Spontaneous Poetics - 77 (Typography - 2)

AG: In that area (typography) (William Carlos) Williams is interesting. And Charles Olson, in a way, is a champion typographer, in the sense that he's making use of the scattering of the lines on the page, very literally, to indicate breathing, breath-stop. Here typography and breath-stop come together. I read a few samples of Olson and I haven't prepared any for today because I just wanted to go on, but some of you are familiar with it, and just take a look at his page in (the) Maximus (Poems). He also adds that the typewriter as a writing tool has given us new suggestions for typography - following a suggestion by Williams. Williams, as I mentioned, used a dot in the middle of the line to indicate, not a sentence-stop, not a period, but just a break in thought. So Williams pulled a dot up, the period up, to the middle of the line. It doesn't fall at the foot of the ladder, it falls in the middle of the ladder. He had to roll his typewriter up to put the dot in there. If you look through Williams, the later poems, you'll see the odd use of dots.. or in Paterson, it's not exactly a period (though it functions as a period - but also functions as a period for an unfinished sentence, or unfinished thought, or thought which goes awry).
Olson noted that the slash bar is another piece of punctuation that people could use. It didn't mean a period, it didn't mean a comma, and it didn't mean a hyphen (although it was somewhat approximate to a hyphen in linking words together) - Are you interested in youth/age? (youth-hyphen-age, but youth-slashbar-age is for either/or, it doesn't mean "and" - the hyphen means "and", like youth-and-age - youth-age, but the slashbar means "or" - so it's a functionally swifter way of saying "are you interested in fucky/sucky?" (fucky-slashbar-sucky).

Student: Olson also used a lot of open parentheses. One parenthesis.

AG: Yeah, That's a really weird one, because it's confusing, But it's just like the mind...

Student: Yeah

AG: ...because you begin a divagation, and you never do finish it. You just go back to your subject. You might break off with a dot.
He also says the typewriter, because it has even spacing - it's not like somebody's handwriting - so it standardizes the eccentricity of individual writing. In other words, you can still be eccentric, arrange your poem on the page equivalent to your breath,( like a painter), or equivalent to your mind, (like one half of the parentheses started but never closed), but, at the same time, it provides a standardized form of those arrangements. It might get too crazy if everybody had their own handscript typography, but with the typewriter, it provides, sort of, a set of keys, or a set of symbols. You can go one space, two spaces, three spaces. You can have a margin. You can have slashbars, you can have "etc"s, you can have ampersands (ampersand is the "and" that looks like a musical staff bar) (&) you can have dollar signs. So he recommended more attention to the typewriter, primarily. People who write on typewriters get into that. Robert Creeley used to always write on typewriters and so his poems look like they were written on typewriters. He adjusted his short lines, the single short lines that you can see neatly put down, rolling up the typewriter, typing three or four words per line. Williams wrote on the prescription pad and so his poems look like they were written on prescription pads sometimes. They have that form...
which leads to another, either sub-section of this, typography, or a whole new node of thought, about arrangement of the mind on the page and the breath on the page, which is the original condition of writing. Conditions of writing. So do you write on a prescription pad? - or do you write in a short notebook that you keep in your back pocket? - do you write in a big schoolbook, that will take a long line? -  do you write on a giant ledger book? -  do you write on the typewriter? - do you write on buses? - do you write in bed? - do you write everywhere? - If you have a short notebook (or if I have a short notebook), I notice that I tend to write little short poems (like Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, which are also written in little notebooks - and that's why the Mexico City Blues page looks like the page of a notebook - every one of them just one page long, each one of them fills up a page) . So the circumstances and conditions of writing do have an effect...

Student: Allen?

AG: ... because they do suggest..

Student: I have a whole bunch of 28-line poems...

AG: Yeah

Student: ...that I got off lined paper. 


Yeah, and then it changed, the style changed. Yeah, I feel that sometimes I get in the mood of wanting to have a notebook that has no lines, and sometimes I want a notebook with big lines. So I wouldn't laugh it, in the sense that it's really important. It's just like (if) a painter has a real big canvas then he can paint a big painting. If you have a big notebook you have a tendency to write big long lines. If you want to write like (Walt) Whitman, get yourself a giant ledger. If you want to write haiku, get yourself a little tiny notebook.

