The Allen Ginsberg Project

More Corso at NAROPA 1975 - 2

2012-02-02T03:17:00.000-08:00

Gregory Corso continues:

GC: Oh yeah, back to the '50's. The 50's answered Death, definitely. (The) Atom Bomb and all that - and Death was checked out, and it was checked out to be a gimmick, it was checked out to be a Big Con, and it was laid on to people in their culture and society. Everyone, they all went, millions and millions went (and they went physically, they went through pain, they went through what is called "suffering" - (by) Buddhists and all that). So, therefore, they got stuck on Death. The Egyptians show you that and it's just a big con. I said the other day, someone could come up with a bullet and say, "Here Gregory, you're dead", and it doesn't make no difference - I don't die. See, when I'm dead, I won't know it ever. You got it? See, so I don't know what death is, and I'll never know. Others will.

Alright, '5o's hang-up, Death, I think that was answered. I think the rebellion came because.. then you got your '60's, which is an extension that handled two other biggies - Love and God. God is Love. Love is God. Those were biggies. They're big words. So it proves, now, in the '70's, that Love ends up a bummer and (that) there was never a God for this nation (America). See? So both suck, see?.. So why they suck is so you've got Truth in the '70's, and you're at the top shot right now (you're in the middle of the decade - '75 - because all the changes came at the middle of the decade - '45, the War was over, '55, the Beatniks came with their "Death" shot, '65, you got your flower-children and all that, and now you're into '75, and you know there's a change). Huh?

Anne Waldman: I said there were other moments too.

GC: I know, there were The Carpenters [The Carpenters were the number one selling music act of the 1970's], and everything else.

Anne Waldman: No, I understand.

Allen Ginsberg [nominally, who's class it is]: Well, there was a change in poetry in '55.

Anne Waldman: Right, right.

GC: Don't interrupt my class!

Allen Ginsberg: I'm just defending you!

GC: Let me teach you something again today. I gave you firsts on things, I gave you first geomancy, of divination, I gave you the first man, right?, I gave you the oracles, right?

Do you remember who the first man was?

Student: (Loki?)

GC: Yeah, and what about his first depiction on the cave wall..

Student(s) : Shaman

GC: Shaman of what? Of what cave?

Students: Trois freres.

GC: There you go, Alright, What I'll give you today, we'll built upon that, because, remember, the first thing I said to you guys when I came into this classroom, I said to you, "I know all there is to know, because there ain't that much to know". And to prove that to you, I was going to give you your shot in your three days. And this is the last day and your shot is ending. I gave you sources (where you can check out from there). (You'll ramify.. all (of) your variables in life..) And that, to me, makes sense. It's not nonsense (that) you've got in your head, like how many baseball stars there were that hit home-runs, all that shit, but you get this real basic shot from your sources, human life. 'Till right now, '75, there was (is) a change happening now (it's a very mellow, a very cool one).

Alright, so the last one I'll give you is a game. Now, I won't say that's the way the game's played, but it makes sense to me. Alright? Now I'll give you the names of it and I'll show you the most difficult thing - none of you can do it, but I can - I can do a seven-pointed star. Can anybody here do it? Zap. And I'll show you how the game is played and draw a seven-pointed star, and (then) I'm going to go home and take a shower and fuck my woman and go and have supper. We call it "Friday the 13th".

Okay, here's your seven-pointed star [Gregory begins to draw] - Right? Seven points. We give the first guy.. what's the first guy? - the Phoenix? What's the Phoenix? What's Phoenix? - that's all your re-incarnation myth, right? Right?. What's the second one? It's The Wanderer, it's a goodie, nice, there's your Wanderer [Gregory continues drawing] - Who's he? Who's that? Who's The Wanderer? Do you know? - Alright, then you get this tough fucker..

Allen Ginsberg: No, who's The Wanderer?

GC: I'm gonna give it to them later. I'm gonna give them the shot first. Give 'em The Wanderer? - they should know who The Wanderer is - Yeah, there you go, thank you. I mean they should know that. These kids are not nineteen years old, they're in their late twenties and thirties..

Student: C'mon Gregory..

GC: I said maybe in their twenties, not in their teens - there was only one teen here the other day. How many teens here today? There you go. In that corner, they hang out.. Alright, The Knight is next, the third shot, because The Knight is the tough fucker, right? The Knight goes.. he lies to the woman (and) says, "I will kill you a dragon" (and she believes it!), and he goes out and says, "I killed your dragon". Great. She never saw it happen. There never was a fuckin' dragon he killed! - So then comes The Hermit. Now The Hermit you know who he is? - that's the person who goes on retreat, right?, (he) says, "Spare me" (he doesn't want to be bothered). One, two, three, four, Gregory - Now the fifth is a funny man, he's The Player. Who's The Player? Hey, yuk yuk, when you get to the other two, see who's The Player?

Student: You.

GC: Oh wow! Really? Bullshit! Watch it - See who comes next - The Joker. Who's The Joker? Watch this shit. Who's The Joker?. You give me "Player", you don't give me "Joker", who said "You"?

Student: I did

GC: Who is it? And you don't give me "Joker"?, you don't give me "Joker"? - Alright, here's the last act. (The) Dealer, right?. He sets it all up. Who's The Dealer? - Now that game tells you (that) the ball-game is over. So you start anew, right? - It's not a geometrical sum, it sucks. The whole game sucks, right? The whole game sucks, but that's the shot and that's what happens in life, I believe. It's all going under, going over, it's all this bullshit. Because really The Knight is in there. Remember I told you he fucked up he always fucks up? Between The Wanderer and The Hermit you get The Knight. The Dealer thinks he's a big deal because he plays the shot. He ain't no big deal. So that's the last thing I think I'll give you under "the Occult". Now we'll get to poetry.

Allen Ginsberg: Wait a minute.. The Player? What's The Player?

GC: The Player..is playing..

Allen Ginsberg: The one who got involved.

GC: I think the Player is The Joker and The Dealer. I think they encompass this shot, in fact encompass the whole number (but it's out of queue, Al, it's not geometrically so..)

Allen Ginsberg [perplexed] : Did you make this up, or what?

GC: That makes a Player of me, right?

Allen Ginsberg: Wait a minute

GC: Am I the creator of this? (this ancient game) - Yuck! Erase it, erase the whole thing! It's all Occult shit.

Allen Ginsberg: Okay.

GC: It's all Occult bullshit.

Audio for this can be heard at http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_3_June_1975_75P004 beginning approximately nine-and-a-half minutes in and continuing until approximately nineteen minutes in.

More Corso at NAROPA 1975 - 1

2012-02-01T03:16:00.000-08:00

[Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, Boulder, Colorado, 1974. Photo c. Rachel Homer]

A follow-up class to the one we’ve previously been serializing. Allen returns, recuperated, but Gregory still manages to take over/dominate the class!

NAROPA in 1975 transcripts.

AG: (It's like I'm)...substituting for Gregory Corso! He may actually show up. He and (William) Burroughs went off with some friends up to the mountains and (he) actually said he’d be here, so he may come in, and I brought some of his teaching materials along.

So what did you think of his teaching?, I wonder(ed). I heard the first day’s tape, which I’d heard described, and it did sound outrageous as a style, as Chogyam (Trungpa Rinpoche)’s style of being outrageous too. Can you hear me in the back? The one thing I noticed was that the material he presented I was somewhat familiar with. I had heard over the years different presentations of some of that material, but I had never heard it developed, or put together, so exquisitely, and actually, so coherently, so that the tape makes a remarkable text (in terms of Loka, which was what I was thinking about, which was that magazine they had last year [1974] that compiled some of the discourses and tricks of the teachers here, and students. The main thing that I got out of that Monday lecture was the Wheel of Years, the Great Year, the length of the Great Year. Did everybody understand that? Did everybody remember..what was it?..24,000 years, for the Great Year? How many remember that? That it was actually 24,000. How many did not? Were you here? Okay, what he was explaining was the concept of "the Great Year", as you will find it in William Butler Yeats, and in any number of more archaic Gnostic poets, probably (Percy Bysshe) Shelley mentions it too. Gregory?

Gregory Corso [arrives in the classroom] Hi – I’m so happy you’re here. I just saw the great mountains, the vista up there!

AG: I brought Shelley and I brought Minutes To Go.

GC: So why don’t you take care of it. You’re here, do it..

AG: You got anything?

GC: It comes out of my head. I never bring notes. Now I thought of this one today to bring, Minutes To Go. (It's icy... No, there won’t be Isis – that’s all religion again) – how long have you been with these people, Al?

AG: Five minutes.

GC: Five minutes?

Student(s): Twenty.

GC: Twenty, alright, the students and people in the class, twenty. What did you lay on them in that five minutes, so I can know, (connect)?

AG: That I listened to the tape of your first class .

GC: And you saw I made an error on the first tape, when somebody said “reality”, and I said, “the way I answer reality is I’ll call it and leave”?

AG: I forgot to mention that.

GC: Mention it, what you thought about it.

AG: When somebody asked a question.. on tape, it sounded like, “I’ll call it and leave”.

GC: No, I said, “I’ll call it an eve”!

AG: How many understand? “I’ll call it an eve” – E-V-E..

GC: There you go

AG: How many understood it as “leave”?

GC: More “eve” and less “leave” . But, because I was leaving with the eve! – Ah, yuk yuk.

AG: But, ok, there’s an enormous difference, aesthetically, between reacting to the question by saying “I’ll call it and leave”, to show what reality was, or (and) saying “I’ll call it an eve”, which is much more poetic. So, in other words, if we can’t give an example of a certain amount of delicacy of language, then we’re not teaching..

GC: That means that my conversation is fucked-up? That’s what you’re saying, right?

AG: No, no, no, that the hearing of “leave” is fucked up, but also [turning to the class] he (Gregory) doesn’t have so many of his teeth!

GC: Right, It was so embarrassing when I lost the uppers and I tried to say the “f’’s. It was very hard to say the “f”’s, but I got the “f” – “Flamboyant”, flamboyant? yeah, what?

Student: Too much hockey.

GC: Too much what? Too much hockey? Oh no no, I lost this in the service.

Student: What kind of service?

GC: Yuk Yuk Yuk

Anne Waldman [also present in the class]: Culture service.

Student: I was disappointed that we didn’t get to talk more about the evolution of poetry, since the '50s, (that's what I'd like to hear).

GC: Ah, I can give you that. And by giving you that, that would probably make the whole class today, because that’s the shot of what you’re at now. I think in the ‘50’s, something was woken up that had been.. (it) wasn’t dormant, it wasn’t there. It wasn’t something that was asleep. We had the big word in the ‘50’s, we really did. Here’s the guy who laid it on them, this one here [points to Allen] – It wasn’t a cut-up.. This here book, Minutes to Go, has all the cut-ups. It’s Burroughs book and I checked it out. I worked with him on a poem and I had written a poem in there.

AG: What’s the provenance of that. They’ve never heard of that, probably.

GC: 1958, ‘59

AG: Paris

GC; Paris, yeah. Burroughs says, you had one Shakespeare book in your hand and you cut it up, you had many Shakespeares, because you’re using it as words. But then again I saw it worked out, and they did it, and it made no sense at all. So I saw it was the “I”. You can cut something up, but the way the “I” sees the cut-up and says, “Ah, that’s a good line”, bam, it takes it. It’s still the tailor. It’s still the poet picking it out, that it’s not just by chance, automatically cutting something up.

AG: So this book was, I think, the first presentation of Burroughs’ cut-ups (that he’s been talking about this week), with some works by Burroughs and some works by Brion Gysin, who suggested to Burroughs the cut-up idea (from painting), and some contributions by Gregory..

GC: It was a ball working with Bill on two of the poems of Rimbaud called “To A Reason”. He had this big bowl in the room, and he said, so you cut-up the Rimbaud and translate it, cut it up, put it in a bowl, and whatever you pick out, it’s still his words - but in English. Here's one of them - I’ll give you one – “Everywhere march your head”. Alright. A cut-up of Rimbaud’s “To A Reason”, "A Un Reason"..

W.S.Merwin: A Une Reason..?

GC: Ah, ok, give it to me in French, Bill.

Student: "A Une Raison"

GC: Yeah, A U.N.E.. “To A Reason”

..o.k. [Gregory reads then from this, from his Rimbaud cut-up] – “A rap of sound. A turn urns back O…”..”Everywhere march your head.” - It’s very difficult for this poem. Now, here’s a second cut-up of that and look at the different words you get (out) of the same poem, called “Sons of Your Inn” ( but all these words are the same, (are) from Rimbaud).

AG: Rimbaud? A little poem from Illuminations? – You know that?

GC: Alright [continues reading from Minutes To Go] – “Sons of your in TC rib tent in..”…”see the new change know the time tea” - (that is cut-up from the one I read, but two different numbers). So, yeah, you can go indefinitely, obviously, by cutting these things up. You get bored after a while with the same one. But you can get good numbers. So it’s all by chance, but the chance takes the “I”, and some chance sucks, and some chance is a gas, see? So the guy knows that it’s a gas, and takes it out, and uses it, for the poem...

Audio for this can be heard at http://www.archive.org/details/Allen_Ginsberg_class_The_history_of_poetry_part_3_June_1975_75P004 Transcribed above is the first approximately nine-and-a-half minutes.

Happy Birthday Philp Glass

2012-01-31T11:07:00.000-08:00

[Philip Glass, Kiev Restaurant, 2nd Ave & East 7th St., New York City, June 10, 1993. Photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate.]

Philip Glass celebrates his 75th birthday tonight in New York at Carnegie Hall with a special concert (and the US premier of his 9th Symphony, expertly conducted, we don't doubt, by Dennis Russell Davies). There’ll be more celebrations later this month, including a five-night celebration at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, (“the Tune-in Music Festival”), which will include – and we’ve mentioned this before – collaborations by Patti Smith and Philip on the 24th, and with Bill Frisell, on the night before (that'd be the Thursday). Frisell and ensemble will be playing a work he composed to accompany a reading of Allen’s poem, Kaddish. Stage designs will be by Ralph Steadman, the event will be produced by Hal Willner. We’ll have more on that, and on Patti's contribution, (and, indeed, on Philip's contribution!) closer to the date - meanwhile.. Happy Birthday Phil !

- oh, and check out this interview with him by Gazelle Emami in the Huffington Post.

Pacific High Studio Mantras

2012-01-31T03:07:00.000-08:00

After the richness of the vintage Gregory Corso of the past week (and more to come), here's a little palette-cleanser - more mantra! - Pacific High Studio Mantras ("Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddi Hum"), old Tibetan mantra of Padmasambhava, tuned by Allen, recorded at Pacific High Studios, San Francisco in July of 1971 (subsequently re-mastered and released as the B-side of Arthur Russell and Allen's collaboration, "Ballad Of The Lights"). Line up is Allen on harmonium (and vocals!), Arthur on cello, Jon Meyer on flute, John Scholle on guitar, Alan Senauke, mandolin, Peter Hornbeck, violin, and "Reverend Adjari and Buddhist Chorus", bulking up, swelling up, the sound. This original version was produced by Barry Miles (subsequent, 2010, re-mastering was by Hal Willner). More notes on Allen and mantras here.

Gregory Corso continues (NAROPA 1975 Class - 7)

2012-01-30T06:34:00.000-08:00

[Gregory Corso, Boulder Colorado, 1974. Photo c. Rachel Homer]

Gregory Corso's 1975 "Socratic" NAROPA class (sitting in for Allen) concludes.

Earlier segments can be read here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Student: Do you have another book coming out?

GC: If I want to. Yeah, I don't owe anybody anything, my dear. I don't have to bring another book out, see? - but that's a shot, tho', right? Who owes who what? - I figured I should get a me(d)al. I tell you, I.. A poet should get a token. At least, I demand that. I don't give a fuck anymore, I say, give the poet his token. They take the weight, they're like the Lamed Vavnik, poets are the Lamed Vavnik, they take the weight of the world and they shoulder it. There's only thirty-seven of them at a time, thirty-seven, yes, at one time, and they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, they don't know who they are, but I can say so, my name is Nunzio, I announce, "I'm a Lamed Vavnik, and I carry the weight on my shoulders". Some people say that's arrogant?, but, it's all I can do - I don't give a fuck, I'm forty-five years old, I don't have to care. Why does forty-five mean that suddenly I don't have to care? Well, who's in their '40's here?..There you go.. and aren't they great years?..top class.. just for the poet-man.. alive, yeah.. so it's something good that you're referring to..

Where's Mr O'Brien [sic]? He didn't come today. Oh, I'm glad you came Mr O'Brien. You're the man that taught me the lesson, that I should never look at a person's face and think what race they are or (what) religion - [looking at Sidney Goldfarb] - "You look like a Goldfarb to me, all the way to me" - and (then) you're not! That was a goodie. That woke me up.

So did ya learn anything, you think, today? I don't know. Remember I'm just.. wow, I can cop out so nice..I'm just (sitting) in for my friend..

Student: Do you want to read poetry or do you want to go home?

GC: What I want to do is eight o'clock, I got a shot with Mr Burroughs. What time is it now?

Student: Quarter to seven.

GC: Oh god, it's early. There's nothing here for me to drink. I'm very uncomfortable. There's nothing here that I like. I like you people, but there's nothing here. Why don't I have water? why don't I have (soap?), why don't they take care of you? you're a host? [pointing to Michael Brownstein perhaps?] why don't you take care of your guests.

Michael Brownstein: Water?

GC: Thank you.

Let's see, I'll give you another fast poem, probably out of this thing [his unpublished manuscript] which I won't read tonight, and let's see how this works. See, that one, that was typed up, I worked on (it). Let's give you a cold one and see how it (reads) [begins reading from another unpublished poem] - "(The) God is sick..".."hurry, burn the magic whip" - oh, of course, "the magic whip"! - you'll love this [goes to the blackboard to draw] - "the magic whip" - "..boil the mercurial blood/ the Old Religion's back in town/and Doctor Faustus once again rides his horse ass-backwards" - do you know that about Faustus? that how he enters the town, it's always the horse going ass-backwards into town? Anybody know that? Jeez, you must know that, good old Faustus goes ass-backwards.. [Gregory continues reading] - "The Calabrian...churns plaster of Paris.." - Yeah, I got my Italians right there, they make classic Paris saints. Right? All the saints in Italy are plaster-of-Paris.

and the first one to make a Frankenstein-ian shot was the Jew in Czechoslovakia, Rabbi Loew made the Golem. Know what the Golem is? Anybody? the Golem?

Student: It was the statue that came to life.

GC: Right, statue that came to life and written on its head was... "emet" - and if you wiped off the "e", the "-met" means "death" ...and so it dies)

so, Rabbi Loew built this Golem to protect the Jews at Passover, because the Christians, at that time, (and it's the 15th Century), would say that they need(ed) a Christian child to make their leavened bread . And lots of Jews were hurt by that.

[Illustration of a Golem, the syllables for 'emet' on it's forehead. via Golem/wiki]

Okay, so, three rabbis who fucked-up, tried to make their own Golem. They ripped off the clay (when the men came and the Golem died), they ripped off that clay, and the secretary of Rabbi Loew joined the three rabbis to build another Golem to get money for them (yuk yuk). Alright, so these three rabbis got the clay from the Old New synagogue (it's called the Old New synagogue, in Czechoslovakia, Prague). They go and they try to make this Golem, and they make him - but they don't know how to stop him. And he gets very big, and is growing and he's growing and he's growing . And you got the three rabbis going, "Oh god, oy vey iz mir! I'm not involved with it! Someone's gotta stop him". And the secretary (who was with them) said, "Look, what you do is take the "-e-" off and he'll die, get the "-e-" off, (which means Life and "-met" means Death), rub the "-e-" off his forehead.. Right, now the other way you can do it, a wise man said, is, "Mr Golem, would you bend down and tie your shoe", right? So the Golem goes down like that, and they rub the "-e-" off, and the fucker falls on the three rabbis, and they're gone! That's a true shot.

Student [(Michael Brownstein) offering water]: So is that.

GC: Thank you very much. Oh, that's even more beautiful than water, juicy-poo vitamins - oh its got sprite in it - oh wow, we gonna have water with sprite!

I'll take back the.. I wanna see if...I (can) handle this for my own head. The other day when I spoke to you people, I said "I know all there is to know because there ain't that much to know". Alright. I want someone to lay something on me that I don't know. Now, but, I'm gonna give you a warning, it's got to be essential..to me.. ((no)...bullshit baseball to a pitcher.. at one time or other..).. there you go

Student: Can bad philosophy induce good poetry?

GC: From bad philosophy can come good poetry? Anything bad becomes good - it's a Dostoeyvskian shot? and you all should.. what's good, what's bad, becomes the same. They never did it to make (Al)yosha bad tho', did he? (Al)yosha never became bad.. Je ne sais pas. I would say on that one, I don't know. Yeah? - okay, that's cool enough - if I could pick on.. I could say - anything that's bad ain't gonna be good (I could do some dumb-ass thing, so I won't). So, You're asking again..what?

Student: Can bad philosophy...

GC: Can bad philosophy..

Student: become good poetry..

GC: No way. Can bad poetry become good philosophy, that's the question! Philosophy makes.. Fuck philosophy! You know how Socrates fucked up? This is the beautiful Socrates, to me, who died the most beautiful death, better than anybody - I mean Buddha, by bad pork! - and Christ, that shot upon a cross - yuk! - but Socrates, top shot. He says "Know thyself", right?, but he ends up saying, "All I know is that I know nothing" - and that's a cop-out. See, I don't dig the philosophers. See, and he put down the poets of the time .. because philosophers suck, all you've got today is teachers of philosophy, you've not got philosophy, so..

Student: But didn't he also say something that you (say's interesting), that people came to him, saying they know something about something, and he finally proved to them that they knew nothing about..

