unbearably intense".

I was looking over a lot of earlier poetry in anthologies, to bring in, and I was struck by (I've always been struck by, actually) how close the English verse that was taught in high school is to primary Buddhist understanding of transiency, the fact that all the constituents of being are transitory, "pleasure waneth".

"Seafarer", I laid on you because... did anybody know this before? does anybody know "The Seafarer"? So most don't. That's pretty strong, actually. Very manly. Very solid manly kind of verse. Alliterative verse - that is, "Bitter breast-cares", "dire sea-surge", "Narrow nightwatch". The lines are composed of halves. Two, usually two, alliterations of the same kind of sounds. Consonant and vowel, alliteration is a consonant and vowel together repeated. "Sea-surge".

WSM: Consonants

AG: Consonant linked to, it could be a different vowel, like "sea-surge" on each half of the line, and a caesura - cut, cut, "caesura" (like "Caesarian") - in the middle of the line. "May I for my own self song's truth reckon / Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days". So, you heard that verse-form, or you can hear it, can't you, when (it's) being read?

(A) curious thing about this - this is in Pound's Personae, which is in the library, and there is also another book of Pound's, of collected Translations you have in the library. So Pound did a lot of research. He had the problem of attempting to reconstruct, or construct, some kind of measure or meter for his own practice for American verse and, in the course of that, he ransacked the world's literature, looking for usable verse forms, usable measure, usable practices in relation to music, in other languages, in Provencal particularly, usable examples of phanopoeia, the casting of an image on the mind's eye, melopoeia, the music of the verse, the music of the vowels, the tone-leading of the vowels, and logopoeia, the dance of the intellect among words. He divided poetry into those classes and if you're interested in exploring what he did with poetry (because he's really the most heroic poet of the century, in terms of his research and his practice, like encyclopedic research - and, at the same time, cranky and personal), there is one useful book that can be used as a little anthology textbook for schools, The ABC of Reading. This is from the library. It's a selection. It's general essays, or piths, not essays, paragraphs, in English literature, and (the) tracing of the back-bone, the skeletal back-bone, of the progression of European verse to the 20th Century..to (Walt) Whitman. In other words, he chose his.. (as) if it were an evolutionary development, considering it as an evolutionary development, with a great leap forward every century or so, with one poet making a discovery, a new discovery, he made the selection for a little teaching anthology. I'll be using a different set of selections because what I'll be teaching is just the poems that I like (or the poems I found in my own ear), much less systematic than Pound. But for an idea of Pound's systematic survey of what happened, real brief, with real brief selections, The ABC of Reading is great.

 

AG: Now how many here have read Shakespeare? How many have not read any Shakespeare at all? You haven't?

Student: Not much

AG: Okay. Great. A live one! How many here have not read "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare? High, raise your hands. How many have read "The Tempest". So it's about half each. So I want to read a few lines from "The Tempest" (jumping from Anglo-Saxon!). "The Tempest" is considered by most people, or some scholars, to be Shakespeare's last play. So it's his sign-off, his last message, his last perception, his last view of things as he wanted to present it to the public, or to himself. The hero is a magician, Prospero, who has great powers, who got screwed out of his kingdom, (Milan was it?), by (his) brother-in-law, (in) some family squabble, hassle, and exiled to an island, where he spent many years perfecting his solitary meditations and magical studies, and plotting revenge, and ripening in his own mind, studying his powers. Horny, (he) made it with a witch, Sycorax, who was local to the island, like a real hag, and sired Caliban, a sort of half-beast, half-man, Rudra, ego, or beast, whatever. He had an assistant, androgenous angel Ariel, who did his bidding, while he did his magic, flying through the air, creating musics to bewitch people occasionally, creating tempests (so, the title of "The Tempest"). Caliban is commenting on the music he hears on the island created by Prospero, the magician, with a couple of clowns (Stefano and Trinculo), one that he is leading around on the island. Ariel plays a tune on the tabor and pipe:

"Stefano: What is this same?/ Trinculo: The tune of our catch, play'd by the picture of Nobody/ Stefano: If thou be'est a man, show thyself in thy likeness. If thou be'est a devil, take't as thou list./ Trinculo: O, forgive me my sins!/ Stefano: He that dies pays all debts. I defy thee. Mercy upon us!/ Caliban: Art thou afeard?/ Stefano: No, monster, not I.

Caliban: Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises/Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. / Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments/ Will hum about my ears; and sometimes voices,/ That if I then had wak'd after long sleep, / Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming, / The clouds me thought would open, and show riches/ Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak'd / I cried to dream again".

I'll do it again, the "Be not afeard The isle is full of noises/Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. / Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments/ Will hum about my ears; and sometimes voices,/ That if I then had wak'd after long sleep, / Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming, / The clouds me thought would open, and show riches/ Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak'd / I cried to dream again". That's like a really pretty thing, that "thousand twangling instruments", and sort of archetypal, longing to get back to the beautiful dream. I think the closest to a basic Buddhist notion of the universe in English literature comes in a famous speech by Prospero, in the midst of the pclay, in Act IV. Prospero the magician has created a magic show in the air to entertain his guests, or sort of an eclogue, procession of the seasons, with representatives of the natural forces, a masque, a pastoral masque, sort of a Whole Earth Catalog masque, say. Diurnal forces represented symbolically, or ancient, natural, pagan images. But he forgot. He hadn't cleaned up the whole tangle. He's created this huge tempest that has brought all of his enemies, the people that screwed him up, brought them to his island under his power. Now he's going to take his revenge on them, or straighten out the scene, or whatever he's going to do. He's[JA2]  got to figure it out, actually. He had a plan, but as he actually has the power over all his supposed antagonists, originally, he changes his mind somewhat. There is something that he had forgotten. Yeah, Caliban had joined the jokers, had joined the clowns, to upset his plan, and, in the midst of this magic show that he created, he suddenly remembered that his own karma, Caliban, his own karmic kid, Caliban, his own cock, so to speak, was now going to screw the scene up for him. Whatever Caliban is. It's in a very pretty instant, because the daughter, Miranda, who he has on the island, a very pretty little teenage teeny-bopper, is going to marry, or is falling in love with, Ferdinand, a prince, who was brought along in the tempest, and he was entertaining them with his magic show and (then he) suddenly remembers:

"Enter certain Reapers, properly inhabited: they join with the Nymphs in a graceful dance, towards the end whereof Prospero starts suddenly and speaks, after which, to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish". His own mirage vanishes. "Heavily".

"Prospero: (aside) I had forgotten that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates / Against my life. The minute of their plot / is almost come (to the Spirits) Well done, avoid; no more. / Ferdinand: This is strange. Your father's in some passion / That works him strongly. / Miranda: Never till this day / Saw I him touch'd with anger, so distemper'd./

Prospero: You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort,/ As if you were dismay'd; be cheerful, sir./ Our revels now are ended. These our actors/ (As I foretold you) were all spirits, and/ Are melted into air, thin air./ And like the baseless fabric of this vision,/ The cloud-capp'd tower's, the gorgeous palaces,/ The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve/ And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,/ Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff?As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;/ Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled./ Be not disturbed with my infirmity./ If you be pleas'd, retire into my cell,/ And there repose. A turn or two I'll walk/ To still my beating mind."

So he had a real vision all of a sudden. "Beating mind", it's really sort of precisely like a presentation of maya. It's the closest thing I've ever seen in English in getting at the essential dream-like, dreamstuff, dream-like-ness of our own universe. It seems to be the last word in the English language on what the nature of the universe is. The gist. I don't think anybody's beat it, in stating, if not what the universe is, what it seems like, what, archetypally, to any 9-year-old consciousness, (and thereafter throughout life).

How many of you had heard this particular passage? Yeah. And how many had not? Well, it's worth hearing, I guess. The whole play moves to an end where, like a good yogi, Prospero finally renounces his powers and comes back to participation in a straightforward human universe, without trickery, hypnosis, magic. Shakespeare himself supposedly retiring from the magical stage, or retiring from his lifelong profession of creating illusions, thus speaking through his character, Prospero, after the play has ended. Prospero is going back to Milan. There's one really funny phrase about his going back to Milan, actually. He says, he's going back to Milan where "every third thought shall be my grave." That's really interesting. "Every third thought shall be my grave", which, for those who do meditation, is kind of an interesting precision: to be able to count your thought, or, for Shakespeare to have been so precise, realizing that thoughts were discrete and (that) you could practically count them, and his constancy to his awareness, or his constancy of consciousness, of awareness, of his own death, had gotten that refined, so that "every third thought shall be my grave". Then Prospero comes out, he's resolved all the problems and everybody is going to go back to Milan in a ship, and he's going to retire, he's burned his magic books and he's thrown his magic wand into the sea, and he's dismissed Ariel, his imagination, his extravagant imagination, made arrangements for Caliban (I guess), and has ended the play and comes out to address the audience, with, what would be the equivalent, if it were analyzed in Buddhist terms, probably the Virtues. How many Virtues are there? five? Five Main Virtues? [Six, actually - or Ten - editor's note - Paramita ]

Student: Seven?

AG: Seven? The equivalent, that is, of applied self-awareness. [reads..] "Prospero: Now my charms are all o'erthrown,/ And what strength I have's mine own, / Which is most faint. Now 'tis true./ I must be here confin'd by you, / Or sent to Naples. Let me not,/ Since I have my dukedom got,/ And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell/ In this bare island by your spell,/ But release me from my bands/ With the help of your good hands./ Gentle breath of yours my sais/ Must fill, or else my project fails,/ Which was to please. Now I want/ Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,/ And my ending is despair/ Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,/ Which pierces so, that it assaults/ Mercy itself, and frees all faults,. As you from crimes would pardon'd be,/ Let your indulgence set me free."

I always liked that "Now I want/ Spirits to enforce", "now I want", meaning, (I) lack. Now I no longer have my magic scene going, so I'm reduced to my human shade. "Now I want/ Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,/ And my ending is despair/ Unless I be reliev'd by prayer", by the prayer of the audience.

Pound, in a sense, had arrived at that state of mind in his old age, in his '80's, or late 70's, -yeah?....

How many here have not read Shakespeare's Sonnets. Okay, then I'll read one. Since this is the Kerouac School of Spontaneous Poetics, I'll read..

 Student: Disembodied (Poetics)

 AG: Well, you know, the "disembodied" was kind of, actually, jokey nonsense. "Kerouac" is disembodied. It would be the "Disembodied Kerouac School", actually, probably, if we were going to be literal.

 So this was Kerouac's favorite sonnet, and among the most celebrated of all the Shakespeare sonnets [reads Sonnet 97 in its entirety - "How like a winter hath my absence been.."]. I just like that "What old December's bareness every where!" - that's good vowels. "What ohhhld December's bareness every where". And that was the key to Kerouac's particular ear, that line.

Student: Allen, would you mind reading it again

AG: Read it again?

Student: Yeah

AG: Well, you can go read it yourself. It's Sonnet 97, and they've got it in the library. I'll read four lines. Really, actually, it's only the beginning I really like! - "How like a winter hath my absence been/ From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!/ What freezings have I felt!, what dark days seen!/ What old December's bareness every where!"

Which is a solid thing there. "What freezings have I felt!, what dark days seen!/ What old December's bareness every where!"

 There's another sonnet on love, or transient love, that has one really great line. "On purpose laid to make the taker mad." Love itself. "On purpose laid to make the taker mad". Well, okay, that was Shakespeare. So there's a big book of Shakespeare you can go read in the library. I'd suggest that, if you're interested in Buddhism, do "The Tempest", because that's total, that's really right on for a study of someone dealing with his own powers, his own extraordinary ego, in a sense, or extraordinary self, his own powers, someone renouncing his powers, so it would be, like, in a sense, to some extent, the Vajrayana renunciation of the notion of sunyata, or emptiness behind the world, and plunging right back into the world, which is what Prospero did, if you know anything about all that Buddhist stuff. Yeah?

Student: I heard a crazy theory that Shakespeare was a Sufi..because the person who explained it to me was...

AG: That's certainly a 20th Century theory. Probably he was. Certainly.., Why not? Well, actually, some people say they don't even (know if he) exist(s). He has a lot of excellent notions. I guess Shakespeare is about the best thing to read if you want to write poetry because his fancy is so funny, his sense of language is so funny. I think Kerouac was reading Shakespeare when he got the "Old December's bareness every where" and "What freezings have I left", and he said, "Genius is funny." Speaking of poetic genius - "genius is funny". That is the combination of words that "On purpose laid to make the taker mad". Or "in the dread, vast and middle of the night". There is a strange humor about the juxtapositions of the words that is like amusing funniness, considering the such-ness of the language, or what the words feel like and how you put them together in a weird way that enters the brain for, like, the first time, so you hear the words and you hear the idea behind it and you get the funny vocal tone and voweled breath of words like "in the dread, vast and middle of the night" (I think it's"Hamlet" - someone reporting to Hamlet about a ghost coming on the castle walls in "the dread, vast and middle of the night".

 

AG: "Around his (Shakespeare's) time there was a lot of great language and song. So I want to run through some of the short songs, or short poems or lyrics of (the) 16th Century, 16th, and maybe 17th, Century. I don't think I put it on the reading list but one very good anthology, or one very good survey of all the poetry in the English language, is one done by (W.H.) Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson in the '50s or '60's called "Poets Of The English Language", and what I'm reading from is the second volume (Marlowe to Marvell), beginning with an anonymous "Tom o' Bedlam's Song". There are several versions of this. Where Auden got his I'm not sure. There is a collection of English songs, like the collection of folk ballads now, called "Percy's Reliques", Bishop Percy's Reliques. Relics of early English poetry and song that has a slightly different version, and has music in it too. But these were songs, so we might as well try to improvise as song. I don't think that it'll be anything like the chords that they used then. [Allen begins singing, with harmonium accompaniment - "From the hagg and hungrie goblin..." - "Tom o' Bedlam's Song", in its entirety]. Actually, singing like that, you don't get the run-on rhythmic charm of the actual versification. "From the hagg and hungrie goblin/ That into rags would rend ye./ And the spirit that stands by the naked man/ in the Book of Moones defend ye/ That of your five sounde sences/ You never be forsaken/ Nor wander from your selves with Tom/ Abroad to begg your bacon..." "Of thirty bare years have I twice twenty" (40).. "bin enraged/ And of forty bin three tymes fifteene/ in durance soundlie caged" (in the looney bin!) - "On the lordie loftes of Bedlam " (that's Tom o' Bedlam talking, Bedlam, the local bug house in London) - "Oh the lordie loftes of Bedlam/ With stubble softe and dainty/ Brave braceletts strong, sweet whips ding-dong/ With wholesome hunger plenty/" - "With a thought I tooke from Maudlin" (now "Maudlin" was, I think, that was the women's equivalent of Bedlam - Bedlam for men, Maudlin for women).

W.S.Merwin: They were both in Bedlam at that time.

AG: What is Maudlin, here?

WSM: I think it's an ironic reference to Oxford, (an) Oxford college

AG: Maybe. Maybe "Maudlin College" (sic), but I think...

WSM: Mary Magdalene (pronounced "Maudlin")

AG: ..at one time there was...

WSM: Mary Magdalene

AG: Yeah. Maudlin is English short form for Magdalene. But at one time, I think, they were separate. I think, I'm not sure, I once read something. "With a thought I tooke for Maudlin/ And a cruse of cockle pottage/ With a thing thus tall, skie blesse you all,/ I befell into this dotage./ I slept not since the Conquest,/ Till then I never waked,/ Till the rogysh boy of love where I lay/ Mee found and strip't mee naked" (it's actually a very sexy poem all the way through, there's a lot of great, funny, somewhat homoerotic, suggestions in it too, everybody horsing around). "When I short have shorne my sowre face/ And swigg'd my horny barrel,/ In an oaken inne I pound my skin/ As a suite of guilt apparell./ The moon's my constant Mistrisse,/ And the lowlie owle my morrowe/ The flaming Drake and the Nightcrowe make/ Mee musicke to my sorrowe./ The palsie plagues my pulses/ When I prigg your pigs or pullen" ("pullen"? - chickens - pullets) - "Your culvers take.." (do you know what "culvers" are?) - "...or matchles make/ Your Chanticleare" (I guess, "steal your"), "matchles make/ Your Chanticleare, or sullen./ When I want provant, with Humfrie./ I sup..." (I don't know who Humfrie is. Some local dummy) - "When I want provant, with Humfrie./ I sup, and when benighted,/ I repose in Powles.." (P-O-W-L-E-S, St.Pauls) - "and when benighted,/ I repose in Powles with waking soules/ Yet nevere am affrighted./ I knowe more than Apollo,/ For oft, when hee ly's sleeping,/ I see the starres att bloudie warres/ in the wounded welkin weeping/ The moon embrace her shepheard,/ And the quene of Love her warryor./ While the first doth borne the star of morne./ And the next the heavenly Farrier" (what that's all about is the shepherd is Endymion, who was beloved of Diana, but Diana was married to...

Student: She wasn't married.

AG: The moon is embracing her shepherd. Diana is embracing Endymion, and the Queen of Love, Venus, who is married to Mars, no, who is Venus married to?

Student: Hephaestus

AG: Right, ok. So Venus is making it with Mars, and so the first "..doth borne the star of morne.." "The moone embrace her shepheard" - the moon, then, would be Diana, horny, or cuckolding - who is "the star of the morne"?

Student: Venus

Lewis Mac Adams (alongside poet W.S.Merwin, also sitting in): Yeah, but then if they didn't know at this time. I don't think that it was the same star, so that one star was Hyperion, one star was the guy that, later, we call a devil..

AG: Hesperus

LM: Hesperus

AG: Hesperus, so..

LM: But Hesperus is the evening star. But, see, the evening star and the morning star have two different names. And what is the.. he has the same name as the devil..?

Student: Lucifer

AG: Uh huh

LM: The light-bringer is the morning star

AG: Now how can Diana be cuckolding Lucifer?

LM: Beats me

AG: I think finally probably in his astrology/astronomy

LM: In Tom's astronomy?

AG: Yeah, in Tom's. The rest is "..first doth borne the star of morne./ And the next the heavenly Farrier." (which means, the Queen of Love is cuckolding Hephaestus by embracing Mars. So, therefore, he knows more than Apollo, Tom does, because he knows all the gossip of the stars fucking each other.

"The Gipsie Snap and Pedro/ Are none of Tom's comradoes./ The punk I skorne and the cut purse sworn/ And the roaring boyes bravadoe./ The meeke, the white, the gentle,/ Me handle touch and spare not" (I wonder what that means?) - "But those that cross Tom Rynosseros/ Doe what the panther dare not" (I know what the "panther" is) - "With a host of furious fancies,/ Whereof I am commander,/ With a burning speare, and a horse of aire" (like a (Salvador) Dali painting - the burning spear and horse of air) - "By a knight of ghostes and shadowes" (that's as good as (Bob) Dylan, actually - or Dylan's sometimes as good as that - actually, this is very Dylan - or Dylan's "Gates of Eden" - and some of his lyrics are influenced by this particular (poem), "Tom o' Bedlam" - some of the "Gates of Eden"-era materials, because we went over this particular and a few other songs like this with Dylan (him), around '64, '65) - "With a burning speare, and a horse of aire,/ To the wildernesse I wander/ By a knight of ghostes and shadowes/ I summon'd am to tourney" ("tourney" - like a tournament) - "Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end./ Me thinke it is noe journey." (to think that it's no journey - and this is his song, "be not afraid"). The "Tom o' Bedlam Song" (by) Anonymous, sang (as "Greensleeves" - you know the "Greensleeves" song?)

 

AG: (A) little tiny song by George Peele I'm reading these because I guess half the class doesn't know these things which, in former days, were considered touchstones of English literary poetry, or , what was the word, you know, standard exquisiteness, exquisities, or something -

"When as the Rie reach to the chin,/ And chopcherrie chopcherrie ripe within,/ Strawberries swimming in the creame,/ And schoole boyes playing in the streame;/ Then O, then O, then O my true love said, / Til that time come againe/ She could not live a maid." - From an old play called "The Old Wives Tale". That "Strawberries swimming in the creame" is Shakesperean - "schoole boyes playing in the streame"

Thomas Nashe, who, (William) Burroughs reminded me, wrote the first novel, the first English novel, which, Burroughs was saying, influenced both (Jack) Kerouac, (Louis-Ferdinand) Celine and himself - The Unfortunate Traveller - whose title presents the archetype plot of the picaresque novel. Tom Nash - 1567-1601 - "Song" ("In Time of Pestilence"), which is again interesting in that the pith of Western lyric thought jives very precisely with the essence of Buddhist teaching on the impermanence of phenomena, or the fact that all the constituents of being are transitory.

(Allen sings the entire "Song" ("In Time of Pestilence") with harmonium accompaniment) - "Adieu farewell earth's blisse/ This world uncertaine is..".

It differs from a Buddhist statement somewhat. "Heaven is our heritage,/ Earth but a players stage" - that's back to "these are players as I foretold you" (or looks forward to it, perhaps). This was probably written before Shakespeare. Yeah. Yeah, because Nash died in 1601, and Shakespeare died 1616, and "The Tempest" probably is in his last ten years or so. So that "Earth's but a players stage", (that's) like that image in Shakespeare. "Mount wee unto the sky" (Mount we down to the bardo, or something). But "I am sick, I must dye", and, of course, "the Lord" (there's a Lord here, which is a Christian Lord, of course) but that "Beauty is but a flowre,/ Which wrinckles will devoure/ Brightnesse falls from the ayre,/ Queenes have died, yong and faire,/Dust hath closde Helens eye." The line I like most of all in that whole thing is

"Brightnesse falls from the ayre", which I've never entirely figured out exactly what he meant, except whatever is bright, takes a fall, or light.

Anne Waldman (along with Lewis Macadams and W.S.Merwin sitting in on the class): Like "glories"

AG: Like glories, light comes down. But "Brightnesse falls from the ayre" (meaning, not only falls, not only descends, like glories, like sunlight, but also what's bright fails. "Falls" like "fails" in the air. Falls. "Brightnesse falls from the ayre". There's always sunset comes too.

I think that's the most perfect poem i ever read, actually. The sweetest, perfectest statement.

"Beauty is but a flowre,/ Which wrinckles will devoure/ Brightnesse falls from the ayre" - it's such a funny line that lights up the whole inside of the brain. Also "Queenes have died, yong and faire" - also the sound, the music in that. Because you have "Brightnesse falls from the ayre/ Queenes have died...yong and faire". So there's a funny space, a funny little gap, a funny little caesura. As you're singing, especially. You'd have to say "Queenes have died...yong and faire"

So there's a slight hesitation there before you get to the "yong and faire". You could say, "Queenes have died yong and faire" but "Queenes have died...yong and faire". There's a stateliness in that measure that comes originally from it being set to music. In other words, he was writing duh-dah, duh-dah, duh-dah..."Adieu, fare-well earths blisse,/ This world un-cert-aine is", he wasn't writing it to a metrical paradigm, he was writing it to music, I think. It says "Song". We're trained to read these, originally in Grammar School or High School, as texts, sometimes read from the eye to the page (read by the eye looking at the page). Sometimes spoken aloud, rarely sung (which is why I'm singing them, as songs, because they're songs really, and you don't hear the structural beauty of it unless you hear it as a song - just as (as a local reference) you wouldn't appreciate the curiosities of (Bob) Dylan's lyrics unless you knew it as a song also. So a later generation will be reading Dylan (who I respect, I like - his verses are very often brilliant). But later generations, when the electric supply is pulled, will have to deal with either what people can remember, or the texts (if the pages that they're printed on don't turn yellow and crumble into dust). So he'll be stuck, like this, in an anthology, with a thing called "Song" that people'll be reading with their eye! (which was a point that (Ezra) Pound made).

 I'll refer to Pound a lot in this course, and I hope that you did check him out, The ABC of .. I'll get to him later on in terms of his own texts, but his theories of poetry, his history of poetics is real interesting, because it's full of little gists and little sharp ideas and usable notions, concepts, one of which was that the further poetry goes from song and music to speech, and then from speech to eye-page, the more degenerate the lyric form will be, if they keep using that lyric-music form, with rhymes and measured lines, because there won't be any kind of elastic from the song in there, there won't be very much variation, there won't be that"Queenes have died, yong and faire". There won't be that subtlety, there'll just be that "Queenes have died..." See, it's "Adieu, fare-well earths blisse" - duh-dah, duh-dah, duh-dah, but "Queenes have died...yong and faire" is a totally different measure, even if you were counting it accentually.

Am I making sense? Do you know what I'm talking about when I say "if you're counting in accentual..."? Do you know about iambics? You might go through that, sooner or later, some day. Why not? Probably most people don't know it and I got a good book that I can refer to (it has the whole thing down in ten pages). Sooner or later, it might be interesting to actually run through some of the more complicated meters. I want this course to be mainly modern poetics and modern writing, and I'll get to it, but is it alright to do this? to go back a bit?

...So we'll go on to Samuel Daniel 1562-1619, "Song" again - I won't sing it, I'm not that familiar with it. "Are they shadowes.." S-H-A-D-O-W-E-S - nice old spelling - "Are there shadowes that we see?/ And can shadowes pleasure give?/Pleasures onely shadowes bee/ Cast by bodies we conceive/ And are made the things we deeme, / In those figures which they seem./ But these pleasures vanish fast/ Which by shadowes are exprest/ Pleasures are not, if they last/ In their passing , is their best./ Glory is most bright and gay/ In a flash, and so away./ Feed apace then greedy eyes/ On the wonder you behold, / Take it sodaine as it flies/ Though you take it not to hold:/ When your eyes have done their part/ Thought must lengthen it in the hart."

 There's a funny line of (John) Keats like that - "Joy whose hand is ever at its lips bidding Adieu". Also (William) Blake echoes a similar vision of the virtues of detachment - "Pleasures are not, if that last;/ In their passing is their best" - "Take it sudden as it flies" - take it sudden as it flies. Blake's is "he who binds to himself a joy/ Doth the winged life destroy/ He who kisses the joy as it flies/ Lives in eternity's sun rise". "Take it sudden as it flies" (they even use the same rhyme!

AG: What I'm doing is just running through little samples of real pretty things.

Student: What was that called?

AG: Samuel Daniel

Student: What was the name of it

AG: .., was he author of a little song, from a masque, or play, "Tethys Festival" - T-E-T-H-Y=S Festival.

Student: Allen, can you say a little more about what kind of festival that was? what kind of play would that be? and how would that song appear?

AG: I don't know enough about it. I've never heard of the Tethys Festival. Do you know about it? My own model for most of it would be Shakespeare

Anne Waldman: I think there would be more music and dance, music and dance...

AG: Well, with a title like "Tethys Festival", it may be. It might have been

AW: It would probably be a unifying theme,

 W.S.Merwin: They had a whole series of (indecipherable)

AG: What was it? Like masques, written by various hands?

WSM: Songs and dancers

AG: Several people writing?

WM: ...sometimes informal, sometimes (indecipherable) and sometimes no

AG: Several people writing, contributing different parts

Lewis MacAdams: Ben Jonson wrote a whole slew of the things, one at a time, an they usually had some classical subject. They may have people in very elaborate costumes, masks and wigs and what-not , and sets that changed real fast and looked very magical and had lots of lights, and it was all sung and danced, and there would be some spoken parts, but mostly it would be songs and parades and pageants an what-not, and it didn't take too long to do, and usually it was done in honor of people's wedding, or somebody's birthday, something like that. It was a very special evening, commissioned.

AG: That's still performed

LM: A private performance. The masque of Ceres that appears in "The Tempest" is an example of one, unless the whole "Tempest".... The masque, (as) I said, was written, usually, for private performance, at some nobleman's wedding, or for the king [or queen]'s birthday, something like that, and it was a short play that was mostly sung and danced, and it would have a few speaking parts, like some guy would come out and say, "I am the Queen of Night" etc, and "Here come the stars". And the stars would all come out and sing poetry of some kind with music. And in the meantime, maybe, they'd be very elaborate stage-sets, designed by a guy, Inigo Jones, that would be changing in the background, and all sorts of lights and fancy costumes and people coming down on wires out of the ceiling, and a very expensive... and the costumes were real - they were real silk and real velvet and real jewels, and so it was an extraordinary expensive trip, and as distinguished from a play that was done on the public stage, which was done on the cheap, or as cheap as they could get away with it.

AG: Who was the Countess of Pembroke, do you remember? Who did she patronize, that is?

WSM: Oh, Samuel Daniel was her chief one

AG: So that song would have been performed.."Tethys Festival".. would have been performed at her..

WSM: She patronized a great deal, and I think she was related to Sir Philip Sidney

AG: She wrote too?

WSM: Probably it was the other way round. It wasn't "The Tempest" that influenced them so much as they influenced "The Tempest". Shakespeare was really trying to draw that strain in there.

AG: No, that was (just) my guess that the songs influenced Shakespeare. Because Nashe, at any rate, was earlier. Nashe was earlier than Shakespeare. That was what I was trying to say.

WSM: But Daniel was later

AG: But died before. The point that I was making was that "The Tempest" was probably the end of Shakespeare's life, 1616 (and Daniel died in 1601), and so, if "The Tempest" was in the last 15 years of Shakespeare's life, then Daniel's poem about this was in a play or on stage before Shakespeare's,

Anne Waldman: It's also in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

 

AG: Yeah, the masque in "A Midsummer Night;s Dream". These are all playwrights, and these songs are probably all from plays, anyway. All of them.

Student: Do you think the poet ever appeared on stage to do these numbers?

AG: Well, Shakespeare was an actor, but I don't know if he ever acted much on his own.

WSM: That was in the popular.. Daniel was very...

AG: Would Daniel appear?

WSM: No, I don't think he ever did. [to Lewis Macadams] Is that true?

LM: I don't think so. Usually the people who acted.. quite often the people who acted in the masques were various court noblemen. They took the parts of all sorts of ladies and gentlemen of the court. So it was very high-class.

AG: Lewis Macadams, poet, who I think will be reading (here) in two weeks.

AW: Yeah, No, three, actually.

