Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 246

 [Guillaume Apollinaire by Picasso]

Guillaume Apollinaire - Zone - Selected Poems - "The fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett's fifty-year engagement with the work of France's greatest modern poet" -  
(a bilingual edition) - has just been published by the New York Review Books. 
Don't miss it.  

For Allen Ginsberg on Apollinaire -  see (for example) his 1975 Naropa class here 
(which includes, among other things, a complete reading and commentary on the title poem, "Zone")  

and here, here - (and, again, here)

 [Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)]

"Guillaume, Guillaume how I envy your fame, your accomplishment for American letters/ your Zone with its long crazy line of bullshit about death/come out of the grave and talk through the door of my mind/issue new series of images oceanic haikus blue taxi-cabs in Moscow negro statues of Buddha/pray for me on the phonograph record of your former existence/ with a long sad voice and strophes of deep sweet music sad and scratchy as World War 1."   (from Allen Ginsberg - "At Apollinaire's Grave")



"America"  - "America when will you be angelic?/When will you take off your clothes/When will you look at yourself through the grave?/Whe will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites.."  We've been listening to and enjoying Robert Matheson's mix-up of double-bass and computer manipulation.   
"America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood."




No, we can not stop singing the importance of, and singularity of, John Wieners. 
Two recent manifestations, courtesy the Christina Davis and the Harvard Woodberry Poetry Room -
This - from 1962 (tho' written in 1955) - "Ode to the Instrument" 
(Robert Dewhurst's "Liner Notes", helpful annotations, may be found here)  
                      
 

and this - (a recent "Oral History Initiative") - Dewhurst oversees a spirited discussion amongst John's friends - Ammiel Alcalay, Jim Dunn, Raymond Foye, Fanny Howe and Gerrit Lansing - memories of John.
  

  ["screen-grab shows Fanny Howe and Gerrit Lansing] 

Other "Oral History Initiatives" from the Woodberry Poetry Room include sessions on Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Frank O'Hara, & others 

Michael Seth Stewart answers questions  - here  on editing John's journals (his recent City Lights edition) 

Jerry Cimino on rock musician Jimmy Page visiting the Beat Museum ("ogling all the manuscrips and letters and digging on Ginsberg's typewriter")

[Beat Museum display - Photograph by L.W.Lindquist] 

[Jimmy Page and William Burroughs]

Paul Nelson's first-hand account of the recent 4th European Beat Studies Network Conference contains an interview with Polina McKay, one of the co-founders of the Network - listen to it here  

Four erstwhile Naropa faculty together for a recent reading in Woodstock, upstate New York - photo by Kim Spurlock

[Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, Michael Brownstein, Peter Lamborne Wilson - Photo by Kim Spurlock]

Expansive Poetics - 110 ( The American Inheritance)

[Blaise Cendrars  (Frédéric Sauser),(1887-1961)]

I want to turn back to 1887 for just one moment to get Blaise Cendrars (because, oddly enough, Cendrars, except for Apollinaire, was the earliest of these practitioners of irresponsibility, of liberty, of poetic liberty. It's after Apollinaire, it's our third Frenchman. "Five Corners" - it's that little short poem and I read it before but I want to go back to it now because he was the earliest of these poets who worked on it, and he was much admired by Henry Miller, by Apollinaire, by the later Surrealists, by Breton - [Allen reads next Cendrars' "Five Corners" (in translation) - " I dare to make noise" - see, "I dare to make noise/color movement explosion light is everywhere/Life blossoms in sunlit windows/which melt in my mouth/I am ripe/I fall translucent in the street/  You speak, old man/  I don't know how to open my eyes/ Mouth of gold/ Poetry's a game"] - So that's actually a description of this liberty - a theatrical statement of a very high order. Very noble, I think, compared to (the) pettifogging, literalistic, heavy-handed poetry that was taught as part of the English tradition. If you read Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, T.S.Eliot, Hart Crane, they are (all) so square in their approach to language - even (William Carlos) Williams, in a sense (although Williams tried his hand at this in Kora in Hell - improvisations). Williams was influenced  by the Surrealist movement and did try that and did a very brilliant job.

And so I think the great thing, when we move to American poetry, is that we have inherited all of this rich tradition, and all these years, and about 1950 or s0 (or (19)48, I would say), there was a poetic explosion in which, all of a sudden, all of these old European traditions were being recognized and poets began using them. Began (using) Ezra Pound, began using Greek prosody, began using Surrealist juxtaposition, began using haiku, began using cut-up, began using liberty of the imagination, began using Dada tricks, began using William Carlos Williams literalism. We inherited all of that, picked all of it up, and most poetries in Europe did not, oddly enough (except a few cranks and geniuses!). Among the Russians it was more difficult, but (Andrei) Voznesensky does do that too.

So what we'll do next is try and trace some of these influences into American poetry next time we come and meet. And I guess (for homework) just read through the American section (of the class anthology), we'll see what we've got…beginning with the sound of Vachel Lindsay..

class ends here

Expansive Poetics -- 95 ( Q & A - Classroom Scraps)

                                            [Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)]

Classroom Scraps - Here's some Q & A at the end of Allen's August 11 1981 Naropa Class -

AG: Well, I've been talking steadily [about Russian poetry, about Guillaume Apollinaire and Cubism and twentieth-century modernism] , so now I'll shut up.

Student: Did (Vladimir) Mayakovsky and his group.. were they familiar with "Zone"?