GC: He's a gadfly. I love him for that. I love Socrates, he's my man. He's my man, the only time

he sucked was when he said on his deathbed, "All I know is I know nothing", and that was a big cop-out. I mean it was easier to say nice things (so they (could) say - how humble! - "I know nothing" - shit!

(tape drops, returns in media res) ....what might mean something? You ever ask your parents that? - You're meat, right? You're (all) hairy bags of water.

You know what happened to me in Provincetown.. about a month and a half ago, was it? ..I had this Italian dude..who (liked me.. dressed.. ) a real paisano, he had a pizza place in Provincetown, right? but (was) supposed to be intellectual, right?

so, one day I told him, "I'd like to suck your great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandmother's dick!"

(and he goes) "don't talk about my family that way!"

- Fuck him - that's why I am (an ego, right, an ego).

Another shot was good that I played there in Provincetown (they all came at me at once these shots). I went up to a person in the street and said "Er.., I can disappear before your eyes?". So they say, "Go ahead!" - (and I want to) hit them over the head! - that's how I disappear! - by killing them!

Alright, I think you should ask me more questions, you know. I don't think I should have to exercise my head too heavy before this eve.

Student: Before, Gregory, you were talking, a while ago, about (Jack) Kerouac's trying to remember the first thing you remember before you die

GC: Right.

Student: What context is he talking about?

GC: Well, he said he wasn't talking (about) if you were hit by a car, I don't think (try to think when you're coming out of the car, man!) - actually, he was thinking of a very philosophical nice death, you know, Socratean. right?, with everyone around - "where are you going?"..you take hemlock, you can talk. The Buddha supposedly went that way. He bought bad pork and he died

Student: What's the heaviest thing (William) Burroughs taught you?

GC: The heaviest? He never taught.. he wanted to teach me, he couldn't - because that was the shot. You see, I'd just come out of prison (when) I met him..(wanted to) teach me prose. He recalled I didn't like prose, that way, (I liked) poesy. And I told him, "Everybody's a poet, that way, if they work in words". But he was the nicest (and good-est) man that I knew in life, yeah, never hurt nobody..

Student: It is recorded that the Germanic tribes...

GC: I love 'em. They're crazy. I know what they did.

Student: ...which..(they) would set up their people who are about to die, and they would say a mantra into their ears. Do you think it would help the person dying to remember things that he has never before remembered?

GC: Ok. You've brought up a good subject, which I know well about. You see.. Germanic tribes were very heavy people (they still maybe are), but they were heavy then. What they did was when they in war.. you know how they (fucked up) the tribes - what they did? - they did a spook-shot. They would dress themselves up in rags and black paint and hide behind bushes while clumpety-clump go the Tartars - they'd go "Yow!" and all of a sudden step on the road and "Chop-Chop". Did ya know that?...

Now what did these Germanic tribes do? they whistled into the ear of whom? and what?

Student: Of people about to die..

GC; Woton. Yeah, Alright.. That gives me just the length.. I don't know what the fuck that guy whispered in somebody's ears dying meant, but I know that it leads me to Woton, I can tell you about that. Woton was a guy, right? He wanted to find out what happens to the Gods, and he found out that the Gods died. There was one God called Thor, right? and they played a beautiful shot on him..witches?, yeah, I think it was three witches who played the shot on him - Thor. They gave him three chances and he failed all three. He was supposed to be destined to kill the World Serpent - (Thunear) (Thor) was supposed to go by Wotan (he was supposed to kill (Walse) the Great Wolf) .. I know that Thor was supposed to kill the Great World Serpent of the Yggdrasil tree - there's a tree, right? (on the bottom, is the World Serpent, on top is the Eagle, in between is the Squirrel, saying "hey, you know what the World Serpent said about you?, you know what the Eagle said about you?" - and the fuckin' tree's roaming all the time, in the middle of the people, right?, the fucking thing's always in action and wrong, (and) something's wrong). So Thor is given these three shots, and these are the shots. The first one is a pussy cat on the floor (and the tree says, "You're supposed to be so big and mighty, pick up the pussy cat", (so it's hard), so the pussy-cat, all it can raise is a paw, and the whole earth trembles because it's The World Serpent, (an) illusion, right? The second shot was, "Thor, can you drink this flagon of wine? (now flagon is about that big, it comes down to..) but they dip the end into the Atlantic Ocean, and Thor says, "Yeah, I can drink it", and the Atlantic Ocean goes down about three feet, I guess... The last shot they laid on him was that all the Gods killed the Giants and they said, "Thor, you're lying upon a Giant". He takes his mjolnir (which is his hammer). And that's how your mountains came, that's how your Rockies came, because it was (a) delusion, it was Earth, it was not Giants. Did you know that? Anybody know that in Scandinavian mythology?

[Yggdrasil - The Tree of Life via Norse Mythology]

The basic line is... the essential and non-essential. Why the knowledge can work for you people

with Scandinavian mythology is this - to know who you've got up here. See, the story was from Woton, that was Loki, and that was the human being, and he is what? he's half human-being, half-God. Loki brought poetry to the planet, and that's where you get the word "poetaster". Now how do you get poetry on this planet? (which they called Midgard(ia)) I'll tell you how they got it. Loki ripped off the Gods with their essence, stole it, took it away, and poured it into a cave of those three women. The guards grabbed.. Loki (and) said, "If you don't bring that fucker back, man, we're gonna torture you so awfully" - "Alright, I'll go get it back". He turned into a raven, had a sack in his mouth, and filled up the essence of the Gods that he ripped off, and, while flying over Midgardia, a little drop fell out, just a little bit, it's called "poetaster", that's the drop you got on this planet. According to Scandinavians, you're an inheritor of it from way back. Check out the sources. Check out the sources.

[Loki as depicted on an 18th century Icelandic manuscript. Creative Commons]

You know what they did to Loki when he died, when he went- Oh wow! - He didn't go. Yeah, Loki did not die (but his wife loved him) - what they had him do - he was stretched out and the bile of the World Serpent fell into his eye, so his wife had this big fuckin' canvas, (so) that the bile would be caught in the canvas, and, when she went to dump it out and it got filled up, one drop fell in the eye of Loki. It's all you need. (Did ya catch that shot?) how big the canvas can be..and dump it out and get it back there fast enough. Anybody here of Scandinavian heritage? Anybody?, right, Scandinavian heritage?...so then, check this shot out, do you know your shot? Check out Alberich, the dwarf , check out the..what are they? they're beautiful. Freyja (she was a great godess of cats.. but in Scandinavia, they had snow, right?, so she'd be riding a cart with cats, tumbling in the snow all the time, and very elegant for a goddess.

Student: What do you know about the Pyramids?

GC: What do I know about the Pyramids? Alright, I know that the Jews didn't build them, and I know that they were covered with black alabaster and that the Pyramid Texts in gold were written on them - Hamilcar, the father of Hannibal, ripped it off, and built Carthage. That's what I know about the Pyramids. They didn't just build those rocks like you see them today, man. They covered those fuckers up beautifully, and the Pyramid Texts were right on them, with all the glyphs, all that gold, and it was ripped off by Hamilcar, and he built his Carthage. What do you know about the Pyramids?

Student: I can't say that I..

GC: (The) Sphinx is a better shot than the Pyramids, because the Sphinx is supposed to be a mystery. They found two solar ships under the legs of the Sphinx..19..59? [1954, in fact]

Student: What did they find?

GC: Solar ships, big ships - under each leg of the sphinx - these solar ships were also taken over (the Ka and Ba was there)... taken over..

Remember, I am not commissioned to give you fuckers a class, I am here taking care of a friend who's ill, and I'm letting my head go with you people. That's the shot you gotta remember behind your heads. Anything that comes out of me, nonetheless, will be truth as I know it. You guys can discredit it, say I'm crazy, then I'll learn..better. Because, I'll tell you one thing, I'm not learning anything today. See, when I.. (when you) can give something out, that I don't know, then I will learn, and therefore others will learn. If I lay out what I know and I don't learn, how the fuck are you gonna learn? You got it? You see, teachers suck, see, they're gonna give what they already know. If they give themselves what they don't know, then, maybe you'll get something? And that's why I think that the Socratic shot works. (Remember, how many people are here.. I'm not just talking to a group.. the whole group doesn't work out.. but a whole bunch of people are here).

Student: It seems now (that) there's a resurgence in poetry again, that it has become recognized by a good number of people...

GC: Really? That's good to hear. I've been out of it. I've been.. in New York... Are you telling me that? That's good to hear. A poet, see, is there, man, shit..

Student: The question I have is do you find the times now say (compared to) the times when you first started writing, say, during the '50s, as far as like, you know, where the consciousness is and what the needs are to be related to..

GC: Jeez, I tell ya. I think poets are so strong they're gonna have to handle the fucker themselves. I ain't gonna talk about (it)... when they come and take the relay from me...and..

(at that time, then, if it happens), ok, (and) if they don't, then fuck it - See, don't trust nobody, don't trust your poet, don't trust the poet, no way, because what the poetry gives you is probably an ignition. You can ignite something.. to go and check out things, for yourself to know. I think everyone in this class should get a poem. I mean poetry's in the human soul, it's there (all of you know that it is). That's my schtick. See, I don't have to be here and talk to you. All I have to do is read poetry, see - and - blam! I've got a big book before ya.

Student: At this point, I feel that the Beat years were like a kind of a visionary time, what the poets were involved in.. because it was a visionary ... they bring on (brought on) the psychedelic years, and now it seems it's going into a whole new other phase..

GC: You know what it's going into? You wanna know what it's going into? You asked me that, right?

Student: Yes.

GC: Alright.. The 50's, I'm sure, had Death on the shot, with the Atom bomb, the '6o's then came in with God and Love, they put the two together. These are big Daddies they're layng down - Death, God, Love. What are the '70's? - 70's? is Truth, see you've got Nixon now and he lied and all of that, but Truth is showing his face. But - don't trust Truth, because Truth can stop you. You go "oh, this is True" and you don't go further, right?. So you still keep on going. I know what comes after Truth - Humor. Humor is the great divine butcher. It's getting rid of all the shit, (It will) knock it all out - Ha!

Student: Do you mind talking about the book, The Vanity of Dulouz (or would you rather not?)

GC: Vanity of Dulouz?

Student: Yeah.

GC: Not Gaullois, that's the cigarettes! - Er..I don't read novels, (I don't read) fiction. I read mostly documentary shit, books on Hitler, books on the Wars, and all that kind of stuff, it's weird, I just don't like fiction. I don't want to be entertained. Alright? But the books of my good friend, who's morte right now, Kerouac, that was his shot. Yeah, I'll check it out. Maybe next time I see you, I'll let you know. I've read it, but.. then it went out

Student: What was your first memory?

GC: My first memory? My first memory was, in a bath-tub (I was two years old) with a woman, who was not my mother. I saw her cunt and I saw the water. I had a double-shot of birth - the contemporary poem of the cunt and the antique poem of water. That's a good hit that I had. And I was two years old. I remembered that when I was sixteen (on a subway-train, I almost fainted! - so there's your hiatus there, like I was saying earlier about your hiatus, your hiatus is that your first memory, you don't remember it, you don't even carry it through.. no way!..you remember your first memory .. at a given time. So, when you remember (your) dream, remember the time-lapse that went - there's a time-lapse - and then you remember it - time-gap - there you go - Now, if you don't remember your dream, it's like you haven't dreamt at all, but if you remember it, is that when you're dreaming? - Ah, yuk, yuk - Ya see? - when you have it in your head. So what is memory? Memory is past. What is present?, What is present? - It's immediacy, right? - Yeah - What is future? - Anticipation. And you guys can't get that..yet? - You gotta know..what is memory?..I wanna hear it..What is memory? - Past - What is present? - Immediacy. What is future? - Anticipation. There you go, you got it. I love ya - [turns to W.S. Merwin, also attending the class] - Do you love me, Bill? - So you and I, we finally got together, right? You and I were put on opposite poles in life in poesy - You're supposed to be the Academic man, drawn by New York, and all that shit, and I'm supposed to be" ol' Beatnik Corso", altho' I'm on the other side, right?

W.S.Merwin: We are.

GC: No - yuk, yuk, yuk..

Student: When did you write your first poem and when did you think of it.

GC: Oh, I like that. I wrote my first poem in prison and I was just turning seventeen and it's called "Sea Chanty" and I got that in my head (because I don't remember my poems, I can't recite them, but that one I know, the first one I know). Wanna hear the first poem I wrote? -

Student(s); Yes

GC: [Gregory reads "Sea Chanty" in it's entirety] - "My mother hates the sea.."..."Thy mother's feet" - Hey, that goes in the water, comes back on the shore. See, I never saw my mother, so she, she went back to Italy, she went back to Calabria and the mountains, she was a cave woman, there wasn't nothing to do in New York, no, no, no, she went back, I never saw her, she went off, across the ocean, so I thought, as a kid, I thought, yeah, anything that goes into the sea comes back. That's the first shot. And it rhymed - that "later" and "ate her" is pretty good fuckin' rhyme (for a sixteen year old!).

Er.. I think you people have had it with me. See, ain't I that nice?, I was about to say I've had it with you, but I think you people have had it with me, and, see, I'd like to go outside now, and walk around with my woman here, and maybe have a drink before that reading with that William (Burroughs). William Burroughs.. You guys gonna be here tonight?... raise all your hands if you're... let me see who's coming... oh.. ok.. [tape and class ends here].

The audio for this can be heard at:

http://www.archive.org/details/Gregory_Corso_The_history_of_poetry_June_1975_75P002

beginning at approximately sixty minutes in and concluding at the end of the tape

Gregory Corso continues (NAROPA 1975 Class - 6)

2012-01-28T04:08:00.000-08:00

[Paleolithic cave painting of a shaman from the cave of Trois-Freres, near Montesquieu-Avantes in France - photo by Herbert Kraft]

GC: Alright, so what else do you want to know, you people. Top of the head. I'll do like (William) Burroughs does now, for show, I'll answer questions. What do you think about all that I said in this classroom today? (because that'll eat up the time and I'll take it easy). Anybody? (can raise their hand). Don't be embarrassed now (because I can fuck you up, you know it!) - You know I scare people from asking questions, so they won't even do it, but...

Student: (I so agree) it go(es) by so fast (so) when you see it on paper. I agree, like, when you see it on paper, it's easier to absorb. So much of what you said, (it) was like trying to catch the next image, and it was traveling in so many different directions.

GC: Well, I'm very fast, I'm a very fast man, and, but the idea is.. nonetheless.. I got that on when somebody told me, "Gregory, get a guitar, because rock n roll has killed poetry", and I said, "Wait a minute now, wait a minute here". I could see the person sitting by themselves and diggin' poesy, reading it and checking it out, rather than hearing "yeah, yeah, yeah.. Dear Landlord", or some shit. [responds to class laughter] - Wait a minute, here, ok, so you're going along with it, beautiful. I wish someone would come along and attack me (but not physical!), give me something heavy. It looks like somebody's gonna do it - oh god! - I'll destroy you, I'll destroy you!

Student: You get a feeling from the poem read out loud that you can't get reading it yourself unless you've already heard it.

GC: That's so, that is so.

So.. the ball-game's over, so - hi - I love you all, it's nice, I've had a nice time in your Boulder, Colorado. We've (I've) got a ticket waiting, to Venezia, to Palazzi Barbaro, on the Grand Canal, man, go to the Lido and gamble, and...

You guys ever been to Venice?

Student(s): Yeah

GC: Ah - I was going to go (their way).. two weeks ago, three weeks ago - but I said, "no, but come here, Gregory, to Boulder, because my two good friends here - (William) Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (are here), and I said, "Gee, I can have Venice any time I want, but this shot won't always be", (so) I took it - that's nice .

With Allen coming.. When Allen gets better, you're going to get from Allen some very beautiful.. (the man is getting well, by the way, I wanted to tell you that, Allen's ok), so maybe Friday he'll do it? - or not - or we'll come together - that'll be the shot, we'll come together. Allen and I, on Friday. That'll be my last shot with you people.

Student: I thought you were going to be in and around longer?

GC: Well, shit, we don't really know, man. I'm impulsive, I don't know.. either..what more..? I wanna get out of here, alright? - or stick around..

I tell you what I can do for you. One thing maybe of knowing some information.

I heard William (Burroughs) lecture yesterday, and his was real far out, his info was that you see people in the street before they see you, so you get them first and they don't got you first (and what that means) and you file it away

And in dreams it's the same way, when you dream of a human being that you never saw before, you saw that face in the subway or on the street, that was an image that you caught when you're moving round in life, and got caught in your head and it came out in the dream. So the thing that he said, when he mentioned mafioso, (because I know them so well) was this - he said that they had (a way to know) who's seeing whom or what, it's part of seeing that I learnt through them, when I was a kid, when I was 17 years old, and I didn't know what the hell that was at that time - "Who's this?". So, "Gregory," - look, I am Nunzio - "Nunzio, if you see two people before you, make sure you see three"...(I always dig it so ..or something told me so). (So I say.). "Well, what about participation?, I can't just stand there, nya, nya, nya, control or not participate, naturally, you automatically do. That means smartness (smartness was a heavyweight with those people). My father, I asked him, I said "Dad, how come you never joined the mafia?", and he said, "Well, the Corsos don't kill". That was my big Daddy...My last name's Corso - the Corsos don't kill

What does Corso mean? What does Corso mean? Does anybody know? What does it mean?

Student: The course or road or something.

GC: It means the way, right? Right on

You know what my first name is?...(this is a goodie) Names are very important. If you have children, all you ladies and guys, make sure you name them right.

[turning, briefly, to poet Michael Brownstein, also attending the class] - so how are ya doin' Mike? - so how much time..(do we have)..wanna get out of here?

Student: So what is your first name?

GC: My first one was Nunzio, and my baptismal name was Gregorio, and Nunzio I didn't like, so I said call me Gregorio, Gregory (don't call me Greg, tho'!)

Student: Do you have children?

GC: Yes, two daughters. One eleven and one four. Four-year-old will be here maybe in two weeks - blonde hair and blue eyes.

Student: Your poetry seems to be going through a period of a kind of paring down?

GC: Oh yeah, I said "brick mews house". I get it real clear now.

Student: So you're headed eventually towards a...

GC: Nice-ies, more nice-ies. These are goodies, or extras, extras for me, because I could have fucked-up many a time, when I shot drugs, I could've died, like that. Someone give me a bag of bad dope and I'd be dead, right? So I feel all is now "extras".

Student: Could you read some Rimbaud for us, Gregory?

GC: Oh, Rimbaud. I loved him when I was a kid, but I don't like him anymore because he did one thing I don't like, which is, to pity the wood that becomes a violin - you dig it? what he's saying? - pity the brass that becomes a trumpet. In other words, pity the human flesh that becomes a poet. I don't dig that pity shit - but he was a kid, he died (he didn't die, he.. forty-five, but he stopped writing..19..).

Thomas Hood, well.. now here's something I can give you. Check out Tom Hood - Hey, he was good. He really wrote (of) the people of his time..(he wrote about) the shirts..people working, making shirts in sweatshops, (the) "Bridge of Sighs" - "One more Unfortunate/ weary of breath/ rashly importunate/gone to her death" (the more modern (the rest of them), I should know it) - but check out Tom Hood, kind of Shelley, maybe a little before Shelley and Keats.

[The Venus of Willendorf, pre-historic fertility symbol, 30,000-25,000 BC]

What else should you know? You should get the essentials. Alright, I think the essentials should be, to know when the first human being was depicted.. what he looked like, what she or he (people say he, it wasn't a she - they did the Venus of Willendorf ...don't say sssss to me... they did the Venus of Willendorf afterwards, but this is the first human being depicted). [Gregory begins drawing, on the blackboard] - this is his head.. the shaman wore antlers and.. trois freres, the cave of the three brothers, (in French, trois freres, trois freres) - now his bottom was like this - watch this bottom [Gregory continues drawing] - his dick was erected but it came backwards on this body (you see, I can do it small, but you can see the whole body). I think you should know the first human depicted, because for all the Paleolithic people did, the cave paintings, were animals, that was the deal (they never did the human being..) Why they did the cave paintings.. here's a shot - where they did the cave paintings were in the most inaccessible part of the cave. It wasn't (openly) painted, these pictures, they did it in the most back part of the cave, this guy, with those psychedelic eyes, would be there dancing over him and spear-holes were in the bison, or the... what's that big cow called? - auroch - the great big cow - auroch, an auroch - and he'd be dancing, always smiling, he'd be dancing over it..(still). They killed the fucker before they killed it (in other words, they did sympathetic magic with it. The flame would be burning, from the fire, and, you know Paleolithic painting? you know it's is very shimmery, the way the colors and the tones are, it's very shimmery, right?, so they make the thing moving. Because they had to eat - to get you fuckers here today! - they had to eat, or..nothin', right?

But that's a great..to know your sources. Write that down if you want - "Check out your source" (not S-a-u, S-o !). Yeah, if you check out your source, I think that you'll feel much better, all of you, in a way, meaning way back, if you can go (way back)... It's one thing, and I didn't get it here, at this place, which is a Buddhistic shot, I've had that very early in the game from Buddhism - it was Jacky Kerouac who laid it on me, "Hey, Gregory, if you're dying, think as far back, as far back as you can, from whence you came, from the cunt, out, right?". So I said, "Wow, I don't have to die to do that. I can be alive and be way way way back, right?" - That's how I checked it out. It's the source.

[glances at the blackboard] - O, an empty board! - and "No Smoking" - I smoke.

The audio for this can be heard at:

http://www.archive.org/details/Gregory_Corso_The_history_of_poetry_June_1975_75P002

beginning at approximately forty-eight-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately sixty minutes in.