AG: Three. Lewis is here in town all summer too, if you want more poets to get onto. As Bill Merwin is. And Gregory Corso will probably hang around (he just got an apartment, so he's available). He'll be here helping, He was staying with me before, but he's got a place of his own now, so he'll probably stay here all summer and fix up a book of his. So if anybody wants to haunt him, or help him (and I think he could probably use someone with wheels to be a friend, someone who could take him around a little bit, drive him around, and look him up), if anyone wants to learn Gregory's condensation and sharpness, it's worth it. You can find out where he is from me, or if anybody wants to be his slave...

 

AW: Don't fall for it!

 

AG: ..or friend

 

AW: Don't let the ladies fall for him

 

AG: Oh well, he's seriously in love with his lady...

 

History of Poetry 5 (Accentual and Quantitative Measure)

 AG:Does anybody know the difference between accentual prosody andquantitative prosody? Is that something that ever came through? Does anybody know what quantitative prosody (is)? - as distinct from accentual? One, two, three (and some of the poets (here) maybe? [W.S.Merwin, Lewis MacAdams, Anne Waldman]). Could you [to student] explain it?, or, what's your version?

 

Student: Quantitative is the number of consonants and vowels, and accentual is the number of accents in a particular line.

 

AG [to second student]: And what was your understanding?

 

Student: (mumbles)

 

AG: Louder?

 

Student: I got the one out of Allen Verbatim

 

AG: I put together a book on spontaneous poetics (which I'll put in the library, on the reference shelf), of my own sort of general pastiche of ideas of about 1968. My understanding (mainly from (Ezra) Pound) is that, in Greek and Latin prosody, the measure of the line, involved a count of the length of the vowels. In Greek also, the pitch - high and low - and that there were fixed lengths for vowels, like "fixed lenngth" - well, the "fixed" is shorter than the "length" - the vowel "ih" is shorter than "eh", I think, to my ear, at the moment. "With love" - the "ih" is shorter than the "ov", so, if it were possible to measure them in English, the "with" would be a half-length and "love" would be a full-length vowel, and you could compose your lines of three full-length vowels (consisting of six half-length, or three full-length, or two half-length and two full-length vowels). In other words, you'd measure the line by the length of the vowel. You wouldn't be measuring it by the accent. You wouldn't try to measure the line by counting the accents neat.Do you understand the difference? Real simple in English - "THIS is the FORest primEVal the MURmuring PINES and the HEMlock" (that's the standard war-horse that's taught, or was taught, twenty, thirty years ago in high-schools). That's counting of an accent. Dah-duh-duh, dah-duh-duh.. The accent, meaning the emphasis on the syllable, how much emphasis you put on it, rather than the length of the syllable. So (Ezra) Pound, realizing that people were no longer singing, points out, first of all, that, when the English figured out their accentual measure of the line, they were trained in classical poetics, and so they took over the terminology of the Greek and Latin measures, and shifted it over, however, from length of vowel and pitch (that's the tone or the pitch), they took it over and just used the same nomenclature for accent. So in a Greek line, which would be in iambic..what? - duh-Dah (short-long), yeah, in a Greek line (which was called iambic - and the foot, the foot part of the line which was called iambic), it would have been a short and a long vowel. "I go...", say, for that sound. "I go" (short "I", longer "go"). The English counted the accent instead of the length of the vowel ("i GO"). So they're counting the accent. Using the divisions and measures of classical quantity. They made a kind of patchwork system. And it was alright, I guess, while they were still singing, because there were a lot of variation(s) because of the singing and the elasticity of the singing and the kind of body that it had and the variableness of the actual singing-the-thing-aloud. But then, Pound complains, as song was no longer practiced so much that it became a literary exercise for speaking the poetry, and it was no longer, later in the 19th Century and early 20th Century, no longer even for speaking aloud, but just to read on the page, the muscular-ness and the organic sense of these kind of measures were lost, and it became mechanical and repetitive and dulled down and even lost all meaning, was, in the famous line: "Thou too sail on, O ship of state"- "Thou TOO" (unaccented, accented), "sail ON" (unaccented , accented), "oh SHIP" (unaccented, accented), "of STATE" (unaccented, accented). Did you know that? Do you understand what I am saying? No? I'll write it out on the board. I just want to make this one point clear and then we get off it. This was one of the most famous lines in the English language at one time in the 20th Century. It's usually measured, in the books, in the prefaces to books of prosody written in the '20's, when, as Pound pointed out, our prosody was most degenerated, mechanical, hand-me-down, they were used to the short or light/heavy - "Thou TOO Sail ON o SHIP of STATE". Right. You did that in grammar school or high school. How many did not do that ever? How many never did that at all? And how many did that? So you know what I'm talking about there, right?

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

(tape ends and then continues) "...used to show what iambic is. But, if you notice, you have the word "O" over here. Now "O" is unaccented, but what is "O" except an exclamation? So how can an exclamation "O" be unaccented ? Something went wrong, because it got squeezed mechanically so that finally it's violating the very organic sounds of spoken English. If you were trying to squeeze an exclamation..

 

Student: Yeah, but if anybody read that, other than this as an example, you'd elongate the "too" and the "O".

 

AG: No, there used to be a "Thou TOO sail ON o SHIP of STATE.". Yeah. In high-school, that's the way they read it to me.

 

Student: "Thou TOO sail on O ship of STATE"

 

AG: Well, it should be, obviously, "THOU TOO...". So I would read it actually as "THOU TOO SAIL ON O SHIP of STATE". So, in other words, this is not an accurate way of measuring the actual accents of spoken verse any longer. It's gotten so scewed up that an exclamation is measured as a non-accented syllable. So, in a way, it's no longer a workable shot, no longer a workable measure, which is the problem that (Ezra) Pound had to face at the beginning of the century and solved in his own way. He thought, ultimately, that some new American prosody or some new measure of American verse would ultimately be an approximation of classical quantity, of Latin/Greek quantity, that people would have to start looking for vowels and measure by vowels and that was his practice basically. (And, later on in the term, I'll bring in some recordings of Pound voweling his own quantitative Cantos, so you hear how he does it and what his ear is like. William Carlos Williams said that Pound had a "mystical ear" - it was so accurate to the length of the vowel. Williams solved the problem a different way - just listening and hearing the organic sounds of the speech around him.

 

 

History of Poetry 6 (Thomas Campion)

Campion 1567-1620. (Thomas) Campion, also, at this point, writing music, got interested in quantitative verse - vowel-length verse - as the measure for his poetry, and he is one of the great ears in English poetry. Most of these, or some of these, are songs. I'll read the famous one(s) that you know mostly - "Rose-cheekt Laura, come/ Sing thou smoothly with thy beaweies/ Silent musick, either other/ Sweetely gracing/ Lovely formes do flowe/ From concent devinely framed;/ Heaven is musick, and thy beawties/ Birth is heavenly. These dull notes we sing/ Discords neede for helps to grace them;/ Only beawty purely loving/ Knowes no discord. / But still mooves delight,/ Like clear springs renu'd by flowing,/ Ever perfect, ever in them-/ selves eternal."

Now the first line is "Rose-cheekt Laura (comma) come". Now if he were trying to measure that by accent you'd say something like "ROSE-cheekt LAUra COME". And there would be a tendency, mechanically, in fact, there is a tendency when this poem is taught in high-school for the teacher to say "Rose-cheekt LAUra COME" (instead of "Rose-cheek't Lau-uh...come.". And only a musician would know that. It's obviously the first line of something like..[Allen starts singing with harmonium] "Rose-cheekt Laura (breath) come", and the music would move to another chord or another note. So, "Rose-cheekt Laura... come'. It has such a nice sound. Such a pretty timing. So that timing coming from Campion, his very perfect musician's ear is why (W.S) Merwin exclaimed in delight when Campion's name was mentioned..I guess [turning to Merwin] is that part of your interest in Campion?

 

W.S.Merwin (sitting in on the class): I just love Campion. Do you know that shadow poem? It's the one of your Buddha

 

AG: Why don't you read that

 

W.S.M: Well, the title is the first line. "Followe thy faire sunne, unhappie shadowe" - . "Followe thy faire sunne, unhappy shadowe,/ Though thou be blacke as night,/ And she made all of light,/ Yet follow thy faire sunne, unhappie shadowe. Follow her whose light thy light depriveth/ Though here thou liv'st disgrac't,/ And she in heaven is plac't,/ Yet follow her whose light the world reviveth. Follow those pure beames whose beautie burneth/ That so have scorched thee,/ As thou still black must bee/ Til her kind beanes thy black to brightnes turneth/ Follow her while yet her glorie shineth;/ There comes a luckles night,/ That will dim all her light;/ And this the black unhappie shade divineth/ Follow still since so thy fates ordained;/ The Sunne must have his shade,/ Till both at once doe fade,/ The Sun still proud, the shadow still disdained."

 

AG: You know, I've never understood that poem. Can you explain it to me?

 

WSM: I don't understand it

 

AG: I love it. It's really beautiful

 

WSM: I don't know who he's talking about, if that's what you mean

 

AG: Yeah, I tried to figure it out

 

Student: Isn't he talking about the sun? Isn't he talking about earth following the sun?

 

WSM: Well you get that part of it clear enough. He's talking about the sun and the shadow and that the..

 

AG: And lovers too, right? I always thought it was some masochistic love relationship.

 

WSM: I've never figured out the sex requirements.

 

AG: Its probably a faggot masochism.

 

WSM: One of the things that I know about it is the thing you're talking about, is this thing - You can't go through that poem fast, You can't read it any faster than he wants you to.

 

AG: Yeah,, that is a very conscious vowel-length adjustment there. I guess the lines are made equivalent to each other by the count of the vowel-length. I've never analyzed that out. Have you? Somebody must have

 

Lewis MacAdams (also in attendance): That may be one of the ones he analyzed himself in that essay about the Art of English Poesie

 

WSM: ..In which he said that no poem that cannot be sung is a real poem.

 

AG: So Pound loved Campion for that statement. Maybe Pound even got that idea from Campion. So you can see what a degeneration we had with poetry in America when you had these poems which were written to be declaimed at high-school graduationsb or even read. Let's try that. It would be interesting to figure out what that poem's about.

 

WSM: It's a poem about illusion too.

 

AG: "Followe thy faire sunne, unhappie shadow' - so that could either be Earth, as you say, or (a) lover, or just a shadow, an actual shadow, but then he's got it unhappy - "Though thou be blacke as night,/ And she made all of light/Yet fllow thy faire sun, unhappie shadow". So we still haven't figured out who that combination would be

 

WSM: No, but the funny thing is the sun becomes female.

 

AG: "she" - that's right. "And she made all of light" - so it's a lover, sort of, we could assume - "Follow her whose light thy depriveth" - meaning the girl, or sun, is so bright, and so pretty, and so knocked-out, that the one who's following around is completely put in the shade and can't talk, hardly. "Though here thou liv'st disgrac't," - "liv'st disgrac't" - L-I-V-S-T - he wanted that, get that?, "liv'st" instead of "livest disgrac't", because he was counting those lengths - D-I-S-G-R-A-C-apostrophe-T, to get it a little faster. But her "thou livs't didgrac'd/ And she in heaven is plac't/Yet follow her whose light the world reviveth" - So that could be Beatrice at this point, Beatrice, some heavenly vision.

 

WSM: He's counting the vowels. He makes the consonants completely unimportant

 

AG: "Follow those pure beames whose beautie burneth/ That so have scorched thee,/ As thou still black must bee/ Til her kind beanes thy black to brightnes turneth" - so she's going to make it, or smile. or look with favor, she's going to make it with the masochistic lover who can't talk and who's light is dimmed by her sparkling babble. "Follow her..." Unless this is a big mystical poem about Mary or Beatrice. "Follow her while yet her glorie shineth" - so it's not eternal, it must be human. "There comes a luckles night" - L-U-C-K-L-E-S, not "luckless", "luckles" - "there comes a luckles night"

 

Anne Waldman: Sounds like "lux" meaning light. Lightless

 

AG: Yeah, just the way they spelled it. They didn't have two "s"'s - "There comes a luckles night/ That will dim all her light/ And the black unhappie shade divineth' - Figures out, prophesies. So it must be human, I guess. If she is going into the luckles night"

 

WSM: (Indecipherable) works in all of them

 

AG: Well, with the divine, ""Follow her while yet her glorie shineth/ There comes a luckles night/ That will dim all her light. So that means that if she is divine, the divine will die

 

WSM: No, divine in the sense of guesses and figures out, and does, like a water-diviner, understands that this is what is going to happen.

 

AG: Oh yeah. "Follow still since so thy fates ordained;/ The Sunne must have his shade,/ Till both at once doe fade,/ The Sun still proud, the shadow still disdained."- Now he's got the thing turned around, the sexes turned around - The sun must have his shade

 

WSM: You could use that possessive of either sex, it doesn't matter

 

AG: Huh?

 

Student: Could it be life and death?

 

AG: Yeah. It could be anything, It's hard. But in a way it's so good because it's so vague. It could be yang/yin, could be life and death, could be the sun and the earth, it could be lovers. I always read it as mystical experience actually.

 

So you heard that really odd beautiful spacing, stately spacing of the vowels there, because, when you're singing, you'd be able to play with those vowels and elongate them [Allen starts singing] - "And this the black unhappie shade divine-eth". So he's hearing it for song, he's hearing it for melody, instead of " And THIS the BLACK unHAPpie SHADE diVINeth", or "And this THE black unHAPpie shade divineth" - it's a much more interesting way of hearing, or composing, if you're going to hear a scheme, if you 're going to hear a scheme in the verse at all, a regular repeated scheme, if you're going to build the stanzas around any kind of repeated, repeatable, paradigm or structure, measurement, the use of vowels and training your ear to hear vowels or maybe even just doing it with music, is a lot better than what I was trained to write with, which was just the accents, back in the '30s and '40s. I guess that's why I sort of rebelled so strongly because my father wrote in very fixed accents and that was what I was brought up with, and it was totally heavy automatonism, that led to that kind, where the actual meaning and pronunciation was regularized and standardized and homogenized to iambic pentameter or quatrain of iambs, so it didn't mean anything, finally. That's why I sort of went overboard into a kind of free verse that had no regulation except rhythms that I could hear, spoken rhythms that I could hear, or chanting rhythms that I could hear around me. Lately, I've been writing a lot of songs so that I find that I'm coming back to forms like these, or forms that are countable by accent or quality.

 

 

History of Poetry 7 (William Shakespeare 2)

"In a few minutes... lets, see, when does this class end?...7.40?..we have one minute. I wanted to get back to one little Shakespeare to end. And it's funny little sounds in a song from "A Winter's Tale" that's not too well-known. So I won't try to explain what the reference in the play to the poem is. There's a certain kind of funny lyric jumpiness, syncopation, in this:

"When daffodills begin to peer,/ With heigh! the doxy over the dale,/ Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year;/ For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale,/ The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,/ With heigh! the sweet birds, Oh how they sing!/ Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;/ For a quart of ale is a dish for a king./ The lark that tirra-lirra chants,/ With heigh! with heigh! the thrush and the jay,/Are summer songs for me and my aunts,/ While we lie tumbling in the hay".

I've always liked that - "With heigh! with heigh! the thrush and the jay", "The lark that tirra-lirra chants,/ With heigh! with heigh! the thrush and the jay". It's funny. He's got that with "The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,/ With heigh! the sweet birds, Oh how they sing!" -So that's a song for singing

 

- and (then) the great "Cymbeline", Buddhist statement:

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun, / Nor the furious winter's rages;/ Thou thy worldly task has done,/ Home art gone and ta'en thy wages;/ Golden lads and girls all must,/ As chimney-sweepers, come to dust./ Fear no more the frown of the great;/ Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;/ Care no more to clothe and eat/ To thee the reed is as the oak;/ The scepter, learning, physic, must/ All follow this and come to dust./ Fear no more the lightening flash,/ Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone; Fear not slander, censure rash;/ Thou hasn't finished joy and moan:/ All lovers young, all lovers must/ Consign to thee, and come to dust."/ No exorciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee!/ Ghost unlaid forbear thee!/ Nothing ill come near thee!/ Quiet consummation have;/ And renowned be the grave!"

 

Okay. Continued next week (tape and class concludes here)

 

 

History of Poetry 8 (more Daniel and Campion)

AG: ..I’m going to continue where we left off and go back once again to one other poem of Samuel Daniel from Hymen’s Triumph. Daniel was the one we had – “Are they shadowes that we see/ And can shadowes pleasures.. be”. That was an odd, Buddhist-like statement of the late 16^thCentury. What I’m doing is equating these with traditional Buddhist notions, for those of you who know some dharma, just to point out, partly, how sharp the 16^th and 17^th Century lyric, and, later, Metaphysical, poets were - and on.. how Western a lot of the basic thoughts on dukkha, or pain, or suffering of existence, how traditional they are in Western basic poetry. Yeah?

Student: Aren’t a lot of these concepts inherited from Christianity? Isn’t most of this poetry suffused with that.

AG: Yeah. Many are (though, actually, for Samuel Daniel, his imagery was pagan). The notion of the universe as illusion and therefore suffering, when you take it for real, is also, like, a Western, Gnostic, notion, and Western-gnostic and Eastern-mystic come from, probably, the same sources in Mesopotamia, beforehand, before both cultures flowered, way back when (areas and times that Gregory Corso was talking to you aboutin his first lecture, when he was tracing the Great Wheel of Time, back toUr and Sumer. Gilgamesh, I think he placed at 6000 BC, wasn’t it?

Student: He didn’t say

Student: Three Thousand

AG: Three? And the flood? Gilgamesh dealt with the flood, mentioned the flood, and then flood was when? What was his date for the flood? He was doing it in 2,000-year cycles. I think that would be preceding thedevelopment of the Gnostic consciousness that went up until Plato and came down with the Aryans into India. Probably had the same home. “Love is a sicknesse full of woes, / All remedies refusing:/ A plant that with most cutting growes/ Most barren with best using./ Why so?/ More we enjoy it, more it dyes, / If not enjoy’d, it sighing cries/ Hey ho. Love is a torment of the minde/ A tempest everlasting;/ And Jove hath made it of a kinde/ Not well, nor full nor fasting/ Why so?/ More we enjoy it, more it dies,/ If not enjoy’d, it sighing cries/ Hey ho”.

So, love is a sickness – that’s very typical dharma talk, as well as Christian talk, as well as Gnostic talk, as well as old lovers’ talk, Hollywood talk. But as I got deeper into Buddhist studies, I got more and more impressed with how either the Buddhist studies were accurate to human experience, or how Campion or Daniel or Shakespeare were accurate to human experience, and how the ideas expressed are finally pretty similar. It’s a funny way of adding a depth to an understanding of 16^th and 17^thCentury poetry, if you realize how close it is to the dharma you’re working with now, if you’re working with the dharma, or sharpening your understanding. If you’re not working with Eastern dharma, sharpening your understanding of Western (thought), cutting through, like a knife, painful disillusionment, that was expressed really early and in a very hip way by Daniel and Campion and Shakespeare.

I was looking over more of that Campion and there was a very funny line relating to his music, in a poem that I don’t know well, but, just looking it over, it was an illustration of breaking time, breaking up time, making gaps in time for the musician to sing – that is to say for the breath, for the musician to take a breath. I’ll try singing it, actually. I only read this (for) the first time this morning, but it seemed such a perfect illustration of what we’re talking about – how the music, timing the language to music, makes the poet think about the breath, for one thing, and about a much more subtle sense of time than if he’s writing, as we later developed, merely to the metronomic paradigm that once was music and is now just a mechanical count.

(Allen then sings, with harmonium accompaniment, the first four lines of(Thomas) Campion’s “Kinde are her answeres” – “Kinde are her answeres,/ But her performance keeps no day:/ Breaks time, as dancers/ From their own Musicke when they stray:”).

It was just that. That “Breaks time”, it’s miraculous. “Kinde are her answeres,/ But her performance keeps no day”, semi-colon. “Breaks time, as dancers”. comma. “..as dancers/ From their own Musicke when they stray:/ All her free favors and smooth words/ Wing my hopes in vaine./ O did ever voice so sweet but only fain?/ Can true love yield such delay/ Converting joy to pain?/ Lost is our freedome/ When we submit to women so/ Why doe wee neede them,/ When in their best they work our woe?/ There is no wisedome/ Can alter ends, by Fate prefixt./ O why is the good of man with evill mixt?/ Never were days yet cal’d two,/ But one night went betwixt.” I was interested just in that time thing – ““Kinde are her answeres,/ But her performance keeps no day:/ Breaks time, as dancers/ From their own Musicke when they stray..”

For that kind of timing, one great modern poet is Robert Creeley, if you know his work. He picks up a lot from Campion and that funny sense of time. A poem of his that has some of that funny halt (is “A Warning”) – “For love – I would/ split your head open and put/ a candle in/ behind the eyes./ Love is dead in us/ if we forget/ the virtues of an amulet/ and quick surprise.”. I don’t think he was writing for music but he was writing after Campion and had a certain dense of breath stop or breath timing that you can hear in the musician Campion.

Do many know the famous poem by Campion called “There is a Garden in her face”, about “cherry ripe”? Has anybody read that? How many? Raise it up, real high. Yeah. And who has not? Okay, so that’s he vast majority. (to student) - You never read that, Lily? - Okay. It’s a pleasure. “There is a Garden in her face..” This is Campion again, Campion, the musician. This is maybe his best-known poem, because of its taking-off from the London street cry: “Cherries, cherries, and pineapples, bananas. Cockles and mussels, alive alive-o”. (Allen then reads Thomas Campion’s “There is aGarden in her face” - “There is a Garden in he face/ Where Roses and white Lilies grow…” in its entirety)..So, I guess, cherry lips, or pearls. So the lips themselves have to ask for it. He’s waiting for his girl to ask him to make out (Campion, as a musician, could be a little more pure-hearted about love, when he wasn’t putting down women).

History of Poetry 9 (Drayton & the Sonnet)

 

[Michael Drayton, painted by unknown artist, oil on panel portrait, 23 1/2 ins x 18 ins, from 1599 - courtesy National Portrait Gallery]

(Michael) Drayton has a funny kind of S&M scene here in a sonnet called“From “Idea”” The whole sequence is “Idea”. It’s a series of, I think, several hundred sonnets. One of which I’ve always liked. It’s for a closet queen – the perfect expression of lack-love – “Since ther’s no helpe..”, “Since ther’s no helpe, Come let us kisse and part” (K-I-S-S-E). [Allen then reads this Michael Drayton sonnet in its entirety – “Since ther’s no helpe.."]. He wants a last chance. That was Drayton. Drayton’s dates, incidentally, are, to keep that straight, 1563-1631.

Student: What’s the number of that sonnet?

AG: The “Idea” - “Since ther’s no helpe..” is LXI, what is that..? What is..

Student(s): Sixty-one

AG: How many of those are there do you know? Does anybody know? In “Idea”? Does anyone know Drayton well enough?

I did that one Shakespeare Sonnet, but there are a couple of others I’d like to get into. Yeah?

Student: Could you talk a little bit about songs. Like, why did the sonnet rise in that time? It would seem like some people could spin off sonnets.

AG: I don’t know enough about it. It’s an Italian form to begin with. Son-net. And I guess it would be for song, to be sung, originally, with a kind of logical division which you may all know of – ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG rhyme, that is, three quatrains and then a couplet at the end, with a rhyme that kind of sums it all up and solves whatever thesis and antithesis were proposed in the quatrains. It could have been a musical form also – setting up the music for some kind of funny musical…I don’t know music well enough to know what that would allow you to do.

Student: Why do you think it was so sympathetic to the time?

AG: Ideas were pretty logical. The surprises, like in that Drayton sonnet... Of the fourteen lines, twelve lines set up this inexorable death of love, and a completely hopeless scene, so you could actually pile it on, if you were a sort of mind-trickster, and then the last two lines pull the rug out from the thought and change it completely, and turn it inside out. People were sort of playful and witty in an innocent way in those days, where you could have a funny black-and-white, opposite, thing going on, a thesis and then an antithesis, and a sort of logical development. People were, I guess, studying classical philosophy, and studying Aristotle, in those days, and things were either “A” or “not-A”, as (William) Burroughs was pointing out, in Aristotelian thinking. Yeah?

Student: Plus instrumentation too . The accompanying instruments

AG: Flutes

Student: Flutes, yeah

AG: Viol, or whatever. But there’s a classic relation between a kind of Aristotelian learning you got with a classical education and the logical development of a sonnet. It might be adapted nowadays to multi-media. multi-dimensional simultaneity, free association, cut-up.(William) Burroughs, I think, has done some sonnets in cut-up, and other people have done… Merrill Moore, in the 20^th century, do you know (of) him at all? He was a doctor, and an acquaintance of William Carlos Williams, who wrote nothing but sonnets. He wrote thousands of sonnets and published them and they’re good. I think you can find some of them in the (Louis) Untermeyer anthologies of the (19)30’s and (19)40’s, and certainly in theOscar Williams (anthologies), I think. That’s where you’ll find some samples of Moore. He was a doctor, and he wrote very plain speech, I think, mostly rhymed, some unrhymed, sonnets about simple medical case histories, like Williams. Parts of his sonnets were like Williams, or flat observation, or observation of the insurance payments - “Since twelve full months have passed since last I got paid, now from my checkbook, my hand will never stray”. Like that. So Moore has done a lot.

Williams came to think that, in our time, the sonnet was such an intellectual falsification, such an intellectually wrong thing, in a sense that the form of the sonnet falsified, or transformed, or changed, the actual nature of mental thought – that people didn’t think in terms of a statement in the first four lines, a counter-statement (as, generally, in Shakespeare), a twist combining the two, and, finally, a capping two-line, couplet, that would resolve it, or take it to another dimension. People don’t necessarily think that way. It might have been that people in Shakespeare’s time did think that way, because their minds were conditioned to a classical education, and to thinking in terms of the kind of simple logic of Aristotle, or, as Al (sic) here said, the music of certain simple instruments.

Student: Also the sounds of.. Petrarch was the first…

AG: Yeah. Vaguely, I remember..

Student: ..And they were used as “courtly love”. They were usually very emotional, and...(indecipherable) is extremely popular, and I used to..indecipherable

AG: Astrophel and Stella

Student: Yeah, right. They were immensely popular.

AG: Well, it’s a popular form. Do you know anything about the origin? the origin, the genesis of something. (Sir Philip) Sidney?

Student: Surrey translated Petrarch

AG: (Sir Thomas) Wyatt translated Petrarch

Student: I think Tyco Brahe had been visiting…

AG: England…?

Student: England, right. They had…

AG: Who was Tyco Branche?

Student: He was an Italian astronomer and alchemist

AG: So a Gnostic astronomer?J

Student: Major, though, orbits.. He had a little study-group..(studying with) Sir Philip Sidney, in the area of Judaica, and they mutually visited back and forth.

AG: So actually the sonnet is a sort of logical astronomical form for people who were doing that kind of logical thinking, I guess. - (to student) Before you came, Lewis MacAdams, asked why was the sonnet so, then, popular?

Student: A manifestation of the harmony of the spheres

AG: The sonnet?

Student: Yeah

AG: That form?

Student: Well, that form and other forms – quatrain…

AG: Yeah

Student: But particularly that, because it has a.. (it's a) manifestation of Medieval cosmology

AG: Of the music of the spheres?

Student: The harmony of the spheres, yeah. This is what (William Carlos)Williams talks about in his essay about Einstein, where he says another reason for dispensing with this is that since.. (bound and unbounded at the same time).. poems should have the shape of a field, rather than the shape of this preconceived form from Medieval cosmology.

AG: So the form comes from Medieval cosmology, which makes some sense, I think. In other words, if you have a little planetary… In Medieval cosmology, was the Earth at the center still?

Student: Yeah, yeah

AG: Earth is at the center still

Student: As far as anyone could say in public

AG: Yeah. So you’d have to have a logical center, whereas for open form poetry, as we practice it in this century, like (Charles) Olson, or Williams, or Pound, that assumes that everywhere is the center, everywhere in the universe is the center, and everywhere in the poem is the center, so, in a sense, it’s like opening and turning on the tap of the mind, and the language gushes out, and then you turn it off again, but it’s the same water all the time,

Student: Do you know if all of this is sung?

AG: No I don’t. I know some of his work, but not his sonnets

Student: The sonnet is a large collection of, I think, maybe 200 sonnets. , ancenter and it seems you could put them all together and then cut them into fourteen-line parts, but there is no observation of the octet and sestet (8/6) division, or whatever.

AG: Yeah that’s right. There was an octet and a sextet. I was just talking about the four-four-four and then two (but) then there’s also the eight lines and six lines, up to fourteen. So, another logical form. There’s a couple of logical forms.

I think those (of you) that are in Anne Waldman’s class probably examined some of Ted Berrigan’s sonnets (which are “cut-ups”, actually, cut-ups of Williams and other things, put together.

There are a couple of nice Shakespeare sonnets that I always liked. It’s not necessarily the whole sonnet, it’s one or two lines that stick in my head and are, like, really perfect pieces of sound (Allen then reads, by way of illustration, Sonnet 18 – “Shall I compare thee to a Sommer’s Day” - I like the “Nor shall death brag thou wandr’st in his shade”, and also “Rough windes do shake the darling buds of Maie”, That’s really sweet Shakespeare mind, the fairy Shakespeare, “the darling buds of Maie”.

There’s another thing on time, “though lips and eyes/ Within his bending sickles compasse come”. A very funny line. I don’t know what sonnet it’s in. [editor’s note – Sonnet 116“].”Though rosie lips and cheeks/ Within his bending sickles compass come” - speaking of time as a scythe -“..though rosie lips and cheeks/ Within his bending sickles compasse come” – it’s like the line “on purpose lay’d to make the taker mad”.

(Allen then proceeds to read, in its entirety, Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou maiest in me behold”)

The one - “on purpose lay’d to make the taker mad” – here’s the two (the other one) of them, “bending sickles compasse” (Allen reads Sonnet 116(“Let me not to the marriage of true mindes”) - “If this be error and upon me proved,/ I never writ, nor no man ever loved”).