[tape ends here]  [to be continued]

Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima Reading Naropa 1974

[Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Diane Di Prima]

Another vintage Naropa audio, following on from this and this. This, arguably the earliest - from 1974 - Allen, Anne Waldman and Diane di Prima at the nascent Naropa Institute, July 30, 1974 - in two parts.

"Can you hear in the back? - Raise your hands if you cannot."

First part:   After introductory remarks, the reading-order and format is established. Anne Waldman: "I'm going to start, and then Allen will read and then Diane, and then I think we’ll have a short break, and then we’ll go round quickly again. First set we’ll each be reading about twenty, twenty-five minutes each, and then we’ll take a break and then we’ll all come back" - Anne begins with her poem "Bardo Corridor", followed by "Lady Tactics", followed by "Light and Shadow" (another, as she describes it, "list poem"). Next come "a few crazy New York City poems", beginning with "How the Sestina (Yawn) Works", "another New York City prose-poem", "Brinks of Fame", and "Summer Revolution New York" (Anne, significantly, would change the concluding line in this poem from a male to a female pronoun) - Allen can, at various times, be heard, at the conclusion of poems, off mike, muttering his approval - Anne continues with "part of a poem called "Life Notes".." and (at, approximately twenty-five-and-half minutes in), "one more".."a chant poem done for everyone", a spirited rendition of her, perhaps best-known poem, "Fast Speaking Woman"  

Allen Ginsberg's first set begins approximately thirty-five-and-three-quarter minutes in, beginning with  "Manifesto" ("Let me say beginning I don't believe in Soul.."). This version has a few small syntactical changes compared to the published version. He then introduces what will be a substantial proportion of the rest of the set ("What I've been reading from are from journals and notebooks, poems that I'll probably type") - "There was a news story I saw in the Denver Post ((or the) Sacramento Bee) a few days ago, saying that the Food and Drug Administration was considering banning sassafras. It was in the Denver Post, it was in yesterday's Denver Post. This is a poem written under the effects of powdered sassafras, an intellectual poem in the sense that there is some observation of present reality [1974] but a great deal of it is just thought association" [Allen begins reading] "Is Dulles airport run computerized by Kwan-Yin?.."..."We who depart from Washington to Portland, Denver, New York, United 157, bleak passengers dressed for cloud travel neck ties wool sweaters.."..."Was it sassafras, white fruit powder I gummed in the Aztec Yankee small plane uplifted from Lexington..?"..."What plane for the planet? How can I scream at the army, scream at the police the military defense the airport freaks enthusiasts orgiastes of space of thrill, myself right now high in atmosphere above the planet's cloud.."..."There's only one thing better than looking out of the window and writing poetry and that's sitting silent in meditation and indifferent to sense phenomenon.."..."6.28 p.m. flying across the continent Portland, Atlantic to Pacific..".."same as not being high, being high, everybody agrees..." - subject-matter of the poem then shifts - "all day cross continent, Nixon's voice transcripts in the Times, his expletives...yes!, that's the language of the President of the U.S...same as mine!"..."one set language public, another set private, different, that causes schizophrenia - just like me and the FBI!.."..."Can Nixon save his ass?"..."And since his "peace" a year ago, 800,000 refugees, 50,000 dead since his war end, 70,000 wounded by our guns and money-machine, Food For Peace fund, $350 million stolen...".."He spent 3 billion dollars last year South Vietnam and Indo-China war.. and only half a billion all Africa and Latin America starving combined.."..."No one can read all the papers...".."It'll all come out some day - too late"... "and I ride this plane United, consuming orange juice gasoline like General Westmoreland, or any airplane murderer cushioned above the clouds, dropping thought bombs across the nation, calling for its Fall...") - A second journal-entry work (about out-door carpentry and laboring (at Kitkidizze) is titled "Energy Vampire" ("Tapping star drill into new porch foundation sill, chipping knots.."..."Who am I wandering in this forest, building a house with young men?, I who never worked with back or hand for decades in city or farms?"... "Words my seeds".. "What a pleasure not to have to do nothing but  sit virtuous and tired, glasses slipping off my blurry nose..".."Work work work, this inspiration proves I have dreamed"). Next, "a song, written in Boulder, 1972, May 10, which some will remember, it was tear gas around this neighborhood" - [Allen accompanies himself on the harmonium on "Tear Gas Rag"] -  ( "Tear gas, tear gas, tear gas tore my throat/Can't say my mantra/Tear gas got my goat/ Tear gas, o lord, tear gas/I can't find my mind/Bombing North Vietnam, I'm stumbling around blind/ Tear gas in Boulder/tear gas in my heart/Frighened on College Hill by Nixon's poisoned fart/ Tear gas here, tear gas there/Colorado and Saigon/ They'll be dropping tear gas every time I get a hard-on!"). Then, "Returning to the Country for a Brief Visit" ("In later days, remembering this, I shall certainly go mad") and (at approximately fifty-six minutes in) the title-poem, "Mind Breaths" (from the collection, Mind Breaths) -  "Last November, with many people probably in this hall, about sixty people from the.. who were disciples of Chogyam Trungpa, who was (is) the director of the Naropa Institute, I spent three months in Teton village, Wyoming, in a cafeteria that had been remodeled into a meditation hall. We sat.. We began the three-month period by sitting, two weeks solid, ten hours a day, meditating – and the meditation was - paying attention to the breath leaving the nostrils dissolving into space, beginning, say, with the end of the nose, into the space outside, so actually a meditation out here, reminding one of the space, like returning to the breath, every third thought, or every fifth thought, or every fiftieth. So here’s a record of fifty thoughts. ("Thus crosslegged on round pillow sat in Teton Space..."..."a calm breath, a silent breath, a slow breath breathes outward from the nostrils..")