Friday's Weekly Round-Up 58

2012-01-27T03:08:00.000-08:00

[Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Morningside Heights, next to Columbia College, New York City, Winter 1944-45. photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

We first reported on this back in November (and again, a couple of weeks back), but now it's official, Daniel Radcliffe will play the part of Allen Ginsberg in John Krokidas' Kill Your Darlings (which begins filming on the Columbia campus this coming March). The source is casting director, Laura Rosenthal, in the Hollywood Reporter. Radcliffe himself has begun, hesitantly, speaking up. His "defence" (of taking on the role) was reported by the BBC. To MTV, a couple of days later (and, prior to Rosenthal's announcement) he was (as they noted), necessarily, "cagey" - but clear - "It's one of the things that's on the table, absolutely. It would be [will be] amazing and I'm very very enthused for that script and that young director...It's an independent film, it's welcome to the world of independent film - from one day to the next it could happen or not happen. Until I'm there on the set, I'm not going to say anything about it"

- Like we say, principal photography for the film starts early March.

Poetry Out Loud, the (US) national (high-school) poetry-reciting competition (we've reported on this too before). It's not until May 13, that there's the national championships (held in the capital, in Washington DC) but.. Leah DeWitt of Derryfield, New Hampshire? - reciting "A Supermarket in California"'? - courage and conviction - she's gonna be a hard one to beat.

Sad news to report, the passing of, to quote Harold Norse (in his Memoirs of a Bastard Angel), "the best German translator of the Beats and raw-meat writers", Carl Weissner. He died on Tuesday, in Mannheim, aged 71. The notice (in the Mannheimer Morgen (auf Deutsch) is available here. Pierre Joris on the PEN American site remembers him (in English). Our friends at Reality Studios have also posted a loving memorial note and host a variety of "Weissneriana" - (for further materials, see here, here and here).

Opening in Istanbul, this very night, a collaboration between Istanbul and Eindhoven museums featuring (amongst other things) a revival of conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg's 2004 Ginsberg hommage, The Singing Posters (for more on The Singing Posters see here and here)

- "When Ruppersberg, who teaches at UCLA, discovered that his students had never heard of "Howl" he conceived The Singing Posters as a way to introduce that important work to a new generation..."

Allen is also featured in "Diggers, Mimes, Angels and Heads", a "walk-in scrapbook of an exhibition" in New York City.

Gregory Corso continues (NAROPA 1975 Class - 5)

2012-01-26T03:07:00.000-08:00

[ (alternate caption) Gregory Corso his attic room 9 Rue Git-Le-Coeur, wooden angel kid hung on wall right, window on courtyard and half block from Seine. Burroughs came to live a flight below, Peter Orlovsky & I had window on street two floors down, room with two burner gas stove where we all ate often. Gregory had “Marriage”, “Power”, “Army”, “Police”, “Hair” and “Bomb” poems ready, I began Kaddish, Peter “Frist Poem” Burroughs was shaping Naked Lunch. Paris 1957. (Ginsberg caption) photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate)]

GC: I'll tell you what I'll do with you guys, and I've got some goodies in this class (at least I know I've got one goodie (I told you it, I entrusted you with it), so I'm going to work out a poem for you. I will show you how, a poem I'll read tonight, how I'll work on it - alright?, how I would take it from my notebook and make it, tailoring, that's what it's called, "tailoring". I would tailor the poem to be a brick mews house, you see? - I'll give you that goodie, I'll take it at random - something I wrote in my notebook [shuffles through notebook] - aw, geomancy, I don't wanna do geomancy here..(The) poem I (wrote) the other night.. is right near me now. I'll work on the poem.. I'll work on my new poem that I will read tonight, because, with that and the oldies..I can read the oldies, and the oldies I know will make it for me. I can be funny with my oldies or I can be serious with my oldies. I know they will past the shot. But what I want to do is do a new number, and see if it works, alright?, and see how I can break it down. So what I'm going to do is to read to you, and, while I'm reading, while doing that, I'll cross things out (I just can't do it on the blackboard). Here we go. This would be the poem that I would read as a new poem this eve.. "Daybreak and the night goes on"..." [Gregory begins reading at this point from his long, unpublished poem "The Day After Humankind", to begin with, abruptly pausing after the first four lines] - Shut your ass, man, I'm reading a fuckin' poem!.. - Ah, now you get that one that I'm talking about? You've gotta catch this very clear, and I don't think that you can get a poem that's read to you on the first shot. I think it has to be given to you three times to get it. Therefore, poetry-readings, to me, suck. I like it that the poetry's on the page, and you sit in your library and you look at the page, then you get it. This fast is fast.. Here's a poem.. Watch how fast it goes.. [Gregory resumes reading] - "Daybreak and the night goes on.." - "while a mob of polar (bears) makes a hot circle around him" - I got that one, I got that old sea-lion, right? - so then you're caught? so alright, so then it's the first hit.. alright? [Gregory continues] -"The human being when young headed towards the dogs"... "My poem began like the first sight of the sun I cannot remember"... - Any of you guys, any of you women, remember when you first saw the sun?...

But one thing is good here, I'll ask somebody a question and watch what happens - and I know I can break it, watch this shot. There's the question.. now, somebody.. I'll take you because you wanted to talk, here you go. What's your first memory?

Student: Uh?

GC: How old were you? (watch this shot, William [Merwin], who's attending the class] it's a goodie, it's a.. hiatus)

Student: Nursery school.

GC: Nursery school. How old were you at Nursery school?

Student: Four.

GC: Four years old. When did you remember that?

Student: When did I remember it?

GC: When you were four.

Student: Just now.

GC: There you go!

There it is..what a fuckin' goodie. We're alive. You know how many years that jumps out at you?

Student: (indecipherable)

GC: That's 17, 18, no, 19 years, 19 years, am I right? My mathematics? Alright. Yeah. That's a good shot, don't you think, tho'? When you remember, the first thing that you remember is later on in years. Therefore the dream that you might have (you wake up but you don't remember), it's like you never dreamt at all! So that brings you back to a great goodie - the source - the source is in its recall - like the occurrence is in the remembrance (and if you don''t remember it, it didn't occur at all!) - This is some simple shit! Wow!

I.. ok, I'll give you the rest of my poem. Let me work on it with you - ok, so I can get it done [Gregory resumes reading] - "My poem began like the first sight of the sun I cannot remember"..."The art of mutation shall knoweth me when death befalls the body" - see there's my change, I had "The art of mutation shall knoweth me when death befalls my body" - not "my body", "the body", "The art of mutation shall knoweth me when death befalls the body - (this fucker's going to go, this meat! (will die)) - "I deny the big lie/en-truthed by ages of morality" - and that's a toughie, I gotta work on that - "..deny the big lie".. un-truth or en truth? - Now "en-truth" could mean that you're filling the lie with truth, that the lie would be truthful, and I didn't want that, so, so "un-truthing" a lie gets rid of the lie as being truthful. It's a tough word to create..[turns again to W.S.Merwin] how would you do it, my Poet-Man?

W.S. Merwin: It's your poem, Gregory

GC: I know what it is..it's a word, it's not in the dictionary.

W.S.Merwin: Say the line again.

GC: En-truthed..

W.S.Merwin: The whole line.

GC: "I deny the big lie/ entruthed by agents of morality". It means "added to", entruthed" would mean "in addition", right? - I'm sorry, (but) I'm working on this new poem, it's a new poem for me and I'm working on it. So that's what I did the class to show the Poet-Man working on his poem. So, between "en" or "un", doesn't make a fuckin' bit of difference to me really, there you go.. "I deny the big lie/entruthed by agents of morality...".. "The book said to be written before the creation of the world.." - You people remember last class when I said that I didn't wanna mention Gilgamesh, because I thought there might be somebody here who would say there's a book before it? What's the book that was written before the creation of the world?

[silence]

Well, the Jews say they got it, they got the Torah. You see, I don't go for that shit..I would say here, Gilgamesh gives me something practical. I'll show you why I hit on that [resumes reading] - " I deny the Torah its mystery, the partitioning of the Red Sea...".."Wisdom is knowing this, not to be obtained by Faith" - "Humankind told me I have to die/and I don't trust humankind...".. "..its monsters now forever constellated" - (the zodiac) - "..while below the last of the blue whale swims..." - there you go, while the blue whale is being wiped out, you fuckers are putting up these monsters in the sky ("why, there's a scorpion there, a goat-footed one there..").

Okay, this is how I end the baby [concludes the poem] - "I am of the Earth mind as a tree is of the forest/ I am Earth personified, a unit of being, apart from Nature.."..."O, to be a matinee idol on Mars, not a driver of spiffy cars, nor a rock 'n roll Dillinger, a Bob Dylan doppleganger, but a Gregory singing songs of reality in the cinema halls of memory, bringing back heirlooms of the future.."... "...while the producer from Tibet-Jerusalem shall say my role as a pulsar/shall win me an Oscar!"

- So the poetry's over, the whole rig's over, so I go back and repeat this?

Allen taught me a great lesson - "don't explain the explanations!"

The audio for this can be heard at:

http://www.archive.org/details/Gregory_Corso_The_history_of_poetry_June_1975_75P002

beginning at approximately thirty-four-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-eight-and-a-half minutes in (featuring/including Gregory reading from his poetry)

Gregory Corso continues (1975 NAROPA Class - 4)

2012-01-25T03:06:00.000-08:00

(Gregory and his delivery of random "shots" continues):

GC: I'll give you a goodie, because I want to take it easy because I have a poetry-reading tonight, with my friend, Mr Burroughs, so I think, what I'll do with you guys is teach you, first, divination, alright? (So, when you're sitting somewhere, and you go with your finger - dot-dot-dot-dot, (well) then, do it!) - okay, give 'em, Gregory, the divination - It's called "geomancy". Anybody know what geomancy is? Geo-? What does "geo-" mean?

Student: Earth.

GC: Right on. (I tell you, they fucked around in the 'Sixties, all these (young) people, now they want to learn!...) Geomancy, Gregory, geomancy, geomancy. I can even do it without looking at the book, but I got it here, but, here you go..this is geomancy. This is what you can do on paper with a pen, or when you're just sitting (out) by yourself. It's like I Ching, it's chance, it's throwing something, but it's not coins, it's this...

bam bam..how many notes?

[Gregory then proceeds to illustrate/elucidate via the blackboard]

[counting (to 12 and to 15) - vigorous making (of) marks - staccato sounds - chalk on the blackboard]

- there you go - and I'll make a hexagram out of it

and I'll show you what it is.

One-x, double-x, one-x, double-x, double-x - yuk, yuk! - Double-x, One-x, double-x, double-x, one-x, - that's Rubeus. Alright, now what's Rubeus?. I can give you all this shot, you know that?

This is the earliest thing that human beings did by chance. The Greeks (who) became the great playwrights.. (but) their paintings were kinda shoddy.. (You get) fucked by your destiny..your Sophocles.. no, Gregory not Sophocles.. Euripides, Aeschylus, even funny Aristophanes, they (were fated). And standing before it was chance - you could break your fate by chance.

Now this was my chance that I took, that I got, double-x, one-x, double-x, one-x, double-x, double-x. Rubeus? what is Rubeus, Gregory?.. Alright, Rubeus says that one plus.. one.. [continues mathematical calculations, and then pauses, confused, in front of the blackboard] how do you do plus? how do you do plus? vertical, that's times!, I've forgotten plus! I've forgotten plus! - [ he then resumes] - one plus one, equals three. Man, Woman maketh Child make(s) third - er, Blue, Yellow maketh Green - bam - one more makes three...) - that's Creation, that's what Rubeus is.

Now if you check out geomancy (here). Nobody knows it, right? Anybody here know it? I'm laying the shot on you. Check out.. It's G-E-O-M-A-N-C-Y. It's the earliest hit on divination

Ah, I can't continue (with) this shit. I'll just lay something on you fast and go to the next ball-game.

Audio for this can be heard/interpreted at

http://www.archive.org/details/Gregory_Corso_The_history_of_poetry_June_1975_75P002

beginning at approx 30-and-a-half minutes, and concluding at approx 34-and-a-half minutes in

Gregory Corso continues (1975 NAROPA Class - 3)

2012-01-24T03:45:00.000-08:00

[Yoko Ono - film-still - from Film No.4 (Bottoms) (1966) via Imagine Peace]

The following is more follow-up/continuation of the previously-published June 9 1975 Gregory Corso class (Gregory, sitting in for Allen Ginsberg at the NAROPA Institute), which we've been serializing here, here and also here.

The tape begins in media res

GC: …yeah that sucks, I don’t wanna (have) no “assistants” here. [to Student] You weren’t here last time?

Student: Yes I was.

GC: You were? Oh, wow!

There was a proposal that.. I give poetry readings, (but) there was a woman, always, in the front row, (who) went ssssssssss [Gregory hisses], and, the last shot, I got on her ass, I found out who she was, and I got on her.

Alright, now how much do you remember from last time?. Qu’est-ce-que c’est? [points to drawing of ankh]

Student: Sandal, sandal strap.

GC: Right, what they wear around their neck… [gesturing to the blackboard] - “wipe me off !” – that’s the fucker! - [re-draws on the blackboard] …it looks European, right?.. that’s why the people, they took it (as) symbolic. It’s not symbolic, it’s very concrete. The big toe goes through there [ Gregory, addressing his own drawing, gets frustrated] - I can’t even draw - aw shit, something like that - it goes around like that (anyway).

Let’s see what else you remembered.

[The “Two Shots”?]

There were (actually) three I gave you.

The third, I’m a little embarrassed by, because I really didn’t give you a good shot on it – Asshole – I didn’t give you a good shot on Asshole. I thought I could, but I couldn’t. Alright, lets see..

[here follows a transcription of his, by his own confession “failed” Third Shot (from the earlier class)]

GC: ...the third shot is gonna be a little funny, the third shot’s gonna be awkward, I wonder if I can handle it. The third shot is "Asshole". Right [begins drawing again], right? - thinking about it - I’m not going to take a homosexual shot because I don’t know, but I’ll take the human shot [continues blackboard drawing]. (So) I was sucking this chick’s asshole, and loving it, and feeling great afterwards, but yet, when you think about it, what you’re getting down to.. and you get up, and like it, so there’s no pain, no weight, (getting your rocks off on all of it, I guess). So those guys who get locked up in prison and.. (are) doing (the) weird things, but you don’t say – ah!.. they’re the law-less, people, (they're the..) What else about the asshole? (William) Burroughs can give you the best description about the asshole that I’ve (ever heard). He has a great routine, that I can repeat. He has "The Talking Asshole”!. - Nobody likes it, nobody wants to kiss it, nobody wants to talk to it - It’s a great routine.

Goofball bits of knowledge. What are the other bits, (the bits) in-between?.. there are a lot of variables..

[Gregory continues]

GC: Now what was the second shot, Gregorio?

Student(s): (The) Missing Link.

GC: Missing.. What’s the Missing Link?

Student(s): Morning glory.

GC: What is it?

Student(s): Morning glory.

GC: The Morning glory seed. The brain, right? When they first said… (Did) anybody check it out? Anybody here check it out? [greeted with silence, Gregory exasperated] - Good god almighty, you really embarrass me!

- Hi William (Merwin). [referring to an encounter in the previous class]. We didn’t cross today! Poets – see, the poets can take it, they’re poets - then some guy says, “you’re not a poet”, and they get up-tight, and (then) they’re not!

Alright. So none of you fuckers checked me out. You took me for granted, right?

Check out the ankh, sandal (in) Ancient Egypt. It means “sandal” . The meaning of life means sandal strap!

Asshole, I’m gonna pass over today, today I’m gonna drop that.

Alan Ansen (1922-2006)

2012-01-23T03:43:00.000-08:00

["Old friend poet-secretary Alan Ansen (who typed manuscript of Naked Lunch in Tangier over a quarter century earlier) visiting from Athens where he expatriates, Henry Geldzahler's back patio, West 9th St. New York City, the afternoon before Francesco Clemente's double vernissage Mary Boone/Leo Castelli Galleries, March 30, 1985." (Ginsberg caption) - photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

Alan Ansen, born January 23, 1922, poet, playwright, erudite scholar, Beat associate, cosmopolitan, had he lived, would have been 90 years old today.

Allen famously declared him to be "the most delicate hippopotamus of poets".

Commenting on the 1989 Selected Poems, Contact Highs, he noted (and paid hommage to) his "monstrous classical versifications" - "he [Ansen] gets conversational fatness 'into stricter order' by use of weird echosyllabics, polyphony, strict rhymeless pindarics, self-annihilating sestinas, mono-amphisbaenic and echo rhyme, skeltonics, versicals & alcaics, coherent palindromes & such like master eccentricities - a hang up on forms, which, interestingly, pushes academic models beyond polite limits into the area of lunatic personal genius."

Contact Highs, he declared to be "an amazing book with many sad poems."

Ansen, for his part, recalling meeting Allen: "I think I first met Allen at the Chelsea loft of Bill Cannastra, a young, charming, self-destructive drunk, who'd been an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, where he'd met Chester Kallman and (W.H) Auden, and a law student at Harvard. I was Auden's secretary at the time. Allen struck me as intense but attractive in ways intense people so often are not."

More on Alan Ansen on the Empty Mirror page

Sebastian Piras -Taylor Mead and Allen Ginsberg, 1997 (ASV #29)

2012-01-21T03:15:00.000-08:00

Sebastian Piras' 1997 footage of Taylor Mead and Allen Ginsberg provides a rare (unique?) glimpse into Allen's new (13th Street) loft, the one that he spent (sadly and tragically) so little time in, the place where, it turned out, he went to die (see Jonas Mekas' harrowing Last Days of Allen Ginsberg" documentary and Colin Still's "No More To Say And Nothing To Weep For" for more from this setting).

Allen arrives in the loft to find Taylor Mead already there:

AG: Hi

TM: Hi Allen. I’m stealing your Dream - your “Rice Dream”!

AG: It’s very good. Have you had some?

TM: Nothin'. Not yet.

AG: Have you had any before,?

TM: I think so

AG: It’s really good. I can’t drink milk, so..

TM: O my word! I drink a half gallon a day.

[Allen acknowledges and waves to the camera]

AG: So, do you like my digs?

TM: Magnificent.

AG: It’s amazing. After the other place I lived in.

TM: I know there were various places.

AG: I was 20 years in that walk-up [437 East 12^th Street].

TM: ... (..Museum) – It was from July. It was called "I Would Have Shot Andy Warhol", after I saw the movie, it’s a review of the movie.

AG : Is it any good?

TM: The movie, "I Shot Andy Warhol"?

AG: [taking out his camera to photograph Taylor]: Yeah.

TM: It’s terrific. And the Basquiat movie, did you see that?

AG: No, I missed both of them.

TM: Both of them?

AG: (I) haven’t been going to the movies much.

[Allen begins giving Taylor a tour of the new apartment]

AG: This painting by Gregory Corso, it's Pearl Harbor Day

TM: Oh yeah.

AG: Here is a painting by Joe Brainard in there.

TM: It looks like Jim Morrison.

[Allen, next, referring to another artwork] (..the rose..and it had that picture at the top, the bottle..)

TM: Well, I remember, Larry Rivers, when I first came to New York in the’40s, he did a Lincoln Center thing of one of his Surrealist works that I really liked

AG: [points to and shows] Keith Haring

TM: Oh my god, It’s a great Keith Haring. Wow!

AG: [referring to Sebastian Piras, the filmmaker] – Has he got the right light?, angle (for the picture)?

TM: That has a plot to it.

AG: He gave me two things. That other thing is Keith’s also. This is a somewhat idealized version of my daydreams – sexual delights.

TM: God!

AG: (It’s) someone in a house.

TM: I love those colors, it’s great!

AG: Yeah. It’s kind of a joke.

TM: Well, I don’t think so. You’re sort of everybody’s…

AG: I thought nobody would treat me like that..

TM: ..the thought of everybody’s Buddha, from going way back..

AG: So this is..(another) area... I was totally knocked out by..

..[Allen previously mentions his admiration for Ron Rice’s “The Flower Thief”, starring Taylor Mead]

TM: But we were inspired, Ron and I (Ron Rice and I) both by "Pull My Daisy".

AG: Really.

TM: Within a week after we saw "Pull My Daisy", Ron says.. you know, the spontaneity of "Pull My Daisy", we were totally influenced by that.

AG: Yep.

TM: ..and we saw..

AG: I’d like to see that again. I haven’t seen that in years.

TM: Well, great film.

AG: Yep, really good film.

TM: Well, but your film cost a couple of thousand, right? Ours cost about 85 bucks! to..

AG: No, ours cost 2500 to…3000!

TM: Oh really? Ours caused maybe… well, Ron forged cheques on his girlfriend’s.. and I had..

AG: So what happened to the later footage he did?

TM: Well the best.. My favorite film is the Queen of Sheba Meets The Atom Man with that great black woman..

AG: Wini

TM: Wini [Winifred] Bryan, yes.

AG: I used to know her years back before that, even, in the ‘40’s..

TM: She died about ten years ago.

AG: But Wini was quite intelligent, but he.. she had a wig.

TM: Very bright, yes. Ron caught her once without her wig (we didn’t see her for weeks after!)

AG: (I was) in this apartment many times for parties. Years ago, it was Karel Appel's, the painter..

TM: Oh yes, well I was here when it was a total wreck.

AG: ..then Claes Oldenburg, then Patty Oldenburg, then, for many years, it was Larry Rivers, (the) place where he..

TM: ...let his girlfriends...

AG: No, no, he had a.. he stacked his paintings, millions of paintings.

TM: Yeah, yeah, I was just so shocked. It was like a warehouse.

AG: And then I had.. bought it a year-and-a-half ago, and been working on it ever since.