Well, I suppose when everything is totally wiped out then he’ll never have writ and he will be in error. When you go over the edge of doom, when the entire universe disappears, goes down the next quasar asshole, then he will not have ever writ, and so the love wlll have bent with the remover to be removed.

The other, which has ““on purpose lay’d to make the taker mad”, again, like that other earlier poem that I was reading about putting down love – “love is a sickness full of woes”, Samuel Daniel, same tune again, same mental tune. (Allen reads Sonnet 129 (“Th’expence of Spirit in a waste of shame..”).,I thought that line ““on purpose lay’d to make the taker mad..A guy I knew in Columbia, who was a very intelligent English major back in 1946, who had read all of (William) Shakespeare and all of (Michael) Drayton and all of (Edmund) Spenser, said that was the most intelligent line in the English language – just for sound, or just for wit, logopoeia.The total simplicity of it., ““on purpose lay’d to make the taker mad”, and the funny kind of assonance in ”ur”,”ayd”,”ake”,”ake”,”ad”.- “on purpose lay’d to make the taker mad”. Like a tongue-twister, except such a funny mind Shakespeare had, a funny ear, a funny mind, funny tongue.”Genius is funny” in that way - ““on purpose lay’d to make the taker mad”,

Student: What number is that one?

AG: CXXIX, what is that? Who’s a Latinist?.. The “Lov’s not Time’s foole, though rosie lips and cheeks/ Within his bending sickles compasse come” is CXVI. So that’s what ? One hundred and six?. No, wait a minute, one hundred and sixteen. So, onward. Onward.

 

History of Poetry 10 (Allen and Gregory - Bickering Over Shakespeare)

( (A) History of Poetry continues today, with more Shakespeare (and gad-fly Gregory Corso bickering with Allen, and almost taking over the classroom. However this is from a class earlier in June and not part of this series) 

AG: There are a few songs of Shakespeare that you might not know that have a funny kind of literality. What they’re good for is to see that crazy Shakespeare, or funny Shakespeare, was funny precisely because of histotally accurate observation. Almost William Carlos Williams-like kitchen-sink mindfulness. Specifically, in a little song from Love’s Labour’s Lost – “When Isicles hang by the wall ,/ And Dicke the Shepheard blows his nail” – because it’s cold! For years, when I was in grammar school, I thought “blowes his nail” was some kind of a horn or something. Like the old thing, coming in and blowing on his (finger)nails, which is a real observation of winter. So all these images of winter. (Allen reads "Song" (from Love's Labour's Lost), ”“When Isicles hang by the wall ,/ And Dicke the Shepheard blows his nail”)

“Tu-whit, to-woo” is obviously a pun, like nothing to do but make love in the middle of the night

Gregory Corso: It’s an owl, Allen. “Tu-whit, to-woo” is an owl.

AG: Yes, of course, but what is the owl saying? – “Make love” – “Tu-whit to woo?”

GC: Coleridge – You’re reading Shakespeare?

AG: Right there, yes

GC: So Coleridge uses “tu whit to-woo” also

AG: Imitating Shakespeare, probably – “Nightly sings the staring (owl)..” - every night – when everybody has finally come in, and the pots have ben keeled.. (what does a keeled pot mean? anybody know?) – “Greasie Joan doth keele the pot” – what does “Greasie Joan… what does “keele the pot” mean?)

Student: Stir?

GC: It means clean the fucking pot!

AG: Clean it, or stir it.

Student: Scrape it

AG: Scrape it?

Student : It’s cooking on a fireplace

AG: Is there a note back here. No, no. So we’ll have to accept “stir” – Stir

GC: We’ll have them (notes) back in my class

AG: ““Tu-whit, to-woo” – I always interpreted that as meaning “to whit”, that is to say, “what is the owl saying?” - ““Tu-whit, to-woo”

GC: It’s onomatopoeic, Al

AG: Of course it’s onomatopoeic, but, what’s better than that it’s onomatopoeic is that it also makes a funny little pun-sense

GC: It’s how ancient Egyptian got it, man. They did it all onomatopoeic. It was all phonetic. You don’t know what it means. So when they drew the picture of the arrow it doesn’t go ““Tu-whit, to-woo” – it’s what it sounds like, it’s not the picture of…

AG: The picture of the sound. What’s the picture of the sound of owl in Egytptian?

GC: Alright. “Owl” means...now here you go, top-shot.. “Owl” means power stick

AG: Owl?

GC: Owl

AG: Awl?

GC: Power stick. Do you know what it looks like?

AG: Uh-uh

GC: Want me to draw it on the board?

AG: Yeah

GC: Why was the owl in Ancient Greece used as wisdom?

AG: Dunno

GC: Alright

AG: Minerva’s bird, Minerva’s bird

GC: They used it on the drachma, Here’s the owl.

AG: Minerva’s bird . Get rid of “Saraswati” and “Nietzsche” (Corso is erasing the chalk-board)

GC: Alright, Nietzche, you gave them Nietsche, Al

AG: No, that was somebody else’s Nietzsche.

GC: (drawing on the board) That’s the owl

AG: Is that the Egyptian hieroglyph?

GC: That’s the Egyptian glyph for owl

AG: Perfect

GC: Alright. Now the power stick looks like this (continues drawing). That’s always with the arm, for their furniture. They do the.. lets say a chair, they do the power stick and the arm together..And it makes a nice design for furniture. Now the owl gets sometimes this..

AG: What’s that?

GC: That’s a pair of feet walking. See?. Let’s say you get a cock. They draw a cock. They draw the cock walking..

AG: Tu-whit to-woo

GC: You got it, hallelujah!

AG: “When all aloud the winde doth blow/ And coffing drownes the Parson’s saw” (The parson, babbling in church, talking like (in a drone), “Don’t get drunk, and don’t listen to any mad poets) – “And coffing drownes the Parson’s saw/ And birds sit brooding in the snow…” (That was (Jack) Kerouac’s favorite line.

GC: “Birds sit brooding” – No, Kerouac’s best with Shakespeare was this – “Fat as butter, cheap as an egg”.

AG: Oh yeah, where was that from?

GC: Shakespeare

AG: I mean, where?

GC: Falstaff

AG: Ah, “fat as butter, cheap as an egg”. Yeah. What year was that?

GC: What year? I don’t know, 1770! - leave me alone!

AG: I got my Shakespeare originally from (William) Burroughs. The first Shakespeare I ever understood was out of Burroughs’ mouth. 1944, Christmas, I went down from Columbia University to Green-wich Village for the first time in my life, taken by a degenerate fellow-student, whom I was in love with, and who was from St Louis, and who knew Burroughs, and they were describing a drunken and bloody night taken.. last Saturday in a dyke bar, where this kid had gotten into a totally alcoholic fight and bitten-off some bull-dyke’s ear-lobe (it was such a disgusting story. Well, not disgusting.. I mean, I came from Paterson, New Jersey, and I never knew about people like that, much less getting drunk and fighting on the floor of a bar and biting somebody’s ear until it was bleeding!). And Burroughs said – “”Tis too starved an argument for my sword” (or he said, “As the immortal Bard said, “’Tis too starved an argument for my sword”). And that led to another line I heard him once quote, which was similar. It’s actually, again, a very deep line of detachment, a very Buddhist line - “’Tis too starved an argument for my sword” – a “starved argument” – it’s a very funny idea again). There’s another line in “The Tempest”, when the fools are scared by the music. (I think it’s “The Tempest”) and maybe Caliban or Ariel says, “Put up your sword..”. No, maybe it’s “Romeo and Juliet” – “Put up your swords lest the bright dew rust them”

GC: Al, we met in a dyke bar

AG: A different dyke bar

GC: 1950, remember?

AG: It’s a different dyke bar

GC: I lived on 9^th Street and 6^th Avenue (New York) and I watched this chick taking a shit all the time and pissing in the bath and fucking

AG: I’m trying to keep it on Shakespeare. I’m trying to do Shakespeare. You’ve got to relate it to Shakespeare

GC: I met you at the Pony Stable, and you dug my poesy, right?

AG: It was Shakespearean. That’s why..

GC: You dug my poesy, right, and I told you, wow, I'd like you to take me to introduce me to this girl, who I don’t know, who fucks these people (for the rent(?)), and I jerk off to (her) - I’m 20-years-old right?.. Well he said, “Gregory, I’m the man who fucks her!”.

Well, you know the address, right? Seventy-five..? What was her name?..

AG: Dusty. Dusty Moreland from Lusk Wyoming.

GC: And you watched me fuck her.

AG: Yeah. We were all in bed together. We wound up all in bed together, which is a basic poetic situation (but then you have that consequence of it, later on, twenty years later, so you’ve got to put up with each other. That’s the actual karma of that kind of total devotion. And it’s an old poetic problem. What do you do with Christopher Marlowe who insists on going into a bar and getting his eye pricked out and getting killed in a drunken brawl? What do you do with… Shakespeare created Falstaff who inspired Kerouac who’ll drink a hole in his stomach. What do you do withChogyam Trungpa and his saki ? What do you do with Gregory and his rounded 24,000 years?

GC: Alright then. Don’t give me Kit Marlowe, man. He’s a spy, right?

AG: Well, I gave you Kit Marlowe, Jack Kerouac and (Chogyam) Trungpa. Why don’t you take your choice ?

GC: I don’t think Trungpa fucked up yet because he’s alive, but Kerouac fucked up, and Marlowe did -they’re dead

AG: The dead are all fucked up, right?

“When all aloud the winde doth blow/ And coffing drownes the Parson’s saw:/ And birds sit brooding in the snow,/ And Marrian’s nose lookes red and raw:/ When roasted Crabs hisse in the bowle,/ Then nightly sings the staring owle,/ Tu-whit, tu-woo/ A merrie note/ While greasie Joan doth keel the pot..” Kerouac kept asking “Who’s “greasie Joan”? I wanna meet “greasie Joan”. I wanna fuck “greasie Joan”. It’s just those two words conjured up this person. In two words, a complete structure in the air with her job, k(n)eeling at the pot, greasy. No wonder greasy, because she’s got to clean out the pots, so she’s got all this grease up to her elbow(s). But everything, absolutely, like William Carlos Williams’ imagism – icicles are hanging by the wall, the shepherd blowing his nails, somebody’s bringing logs into the hall, named Tom, milk is frozen in the pail, blood’s nipped - well that’s sort of far-out, that’s poetic.

GC: It’s his most top-class poem really.

AG: “Tu-whit to woo”, the actual sound of the owl, “greasie Joan” working there, wind blowing, coughing, while the Parson’s saying, “Well, everything’s alright, folks. Keep it low”. Birds sitting “brooding” in the snow , Marrian’s nose red and raw, crabs hiss in the bowl, “tu-whit to woo”, the owl again, Joan back there still at the pot. What’s so great about that is the accuracy, the focus, the concentration of attention (like a Zenhaiku – every line worthy of haiku, every line a fact, every line a sensory detail).

Student: Which poem is that?

AG: It’s a song from “Love’s Labours Lost”. The whole play is as good as that. This is sort of concentrated into one song.

You know the little song from “The Tempest”, “Full fadom five..”. How many here do not know “Full fadom five thy Father lies…” ? Amazingly great. This was considered twenty years ago by a lot of people to be the most beautiful little piece of poem in the whole English language. Now the situation in the Tempest is, I think, Prospero, the magician of the tempest, has entrapped all his karmic enemies and brought them to his magic isle and separated them so they were confused, and Ferdinand, a young, sweet-looking prince, who was going to marry Prospero’s daughter at the end of the play, Miranda, is separated from his father, who’s name I’ve forgotten, and thinks his father is dead, and I think Ariel sings him a song. This is probably sung by Ariel – imagination. Do you know? (Allen then recites in full “Full fadom five thy Father lies..” I don’t know (if) she would.. I think it would be a song so I don’t know how they would say “ding-dong bell” at the end (there). I never figured that part out.

GC: Shelley had that on his grave, Al

AG: “Sea-Nymphs hourly..” No, “th(e)se are pearles that were his eyes”, or what?

GC: Something about those changes

AG: “Nothing of him that doth fade,/ But suffer a Sea-change/ Into something rich, and strange.”

GC: Shelley has it on his tomb

AG: I’ll read it once again for those who’ve never heard it before, in fact, three times. Three times, that ‘s the official number for a mantra. “Full fadom..” F-A-D-O-M, or fathom. Full five fathoms down into the ocean, because the kid thought his father was drowned in the ocean with the tempest.

 

History of Poetry 11 (Hesperus - Allen & Gregory part 2)

 

 

Continuing where we left off, with Allen's "History of Poetry" class. You might recall that there was some intervention from Gregory Corso, that intervention continues. Hesperus, the morning or the evening star? - a hart, a deer or a rabbit? - Ben Jonson or Samuel Johnson?. Fortunately Allen keeps his temper and things become clear. Allen reads Ben Jonson, John Fletcher and John Ford. Here is a transcript:

 

AG: Ah. Getting onto Shakespeare's friend, (Ben) Jonson for a moment. Funny, witty Jonson, also writing for music. This is a hymn (so, literally, to music), but here more stately than any of the "cherry ripe themselves doe cry" sort of pop songs. Like.."Cherry ripe themselves doe cry" is a 16th century pop style. Jonson is..when? - 1572, born (to) 1637. I'll read it stopping my breath,or taking a breath with his commas (which was something that I think I mentioned when I was reading the Shelley the other day, that in reading older poetry, if you will pay attention to the actual punctuation, (if you can find a text that has the original punctuation, particularly in (William) Blake, but especially in very sensitive poets like (Thomas) Campion or (Ben) Jonson, whose ears are perfect, and whose hand, therefore, was perfect in marking time), if you pay attention to the commas, semi-colons, or dashes, or the line-lengths, you'll get some indication of how to breathe while vocalizing the poem. Sometimes it's very delicate, like in this hymn - "Queen" (comma) - and Huntress (comma) - chaste (comma) and fair (comma)/ Now the Sunne is laid to sleepe..". So it's like a very funny music that is being set up. "Queen" and "Huntress", "Chaste" and "fair". No, I didn't do it right, because I didn't breathe. [Allen proceeds to read Ben Jonson's "The Hymn of Hesperus"from "Cynthia's Revels" in its entirety].Whether or not you.. I was just doing sound and time so I wasn't even hardly following what it was all about, what the poem was about, and I don't even know if I could figure it out. "Queene and Huntress" is who? - "Queene and Huntress, chaste and faire"?, that would be Diana, the moon, "Queene and Huntress, chaste and faire"Noe the Sunne is laid to sleepe, so it's an address to the moon. "Noe the Sunne is laid to sleepe,/ Seated in thy silver (moon) chaire,/ State in wonted manner keepe:/ Hesperus intreats thy light" - Hesperus? Morning star? Hesperides, morning star, right? Is Hesperus not the morning star?

 

Gregory Corso: No

 

AG: What is?

 

GC: Lucifer

 

AG: Aargh! Then what is Hesperus?

 

GC: The Bible has it that..

 

AG: We had this yesterday

 

Student: Lucifer is the morning star

 

AG: Well, okay, then Hesperus, the evening star, would "intreat" the light of the moon.

 

GC: No, they're the same, That guy's bull-shitting...

 

AG: Right on. Answer him back.

 

GC: But he is bullshit. It's the same - the evening star and the morning star are both Venus.

 

Student: Yeah.

 

Student: Different name.

 

AG: Oh, the planet, huh? They are both on the planet Venus, is that what you're saying?..

 

GC: Right.

 

AG: Is that true?

 

Student: You see Venus in the morning and you call it Lucifer. You see it in the evening, they call it...

 

AG: So the rising of Venus..

 

GC: In the Bible, you don't find that Lucifer is kicked out of Heaven. But they have in the Old Testament that Lucifer fell. The evening star fell.

 

AG: Which would be..what?

 

GC: Lucifer

 

AG: Meaning morning or evening?

 

GC: Well, both, maybe. I told you but you started screaming that they're both the same!

 

AG: But Hesperus himself, Hesperus, however, is a specific name for the evening, or the morning, then. You're saying that Lucifer would be morning and Hesperus would be evening..

 

GC: ..I'm saying that the lover of Diana was Actaeon...

 

AG: Wait a minute.. let's get to Hesperus. I would like to get this straight. Hesperus, then, would be evening and Lucifer, morning?

 

GC: Lucifer's evening

 

AG: Which is which? Does anybody know?

 

GC: Lucifer fell. In other words, evening fell

 

AG: Might be. Well then, why would Hesperus..

 

GC: I might be wrong.

 

AG: ..Why would Hesperus entreat the light of the moon? Why would Hesperus entreat the moon to be lit up?

 

GC: (indecipherable - alas!)...that I've been so wronged!

 

AG: Okay. Oooh. "I know everything there is to know because there ain't that much to know". It's a great line actually. Does everyone remember that line?

 

Student: Lucifer means light-bearer, so it probably is the morning star.

 

AG: Uh-huh. Okay. Well, Hesperus would make sense here, Hesperus, the evening star, entreating the light of the moon

 

Student: Who's Hesperus, though?

 

AG: Right on. Who is Hesperus? Who knows Hesperus? Who knows Hesperus?

 

Student: Hesperus may be the name of something known as the sun behind the sun. I think it has something to do with the sun. But I'm not...

 

GC: (indecipherable) Hyperion

 

Student: Well, that's not the right answer

 

GC: See, I knew what he was..

 

AG: I'll find out who Hesperus is by Friday.

 

GC: Lucifer was the evening star and it fell.

 

AG: Well, we'll find that out too.

 

GC: Wake up!

 

AG: Wake up. "..let not thy envious shade/ Dare itself to interpose/ Cynthias shining..." Well, so, he doesn't want the Earth to get in the way there. "Cynthia's shining orbe was made/ Heaven to cleere, when day did close:/ Blesse us then with wished sight,/ Goddesse excellently bright." - So all it's saying is, "Moon, c'mon and shine!" (but a hymn to the moon to shine - "Lay thy bow of pearle apart,/ And thy cristall-shining quiver" -Diana was also a huntress - "Give unto thy flying hart" - H-A-R-T, the hart is a deer..)

 

GC: It's a rabbit.

 

AG: Rabbit or deer

 

GC: Rabbit

 

Students: Deer

 

GC: You wanna bet? How much do you wanna bet?

 

AG: Wanna take a vote? Let's take a vote. Who wants it to be a rabbit? [show of hands]/ Who wants it to be a deer? [show of hands]. You're outvoted three-to-one!

 

GC: How much money am I going to make tonight? Assholes! - A hart is a rabbit.

 

AG: We'll find that out, too - "Give unto the flying hart,/ Space to breathe, how short soever:/ Thou that mak'st a day of night/ Goddesse, excellently bright" - Somebody must have set that to music and made a really solid anthem-like hymn of that, because it's such a perfect set-up, that "Queene and Huntress, chaste, and faire,/ Now the Sunne is laid to sleepe", it's such perfect time and stately time.

 

Allen then reads Ben Jonson's "Epitaph of S.P." (Salomon Pavy, a child-actor of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel) - "Weepe with me all you that read.." - "It's just witty and intelligent and sympathetic and appreciative of a thirteen-year-old actor, who, for three "zodiacs" (three years) had played old men, and died at thirteen. I like its small-town, small scale. I don't know how many people who lived in London then that would have gone to the theatre, but it's for something that everybody would know who "S.P" was (that he was Salomon Pavy, as he was called), everybody would know who he was and everybody would have seen him around the streets or would have seen him on the stage.

 

GC: I may have made the mistake that maybe a hart might be a deer, but I thought it was a rabbit. So... (indecipherable)

 

AG: Yes, its a deer. It's a deer.

 

GC: I also insisted that it was a beautiful little rabbit

 

AG: I wrote a line years ago about "tame the hart" and "wear the bear"

 

GC: The hart is then, what? A young dear?

 

Student: It's a mature deer.

 

GC: A mature deer?

 

Student: I think. Isn't it? Somebody said a mature deer.

 

Student: Yeah.

 

GC: Oh, I'm so embarrassed. I told the class I knew everything!

 

AG: "Song to Celia" - so now we're actually into an area where you're already familiar. We've brought the lyric up to a place where you've heard it already, which is... [Allen sings Ben Jonson's "Song to Celia" - "Drinke to me, onely, with thine eyes."]

- I wasn't following exactly the breathing, because I couldn't remember the exact tune. So that tune survives. I guess that's an old tune, isn't it?, survives from (Samuel Johnson's time [sic]), Shakespeare's time.. Next, Johnson (Jonson) on Shakespeare. Has anybody ever read it? It's sort of literary and boring. I think I'll skip it.

 

GC: I didn't say.. He made a mistake on America. You know, the time of the Revolution, he said America sucked!

 

AG: Jonson said? in that particular song?

 

GC: At that time, man

 

AG: No, in that song?

 

GC: He sided with the King.

 

AG: In that particular thing on Shakespeare?

 

GC: Not on Shakespeare, but just in history,

 

AG: Well, I liked Jonson's ear, (I like Jonson's ear). That "Queene and Huntress, chaste and faire" doesn't suck, because it reads..

 

GC: No, I'm not talking about that one (Jonson), I'm talking about what he (Johnson) said about America, man.

 

AG: I was talking about his memory of Shakespeare.

 

GC: When I first took your class, I put something up of Sam(uel) Johnson's on the wall (about "I hate mankind")

 

AG: This is Ben Jonson we're talking about!

 

GC: Sam Johnson

 

AG: Ben Jonson

 

GC: Oh, Ben is top class.

 

AG: You idiot! - I mean(t) Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare. The one who didn't know a hart was a deer, you thought "hart" was a rabbit! You're un-done! You're unmasked! Proven a fool!

 

So now we're up to John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. [Allen reads William Shakespeare's, (or possibly John Fletcher's), "Orpheus With His Lute Made Trees.." - "Orpheus with his Lute made Trees/ And the Mountaine tops that freeze/ Bow themselves when he did sing.." )

 

GC: "O rare Ben Jonson!"

 

AG: Right. Who said that.

 

GC: Westminster Abbey

 

AG: Who said it originally?

 

GC: "O rare Ben Jonson"?

 

Student: He said it to himself

 

GC: Right on

 

AG: He did?

 

GC: (indecipherable)

 

AG (indecipherable) played for Ben Jonson. You're the scholar here, then

 

Student: No, I just happened to know that

 

AG: You visited Westminster Abbey? - or St Paul's or Westminster Abbey?.. It's a very famous classic sort of approach to a poem, that I guess (John) Milton picked up on later from the playwright. These are songs from plays by Beaumont - John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. There's a play listed here, "The Nice Valour", which has a first line - "Hence all you vaine Delights", which you can just tell what's coming on there. And then, I guess, Milton took some of that rhetoric too. "Hence all you vaine..." - do you want to hear what comes after that? It's just that one line that I really like. [Allen reads John Fletcher's "Hence all you vaine Delights.." - "Hence all you vaine Delights/ As short as are the nights/ Wherein you spend your folly..."] That's pretty good, actually. It's a very varied verse form. It's not just simple quatrains. And the last lines ("Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley/ Nothing so daintie sweet, as lovely Melancholy") are almost like the end of a sonnet.

 

Next, (John) Ford. What I'm doing, as I think I said, I'm running through the specific poems that most influenced my ear when I was thirteen to twenty-five. John Ford, another playwright, 1586-1640. [Allen reads Ford's "Can you paint a thought? or number.." - "Can you paint a thought? or number/ Every fancy in a slumber?" - That's a really great little fast rise into ecstacy, and then... And very intelligent in terms of psychology, in terms of self-observation. Can you paint a thought? or number / Every fancy in a slumber?" - Can you paint a thought? or number / Every fancy in a slumber?/ Can you count soft minutes roving/ From a dyals point by moving?/ Can you graspe a sigh? or lastly,/ Rob a Virgin's honor chastly". "No, o no" (no comma, o, no semi-colon), "yet you may/ Sooner doe both that and this,/ This and that and never misse", "Sooner doe both that and this,/ This and that and never misse", you could sing that , weirdly. Well, it must have been sung [Allen continues singing - "Sooner doe both that and this/ This and that and never misse/ Then by any praise display/ Beauty's beauty, such a glory/ As beyond all Fate, all Story/ all armes, all arts/ All loves, all hearts,/ Greater than those, or they/ Doe, shall, and must obey" - That is to say, the "Greater than those" is all fate, story, all arms, all loves, all hearts, anything even greater than those arts, hearts, loves, fates, must, do, shall and must obey beauty's beauty. So the hero is beauty here

 

Student: What was that Allen?

 

AG: Huh?

 

Student: What was that called?

 

AG: That's "Can You Paint A Thought" (is the title given here, by (W.H.) Auden, I think) from a play called "A Broken Heart". There is a... What time is it?

 

Students: 7.30.

 

AG: Oh, good. We've got all John Donne to go through, (and) so I'm going to save him till next time, and get on to a fellow named James Shirley. And I'm going to read a poem by James Shirley and a poem by myself, because, as I was saying, these are things that I heard, or got in my ear when I was... [second side of audio-tape ends here]

 

History of Poetry 12 (Shirley)

 

 

[Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1661) - Vanitas With A Putto Resting His Head On A Skull, oil on panel 16 3/4" x 13"]

 

Allen's June 10 1975 NAROPA class concludes.

 

AG: It's called "Dirge". Now, (James) Shirley's 1596-1666, so now we're getting about half a century later than Shakespeare. So that little airy thing in Shakespeare is beginning to get a little bit lost, but a kind of funny Buddhist Noble Truth logic horror is coming in. A Death's Head is coming in. It's perhaps stupidly, in a sense, like, Western mechanistic industrial-minded.. the wheel has been invented or something, and (William) Blakeis about to be born pretty soon (well, maybe another century). It's this kind of thing that drove Blake mad, really, but actually it's the apex of logical English horror thought. It comes out of Shakespeare, because it's like the Shakespeare lines, "All lovers young, all lovers must/Consign to thee, and come to dust". "Golden lads and girls all must consign to thee, come to dust." "Dirge", from "The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses". [Allen reads James Shirley's poem - "The glories of our blood and state/ Are shadows not substantial things.."] - No, it's better than I thought, actually. That's really good, Marianne Moore paraphrases that in one of her poemsabout the war. I was influenced by this.. and, this mainly. This is [he turns to his own poetry] called "Stanzas - Written at Night in Radio City", [Allen reads his 1949 poem - "If money made the mind more sane/ Or money mellowed in the bowel.." in its entirety] - Actually, the first, one, two, three, four, five, six lines were after Shirley's "Scepter and crown/ Must tumble down", and then I got mixed up and started writing like (W.B.) Yeats. The "woman withered in the lips". So I got to be "Crazy Jane" or something. "Contemplate the unseen Cock/ that crows all beasts to ecstacy" - that was a take-off on "I know, although when looks meet.." You know "Crazy Jane"? Yeats?, a figure, sort of a dharma crazy-wisdom figure in Yeats. "I know, although when looks meet.." On "Wild Jack", her lover..[Allen then reads Yeats ("I know, although when looks meet..", from "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman")]. So I think I was getting some of that dirty old woman talk, kind of "Crazy Jane".

So, that was James Shirley. That's really so good, that - "Upon Death's purple altar now,/ See where the Victor/victim bleeds" - it's like perfectdharma karma talk. That poem, "Brightnesse falls from the ayre" of(Thomas) Nashe, and (Shakespeare's) "Of his bones are Corrall made" have some funny perfect things. "Death lays his icy hands on kings/ Scepter and Crown/ Must tumble down". It's really so pearl-like, it's so beautiful. You should know those poems. You should keep track of just a few really exquisite lines, with the exquisite time, and the exquisite literary detail that they present. So that's Shirley. If you've got it written down, look it up and read it a couple of times. If you read it a couple of times, you'll have it in your head without even attempting to memorize it. That's what I find, and I find (true) with a lot of people. If you have something really good and perfect like that, where it makes total sense and where it's totally literal, and the music is perfect, if you read it three or four times, then fragments hang around in your consciousness, and you'll have them for the rest of your life to refer to, and then you'll have to fight them when you want to write your own poetry. Because the nervous system practically gets altered, the entire nervous system, the neural network, gets altered by these vibrations. It's like really subtle perfect vibrations (which was a theory of the French 20th century poet, Antonin Artaud, who, speaking of music and voices and poems, said that there are some tones and vibrations which are so penetrant that they actually alter the molecular composition of the nerves. A certain vibration enters in and alters the physical, biochemical, structure of the corpse, making a permanent change. What time (is it)?

 

Student: It's ten to..

 

AG: Yeah, okay, We'll continue. I'll continue with a few more of these. I'll continue next week, or next, with George Herbert, (Henry) Vaughan, (Andrew) Marvell, (Thomas) Traherne, and begin/do a little (John) Donne.

[class and tape end here]

 

History of Poetry 13 (John Donne)

 

 

[John Donne - 1572-1631]

 

AG (singing with harmonium) : "Go and catch a falling star,/ Get with child a mandrake root,/ Tell me where all past years are,/ Or who cleft the devil's foot..." [Allen improvises/ sings the whole poem - and then, self-depreciatingly] - Well that's not a very good tune.

 

"Sweetest love, I do not go,/ For weariness of thee..." - you know that? How many know that? I guess it's the sweetest of them. Huh?

 

Student: Which one is the one with the contest?

 

AG: Later on. I think that's the one where they're lying in bed, looking into each others eyes. Well, I've got it here. Eventually probably. You all know "Hymn" - [Allen then reads in its entirety, Donne's poem - "Sweetest love, I do not go..."]. What I liked about that, I guess, is it's really song, and it says "Song", "Sweetest love, I do not go,/ For weariness of thee..." There is a comma: "Sweetest love, I do not go,/ For weariness of thee..." But, without a comma, it's a very curious perfect swift "Sweetest love I do not go/ For weariness of thee/ Nor in hope the world can show/ A fitter love for me/ But since that I/ Must die at last,'tis best/ To use myself in jest/ Thus by feign'd deaths to die." "O how feeble is man's power.." - it's a funny kind of syncopation. "O how feeble is man's power/ That if good fortune fall,/ Cannot add another hour,/ Nor a lost hour recall." It's a delicate ear. I remember I had to read it when I was in college and those few little rhythms like, " Sweetest love, I do not go,/ For weariness of thee" stick a long time. I used to write a lot of imitations of it.