    

For the remains of this first part,  (beginning sixty-five minutes in) Diane Di Prima reads - "I'm going to read from one long poem that I've been writing for over three (sic) years, it's called Loba - the she-wolf. I'm going to start by reading the piece that opens it, part of the first sections, which sort of sets the tone, and then I'll just skip through (Loba has two quotes beginning it, one quote is from an Indian song, and that quote is "It would be very pleasant to die with a wolf woman. It would be very pleasant". The other quote is from the Chinese Book of Odes, "The clever man builds a city. A clever woman lays one low")

Anne Waldman; We'll have a ten-minute break and then come back for a short set.

Allen Ginsberg: When we come back, what we'll be doing is trading back-and-forth shorter poems, sort of skipping back-and-forth and capping each other  

Second part: (begins approximately thirty seconds in) - Allen Ginsberg: We're going to do a second set, which will be trading poems back-and-forth in the same order - Anne Waldman - Allen Ginsberg - Diane di Prima - (Allen goes on to announce also an upcoming poetry reading by Jackson MacLow and George Quasha - "Quasha travels, MacLow rarely travels, and I think this is the first time that he's been in this part of America", also a reading by Diane Di Prima in Denver the following night) 
  

Anne Waldman begins - "This is a poem called "Pressure" ("When I see you climb the walls, I climb them too" - "No way out')
At approximately six and three-quarter minutes in, Allen Ginsberg (with harmonium accompaniment) presents a loose improvised version of "Stay Away From The White House" (incorporating sex, politics, race - and a (self-directed) injunction against smoking! - "Stay away from The White House/or you'll go to Vajra Hell")
Eleven-and-a-half minutes in, Diane di Prima reads - "I'm going to read a couple of short poems from Revolutionary Letters.  [to Allen] This was written on the day you read that May 10, 1972 poem. I was driving out of Tassajara that day to read in Santa Cruz and most of my audience was in jail, and I wrote this on the way to the reading, for them, for they were mostly not there. It's called "San Francisco Note" because that's where I was living then."..(and) "one more" - "This was written the night of a benefit I was at with Allen to free the Becks and the Living Theatre, who were in jail in Brazil at the time. I went home and wrote this after a long - till two a.m. - chant - free.. some of the people are now dead, or something else, but the poem is the same. What date was that '70? - 71? - 71 - Summer of '71 ("Free Julian Beck, Free Us, Dance!")
Anne Waldman - "This is a meditation written on a plane from India back to New York City - Delhi to New York City, after reading Time magazine! It echoes Diane's poem and it's called "Empty Speech" ("empty...")
At twenty-two-and-a-half minutes in, Allen Ginsberg  gives a rousing recitation of "Jaweh and Allah Battle" -
At approximately twenty-nine minutes, Diane diPrima again: "This is a poem called "Ave", "Ave" like in "Ave Maria". I wrote it about a.. It was sort of prefatory to the begining of Loba's story, I wrote it about a month before Loba began. It's kind of a poem to all the street women in the world, sense of myself as stray-woman-with-baby-wandering-over-globe kind of poem" (ends "Ah")