TM: Beautiful.

AG: All the light is great!

TM: Yeah, I remember it as very dark and dingy.

AG: No, it’s heaven! You wake up in the morning and it’s so different from where I rent(ed) for 20 years – and I have (a) cardiac problem..

TM: Oh my god!

AG: ...so I can’t climb the steps anymore. (But) This is a great elevator [points to the elevator]. So, I’m fixed up.

TM: I’m up a 5-flight walk-up on Ludlow Street.

AG: Oh god!

TM: It’s become a great block, very interesting.

AG: Yeah. So it’s just a walk up..

TM: Well, I keep telling myself it’s good for my heart, it’s good for.. because I got so..

AG: Well, maybe. My heart problem comes from an overdose of an anti-biotic in the hospital – medical nemesis.

[discussion moves on, to old age and sex]

AG: It’s just that's a shot in the dark, so – who wants to? If you’ve got somebody you’ve got a heartache for..

TM: If it’s really great, then I don’t think about that, but otherwise, even if it’s good, I get this terrible conscience thing, that lasts for about a week

AG: Well, I get into these heart-throb situations. ..They seem to last for years...as friends.. so, but I can’t cum, by myself, so what I need is somebody to tickle my bottom or put his head on my chest..Somebody…

TM: Well, I never.. I try not to cum. I still have the same number of wet dreams that I had fifty years ago.

AG: Uh-huh.

TM: But I’ve always had a terrible conscience thing, after I cum.

AG: Are you Catholic or something?

TM: No, Presbyterian.

AG: So what’s..

TM: Very severe Wasp [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] family background.

AG: So what’s the problem?

TM: I’m a Super-Wasp - Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Lutheran. It’s something in my conscience.. I can’t...

AG: Well, what does your conscience say?

TM: It’s “la petite mort”, it’s “grande mort”!

AG: [reaches over and kisses him] My dear!

TM: Only one year older.

AG: I thought you were somewhere in your 50’s, or something.

TM: I tell people I’m 27 or vice-versa!

AG: I thought you were in your 50’s!, so you’re older than me!

TM: Yeah

AG: Oh daddy-o!

[AG then goes to light incense on his home altar and potter around the apartment]

TM: You know, under the Islamic people that.. (they used to live next door, I think)...

AG: No, but I know, there’s a poet-friend who’s Sufi - Daniel Moore from San Francisco, you remember him? ..And then he went on a Hajj.. and he studied with teachers in Africa, and in Morocco, and is very learned, and is a good poet. City Lights put out some early books (of his) [Dawn Visions (1964) and Burnt Heart (1971)]

TM: Well, the Islamic people scare me. Anti-homosexual.

Friday's Weekly Round-Up 57

2012-01-20T03:35:00.000-08:00

"Ginsberg's voice defended us, exonerated us, and forgave us for the murders we committed for a government that acted like a godfather with an army of hit-men". Vietnam Vet, Victor Claude Pirtle offers an impassioned defense of Allen's Vietnam war ethic and argues for his continuing relevance, on the web-site FWB On Line.

Still remembering the 'Sixties and the "peace-niks", Ed Sanders' most recent memoir, Fug You (full title "Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side") is, happily, now out. Here's Ben Ratliff's enthusiastic review in the New York Times. Here's a follow-up note from the Poetry Foundation. Ed Sanders is interviewed and speaks about the book here, here and here - and here.

His "verse-biography", The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg, in case you've not come across it, is also an absolute "must-read".

It was Ed who, in 1994, commissioned "New Stanzas For Amazing Grace" (included in Death and Fame: Last Poems 1993-1997, and in Illuminated Poems).

Here's the audio (from an October 6 1994 reading at the New School)

- and here's another raw unaccompanied version.

New York's Bowery Poetry Club has been "tweeting" some of Allen's "unpublished haiku" (as featured in Gordon Ball's Journals Early 'Fifties, Early Sixties, under the title "Haiku composed in the backyard cottage at 1624 Milvia Street, Berkeley, 1955, while reading R.H.Blythe's 4-volumes Haiku" - there are 21 of them there). Here are some of them:

"Looking over my shoulder my behind was covered with cherry blossoms" - "I slapped the mosquito and missed. What made me do that?" - "A frog floating in the drugstore jar: summer rain on grey pavements" (after Shiki) - "Reading haiku I am unhappy, longing for the Nameless". The "resident expert" at the BPC also drew our attention to Sabine Sommerkamp's

perceptive essay, "The Function of Haiku in the Development of Ginsberg's Howl".

Another new (previously-unpublished) poem from Nanao Sakaki ("In The Next Life I Will Be.."), from his forthcoming Collected Poems of Nanao Sakaki, (now slated for Fall publication), appears on Gary Lawless' Poems from Gulf of Maine blog.

and - more gleanings from the blogs - Dennis Cooper provides a very useful over-view of the legendary Alex Trocchi over on his blog (including re-printing this lively Ginsberg-Trocchi conversation).

Gregory Corso continues (1975 Naropa Class - 2)

2012-01-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

GC: What do you people know zodiacally? Just the bullshit you got in the last 15 years, right? You're all young people, and you're brought up that the zodiac was always so - it wasn't. In the '50's and the '40's, you didn't hear of the zodiac. No way. It was all covered down. Right? So I think this is my last lesson I'll give you all. Why did they call it "the Aquarian Age"?

[turns to and begins rubbing clean the blackboard]

Did you ever check it out, why it's the Aquarian Age?

Student: End of the Pisces?

GC: End of the Pisces, right. So what does that make that? What comes after Aquarius?

Student: Capricorn.

GC: Capricorn, right. So it makes it a Great Year. It gives it two year stars. Watch. [Gregory begins drawing on the blackboard]. It's the Great Year it takes the Sun and the planets to go across the Milky Way (as it takes it our planet to go around the Sun), makes a year. And it's a 12-shot. It's a twelve years, 12-shot, Gregory.

Hold it [Corso once again, accompanying himself, drawing on the board], here's Cap(ricorn), here would be..uh..Aquarius, here would be our Pisces, here would be Gregory, Aries. He would be Taurus, here would be Gemini, close to Cancer. Alright, here's Cancer, there's Leo, there's Virgo, there's Libra [chalk squeaks on board] - (oh, I hate that! - o god, I did it! - I used to hate when people did what I just did it!) - there comes Scorpio, beautiful Scorpio, and then Sag(ittarius) right? There you go.

Alright. Now what this teaches you is a great thing. This teaches you the progression of the elements. Fire first. Zero degrees from No-house. Bam! Aries! - You get your Earth, because Earth is the Ash of Fire, so Earth is the Child of Fire. And out of that conglom(eration) - poom! - comes your atmosphere and your vapor, which is Water. So, if you wanna know those four elements, how they start - Fire, Earth, Air, Water. And that's the products of Earth. And it goes all around the zodiac that way. So, Fire again, and Earth, some Air, Water. Fire, Earth, Air, Water. Three, triplicities and quadruples are the zodiacal chart, which is a beautiful chart when you really check it out. The way I'm doing it is not..

Here's another thing now you should know about, which is a heavy, and nice - and it's easy, it's light.. Fire, that made this thing, the Earth, Earth can douse, smoked Fire out.

The only good thing that Earth has.. that Fire has with Earth.. (is) that.. Fire made Earth, but Earth can smother Fire out. Air, Fire loves (because Fire expands in Air). All my friends are under Air signs, or Fire (signs). Water, I know, douses me out, but I can boil Water and evaporate it. See... Earth smothers me out. All I can say is, "Well, I made Earth, but he smothers me out."

Okay, here's a Great Year. I'll give a Great Year. This is what just passed. Why they call it now "the Aquarian Age". A P.. Pisces, right?, alright, here you go. Pisces just finished - fishermen, Christ - it's 2,000 years, it's 12,000 years a shot - it's 24,ooo, see? (12 points, 2,ooo years a hit, makes 24 thou(sand) - that's the Great Year). And it takes the Earth, the Sun, all the planets, to go around the mega-gal- not the mega-galaxy, the galaxy, the Milky Way (no, the mega-galaxy's a bigger shot - but the galaxy itself, takes 24 thou(sand)). So this is how (proof, looking at history) is how you'll know it -

Ares after, or before Pisces, was Julius Caesar, Alexander, the God of War, and all that shit. The lamb? yeah - call that Taurus, the bull - the worship of the bull in Crete - dancing over the bull. Before that, communication, Gemini - Hebrew hieroglyphics and cuneiform. Before that, the Flood - the Moon, Cancer. And you get to Gilgamesh, with the Flood in it, and the Bible. Before that now, Leo - regency, the Kings. You get the Gate at Mycenae with the two twins, the lions' heads. Ha h ha. You wanna go up one more with me folks? You wanna go around again, around and around and around. Wanna get right back to it again? Ha ha ha. It's a kick, it's a kick to teach. You guys should grow up to be teachers. Look at the ball I'm having, right? You wanna seem like dumb-asses, right?

Okay, the ball-game's over this week. See you Wednesday. [class and tape ends here].

Audio for this transcription can be found at

http://www.archive.org/details/Gregory_Corso_The_history_of_poetry_June_1975_75P002

beginning approximately ends twenty-two-and-a-half minutes in and concluding just under 28 minutes in

Edgar Allan Poe

2012-01-19T03:15:00.000-08:00

[Edgar Allan Poe, 1848 - from original daguerreotype by William S Hartshorn - collection of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division]

In the Summer of '39, 13-year-old Allen graduated from grammar school. He listed Edgar Allan Poe (sic) as his favorite author and (Hugh Lofting's) Dr. Doolittle as his favorite book!

In May 1944, he published in the Columbia Jester Review, "A Night in the Village with Edgar Allen Ginsberg."!

From "Howl" - famously, from "Howl" - "who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross

telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet.."

"Everything leads to Poe", he later declared, "You can trace all literary art to Poe's influence: Burroughs, Baudelaire, Genet, Dylan...It all leads back to Poe".

From his Naropa lecture in 1981 on "Expansive Poetics" (the audio here contains readings by Allen of both "Annabel Lee" and "The Bells"):

""The Bells" was the earliest poem I knew and that determined my rhythmic system, probably, because my father would go around the house reciting it because he taught it in high school. So the way that he recited it was very rapid and purely emphasizing the rhythm. Has anybody heard this read aloud? Yeah, I've read it here a few times...That's a real piece of sound. That's really amazing. There's not very many people who get that, that powerful a rhythmic cadence. Has anybody here ever tried writing with that jingle jangle jingle at all? It's really interesting to try.. The thing that I notice is that it's actually really rare among poets to get a construction of sound that's as definitely rhythmical as that. That's to say, you've got the rhythm, but you've also got the vocables of the sounds of the vowels that make it possible for the rhythm not merely to be sing-song but actually be clangorous and effective in the mouth and in the ear....

(Percy Bysshe) Shelley has it - that mighty, passionate, rhythmic force - Poe has it. I think that's the highest thing that poetry has, actually. Pure sound. Pure musical sound. Of course, a lot of people don't like it, because they say it's just stupid, that is, it's just pure sound and there's no intellect (or there's no serious conception that goes along with it). Except, the physical excitement in itself (or) the ecstasy of that kind of pronouncement is another form of intelligence. It certainly makes you more open to sympathies (the sympathies of nature, say), more open to sex, probably, makes you more open to music, to the beat of your own heart, the possibility of your own excitements. It makes you more open to the possibility of your own ecstasy, and that, certainly, would lead to intelligence, if it isn't intelligence itself."

Allen goes on to note: " Jack Kerouac's favorite rhythm in Poe is "Annabel Lee" - and that was one poem Kerouac knew by heart. And I think it was the rhythm in that he imitated..that turned him on..a very specific rhythm, as well as the dreamy symbolism."

And - "Everybody (know) "The Raven"? Anybody here never hear "The Raven"? Anybody? "The Raven" is the one poem that finally penetrated through every skull. Terrific. I always liked that one."

Edgar Allan Poe was born on this day.

Lets salute the event (notwithstanding the no-show last night of "the (late lamented) Poe Toaster"!)

Gregory Corso continues (1975 Naropa Class - 1)

2012-01-18T03:38:00.000-08:00

[Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Boulder, Colorado c. 1974-1975, photograph c.Rachel Homer]

Gregory Corso: I'll tell you what I'll do. So the class can handle itself nicely. Ask me a question? Being if I say I know all there is to know (because there ain't too much to know!), I should be able to answer any fuckin' question you guys lay down on me. Let's make it Socratic. Not all at once and heavy. Take it easy with my beautiful head, but lay it nice.

Student: Have you been staying out of jail, and, if you have, how?

GC: Alright. Last time I went to jail was when I was 17 years old. Spent three years in prison. Got out when I was 20, and I should have learned then not to get back in, and I didn't

Student: Do you know the answer to the second part, how?

GC: How to stay out?

Student: Yeah

GC: Oh! Become as smart as Gregory! Yeah. "Know all there is to know and there ain't that much to know". You can compensate. You see they fucked you up when you were a kid. They did this first thing to ya. They suck on your ass, so you come out of the cunt. They slapped you, and, "You little fucker, here's where you are!" - Pow! - And you went "Yow!" - you're alive, right? And then the next thing they laid on ya, they told you, you're gonna die. They say, "One thing that's sure, son, you're gonna die". So you go "Yeah, I'm gonna die, wow! - looks like I gotta die here". And it's just a big fuckin' con. Who told you you're gonna die? - I don't trust people. You see, one thing I learned in jail was not to trust people. And in the conglom [sic], don't trust 'em really. Personally, maybe, you know, separately, you know, I can trust William (Merwin). A person by itself, yeah, but a conglom, no. And don't even trust a person. They tell you you're gonna die, and you believe it and you die! - and they all went.. you know how many went.. Well, I've seen billions of flawed poets... Well, Gregory's around. Now somebody can come up and say, "Gregory, you're gonna die" - Pow! - here's a bullet through your fuckin' head

and I said well, there's people that did it. Okay, a fuckin' con - So, we've passed the death shot - good deal. What's the other question? From jail to death. What's the other one? If there's no question, I'm gonna curse you all out. I'll call you.... saved!

Student: Camels. Can you talk about camels?

GC: Camels, you wanna know about camels? I know dromedaries and I know the other camels. The dromedary has one hump and the other camel has two, that they can take well-water.. But this is dumb-ass shit. (If) you're playing, then I'm gonna really put you down, and you deserve to get it. I'm embarrassed by you people. You all look at me like dumb-ass. At your ages.. I wanna tell ya, when I was 17, I was in prison. Who's 17 here? who's 17 here? - Oh I love you! - now let's see if I can remember your name..? Does it begin with an "l"? it does? with an "l"? - I got it all together here, you fuckers, you embarrass me..

Student: Have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle....

GC: Oh, bullshit! I don't take that bullshit. I eat it up, I gobble it up and I vomit it out.

Student: (Can you tell us all you know about the nature of reality?)

GC: All I know about the nature of reality? Okay, I will call it reality and leave - [GC acts exasperated, and makes to leave, he turns off the music that has been playing in the background since the early moments of the class] - See you guys again (on) Wednesday, everything's set. Where's my girl? where is she? - Yeah, yeah, yeah - See, that always happens, I don't want to embarrass you people, but it happens in other places, when they ask a question, they end up with reality shit. And so I say, "Okay, I will call reality" - and leave! And that's the coolest way. I walk(ed) out. I love you all.

(However) I'm gonna be around, we all live here. Where am I going? There's no bus outta town, there's no plane. You try to hold me back? You love me?, really - you love me?

Students: [enthusiastically] Yes!

GC: Now I'll give you a poem

Students: Give us a poem.

GC: "A star/ is as far/ as the eye/ can see/ and/ as near/ as my eye/ is to me."

See, if you're going to take poetry, I'll blow your heads! See that's my forte. This (teaching?) is not my forte. It's like I'm a clown up here. My friend [Allen] is sick. I've gotta take care of this fuckin' class! Yuck! I think I did the best I could. I gotta good escape note for my friend. "Tell us reality.."? Yeah, I'll call it and leave - bam!

Student: Are you going to answer the question?

GC: There's no mystery to reality. There's no mystery, there's no mysteries. I mean, nobody can, I think, in this classroom..can give me a mystery. You can?

Student: Is there life after birth?

GC: Is there life after birth? No, no, because you see... where's my girlfriend?, I can't see your face, I've been looking for her fuckin' face. Right there, Alright, so the thing is, Allen's got my infinity stick with him. People wear scarabs around their neck - here's another Egyptian shot - it means re-birth, right? So I never wear the scarab because it means you gotta die to be reborn. So what I carry around with me is a vulture with an infinity sticker (it's immortality holding the infinity stick, where you don't have to die). It's a drag, Allen was checking out dying last night, right? (he's reading this book on dying), alright - so the father's shot, which I agree with, comes up, and hits the head, and is white, the mother's shot is fire, hot red, and it comes up here, and they meet and you're dead, but the white shot makes up, because men are really manure (men are fertilizer, they're shit). You see, they shoot into the woman, who's got all the eggs, she's fertile. But the man has to fertilize it. You have to fertilize the fertile, and if you fertilize it, you're shit! - but, see, you can't tell some kids, "Hey, you know, you're born, you're dead, you're shit, and your mother... ahh! "..they'll go, "Ach", they'll beat ya up, or sumpin'. Yeah...

How many of you were born by accident, do you know? how many of you were born by a bad fuck, do you know? Now, good. You look good, you're nice, well, that's good. Yeah, I was, I think - not born by a bad fuck, but by an accident, because it was the Depression. They didn't need more mouths to feed. I think I was born by accident - but I think they had a good fuck (that's very important - at least that, let it come out).

Student: Do you know what that book was that Allen was reading about death.

GC: A very thin book, and it has to do with the Institute (Naropa Institute). Some lama talking about the death shot... which makes much sense, because it's obvious, you know. Check yourself out. When they show the Buddha lying on his side, of course, that's how he died, right? Somebody gave him bad pork (is that the shot?). A cousin of Buddha gave Buddha bad pork to eat. Buddha knew it was bad pork (but) said, "Fuck it, I'll eat it anyway, because I won't refuse a gift", right? - So stupid! I don't like that Buddha. You know how stupid Buddha is? He sat under a tree for forty fuckin' years to find out the answer to life - or death (it was a death shot). What's the answer to death? Forty fuckin' years under the bodhi tree to realize that - ah - life causes death. Long time. So I said,"What about accidents?" - if you get hit by a car, man, and you're lying on your side, man, and they have barrier bolts with the two - That sounded good to me - if you know you're going, that's the thing, if you know you're going, how to handle it and not panic. That's a cool shot. What did you want to know?

Student: Read some poetry from Gasoline?

GC: You want a poem from Gasoline?

Student: Yeah

GC: Alright, let's see if I can remember one now, Gregory. Now get one you really like.

Student: Please, Gregory

GC: I don't remember my poetry at all. It's a fact of life, and I should know it, I should know the shot.

Student: (page) 51

GC: I know a simple Haiku from Gasoline. I could give you something from Gasoline. Simple. "In the Mexican zoo/ they have ordinary/ American cows."

Student: Gregory, Hey Gregory..

GC: Somebody said "Hey Gregory" without his hand raised.

Student: It's right here.

GC: As if you were my friend or close to me! - I don't want nobody coming up to me afterwards when I get outta here as if we're friends or somethin'. You're still fuckin' students, all of ya. Right? And Annie's down here and all that [Anne Waldman]. No matter how close I get to you guys on the three days I'm gonna be teaching here, right? Alright? So raise your hand. What do you wanna say?

Student: How did it all begin?

GC: How did it all begin? I'll give it to you very scientifically. I don't bother with it. I leave the science and all that to mathematicians. He said that it might have begun with steady state or a big bang, so I met him, right? And he was fucked. He didn't know which way of the two it began. I said, "Wow, if it's dwindled down to two, there's an old Italian expression". I don't know it in Italian, but I know it in English - "If you have a choice between two things and you can't decide, take both". You know, fuck, so I said, "C'mon, don't hang 'em up, you got it dwindled down that far, right?" A beginning shot, you're talking about. No, no, you can't. No way, it's done. The ball-game's over.

So you got nothing to learn with. Just the essentials. I say, for instance, what you should be asking me about - what came first, the Odyssey or the Iliad? - that's what you should be asking me. You should be asking me about Ganymede and Pygmalion. That's what you should be asking about. These fuckin' questions, man. You guys are on that shit - you were brought up in the '60's with your rock 'n roll shit, and you didn't learn shit - you didn't, you didn't learn nothin' - now you wanna know! That was the Golden Calf of the '60's and you didn't know it, but, one good thing, okay, you're right, against the war, not going into the army and all that, that's cool. Yeah, yeah, (the) '60s, beautiful, with the students in America. What do you think Mr Merwin? [turns to W.S.Merwin], you taught in America, man. Yeah, shop class.

But, right now, I'm a little embarrassed, because of (questions about) "reality" began it all, all that shit. Ask something practical.

Student: Where do you get your shoes?

GC: Where do I get..? Ah, there you got it! Alright. I got these shoes through my beautiful woman there. We went.. we realized New York City's going - psst [down], it's wiped out, so why not go and get beautiful things?

Student: Saks?

GC: And (so we) went to Saks Fifth Avenue, and I said, "Can I have a pair of shoes, please?", "I like those". "Good". "Right there". And she just wrote on a piece of paper (we had no money in the bank or nothin'), gave 'em a cheque, and walked out. That's hurting people? Saks Fifth Avenue? if I take shoes from them?. I said, "Well, I take the coat that was taken from the lamb, if I need it", if I need it - I don't need these fuckers. I like them.

Student [girlfriend]: You needed them.