 

And (then) there's "The Canonization", which I begin to appreciate now [Allen reads "The Canonization" - "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love.." - just the opening stanza] - that's the first stanza - you can read on yourself.

 

How many here know "The Extasie"? I'm not sure, so I'll read that. It's longer. [to student] Do you know these at all, any, (Don)?. You went to school in Maine?

 

Student: No, actually...

 

AG: Where?

 

Student: It was a long time ago in Iowa...

 

AG: Iowa.

 

Student: ...where I finished high school.

 

AG: What really upset me is Lewis MacAdams, who is an older poet, told me that he had the same experience that when he went to school they were teaching me and (Jack) Kerouac, rather than this, or rather than traditional poetry, and it seemed like a bum karma, kind of. Even MacAdams hadn't read that (James) Shirley poem about "Scepter and crown/ Must tumble down"

 

Student: How old is MacAdams?

 

AG: Huh?

 

Student: How old is MacAdams?

 

AG: Well, he must be 32. Yeah. Can you hear me actually?

 

Students: No

 

AG: Way back in.. There's a chair here. I want you to move up. Move a little more then. I feel kind of weird because my pronunciation feels funny with my face [Allen here is alluding to his "bell's palsy"] - Visually, I keep seeing myself as sort of like a Francis Bacon painting with half the face slipping. I have difficulty with "f"'s and "p"'s.

 

Well (ok), it's sort of like a Platonic thing, called "The Extasie" [Allen reads "The Extasie" - "Where, like a pillow on a bed.." ...there's a kind of erotic haze throughout the room. I guess you've all had that experience. If you haven't, then go do it immediately, with the knowledge that you're going to make it, but hold off and lie there a long long time until there's some total erotic communication before you get to the body, before you get to the hard pushing.

So the interesting thing there, "Our hands were firmly cemented/ By a fast balm" - ok - "Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread/ Our eyes upon one double-string" - that's clear (it's a little ugly, actually, but I have to say it was clear anyway). Now, "As, 'twixt two equal armies" - as between two equal armies - "Fate / Suspends uncertain victory/ Our souls - which to advance their state/ Were gone out - hung 'twixt her and me" - so that's a common experience - "And whilst our souls negotiate there/ We like sepulchral statues lay" - that's a good one. So there's a lot of funny stuff, like "This ecstacy doth unperplex", which is like "On purpose lay'd to make the taker mad" - "This ecstacy doth unperplex" - what really gets kind of interesting, talking about finally getting back to the body. "Else a great prince in prison lies" - the next time somebody doesn't want to make it with you, well, just say, "A great prince is lying in prison", and they'll laugh. And, at the end, "And if some lover, such as we.." - it's very firm, very clear, that he has accomplished something in love, has experienced something in love, or has accomplished something in love, or has felt something". There's his poem, "On His Mistress.." Yeah?

 

Student: I think there's.. I don't know.. when you were reading that, I got a different impression than the way you were seeing it...

 

AG: Yeah..

 

Student: ...which is that.. Yeah, I saw the poem, and in a kind of different light than the time right before two people make it, seeing it more like ideal love, when two people become one, that experience of inner twining of souls and leaving the body, more than any kind of sexual.. like leaving the body, like entirely..

 

AG: But he's saying then you've got to get into the body. That's the whole point of the poem.

 

Student: I thought it was more like... especially in..

 

AG: "To our bodies turn we then, that so/ Weak men on love reveal'd may look;/ Love's mysteries in souls do grow,/ But yet the body is his book". In other words, this is explaining why he, finally.. why, after a long time preparation, a long time looking in each other's eyes, finally the metaphysical turn was to the physical, and it was alright.

 

Student: I thought that it just needed a physical manifestation of ideal love.

 

AG: Well, it's the same thing,

 

Student: Yeah.

 

AG: What do you want? That's all he's saying. Yeah, sure. I'll buy that, sure - "But, O alas! so long, so far,/ Our bodies why do we forbear?" - Why don't we make it in the body? - "They are ours, though not we; we are/ Th' intelligences, (but) they are the spheres. / We owe them thanks.." - I mean, he's glad - "Nor are dross to us.." - The bodies aren't dross - "..soul into the soul may flow,/ Though it to body first repair."

 

Okay. There's a poem , "On His Mistress..", which I won't read at length, except the first ten lines or so because of the movement of the lines, which is something you might note, because, except maybe for that little passage of Shakespeare, "in cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces..", here it begins a movement which starts like a repetition and builds up to a mighty kind of rhyme, builds up a flow, builds up a sort of cum, beginning of orgasmic poesy, beginning of rhapsody which we'll get to later in(Percy Bysshe) Shelley, total rhapsody - or in Hart Crane, total rhapsody. So far we've been dealing with intelligence, precision, music, break-time, but here, time build-up, rhapsody build-up. "On His Mistress.." - See, just dig how he begins it, and then, sort of, a Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, just building it [Allen reads first nine lines of "On His Mistress" - "By our first strange and fatal interview/ By all desires which thereof did ensue.." - He came. Rhetorically and syntactically. By this, by that (duh-dah, duh-dah), "I conjure thee.." - "..and all the oathes which I/ And thou have sworn to seal joint constancy/Here I unswear and overswear them thus.." And so forth. It goes on and on, long poem about his lady, full of intelligence. And another great line: "When I am gone, dream me some happiness" - That's very strange, sort of Shakespearean, oddness. "When I am gone, dream me some happiness" - You know what I mean by a rhythmical build-up here? It's pretty obvious. And this is something stronger than anything I've been reading so far. So, if you're writing, that's where your ear develops, if you can start something like that and pick up and go on and build it. Here it's the repetition. Does anybody know what the technical word for repetition like that is? There is a technical word for, "..who throw themselves on the meat truck looking for an egg, who did this, who did that..", like in "Howl", or, well, it's not a litany, there's a litany form, but there's a technical word for it. Maybe I'll find out by next time...

 

Student: Why were they so into that third-person titles?

 

AG: "On His Mistress"

 

Student: Yeah

 

AG: Let me see. It may be that there was no title. It might have been a letter and it might have been titled by another person, saying..

 

Student: It's pretty common, though.

 

AG: Yeah. The titles may have been given by friends, "John Donne, On His Mistress". There's the great text, this poem beginning "By our first strange and fatal interview.." which may have been a letter or just a little poem without a title, but I don't know. Or, actually, I think it probably began that way and then people got used to it like that and began titling their own poems that way. I don't know, though, otherwise. When I was twenty, I used to write "On His.." because I was influenced by this.

 

Student: I think it was just a conventional thing Allen, from like wills and things - you know, "John Donne, his Last Will and Testament".

 

AG: Yes, it might have come from legal language, but I think in poetry, the convention might have come just from the usage of hands passing poems around.

 

Then there are a series of "Holy Sonnets", which are very powerful. They're no longer that light violin music or whatever - cellos - like in Shakespeare, and they get very solid in confrontation with death, but also he has this obsession with transcendence and coming to another life and being taken up by Christ and being redeemed. A whole Western shot which you'll find building up into the final suicide by Hart Crane in the 20th Century - an insistence on making it into Godhead, and so breaking up his body. In other words, he's depending on a God here. See, the early poems, they were a little more pagan. All of a sudden in here, with God, they get really serious about a Central Intelligence Agency (sic) in the universe running things, and from there on in, in a sense, the poetry gets less freely playful and more and more intellectually serious and begins hardening, and finally people stop singing even, and they get more and more intellectual. They still mixed song, but here now he's writing sonnets which are not likely even meant to be sung, or are almost prayers, but they're so intelligent, or so well-built and so intelligent, that they've got a lot of strength.

 

"Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?/ Repair me now, for mine end doth haste, / I run to death, and death meets me as fast,/ And all my pleasures are like yesterday.." - Well, that's almost as good as Shakespeare - "And all my pleasures are like yesterday.." [Allen continues] "I dare not move my dim eye any way/ Despair behind, and death before doth cast/ Such terror and my feebled flesh doth waste/ By sin in it, which it t'wards hell doth weigh./ Only thou art above, and when towards thee/ By thy leave I can look, I rise again;/But our old subtle foe so tempteth me..." - He's got the Devil in there already. Nothing as terrified.. I haven't seen anything as terrified as this, of a personal bring-down, of a personal demon - "But our old subtle foe so tempteth me" [Allen concludes the poem] "That not one hour I can myself sustain;/ Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,/ And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart." - Like a magnet - "thou like adamant draw mine iron heart".

 

Then, the very famous one, "Death be not proud..." [Allen reads the first six lines of this John Donne sonnet] - "That's pretty funny. Do you understand? - "From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,/ Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow" [Allen continues with the last eight lines] "And soonest our best men with thee do go,/ Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery, / Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men/ And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell, / And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well/ And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?/ One short sleep past, we wake eternally/And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die" - That's very heroic. Actually, it makes sense in a non-Christian or a pagan system too.

 

 

History of Poetry 14 (Gnosticism, Milton & More)

 

 

 

Continuing with Allen's June 23 1975 NAROPA lecture, (topics already covered, John Donne and Andrew Marvell - and now this:

 

AG: According to some Gnostic schools, in the beginning was the Abyss of Light, which somehow shimmered to reflect itself for a moment and that reflection was the Word, known as Sophia, wisdom, or word, and in Sophia's mind, being born, she had a thought and, as (William) Blake says, "One thought fills immensity". So her thought was the first Aeon, first time-span, presided over by the Archon, or ruler of the Aeon, or guardian of the Aeon. I believe his name was Ialdabaoth, and Ialdabaoth had a thought and his son, or thought, was Iao - I-A-O - and had his Aeon. And Iao had a thought (I forget the Archon that was his son), and then the next Archon and the next Aeon had another thought and his son was named Elohim, and Elohim had a thought and I believe his son was named Yahweh, and Yahweh had a thought and this thought included a Universe and a World, and a Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve, but Yahweh didn't want Adam and Eve to know that Yahweh was as "insubstantial a pageant"as Shakespeare's players. Yahweh wanted that authority. Yahweh was so far removed from the Abyss of Light that he'd already developed a fully grown ego, which he felt was permanent, and so he told Adam and Eve they could take any fruit from the Garden except from the Tree of Knowledge, because, if they tasted the Tree of Knowledge, they would know that they were as insubstantial as Yahweh, and that Yahweh was only the thought of Elohim, and Elohim was only the thought of Iao, and Iao was only the thought's thought, the thought of Ialdabaoth, and Ialdabaoth was only a thought of Sophia, the word, and Sophia was only a shimmer, or a reflection, within the Abyss of Light. So there they were, stuck with the CIA in the Garden of Eden, arrogating to itself all of the authority of the Universe. So the way they got out of that, because all the Archons were guardians of their Aeons, and they had this property they wanted to protect now - Self and Thought and so, Sophia, realizing that she was the spark of the Light of the Abyss, a reflection, and that everything she thought that had a spark of the Abyss originally was in her, in it, even her thoughts..(and) she felt incomplete, and compassionate, and felt she'd made some great mistake, or that it had to be restored, that all these sparks had to be restored to the original night, to the original Abyss. So she devised the Stranger, (so there's the concept of the Stranger, the Wanderer, the Caller of the Great Call - a beautiful idea - the Caller of the Great Call, the Alien, the Messenger), to go down through the Aeons in disguise, and go to Adam and Eve and tell them what to do, and so, the only critter that would get past the eyes of the Archons (it was so lowly a thing) - was the Snake. So she sent the Snake, as the good guy, the Messenger from Sophia, the wise Messenger from Sophia, to go down through the Aeons, undisturbed by the Guardian Archons, and get to Eve, and tell her to turn on, which she did. And so broke the mind-spell of the Garden of Eden and the egoistic hallucination created by Jehovah (which some people are still trying to enforce!).

 

That was because I started mentioning "gnostics". That's the Mandaean gnostic interpretation of The Garden of Eden, otherwise known as theOphitic - O-P-H-I-T-I-C - the Snake interpretation. Sir?

 

 

Student: I did my homework. I dug it up

 

AG: The Milton?

 

Student: Yeah

 

AG: Yeah, I'm actually about finished with Marvell. Now the Milton. Who brought the Milton up to begin with? You?

 

Student: I don't know

 

AG: Somebody mentioned a... no you didn't.. Somebody mentioned a poem by (John) Milton that they thought had great inspiration in it. It has a little inspiration in it because it is a brief poem, but it does have a little inspiration in terms of the breath

 

I just jumped to Milton for one sonnet because, when we were out on the grass [sic - class had moved outdoors since the room had been taken over] somebody mentioned Milton's sonnet to his deceased spouse and saintly wife, and wanted it introduced, and why not? My father (Louis Ginsberg) will be here later in the term to teach one day, and he'll teach Milton (because he taught me Milton), so you might as well get it from the horse's mouth.

 

Student: Is this Sonnet 23?

 

AG: Yup. On his deceased wife - [Allen reads in its entirety Milton's Sonnet 23] - "Methought I saw my late espoused saint..." - Well, there's quite a bit of excitement there, breathing excitement in that, the last half. Some of the references I don't understand - "Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint/ Purification in the Old Law did save.." - I presume she died in child-birth? - "Purification in the Old Law"? - I don't know what that refers to. You can guess. Do you know?

 

Student: Yeah, the whole thing is based on Alcestis, and Alcestis was rescued by Hercules

 

AG: Heracles

 

Student; Alcestis died for her husband. I forget his name, Admetus or something like that. The Fates told Admetus, her husband, that he had to die, and he didn't want to die so he got someone else to accept his fate. Admetus's wife accepted his fate. So she died. And then the husband started feeling really bad, and Heracles was visiting in his house, drinking wine and everything, and then he came up to this man and said, "Why are you feeling so bad?" - "Oh, my wife died, can you do something to help me?". And so he goes and wrestles with Death, who is personified, and he brings her back. And that's "her face was veiled" ("Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight/ Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined"). The husband doesn't recognize.. this guy's a real creep. He doesn't recognize her when Heracles brings her back from death and so that's what Milton does.

 

AG: Gluck wrote an opera called Alceste..also (probably recorded and available if anybody's really interested).

 

Student: Isn't this thing about ablutions performed at childbirth ?

 

AG: Maybe. I'm actually interested in the sound. I was interested in the sound and the breathing. I don't want to neglect the intellect or the wit or the learning in the poem, but I don't feel I'm prepared to deal with it at the moment, as I'm prepared to deal with the sound, so, move on.

 

Now we have.. in between.. there are several things I want to do before we get to (looking at) modern poetry, but that depends (on) what you want to do. I'd like to stop briefly on Christopher Smart, who wrote four lines a day in Bedlam, once he wound up there, and wrote this huge poem called"Jubilate Agno" ("Rejoice in the Lamb") while he was in Bedlam. Has anyone got a copy of that here? There's one in the library. Is the library still open? Too late?

Let's get a copy. I want to go through a little of that from the point of view of inspiration. That is, the breath. Because it's a break with this form, where it's long-line poetry, a little bit like (Walt) Whitman, or my own, orGuillaume Apollinaire, a French poet. So I'd like to stop on Christopher Smart a friend of Dr. (Samuel) Johnson.

 

Student: It (the library)'s closed

 

AG: Okay. Maybe next time. (I) also would like to stop over on (William) Blake, sing through Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Would anybody have that here?

 

Student: Yeah

 

AG: You do, Okay (and) maybe I'll read some fragments of Shelley and some Wordsworth. Now that would probably take a day or two more.. or finish this day and another day, maybe. Do you want to do that or do you want to insist on jumping ahead to the 20th century?

 

Student: Let's do that

 

Anne Waldman: I think Dick (Gallup) is going to be here Wednesday

 

Student: I'd like to jump ahead

 

AG: How many would like to go ahead to the 20th Century? Raise your hands. You're allowed to if you want. There's free will here. How many want to go through Smart, Blake, and a little bit of Wordsworth, raise your hands.

 

Student: And Shelley

 

AG: And Shelley. Okay. When I get to the moderns, we still have several weeks. I'll try to cover.. begin with Whitman, go to William Carlos Williams, some Ezra Pound, at length, if possible, on Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, some of Gregory Corso's classic numbers, and anything else that comes up. Maybe a little Gertrude Stein. I have recordings of Pound, Williams, Stein, also vocal recordings of Russian poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin, which are recordings that probably have never been heard in any school, but their actual voices, so you get voice again, sound, because they have that heroic style of reading. So that's what I'm planning, at least by the finish. We have how many days left now?

 

Anne Waldman: Two more weeks after this..

 

AG: Okay. Pardon me?

 

Student: There will be eight more sessions after this.

 

AG: Oh, okay. We'll have time to do something. I want to get into, first, a little (William) Wordsworth. I'm jumping way ahead. Yeah?

 

 

Student: Allen, where would Oriental poetry fit into this cosmology, or does it?

 

AG: Well, the problem is time. I have a very interesting anthology of haiku - Oh Ant, Crawl Up Mount Fujiyama, But Slowly, Slowly by various Japanese, (and then) the R.H.Blythe series of haiku in four volumes

 

Student: It's in the library

 

AG: They're in the library. Blythe's haiku, which you can look up, which, when we get to 20th Century poetry, relates very clearly to a lot of the inspiration of 20th Century poetry, which was precision observation, detail, single-mindedness, and clarity of observation of an object. Mindfulness - that mindfulness of non-generalized, non-abstract, visual detail. I thought we might get into that sooner or later. I haven't plotted out a course, I'm just working on what texts we have around. The other would be.. I have a really great book made in India, an anthology of Sufi,Yogi, Hindu poetry - different Hindus, different Sufis and different Yogis, covering about a thousand-years span, very beautifully translated, including Kabir, Dnyaneshwar (actually, the lineage of Swami Mutkananda, if anybody knows Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa, the 12th century poets in his lineage that he goes back to), Dnyaneshwar, Nivruttinath.

 

Well, I'm not quite sure how you mean it. What do you mean by how does it fit into the scheme? It's basic human perception, a certain amount of gorgeous extravagance, "What wond'rous life is this I lead/ Ripe apples drop about my head" - (A poet in?) Nivruttinath's lineage had a very great poem about how Nivruttinath's consciousness included cooked diamonds. His disciple wrote of the smell of pearls. Namdeo wove a garland of roses. The secret of all three has come into my hands, so says [Shantidaan (?)]. There's like an extravagance - Cooked diamonds. It's all poetry. People inventing gorgeous strange words out of their own heads to turn other people on to the weirdness of mind.

 

 

 

History of Poetry 15 (Wordsworth)

 

File:William Wordsworth at 28 by William Shuter2.jpg

[William Wordsworth (1770-1850) - painted, in 1798, by William Shuter]

 

Well, Wordsworth was doing the same thing, but he came at a time after Blake, after a sort of drying out of poetry and a rigidification of the meters, which we're skipping over. Actually, quite extraordinary,(Alexander) Pope, (John) Dryden, (Jonathan) Swift, (the Earl of) Rochester. Wordsworth came to a modern spirit, post Industrial Revolution. His consciousness dimmed somewhat - conditioned, needing Rolfing, or needing acid, or needing the country, or needing vision, needing meditation. He was one of the few people who was able to recall his original visionary child-eye recollection of nature, and so wrote a series of poems in which you have a pantheistic vision, in which everything seems animate, or in which he gets a kind of visionary gleam from walking around craggy hills in the Lake Country, mid-England. And one of his most clear statements of that is called "Ode on Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood". Now how many of you know that, have read that? That's pretty much taught. And how many have not? Wordworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality.." Well, is it worth going through, because the majority...

 

Students: Yeah

 

AG: I think it's a great poem. It turned me on. I think it's a key poem in many many ways. Key because it is a recollection and an evocation of a visionary state that we've all experienced one time or another, whether in childhood, or through drugs, or through meditation, or through accident. It's also a funny attitude toward it, like a clinging attitude toward it, so it's a real 19th Century Post-Industrial hung-up attitude that assumes that it's gone forever and we're not going to get it back and the best thing you can do is lie here on the shores of life and moon about it some more. At the same time, it's a very humane statement of what most people go through, and it's a great poem. My book here says it comes from Plato - "Your favorite doctrine, Socrates, is that knowledge is simply recollection" - "The Child is father of the Man/ I could wish my days to be/ Bound each to each by natural piety" - [Allen reads the entire "Ode on Intimations of Immortality.." - "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream..." -

 

There's a more direct description of the specific inspiration or vision that he was talking about in another poem, not so long, called "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey". He had visited Tintern Abbey and had some sort of psychedelic experience and five years later he came back and wrote - Tintern Abbey is an abbey, a church ruined in Monmouthshire, England. He'd gone there in 1793, the time of the French Revolution, I think. It's a hollow shell of a building, solid red stone wall, the roof out, some tower left. So he composed it on the spot, or on a hill above Tintern Abbey, so the famous title is "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey". I don't know if I'll read it all, but there's a specific section that should be heard and it needs to be built up from the beginning [Allen reads first 17 lines - "Five years have past, five summers , with the length/ Of five long winters..." to "Of sportive wood run wild, these pastoral farms/ Green to the very door.."] - He has a really perfect eye - "sportive wood run wild" "pastoral farms/ Green to the very door". Are you visualizing with your inner camera a farmhouse where the cultivation is so ancient, the lineage of farming so ancient, that the grass is green to the very doorstep? In other words, you step from grass right on to the lintel of the door. Which means really old, old, old consciousness and cultivation and living there - "these pastoral farms/ Green to the very door, and wreaths of smoke."

So, to interrupt, what was partly Wordsworth's excellence is his eye, his common-sense eye. Fading into the light of common day he still sees what's there. Louis Zukofsky is a great poet (who was in the school ofImagists, a friend of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams) and I asked him what he liked about Wordsworth, and he mentioned a line very similar to this "Green to the very door", which was "The star-shaped shadow of a blossom cast on stone". [Allen/Zukofsky just paraphrases, not directly quotes the line here] - Just a line lost in some fragmentary poem. Which means that Wordsworth, at one time, was walking in a very clear air in a sunny day in a field. The sun was out and it was relatively cloudless, and so bright that he could observe the star-shaped shadow of a blossom cast on a stone. Which means he was walking along with head down looking at what was going on and not only looking at the flowers but also observing the shape of the flowers, the ground and the shadow. Just as "Green to the very door" tells you a whole historical.. a whole history of that land - orchards of mind-language cultivated for centuries - so there's a photograph of himself given in the lines, "Star-shaped shadow of a blossom cast on stone".

"Sportive wood run wild" is also pretty interesting. It's very hard to describe the time taken for a wood to grow while along the side of a field. "Sportive wood run wild" is really about two hundred years of woods put there in your eyeball - "Once again I see/ These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines/ Of sportive woods run wild; these pastoral farms/ Green to the very door.." [Allen continues reading - "..and wreaths of smoke..." to "The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/ Of all my moral being..."] - There's another thirty or forty lines addressed to his sister. [tape ends here - Allen picks up with lines 94-102 - "..disturbs me with the joy.." to "And rolls through all things"] - That's like a really great moment there. And there's a lot of inspiration in that in terms of the sound, the breath there. So there he rises, in that one moment. Everything else is intelligent, everything else is really clear and pure, but, all of a sudden, he gets to a sequence of phrases that involves the whole body and all breath.

 

He claims that in his old age he lost his inspiration, and Wordworth is the great case of a great poet, like Blake.. Blake loved Wordsworth. Blake, the visionary, thought Wordsworth was a great visionary in youth, too. But then got mad at him because Wordsworth got older and crustier, sort of as prophesied by his rhetoric, like a constant lamentation of what was gone before, of the brightness and the glory of the dream that somehow he feels that he's missing now he's getting older, and then he started putting down the French Revolution in a kind of conservative way, like the professional Cold War Anti-Communist put-downers of the day now - sort of a too-heavy rejection of his youthful ambition, delight, revolutionary sense. So then Shelley got mad at him for that. Shelley was really disappointed because the great Wordsworth who had perceived the visionary light over the fields had turned into a duller, older reactionary in his old age. So Shelley thought, at the age of 22 or 24, thinking of Wordsworth.. How old was Wordsworth when Shelley was... does anybody know? Well, okay, Wordsworth was... Shelley.. let's find Shelley's date. The "Tintern Abbey" was written 1798. Shelley's "Ozymandias" or"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is 1816-17. Wordsworth died in 1850, so Shelley died before him actually.

 

Student: Shelley was 27 years younger

 

AG: Yeah. And, in a way, a more brilliant poet, Shelley . Because he did as well as Wordsworth. For the early Wordsworth, there are a number of very great poems that rise up, or very short poems that make out into a great visionary... (William) Burroughs' favorite was a very brief "Lucy poem" (he wrote a series of poems to a dead love, Lucy) - "She dwelt among the untrodden ways/ Besides the springs of Dove/ A Maid whom there was none to praise/ And very few to love. A violet from a mossy stone/ Half hidden from the eye!/ - Fair as a star, when only one/ Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know/ When Lucy ceased to be;/ But she is in her grave, and, oh/ The difference to me!" - I think I heard Burroughs reciting that from memory, that and several other short poems of Wordsworth. There's one great sonnet, but you can look that up yourself.

 

Audio for this (including Allen's remarks on Gnosticism and his readings from both Milton and from Wordsworth - see above) is available here:

http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_12_June_1975_75P010B

 

“Who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword”

 

— Howl

 

Three fish icon

 

 

History of Poetry 16 (Shelley)

 

File:Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Curran, 1819.jpg

[Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) (painted by Amelia Curran (1775-1847) in 1819]

 

Move on to.. There are certain things in Shelley that should be noted. You had the "Ode to the West Wind". There is a great thing called "The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" - again Neo-Platonic. It's actually very similar to what Wordsworth said in the "Intimations of Immortality" except it's a little bit more abstracted in Shelley. It's like trying to break through consciousness to another level of consciousness, to some sort of abstracted Platonic eidolonic intellectual beauty - not the beauty of"Green to the very door", or "sportive woods run wild", or "star-shaped shadow of blossom on a white stone' - an absolute beauty, simple, pure, uncontaminated with a mixture of human flesh and colors. But actually it's the same thing as Wordsworth, because Wordsworth, by then, had so abstracted his notion of mind-manifestation, that, in poetry, looking back on it, saying you can't get it again, Shelley's doing it too. A young fellow, too. Very early already he was sort of giving up. 1816. [Allen reads, in its entirety, Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", pausing only twice, to note, in the third stanza, "Thy light alone" - "Intellectual beauty - thy light alone..", and stanza 5, "I called on poisonous names on which our youth is fed" - "David Bowie, or something - I called on poisonous names on which our youth is fed" - The poem concludes "Whom SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind/ To fear himself, and love all human kind."] - That's a really powerful moment. That's total inspiration. He couldn't be sharper or more brilliant, like the title, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty". "I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstacy" - There's nobody in English poesy who was so overt, so far-out, so flipped out, so open, so unspeakably enthusiastic, so completely given to his inspiration. So Shelley is the angel poet in that sense, because his head is the most transparent and purely luminous of all the poets. Later on in the 19th Century, there are a lot of more mature, duller, souls, who didn't have the same transcendental insight as Shelley. Actually Shelley was a great scholar, who knew all the Gnostic writings, incidentally (Shelley knew that myth of the Garden of Eden that I was speaking of). He was a great learned scholar in transcendental mysteries and had gone through all of the books of Thomas Taylor, the Platonist (Thomas Taylor, being a man who had assembled all of the fragments of Gnostic writings from the Ancients, including the Delphic Oracle texts, little fragments of Pythagorus, like, "Everything we look upon when awake is death, and when asleep, dream". Pythagorus - "Everything we look upon when awake is death, and when asleep, dream" - Thomas Taylor. Taylor was a scholar of Blake's time (or earlier) who assembled all these magical fragments, put them together translated into books, and these books circulated into Blake's hands, into Shelley's hands, into Coleridge's hands. The American cat who was on a commune in New England, Bronson Alcott, went to England, specifically, to collect all Thomas Taylor's writings and bring them back for the Brook Farm Commune experiment [sic - Allen confuses Alcott's "Fruitlands" with George Ripley's Brook Farm experiment here]. Do you know Brook Farm, the 19th Century AmericanTranscendentalist Communard Free Love Doing-What-We're-Doing-Now (Commune)? It was one of the first experiments, or among the first experiments, in communal consciousness-raising, drawing from Vedantic and Vedas and Vedantic texts, also drawing from the Western Vedanta, or Western Gnostics. Alcott brought these texts back and loaned them to (Ralph Waldo) Emerson who made his little notes in them. Probably the reached Herman Melville too. And in Melville's crazy, cranky novel,Pierre (or (is it in) The Confidence Man?), there's a funny chapter on the Gnostic philosopher, Plotinus Pliniemon, who hangs around Wall Street, accosting people, trying to sell his pamphlet about the nature of the illusory universe. So what I'm trying to point out is that there is this tradition in the West of doubt as to the reality of things and understanding that things really are here, actually.

 

Student: That line from "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" where he says, "Depart not - lest the grave should be/ Like life and fear, a dark reality" doesn't seem to doubt the idea of life and fear at any rate.

 

AG: No, except he says life is a dark reality, fear is a dark reality, the grave is a dark reality, but, you, Intellectual Beauty, come and wipe all this out. And shine from the top of the skull, and illumine me with some transcendental insight, where my life-fear and all that will be just shadows of one illumination from the central source of the Universe. And for a definition of that, the last stanzas of "Adonais" are the best statement of what he finally concluded.