At approximately thirty-four-and-a-quarter minutes in, Allen concludes the proceedings - "I'll end the evening with a chant, as the chant "Ah" began, and ended, the (previous) poem. (I'll) finish with a.. This evening's over (as life must be also) - gate gate parasamgate bodhi svaha - gone gone - gate gate - ga.. [AW: "absolutely gone"] - ga - Sanskrit - go, ga, gone [AW: "completely utterly gone"] - completely gone - para (like parapsychology, paragon, big gone, completely gone, high gone, highly gone [AW: "highly gone" - DD: "utterly, completely gone"] -  and parasamgate - para, you know the Latin, para - well, same root, Sanskrit, Indo-European - para - sam - summa - completely most high gone, or completely utterly gone - parasamgate bodhi - which is mind - svaha - salutations -  gate gate parasamgate bodhi svaha (Allen leads chant, joined by AW and DD of the Prajnaparamita Sutra (or Heart Sutra)  

Friday Weekly Round-Up - 126

The DVD documentary - Jerry Aronson's  The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (2008) was re-released this week by Docudrama. What can we say? - If you still don't have it, an essential item.

Michael Kammen's essay on Jack Kerouac in the L.A. Review of Books, "Jack Kerouac's Restless Odyssey and His New Life 'On The Road'", (reviewing, among other things, Joyce Johnson's recent biography), has had some tongues wagging. 

Speaking of L.A, here's Elaine Woo's obituary of Taylor Mead in the L.A.Times (more memories and obituary notices on Taylor can be found here, here and here).

Meanwhile, in Northern California, celebrating the life and work of the great Nanao Sakaki. Here's three images of participants from last week's reading/celebration - Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, and poet and publisher Gary Lawless - taken by our good friend Steve Silberman.  
   








Ronald L Collins and David M Skover's Beat analysis, Mania (noted here in March) gets a "professional review", by Joseph Maldonado, in PsychCentral. 

One of the great unsung geniuses - Sid Kaplan, Allen's go-to printer for photographs, is profiled here.

Anybody hear how the Harry Smith seance went (in Portland, Oregon) yesterday evening? 

Spontaneous Poetics - 76 (Typography - 1)

["A manuscript page of an unpublished Ginsberg poem" - to illustrate the 1966 Paris Review interview]

AG: Typographical typography – topography – Typographical Topography – I invented that category!  - Topography – the way it looks on the page, the map, the map of the words on the page (or, that’s probably the wrong word, but, anyway, the typographical arrangement of words on the page) is another 20^th Century trick, or technique, or piece of shrewdness for arranging the lines on the page. This is for the eye more than for the tongue or the mouth.  And for that, you have to see the experiments on the page of Guillaume Apollinaire, around 1910, in which he was making little pictures of the words, literally, pictographs of the words – like “Il pleut”, a little poem about the rain, which has.. (I’ve forgotten if it’s in the same one, well, anyway… “Il pleut dans mon coeur, comme il pleut dans la ville” - the words are “ it rains in my heart like it rains on the town”) [Allen is indeed mis-remembering and is quoting Paul Verlaine here] The letters are arranged running down, like regular raindrops down the stage, and there’s about eight [five] streams of rain coming down the page 

He’s got another poem, “Mon coeur pareil à une flamme renversée"  (My heart like an inverted  flame”) [this poem is inscribed on his grave at Père Lachaise] - in which all the words are strung around like a Valentine. Around the edge of the Valentine there's all these little words.