GC: You're wrong there. I don't need them. Oh yeah, I did need them, right. I had a hole in the other shoe, you're right. It was cutting my feet in the city. I did need a pair of shoes. Yeah, it was needed. Okay. But the opulence wasn't needed, but the opulence I take. I love 'em. See my emerald ear-ring?

Student: Ooh

GC: It's a beauty. One carat. Beautiful. But I should not show it to too many people. They'd grab me and rip my ear apart, grab the fuckin' emerald. Ugh! God, what am I doing? I need protection in this place! I find your Colorado, Boulder, very nice, by the way. You people are visiting and students and you don't live here, but for those who (do) live here, it's a really nice place, I mean, air-wise. And I have yet to see one policeman - and that's true! - have you seen one, Jelson (sic)?

Student (Jelson): No

GC: (It) doesn't bug me if I see one (because, I guess it keeps order, and that's a necessary evil, what they call it). Alright, so is there any more you want to know? See, I don't think there is, but I can tell you and then you'll want to know it.

Student: Gregory, I don't know if you want to get academic here..

GC: Well, why not?

Student: Well, I don't know if it's appropriate in this atmosphere yet, and I can wait, because you're gonna be around...

GC: No, now I'm gonna be going right now, in a while. I'm just waiting... give it fast

Student: Well, I just wanted to know...

GC: I'm being academic.

Student: ..the form of your poetry is changing. I just wanted to know where you were taking it?

GC: Ah, well, you'll get that on Wednesday, when I read my new poems. I'll be reading with William Burroughs, and you'll get a new shot. That's the shot. You see, I'm standing in for a friend of mine, for Ginzy. All I can do is stand in and try and make this class go to its allotment, so you feel you're getting your money's worth.

Student: Can you talk about your drug culture?

GC: Alright. I learned through drugs that money sucks. I learned that I needed money to get drugs. I did not need drugs to get money. I gave up drugs because I figured, "fuck, what do I need money for?". So my woman there taught me the one lesson - mobility, Gregory! - you can move - and money. You don't have to be stuck in one place taking the drug. And so, yeah, cool. So, alright. That's what I learned. That's all. Nothing much.

Student: What did you learn from Gilgamesh?

GC: Ah! What I learned from Gilgamesh is why I had to think it was the oldest book ever written. Is it? Is it the oldest book?

Student: As far as I know.

GC: Yeah, it is. That's the course I was gonna give you tonight, but I'll tell you I'll hold that a little off. But I can lay a little bit down on it. That's the oldest book. Nobody's going to come here and say, "in Tibet they had an older one". I don't want to hear that shit. I don't want to have to argue about it, say, "Good god", alright..".Yeah, but that's the old daddy, lets say where the Bible comes from, and the Pyramid Texts, and Gilgamesh, all the real oldies come from, right? Right? I'm asking you, right?

Student: Right

GC: No? You must not know Gilgamesh. Does anybody know Gilgamesh here? How many hands with Gilgamesh?

Student: A little bit.

GC: C'mon. I wanna see how many, so I know who I'm talking to. Alright, two. There's..uh..and there's the other. What's Gilgamesh? Yow! Gilgamesh. Who's Gilgamesh?

Student: I read the epic.

GC: You read the epic?

Student: Uh-huh

GC: Did you read the complete form of it?

Student: I only knew of one form

GC: No, no, no, no, no. See, because I went to check out this guy who was translating it recently, and they still don't know why Gilgamesh broke the tablets when he was crossing the stream to see Noah, the old man, to find out what life was about. The only angry thing he did was to break these tablets on his knee before he got into the boat and the boatman took him across. And nobody knows what's on the tablets. But they were set down in the Akkadian language. Sardanapalus, or Ashurbanipal, whatever the fuck, he had two names, alright? Sardanapalus, or Ashurbanipal made his library. Akkadian, Chaldean. Way back, man, to go to the Sumerian.

You know, I'll give you one kick away from the Gilgamesh to bring this into you people here, you know, the Bible. How many of you know the Bible? Raise your hands. What's this shot? Great. Good, good, do it, do it, raise it, man. I know the Bible, man, shit. Alright, here's a goody - Abraham leaves Ur - [GC begins again writing on the blackboard], you know what Ur is? That's Gilgamesh,

Student: Ur, Sumer.

GC: Sumer, Sumerian. And they were the only non-Semitic peoples. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Such a kick, but it's true. Alright, now where did the Jews come from, the Semites? Because Abraham's a daddy, they leave Ur, they go down to Canaan, right? (was it Canaan? Canaan it was). Jacob was the only one that got into it, but he didn't get into it. Ur - that's the old daddy, older than Egypt. I always go back to my Sumer. They had electricity there. If you go to the museum in Iraq today [Gregory is speaking in 1975 - sic], if any of you people, you know, take an airplane ride, airy-plane ride, some day in your life, and you go to the Mid-East, go to Iraq. You'll see the ziggurats, and, of course, you'll see in a museum there's a cylinder with a battery in it.

Audio for this transcription can be found at http://www.archive.org/details/Gregory_Corso_The_history_of_poetry_June_1975_75

P002, beginning at approximately four-and-a-half minutes in and lasting until approximately twenty-two-and-a-half minutes in

Two "Shots" From Gregory (Gregory Corso)

2012-01-17T03:09:00.000-08:00

More vintage NAROPA transcription. The first two classes in Allen’s 1975 “History of Poetry” NAROPA course (Allen being sick) were taught/conducted by Gregory Corso. Gregory Corso - Substitute Teacher!

GC: ….It’s a virus, that’s the shot. Now the virus hits the cell, once it hits the cell, you’re fucked. You can’t see the virus. Antibiotic – you know what antibiotic means? They’ll give it to you easy and you’ll take it. In a hospital, you feel ill, you call an ambulance, right? Well, call an ambulance, you’re fucked. So they give you antibiotics now, that’s anti-life stuff they’re putting in your body. The virus doesn’t die when they shoot the antibiotics in you because the virus is immune to it already. You get screwed up.

How are you, Mr Goldfarb? [Sidney Goldfarb - co-founder of the Creative Writing Department, University of Colorado at Boulder] - Right. So the next sling shot... I like music behind me when I rap on boring things. The boring thing is.. don’t feel this is an insult on my part, but your names, I have to check who’s here, who’s in the class, and all that shit. And so, while we’re doing that…

I know I told you, “I know all there is to know!”. And I asked him, "do they want to know why?" And he said, "Yeah, they want to know why (why) I "know all there is to know"." Now it’s all because there ain’t that much to know - see?!

So all I can do is give you the goods, maybe in one class. How much time have we got? I can teach you one thing very fast, that nobody knows. I studied this for about a year. Hieroglyphics, Ancient Egypt, right? And this is the simple shot that people have [draws on board]:

You know what they say that is? It looks a human thing, right?

[at this time, suddenly, an altercation almost breaks out] -

Are you crossing my words? I'm gonna say "excuse me" - it's my fuckin' class, William - this is another poet in America - like I am, right? - Mr Merwin here - But don't you think you (could) say "excuse me" when you pass a fuckin' desk of mine?

W.S.Merwin: Afterwards.

GC: Not afterwards, before! - It's my fuckin' class time now.

Alright, so dig, the dumb asses, because they think it looks more like.. well, they don't know what it is. Nobody in this classroom knows what this fucker is. You wear it on your necks? What is it?. I'll blow your heads by telling you what it is, and it's the truth - it's a sandal strap!! It's the big toe goes through here [points to the hole], this goes around.. In Ancient Egypt, the ankh, which means sandal, sandal strap. Right there. But because it looks like a human being, (with the head, right?) or the Jesus shot (on the cross, right?), they've got a thing that it's a real mystical hit. The Egyptians never did anything abstract, everything was concrete. All their fuckin' glyphs were concrete. That's one shot. Now you got that.

["Ida" - prehistoric fossil remains - image via National Geographic News]

What's the other shot? (they're just a little bent, but they're the things I know) - Missing Link - well, now that's supposed to be a biggie, right? Missing link is supposed to be a biggie? No way. Old anthropologists are trying to find these skulls to match.. to get some connection between.. ape man and primitive man. Well, I know what happened between those two brains (I gave you the word, right - "brains"). It wasn't a skull change, it was a brain change, and what made the brain change between ape and man is very simple (Because I checked it out scientifically). Planet of the Ape(s). The first seed family was born at the time of cave man, so he got zapped on morning glory seeds! - There's your "dawn of consciousness". The brain expands and opens up through what they ate, through getting high, but they can't find the brain because the brain rots away (the skull stays there, the skull's bone). Where did the change come? through bone shape? - bullshit! - through brain-change. And morning glory seeds were the first seed family. Write that down so that you can check it out - first seed family. And you know what seeds do, right? [continues writing on board] Seeds. Morning glory family (What a nice name, huh?, Morning glory).

That's the first seed plant. All plants before them were born divisional, all born of themselves. Alright, that's the second shot that I know...

Gregory Corso's remarks have been transcribed from his June 9, 1995 class, and can be heard as the first, approximately, four-and-a-half minutes of http://www.archive.org/details/Gregory_Corso_The_history_of_poetry_June_1975_75P002

Eleven years ago today, Gregory passed away.

Gordon Ball's Cherry Valley

2012-01-16T03:53:00.000-08:00

[Clockwise starting from upper left: Peter Orlovsky, Denise Mercedes, Julius Orlovsky, Gordon Ball, Gregory Corso, Ray Bremser, Bonnie Bremser (Frazier) c. 1971. photo: Allen De Loach]

East Hill Farm is out. Wanting to spread word on Gordon Ball's new book.

From the publisher's blurb:

"During the late 1960s, when peace, drugs, and free love were direct challenges to conventional society, Allen Ginsberg, treasurer of Committee on Poetry, Inc., funded what he hoped was “a haven for comrades in distress” in rural upstate New York. First described as an uninspiring, dilapidated four-bedroom house with acres of untended land, including the graves of its first residents, East Hill Farm became home to those who sought pastoral enlightenment in the presence of Ginsberg’s brilliance and generosity. A self-declared member of a “ragtag group of urban castoffs” including Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Herbert Huncke, and the mythic Barbara Rubin, farm manager Ball tends to a non-stop flurry of guests, chores, and emotional outbursts while also making time to sit quietly with Ginsberg and discuss poetry, Kerouac, sex, and America's war in Vietnam. In honest and vivid prose, he (Ball) offers a rare intimate glimpse of the poetic pillar of the Beat Generation as a striving and accessible human being at home on the farm and in the world."

Michael Schumacher, Allen's biographer, writes:

"In writing a memoir about the time he spent managing Allen Ginsberg's farm in upstate New York, Gordon Ball has detailed an important yet often overlooked side of the poet's colorful life. Anecdotally fertile, with a memorable cast of characters, East Hill Farm is informative, entertaining, often very funny, and ultimately important. Allen Ginsberg and Friends live again in these pages."

and Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

"I couldn't stop reading East Hill Farm and learning so much of what really went down on that farm in that so crucial period in the lives of the Beats. I visited the farm just twice but wish I had Ball's innocent yet so perceptive eye"

Lesley Wheeler's review is here. Marc Olmsted's review here.

For 28 years Gordon Ball took well over a thousand photographs of Allen and of other members of the Beat Generation. A selection from those photographs may be viewed on his web-site here (a perceptive essay on them, published in Jacket magazine, in 2007, may be read here).

He also edited three books with Allen - Allen Verbatim, Journals Mid-Fifties and Journals Early Fifties and Early Sixties.

He's also, in addition, an accomplished film-maker (see his memoir, '66 Frames). A DVD of his work, a retrospective, came out in 2010 - sadly, not including his Cherry Valley footage, 1968-1969's "Farm Diary").

His stewardship of the farm was from 1968 to 1971. Here's Elsa Dorfman's classic shot of Allen on his new property. Here's an image of a winter-wrapped Herbert Huncke up there in 1969. Here's a shot of the farm as it looked the following year (the snow, the snow!). Long after he had left the spot, "Bearzimages" (not Gordon) provides haunting super-8 images of the location (to a Pablo Casals sound-track). Here's Allen, comfortable, indoors, ('73?) working at the kitchen table.

Here's a young Gordon (and "the early 70's Allen") working together on editorial projects in New York:

[Gordon Ball and Allen Ginsberg, New York City, East 10th Street, circa.1973]

Gordon Ball will be appearing with Bill Morgan at City Lights on Wednesday March 14.

Allen Ginsberg Reading in Olomouc in the Czech Republic 1993

2012-01-14T03:42:00.000-08:00

David Hrbeck has just uploaded to You Tube footage of Allen in 1993 (November 12, 1993) reading in Olomouc in the Czech Republic at a high school gymnasium (in Hrbeck's home town, and where Hrbeck was, at that time, teaching). "This is a real treasure", he, accurately, declares. "The classroom was full of students, and it was a big success, (an) amazing event."

The recording is broken down into four sections. The first has Allen giving a rendition of his version of (William) Blake's "The Tyger" (accompanying himself on the harmonium). The second, features a reading of "Sunflower Sutra" (a Czech version is read first by actor, Mikuláš Pánek). The third segment (again begun by a reading by Mikuláš Pánek) features two short sections from "Kaddish", and the fourth, and final, section features (fittingly) "Kral Majales" and "The Return of Kral Majales" (again with Czech renditions by Mikuláš Pánek.

Friday the 13th - Friday Weekly Round-Up 56

2012-01-13T03:33:00.000-08:00

[Frames from Thomas Edison's 1896 film, The Kiss]

Some time since the last “Weekly Round-Up”, and we begin this, the first one of the New Year, with "Hollywood scoop" - more news on John Krokidas’ upcoming (2013) thriller, Kill Your Darlings (based around the David Kammerer murder). We (and everyone else) reported a while back on the inspired casting of Daniel Radcliffe (“Harry Potter”) as Allen Ginsberg, but wait, now we hear more - Jack Huston been slated for the Jack Kerouac part, Dane Dehaan to play Lucien Carr, Elizabeth Olsen (younger sister of tv's "Olsen twins") as Edie Parker, Jack's "girl"... More news to follow.

Meantime, the “buzz” continues with Walter Salles’ On The Road movie. Dates now being announced, May 28, for its opening in France (which makes it more and more possible that it will debut, the previous week, at the Cannes Film Festival). Salles (and Jerry Cimino of The Beat Museum) are interviewed in a two-part interview here and here. Cimino quotes cast member Tom Sturridge – “It kind of knocks me out and I’m pinching myself that I’m playing Allen Ginsberg in this film".

Had Kerouac got the casting he wanted, Dean Moriarty (the legendary Neal Cassady) would have been played by…Marlon Brando! (with Kerouac himself as Sal Paradise!). A letter from Kerouac to Brando has recently re-surfaced (it was auctioned in 2005 at Christies, along with other personal items from Brando’s estate, and realized $33,600) – “I wanted you to play the part”, Kerouac writes,” because Dean, as you know, is no dopey hot-rodder but a real intelligent (in fact Jesuit) Irishman. You play Dean and I play Sal (Warner Bros. mentioned I play Sal) and I’ll show you how Dean acts in real life, you couldn’t possibly imagine it without seeing a good imitation..”

Don't Smoke!

2012-01-12T03:49:00.000-08:00

Apologies in advance for the quality of the tape (shot off the t.v., but, then again, it was a t.v. show), here's Allen on NBC's "Late Night With Conan O'Brien", from May 10th 1994, performing "Put Down Yr Cigarette Rag" (alternative versions of the poem/song can be accessed here and here). "Don't smoke don't smoke don't smoke/Don't smoke/It's a nine billion dollar/ Capitalist Communist joke.." Recordings of the piece are available both on the Harry Smith-produced First Blues and the John Hammond-produced First Blues (always some confusion about those titles there!). Timeless, but Allen was particularly incensed by the blatant hypocrisy of the tobacco lobby, and, in particular, Senator Jesse Helms, five-term Senator from the tobacco state, North Carolina ("Nine billion bucks a year/a Southern Industry/ Buys Senator Jesse Fear who pushes Tobacco subsidy"). Likewise the puritanical misplaced rhetoric of the purported "War on Drugs" ("30 thousand die of coke or/ Illegal speed each year/430 thousand cigarette deaths/That's the drug to fear").

From the July 2011 Fact Sheet of the World Health Organization - "The tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced. It kills nearly six million people a year of whom more than 5 million are users and ex-users and more than 600,000 are nonsmokers exposed to second-hand smoke. Approximately one person dies every six seconds due to tobacco and this accounts for one in ten adult deaths. Up to half of current users will eventually die of tobacco-related disease."

"Don't smoke don't smoke don't smoke don't smoke, don't smoke.."

Allen Ginsberg Interviewed by Allan Gregg 1997 (ASV #28)

2012-01-11T13:15:00.000-08:00

Allen Ginsberg, interviewed on Canadian television by another A.G., pundit Allan Gregg.

Allen Gregg: The Beat Generation of avant-garde writers and artists of the '50's and '60's are experiencing a huge resurgence, especially among the young people. As a guy who was there at its generation, who has sustained it all these years, what's your reaction. Are you gratified by all of this? (are you) amused?

Allen Ginsberg: Well, actually, it's been going on all along, with different levels of attention by the media. But there's always been a phalanx of younger people who picked up, as we picked up, on what the older generation did, and picked up from them, and tried to carry a torch, like, let us say, the generation after mine. After all, Bob Dylan, was inspired to poetry by (Jack) Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, according to Dylan. When we were working on the Rolling Thunder tour, even back twenty years ago..

Allen Gregg: With Bob Dylan?

Allen Ginsberg: Yeah, he [Dylan] was the Chief there [Rolling Thunder Tour]. We went to Kerouac's grave, and I had pulled out a copy of this Mexico City Blues book. Dylan picked it up and started reading from it on camera, and I said, "What do you know about that?", and he said, "Oh, this book turned me on to poetry", and I said, "What happened?", and he said, "Someone gave it to me in St Paul, in 1959, and it blew my mind", and I said "Why?", and he said, "Because (it was the) first poetry that spoke to me in my own language", (in other words, a living American language, living idiom, living United States idiom, that a young person immediately could pick up on as someone talking for real, rather than.. oh, making-believe he was writing poetry). I think that's the key, that we were following an opening of verse form that allowed us to talk in a normal idiomatic vernacular.

Allen Gregg: You called it, I think, the cadence of the street.

Allen Ginsberg; Well, not really - cadence of the kitchen, like you talk to your mother, talk to your brother, talk to your best friend - or the street (the street aspect was, I think, laid on, later on, by the idea of street poetry but originally, it's just the real way you talk when you're talking with your friends and you're being emphatic and they're so there are intense moments of ordinary mind and ordinary conversation.

Allen Gregg: You hear people now trying to make a parallel between the conservative leadership of Eisenhower in the '50's and the conservative leadership of fundamentalists and neo-conservatives in the '90's and that and using that parallelism to explain the continuation. Is that too simple?

Allen Ginsberg: There's some element of it. Just some element. In the area of liberation and censorship, there's a parallel. During the Eisenhower administration, the Postmaster General brought a copy of D.H.Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover to Eisenhower's desk and he had underlined what he thought were salacious passages..

Allen Gregg: The dirty parts..

Allen Ginsberg: ...and the President said, "terrible, we can't have that!". And so Summerfield, Postmaster General, went on a crusade, you know - "Report dirty mail to your local postmaster". Secretly, he prevented something like two hundred million.. letters.. two hundred tons of mail from entering the United States from China (without telling anybody, just destroying it), and began persecuting many people who were sending (William) Burroughs, or other (controversial writers), D.H. Lawrence through the mail.

Allen Gregg: Right

Allen Ginsberg: Now you have Senator Jesse Helms, who's preoccupied with sex, himself, and sort of has a distorted view of it and maybe is sexually disturbed because he's so obsessed with it has put in a law directing the Federal Communications Commission in the United States to prevent so-called "indecent language" off the air. And so I've been involved in a legal suit there. In other words, the censorship has shifted and you have the so-called moral.. minority, I guess, or the fundamentalist, Bible-thumping, theo-political, televangelist, fund-raising demagogues, trying to put the kibosh on any literature which they disapprove of, which doesn't follow their particular party line, which is that of biblical inerrancy - that everything in the Bible is inerrant - no errors in the Bible - and they are the interpreters of what the Bible has said and anybody who doesn't follow their idea of what the Western Bible says is some manifestation of Satan! It's sort of like the Ayatollah, you might say. So they have attempted to sort of censor schoolbooks and schoolteaching, all over the country, and also censored radio and television, through Jesse Helms, who works for them - and now are trying to extend that even to (the) internet

Allan Gregg: Sure

Allen Ginsberg: And their excuse was to protect the ears of children. Although what's really interesting is that Helms began his career as a censor with denouncing the National Endowment for the Arts for showing..for funding a display of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, and at that time, the New York Times said, "don't pay attention, this is a poor little demagogue thing to raise money for his campaign, it's not serious", and Helms himself said, "this is not censorship, this is just guarding public money, to make sure that citizens' money is not spent on degenerate art" - or "spiritual corruption", or whatever. So he was bringing up defence of public money with the same rhetoric that (Josef) Stalin used - "elitist art" ("degenerate art" was Hitler's, Mao Tse Tung's was "spiritual corruption"). But then, having had this sort of front rationalization, that it's just public money, he then went on to pass a law that censored listener-supported stations that were not supported by the government, that was censorship, after the first rationalization, which people swallowed without question.

Allan Gregg: Now I know this has been a life-long cause for you but I'm thinking again about..