 

My original intention was to read all of "Adonais" aloud, because I think it's one of the strongest mantras in the English language, but I'm respecting also the notion of my getting it on, and getting on to modern stuff. I'll just read the last seven or eight stanzas, or whatever will state his case. It's an elegy on the death of his friend John Keats. It was written after Keats' death. He was mad because he thought Keats had been put down by the Academy, or by the book-reviewers - had been a neglected poet. Keats was actually a really beautiful perfect observant mellow kid poet, died young, 24, but totally mellow. His mind was exact - right here on the world. He was able to write about a wine-glass - "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" - where is that? (well, we'll find it later) - What is the line, "beaded bubbles winking at the brim"? A wine-glass with "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" - That's a really perfect observation (like "Green to the very door"). In other words, the whole point of poetics is to get inspiration you have to tie your mind down also to totally accurate observation of what's in front of your eyes. Imagism, in a sense. So Keats, a great poet, and Shelley, who knew him, his friend, cursing the world for killing Keats, calling on the Gods to take him to some place of honor. The opening stanza I'll read and then I'll get into a later stanza [Allen reads the opening stanza of Shelley's "Adonais", followed by stanzas 39 to 55 - "The soul of Adonais, like a star/ Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are"] - He made it again. And at the very instant of making it, "The breath might I have invoked in song/ Descends on me" - so he's named his inspiration.

 

Student: Is that the whole poem?

 

AG: No, I just read the last half. The first stanza and the last half. But it's worth hearing the whole thing, because it builds up to the cum in the very end [tape ends here].

 

History of Poetry 17 (Blake)

 

AG: What I want to do today is to run through (William) Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience". Do most of you have the texts, or some of you have the texts? You might take them out. You've all read some Blake. Is there anybody here who never read any Blake at all? Raise your hands. Now, do most of you know some of the "Songs of Innocence and Experience"? I guess. Those of you who read Blake in grammar school, can you raise your hand? What schools did you go to?

 

Student: Public

 

AG: Where?

 

Student: In Detroit

 

AG: High-school, yeah, their regular high-school English. And then college? Yeah. Well Blake seems to be the one person who's penetrated through the educational system. [Allen begins, with harmonium, by singing the"Introduction" (from "Songs of Innocence") - "Piping down the valleys wild.." - followed by "The Shepherd" - "How sweet is the Shepherd's sweet lot.."].(And) the next, "The Echoing Green", I have recorded [he attempts to play the recording but the record skips] - can't do it, I'll have to sing it.

 

Student: Do you want some help?

 

AG: I need some help then. If somebody could come up and turn pages for me,

 

Student: Is there a chair?

 

AG: Yeah, there's a chair. Would you bring that over? [ Allen begins with the harmonium and sings, in its entirety, "The Echoing Green" ("The Sun does arise,/ And make happy the skies"), followed by "The Lamb" ("Little lamb, who made thee..?" "Little lamb, God bless thee" - he repeats the final refrain many times with the class] - (Next) "The Little Black Boy", which is the nearest to a statement of Gnostic nihilism, in a way, or anti-materialism, that Blake came to in this book, except maybe for the last poem, added on towards the end of his life,"To Tirzah".

[He sings "The Little Black Boy" ("My mother bore me in the southern wild..") and then follows it with "The Blossom" ("Merry Merry Sparrow..") ] - "The Blossom", which is Tantric yab-yum. Sparrow and blossom. Phallus and yoni. I think I have a recording of that I might take out [Allen plays a studio version of "The Blossom", with a chamber-orchestra accompaniment] - and "The Chimney Sweeper" [he plays a studio version of "The Chimney Sweeper", which begins with Peter Orlovsky commenting to Allen] - Peter said, "You know the words by heart" - I don't know if you can hear the words clearly without a text, actually, with that, because we were using echoes. I couldn't sing that because there were some high notes that only Orlovsky could get - "And by came an angel who had a bright key". "The Little Boy Lost" is done well on here [the record], and then I'll get back to singing myself. "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Little Boy Found".

 

Student: Allen, the last line of that, or the last couple of lines, what degree of irony.. what degree...is (there in) "The Chimney Sweeper"?

 

AG: I took it as very straight, naive, in that one. There are Marxist interpretations and others. And Gnostic interpretations that say it's totally sardonic. But actually, my ultimate feeling about it is that it's great sentimentality. I like it better that way than any other way at the moment. So that was the interpretation that was put on it. But I guess you should be forewarned that that actually might be Blake being really nasty also. [Allen then performs "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Little Boy Found" - "Father, father, where are you going?/ Oh, do not walk so fast!.."] - Then, "The Laughing Song"[Allen sings with harmonium - "When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy.."] - There's a weird version, kind of jazzed up, with laughter that we did. Are you interested in comparing the recordings? The trumpet on this (recorded version) is Don Cherry, who's a really great jazz musician, so it all jazzed itself up. And also Cherry is on the maracas [ Allen plays the studio recording of "The Laughing Song"] - I was doing that to actually punctuate the rhythm, score the rhythm, with "ha's".

 

Student: What year was this?

 

AG: This was 19...

 

Student: 68?

 

AG: '68 or '69. I forget. I don't know. This is still available actually. Even here, I think, but the album said "liner notes enclosed" - but they're not enclosed - So it's a sort of a mess.

"Cradle Song", or "A Cradle Song" [Allen proceeds to sing, with harmonium accompaniment, "A Cradle Song" ("Sweet dreams, form a shade/O'er my lovely infant's head...", including "Heaven and earth to peace beguiles", the last line, which he repeats many times, with the class joining in) - and then "The Divine Image'' ("To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love") and "Holy Thursday" ("'Twas on a Holy Thursday...) before tape ends here]

[second side of the tape begins with] AG: "Night" - What I've done is set about 35 of the 45 songs, so I'll run through if we have time (left), is that alright? - Students: Yeah, wonderful - [Allen recites, with harmonium accompaniment, and in its entirety, "Night" ("The sun descending in the West.."), then ("I'll try that again) repeats the last two stanzas]. (Next), "Spring", which has a refrain at the end - I have a recording of some of these that I'll put out. This one I've done with (Bob) Dylan and Happy Traum doing the chorus work, which you can do ma'am..

 

Student: Me?

 

AG: Yep [Allen proceeds to give a rendition of "Spring", with numerous repetitions of the chorus line - "Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year"] - The next also has a chorus. "The Nurse's Song" (from "Songs of Innocence") . I want to skip, for one second, to do "The Nurse's Song" (from "Songs of Experience")first, on recording [Allen plays recording of "The Nurse's Song" ("When the voices of children, are heard on the green/And whisperings are in the dale..")] - When I was 20, I had an auditory hallucination of Blake's voice, which was just about like that. But it took me about 20 years to perfect it. So it was probably a hallucination of my own latent diaphragm vocalization. I was hearing my own voice, probably, as in a dream. (Next), "Nurse's Song" (from "Songs of Innocence") - "When the voices of children, are heard on the green/ And laughing is heard on the hill" [Allen performs this song and, as was his manner, repeats the final line several times, midway - "And all the hills echo-ed" - turning it into a "round" - this is followed by "Infant Joy" ("I have no name/ I am but two days old..") - and "A Dream" - "A Dream - this also has a chorus, a Buddhist chorus at the end of this, making use of "Om" and "Hum"" - "Once a dream did weave a shade".."Little wanderer hie thee home".."Hum hum hum hum..home home home home")] - (and) "On Another's Sorrow" - Can you hear me when I'm singing low? What time is it?...

[tape begins again] - Allen recites (with harmonium) "On Another's Sorrow" ("Can I see another's woe/ And not be in sorrow too?", repeating the last line, "He doth sit by us and moan" several times)] - "Songs of Experience" - I don't have all of them done [but Allen recites the first part, the Introduction - ("Hear the voice of the bard,/ Who present, past, and future sees..")] - I don't have"Earth's Answer" prepared. I have a "Holy Thursday" done country & western (style), but I don't know how to play the chords correctly, so I'll experiment with it actually. You'll get the general idea, if I can't get it straight, anyways [ Allen sings "Holy Thursday" ("Is this a holy thing to see..")] - Now let see how that goes..Okay..yeah..

"The Little Girl Lost" (which is, more or less, an improvisation). I have the chords for it, but I don't have it worked out. I think it's actually one of the most powerful of the songs. The sentence and prophecy in it. He says himself, "Grave the sentence deep/ Shall arise and seek/ For her maker meek". So it's the same as the "voice of the bard", saying "Hear the voice of the bard".."O Earth return!.." "Why dost thou turn away?" "Why will thou turn away?" ("O Earth, O Earth, return../ Turn away no more/ Why wilt thou turn away?") - So its actually consciousness turning away from his ground that he's talking about. And "Lyca" [Allen pronounces it like "Lisa"] is the lost consciousness. So Lyca is the consciousness of mankind, which has become lost, and is wandering in the void. As I interpret it. Well how would you pronounce it? [to class] - L-Y-C-A - How would you pronounce it? I've puzzled over that for years. LIE-ka?

 

Student: Yeah, LIE-ka, like "light-house".

 

AG: I think, "Lisa", "Lysa", "Allysa". What do you figure? - LIE-ka or LEE-suh? Take a vote. Who wants LIE-ka? What were the various ones? LEE-ka. Who wants LEE-ka? Raise your hands for LEE-ka. Raise your hands for LEE-suh? - Oh shit, who's got the book? There's a picture of her in the book. Who's got the Blake book? "The Little Girl Lost" - Is there a picture of her in "The Little Girl Lost"? Who wanted to know what she looked like? There's one there who wanted to know what she looked like. Pass it back.

 

Student: She's a big girl

 

AG: You want to pass it back?

 

Student: Someone else.. It's over there..

 

AG: It's alright. You just keep passing it on.

 

Student: If its LIE-ka he's playing with a simile

 

AG: True enough. You mean "like" ?

 

Student: LIE-ka

 

AG: Maybe. Lovely likeness lay ("Lovely Lyca lay")

 

Student: I looked up "Lyca" in the dictionary and I can't remember what it was

AG: The Blake Dictionary?

Student: An old OED

 

AG: By the way, if anybody's interested in figuring out Blake.. because, I'm not explaining very much here, because I figure the singing is sufficient - interpretation of the phrasing , and with the right phrasing it's pretty clear, more or less, isn't it? Has it been very much complicated about... a few (like this) are really obviously symbolic so I stop and take time, but..

Student: What do you think happened in between the times that these two sets of things were written? Do you think that his consciousness was actually, as that experience would.. indecipherable ? Do you think he knew all the stuff that he was singing about after he wrote...

 

AG: I think, latently, sure, but I guess he was still holding out for innocence, or still sentimentalizing a bit. But he thought he had made it so innocent that it would be a great stroke of genius to turn the other, dark, side on, maybe. I don't know. I don't know the times of composition. It may be that some of the "Songs of Experience" were composed during the time of "Songs of Innocence", but he didn't feel they fit, and then, all of a sudden, he had the idea to put them in. Yeah?

 

Student: Have you set "How sweet I roam'd from field to field.." ?

 

AG: No, actually Ed Sanders and The Fugs set that. (Sanders will be teaching here, you know. I think the last week of the first session, I think). Sandersturned me on to this, actually. It was through Sanders' experiments with music with The Fugs that I decided, well, if he can do it, I can be a..

 

Student: Do you know...

 

AG: [begins singing] - "How sweet I roam'd from field to field,/ And tasted all the summer's pride,/ Till I, the prince of love beheld,/ Who in the sunny beams did glide!" - "He gave me lilies for my hair..." ("He shew'd me lilies for my hair..") - Do you know the rest?

 

Student: [takes up the singing] - "...And blushing roses for my brow;/ He led me through his gardens fair,/ Where all his golden pleasures grow.."

 

AG: Louder!

 

Student: Oh, I can't sing

 

AG: Oh..

 

Student: Do you want me to try...?

 

AG: Yeah, yeah..

 

Student [sings, in its entirety, the poem]

 

AG: [singing] "And mocks my loss of liberty". Actually, it was (Ed Sanders') idea, the country & western, originally. Yeah, I took it off from his.. does anybody know that Fugs record? It's actually a classic. It was recorded, I think, by Harry Smith...

 

Student: Allen, you started to say, if anybody's interested in figuring out Blake...

 

AG: Oh, if anybody's interested in figuring out Blake, look up "Lyca", LEE-suh, LIE-ka.. Likeness. Looking up the likeness of any of the images. There's S. Foster Damon's "A Blake Dictionary". (The book's) in the library now. Damon was a great Blake scholar, a friend of Virgil Thomson, who, at an early age, began to study Blake in a sort of scientific way, by going back and getting a hold of the Gnostic and Hebrew cabalistic texts that Blake used and knew, and has written a number of books on Blake which are considered to be the most esoteric, ground-breaking, interesting, mystical books. S. Foster Damon - D-A-M-O-N. He used to set one song of Blake's to music every Christmas, because he was also a folklore archivist, and I once went to visit him a couple of times to sing to him what I had done, to see if it sounded right. He said what I was doing was more or less probably close, because what Blake was doing was working in the tradition of the Wesleyan hymn songs of the time: John Wesley's hymns and hymn tunes. Blake sung these songs, I forgot to say. "Songs of Innocence and Experience" are, literally, songs. They were intended as songs, and Blake sang them. It's not well-known in grammar school but in the Gilchrist biography of Blake, which is the earliest biography by a family friend, it's recorded that Mr Blake used to go to his friends' parlors and sing the songs unaccompanied, or with instruments of the time, and scholar-professors who heard him sing unfortunately did not notate the tunes. So he was out there singing, which is why I try to restore some of the vocalization to them by singing them, because they're a lot easier to understand sung. And the music of them, that is the rhythm of them, gets a lot more subtle when you sing it. I goofed on the verse in "Night" which is actually the most interesting , rhythmically - "And there the lion's ruddy eyes/ Shall flow with tears of gold,/ And pitying the tender cries,/ And walking round the fold,/ Saying: 'Wrath, by his meekness,/ And by his health sickness/ Is driven away/ From our immortal day/" - is like a really fast, sudden, syncopation of it. Here was where I began discovering that if you follow the punctuation you would begin to be able to figure out the breathing, and the swiftness of pronunciation, because, if you'll notice here - "Wrath", comma, "by his meekness", comma/ And by his health (comma) sickness/ Is driven away/ From our immortal day". Now, in the illustrated edition, you'd have to actually check it out (not from any copybooks, books copied) but you have to go back to Blake's own edition (which is illustrated with his own pictures) to find the original punctuation as he engraved them on the plates. Because he engraved plates and then colored them. He and his wife colored them. And, if you get a chance, one of the best ways to read Blake is to get to a library in a major city like New York or Los Angeles, the Huntington Library, the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library in New York, and I think some in Washington, I don't know, some in Washington..

 

Student: Probably the..

 

AG: Mellon?

 

Student: (Library of) Congress too has everything

 

AG: Maybe. Well, no. They don't have everything of Blake's, because there aren't that many. There are only 24 copies or so of "Songs of Innocence". There's only one copy engraved and colored of his major last work extant,"Jerusalem". Now, a lot of these are reprinted by Trianon Press, Nonesuch?, I don't know.. what is it? ..what is the... There are a number of Blake books which are illustrated now. Colored illustrations meticulously done. $100 and $200 and $500 and $1000 each, to get copies, $1000 to get a colored illustrated copy of Blake's "Jerusalem", but it's the best way to read them [this discussion, of course, taking place, long before the invention of the internet and the Blake Archives] - Read the texts and then go back and read those. Turn on, get high, and then look at the pictures and read the words, because a lot of his intention is given there in the illustrations, and if you can get a chance to go library to library, like (to the) Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, you can see one or more copies at the same time of "Songs of Innocence". For instance, in "Night", you can see how from copy to copy he changed the face of the tiger, the "tyger, tyger". Sometimes it's a little cuddly, friendly, human-faced, tiger, sometimes it's a really wrathful Tibetan tiger. Sometimes it's a smudgy-faced tiger. Because each illustration he touched up with pen and painted slightly differently, and his wife painted and colored in some of them and touched them up. So to really get Blake, if you get into Blake, it's a total delight if you can go get something done by his own hand and look at what he did physically. And if you don't understand what he did, Damon's researches are among the best that I've ever read. Damon has boiled down all of his intelligence into "A Blake Dictionary", where all the names, all the concepts, are spelled out and defined and compared from poem to poem. It's in the library here. You don't read it, you just .. If you run across a problem in Blake like, who is "Los"? or who is "Urizen"? [pronounced in succession by Allen as "Yur-reason" and "Yur-eye-zen"], you look them up. You can look it up in the book if the right words are important.

 

The audio for some of this (beginning with Allen's performances of "Night","Spring", "Nurse's Song", "A Dream", :Holy Thursday") is available courtesy the Internet Archive at: http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_14_June_1975_75P014

Thanks once again to Randy Roark for his pioneering transcription work

 

addenda: (still from Allen's 1975 "History of Poetry" class, but the following week (July 4 - sic) - http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_15_June_1975_75P016

AG: What I want to begin with is the last song of Blake that I'll sing (in this particular class) - called "The Schoolboy". This is a farewell to Blake and a salute to Independence Day and a tribute to those who came. So "The Schoolboy" (Allen sings Blake's "The Schoolboy" (from "Songs of Experience") in its entirety - "I love to rise on a summer morn...") Okay, (that's) a last Blake for this session.

History of Poetry 18 (AG discusses remainder of class & Whitman intro) 

 

Still following Allen's 1975 History of Poetry classes. Whitman tomorrow - but, first, Allen sets up a template for the days ahead:

"We'll move from that time (William Blake's time) to a breaking open of those stricter verse forms that we've been dealing with and get on with Walt Whitman for about ten minutes because I'll take up Walt Whiman later during next week.

Beginning today, I'll start with a little Whitman and maybe come back to him later. From Whitman, an open form, a more open voice, the voice of declamation, inspiration.

 

So today I bought along the only recordings extant of the Russian poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the only recording extant of the Russian poet, Sergei Esenin, both of whom were big wild rhetorical declamators. (I'll) cover that a little (for whatever time we have), and then go on to, or maybe after Whitman, a little(Arthur) Rimbaud, and from Rimbaud to a 17-year-old imitator of Rimbaud in Fairlawn, New Jersey, last week, who sent a letter and a poem.

 

I want to cover a couple of texts of (Federico Garcia) Lorca, a couple of texts ofGuillaume Apollinaire, so I'll do it more or less in chronological order. Apollinaire, the French inventor of modern style, both "cut-up", juxtaposition, and, at the same time, run-on mind thought associations, Mayakovsky, around the same time 1905, Futurist, Esenin, a little later (a crazy poet, somewhat like (Gregory) Corso - in fact, shot and killed himself and wrote his last poem in his own blood!). Rimbaud, a little earlier, quit poetry to go sell guns and run slaves in Africa. All those are preparation for American style, later American style".

 

History of Poetry 19 (Whitman) 

 

AG: You've all heard some of Whitman. His first line, which is generally taught in high school, and which you all know, isn't generally spoken correctly, it's "I celebrate myself, and sing myself" (Allen emphasizes the second syllable - he then goes on to read the first five stanzas of "Song of Myself", pausing only after/mid-way through the third section - "Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of all things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself" - Actually that sounds like Philip Whalen a little - "while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself")

 

Student: What's the name of that poem?

 

AG: It's "Song of Myself", it's the beginning, the first five sections of "Song of Myself"

 

Student: Will you read some more?

 

AG: I'm going to, actually, later, I think, in the week. It's clear what he's saying, isn't it? I read some of this on a plane between Denver and Jackson Hole to (Trungpa) Rinpoche once, and by about the time we got to this point, he said, "It's like sutra". He recognized it as open statement, actually of no identity, likesutra, because, actually, remember?, when I was talking about Gregory (Corso), I was saying, "well, there's Gregory, the difficult person, and there's also another sense.. I was thinking of that when I was reading the section, "Apart from the..", Where is that? I just read it [Allen takes up the poem again - from section 4 - "Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am/ Stands amused, complacent compassionating, idle, unitary,/ Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,/ Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next/ Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it"] - which is actually good Buddhism, for.. what is this 18..?

 

Student: '70

 

AG: 1870 America. Yeah. There's a lot of very beautiful little vignettes. I'd like to go through a lot more Whitman (and so, will, later), but what I'm just doing now is giving samples of the break-out from the older form that we've been dealing with all along, a stricter and more rigid form, sometimes depending on a God up there to chasten and hasten and subdue. Whitman may be the first to really break out, really crazily, in the sense of to make his own sense stand for an egoless play of wind in the leaves, that is his own self is as egoless as the wind playing through the leaves. (He) understood that the self was not an ego, or the self was not a "self" - the self was mere noise through the branches, that the registration of the variety of his moods and sensations was as impersonal as the ocean's roar, or that the only completely subjective is actually objective, that only total subjective, only registration of completely subjective fact, is dealing with the self in an objective way, or that by registering a variety of self-observed fact you actually are dealing with an impersonal object. So it's sort of like the watcher watching in meditation, or sort of the non-watcher, the wakened emptiness through which thought-forms pass. So there's an element of wakened emptiness in Whitman, of thought-forms passing which he's not attached to - "Do I contradict myself / Very well, I contradict myself" - because that's the way it is, or that's the way the mind is.

 

Student: Allen, (Carl) Jung says the same thing about dreams, that they're the only objective part of you, because you don't have a chance to manipulate them

 

AG: You can't control them. Yeah. I feel good if I write a dream down because I can't be accused of being subjective. I'm just observing the data. I'm just registering data, like you'd register the look of the Empire State Building. So a dream is always a very good way of (proceeding). If your tendency is to write sort of stupidly subjectively - getting lost in your generalizations and abstractions and images of yourself and attached to fixing a specific image forever as being your nature - then, you're naturally going to get entangled in yourself in a way that's a drag. Whereas if you're just looking at a dream, it's just something you didn't.. it's you, it's just you there, but the "you" there is as "non-you" as a rock.

 

Student: Don't you think that the "you" would have some control over that, and that there would be different kinds of things...

 

AG: If you study Naropa's dream yoga, yes, you could have control over your dreams, but until you've done some selective self-examination, of such extent that you can actually control your dreams, you can't really blame yourself for them. You can't blame, at least, your conscious mind. You can't help it. If you can't help it it's not you. Provisionally. For the next ten minutes....

 

[Allen, after discoursing on other topics, returns to Whitman at the end of the class] -

 

...reading Whitman, who was a dreary old fart - or myself! - the great egotists who have created a self as big as the entire universe - which was in a sense, theYogacara trick in early Buddhism - there was the phase of the Buddhism, which was One Mind, that Buddha was one mind, one mind pervading all, one mind in the trees and god in the window, god in the door, god in the stairway, god all over the floor - one yogacara, or One Mind school of Buddhism, which Maitreya-natha Buddhism or Asanga destroyed, saying that there was no mind, it wasshunyata, and there wasn't a shunyata because that was objectifying something that didn't exist, or reifying something that didn't exist.

 

So in a way Whitman is like the final extension of selfhood to cover the cosmos (and that’s why he’s “I, Walt Whitman, a Kosmos..”). It’s a remarkably great position that somebody had to fill out, a position which I took for a long while too, thinking that that was the only way to extend the self, or to… that the body was real, and that the feelings were real. The only more charming position is, (as Trungpa pointed out in his lecture the other night), is (that) - no self, in which case, then you can slip anywhere in the universe, also, if you want to, but there’s nothing to be destroyed there, so it’s totally illusory, also. But Whitman doesn’t have total victory because he spread himself throughout the universe, and then at the end he has to (renege?) and gets to wonder..because Whitman has poems called “Sands at Seventy” - well, he had just a funny kind of attitude towards himself when he was really old – and when he was ill. He had a… there’s a very brief poem.. in which he talks about that the only thing he can write about at this point is his bowel movements, but he wrote it down, he wrote it down, and laid it out. [Allen reads. in its entirety, "Queries to my Seventieth Year" ("Approaching nearing, curious..") - That was one of Whitman's last self.. last presentations of self. So it shrank with sickness too - Seventy - Later, he said "After the supper and talk, after the day is done.." "garrulous to the very last" [Allen reads this late poem too] - What time is it now?

 

Student: 7.30.

 

AG: ...jumping ahead.. so Whitman and Rimbaud broke up the form and what we're dealing with is a total break-up of the psyche and the formal manifestation of the psyche in poetics in the late 19th Century - Rimbaud in France, Whitman in America, somewhat at the same time, somewhat contemporaneous - a breaking apart the stanzaic structures and the rhythm of the vocalization, fulfilling the prophecy of Plato - "When the mode of the music - or the prosody - when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake, because the changing of the mode of music means change of rhythm, that means a change of the speech-rhythms, or a sudden re-consciousness of the speech-rhythms, which means a sudden realization of speech, which means the.. what? ..the..grammatical illumination?, (Chogyam Trungpa) Rinpoche spoke (of) yesterday as the "Zen method", (a) consciousness of language, and a consciousness of its expression, therefore of what are the movements of the self, or what are the tongue-ings of the self, a discovery of self, as distinct from the society, or the culture, or the country, a breaking of the forms of the culture, a breaking of the walls of the culture, a new thought, new consciousness, initiated by Rimbaud, Verlaine (Whitman)...

 

Audio of this is available at http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_15_June_1975_75P016

(starting, approximately ,six-and-a-half minutes in, and concluding approximately twenty-and-a-half minutes in)

Audio for the second section can be found on the first 20 minutes of the recording - http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_16_June_1975_75P017

 

History of Poetry 20 (Rimbaud) 

 

At the same time (as Walt Whitman in America), in the provinces, in Charleville, in France, (Arthur) Rimbaud. How many people have ever read any Rimbaud here? First of all.. yeah, raise them. How many have not? Okay, now how many here were in Anne (Waldman)'s class? She read some Rimbaud. How many were in Anne's class where Rimbaud's "Lettre du Voyant"was read?. Okay, Rimbaud was, at that time, as most of you know, a 15-year-old kid in a French border-town, near Belgium. He'd had a good relation with a school-teacher who'd turned him on to Latin and various other classic strains. He had done a tremendous amount of reading and he had read Paul Verlaine, who was a very elegant bohemian lyric poet, married, with family in Paris. Famous, the editor of literary magazines, a big mucker and boulevardier. (He - Rimbaud) addressed a letter to Verlaine, enclosing a great thirty-stanza-ed epic poem called "(The) Drunken Boat". He wrote that he wanted to come to Paris and turn on Verlaine and turn on Paris and change poetry entirely. And that one poem, actually, 1869 or '70, did transform French poetry thereafter. In 1871 he was in Charleville and he wrote a letter to Paul Demeny, who was a friend and teacher, summarizing everything he thought about literature at the time. which I'll read. It's the best essay on poetics in the 19th century, Rimbaud's letter to Paul Demeny in Douai. Charleville, May 15, 1871 - In 1871, I think he's still 16, 15 or 16 - "I have decided to give you an hour of new literature...." ("J'ai résolu de vous donner une heure de littérature nouvelle..") [Poem enclosed - "Chant de Guerre Parisien" ("Paris War Song")] - And now follows a discourse on the future of poetry ("Voici de la prose sur l'avenir de la poésie") - And now follows a discourse on the future of poetry - This is from a 15-year-old kid! - ("Toute poésie antique aboutit à la poésie grecque..." (All ancient poetry culminated in Greek poetry..") [ Allen continues reading from " "Lettre du Voyant" - "La raison m'inspire plus de certitudes sur le sujet que n'aurait jamais eu de colères un Jeune-Franc" ("Reason inspires me with more certainties on this subject than any Young France ever had" [Allen, following a mis-translation - "I suppose an angry newspaper of the day" - Allen reads on (in English) - "Du reste, libre aux nouveaux! d'exécrer les ancêtres: on est chez soi et l'on a le temps"("Besides newcomers have a right to condemn their ancestors: one is at home and there's plenty of time..")] -"Car Je est un autre" (Allen reads the famous line in French and then in variants in English - "For the "I" is another", "I is someone else" (as translated here), or "I is another", or, in French, "Je est un autre".." [He continues] - "Car Je est un autre. Si le cuivre s'éveille clairon, il n'y a rien de sa faute" ("For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it isn't to blame") -"En Grèce, ai-je dit, vers et lyres rhythment l'Action. Après, musique et rimes sont jeux, délassements." (In Greece I have said, verses and lyres rhythms: Action. After that, music and rhymes are games, pastimes") - Actually, that's basically what I've been saying here, that "verses and lyres", verses and lyres, verses with music, rhythms, action, after that music, are game, games. That is to say, as (Ezra) Pound pointed out, when poets stopped singing, the verse structure and the rhyming structure began to degenerate and become metronomic and automatic - "After that, music and rhymes are games, pastimes". [Allen continues reading from the letter] - "The study of this past charms the curious..." ( "L'étude de ce passé charme les curieux..") - "Mais il s'agit de faire l'âme monstrueuse: à l'instar des comprachicos" ("But the soul has to be made monstrous, that's the point - like comprachicos" [Allen glosses - "bandit-friends (if you like)" - and continues] - "Imagine a man planting and cultivating the warts on his face" ("Imaginez un homme s'implantant et se cultivant des verrues sur la visage"). "Je dis qu'il faut être voyant, se faire voyant"("One must, I say, be a visionary, make oneself a visionary") - "The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses" ("Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens") - In French that would be "dérèglement de tous les sens", and that phrase, disordering or deranging of the senses ("dérèglement de tous les sens") is, like, the greatest slogan in the last 200 years of French poetry. And every French poet has had to either derange his senses or get around it one way or another. It's in-bred in the brain of every author in France from(Guillaume) Apollinaire on to the great Antonin Artaud, who took it to its limits and "springtime brought him the frightful laugh of the idiot" (a line of Rimbaud - later on, Rimbaud said " Et le printemps m'a apporté l'affreux rire de l'idiot" (from "Une Saison En Enfer" (A Season in Hell") - "Springtime I heard the idiot's frightful laughter (having deranged his senses, having succeeded) - "The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, prodigious (prodigious!) and rational (dérèglement) disordering of all the senses". [Allen goes on] - "Every form of love, of suffering, of madness..." ("Toutes les formes d'amour, de souffrance, de folie...") - the letter includes Rimbaud's second enclosed poem"Mes Petites Amoureuses" ("My Little Sweethearts" and Rimbaud's self-description "Moi pauvre effare" ("I, poor waif") - "Note Rimbaud's poem, "Les Effares" (describing haggard street urchins gazing through a cellar vent at bread in a baker's oven) - "n'ai pas tenu un seul rond de bronze!" ("without a red cent to my name!") - Because he's living with his mother in a big house in Charleville! A really heavy mother too! -

"je vous livrerais encore mes Amants de Paris, cent hexamètres, Monsieur, et ma Mort de Paris, deux cents hexamètres!" ( " I would offer you my Paris Lovers (Amants de Paris), one hundred hexameters, dear Sir, and my Death in Paris (Mort de Paris), two hundred hexameters. "Je reprends : Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu'' (I continue: So then, the poet is, truly, a thief of fire") - Let me see if there would be anything else of importance here. It's a great letter. It's in the Preface of "Illuminations", which you have in the library, I think. In poetic criticism, it's a great signal statement, so it's worth reading, only don't go crazy with it. It's at the base really, or it's the classic statement of what later became the 'Sixties acid-head hippie culture, this letter of Rimbaud. It filtered through and was tremendously influential, directly or indirectly, like take anything, STP, total derangement of the senses, I'm sure some people here have gone through that.