And there were poems like that in English, way before. George Herbert's "The Altar"is arranged in the form of an altar.

And another poem by (Henry) Vaughan maybe, "Wings' (or maybe that's Herbert, I'll look it up)

Student: That's Herbert

AG: Pardon me?

Student: I think that's Herbert

AG: Herbert. Okay. So Herbert was the big experimenter at first. There were probably others but he was the funniest and the best poet to be working with that. "Easter Wings" - I'll show you what it looks like. [ Allen displays the poem in his book to the class] - I don't know how much you can see. Can you see the wings? Far off in the distance?. But what's funny is the verse-form here, which was also imitated by Dylan Thomas, the statements within the lines correspond to the size of the content of the line, or the statement within the line corresponds to the thin content of the line.

AG: While we're at it, there's an excellent poem by Herbert that we didn't cover - Did we cover Herbert? Did I cover Herbert at all?

Student(s): Yeah

AG: Yeah , Okay then, I'll leave it. There's that poem on "Death", the first stanza of which - "Death thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,/ Nothing but bones,/The sad effect of  sadder groans;/Thy mouth was open but thou could not sing.." - That's the beginning of a poem - terrific (but nothing to do with our subject of arrangement of lines on the page, at least for free, open-style, verse, which is what we're considering).

Herbert began, others picked up the trick. Dylan Thomas has poems which are vortices or funnels. Other poets have had poems about hourglasses which are in the shape of hourglasses. e.e.cummings is the American specialist in typographical painting or sketching. There's a poem about "the/.. balloonman/ whistles far and wee", and "far and wee" are scattered way off on the margin of the page - talking about in a park -"the../ balloonman/" whistling "far and wee", so "far and wee" are printed on (the margin). He experimented around with parentheses and balloons inside poems. You've all read a little cummings? Everyone's read a little. So you know cummings, you can look at it yourself, no big deal. 
He was a painter and he was involved with painters and he was interested in painting and he was interested in the eyeball aspect of the page. That has, generally speaking, less to do with vocalization and sound. It has a little to do with mental process, division of phrasings into mental units. So it's a contribution there to the psychology of poetics, or the physiology of the page, or the psychophysiology of the page. (I've never been too much into that myself, but I've worked with that, realizing that, in certain cases, a pyramidical form within a poem can be used to begin to make a statement, repeat the statement with an increased response, repeat it again with a longer response, repeat it again with a longer response - the litany form - regular litany. Litany is when you repeat the original statement and then answer it. And you can have graduated litany, in which the response got longer and longer until it was more and more ecstatic, or more and more hysteric.

So the examples of that are Part III in "Howl" - "Carl Solomon, I'm with you in Rockland/where you're madder than I am/... I'm with you in Rockland/ where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter/...I'm with you in Rockland/ where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica.." - there's a graduation or a lengthening, but there I've tried to make the lengthening correspond, not so much with an idea as with the vocalization factory, that is a louder and louder vocalization and bigger and greater intensity. I also used another rearrangement of that in the end of "Kaddish"  - "O mother/what have I forgotten/ O mother/what have I forgotten/ O mother/farewell/with a long black shoe/...with six dark hairs on the wen of your breast/...and long black beard around the vagina"... - and the lines get longer and longer until they get to a complete length of the page and then they begin graduating and diminishing again until they thin out at the end, as the voice drops and the consciousness becomes more and more sobered. In other words, building to a hysteria and then receding to a coda).

So there's that typography as an ideational note, as an ideational arrangement, as an idea or a trick, and this typography as painting, typography to measure out mental ideas and indicate their space written in the balloon of the mind, right there on the page, and then there's typographical arrangements to indicate vocalization, or to encourage vocalization, or to be identical with a form of the vocalization. Somebody had their hand raised?