Allen Ginsberg: Well, it affects my own writing

Allan Gregg: Of course, because much of your work can't be heard on the radio

Allen Ginsberg: Well, much of my work is in high school and college text books, the Oxford Book of English Literature, or Macmillan, or Norton, so young kids are studying it in high school and college during school hours when they're not allowed to hear it on the radio or on television.But my particular contribution to poetry has been the vocalization of poetry,

Allan Gregg: Right

Allen Ginsberg: So that, actually, with all these guys who believe in free-trade or the market (they say!) , they're imposing a censorship on the market and are they're interfering with my free-trade on the market

Allan Gregg: In a format that you're most comfortable with and you would go to great pains to..

Allen Ginsberg: Well, vocalization

Allan Gregg: Sure

Allen Ginsberg: This is my something that I'm quite well-known for

Allan Gregg: The thing that you must sense is that kids can be made to be aware that censorship is insidious. When they're reading "Howl" (I mean you hear more about "Howl" in the 1990s, than I heard about in..) it's striking a real resonance. Is that..have you..are you tapping in to an alienation of youth today?

Allen Ginsberg: No, no, I'm tapping into some sanity on the part of the youth, I think. I think it's the governments and the media are alienated from nature, from human nature and from planetary nature. We punched a hole in the ozone layer. We polluted the oceans and the river courses, we decertified very valuable farmlands, we attacked the lungs of the planet, and the kids are aware that they're going to have to live with that, that..not only that we announce to them that they're going to have diminished expectations because we're too piggish and have made that conspicuous consumption of the world's raw materials, and still do that, and, in addition, have left behind them this great polluted dump of nuclear waste which nobody knows how to deal with, in the name of science ! - well it's not science, it's some kind of half-assed politics.

Allan Gregg: Oh, In fact there's an argument that the youth of today are faced with far more adversarial conditions, far more despair..

Allen Ginsberg: Yes they are

Allan Gregg: The '50's, for all the Beat Generation, was a marvelously prosperous time economically.

Allen Ginsberg: It was a prosperous time but the signals were there, and, you know, when you look back what were the themes that the poets were involved with? Gary Snyder, the Buddhist poet, was interested in Eastern thought, meditation practice and ecology - myself, in the poem "Howl" that you were speaking of, describes the world of conspicuous consumption as a kind of Moloch, to which children were being sacrificed (that has more resonance today than it had then, although the evidences were there, way back). And so, among the other themes we had were Eastern thought, ecology, meditation practice, the decriminalization of some of the drugs

(marijuana - which is obvious at this point), and a sort of a plea for the government to get out of the drugs business, which was.. even known then.

Allan Gregg: In terms of their involvement in the opium wars and so forth.

Allen Ginsberg: Well, even then, cops were beating up junkies in Times Square and stealing their junk and re-selling it. I knew that from Herbert Huncke, who was an old junkie who lived on Times Square in the '40's. I knew about that in the '40s, having tried some marijuana, I realized it doesn't drive you crazy, frothing at the mouth like mad dogs in Algeria which was the official Narcotics Bureau Treasury Department party-line. All I saw was a great big ice-cream sundae with chocolate syrup in front of me and it was like the greatest I'd ever seen! I certainly thought, "my what a marvelous world we're living in!"

Allan Gregg: Well, you were also tremendously associated with everything from gay rights to environmental protection to protesting the war in Vietnam to freedom of speech, how much did your activism kind of form your art and how much did your art form your activism?

Allen Ginsberg: Well, I think the activism came after an assault on my own art, actually.

Allan Gregg: In terms of the obscenity trial with Howl?

Allen Ginsberg: To begin with, and then later on, Helms' prohibition of my voice on the air. I was just sitting there writing, doing my business, I wasn't trying to get mixed up in public stuff. I thought that "Howl" was just like sort of a private little document that would circulate in the

velvet edition of a thousand or five hundred copies and I hadn't expected it to be made notorious by the cops, by grabbing it, and..or.. I had helped edit the first portion of Naked Lunch and when that was published in (19)59 by Chicago Review, it was burned by the trustees of Chicago Review and we had a big trial and the Postmaster got in on that, he wanted to ban it from the mail, so, we were just doing our normal artistic business and the maw of the government..the government put its paw in our business, so, as they said during the American Revolution, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty".

Allan Gregg:But,as a consequence of that..I don't have to tell you this, everyone's heard of Allen Ginsberg, but, sadly, not as many have read "How;" or any of your other works. I mean..has your sort of cultural notoriety eclipsed your literary legacy, do you think?

Allen Ginsberg: I don't think that's a problem because my "literary legacy" will be around when I'm..when I kick the bucket, and it will be around still, it's like a radio broadcast that goes on for centuries, and that's alright, and I feel that the work I've done, or Kerouac, or Burroughs, or Gregory Corso, Snyder, and few others, will all be classic, and will all be around for a long long time as some kind of touchstones of sincerity or candor (if not sincerity, at least candor).

Allan Gregg: Well, I want to talk specifically about two innovations in your poetry that you're really associated with, and I know that you'll tell me that these aren't innovations and that if you go back and see.. but my scholarship and my memory is relatively limited..

Allen Ginsberg. (But I'm a) (Distinguished) Professor of English at Brooklyn College, so I can't help (but be) a scholar!

Allan Gregg: First, unformatted verse.. And I guess the second is coupling words with music. How important, of those those two things then, do you think, in terms of establishing your continued relevance and impact in culture. I mean there's no question that Allen Ginsbrg has impacted popular culture now for five decades..

Allen Ginsberg: Well you're speaking of "unformatting", (you mean) "open form verse.

Allan Gregg: Yeah, getting away..

Allen Ginsberg: Getting away from rhymed lyric. The rhymed verse was originally called "lyric verse" because it was accompanied by a lyre..Sappho

Allan Gregg: Sure

Allen Ginsberg: Homer

Allan Gregg: Homer before him (sic), of course.

Allen Ginsberg: So chanted, or sung verse, or lyric verse, is very ancient, and is the earliest we have, and spoken verse, even without music, or, chanted, goes back, the oldest form we know, all the way back with the Australian aborigines, twelve thousand years, which is what? twice as old as the Biblical idea of "back to the Garden of Eden", if you figure that as 404 BC, (as the Biblical Inerrancy people will tell you), so that's the oldest form, so music and poetry and chant have always gone together. Vocalization has always been part of poetry, until, maybe the invention of the printing press? when you had multiples and duplication and you could take the book home and read it silently to yourself by fire-side or candle-light or electric bulb but the older tradition has been vocalization.

Allan Gregg: ..which you popularized..and are very much associated with...

Allen Ginsberg: No, (Walt) Whitman, and then there's a long tradition of the Bible, which are my models..Christopher Smart, a great poet of Doctor Johnson's time, who used a long verse line in his long 80-page poem "Jubilate Agno", (Rejoice in the Lamb), which is my model..Then there is, later, Whitman, then there is Rimbaud and there's a lot of experimental verse come up with the Dadaists and the French Surrealists, the European Futurists, so there's been a development in painting of an open form, (no longer, you know, just the perspective lines, after Cezanne), there's a development in music (both in bop and, later, Ornette Coleman, toward a free-form music), there's been a development in science (toward..well what chaos theory?, so to speak?)

Allan Gregg; Yes, I guess that's true.

Allen Ginsberg: There's been a development... Because it's nature, this is the nature of things. Things are not regulate-able to, you know, a fixed format. Now, song, lyric song, which rhymes and which has a tune does have that fixed format that comes back to a rhyme with a stanza, and so there's some great practitioners of that now, like Dylan and The Beatles, and they've opened it up a little bit. I write songs like that too, ballads and what-not, because I was trained to by my father. who was a poet and a teacher (it's a family tradition actually). People misunderstood and thought that we didn't rhyme because we didn't know how, but, actually, I can do that sort of with my eyes closed.

Allan Gregg: But when you break away from the formats, all of a sudden you can get into performance. If I'm reading iambic pentameter, I can't do an Allen Ginsberg..

Allen Ginsberg: You could..

Allan Gregg: ..but it'd be pretty awful!

Allen Ginsberg: No, you could, if your.. ballad-meters, say, were informed by vernacular pronunciation and non-distorted syntax, no inversions, and you did it very straightforwardly, then you could get away with it. It's what (Bob) Dylan does and what the Beatles (did)..

Allan Gregg: (Bob) Dylan, and some of the rappers, Tupac Shakur, are they the inheritors of that tradition? Will we see them, sometime, when we're all dead and gone, as great poets of the last half (century)?

Allen Ginsberg: There are great poets free verse poets and there are stupid free verse poets. Dylan, I'm sure you'll see, because, in fact, Dylan may be the only one left after... because, you know, when they pull all the plugs, if they ever pull all the plugs, or you know, civilization breaks down, more people can remember individual Dylan lines and tunes..

Allan Gregg: Oh yeah.

Allen Ginsberg: ...and songs than any other living poet, so Dylan may prove to be the great poet of this half of the century.

Allan Gregg: But you would hear people, around regular coffee tables, not stupid people, saying that poetry is dead, (that) you never hear poetry. You say, well, listen to music because that is poetry.

Allen Ginsberg: Well, if you listen to Lee Renaldo..or, if you listen to.. especially Beck now, who's a great words man, a great poet, a great interesting, you know, pop poet, but better than that, the lyrics he has on that Stereopathetic Soulmanure album - "Satan Gave Me A Taco" - are very...do you know that? - it's a thing about - he walks into a taco stand and takes a very hot taco which burns him up, and suddenly he finds himself in the fires of Hell in front of a judge, with all sorts of devils around him, and he's being judged, and the judge says "You're condemned to hell", and then he sees fires and noises around him, and lights, and its horrible, and all the appurtances of Hell, and booming noises, and he realizes he's on a rock n roll sound-stage! , so he joins a band, and then he drinks up all the Coca-Cola, sniffs up all the cocaine, and makes love with all the girls back-stage, and the band gets killed in a plane-crash, so he goes on to solo act, and then he becomes very rich, and finally he opens up a string of taco stands. So very funny like the snake that's holds its tail in its mouth, ouroboros, he's got this very funny conception, very beautiful music and words that are very very clear and amusing so that's a very good thing.

Allan Gregg: So you've been recording for a number of years, but here you are, 70 years old, on a "buzz-clip" on MTV, perhaps your most popular recording, The Ballad of the Skeletons, out on a CD, Mercury Records, tell us how that all came about?

Allen Ginsberg: Oh, well there was this sort of right-wing self -righteousness going on with Newt Gingrich and the accusation that liberals were "liberal" (sic) (that liberalness just meant open, you know, open hearted, as if being open-hearted were some sort of crime in a Malthusian universe where dog eats dog under the aegis of Jesus Christ and the Bible (it was so contradictory, and so stupid, nobody seemed to be able to answer them. You know, the Bible and Christ says, "take care of the poor" and these right-wing televangalists were saying "kick the poor in the face", so the Bible says "Let him without stain throw the first stone" and you had all these guys accusing a black girls of having babies and of rejecting human values basically, pedaling unfriendliness, pedaling mean-ness, pedaling disdain, pedaling contempt. It seemed to me somebody's got to make some kind of answer. I was working with Paul McCartney on some poetry (he was interested in haiku and his wife Linda does photography and I do too and she likes Robert Frank who was my mentor, so we got kind of friendly in the last few years. Then I had a concert in the Royal Albert Hall, London, with about 15 other British poets, and I thought that would be an interesting thing to recite, or sing, if I could find a guitarist, so I faxed McCartney and asked him if he could recommend a young kid who was a quick study, and he gave me some names and phone numbers but he said, "But if you're not fixed up with a guitarist why don't you try me, I love the poem", and I said, "Sure, it's a date". So I read about ten minutes and then announced that I was going to sing and that I had an accompanyist and announced Paul McCartney, and he came on stage, everybody was very happy to see..

Allan Gregg: I bet

Allen Ginsberg: ...this funny conjunction of an old geek, me, an old geezer and a slighty-younger geezer collaborating unexpectedly (unexpected for me too, mind-blowing for me, like I felt like a Beatle for two minutes!). So we performed together and that was successful and he enjoyed it, and then it was time to record so we sent him the 24 tracks to England, after we'd made a basic track, and he added maracas, and the drum (which it needed, to give some kind of skeleton to it), and then organ also, the Hammond organ (to sound like the old Al Kooper on Dylan records) and then his own guitar (responding very much to my intonations as a vocalist), and he said he had a lot of fun. And then we got the tape back, and Philip Glass was in town and I'd done a lot of work with him..so he volunteered to add his piano. He did some arpeggios that just fit in perfectly with rock n' roll, so it just fell into place, "with a little help from my friends".

Allan Gregg: And Gus Van Sant directed the video

Allen Ginsberg: I knew him through (William) Burroughs, and we'd lectured together at Princeton, and when we'd arrived in the limo (well, he had a lecture and I had a reading), he took a guitar out of its case, in the car, and I said, "Can you play?", and he said, "Yeah, I got a band in Portland", so I asked him if he'd accompany me on it, the (Ballad of the) Skeletons, and he did so. He knew the thing quite intimately, the text, and when it came time for a music video (which MTV asked for, and (for) which Danny Goldberg, the head of Mercury, appropriated a little bit of, you know, a shoe-string of money, Van Sant volunteered to do it - and did it on a

shoe-string.

Allan Gregg: Now, you are, without question.. somebody even said that you may be the last famous poet. You are recognized everywhere you go popularly, yet you haven't been recognized with Pulitzer prizes or MacArthur Awards. What is it about the literary establishment? Do you scare them still, you think?

Allen Ginsberg: I don't know. I'm actually an academic. I'm a Distinguished Professor of Literature at Brooklyn College, I'm an honorary member of the Modern Language Association, I'm a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is a very exclusive club (I think there's about 240 0f us, I've been there for 20 years or so), and I have enough, more than enough, reward and fame, so somebody else might need a Pulitzer (as far as I'm concerned)! - I could use a MacArthur! - that's money! , that's real money! (Pulitzer's 500 bucks, or a thousand dollars, I can do that with a.. give a poetry reading at a local club).

Allan Gregg: Has the homoerotic imagery in your poetry and your open sexuality, has that hurt you, (do) you think, in terms of that recognition?

Allen Ginsberg: I don't think so. I don't think so, because.. It's really amazing that this generation, particularly, are undaunted by that, there'll be straight young kids, who are quite beautiful and quite attractive, who come up and say they love me (but are absolutely straight).

Allan Gregg: Sure.

Allen Ginsberg: So it's a question of being transparent. Since the whole cast of government and media is not transparent but opaque, built on secrecy and manipulative-ness, the area of poetry, therefore, becomes a free area, where people can not be paranoid, or (can) understand that what is being said is being said for real (unless it's bad poetry, or it's manipulative poetry), so I think younger people appreciate that.

Allan Gregg: Now, at the risk of sounding overly-fawning, I mean, I have to ask you, it's clear that here are a lot of things that bug Allen Ginsberg, but (that) throughout your entire career you've been so vital, and completely un-jaded. I mean, you always seemed to be having fun (even when you're being arrested). What is it that keeps you this way? You'd think you'd say "(To) hell with this!"

Allen Ginsberg: When I was young, I realized I was gay, and, once, Kerouac - in 1945 it was, so it went back, I was (what?) twenty years old? - Kerouac came over to my room, at Columbia - and Burroughs had warned him about hanging around with those mothers who forever are tying their apron strings, and it really struck him - and I had a new poem and I read it to him, and then it was too late to go home, so he stayed in my room. And we had our underwear on, and I was a virgin - nothing happened! - and we slept together. And, somehow, someone came to visit. The Dean of Student-Faculty Relations burst into the room and found us in bed together, and assumed - what for them would be - the worst (for me, would have been the best!), for them would have been the worst, because they were so homophobic in those days. So I was called down to the Dean's Office. And he said to me. "Mr Ginsberg, I hope you realize the enormity of what you've done", and I looked at him, and realized that he was completely mad! - and he was running Columbia College! - So, (I thought), this was going to be a funny scene. So I said, "Oh, yes sir, I'm completely ashamed of myself, what can I do to get (ahead)?, but I realized that..he was nuts! - and, to a great extent, the entire society was nuts! And I felt kind of liberated, like a man who was in the land of the sleepwalkers who can see, or the land of the blind, who can see. But not only on that, but on many many subjects. Like I smoked a grass..a little bit of grass, and I realized that the government party-line was stupid. Like somebody, some kid in Russia, who knew that the Stalinist party-line was fair fraud, much of the American party-line, the official New York Times even, to the CIA and the State Department, the Narcotics Bureau, the whole police agency, is actually racist and prejudiced and corrupt. So then it becomes fun, because, you know, I don't feel guilty, I don't feel that I'm trespassing on anything, I'm trying to wake these people up!, they're sleep-walking!

Allan Gregg: Well, I want to thank you very much for joining me in this conversation. Thank you.

Allen Ginsberg: Thank you for your hospitality.

Charles Olson (1910-1970)

2012-01-10T03:06:00.000-08:00

[Charles Olson, "Poet Maximus elder", during the Vancouver Poetry Conference, July 1963 c. The Allen Ginsberg Estate]

January 10 - 42 years ago today - Charles Olson died. We've linked already to Henry Ferrini's documentary movie, Polis Is This. His (Olson's) EPC page (out of the University of Buffalo) may be accessed here. His PennSound (University of Pennsylvania) audio recordings page may be accessed here. Storrs (University of Connecticut) is, of course, the singular repository of his archives.

Allen and he first met in Harvard in 1959, but the crucial first conjunction, perhaps, was the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference (at which the above shots were taken). Audio of Allen's reading at that Conference can be heard here and here, Olson's here and here. There are also a number of fascinating panel discussions, featuring not only Olson and Ginsberg but also Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov, and others.

The 1970 Paris Review interview with Gerard Malanga (at least the version published by the magazine) may be read here.

Herbert Huncke (1915-1996)

2012-01-09T03:19:00.000-08:00

Beat aficionados, today is the birthday of Herbert Huncke, "the original Beat". Comprehensive info' on him is available here, here and here.

American Hipster, Hilary Holiday's long-awaited biography is due out this Spring (a brief excerpt from the opening chapter can be read here).

and, for those of you who missed it, there's a quaint story Jonathan Lethem tells in a recent (October 2011) issue of the New Yorker. "Allen Ginsberg had taken a carton of his collection "Planet News" and autographed every copy "To Herbert from Allen with love". He then gave them to Huncke to sell.." Now read on..

Oh, and did we mention Huncke's spoken word CD, From Dream to Dream (1994), including the classic story, "The Evening Sun Turned Crimson"? - Yes, we do believe we did.

Robert Duncan (1919-1988)

2012-01-07T04:04:00.000-08:00

[Robert Duncan, Anne Waldman, unidentified male, and Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche - June 1976, Boulder Colorado. Likely taken shortly before the reading with Helen Adam, mentioned below. Photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

January 7 marks the birthday of the great master poet and mage, Robert Duncan, born in 1919, died in 1988, he would have been 93 today. As an entry into his work, one can happily rely on the invaluable resources at PennSound, an extraordinary trove (the extraordinary trove) of recorded (poetry) audio. His May 1959 reading at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State is there (tho’ not, curiously, this earlier 1956 reading). From the same location, there’s a 1972 reading (be warned, tho', there's silence for the first 45 seconds - the poetry-reading begins about one minute in), and a 1983 reading (with Michael McClure - by the way, there's a 5 second break, around 44 minutes in, on this one, where the tape gets turned over). Vintage - essential - audio would also have to include his participation in both the Vancouver (1963) and Berkeley (1965) poetry conferences (regarding the former, not only his reading, but recordings of ancillary discussions, may be found here - regarding the latter, Berkeley, 1965, here's him reading his classic "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow"...

Here are some remarks made by Allen transcribed from the (June) 1976 Naropa reading he gave with Helen Adam (the audio of this is available in two parts here and here):

AG: “Tonight’s couple represents a mystic marriage already many decades old. When I first came to San Francisco in 1954 among the reigning stars of poetry on the West Coast in the SF poetic community was Robert Duncan and Helen Adam, both of whom are here together, reading as old friends, and old collaborators, and old fellow brother-sister dreamers, witches and warlocks, magicians, players. Robert is, perhaps, the most elegant poet in America, both in mind, in body, speech and mind, which is to say, dress, language, syntax (he claims that he’s getting so old that he practically can’t walk but he still looks in pretty good shape, and, as you notice, one of the rare American poets dressed in a velvet suit! – which corresponds to the exquisiteness and delicacy, and richness and splendor, of his work as a poet . His reading here is also a rare occasion, because it’s one of the… We’ve all read together under the Buddhist auspicies in San Francisco before, (but) this is Robert’s first visit to NAROPA Institute, and we’re very happy that he made it here finally, because it represents a merger, or wedding, or joining together, of many streams, many traditions, many families, of American poetry, which we’ve been trying to do, to accomplish, here in Boulder. When I first came to San Francisco, the King, or Prince, or Queen Poet, was Robert – and still is, I think, the presiding Muse of San Francisco.

His work, as it flowered in print, available to you, is published by New Directions, The Opening of The Field, that was followed by Roots and Branches, and then Bending The Bow (so those are all currently [1975] in print from New Directions). There’s extensive lore in those books. There’s currently (also) [again, it’s 1975 that Allen’s speaking] available out of Sumac Press, The Truth and Life of Myth. Robert has also been working for many.. over a decade.. on a long poetic essay, critical-poetic-imaginative essay, on the work of HD, [now out], one of the early Imagist poets, and one of the great poets of American century. So Robert has.. [a list of subsequent (post '75) books would include the silence-breaking Groundwork: Before the War (1984) and Groundwork II: In the Dark (1987), Fictive Certainties, his 1983 book of essays, and a whole lot more]...