There's a few other interesting statements - "Humanity is his responsibility, even the animals, he must see to it that his inventions can be smelled.." ("Il est chargé de l'humanité, des animaux même ; il devra faire sentir, palper, écouter ses inventions") - His poetry - he wants a poetry that you can smell! - felt!, heard! - "If what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form, if it is formless, he gives it formlessness. A language must be found. As a matter of fact, all speech being an idea, the time of a universal language shall come!" ("Si ce qu'il rapporte de là-bas a forme, il donne forme ; si c'est informe, il donne de l'informe. Trouver une langue; - Du reste, toute parole étant idée, le temps d'un langage universel viendra !") - Actually, that will be accomplished, in James Joyce'sFinnegan's Wake. - "Il faut être académicien, plus mort qu'un fossile.." ("One has to be an academician - deader than a fossil") - "This harangue would be of the soul for the soul.." ) ("Cette langue sera de l'âme pour l'âme") - "The poet would define the amount of unknown arising in his time in the universal soul..." ("La poète definirait la quantité d'inconnu s'éveillant dans son temps, dans l'âme universelle..") - This is very Burroughs-ian - "The poet would define the amount of unknown arising in his time in the universal soul..." [Allen continues] - "Meantime ask the poet for the new" ("En attendant, demandons aux poètes du nouveau") - "Les premiers romantiques" ("The first Romantics") - Shelley, we have read, say - the French equivalent - "The first Romantics...were visionarieswithout quite realizing it.." ("Les premiers romantiques ont été voyants sans trop bien s'en rendre compte...") - And that actually does apply to (William) Wordsworth, or in Rimbaud's terms - "The first Romantics...were visionarieswithout quite realizing it.." - "la culture de leurs âmes.." ("the cultivation of their souls...").."Every grocer-boy can reel off a Rolla-esque apostrophe" ("Tout garçon épicier est en mesure de débobiner une apostrophe Rollaque") - Every grocery-boy can reel of a Dylan-esque (sic) apostrophe [Allen continues to read and annotate] - These are all Romantic heroes of the 1850's, '60s, and '70's (that Rimbaud lists) -

"Les seconds romantiques sont très voyants.." ("The second Romantics are reallyvisionaries..") - Theophile Gautier - Gautier of the Club de Hashishins, hashish smokers - "(Charles) Baudelaire is the first visionary, king of poets, a real God!Unfortunately he lived in too artistic a milieu, and his much vaunted style is trivial. Inventions of the unknown demand new forms" ("Baudelaire est le premier voyant, roi des poètes, un vrai Dieu. Encore a-t-il vécu dans un milieu trop artiste; et la forme si vantée en lui est mesquine: les inventions d'inconnu réclament des formes nouvelles.") - This is quite true, actually, I think, quite perceptive on his part, at fifteen! - Actually, it's so funny the way he comes on - "Trained in the old forms..." ( "Rompue aux formes vieilles..") [Allen continues reading, in English] - These are just names - [concludes reading of Rimbaud's"Lettre du Voyant", including note on the third poem enclosed,"Accroupissements" ("Squattings')].

 

So (next) a sample of Rimbaud's prose-poetry, in this case - "Aussitot que l'idee de Deluge se fut rassise.." (from the "Illuminations" Sort of a tone like that -"Aussitôt que l'idée du Déluge se fut rassise.." - In English, "As soon as the idea of the Deluge had subsided.."[or, in John Ashbery's recent translation - "No sooner had the notion of the Flood regained its composure"] A hare stopped in the clover and swaying flowerbells and said a prayer to the rainbow, through the spider's web" [/Than a hare paused amid the gorse and trembling bellflowers and said its prayer to the rainbow through the spider's web] - "Un lièvre s'arrêta dans les sainfoins et les clochettes mouvantes et dit sa prière à l'arc-en-ciel à travers la toile de l'araignée - " It's all like perfect cinema - A completely hard imagery in which you can see every eye-movement in the field - "Oh! the precious stones that began to hide.." ["Oh the precious stones that were hiding.."] - "Les castors bâtirent. Les "mazagrans" fumèrent dans les estaminets"("Beavers built. "Mazagrans" smoked in the little bars" - "The beavers built. Tumblers of coffee steamed in the public houses") - "Mazagrans" are, I think, little cigarette stalls, cigarette and paper-seller stalls, I think - ""Mazagrans" smoked in the little bars" - "Madame X installed a piano in the Alps" ("Madame X established a piano in the Alps" - "Madame (it's actually star,star,star) xxx etablit un piano dans les Alpes" - a "piano" is a little piano, it's not a piano, it's a house-let, a social house, in the Alps - "Madame xxx installed a piano in the Alps", "Madame xxx etablit un piano dans les Alpes". It's a funny kind of sound that you get in French, which is very crisp, clear, laconic, in his writing. Completely visual and condensed - "Madame xxx etablit un piano dans les Alpes".[Allen continues reading the poem "Après le Déluge" from "Illuminations" ] - I'm skipping, or just choosing out little lines to get the essence of Rimbaud -

"Au bois il y a un oiseau, son chant vous arrête et vous fait rougir." ("In the woods, there is a bird, his song stops you and makes you blush")

"Il y a une cathédrale qui descend et un lac qui monte" ("There is a cathedral that goes down and a lake that goes up")

"Il y a une troupe de petits comédiens en costumes, aperçus sur la route à travers la lisière du bois" ("There is a troupe of little actors in costume, glimpsed on the road through the border of the woods')

The title is "Illuminations" meaning "colored pictures". Not the visions, although there is a pun on the visionary illumination, but "illuminations", I think, is a French word for colored illustrations in old books.

There is also a thing called "Side Show" - "Parade" - "Very sturdy rogues . Several have exploited your worlds." (William) Burroughs gets a lot of his style out of Rimbaud (if you're at all familiar with Burroughs' later style) - "Very sturdy rogues . Several have exploited your worlds." [Allen continues reading] - "With no needs, and in no hurry to make use of their brilliant faculties...".."J'ai seul le clef de cette parade sauvage" ("I alone have the key to this savage parade") - On hashish, obviously.

 

Audio for this class (continuing from yesterday) may be found at http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_15_June_1975_75P016

(beginning approximately 21 minutes in and continuing through to approximately 44-and-a-half minutes in)

 

 

 

 

History of Poetry 21 (Rimbaud continued) 

 [Allen is in the middle of discussing Rimbaud's "Parade"] - ...interzone teacher gypsy sadist, well, there's little elements of modernity in it, you could say, if it were called "Hell's Angels", it would be immediately apparent what the subject is - (a) Sideshow, (a) Parade (and romanticizing maybe, the traveling-circus). That's a great line - "J'ai seul le clef de cette parade sauvage" - I alone have the key to the circus, parade. I alone have the key to the savage mental sideshow -"J'ai seul le clef de cette parade sauvage" [in the John Ashbery translation - "I alone know the plan of this savage sideshow"]. [Allen continues reading from"Illuminations" (Vies, section 3)] - ..."In a loft, where I was shut in.." [Ashbery renders this "In an attic where I was shut up.."] - "Dans un grenier où je fus enfermé.."..."I'm really from beyond the tomb and I'm not taking commission" ("Je suis réellement d'outre-tombe, et pas de commissions" - Ashbery translates this as "I'm really beyond the grave, and no more assignments, please") - "Je suis réellement d'outre-tombe, et pas de commissions".

Then a sense of fatigue, à la Whitman, set in - Départ - departure - Assez vu -seen enough. La vision s'est rencontrée à tous les airs. The vision was met within every air [Ashbery has "The vision has been encountered in all skies"] - Assez eu - had enough. Rumeurs des villes, le soir, et au soleil.. - Sounds of the city and in the evening and in the sun. [Allen gives line-by-line translation of this short poem] - And a nice one called "Drunken Morning" (Matinee d'Ivresse) - O my good, o my beautiful.. O my good, o my beautiful - O mon Bien! O mon Beau!.." - "Cela commença sous les rires des enfants..." - It began in the midst of children's laughter - Rire des enfants... - laughter of children... - We pronounce you method! - Nous t'affirmons, méthode- Voici le temps des Assassins - Now is the time of the Hashashin - Now is the time of the Assassins - Voici le temps des Assassins - Now is the time of the Assassins (which is such a great line, (it) killed everybody in the 20th Century, (that) a kid like that could say something so heart-stabbing. I think Henry Miller wrote a book on Rimbaud,(The) Time of the Assassins - and of course (William) Burroughs too draws a great deal from that - Time of the Assassins. Well, there's this whole book called "Illuminations", the last of which I'll read is called "City" ("Ville") - It's very odd, it's like getting high and seeing city, the megalopolis, the movement of the city.

Wordsworth did it in his Sonnet rhymes overlooking London.."...On Westminster Bridge..", but there's, like, a dislocation from time in Rimbaud, as there probably is.. He wrote a lot of this on grass, or hashish, and - it's a model for hashish writing by the way. If any of you are involved with that kind of experiment with writing - and everyone's tried a little - but the dissociation of thought you're familiar with (while writing with hashish or not), the dissociation you're all familiar with, (instructive) to see how someone fresh and virginal, a master of his own mind, sort of almost naively eager, watching his mind, handles it, and keeps it all solid. I'll give you the beginning in the French - "Je suis un éphémère et point trop mécontent citoyen d'une métropole crue moderne.." - I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen of a metropolis considered modern - [Allen continues reading "Ville" - in English translation] - Petty crime howling in the mud of the street ("un joli Crime piaulant dans la boue de la rue") - I've always liked that line - "Petty crime howling in the mud of the streets". Well, there's others called "Cities II" (Villes II). I'll just begin it. "What cities! this is a people for whom these.. "Ce sont des villes! C'est un peuple pour qui se sont montés ces Alleghanys et ces Libans de rêve!" - there's a kind of nice thing he did there..

Actually, "Illuminations" is one of his last works according to some biographies. (A) great biography of Rimbaud by Enid Starkie - Enid Starkie - Rimbaud. It is one of the most interesting literary biographies of any figure that has been written, in that Starkie was a scholar at Oxford, a lady (dyke, I think), who wrote a book on Petrus Borel, the "wolfman" (who was a great literary figure), abiography of Baudelaire (which is [was] out-of-print) and a (this) great biography of Rimbaud (and a follow-up book called "Rimbaud in Abyssinia", 'cause Rimbaud ran off to Africa at the end (when he was 2o or something), he went to Borneo!, he quit poetry and went to Borneo, joined the circus and went all over Transylvania! He did everything that every kid I imagine wanted to do, he went "on the road", actually.. finally wound up in Harrar, in Abyssinia, died of cancer in a hospital in Marseilles.. of syphilis

nursed by his sweet "square" sister.. apparently reading great poetry in his last... (so she said - she was a Catholic, and so sweet, heart-rending a way as...

 

Student: How old was he when he died?

 

AG: 34, I think. Quite young. ..he had a boyfriend.. (he had a real funny career) - he ran off.. he came to Paris, lived with (Paul) Verlaine.. first he came to Paris and Verlaine put him up in the house of some poet in the Latin Quarter and (he created) some great scandal by throwing bed bugs out the window! ((he was) just a kid, like a mad kid coming to Paris), and (so he) moved in with Verlaine for a while, but Madame Verlaine really got bugged, and then they ran off together to London, and taught English for their living, (and) then Mrs Verlaine said come back, so Verlaine came back. I think Rimbaud went back to his home and then they got together again - then Rimbaud wanted to leave Verlaine (because Verlaine was basically like a creepy old fag trying (to make a) 17-year-old beautiful boy, with the most beautiful face in Europe, actually angelic face). There's a photograph of.. oh, maybe you can see it from here - (when this) was done he was maybe 15 or so.. a really mean eye! -

 

 

Student: That's his catechism..

 

AG: I was going to say.. Is it..? catechism? He's all dressed up with that funny bow-tie. This face has launched a thousand books! - I was in love with Rimbaud. I was, in fact, physically, erotically, in love with Rimbaud when I was 18. It was my first.. "Voici le temps des Assassins" - that turned me on completely - and I went downtown to Times Square to meet a local criminal world with their "petty crime howling in the mud of the streets". So this is"Vagabonds", him and Verlaine wandering around - Pitiable brother!..

(pitoyable frère..)..[Allen reads the entire poem - "Vagabonds" from "Illuminations" in English translation] - moi, pressé de trouver le lieu et la formule.

Well, I'm going to quit Rimbaud for a while..

So Illuminations is worth reading. It's a handbook of purest imagery, mind poetry, a little bit seductive because you can start writing these imaginary poems - "Mystique"-like - Angels whirl their woolen robes in emerald and steel pastures ("les anges tournent leurs robes de laine dans les herbages d'acier et d'émeraude") - Well now amateurs trying that can't get that "emerald and steel" - and "woollen" robes, angels in "woollen" robes. So there's this mixture of a real practical concrete observation. (Ezra) Pound translated one very famous rhymed poem called "Vagabond" [actually "Au Cabaret-Vert"] and pointed it out as a great moment in French poetry, European poetry, when Rimbaud compared the arm of the waitress in a country tavern, serving him beer, blonde.. beer over-flowing.. plate of ham.. I forget the precise wording, but (he) compares the color of the ham to the color of her thick fat right arm - with a sprig of green parsley! . .so, it's this idyllic wandering in the countryside, going to country inns, sitting down, foaming beers, plate of ham, like the waitress' fat arm (color of the waitress's fat arm.. [ "Pink ham, white fat and a sprig/ Of garlic, and a great chope of foamy beer/ Gilt by the sun in that atmosphere."]

 

Student: Could you read it?

 

AG: It's too good to read really (right now) and (but) there are many great lines in it, [in "Illuminations"] - like "J'ai embrassé l'aube d'été - beginning of the poem, Dawn ("Aube") - I embrace the summer dawn - and ends.. a little visionary thing, like Spring, seen, as a little girl describing it - Above the road, near the laurel wood, I wrapped her up.. ("En haut de la route, près d'un bois de lauriers, je l'ai entourée..") - "Au réveil il était midi." ("Waking, it was noon").

So, these Illuminations are like prose-poems and a long consecutive prose-poem called "Un Saison d'Enfer" (A Season in Hell) is like a tiny novel written in prose-poetry, with a central chapter describing his relationship to Verlaine.

 

Student: Didn't one of them try to shoot the other one?

 

AG: Yeah, they were in Belgium, in Brussels or some place like that.

Rimbaud was trying to get away from the old creep and shot him in the hand! So Rimbaud turned him in to the police! and got sent out for two years, got very religious, Verlaine got very religious in jail. But then Rimbaud wrote a letter to.. a letter of Rimbaud to a friend, when they met again, in which Rimbaud says, we met again and within 20 minutes he'd abandoned all the Stations of the Cross and cursed the rosary and was all over my pants again! - something like that. So here's Rimbaud's version of Verlaine's.. It's called "Délires", it's from the beginning of "A Season in Hell", it's too classic not to enter your brain - the phrasing is so.. sweet-and-sour like. It's an autobiography, a spiritual autobiography, in which, in a sense, he renounces the world and goes off on his wanderings, beginning with a recollection of childhood enthusiasm and open-ness ("Jadis, si je me souviens bien...") - "Jadis" - What's "Jadis"? - in French, you can't get it in English. "Jadis" is like a old.. like someone would sing an old blues "Jadis" - "In old times", "in old days", "formerly", "once", "early", "when I was young", "Jadis", so you get all these old French diseurs, old French art-sceners, who sing songs about "Jadis", you know, with flowers and violins and springtime and I-got-wrinkles-all-over-my-brow. But he's now 17, saying, "Jadis, si je me souviens bien", Jadis - "formerly", "if I remember well", - if, je (I),me (me), souviens (remember) bien (well) - "Jadis, - if I me remember well - if I remember myself well, what (would be) the implication in the French grammar. "A long while ago", "If I remember my history well", "si je me souviens bien" - ma vie était un festin - my life was a festival -où s'ouvraient tous les coeurs - where opened all hearts.. where all the hearts were open "où tous les vins coulaient" "where all wines flowed. So here - "once if I remember well, my heart was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.."

[Allen continues reading from this poem..] - (Un soir..) "One evening, I seated Beauty on my knee.." - (Rimbaud) goes on.."Charity is the key.." - the key to the way out of his fix - and he goes on to try to trace his ancestry back to the "tattooed narrow-skulled savages" of early Europe, saying that (that) was the reason he was so messed up, and then there's, like, a history of Europe enslaved by the Machine Age and.. and then a little chapter on his relations with Verlaine, which I'll begin to give you the tone of the, again, laconic, sardonic, funny sardonic kid, (and) such intelligent psychological perception. [Allen begins reading] - "The foolish virgin" - Vierge folie (presumably Verlaine) and the Infernal bridegroom - L'Epoux Infernal.

[Allen reads enthusiastically from Rimbaud's Délires in English translation]

It's like a great novel in about 12 pages. It ends "One day perhaps he will miraculously disappear" - "Un jour peut-être il disparaîtra merveilleusement" - (which Rimbaud did - he miraculously disappeared to his circus..)

- Drôle de ménage! - funny menage, funny household (queer couple, if you will, as it's translated here) - Drôle de ménage - which is Rimbaud's comment on the whole scene - Drôle de ménage - then that goes into "Delirium", a section called "Delirium (The Alchemy of the Word), which is like the first Western assault on language to make it mantra. It's so important, actually, in terms of later theory that I want to read that too. I think I have the tape-recorder here..

- "À moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies." - Now for me the history of one of my..follies [Allen continues to read from "Delirium (The Alchemy of the Word)"] - For a long time.. (Depuis longtemps...) - "Ah, je souffre, je crie, je souffre vraiment.." - (I suffer, I scream.. - this is Rimbaud's version of Verlaine complaining - "La vraie vie est absente" - real life is absent - "L'amour est à réinventer" (that line, "love must be reinvented", also, was like a dominant theme in all later French poetry) - "L'amour est à réinventer", love is to be reinvented - "refrains niais, rythmes naïfs" (naive refrains and artless rhythms)- "Je fixais des vertiges -

then he puts a little poem in here - Chanson de la Plus Haute Tour (Song of the Highest Tower), which sounds very pretty in French - "Qu'il vienne, qu'il vienne,/ Le temps dont on s'éprenne." - Then let it come, let it come, time.. "O may it come the time of love/ the time we'll be enamored of" (the time that will seize us, the time that will really take us) - "Qu'il vienne, qu'il vienne" - This is where he finally says "I love the desert.." ( "J'aimai le désert..")- "Elle est retrouvée ! Quoi ? l'éternité. C'est la mer mêlée. Au soleil- It's recovered? What? Eternity. It's the sea mixed up with the sunlight (a little poem there).

Finally we get to..oh somewhere in here, I can't find it - finally, Et le printemps m'a apporté l'affreux rire de l'idiot" "In Springtime brought me the idiot's frightful laughter" - So he cut out there, actually went back home, stayed with his mother, wrote Illuminations and left Paris forever - and Verlaine gathered all his poems about ten years later, assuming that Rimbaud was dead, or gone beyond communication, and published them, and they just sensationalized everyone in Paris and turned everybody on.

 

Student: Wasn't Rimbaud a smuggler?

 

AG: Yeah, he smuggled guns to Emperor Menelik.

 

[Allen turns abruptly next to a letter he'd recently received from an acolyte in New Jersey, reads sections from it]

- I read that to show that the spirit of Rimbaud is not dead at all. It's actually.. Rimbaud seems to be a complete turn-on catalyst to every poet in small town isolated, or big megapolis, staring at the city lights over the roof. It has been for decades in America.. since Louise Varèse

translated "Season in Hell" and "Illuminations", which came out in the.. I guess, in the '40's, early '50's - Louise Varèse, who translated these, was the wife of Edgard Varèse, the composer (a modern composer who worked with pure sound, also), so, it's odd - the tradition of Rimbaud was continued in America by the highest of the avant-garde here. If you haven't read Rimbaud.. (it's sort of) the ABC, to begin with, I would say, for any kind of poetry, because it'll turn you on, in the sense of inspire erotic ethics in your mind and give you a sense of the magic that you can do in total isolation (and also a sense of the companionship, the sangha of poets, you know), and the possibility of total direct communication or outrageous clarity and frankness - and selfishness! - So Rimbaud, aged 15 to 17, oddly, is "the poet's poet" for the last hundred years.

 

Audio source:

http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_15_June_1975_75P016

(beginning at approx 45 minutes - and continuing until approx 81 minutes in)

 

 

History of Poetry 22 (Apollinaire)

 

 

AG: How many were not here last time? Okay. Last time we went through some Whitman, some Rimbaud. The point was to show the break-up in the 19th century of the older stanzaic rhymed forms, inherited from the practice of musicking the poetry, late 19th century. It broke up in the 1870s. So samples of that were Whitman, Rimbaud (and then I played some phonograph records of the Russian poets (Vladimir) Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin (and Ezra Pound and the Italian Futurist, Giuseppe Ungaretti)). The Mayakovsky, we didn't have any English text.

 

I'm going to start out with (Guillaume) Apollinaire, the earliest of them, a French poet. There's a kind of jump between Rimbaud and Apollinaire. There's a lot of interesting poets in-between, who influenced (T.S.) Eliot - Jules Laforgueand Tristan Corbiere. Corbiere is worth reading, who still wrote in a rhymed form, but Corbiere's diction was totally modern and Laforgue broke up the stanza form and wrote in prose lines like Eliot, slightly rhymed, like Eliot in"Portrait of a Lady", which you should read somewhere else, is a take-off of Laforgue.

 

Student: Is that Tristan or Christian Corbiere?

 

AG: Tristan Corbiere. And there are excellent translations of him by... who did that now? I think William Jay Smith, unless I'm mistaken. If you can find a rare volume published by the Banyon Press of Corbiere's "Cries of a Blind Man" (Cris d'Aveugle") and "The Rhapsody of a Deaf Man" ("Rhapside de Sord").. But the big jump is to Apollinaire. This would be before World War 1, or around World War 1. A long poem called "Zone", which turned on Eliot and turned on (Ezra) Pound, somewhat, influenced almost all free-style, open-page writing in the 20th Century. (There's a) good translation by Roger Shattuck. There's another translation, that Anne Waldman can give you the bibliography of, by Ron Padgett, who'll be here.

[Allen proceeds to read Apollinaire's "Zone" in its entirety] - "À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien.." - "In the end you're sick of the old world..." or "You are tired at last of this old world.." - "Soleil cou coupé" - "The sun's a severed neck" or "a sun's neck cut" - Now what does that sound like? Is that familiar? That tone? It's a run-on of thought and a juxtaposition of thought with some likeness to the traditional Surrealist methods and (William) Burroughs' cut-ups. Some of Burroughs' tone comes from Eliot which comes from this. It's the first time that anybody wrote whatever was going on in his head, in a sense, in so precise a way that the transitions are sudden. Like Burroughs says, "I'm not American Express", in terms of, "Here you are in Marseilles amid the watermelons/ Here you are in Coblentz at the Hotel of the Giant/ Here you are in Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree/ Here you are in Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty and who is ugly."

What does it mean, jumping from place to place? At first when this was written, people couldn't understand. It wasn't telling a sequential story. It wasCubist almost [Apollinaire coined the term "Cubism"] or one city superimposed on another, one line superimposed on another, a simultaneity, in which all the cities were seen almost in one glimpse with only a little space on the page to jump the gap in space. Almost like a series of false starts or a series of.. maybe you thought he was going to write more but he realized that one line was a complete haiku, But he's "not American Express", so he doesn't have to get you from one transition to another. He doesn't have to get you from one city to another, or one mental thought to another, He's already perceived that the mind jumps around.

Rimbaud was still doing it within a traditional syntax, as if it made syntactical sense, or as if it made rational sense. That's what the prettiness and irony of Rimbaud is. "A hare playing through a spiderweb on a bluebell."[ "A hare stopped in the clover and swaying flowerbells and said a prayer to the rainbow, through the spider's web" - "Un lièvre s'arrêta dans les sainfoins et les clochettes mouvantes et dit sa prière à l'arc-en-ciel à travers la toile de l'araignée"(from "Après le Déluge" in "Illuminations")] - "When I awoke it was noon" ("Au réveil il était midi"). Rimbaud discovered a little bit - like in that prose-poem, having spent the morning drunk, "Matinée d'ivresse", I guess - and then he ended, "When I awoke it was noon" ("Au réveil il était midi") (this, from "Aube"(Dawn) in "Illuminations"). Very abruptly. So there's a little element in Rimbaud that Apollinaire picks up on and carries through, a sudden transition of mind, almost like hashish transitions, hashish thoughts, suddenly shifting.

The other element here in the French is that there is no punctuation at all. So it's just the thoughts because they are not syntactically sequential in terms of rational French or English purity of grammatical and punctuational notation. They are just scattered thoughts, in a sense, so there is no need for punctuation, because it represents the process of the mind moving around. Now I don't know what other writers abandoned punctuation, and I once read, I think, that Apollinaire eliminated all the punctuation deliberately in the proofs of the book in which this (Zone) was published. Anybody got anything to say about Apollinaire?

 

Student: "You".. Did he start that "you", instead of "I" - "You"

 

AG: (quoting, again, Zone's opening line) - "You are tired at last of this old world" - "À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien" - "In the end you're sick of this ancient world".

There's also, in Apollinaire, another element of a heartfelt sentiment. The religious passages, talking about Christ, are obviously very funny and surrealist. "Religion alone is simple, religion alone like the hangars in the airfield" ("La religion seule est restée toute neuve la religion / Est restée simple comme les hangars de Port-Aviation"). First of all, throughout the whole religious passage, he actually is, sort of, seriously devotional, mixed in with the humor, which is an element of modern, what they call, irony, I suppose, but there's a serious sentimentality in there, which is really pretty, and which is really useful, and which you don't get very often in ironic modern Surrealist poetry. You do get (it) in the poet Philip Lamantia, who is an heir of Apollinaire and (of) the later Surrealists. So, if you have a chance, check out the Lamantia in the library (or I might get a chance to read something, before the session's out).

 

Student: That was pretty realistic for a Surrealist

 

AG: Well, ok, "absolutely moderne" ("il faut être absolument moderne" - Rimbaud in "Une Saison en Enfer"). Apollinaire alone is modern, like the hangars in the airfield. He was almost the first one to bring in that sudden jarring juxtaposition that's actually extraordinarily beautiful, like this vast hangar in the airfield compared to religion. It's a very accurate comparison.

 

Student: I meant towards the end of the poem where it was going through those shots from city to city. It was dreamlike the way Surrealist stuff is, but it was flicked out, not like Surrealist, but..

 

AG: There's a naturalistic base..

 

Student: ..It's like a Ken Russell movie? - Have you seen "The Music Lovers"? There's a scene in that where he (Tchaikovsky)'s playing this unbelievable piece on this piano and he's really smashing it out, because he was woken... and he's just smashing it out (with), like, the whole audience behind him, and then it'll go into another piece where suddenly there's this fantasy of his, of this entire white birch forest, where every tree is white, and he's dressed in white, and running in a syncopated... and it's like hashish, that other thing too.. and then they'll cut to some woman. There are all of these fantasies and they all sort of jar against each other and build into this incredible crystal.

 

AG: I think it was Apollinaire who was among the earliest people to discover that - photo-montage - and he may even have been influenced by movies, because he was a Modernist, in that sense. His big influence actually wasCubism, not Surrealism, but Cubism, which was a predecessor [as noted before, he actually coined the term "Cubism"']. It was seeing things simultaneously from different angles.

 

Student: They were all such emotionally-charged things!'

 

AG: In Russell or in Apollinaire?

 

Student: Well, both,

 

AG: Yeah. There's also an element of real realism, psychological realism, or real disillusionment, in which, after all the romance of the 19th Century, and after all the Romantic surges and prettiness of earlier French poets (with the exception, maybe, of (Charles) Baudelaire - Rimbaud was still pretty pretty, Rimbaud still had beauty. He seated her on his knee(s) and found her bitter and cursed her). The beauty in Apollinaire comes from his frankness and the frankness seems to come from some element of spontaneity in the composition. In other words, I think he must have written down that line about the girl who I find pretty but who was really ugly,

 

Student: Yeah, I think..

 

AG: "Here you are in Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty". I bet he didn't think of "and who is ugly" until he'd already written "a girl you find" and said "pretty", and then..

 

Student: He could've thought of it just going down the street, or it could have happened to him, but..

 

AG: Oh, it happened to him! Of course.

 

Student: Yeah, well...

 

AG: But what I'm saying is most poets wouldn't have admitted that the girl was really ugly.

 

Student: But that was what was getting him inside probably, so that was how he got....

 

AG: Of course and it hits everybody inside but they never say it. So he was one of the first people that was willing to admit his first thought perceptions

 

Student: But where's the music in that?

 

AG: It's pretty pretty. Well, where is the music? Of course, I'm reading it in English.

 

Student: Were you translating it as you were reading it?

 

AG: This is Roger (Shattuck's translation). Actually, I was translating a number of lines, yeah. Actually, is this the right translation? [tape ends here]

 

[tape continues] - Bernard (sic), do you know any better? Could you read a few lines in French?