The rarity of this reading (and of the texts to be presented) consists, in part, in the fact that Robert has taken a vow not to publish poetry for 15 years (which is very rare for a poet to do) - so there’ll be no major work in print by him until 1984, he says. Partly to escape the poetry star system, partly as an act of meditation, poetic meditation, (the writing will perhaps be more extensive than if it were to be published, it’ll be less self-conscious(ness)). So (t)here is a rare true practitioner of the art of poetry as a form of meditation (preoccupations here) . He’ll read first, do a brief set, and then Helen Adam will read and present her major set, then Robert will come back and finish the evening. And we’ll encourage them to read as long as they have strength and we have ears..."

Courtesy, the Internet Archives, part one and part two.

Robert Duncan: “I have one footnote to Allen’s introduction. He spoke of my having taken a vow, not to publish a major work for 15 years, (not) until 15 years after (the publication of) Bending The Bow. I’m much more ex cathedra than that, and much less humble. I informed my publisher that I would not deliver him a volume of poetry until 15 years had past, and (it's) a vow - I am mercurial, I have no responsibility to my vows, but I, as an imperial force, I’m not about to release my publisher, who keeps whining around the corner, and let him have a volume, for 15 years. I think you see the difference. One, I know is a very good virtue (but when you propose good virtues, I’m likely to occupy the other side of the proposition). I will try not to be, well, the one thing I do appreciate about Buddhism (is) that it’s hard to pose what the other side is..."

The University of California Press is planning the publication of a 6-volume set of The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan, of which Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman's edition of The H.D.Book is the first volume. Lisa Jarnot's biography of Duncan, The Ambassador From Venus, is scheduled for the Spring (excerpts may be read here and here). And for the Fall, the exciting news of Christopher Wagstaff’s collection of interviews - "A Poet's Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan 1960-1985".

Louis & Allen 1975 Naropa Class - Conclusion (Hart Crane)

2012-01-06T03:21:00.000-08:00

AG: Okay to Hart Crane - another example of that genius and stupidity mixed. The reason he’s interesting to read right at this point is we went through the breakthrough in the late 19^th century of the old verse forms, through Rimbaud, Whitman, and then on to the great 20^th century voices, Lorca, Apollinaire, Mayakovsky (and you heard Esenin’s voice), some lesser voices, but total voice, like “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan”[Vachel Lindsay], total vocalization. One man who tried to get it all together was Hart Crane. Hart, (a) terrific first name! – from Cleveland. His father was a candy-maker!. (Crane) ran off to New York and read Rimbaud when he was 17 and 16, 17, 18, hung around with the early American Dadaists and modernes, and the vanguard people in Greenwich Village, went to Europe, and was in the sophisticated ‘20’s scene with Caresse Crosby and Harry Crosby, who were rich millionaires who had the Black Sun Press, printing early Gertrude Stein, early Joyce. Hart knew (F Scott) Fitzgerald and (Ernest) Hemingway, I guess – or knew Hemingway and Matthew Josephson, who was a great sociologist/economist..

Louis Ginsberg: Allen you read Rimbaud?

AG: Everybody did.

Louis Ginsberg: When he read Rimbaud, I said “Allen is always chasing Rimbauds”!

AG: Well, Hart Crane was one of the first great American chasers of Rimbauds. So he tried to bridge the gulf between modern machinery, open-hearted Whitmanic, or post-Whitmanic, American idealistic spirit, as you find in Kerouac, or in Whitman (and some of the early Melville before he’s totally disillusioned). He tried to bridge that modern machine-America with a classic Neo-Platonic idealistic sense of the universe, a Gnostic spiritualism, like a Swedenborgian spiritualism. He ran into Swedenborgian teachers in Ohio, just as Vachel Lindsay had. It’s amazing that the crank Buddhism of that day, which came through theosophical societies emanating out of England in (the) 1890’s, like the Order of The Golden Dawn, the same influences that William Butler Yeats fell into, Aleister Crowley’s, a certain amount of black magic, coming over to Springfield, Ohio, maybe taught in the YMCA by a lonesome dyke schoolteacher… So they all had spiritual friends. If you want to read about that, read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, for that American loneliness and the beautiful cranks therein. “The Bridge”, then, is his attempt to bridge that gap. And he was writing verse which was both varied – some modern, and some kind of modern Cubist, after Rimbaud and Apollinaire, and some very formal broken associative verse. Partly because of time, I’ll stick to just gists here. First of all, there’s a tribute to (Walt) Whitman in it, at the very beginning, at the opening of a long poem called “The Bridge”, on Brooklyn Bridge. He lived in a room overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge and brought sailors home to his room, and had platonic and earthy love affairs, always out of his window the Brooklyn Bridge as his big symbol. A single, furnished room (which was later reconstructed into an apartment house that (Jack) Kerouac and I visited years later). The poem is about forty pages, built in different sections, the end of one section, called “Cape Hatteras”, has an epigraph from Whitman, “The seas all crossed, weathered the Capes, the voyage done”. So there’s a little tribute to Whitman, which is one of the prettiest things ever written about Whitman by a later American follower, both homosexual Neo-Platonists, both trying to either extend themselves to embrace and include the entire universe, or all man, at any rate. [Allen reads from Hart Crane – “Panis Angelicus! Eyes tranquil with the blaze/ Of love’s own diametric gaze, of love’s amaze!”…”yes, Walt,/ Afoot again, and onward without halt - / Not soon, nor suddenly – no never to let go/My hand/ in yours,/ Walt Whitman-"] - So… then, a strange piece of American, sort of hobos-by-the-railroad-yard, so that in the Bob Dylan, (Jack) Kerouac, wandering-minstrel style, or subject, a little piece of, like.. who’s the inspirer of (Dylan)?..a Woody Guthrie, On The Road, scene. A section called “The River” – [Allen continues reading from Hart Crane – “So the 29^th century – so/ whizzed the Limited – roared by and left/ three men, still hungry, on the tracks, ploddingly/ watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slip-/ ping gimleted and neatly out of sight” – and, from further on in the poem - “The last bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas…”.. “He trod the fire down pensively and grinned/ Spreading dry shingles of a beard..”..”Behind/ my father’s cannery works I used to see/ rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery”..”Snow-silvered, sumac-stained or smoky blue - / is past the valley-sleepers, south or west./ As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too…” [tape ends here]

[tape continues. Allen reading/quoting Hart Crane – “…her yonder breast/ Snow-silvered, sumac-stained, or smoky blue../ Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west”] - It’s like Rimbaud, taking off on the open road in France.

Where he finally rose to a height is in a section called “Atlantis”, which was his attempt to break through totally into a completely ecstatic visionary universe, in which the modern engineering bridge-metal, heavy-metal universe was linked to the early American promise of the open road, open heart, open soul – What time is it now?

Louis Ginsberg: It’s quarter to eight.

AG: Well it’ll take about ten minutes to read this. Shall we do that?

Student(s): Read it

AG: Since “Adonais”, I think it’s the strongest bit of sonorous rhetoric that has been written in English that I know of.

AG: [To Anne Waldman, also in the class] Are we alright, Anne?

Anne Waldman: Just announce the reading [for later that evening]

AG: Yeah, a couple of announcements. First of all, the reading tonight – Ed Sanders (in this tradition of visionary-eyed American Hart Crane, (Charles) Olson mid-Western fury), and Michael Brownstein (another shy, laconic, mid-Westerner). Also – I have to give grades to people who want credit. I’ve been grading you according to your poetic responses. Ah, but also, hand in, by Friday, for grading, a poem, or else a piece of prose, or any form you want to put it in, detailing, not generalizing but detailing, anything that sticks in your mind from this course. Gregory (Corso) [Corso had taught a couple of Allen's classes], myself, Shelley, anything you want, but some substance, some matter, that’s been left over, that’s been precipitated. Write it as interesting as possible so I can read it. Type it, for the love of God!, if you can!, or if you write it, write it in a really beautiful hand so (that) it’s readable. For those who want credit. A page will do, because it’s just a question of sampling, tasting your consciousness. That was for this class I was just talking about. For the Visiting Poetics Class, people taking it for credit, you’ve got Visiting Poetics memorandums which were announced in class, and they are due tomorrow at class. One page, or less, unless they have something long and great to say, according to Louie.. Any questions see Louie (Lewis) Macadams..

So.. beginning with a description of the bridge itself , the structure of this (is): It rises, comes to a climax, comes to a demi-climax, goes into a sort of symphonic calm, rises again, comes completely – total orgasm, and then a little post-coitus coda. The last section of “The Bridge”, “Atlantis”, with the epigraph – “Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and system”. About three pages.

Student: Can you read that epigraph again?

AG: “Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and system”. Love in harmony and system. He’s quoting from Plato. So here’s an attempt to get to the Platonic eidolon.

Louis Ginsberg: Do you know what (Carl) Linnaeus said?, “Music is love in search of a word”. Closely related to that. Sorry to interrupt you, Allen, go ahead.

AG: So here it is, literally, love in search of a word, coming to pure music and language. What it means we can always take out later, or you can look it up in the dictionary, but it’s the sounds which are important, and the emotion in the sounds. [Allen reads from Hart Crane’s “Atlantis” – “Through the bound cable strands, the arching path/ Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings..” “The serpent with the eagle in the leaves… Whispers antiphonal in the azure swing”] - There I was following, for my breaths, his exact punctuation – dashes, dots and commas, periods – which gives the indications for breath. And if you follow those through reading it aloud, there’s a certain kind of buzzing high that you get (as you can get through (reading) “Adonais”).So I recommend that for vocalization in the bathroom.. [ class and tape end here]

[Allen and Louis Ginsberg reading at NYU, October 1971 - photo by Layle Silbert]

Louis and Allen - do note/don't miss Charles Ruas' 1968 recording of Louis and Allen reading from the Pacifica Radio Archives, a two-part recording - Louis reads here, and Allen here. (an earlier, 1966, father-and-son reading, and a later, 1975, reading are reviewed here and here). Michael Schumacher's 2001 volume, "Family Business: Two Lives In Letters and Poetry" (described by Publisher's Weekly as "some of the most astonishing correspondence in American Literature") remains happily available, as does (a little harder to track down, but worth it) Louis' Collected Poems (a reproduction of the 1920 volume, The Attic of The Past, can be accessed here).

Louis Ginsberg Guests In Allen's 1975 NAROPA Class - part two - (Vachel Lindsay & John Keats)

2012-01-05T03:17:00.000-08:00

[Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)]

Student: Allen said the other day when he mentioned you were coming that you might say something about Vachel Lindsay

Louis Ginsberg: Vachel Lindsay? No, not particularly. I used to like him. He’s called “The Poet in Vaudeville” [Lindsay himself referred to his compositions as "the Higher Vaudeville'] and he had a very strong rhythm, he accented it. For instance, he had some lines that, if I can remember.. “Big fat bucks in a wine-barrel room, ram-bam-bam, bam able”. Right, “In the Blood of the Lamb”. Do you remember some of the lines?

AG: Actually, is there a Lindsay in the library?

Student(s): Yes, there is one

AG: Could someone get the Lindsay. We can do that too. It’s “Fat black bucks in wine-barrels…”

Louis Ginsberg: “Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel…”

AG: “Barrel-house king”

Louis Ginsberg: “Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable”

AG: “Sagged”

Louis Ginsberg: “Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom”. Well, he was quite a fad for one time, but the noise. It was a little bit too loud for the poetry, which needed to be a little bit more subtle. But he had his vogue, one day.

AG: I think actually, well, I can remember you reciting “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” and also “The Congo”.

Louis Ginsberg: That’s right.

AG: And I think both of them.., they seemed, when I started reading John Crowe Ransom and New Criticism and more intellectual approaches to poetry, or non-physical approaches, or metaphysical approaches, Lindsay seemed like an American crank..

Louis Ginsberg: Yeah

AG: ..and sort of provincial. But, as years go by, I realized that he was writing in classic rhythms that very few people have ever tried or accomplished in America, and it’s sort of like a hit of what could have been done, maybe on a more sublime scale, but real solid as it is, as it stands. If we get that volume, I’ll try and read some in a while.

Louis Ginsberg: Do you think we’ll have time?

AG: Yeah, we’ve got an hour.

Louis Ginsberg: Alright, we’ll listen to you. But here’s a poem, always my favorite, “Ode on A Grecian Urn”, by Keats. Allen and I were in Rome one day and we were in the house where Keats lived and we were very depressed by the tragedy of Keats, but while he was living he wrote some poems. An ode. He saw a Grecian urn. He loved things in Greece. He saw a beautiful Grecian urn. Now we may see many beautiful things, and we pause. But if we were asked to explain it, we couldn’t. In other words, what’s the difference between a poet and an ordinary person? I think the big differences are two – One, the poet feels deeply, but, more than that, he can express eloquently and beautifully what the average person can’t express. For instance, sometimes I’ll write a poem and I’ll get letters saying, “Thank you for writing the poem”. Or we come off the platform, “Thank you”. And I used to wonder “Why are they thanking me?” And then I realized. I am expressing, the poet is expressing, well, beautifully, eloquently, marvelously, permanently, what people cannot express. The poet, you could say, is a voice for the voiceless. (Robert) Browning said the poet helps the person release the splendor hidden deep in him. How often do you hear a poet, you read a poem, or even you hear a good speaker, expressing marvelously what you felt dimly, and you say, “Ah, that’s what I feel”. And you have an inner expansion. So, well, I was diverted a little bit.

AG: I want to make one check.

Louis Ginsberg: Yeah

AG: How many here have read “Ode on a Grecian Urn”? Raise your hands. So almost everybody has. How many have not?

Louis Ginsberg: Well, then you know this poem.

AG: There’s one person in the class who hasn’t, so it’s worth doing

Louis Ginsberg: So I don’t have to read it over, (I’ll) just (read it) once, and then we can listen to comment(s) [Louis then reads Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, first three and final stanza] – Just a few points. One, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard”, what can that mean? Anybody? It’s a paradox.

AG: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter..” still..

LG: That’s right.

Student: It means that what you hear in your imagination is always more beautiful.

Louis Ginsberg: In other words, the anticipation may be greater than the actual realization. But I think that if we wanted an implication, at least from my viewpoint, I think what is implied here in this stanza. “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave/ Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;/ Bold Lover, never never cast thou kiss/ Though winning near the goal – yet do not grieve;/ She cannot fade , though she has not thy bliss/ For ever will thou love, and she be fair!”. The implication is, as I take it, as follows., But, before I say that, I want to repeat what I said before that what poetry does is to express marvelously what the average person cannot. Now another thing poetry does is to reveal the glory of the commonplace. But a third thing, and I think that arises from this poem, is this – that whereas man dies, the poet dies but his art, his poem, lives on, so that poetry can, by its beauty, perpetuate an emotion or beautiful thought. Suppose Keats had thrilled at this vase, but had never been able, as a poet, to express it? We would have lost something beautiful in the language. So another thing poetry does, as you can see in Shakespeare and other great poets, is to make permanent ideas, so that they can sparkle on the forefinger of time. And then the last, this is a puzzle, this is a paradox, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty..” There’s a tough nut to crack. Because, on earth, we cannot know truth, although we may know beauty. Could it be that in a Platonic sense the ideal truth and the ideal beauty blend and harmonize? I’ll leave you with this enigma. Thank you for listening.

AG: Lindsay was brought up and we have a volume so I’m going to read a few fragments of Lindsay. I first heard it from.. Stay, Lou..

Louis Ginsberg: Alright. I’ll let you have the center.

AG: Nah, I make my own.

Louis Ginsberg: I’ll compromise.

AG: Can I have a cigarette? Could I have a cigarette?

Student: Do you want one of these?

AG: Yeah, I guess so. I first heard Lindsay from my father, though he says..

Louis Ginsberg: Well, I don’t remember. This was thirty years ago.

AG: You met Lindsay, didn’t you, at one point?

Louis Ginsberg: Yeah, I met him. I belonged to the Poetry Society of America, where he used to come as a poet and we listened to him, Robert Frost, and all the other well-known poets. They took you there, (Allen).

AG: Yeah. What did Lindsay sound like? Do you have any idea?

Louis Ginsberg: Well, he had a booming voice that when he began to talk frightened people, because they were not used to poets being so..what they though, you knowm boisterous and loud. They were used to the quiet poets. Read that, Al.

AG: Well, there’s Lindsay’s comment on the poetic voice itself. William Jennings Bryan, do you know who William Jennings Bryan was? Presidential candidate against “Teddy”, Theodore Roosevelt, and anti-bank man, and also anti-gold standard, so he had this great magnificent poetic line, which he delivered in a great speech in front of a Democratic Convention when America was going to go on to the Gold Standard. “Thou shalt not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”. So a poem by Lindsay, memoralizing the.. Bryan had a reputation for being, like, a silver-mouthed rhetorician - “Bryan, Byan, Bryan, Bryan” is the title of the poem, “The Campaign of Eighteen Ninety-six as Viewed at the Time by a Sixteen-year-old, etc.”. Lindsay’s comment on that voice. (So this is about the same time written at that booming voice of Esenin and Mayakovsky, “at the top of his voice”) [ Allen reads a little Lindsay – “In a nation of one hundred fine, mob-hearted, lynching, relenting, repenting millions,/ There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging gorgeous things to shout about,/ And knock your old blue devils out./ I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,Bryan"…"Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores/ And torchlights down the street to the end of the world.”] – It’s just that one..

Louis Ginsberg: Allen, how about the…

AG: this is Lindsay, it’s just that one Lindsay thing on Bryan, which is Lindsay picking up on the tradition of the great American crank, which is the great American poetic tradition from weird Poe, through late hermetic Melville, solitary Emily Dickinson, through Lindsay himself, through Hart Crane, who we’ll get to. “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” (to be sung to the tune of “The Blood of the Lamb”)

Student: (singing) “Are you washed in the blood, in the soul-cleansing blood, are you washed in the blood of the lamb?. Two,three, are you..”

AG: Go on, General William, who enters here, on his death, an elegy, I suppose for his death. Do you know this poem, Louie?. (William Booth) was the founder of the Salvation Army (bass drum beaten loudly) – so it’s going to be accompanied [Allen reads from Lindsay – “Booth led boldly with his big bass drum”…”And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place/ Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”] – there’s a couple of nice lines that I missed, like; ‘Oh, shout Salvation!, it was good to see/ Kings and Princes by the Lamb set free/ The banjos rattled and the tambourines/ Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens”. That’s a remarkable rhythm, and, actually, few American poets wrote in that rhythm, and those rhythms are very ancient. They’re Greek dance rhythms. If you see analyses of the Greek choral rhythms, in the Greek plays, the Chorus, which commented on the play, was a musical and dance chorus, though, translated, now it’s just a chorus. They actually were rhythms danced and chanted by the Chorus, and because they were danced, there were odd skipping ones, like duh-duh-dah, duh-duh-dah, duh-duh-dah [ Allen sounds out rhythm] – with a whole group of people, a masked Chorus, maybe twenty people, moving across the stage in those rhyhms. That particular interest was (Ezra) Pound’s interest, when he discovered that poetry was originally linked to music and then back to physical dance.

Louis Ginsberg: But his influence didn’t last too long, though.

AG: Lindsay?

Louis Ginsberg: Yeah

AG: It’s going to spread out right now.

Louis Ginsberg: Well, but I mean, I don’t think he’s read as much as some other poets.

AG: He’s read less than he was in the ‘20s.

Louis Ginsberg: Well, he’s read by experts, like you.

AG: Well, he was read in the ‘20’s, but.. pardon me?

Student: Didn’t he go around, dream up his own..

AG: Yeah, he was one of the first heavy beatniks, and a Buddhist, a Swedenborgian-type.

Louis Ginsberg: He used to walk and sell his poems, not to sell them, but give his poems in exchange for a night’s lodging and go to the door of a farmhouse - “I have no money but if you let me sleep here and give me a meal I’ll read you some of my poems”. He was successful in doing that, before the people had a chance to say anything he’d start to read.

AG: He had a book called Rhymes to be Traded for Bread..

Louis Ginsberg: That’s it.

AG: ..that was interesting.

Louis Ginsberg: That was the one.

Student: He went on to do himself in tho’, didn’t he?

AG: Shot himself in a hotel room in Springfield, Ohio [Illinois]

Student: Didn’t he drink a bottle of Lysol

AG: A bottle of Lysol, that’s right. You’re right , drank a bottle of Lysol. Lewis (Macadams)? [poet Lewis Macadams is also attendant in class]

Lewis Macadams: There’s a beautiful story. When you were saying about him going from home to home in the South., He wrote the precursor to Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” called “The Hobo’s Handbook”, [actually, "A Handy Guide For Beggars"] which Vachel Lindsay wrote about the South.

AG: Have you read that?

Lewis Macadams: Yeah, it's a wonderful book.

AG: I once read through the entire Collected Works of Lindsay, in Paris, and I really liked it. It was very solid. We’ll get on to “The Congo”, which is his great sound masterpiece. How many have read “The Congo”? And how many have not? So it’s actually more than one, Never heard of “The Congo”? what a situation! - “The Congo – A Study of the Negro Race (Being a memorial to Ray Eldred, a Disciple missionary of the Congo River)” . And it’s divided into three sections - it’s a little bit like (Edgar Allen) Poe’s “The Bells”, divided into three alternative emotional, alternative rasas, or alternative emotional sections – (I) Their Basic Savagery, (II) Their Irrepressible High Spirits, and (III) The Hope of Their Religion.” I’m going to read it all through…

Student: Do you have a date on that?

AG: A date on this? Yes, I think so. I can check it out. No, I can check it out later for you (since) it would mean thumbing through the book instead of reading through the poem [Allen begins then reading, in its entirety, “The Congo..”.. “Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room/ Barrel-house Kings with feet unstable..”.. “Mumbo-jumbo will hoo-doo you”] – he has notes on pronunciation and tone, like “Slow philosophic calm” with “Heavy bass. With a literal imitation of camp-meeting racket, and trance”. So, actually, there’s some music intended here. It’s such a white-chauvinist or civilization-chauvinist piece that, if you compare it to what’s going on in the Brazilian jungle now, you realize that Lindsay was an idiot, politically, culturally, except that there’s kind of an exaggeration of the preaching and a sort of simplistic exaggeration that makes it almost like an archetype of minstrel show burlesque, both in the music and in the imagery, but at times really exquisite. Like “Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play..Blown past the white ants’ hill of clay.” So there’s a funny combination of genius and stupidity, which is actually perfect American. As you have it in Whitman, as you have it in Melville, in “Billy Budd” or “The Confidence Man” (well, that is, Melville is much more intelligent than that, but), the genius and stupidity that you’ll have in Burroughs, or in Kerouac, or in myself, actually.

Student: Charles Ives?

AG: Charles Ives, yeah, it’s the American crank!

Student: How about Mark Twain?

AG: Well the same stereotypes that they took and elevated to a kind of aesthetic prettiness.

Louis Ginsberg: They evaluated Lindsay. They called him “The Poet in Vaudeville”. He was more attractive as an act, rather than the intrinsic poetic merits.

Student: Did he actually work in Vaudeville?

Louis Ginsberg: Well, no. They called him “The Poet in Vaudeville” because, when he read his poetry, it seemed more like an act, in its exaggerated rhythm. You were going to..

AG: Yeah, what time is it?

Louis Ginsberg: Half past late! No.

AG: There’s time.

Louis Ginsberg: It’s 7.30.

Louis Ginsberg Guests In Allen's 1975 NAROPA Class - Part One

2012-01-04T01:43:00.000-08:00

[Allen & father Louis Ginsberg, teaching course at Naropa, August 1975. Photo c. Rachel Homer]

AG: Okay, my father and I have given poetry readings together in the past, and he’s one of my gurus of poetry in a sense that he first taught me verse and first taught me sound, so I thought, getting it from the horse’s mouth, since he was going to be here, it would be a good idea for us to teach together, because we’ve never taught poetry together. I’ll turn the class over to you for about three quarters of an hour to go back to Keats probably.

Louis Ginsberg: When Allen asked me to come here and read some poetry, I asked him what he read, and he said “Shelley”. Well, immediately, of course, you think of Keats. As a mater of fact my mind went back to the time when Allen and another boy of mine, also a poet [Eugene] were lying on the rug reading the jokes, and I came home from the school, college, and quoted Shelley and Keats and Milton and so on, so that perhaps some of the lines sank into his subconscious.

Poetry, of course, is a subject that everybody talks about but sometimes can’t quite put their finger on. The best definition of poetry that I know is this: “Poetry is the most beautiful way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget”. Man is distinguished from all other creatures on earth by his ability to express himself, and the highest power of expression, the cream of expression, is poetry. Now, sinking lower to something more concrete, here’s a notion, or general idea, of what real poetry is, namely, poetry is a collaboration of a concrete particularity with a general principle. Most of the people who write poetry write in generalities, but that’s more like prose. Prose states, but poetry implies. And one of my favorite poems is this, called “Ozymandias” by Shelley. Ozymandias was a famous Egyptian captain, then he became king, a tyrant. Shelley was told by a traveler that this traveler saw a broken statue in the sand,. From this, Shelley made this sonnet [Louis reads, in its entirety, Shelley’s “Oztmandias” – “I met a traveler from an antique land..”..”the lone and level sands ] – Now there’s a concrete detail, namely, “shattered statue”, “And on the pedestal..” – “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”/ Nothing beside (the statue) remains. Round the decay/ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

Another way of stating that theory of poetry was (that) the lines of a poem should move with a double-force of observation and implication. Now I’m going to ask you what do you think is the implication of this poem? Anybody? Let me repeat the nub of the poem which is “And on the pedestal these words appear:/ “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;/ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”/ Nothing beside remains. Round the deacy/ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away”. See, prose states and explains, but poetry implies, hints. Anybody? Please.

Student: Impermanence

Louis Ginsberg: Pardon me.

Student: Impermanence?

Louis Ginsberg: Now you’re near it. Impermanence of what?

Student: Impermanence of achievement by man.

Louis Ginsberg: Pardon me?

Student: The impermanence of achievement by man.

Louis Ginsberg: Impermanence, that’s right. The impermanence of the man’s (achievement), or man’s vanity, contrasted with what?

Student: The sand.

Louis Ginsberg: The what?

Student: The sand.

Louis Ginsberg: Well, what about the sand?

Student: The sand is eternal.

Louis Ginsberg: That’s right. The transience of man’s vanity and boasts contrasted with the imperturbable permanence of nature. Note the last lines – “boundless and bare” – the alliteration – to emphasize – “lone and level” – the alliteration.

Now one more point, in order to emphasize the imperturbability, the impermanence, the solidity of the earth, the poet does what all good poets do, he unites sound and sense, matter and meaning. Can anyone tell me what there is especially good in this last line that contributes to the permanent solidity, the eternal imperturbability of nature. Anyone?

Student: It’s pure meter. It’s pure..what is it, iambic?

Louis Ginsberg: Well, the whole poem, of course, is iambic.

Student: Yeah, but this is very pure.

Louis Ginsberg: Pure? Well, I don’t know if that’s the world we should use. You’re getting close though. You’re flirting with the answer

Student: It’s totally monosyllabic.

Louis Ginsberg: That’s it. There’s the poem. It is monosyllabic in the main. It drags because of the monosyllables that make the reading of it slow. “The lone and level sands stretch far away” . So, as in this poem, so in most good poems, the implication is very important. I remember Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall” – he’s talking about two men, one wants the wall, the other doesn’t. The one that wants the wall is.., the poet says, he stands in the shadow, in the past. He is in the shadow of the past and the shade of trees. What a bad poet would say (would be), “Yes, but not only that, he’s old-fashioned” – or in “Othello”, when Othello is crazed by jealousy, and he’s furious and raging, he goes into the bedroom of Desdemona to kill her, and he says, “(Now) put out the light, and then put out the light”. The first light, of course, is the lamp, but the second light goes on in our minds. The light of his life. So in all poetry there is that implication. Suppose I pause, now, for a few questions on poetry in general. Is there some water here?

AG: There’s also, in the end, the other element is just space. The other element is just endless space also

Louis Ginsberg: Endless space?

AG: As an image.

Louis Ginsberg: Well that may be true but meanwhile he’s anchored it to earth. He’s talking about the lower level, sands. Of course, it might be space too, but it’s more anchored to the land. Now, if you had some questions about poetry, some nights when you couldn’t sleep, and you resolved some day that you’d like to find the answer, well, maybe I can roll away the fog from your mind. Maybe, I said. If I can’t, then Allen and I might. So any question about poetry in general. Yes sir?

Student: In monosyllabic phrasing, should the words be spaced on the page to make it that way or just will the presence of the words do it?

Louis Ginsberg: No, it’s normally printed. There’s no space there, although some poets might do that.

AG: (e.e.) Cummings, remember – the balloon?

Louis Ginsberg: That’s right, yes, but..

AG: Do you remember the line?

Louis Ginsberg: That’s right. But the fact remains that you’re forced, when you read it, not to rush, but you’re held back, as if to say, there’s something ponder-able, something weighty, something lasting. Anybody have a question about poetry in general

AG: I want to add, there’s a line of Cummings about the balloon man. Do you know how that goes? “Far and wee” – “The balloonman whistles/ far and wee” [from the poem [in-Just-]]

Student: “The little/ lame balloonman/ whistles far and wee”

AG: And how does he divide that line? “Whistles….far….and….wee”. The “and….wee” is way over on the edge of the page. I guess it’s mostly Cummings did experiment with page.. ways to get that break,

Louis Ginsberg: Anyone else have a question?

Student: what did you do to help your son become a poet?

Louis Ginsberg: Well, that’s rather difficult to answer. As a matter of fact, I have two sons. Another boy is a lawyer, a little older, but he writes poetry and he’s had a book of poems published. So the question is, is it nature or nurture? I think it’s both, because it may be, as I gather, in the lineage of my family. There were writers in Europe, and then, as I say…

AG: Rabbis.

Louis Ginsberg: ..Rabbis and writers, and that the two boys, as they grew up, were..was it molested?, no, by my reading, my reciting poetry all the time, and, subconsciously, as I think, some of it sank in.

AG: I can remember “Ozymandias” by the grand piano in the living room

Louis Ginsberg: Is that so?

AG: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings”. I can hear that echo for a long long time.

Louis Ginsberg: And then, John Milton. One night we walked to and from Milton. “Him the Almighty Power/ Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky/ With hideous ruin and combustion down../... there to dwell/ In adamantine chains and penal fire,/ Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms..” Well, it must be that…

AG: Page one of “Paradise Lost”.

Louis Ginsberg: It must have been that these influences sank into his subconscious and (were) having an effect on him. But there’s an anecdote (that) I remember – although I don’t think Allen remembers, or he disclaims it. One time when Allen was in Columbia, I went visiting him, and a friend said, “You know, Allen writes poetry”. So I looked at Allen, and I said, “Is that so?”. And he said, “Yes”. “Well, why didn’t you tell me?” “I thought you didn’t want me to write”. I said, “How do you figure that one out?”. He said, “Well, you introduced me and Eugene (my other son) and you said, “Eugene and I write poetry, but Allen is normal”. So he thought… So I answered him and I said, “No, I don’t want you to write poetry because I write, or Eugene, your brother, writes. I want you to write poetry because you have an inescapable inner compulsion to write, if there’s a burden of expression you cannot withhold, and so, if you do write, you’ll find an exhortation, or exaltation, and so he began writing. And before I knew it, he was in media, soaring high in the skies. Anyone else? We’ve often given readings together, all over the country, in Europe. I am a traditional poet, a square poet, Allen is avant-garde, or left, let’s say, but people like to see us together and they think that we bridge the generation gap, and in many ways we do, although sometimes we transcend it. Because we differ a little bit. I’m traditional, you know, and old-fashioned. Well, not exactly old-fashioned but traditional not conventional. But we get along. I maintain, I have no ax to grind. I say that any poem that works is good, whether it be a free-verse poem, or a poem in regular meter. I like to write in regular meter because I think that meter has a certain hypnotic effect, you know, and it enhances emotion. Any emotional utterance psychologically starts to be rhythmic, and I like rhyme. It doesn’t have to rhyme, but there’s an instinctive magic to rhyme. For instance, when we’re in lower grades, we remember verses, we don’t know what they mean, but the rhyme seduces us, it sinks deep into the threshold of our primitive natures. But, as I say, Allen writes long flagellating Walt Whitman lines, with which he flays the corrupt body politic. I’m more philosophical and write short brief (poems). But (today) we’re supposed to talk to read..

AG: It’s S & M versus Missionary Style!

Louis Ginsberg: any more questions, and then I’ll read

AG: There’s a person on your side there.

Louis Ginsberg: Okay

Student: What I’ve heard of your aesthetics sounds very similar to a poet I studied with a long time ago at the New School by Garcia Villa

AG: Jose Villa ? Jose Garcia Villa?

Student: Your aesthetics sound very similar

Louis Ginsberg: Oh yes,yes. Is that so? Yes, I’ve read him and I like him very much.

Student: talk about concrete detail and generality and the fact that prose names and poetry suggests. That’s very similar to what he said.

Louis Ginsberg: That’s right. Of course, the essence, too, of poetry, as Allen can well attest, is the concreteness, the vivid concreteness. The concreteness should be like the.. what do they call it? the sun has a corona. The corona sort of radiates so many meanings in a symbolic way. As for the difference between prose and poetry, here is a statement that somehow I like, see what you thinki of it. In prose the words dissolve in the idea, but in poetry the idea dissolves in the words. Because in poetry it ain’t so much what you say as the way you say, the vividness, the uniqueness, the felicity, the fresh concreteness. You take Shakespeare, the master. His thoughts were universal, commonplace - greed, hate, love – but he clothed them in such immemorial, magnificent, masterful, language, that it’s ever new. Any other questions?

Student: This is sort of a comment along those lines. Keats said something, in one sentence, that combines the general…

Louis Ginsberg: Pardon me?

Student: Keats gave comment that combined his idea of putting the general and the concrete together. Poetry should strike the reader as a working of his own highest thoughts, which includes the general, and appear almost as remembrance.

Louis Ginsberg: That’s right. Doesn’t Frost have a line like that? That with poetry we remember what we forgot? Something like that. It reminds me of one of my comments of what a college is – it’s a place where the reluctant are led by the incapable to do the impossible in too short a time. But, of course, this place is an exception! Anyone else have a question on poetry?

Student: Could you recite some more Milton?

Louis Ginsberg: Milton? Well, I don’t remember too many of his. Of course, there’s Milton, the one we studied.. in "L'Allegro"?.. in "Il Penseroso"? [ it is, of course, from "L'Allegro"] – “Come, and trip it as you go/ On the light fantastic toe/ , and in that right hand lead with thee/ The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty..” – which reminds me, a question you don’t ask that you should have asked, when did I start writing poetry?

Student: When did you start writing poetry?

Louis Ginsberg: Thank you. It reminds me. Milton, one day in high school, our teacher was reading Milton’s poems, and she said (this was Friday),”Monday, everyone will come in with a poem imitating Milton”. Well, I’d never written a poem, much less an imitation, and I hesitated, but that Sunday night, late at night, I thought, “Well, I’d better do something” and I wrote one line. Before I knew it, other lines tumbled in place so quickly that I turned around to see if anyone were dictating it. And I thought to myself, “Well, that’s not too bad”. And I took it to school and the teacher next day said, “ Well, I’m going to read a poem here”, and, sure enough, she read my poem. Well, then, from there I went to Rutgers College and won a prize in poetry and one of my professors said, “Why not send them out?”. I sent them out, and by this time I’d known how to concoct reasonable facsimiles of poems so they eluded the questions of the editors and they published them in their papers. In other words, they began to publish them. So I figured I might as well continue. So I continued and had three books (one was published in 1970, and the man who wrote an introduction to it, and praised it… [tape ends here]

[tape continues] - Really, you know, .you wouldn’t believe it, but I really don’t remember my poems, except little short ones, like, for instance, four lines, an epigram, like, what do we call them? – it’s called “Fetters” – Fetters – F-E-T-T-E-R-S - Shame – “Only in fetters/ is liberty/ Without its banks/ Could a river be?” I mention it because Allen is wide. Well, he says, the banks could be wide. Or this one about knowledge – “Heap the logs of wisdom higher/ Yet the bigger leaps the fire/ It realizes a greater arc/ of impenetrable dark”. And mine are (typically) short poems, but Allen goes over the landscape. Well, any other., we have time..it’s 7. You said to stop at 7,

AG: Well, let’s get on to Keats unless there are more questions.

Louis Ginsberg: Unless there’s another question or two? Anything about poetry that never let you sleep. Now at last..

Student: What was your reaction to “Howl”?

Louis Ginsberg: “Howl”? Well..

AG: First reaction.

Louis Ginsberg: You want my reaction to “Howl”?

Student: Your first reaction.

Louis Ginsberg: Well, my first reaction was that.. “boy, that was wild!” . And some of the words I didn’t use. But it had violence and strength and energy that made it a landmark in literature. Of course, some of the words I don’t use.

AG: I’ve heard you use every word in that. At one time or another, Maybe afterwards.

Louis Ginsberg: Not publicly, not publicly. I said to a little girl one time, little girl, seventeen or eighteen, listening to Allen, “What do you think of those words?” “Ah, we know what they are, (it) doesn’t matter”. “Suppose I use them?” “Oh no, Mr Ginsberg, you’re too dignified for that!” – But, anyway, one more question, and then I’ll…

Naropa 1975 Another Classroom Improvisation

2012-01-03T01:08:00.000-08:00

[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!

A Poet On the Lower East Side: A Docu-Diary (ASV #27)

2011-12-31T16:30:00.000-08:00

Istvan Eorsi has already been profiled on The Allen Ginsberg Project - here. In 1995 he brought a Hungarian film crew (lead by director Gyula Gazdag) over to New York to film Allen in his downtown environment. "A Poet On The Lower East Side: A Docu-diary" was the result, "a free-wheeling cinéma vérité documentary", in the words of one reviewer. To continue (and providing for us a useful synopsis): "Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, host(s) radical maverick Hungarian writer, poet and translator, Istvan Eorsi, on his one-week visit in May 1995 to the Lower East Side. The(se) soul-mates talk about various subjects, that range from Buddhism to the meaning of "first thought", ['first thought, best thought'], and stroll together around Allen's neighborhood, where they are followed by a camera crew, as they encounter Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky and Jonas Mekas, visit a Korean grocery, reminisce about a poets' hang-out coffee house long gone on MacDougal Street [the San Remo], visit several bookshops, St Mark's Church (Poetry Project), and chat with sincere protesting squatters about to be evicted in Alphabet City. There's also time for a visit to Ginsberg's hometown of Paterson, N(ew)J(ersey), a chance to hear Allen record "Howl" at the Looking Glass Studios, and hear (him) sing "Father Death Blues" in his humble old-fashioned kitchen [it’s the bedroom, actually]. If you've ever wanted to catch the legendary poet...in some spontaneous moments on camera, here's your chance in this heartwarming no-frills doc..”

Yes, "Father Death Blues", there's filmed recordings of it here and here, but this late version (against a backdrop of books, Tibetan statue and thangka painting - Allen in crisp white shirt, Allen at home) is surely one of the most beautiful.

Happy Birthday Patti Smith

2011-12-30T03:30:00.000-08:00

[Berenice Abbott, Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, 1936.]

Happy Birthday, Patti! (Patti turns 65 years old today)

Quite a year for Patti Smith - notably that National Book Award. We're wondering who'll play Allen in the (inevitable) film version of "Just Kids" (wondering who'll play her and Robert Mapplethorpe, for that matter).

Here's the iconic account of the meeting-in-the-Automat.

“...I went through our belongings and found exactly fifty-five cents, slipped on my grey trench-coat and Mayakovsky cap, and headed to the Automat. I got my tray and slipped in my coins but the window wouldn’t open. I tried again without luck and then I noticed that the price had gone up to sixty-five cents. I was disappointed, to say the least, when I heard a voice say, “Can I help?”. I turned around and it was Allen Ginsberg. We had never met but there was no mistaking the face of one of our great poets and activists. I looked into those intense dark eyes punctuated by his dark curly beard and just nodded. Allen added the extra dime and also stood me to a cup of coffee. I wordlessly followed him to his table, and then plowed into the sandwich. Allen introduced himself. He was talking about Walt Whitman and I mentioned that I was raised near Camden, where Whitman was buried, when he leaned forward and looked at me intently. “Are you a girl?” he asked
“Yeah, I said, Is that a problem?”.

He just laughed. “I’m sorry. I took you for a very pretty boy.”

I got the picture immediately.

"Well, does this mean I return the sandwich?"

"No, enjoy it. It was my mistake".

He told me he was writing a long elegy for Jack Kerouac, who had recently passed away. “Three days after Rimbaud’s birthday”, I said. I shook his hand and we parted company.

Sometime later Allen became my good friend and teacher. We often reminisced about our first encounter and he once asked how I would describe how we met. “I would say you fed me when I was hungry”, I told him. And he did.”

[Patti Smith, poet, 70’s cult pop singer artist, early house-mate of Robt. Mapplethorpe, Rimbaud & Wm. Burroughs devotée, retired 14 years from stage fame to raise two children, till her musician husband passed away. We did Buddhist Jewel Heart Center benefit performance in 4,000 seat Hill Auditorium together, she came from Detroit retirement to Ann Arbor’s Univ. of Michigan. Next day, signed new volume poems Early Work 1970-1979 in bookstore, that night we supped at Gelek Rinpoche’s home, February 17, 1995. (Ginsberg Caption) photo. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

Xmas Gift (from December 1972)

2011-12-25T03:30:00.000-08:00

XMAS GIFT

I met Einstein in a dream
Springtime on Princeton lawn grass
I kneeled down and kissed his young thumb
like a ruddy pope
his fresh face broad cheeked rosy
"I invented a universe separate,
something like a Virgin" -
"Yes, the creature gives birth to itself,"
I quoted from Mescaline
We sat down open air universal summer
to eat lunch, professor's wives
at the Tennis Court Club,
our meeting eternal, as expected,
my gesture to kiss his fist
unexpectedly saintly
considering the Atom Bomb I didn't mention,

New York, December 14, 1972

Allen Ginsberg - from "Mind Breaths - Poems 1972-1977"

Tom Waits - Closing Time/America

2011-12-24T03:30:00.000-08:00

The ubiquitous Tom Waits-Allen Ginsberg mash-up "Closing Time/America" has got to be one of the most accessed Allen Ginsberg items on the web - 86,000 (and counting) hits on this particular up-load (since it was first uploaded in April of 2006), and that's not counting the hits for other, more recent, versions, here and here and here. Of course, the two never recorded anything together. The reading of "America" is from Chicago, in 1959 (when Tom Waits was all of ten years old!) and the Waits instrumental is the last track (and the title track) from his first (1973) album, Closing Time, recorded some decade-and-a-half later. "America I've given you all and now I am nothing/ America two dollars and twenty-seven cents, January 17, 1956./ I can't stand my own mind./ America when will we end the human war?". The bitter-sweet last-dance-in-the-dancehall strains of the instrumental may or may not resonate with some of the lines of the poem (one of the poem's strengths, the range of tones, not simply poignant resignation and melancholy). And is the music? might it not be (on a number of occasions) too loud? (drowning the delivery and import of the words?). That said, there's something sweet, and curiously fitting, about this "artificial collaboration".

[Tom Waits, Allen Ginsberg and David Blue ca 1975 by
Richard E Aaron via Rolling Stone ]