Specifically is there any half-page that you know well, that you like musically? In terms of the impulse of rhythm of the poem?

 

Bernard: Boy, it's a good deal of poem there.

 

AG: No, I don't want you to read the whole poem. I can't stand it. Half a page or..maybe, well, the obvious..

 

Bernard: Well, the repetition is very musical

 

AG: Okay - "the flaming glory of Christ" - page 118 - "C'est le beau lys que tous nous cultivons.."? Can you read that,loud, tho'?

 

Bernard: "C'est le beau lys que tous nous cultivons / C'est la torche aux cheveux roux que n'éteint pas le vent / C'est le fils pâle et vermeil de la douloureuse mère "

 

AG: Doh-low-ruse or Doh-low-ru-suh?

 

Bernard: Doh-lew-rose - " C'est l'arbre toujours touffu de toutes les prières/ C'est la double potence de l'honneur et de l'éternité / C'est l'étoile à six branches / C'est Dieu qui meurt le vendredi et ressuscite le dimanche.." And that's it, it's long.

 

AG: Yeah, there's a certain musicality in the repetition, as in (Christopher) Smart.

 

Bernard: "C'est Dieu qui meurt le vendredi et ressuscite le dimanche. C'est le Christ qui monte au ciel mieux que les aviateurs / Il détient le record du monde pour la hauteur / Pupille Christ de l'oeil. / Vingtième pupille des siècles il sait y faire. / Et changé en oiseau ce siècle comme Jésus monte dans l'air". It's rhymed. Many times.

 

AG: Yeah. In French.

 

Bernard: "Les diables dans les abîmes lèvent la tête pour le regarder / Ils disent qu'il imite Simon Mage en Judée / Ils crient s'il sait voler qu'on l'appelle voleur / Les anges voltigent autour du joli voltigeur / Icare Énoch Élie Apollonius de Thyane / Flottent autour du premier aéroplane."

 

AG: Okay, So thus rhymed like that. In English you only get it with "Surrounded by fervent flames Notre Dame looked at me in Chartres/ The blood of your sacred heart flooded me in the Montmartre".

 

Student: Sam(uel) Beckett has a translation that brings more of the sound there

 

AG: Yeah, where did you see it? in The European Caravan?

 

Student: An edition of simply that poem (Zone)

 

AG: Yeah, I think it was printed in a book called The European Caravan years ago. Well (so) what do you mean by music (sound)?

 

Student: Well, I just heard it

 

AG: Huh?

 

Student: I just heard it

 

AG: Well, he read it a little haltingly. The music is in a funny kind of run-on thought.

 

Student: In French, it's very rhymical it's almost classical.

 

AG: Yeah, The French is very ornamented.

 

Student:Yeah

 

AG: The English is sparer, but the swiftness of the lines, which I was reading very swiftly, very rarely stopping, it's a quality of swiftness of thought. That's interesting, first of all, but, read aloud, it's the model for all of the poems you hear in English in which the poet gets up and just reels off a string of words without any kind of tone variation, but just sort of a single cry/lament. Do you know that kind of Beatnik poetry?

 

Student(s): Yeah.. There's a music there in the cry and lament that isn't there in the prosaic. Do you know what I mean?

 

AG: Yes. But what I'm saying is that, even in English, in the Shattuck translation, there's a kind of nostalgic European schmaltz. Well, I'll tell you, in a line like "It was and I would prefer not to remember it was during beauty's decline", there's a funny thing that happens without punctuation. You have a little run-on in the single line where it's swiftness of mind-thought, but also spoken aloud as a single breath. If it isn't heard then I wonder how to analyze it . I depended on this myself for "Howl" and for a lot of my poems, like, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" - that's just the length of it.

 

Student: There's energy in that and it isn't just this flat thing.

 

AG: Well, I don't think that it's that flat in this translation, but maybe I was reading it too flat. I wouldn't take a vote on it, either.

 

Student: ..(just hearing it) in the French

 

AG: Yeah, that's understood but we're now discussing the English. The basic thing is a traditional alexandrine. And variations of that, with irregular rhymes, an irregular rhyme.

 

Student: He's not very strict about the rhyme. It's almost very classical and perfect and classical.

 

AG: Oddly, I was struck by the music of it in English, or maybe just in the technique of the fast shift of thought, even within one line. "I am ill from hearing happy words/ The love from which I suffer is a sacred sickness". I think there the music comes closer to actual speech than to poetry, that is, it would be whatever music there is in someone talking very melancholically, talking in a melancholic mode. When people talk in a melancholy mood, there's a funny kind of mellowness to the line. So it isn't the ornamentation of the original, and it isn't the music of a verse for music, or a lyric rhyme, it's a modern music, I think, even in English.

 

Student: Can you read a little piece of it again?

 

AG: Well I can't do any better than I did before. I'm ashamed that it sounded so bad. [unnecessarily self-effacing] - I'll try and read something else.

 

Student: Maybe I just didn't hear it.

 

Student: Do you know the poem that starts out...

 

AG: I was interested in reading a poem which has influenced a lot of poets in America, the "Poem Read at the Marriage of Andre Salmon - July 13 1909" - "Seeing the flags this morning I didn't say... [Allen reads the poem in its entirety] - Aside from any vowel music, there's the obvious forward, ongoing rhythm of a single thought from beginning to end, which ends with a thump and a whump and a complete syntactical statement. Beginning seeing the flags this morning and then a whole series of "Nor-nor-nor-nor-nor", a whole series of repetitions using the single first word, going on to a pretty energetic description of their childhood together, then ending on this apostrophe "let us, let us, let us, let us", "not, not, not, not", "nor, nor, nor, nor"."Let us rejoice" - and then he ends it, he comes.. "Let us rejoice, because.. and then he says it "because the director of fire and of poets/ Love which like light fills/ all solid space between the stars and planets/ Love desires that my friend Andre Salmon should get married today". So both in this and in Apollinaire there's a forward impulse, an energy that you spoke of. More obvious in here as I read it because I was more conscious of having to please you with a palpable rhythm, a palpable impulse that rolls through the poem,

 

Student: Isn't it Gertrude Stein who said that French is the spoken language and English is the written language?

 

AG: Is it? Does Anne (Waldman) know? She's the expert. [continuing] - I'll see if there's anything else. He wrote in a very pure, classical lyric French form in the poem "Mirabeau" which I'd like to read a little in French, because it's so pretty. It's a little rhymed poem. - "Sous le pont Mirabeau.." [Allen reads the poem, first in French then in English translation - "Under Pont Mirabeau.." - Because it rhymes in French - "Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure/ Les jours sont vont je demeure" - Really pretty in French - In English, even the thought is pretty in English - "Under Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine" has a really great sound, a great sound in English, even as in French. That's 1909. When was "Zone"? Do you know, Bernard?

 

Bernard: Pardon?

 

AG: What was the date of "Zone"?

 

Bernard: I don't know. About 1916.

 

AG: Before he got messed up in the war.

 

Bernard: Yeah

 

AG: Yeah.. He was...

 

Bernard: He was killed in 1917.

 

AG: He got injured in the war. He thought he had to go out and do a big poetic thing and fight in the war. Do you know a little about him? Does anybody know anything about Apollinaire? Or who doesn't know much of his biography?. Can you... his relations with the Cubists, and..

 

Bernard: I don't know very much of him.

 

AG: Okay. He was a poet very much like the American, Frank O'Hara - a great friend of painters. So he knew Picasso and the friends of Picasso in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a big house, communal house, a lot of painters shared together. Marie Laurencin, a lady painter, who would come with her kid, walking down the street in Montmartre (and up the hill) to visit her boyfriend(s) in the house.. And Picasso shared the house with (Georges) Braque, and they had a big...

 

Bernard: Max Jacob was there also.

 

AG: Max Jacob, another poet hanging around. It was a real center.

 

Student: Allen, there's a good story...

 

AG: (In) The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck?

 

Student: And also in a Stein biography, The Charmed Circle

 

AG: The what?

 

Student; The Stein biograpy, The Charmed Circle

 

AG: Gertrude (Stein)?

 

Student: Yeah, it deals a lot about it.

 

AG: A famous friend was a crank painter named le Douanier Rousseau. Rousseau you know? "The Sleeping Gypsy"?. And they all got together and decided to give him a big banquet, I guess Apollinaire was there, to honor him. So Picasso and all the sophisticates got together and gave him a real honorific banquet, where he sat at the head of the table with his beard, played his violin and wept...

Apollinaire made his living writing articles. He was somewhat of a madcap, and I think he stole a Greek statue head from the Louvre and he got caught, like the college student who steals the Dean's chair or something. His main thing was art criticism, or a great thing he did was art criticism. Not his man thing - his main thing was poetry, but he did a lot of art criticism, like Frank O'Hara. In the course of really exploring with a modern spirit what was going on, he got to be friends with all of the early (20th) Century French painters, who were initiating a whole theory, or a whole practice of relativism in their paintings, breaking things up, so, literally, you could see the table, if you were doing a still life, from various angles at one time, (they were) interested in taking (Paul) Cézanne's theory of hot colors - (red) advances into the eyeball - optical eyeball kicks - hot colors advance, cool colors recede. That was Cézanne's understanding and so Cézanne created his "petite sensation", his little sensation of space. Space that we consider (at NAROPA) when we're meditating on space, the spaciousness Cézanne created (in) his little sensation of space, not by perspective lines but by optical arrangements on the flat canvas that would deceive the eye into seeing space because overlapping red and, say, green, which is cooler, would make the red stand out in the eyeball. The Cubists took that specific optical perception to a greater openness and an extreme, and began creating vast artificial spaces by making great blocks of design and color, which, if you look at them high on grass, or with a trained eye, or look at them squinty-eyed, will turn from two-dimensional canvases into big space cubes.

How many of you have seen Cubist paintings as 3-D? like real 3-D? How many of you have looked at Cubist paintings? You know, the Museum of Modern Art. How many have never seen them as 3-D but have seen them as mainly flat designs, very beautiful but flat designs? So the thing to do is, when you go to a museum next time, see if you can find some old Braque of that period, 1909, 1905-1909, or a Picasso, and look at it. Sit down in front of it and look at it a long time and you see it begin to open like the tiled squares in bathrooms that suddenly become not flat squares. It's the same eyeball kick, same process, that goes on with the Cubists and among the great Cubists (or, even later painters, the Abstract Expressionists, like Willem de Kooning's series called "Excavations". If you look at it a while, letting your eye rest, you can see it as a great three-dimensional wooden crystal construction(s). An easy way to practice it is look at Paul Klee's "Magic Squares", (which are like checkerboards, except all different colors), and if you look at them for a while, you see that they become great fundamental buttresses, rising in space, with giant castellated block-holes in them.

So this was a specific perception which Apollinaire understood. He was able to write very elegantly and intelligently with personal knowledge of the painters of that day, so there's a kind of application of that to his poetry. I don't know if you see the parallelism of the painter's approach to simultaneous view of space and his approach to the simultaneous appearance of imagery in the mind's eye, one image set next to the other, without connective, in a sense, without the connectives of perspective lines. Perspective lines in painting might be equivalent to the syntactical connectives of "and"'s, "but"'s, "if"'s, "or"'s in language, or punctuation. In a sense, without perspective lines in the poetry, he created both space and a sense of passing time.

 

Student: Does the Cubist see that in one shot, or is he moving his eye around, to pick up those angles?

 

AG: Not (being) a painter, I don't know, but I think they perceived it first in Cézanne, according to Picasso and other people. Cézanne was very conscious of that. He wrote a letter to Emil Bernard, an old friend, when he was really old, saying "thank God I am not like those men who vice has coarsened the senses of. I can go out and look at Mont Sainte-Victoire and reconstruct "ma petite sensation", my little sensation of space, my little sensation which is none other than painter omnipotent, eternades. He actually said that in the letter. "My little sensation is none other than the Father Omnipotent, Eternal God - or, in Buddhist terminology, dharmakaya, or empty space, or the petite sensation, if you wanted to put it in more patois, if you wanted to say it in small talk. "My little sensation", modestly, he said. He described being able to stand in the field and look at Mont Sainte-Victoire, and, by moving his head an inch to the left or an inch to the right, the entire composition of the canvas changed. The entire composition of the field in front of him, the field of his eyeball, changed, and all the cubes, triangles, what were they? -does anybody know Cézanne? anybody paint here? - Triangles.. he built his canvases by means of reducing the landscape to triangles, cubes, and one other geometric element.. Huh?

 

Student: Spheres

 

AG: Yeah well, cube, square. Cone, cubes - cones and cubes, Making them advance or recede in the eyeball by hot and cool colors advancing and receding. Picasso discovered that, and began digging Cézanne, as a great secret Gnostic master, who was not just painting these muzzy landscapes, but was creating eyeball crystals, that is great crystalline structures which hung in the eyeball as in space as a background for where the Moderns have found themselves, the 20th Century people. Apollinaire was plunged into that like, say, the poets of the 1950's were plunged into marijuana perceptions, or later poets might be plunged into vipassana examination of sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, and mind, and the simultaneous realness of it and illusoriness of those little sensations. So the beginning of the crack-up of consciousness that lead to an Einstein-ian doubt as to the external reality of the world entirely in poetry and in painting.

 

Student: Allen, a lot of the poets in the Surrealist movement.. There were never any musicians in the Surrealist movement... The Surrealist movement was incomplete...

 

AG: The tradition continued in New York, especially with Frank O'Hara andJohn Ashbery, because John Ashbery edited (worked for) ARTNews and O'Hara was a great friend of De Kooning ,(Franz) Kline, (Jackson) Pollock, and wrote monographs on them and drank with them.

 

Student: It is remarkable, these conditions...Baudelaire has written..

 

AG: Yeah. Baudelaire was also a friend of (Eugene) Delacroix and hung around painters.

 

Student: He wrote things about music and if you look at what kind of music he liked, you know, the music he liked was real concrete, was very like (Eugene) Delacroix's paintings. He liked...

 

AG: (Walt) Whitman used to do opera reviews, which he later thought was over-fancy-pants...

 

(Audio for the first part of this transcription is available at http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_16_June_1975_75P017

(starting approx 46 minutes in).

Audio for the second part begins at

http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_17_June_1975_75P018)

 

History of Poetry 23 (Mayakovsky)

 

Shifting same time (19th/early 20th century) to Moscow. Or.. of the same time, the equivalent group in Russia were the Futurists, who were maybe the earliest relatives, the earliest people who broke up a sense of consciousness, or a sense of a solid consciousness that the 19th century had. It was broken up a good deal in Rimbaud with the Alchemy of the Word and the long reasoned derangement of the senses, but by the time of 1905, it had become already artistic practice, and not just a great eccentric genius like Rimbaud. It (had) got into the mainstream. Cezanne said his big ambition was to paint pictures like they hang in the museums. That was his big ideal.

Student: All the German poets, on the other hand, were really connected with music. Always.

AG: No I don’t know. Yeah I guess so, because the music was so strong in Germany.

[He begins, with no further announcement, to recite “An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky In A Summer Cottage] “A hundred and forty suns in one sunset blared…/… I must sit here and draw these posters” - Because Mayakovsky began, 1905, as a Futurist, with a long poem, “A Cloud In Trousers” – This is post-Revolutionary practical realism, but still with some weird imagination going on – “I’ve got to sit and draw these posters”! [he continues] – “I yelled at the sun again;/”Wait now!..” … “drawing a breath, he spoke..”…”We warmed up/to each other”… “..to hell with everything else!/ That is my motto – and the sun’s!” – It’s a funny application of that modern informality of spirit to a great classical subject. There’s a poem by Frank O’Hara, who taught me Mayakovsky actually, gave me my first book of Mayakovsky, “A True Account Of Talking To The Sun At Fire Island” [Allen begins] “The Sun woke me this morning loud/ and clear, saying Hey..” – So you see the shift of tone in 50 years. “Hey!” – there’s a kind of brusque, boisterous Russian familiarity in Mayakovsky, but then, fifty years later in New York City gossip, funniness, faggotry, camp,”Personism”, the same thing as Mayakovsky. I think O’Hara liked Mayakovsky because Mayakovsky realized that he was as good as the sun. The sun shone, Mayakovsky shone, both were natural objects, both had nothing to fear from their shining. Both shone equally on their own nature, or the poet and the sun both shine equally of their own nature. It ain’t against the law to mouth vowels any more than it is against the law for the wind to make wind in the trees – noises. But here the diction is different, it’s “Hey!” – “The sun woke me this morning loud/ and clear, saying Hey..” [Allen continues - “..I’ve been/ trying to wake you up for fifteen/ minutes…”.. and continues to the end of the poem, O'Hara's poem, “Darkly he rose and then I slept”.] – It’s as good as the Mayakovsky, almost. Or, as he says, he’s “only the second poet that the sun has chosen to speak to personally". It’s a great gimmick – the image set-up, the metaphor, whatever you call it. The dramatic situation set up shows how you can write a poem real easy. All you have to do is imagine something as funny as that. Go talk to a subway or talk to the floor! – “Floor, why are you so…

Student: Flat-

AG: …hard on my heels”. “I’m trying to support you as best I can” – Seeing light always shining out the sky? – “Well, I was , just tryin’ to keep the rain off ya”. Well, you could talk to a microphone if you want. It’ll answer back and you’ll hear it. So anybody can write a poem, anytime, anywhere. All they have to do is think of something funny. An image. It’s got to be an image, and it’s got to be real, and it’s got to be clear enough so that everybody can understand it on a child’s simple level. It’s the child’s simple level, which is actually what everybody really is in their secret ear or mind, that makes it so engaging. Because Frank is Frank, Frank is being frank, his own “bang-tail mind” (was (Jack) Kerouac’s phrase, or (Neal) Cassady’s phrase) – “Oh, little bang-tail mind”. A poem iike that or Mayakovsky’s is like opening a door of the mind to all of the natural thoughts that we actually have, as children have them, and we have as old men. I think Anne (Waldman)’s class and others will probably get more O’Hara. I want to go back to Mayakovsky, because what I’m trying to do… What time now?

Student: 7.25

AG: Okay, what I’m trying to lay out now, fast (I’d better jump more then) is the heroic voices that took up, took off, after Rimbaud. That’s why I skippedLaforgue and I skipped Corbiere. Their voices were very “right”, very dictional, correct, dictionally correct. Their minds were smart, but that burst-of-sun language comes from Mayakovsky, as it came from Apollinaire, a burst of mellowness of language, a burst of humor which is 20th century. It really is an escape from the authority of the State , and the authority of Literature, and the authority of rightness and wrongness, and an escape and a refuge in the final authority of personal imagination. So it’s in a tradition of Whitman, it’s in a tradition of Thoreau, it’s in the tradition of Einstein, because Einstein says the eye altering alters all, or according to the measuring instrument, you space your universe. The space of the universe is determined by what instrument sees it, hears it, smells it, tastes it, touches it, or measures it with a light-year-telescope or rumor of mind… [tape ends here, second side begins in media res] – …at a very weird time when Stalinism had already begun to destroy Mayakovsky’s friends. The greatest Soviet poet of the century, I think, Sergei Esenin, had committed suicide, writing his name in blood on the wall of Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad, or (St.) Petersburg (it was Leningrad by then). I don’t have a text by Essenin yet. If anyone can get me one, I’d like to find “The Hooligan’s Confession” or “The Confessions of A Bum” (same poem, differently translated). I haven’t been able to get over to the school library and I haven’t found it in Brillig Works (the book-store) yet. Does anybody get over to the library? Here. Raise your hands if you get over to the U(niversity) of C(olorado) library. Could you check that out? – Esenin – Y-E-S-S-I-N-E-N (you might write that down, because I’m giving you the name of a great classic poem to turn you on) - or E-S-E-N-I-N, depending how it’s spelled. First name, Sergei – and it’s a poem called “Bum’s Confession” or “Hooligan’s Confession” or “Confessions of A Bum”. (Mayakovsky’s) “At The Top of My Voice” - So I think Esenin had already suicided, Mayakovsky defending himself against the party hacks, taking his poetry case to the public [Allen begins reading Mayakovsky’s “At The Top of My Voice”] – “Most respected/ comrades heirs and descendents…”…”there lived once a singer/ blood all a-boil/ who hated most cold water raw” – I’ll look up the footnote and find out what that’s all about.It’s some provincial Russian.. ah! “Mayakovsky has drawn health posters”. You see, he worked real hard for the Revolution and he got into poster art and public poetry.”Some posters urged people to drink boiled water against epidemics”, “A certain champion of boiled water, and an inveterate champion of raw water” – [Allen continues reading] – “Professor,/ take off those optical bicycles!..” [Allen reads through till the end of the poem] – “I’ll lift high,/ like a Bolshevik party card/ all the hundred books/ of my/ ComParty poems!” – 1930 – and then he committed suicide within several years. His suicide note – he was on love with a lady named Lili Brik (who’s still alive (1975), who was married to an essayist and living in London at the time, 1930. This year then, I guess, then. Lili Brik has a later interesting history as a great friend of the younger poets following Essenin and Mayakovsky’s vocal example – Andrei Voznesensky (and, somewhat, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, but more Voznesensky) and the wilder poets of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s in Russia, who did break through, and had to confront (Nikita) Khruschev in the mass party-hack assemblages of the government conventions. So Lili Brik was like the old Bohemian, tolerant, friendly, non-ideological survivor – by wit, by fame, by friendships (her sister married to a great Communistic poet, Louis Aragon). So it was like an international family, but still within Russia, still inside the Communist scene - still trying to transform that, in a sense, as the American poets have tried to transform the American scene. At that point, I think Brik was in London, he was alone. He didn’t really have anyone he could talk to, under attack by a bunch of “party hacks” (this is a phrase used in Russia for the subservient bureaucrats, the subservient officials, in the Writers Union, or the theatre, among the groups of theatre workers who were subservient to what is there called the “police bureaucracy”, which is a very apt phrase). Mostly party hacks and police bureaucracy out of the old tradition of Russian police state. They’ve evolved those terms, which are very useful because they are non-paranoiac terms and socially acutely descriptive. He had a play in rehearsal which was an attack on the party bureaucracy and I think it was cancelled and a note was put on the door that it was cancelled and he wasn’t told, and it was like the sign of doom for him that he no longer had power in the Writers Union, and could no longer defend himself and that what he thought was (a) great revolution had turned in on him and destroyed the poetics of his own time, beginning with all the Futurists who he was friends with, who got bricked out of the scene in 1920, ‘23, when there was a great theoretician, named (Anatoly) Lunacharsky, who ran the art scene in Moscow, and b(r)ought up all the Futurists, and got a really great poetry and painting scene going, and theatre and movies. By the time between 1935 and 1953, probably, the gossip in Moscow is that 20 million people were arrested, and 15 million never came back! – arrested and sent to Siberia! – 15 million didn’t come back. That was already closing in on Mayakovsky with the closing of his play. But his main concern was Lili Brink in London [Allen takes up the poem again] – “It’s past one o’clock/ you must have gone to bed”..”Look what stillness in the world/ Night has covered the sky with a starlit tribute/ At such hours you rise and speak/ to the ages, history, and the universe” – (And) then he shot himself. So there was this enormous surge that you get, a common- brotherhood surge that you’ll get again in (Federico Garcia) Lorca, particularly his “Ode to Walt Whitman”.

The audio for this class is available (starting approximately 26 minutes in) on http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_17_June_1975_75P018

History of Poetry 24 (Garcia Lorca) 

"and you. Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?"

 

(Federico Garcia) Lorca came to New York, hung around Columbia University quite a while, wrote big poems on the Brooklyn Bridge, as Mayakovsky did on Harlem, in 1930, probably '32, two years after Mayakovsky's suicide. Lorca was gay and killed by jealous cops or something, by Franco's Guardia Civile,Civil Guard. He wrote while in New York a book of Surrealist poems, and he was turned on, perhaps, by Salvador Dali, whom he met. I met Dali once and I asked him if he knew Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman" ("Oda a Walt Whitman"), and he said, "Have you read his "Oda a Salvador Dali?" So there was a Surrealist element mixed in and that comes out of (Guillaume) Apollinaire, and you can see some of the Apollinaire influence here, but you get that powerful personality and the voice here, as you have, somewhat more muted, in Apollinaire, but then (it) bursts out completely with the Russian poets, (as you can hear on the recordings, especially Esenin, where the voice boom(s) out from the chest and can be heard - I think in the room you could hear - even with that scratchy old record - the total resonance of a complete body put into the vocalization of the poem).

"Ode to Walt Whitman" - I'll read the first five lines in Spanish, because it's so pretty in Spanish, an so awkward, that you realize his mind is taking a very realistic jump so he can use the word "Bronx" in Spanish, as if it were "cocaine" or "Elysium" - "Por el East River, y el Bronx/ los muchachos cantaban enseñando sus cinturas/ con la rueda, el aceite, el cuero y el martillo/ Noventa mil milaros sacaban la plata de las rocas/ Y los niños dibujaban escaleras y perspectivas" - So it's like real Spanish. My Spanish is goofy but basdanom real Spanish, like - ni la reuda amarilla del tamboril. In English (there's a) reasonably good translation by Stephen Spender and J.L.Gili, done, probably probably late'30s, or early "40s, published by then at any rate [Allen then reads then, in its entirety, in English, Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman" - "Along the East River and the Bronx/ the boys were singing, showing their waists/ with the wheel, the oil, the leather and the hammer./ Ninety thousand miners extracted silver from rocks/ and children drew stairs and perspectives.."]

Okay. Well, so that voice you heard in recordings - Mayakovsky, Lorca, Apollinaire, Esenin, has its equivalent in the United States also, various poets. The nearest, Hart Crane, maybe the most powerful and sonorous, in terms of sonority. I'll continue with certain elements of (Ezra) Pound, certain elements of my own writing. I'll continue next time with Hart Crane, and some American writers of the '20's and '30's, who either have sound, or total sense, total mindfulness, or sometimes mindfulness and sound wedded. My father (Louis Ginsberg) will be here and will teach Keats (who I skipped over, purposely, because he taught me Keats, so I thought it better to get it directly from the horse's mouth, so we'll have a double-class).

 

Student: Will you get to Vachel Lindsay at all?

 

AG: Yeah, I might do that tomorrow. Depending on the time, I'll bring in Lindsay. I'll bring in Lindsay because it has good sound. Lindsay and Crane would be a very strange combination.

[class and tape ends here]

 

Audio for this class is available (audio that includes Allen's reading of Lorca's "Ode To Walt Whitman") at: http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_17_June_1975_75P018

 

History of Poetry 25 (A Brief Visit to William Carlos Williams)

AG: So what do you remember about our visit to(William Carlos) Williams?

 

Gregory Corso: I remember..

 

AG: You remember different things from me

 

GC: Well I remember you telling me about...

 

AG: Yeah, Gregory, myself, Peter Orlovsky and Jack Kerouac, all went to see Williams one afternoon. 1957

 

GC: ..about that.

 

AG: Yeah. Jack went into the kitchen with his wife, and his wife told him all about how she and Williams were young in Vienna when he was studying to be a medical student and they went to beer-gardens and there were lilacs or flowers all over, flower petals falling in the beer. Jack sort of romanced up his wife, Flossie, because Jack was used to his mother, so it was like relating to the older woman. And what did he say to you?

 

GC: Well, when I was in Paris I wrote him a letter for money

 

AG: Oh you did?

 

GC: And he sent me back a postcard saying, "Be careful where you buy your meat, on what street". So I answered him with a little postcard saying, "Well, all I wanted to do was buy a crazy white hat". Not too top class, but that was about the connection I had with Williams. I loved him. He was a doctor too.

 

AG: [quoting Williams' vernacular] - "I'll kick yuh eye"

 

GC: He brought babies into the world.

 

AG: I finally sat on the edge of the couch and said, "Well, Dr Williams, here we are, all assembled, what immortal words do you have for us?". So he pointed to the curtained window, looking out on the main street of Rutherford, and said, "There's a lot of bastards out there!"

 

[Peter Orlovsky 1933-2009]

 

 

GC: He liked Peter's work.

 

 

AG: Yeah. He was one of the few people to immediately pick up on Orlovsky's peculiar, awkward, reality, and he said that Peter was the best of the lyric poets among the young

(a very odd, and sort of classical, category for Peter).

 

History of Poetry 27 (Kerouac Mexico City Blues & Corso)

 

AG: We still have Kerouac and Corso to deal with. What time is it?

 

Student: Why don’t you keep on going.

 

 

AG: [Allen begins reading from Jack Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues”] – 5th Chorus, Mexico City Blues – “I am not Gregory Corso/ the Italian Minnesinger - / Of the song of Corsica”..”KIND KING MIND/ Allen Ginsberg called me”..” [reads next 10th Chorus] – “The great hanging weak teat of India… The Korea Ti-Pousse Thumb..” – “Ti-Pousse”, Canuck for “little thumb" (which is what his mother called Kerouac)  - “The Korea Ti-Pousse Thumb..”..”Spots of Foam on the Ocean” – [reads next 11th Chorus] – because the little epigraph (to the book) says; “I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses, my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus or from half-way through a chorus to halfway into the next”. – “Brown wrote a little book called/ The White and the Black…”..”A n g e r  F a l l s – “ For emphasis, bottom of the page – “(musician stops,/ brooding on bandstand)” – [reads 13th Chorus] – “I caught a cold/ From the sun..”..”Asking for more/ I popped out Popacatapel’s/ Hungry mouth” – He did this on a rooftop in Orizaba.. 210 Orizaba Street, Mexico City. Each morning with a little notebook, pocket-sized, getting up, shaking out his sleeping-bag, hanging it over the roof-edge in the sunlight to air, taking a cup of black coffee, smoking a giant bomber joint, and then writing the first thing that came to his mind in the first half hour. And so in three months (he) accomplished this Shakespearean sonnet sequence. [reads 17th Chorus] – “Starspangled Kingdoms bedecked/ in dewy joint..”…”Revisiting Russet towns/ of long ago/ On carpets of bloody sawdust” – [reads 24th Chorus] – “All great statements ever made/ abide in death”..”A bubble pop, a foam snit/ in the immensity of the sea/ at midnight in the dark”.

 

 

Student: What’s that number, Allen?

 

AG: Twenty-four – [Allen reads next 28th Chorus] – “The discriminating mind..”..”You suffer & you fall,/ You discriminate  a ball

 

 

Student: Ball? as in what?

 

 

AG: Well, “discriminate a ball” – meat. [Allen reads the 32nd Chorus] – “Newton’s theory of relativity/ and grave gravity…”..”Monotonous monotony/ of endless grape dirigible stars” [next, 36th Chorus] – “No direction/ No direction to go..” “(ripping of paper indicates/ helplessness anyway)”  [then, 43rd  Chorus] - “ Mexico City Bop…” --.”Bespeak thyself not, soft spot..” – imitating Shakespeare! – “Aurorum’s showed his Mountain/ Top/ Of Eastern be Western morning..” …“the lay of the pack/ in the sky”. [then, 230th Chorus] – “Love’s multitudinous boneyard/ of decay…”..”Like kissing my kitten in the belly/ The softness of our reward”.

 

 

Gregory Corso: That’s his top-shot poem “ the wheel of the quivering meat/ conception…” [Corso refers here to the 211th Chorus]

 

 

AG: There’s a very funny thing that’s pure sound [Allen reads Kerouac’s 217th Chorus] – “Sooladat smarty pines came prappin down..”..”twab/ twab/ twabble/ all day.”

[Allen then reads the whole of the 211th Chorus – and then] – Last chorus. Of the 242, this is a funny selection. Last chorus is actually an art of poetry – [Allen reads Kerouac’s 242nd Chorus] – “The sound in your mind/ is  the first sound/ that you could sing..”…”All’s well/ I am the Guard”.

AG: What time is it?

 

 

Student: Seven-thirty.

 

 

AG: Ah, we have some time.

 

[Milarepa (c.1052-c.1135)]

Student: Can you talk a little bit about why you chose the name - "the (Jack) Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics"?

 

 

AG: Because the tradition of the Kagyulineage is exposition of dharma, spontaneously, through training and experience, and reliance on no-mind utterance, no-mind utterance, or the rising of thoughts, the observation of thoughts, the acceptance of such thoughts in a friendly manner, and the tongue-ing of such thoughts without check or hesitation, as being the actual rhythmic movement of Buddha activity. Several years ago, when (Chogyam Trungpa) Rinpoche and I were discussing my own "career", I said I was tired of going around to poetry readings (and I didn't see howhe could keep up such a schedule of discourses cross-country), so he said, "Well, that's because you don't like your poetry". And I said, "What do you know about poetry?" (and) He said, "Why don't you be like the great poets, likeMilarepa? You don't need a piece of paper. Why don't you simply get up on stage and recite poems out of your mind?"

That's the idea of this school. Kerouac was the chief American practitioner of that, and first introduced me to that notion, and I think first really nailed down that notion into American consciousness, the idea of total spontaneity and acceptance of first-mind reverie, first thought, best thought, not revising because revising is always a question of shame, trying to obliterate traces of nakedness. As the sound in your mind is the first sound you could sing if you were singing at a cash-register with nothing on your  mind. So there's a certain early knowledge of sunyata, or empty mind, in Kerouac, which gives him a tremendous playfulness, and when I read through a lot more of Mexico City Blues to (Chogyam Trungpa) Rinpoche, several years later to that conversation, (19)74, he laughed, all the way from Vermont to New York, over the wit of the lines, and ended by saying, "That's a perfect exposition of mind". So it seemed attractive, and honorable, and charming, to found an academy in the name of Jack Kerouac, who died shunned and not understood by (the) academy, and to join the American tradition of awkward first-thought, eager stumbling blissful desire for some innocent utterance that would open the gates of heaven (which was Kerouac's version of beatific, or "beat") to the more ancient practiced tradition of spontaneous utterance historically echoed from Milarepa to Trungpa, who is the director of this academy - And the word "disembodied"? - I'm not quite sure what that means. That was Anne Waldman's phrasing (when I was stumbling as a head of the academy and she was doing all the work!), she gave a name to the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

 

 

AG: Ah, Gregory Corso - The other day Chogyam Trungpa (Rinpoche) gave a lecture on power, and tantric power, or power seen through tantric mind. A poem written in 1957 in Amsterdam? Gregory? Holland, Amsterdam?..

 

Gregory Corso: Amsterdam

 

 

AG: ... and I was struck by the similarity

 

 

Gregory Corso: Oh no, (19)56, San Francisco..

 

 

AG: I was struck by the similarity of statement, and also amazed, recollecting that Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was a good liberal man, saw this poem and thought it was a big Nazi poem, whereas I was seeing it as a big tantric statement for all, awkwardly that I knew of tantra. I was seeing it as a statement of non-attached mind, or a statement of non-attachment and egoless-ness. [Allen begins to reads Corso's poem "Power"] - "We are the imitation of Power..."

 

 

Gregory Corso: You forgot something.

 

 

AG: That's alright.

 

 

Gregory Corso: Say it.

 

 

AG: No, the students can look that up in the book.

 

 

Gregory Corso: Say it.

 

 

AG: Well it's dedicated to Allen Ginsberg. We were friends then. [Allen then reads the poem in its entirety - "We are the imitation of Power" -  (including a second section added on in 1958 - "Power is still with me! Who got me hung on Power"..."  - "My Power/ alive with a joy a sparkle a laugh/  That drops my woe and all woe to the floor/ Like a shot spy")].

 

 

Gregory Corso: Thanks for reading that one nice, Al

 

 

AG: Yes, that was good. What's the time now?

 

 

Gregory Corso: It's eight o'clock

 

 

 

AG: Oh well. Oh I had one last  tiny four-line poem to end. To switch the entire scene over to Jñāneshwar as a prelude to next term and a summary of everything that's been explained here in terms of both meditation lineage, here at Naropa, and, in the Poetics Institute, as a vocal lineage. Changdev here's a little tiny explanation - the reputed disciple of Muktabai, who is said to have lived for 700 years, has composed an elegant abhanga in praise of its teacher Jñāneshwar, his brother and sister. Another abhanga of his describes a final scene of the miraculous exit of the poet Muktabai thus (this is 13th, 14th  century) - "Jñāneshwar drank to his fill the water of pearls, Nivrutanath caught in his hands the freshness of clouds, Sopan decorated himself with a garden of smells, Muktabai fed herself on cooked diamonds. The secret of all four has come into my hands".  Thus speaks Changdev.

For those who want credit, please hand in a paper, either summarizing the gists and piths of this course, or an original poem. One page of summary will do, unless you're more verbal.

 

 

 

Gregory Corso: Do I have anything to do it with it, Al? When I took the class, do I have to correct any papers also?

 

 

AG: Gregory will correct anything written about him.

 

 

Gregory Corso: Ah-hah.      [class and tape end here]

 

 

The original audio of the above may be heard at

http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_19_June_1975_75P021 (from approx 31 minutes in).

(A so-far untranscribed 1988 class conducted by Ginsberg on Mexico City Blues is available here)

 

 

History of Poetry 28 (Death Is.. An Improvisation)

 

 

 One final transcript from Allen's 1975 NAROPA History of Poetry classes - this curious and lively in-class improvisation.Gregory Corso andW.S.Merwin were on hand on this occasion to add their contributions.

AG: The subject of today’s improvisation will be death. So, in answering the roll call, “Death is…”, fill it in. No reading from old books. No stumbling on your own old quotations. Death is your tongue speaking right now.

Student: Death is your obsessive angel.

AG: Death is pure obsessive anger? Is that what you said?

Student: Your obsessive angel.

Student: She thought she was holding but she’s six feet under now.

AG: Death is she thought she was holding but she’s six feet under now. Repeat the first line, then keep it going.

Student; Death is everywhere…hmm.

AG: Death is everywhere, Hum?

Student: Death is momentary madness.

Student: Death is all there, breathing.

AG: Death is all there breathing? That’s nice.

Student: Time is…

AG: Death is…

Student: Timeless void.

AG: No good, rejected, do it again. Two abstractions don’t make a concretion. You have to at least have one concrete and one abstract.

Student: How about “voidless time” instead of “timeless void”?

AG: Come on. Try again [long pause]  David [long pause]. Look at anything in front of you and say what it is [longer pause]. Look out of your eyeball and say what you see. Don’t look in your head. Just look out at anything in the room.

Student [after another long pause] Confusion.

AG: No, that’s another abstraction. You can’t substitute one abstraction for two abstractions.

[Another] Student: He’s getting closer, though.

Student: Is there a right answer?

AG: Yes, there’s a right answer. Just something concrete. Clamp your mind down on objects, an object in the room. Look out of your eyes. Don’t look in your head, look out of your eyes.

Student: Unborn flower.

AG: You don’t see that in the room. Give me a specific text. Just name one object in this room, with an adjective.

Student: Concrete wall.

AG: Okay. Death is a concrete wall. That’s better than “timeless void”. [AG calls out another name, another student’s name sounding something like “Shambodhichti”]

Student: Iron dog jumping through a hole in the earth.

AG: Death is an iron dog jumping through a hole in the earth. Where did you get that name?

Student: In death.

AG: Oooh.

[Another] Student : Death is recording this lecture on my tape-recorder.

Student: Death is my shadow on a cloudy day.

Student: Death is my favorite character in literature.

Student: Death is a silent piano.

AG: Silent piano, right, right in the room.

Student: Skin of your teeth, skin of your eyes.

AG: Come on, say it! – Death is skin of your teeth, skin of your eyes.

Student: No, I just like the line.

AG: No, no, you gotta play by the rules! – “Skin of Your Teeth” was the title of a play, anyway, you know.

Student: Yeah.

AG: “Skin of your eyes” is nice. “By the skin of your eyes” is a good phrase.

Student: Death is this day, all day, crazy painting white wall gig in Denver, rush to poetry class with three cylinder Volkswagen.

Student: Death is an erased blackboard.

AG: Death is an erased blackboard? Pretty witty.

 

 

 

[Flying skeleton via Mexicansugarskull]

 

 

 

Student: Death is a pole vault in Benares.

AG: A pole vault in Benares? Pretty esoteric.

Student: Death hurts.

AG: Death is..death fruits? – I can’t hear.

Student: Death hurts.

AG: Death hurts. Oh, death hurts, okay. That would fit in, though Gregory (Corso) wouldn’t agree. Once you’re dead, he’d say, there’s no death, so.. Well, cancer hurts.

Student: Death is breath is all.

Student: Death is what we practice when we sleep.

Student: Death is your flower.

Student: Death is our friend and lover.

Student: Death is randomizing your particles on magnetic tape.

AG: That’s the second time you’ve got that magnetic tape in there. Vandalizing the particles?

Student: No, randomizing.

Student: Death is the smell of a dying flower in a bunker of roses.

AG: Speaking of which, where were you the last couple of chain-poem (assignments)?

Student: Late.

AG: Late? Oh. Well then you owe three lines of death.

Student: Death is choking smokers in bunker rooms.

AG: And the third death?

Student: Death is choking smokers.

AG: Ahh, we need a fresh corpse!

Student: Death is fresh quotations upon request.

AG: Yeah, Cadavre Exquis, the Exquisite Corpse, was a form of drawing or painting that Surrealists used or Dadaists used in which they’d fold a paper, and one would start a figure, and then, without seeing the other, but where the lines ended on the fold of the paper, (Hans) Arp would continue, and then fold the paper, and then Tristan Tzara would continue, or whoever, (Francis) Picabiawould continue, and so they made what they called (an) “Exquisite Corpse”, which is a combine painting, or a collaboration painting or drawing, part chain-poem.

Student: Death is a cold hard knife, slashing at my flesh (indecipherable) death peace.

AG: Now make one up again.

Student: I made that one up.

AG: Yeah, I know, but you wrote it down, you cheated. You cheated!

Student: Fuck you!

AG: Death is fuck you.

Student: Death is flesh and flowers for gone Kerouac.

Student: Death is a busted universal joint in Grayville, Indiana.

AG: Gregory Corso

Gregory Corso: Death does not exist.

AG: Death does not exist.

Gregory Corso: Let me make one more. Death is a gimmick.

Student: Death is a window with screws.

Student: Death is a warm trampoline.

AG: Death is a warm trampoline?

Student: Well, I’m not registered.

AG: It’s alright. You’re on the list for auditing. We’re doing everybody.

Student: Death is nobody ever did anything that bad.

Student: Death is an old woman walking backwards.

Student: Death is being called on, but he’s not here.

AG: Ah, Death is being called on but he’s not here.

Student: Doesn’t exist, he can’t be here.

Student: Death is a blackboard.

AG: A black wart?

Student: A black board.

AG: Okay. The black wart.

Student: Death is a myth to die by.

AG: Death is a myth to die by . What do you think of that one,Gregory?

Gregory Corso: It’s top shot.

Student: Death becomes old hat after a while.

Student: Death is boredom in the garbage grid.

AG: Death is boredom in the garbage grid? If you insist.

Student: death is the last time you get off.

Student: Death is the ballad’s end.

AG: Death is the ballad’s.. ah, that’s too corny, come on!

Student: Death is wrestling with self.

AG: Ah, that’s too corny.

Student: Death is no smoking.

AG: Oh well, Death is wrestling with yourself, no smoking.

Student: Death’s illusion counterpoints life’s orgasm.

Gregory Corso: Oh dear!

Student: Death is the ultimate.

AG: The ultimate? The ultimate what?

Student: Zapper.

AG: The ultimate hand gesture zapper.

Student: Um-hum.

Student: Death is a warped phonograph record.

Student: Death is a beautiful woman I encountered in my dream.

AG:  Umm. What color hair?

Student: Black.

Gregory Corso: Edgar Allan Poe again.

Student: Death is so boring.

AG: Huh?

Student: Death and whatever.

AG: Death and whatever? One abstraction, you need at least one concrete and one abstraction.

Student: Absolutely.

AG: Death and absolutely whatever?

Student: And so on.

AG: That’s three abstractions in a row. Just throw in one microphone. Come on, just one concrete object.

Student: Death and a booger.

AG: Huh?

[Several] Students: Booger!

AG: What’s a “foe-gurt”?

Student: Booger!

AG: Booger, Okay.

Student: You look like a booger, Allen.

AG: Okay, Death looks like a booger. I keep saying, don’t let yourself be embarrassed by your false unconscious – William Merwin [alongside Corso, the poet W.S.Merwin is also in the room]

W.S.Merwin: Death is the dust of the piano.

AG: Death is the dust of the piano, microphone  - David Rome?

David Rome: Oh shit, Death is… next door.

AG: Next door? Well what next door?

David Rome: In the music store, next door, before I came here.

AG: Death is…not think. All you have to do is not think.

Student: Death is life laughing.

AG: Life laughing? That’s too abstract. Well, I guess laughing is, I suppose, concrete, you might say. Death is laughing, twiddling our beards.

Student: Death is an unpeeled tomato.

AG: Melissa Sprowl?

Student: I’ll take it. Death is your feeling of  being alive.

AG: Why is it an unpeeled tomato?

[Another] Student: I liked that line.

 [& Another] Student: I liked that too

AG:  What made you think of that?

Student: That was the line I said before, on Monday.

AG: Death is eating the same unpeeled tomato twice!

Student: Death is the donut we spend our whole life eating.

Student: Death is like graduating.

AG: Death is like graduating? Graduating where? what?

Student: From..

AG: Death is like graduating from..?

Student(s):  Naropa!

AG: The University of Oklahoma.

Student: Death is knocking.

AG: Anybody I didn’t get? What are you doing standing in the doorway, death?

Student: Listening.

AG: What is death?

Student: Listening.

AG: Death is listening. Anybody listening besides death? Yeah?

Student: Death smells, especially when it decomposes.

Gregory Corso: And that means a smell that is not very, you know, nice.

Student: Death is taking your pants off for nothing.

AG: Death is taking your pants off for nothing?

Gregory Corso: There’s nothing there.

AG: Anybody got any other lines they tought up?

Student: Death is welcomed with white eyes.

Student: Death is a pool cue in the hands of W.C.Fields.

Student: Death is a factory foreman.

Student: Allen, I came in late. Death is a mocking boy sucking on my windshield, laugh off, fucker.

AG: Any other Deaths here?

Student: Death is a donkey trying to be Ulysses S Grant.

Student: Death is my name.

Student: Grey plastic bag.

AG: Death is a green plastic bag.

Student: Grey

AG: Grape?

Student(s): Grey!

AG: A grey plastic bag.

 

 

Gregory Corso: Alright, Ginzy. What is death?

AG: Death is the end of the poem.

Gregory Corso: No, you laid it out the other night. It was beautiful.. Do you know what you said?

AG: “Ah poor death!”

Gregory Corso” No, you said, “Gregory, why pick on poor death?”

AG: (I wasn’t intending) such a poem.

Gregory Corso: That’s top shot.

AG: Now, going back to life, coming back to life.

Gregory Corso: Oh great.

AG: Can I have a cigarette, please.

Gregory Corso: See, you’re playing with death.

AG: death smokes in a death fire

Gregory Corso: Does anyone have another kind of cigarette?

AG [to straggler] – Did you get here in time to answer? No. What is death again? Death is..?

Student: (indecipherable)

Gregory Corso: That’s good enough.

AG: Not in a poetry class.

 

The original audio for this transcript (a roll call with improvisation) is available at: http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_18_June_1975_75P020A,  (for the first approx. 25 minutes)

– Grateful thanks (once again) to Randy Roark for the transcription. Transcriber’s note: “I have deleted extraneous material and transcribed only that which I believe to be to the point. Names, repetitions, etc have not been included”.

 

History of Poetry 29 (Another Classroom Improvisation)

[Kobun Chino Roshi, sitting Sesshin, Naropa University, July 1989. photo.c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

 

 

We recently presented the “Death Is..” Improvisation”. Here’s another, from our continuing NAROPA lecture transcriptions (from a class conducted on July 9 1975, where Allen’s special guest was his father, Louis Ginsberg).

 

Randy Roark explains (and notes): “ The class begins, again, with a roll call. This time the students have to respond by saying whatever is on their mind. As the roll continues, Ginsberg begins to try to steer the class into composing a continuous poem about their environs. The following transcription is much edited from the original tape (for instance, deleting the call-and-response of the student names and (other) non-essential material for clarity’s sake), but will (hopefully) somewhat demonstrate Ginsberg’s poetic teaching in action.”

 

AG: We’ll take the roll again, only this time will you answer by presenting whatever is in your mind, not what’s on a book or not what’s written down on paper. If you can remember a line of your own, from your mind, then do it, that’s alright. But no quoting anybody else this time. [The first student responds “Here”] – It’s got to be more than three words.

 

Student 1 : Dark, humid, starting to rain, thinking about the day

 

S2: Tinted haze encircling the moon.

 

AG: It’s getting very pretty.

 

S3: I was thinking about going to the Dathun..And I was also thinking that..

 

AG: Condense it. Thinking about the doc? Going to the doctor? See, I can’t hear. Thinking about going to the Dathun? And also?

 

S3: It seems like it would be better than going to..Sesshin

 

AG: Thinking about going to Dathun, better than going to Sesshin. We might keep it on the.. we’ve got a line going now.

 

 

[Dathun meditators, via Karme Choling Blog]

 

S4: In the land of Buddha…

 

AG: Well, how about here, in Boulder? Because everyone was up in the air with the weather and the mental thought of the moment. It might be interesting to get a poem continuous about the planet and the weather and Boulder (Colorado) and the mountains and where we are.

 

S4: It’s a long walk to here

 

AG: Where’s here?

 

S4: (no answer)

 

AG: It’s a long way to Sacred Heart

 

S5: Through the forest of pianos that makes no rustle of keys

 

AG: It’s a long way to Sacred Heart/ Through the forest of pianos that makes no rustle of keys.

 

S6; Oh, the intrepid tubers!

 

AG: All the intrepid tubers? Okay, so the next one, see if you can follow-up the “intrepid tubers”

 

S7: Perforated reality.

 

AG: All the intrepid tubers/ Perforated reality. Remember, keep it to where we are, or getting around to where we are, or keep it in a straight line.

 

S8: No night falls without magic free?

 

AG: No night falls with out magic free?

 

S9: The mind plays empty

 

AG: While it’s doing what?

 

S9: That’s for the next person

 

AG: Okay. But we’ve still got to keep it on the street, leaving Sacred Heart, or we can make some sense, at least. We’ve had some tubers perforating reality while the mind plays empty

 

S10: The harmonium works on a hinge, so too the human voice.

 

AG: The harmonium works on a hinge, so too the human voice.

 

S11: It’s one light-switch up, one light-switch down.

 

AG: One light switch up, one light-switch down. Allen, flick the switch [the next student’s name, Student 12, is Allen Flick]

 

S12: (indecipherable)

 

AG: What were you thinking when you were thinking?

 

S 12: A combination of total emptiness and paranoia.

 

AG: One light switch on, one light switch off/ total emptiness and complete paranoia

 

S12: Thank you.

 

AG: You had it. Although you might have been a little more specific about the paranoia. I mean, if we’re going to be concrete in the poem..

 

S13: For an invitation to the open poetry-reading, Thursday night, Room 10, 7PM.

 

S14: That’s like a commercial.

 

AG: Total emptiness and total paranoia.

 

S15: To get there I eat of the poetry reading, you have to pass the red barn, comma, a truncated fetus.

 

AG: To get there I eat at a poetry reading, you have to pass the red barn, comma, a truncated fetus. Good.

 

S16: Ripped toes, big skin.

 

AG: You stumbled on the barn? Ripped toe, big skin.

 

S17: I can hear no one, they all have beards between their legs

 

S18: The day was not a color but a sound.

 

S19: Stained keys, black and brown pianos, a hole in my side.

 

S20: Coffee and cherry pie with calcium proportionate and the record head might not work.

 

AG: Coffee, cherry pie with calcium proportionate and the record head might not work?

 

S20: I tried it, though, and it does.

 

S21: Debating the pros and cons of saying that I’m here.

 

AG: Were you here last time?

 

S21: Yes I was and you missed me last time

 

AG: So what was your line last time?

 

S21: You missed me.

 

AG: What was your line last time?

 

S21: You missed me. I just got a chance to say you missed me and then you went on.

 

AG: And your line this time, “Debating the pros and cons of saying that I’m here”?

 

S22: With soft ill though saving it for later.

 

S23: I don’t like the altitude anymore. It only makes me thirsty.

 

S24: Thoughts gathering on the shimmering lips of the mind.

 

AG: Thoughts gathering on the what?

 

S24: On the shimmering lips of the mind.

 

AG: On the shimmering lips? Speaking of thoughts gathering on the shimmering lips of the mind? It’s not bad because I’m thinking about the situation, but it would be interesting if everybody would lay out something that was outside themselves. Still in the atmosphere, because we started in the atmosphere and it was a good beginning. You realize that if you listen ti everything that’s going along, there’s a continuous chain of thought forms, that we could actually create a “chain poem” - Do you all know what “chain-poems” are? - A chain-poem is when a lot of the Surrealists (and a lot of other people way before – the Japanese and the Chinese also used to do it) contribute linked verses, line after line, going around in a circle, or people spontaneously uttering lines and then (having them) taken down by a scribe, or by a tape-recorder, but everybody conscious of the fact that they were writing a poem, not a bunch of fragments. And so the humor was to cap the other person’s line. Relating to the last person’s line. So, “The shimmering lips of the mind…”

 

S25: Day and I were sitting on the fence. One got off, and the other commenced, “Why do I give a shit, I didn’t see it”.

 

AG: Who was sitting on the fence with you?

 

S25: It was day and night.

 

AG: Day and night were sitting on a fence, one got off?

 

S25: The other commenced.

 

AG: The other commenced, “What do I give a shit, I didn’t even see it”. Does that come out of the “shimmering lips of the mind”?

 

Louis Ginsberg: [Allen’s father is present, guest-lecturer in the class] –Shimmering lips wouldn’t say those words.

 

AG: Shimmering lips wouldn’t say those words, says the elder Ginsberg. Did they ever say “shit” in your class?

 

Louis Ginsberg: No, not in mine.

 

AG: Well, this is a class in spontaneous poetry.

 

Louis Ginsberg: No, no. Those were the olden days/

 

AG: In spontaneous poetry, all they can come out with is “shit’ all time! Last time, my big teacher’s comment [Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s?] was “a bunch of coprophiliacs!”

 

S26: Red lips, big fat lips, eat the mind.

 

AG: Red lips, big fat lips that eat the mind?

 

S27: And say “No Smoking” above the blackboard psycho-cultic eclipse of personalities.

 

AG: Red lips that eat the mind/ and say “No Smoking” aboard the blackbird psycho…

 

S27: No, “No Smoking” above the blackboard psycho-cultic eclipse of personalities.

 

AG: Psycho-cultic eclipse of personality?

 

S 28: Lips don’t eat anything. They don’t have to have teeth

 

S 29: I didn’t hear what you just said

 

AG: Something about teeth. It was a dental image. You can continue with laughing gas.

 

Louis Ginsberg: Put some teeth in it!

 

S29: White, gold, black, enamel

 

AG: What ? White, gold, black, enamel what? teeth?

 

S29: White, gold, black, enamel teeth

 

S30: White, gold, black, enamel . You’re such a fine, fine fellow, but you almost missed me, you almost missed me, because, because you said, “Bullshit, bullshit, blullshit” , and then you went for the quick hit, quick hit, quick hit.

 

AG: Pretty good. Rhythm. Okay, now we’ve got some rhythm going.

 

S31: Boulder would be Valhalla if it only had a jack-in-the-box

 

AG: Boulder would be Valhalla had it only a jack-in-the-box

 

S32: All my friends wear cockroach antlers.

 

AG: All my friends are cockroach handlers? That’s nice. “Wear” or “were”?

 

S32: All my friends wear cockroach antlers

 

AG: “Wear”, oh – All my friends wear cockroach antlers. “Cockroach antlers” is pretty good. I had a line like that – “Radiator cockroach waving your horns at the wall/ What’ll I feed you, I don’t eat meat at all/ Go tell the bed buggies they better stay out in the hall?” – for a blues.

 

S32: Does it have a melody with it? Mine has a melody ?

 

AG; [singing] “Radiator cockroach/ Waving your horns at the wall/ What’ll I feed you/ I don’t eat meat at all/ Go tell Mr Bed Buggie/ Better wait out in the hall”. [This is his “Come Back Christmas: Blues Stanza” from “First Blues”]What was yours? You had a melody?

 

S33: [singing] : “All my friends wear cockroach antlers/ hmmm/ cockroach antlers / All my friends wear cockroach antlers/ Dah dah dah do dah”..

 

AG: That’s rhythm n’ blues. Mine was a blues. Yours was more of a rock n roll.

 

S33: Walt Disney.

 

AG: Walt Disney?

 

S34: Smith and Barnes of Chicago have just started a psycho-cult to eclipse our personalities.

 

AG: Smith and Barnes of Chicago have just started a psycho-cult to eclipse our personalities.

 

S35: (indecipherable)

 

AG: Louder

 

S36 (for S35): The hormone hit Paris. The thyroid roamed Italy

 

Louis Ginsberg: Ginsbergs can’t hear it.

 

S36 (for S35): The hormone hit Paris. The thyroid roamed Italy.

 

AG: The hormone hit Paris. The thyroid roamed Italy. Just louder, that’s all.

 

S35: The hormone hipped pear, a thyroid puberty

 

AG: The hormone hipped pear, right? – A thyroid hit puberty?

 

S35: Just a thyroid puberty

 

AG: A thyroid puberty

 

S37: So let’s start a rumor or myth.

 

AG: So let’s start a rumor or..?

 

S37: Or myth

 

AG: A myth. Let’s start a rumor or a myth.

 

AG: Is Al Santoli here? (left under my bed when Gregory Corso departed to his other apartment was half a poem of yours). What’s your line?

 

Al Santoli: The difference between a man and a hawk. A hawk smokes a pipe and a man flies through clouds.

 

AG: The difference between a man and a hawk. A hawk smokes a pipe and a man flies through clouds.

 

S38: Reconstructed ocean, my saltwater body oozes itself .

 

AG: Reconstructed ocean, my saltwater body oozes itself .

 

S39: People call me Jean, at home, in the oven.

 

AG: Good luck sir, don’t burn it. Were you here the last time? [looking at class-roster].

 

S39: Yes

 

AG: Then I goofed then. What was your line last time?

 

S39: Help, I’m alive.

 

S40: We could break off the antlers and put them in Larry’s sock-hole.

 

AG: Sock hole? We could break off the antlers and put them in Larry’s sock-hole. What’s a sock hole? A sock hole? A hole in a sock?

 

S41: Music is raining on the mike.

 

AG: Hmm. Music is raining on the microphone.

 

S 42: I wish I were

 

AG: you wish you were raining on the microphone. You were here last time too, weren’t you?

 

S43: With one squeaky galosh

 

AG: You wish you were raining on the microphone with one squeaky galosh.

 

S44: Let us, let us, let us, let us

 

AG: Let us, let us, let us. Is that “to eat” [i.e. “{lettuce”] or “to be permitted”

 

S44: Both

 

S45: Florid green illuminescence playing beautifully

 

 

[Aqua luminescence, via Vancouver Aquarium]

 

AG: What was the vern?

 

S45: Verb?

 

AG: Florid green illuminescence…

 

S45:..playing beautifully

 

S46: On the way out of the Boulderado Hotel, two old ladies smeared in rogue, has Roman clowns and clouds of jasmine.

 

AG: Two old ladies smeared in rogue and..?

 

S46: ..has Roman clowns and clouds of jasmine.

 

AG: Has Roman clowns and clouds in jasmine. Okay, Louis (Ginsberg)?

 

Louis Ginsberg: Yes, sir.

 

AG: What’s your line?

 

Louis Ginsberg; What’s the good word? “Is life worth living? It depends on the liver”. “Not having beard as a bard, but with Allen it grows on you”.

 

AG: He says that to all the classes!

---

 [JAB1]9:20

 [JA2]Min 22