AG: Well, now I think not. Maybe not. (They) might have. Some would have. There was a French influence on Osip Brik, Mayakovsky's friend, and on (Nikolay) Gumilev and the Acmeists, but I don't know. I know the Futurists got together. There was an exchange between the Italian Futurists of 1905-6-7 [Editorial note - Italian Futurism was founded by F.T.Marinetti in Milan in 1909] - Allen is a little confused with the dates here, but I don't know if "Zone" (did).. (but it) must have, because they were all reading French. The Petersburg intellectuals were reading French and admiring European culture. But "Zone" probably came out in some local.. well, I don't know where it came out. I've forgotten what magazine it came out in, but if it was some larger magazine, a few copies might have gotten to Petersburg and circulated, certainly among Osip Brik and (Nikolay) Gumilev, and (Anna) Akhmatova, maybe.  Yeah?


[Vladimir Mayakovsky of the streets of New York, 1925]

Student (CC); This self-mythologizing (that you spoke of earlier)..
AG: Um-hmm
Student: (CC) …in terms of (Jack) Kerouac..
AG: Um-hmm
Student (CC):..Is this what Alan Watts means by Kerouac, that (you know), the verb from caricature - that he caricaturizes, caricaturizes
AG: Yeah, in a sense that there's a certain caricature, too, when he (Guillaume Appollinaire) says (in "Poem Read At The Marriage of Andre Salmon") - "We met in some miserable cellar/During the years of our youth/Both of us smoking and awaiting the dawn in ragged clothes" - There was probably a good deal more life and dignity than this little thin portrait, which is slightly caricature. But Kerouac did. That sounds like a Kerouac line -  "We met in some miserable cellar..smoking". 
Was Watts talking (specifically) about Kerouac?
Student (CC): Yes
AG: I think he was saying (that) Kerouac was more of a caricature than a serious…
Student (CC): Yes
AG: .. he meant. Yeah.. Well, reading Kerouac's long prose, it (sometimes) seems… I don't know..  did (Gregory) Corso cover (any of) that today?
Student: Yes he did



[Alan Watts (1915-1973)]

AG: Yeah, what happened in Gregory's class, by the way? I'm dying to know.
Student: He talked about On The Road and Big Sur, primarily.
AG: Yeah
Student: And said (that) they were not seeking but fleeing
AG: They were not..?
Student: … not seeking but fleeing.
AG: Uh-huh. What else? Anything other?



[Gregory Corso in Amsterdam circa 1980 - photo by Eddie Woods]

Student: He read about the descriptions of  (William) Burroughs and New Orleans…and, uh, then he went to Big Sur and described what a masterpiece it was, and then he took lines out  of Kerouac's poems and talked about.. 
AG: He did
Student ..the sparrow and the leaf
AG: Uh-huh. Which was that? I didn't know that..
Student: ..the sparrow and..
AG:  From Mexico City Blues?
Student: A big leaf falls on the back of.(a little sparrow)  I don't know where he got that.
Student (CC): I think it's one of the haiku at the end of Scattered Poems
AG: Um-hm. He cut the haiku down even further
Student: It's in (the interview in)  Paris Review.
AG: Ah, yeah


[Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)]

Student (CC): Watts goes on to say that the..  (the) one clique was going to northern California and there was another clique in southern California…and that the hipsters were, more or less, in northern California, whereas, I guess, the religious seekers were in…southern California.
AG: Ah, well, I don't know. Actually, out of that group. a stronger religious Buddhist center rose in San Francisco than out of the writing group in L.A. who (most of them) turned out to be radicals or lushes, from Venice, California
Student: Radicals or what?
Student (CC): Lushes
Student: Alcoholic(s)
AG: The Venice group, a lot more of them died of lush.
Student; "The Holy Barbarians"
AG: Yeah, Lawrence Lipton's group



Student: Who is in that category?
Student (CC): A lot of jazz musicians
AG: Stuart (Z) Perkoff .. well, not a lush, but some drugs, I think - Stuart Perkoff


[Stuart Z Perkoff (1930-1974)]

Student (CC): Charles Foster - that poet that I was interested in
AG: Radicals would be… what's his name… McGrath, Tom McGrath - and (Lawrence) Lipton (himself). And almost all the poetry that goes on from that has that same insouciance and fast movement of mind, jumping from one frankness to another..



(Any more questions?) - Then, well, let's quit for the moment. It's a quarter-of. Anybody got any other questions?. I think the Dalai Lama is speaking…
Student (CC): Tonight at Karma Dzong, I believe
AG: No
Student (CC): No, I think it's over at the school..
AG: Do you know where?
Student: No
AG: It's out..
Student: ..in Denver, isn't it?
Student (CC): No
AG: No, tonight, here (at Naropa), and tomorrow
Student: Oh
Student (CC): Tonight, here
AG: As part of that on-going Christian-Buddhist Meditation Conference 
Student (CC): Right
AG: There is a public speech by the Dalai Lama which anybody can go to. I don't know the price.
Student (CC): Where is it?
Student:  I think it's at the Chemistry Building…up at the University (University of Colorado, Boulder)
AG: Right…Yeah
Student (CC): Chem 140, or something. I think that's it.
AG: Then there's a poetry reading…on Thursday. (William) Burroughs class will come back two to four on Thursday..
Student: I thought it was..
AG: Oh, (that's right) three to five, three to five, just before this one. So we have an ordeal, because Thursday there's going to be this solid phalanx of courses - from Gregory (Corso)'s course, eleven to twelve-thirty, Peter (Orlovsky)'s, what?, one to two-fifty…(William) Burroughs, three to five, and me, five to seven. So fare-thee-well.. [class ends here]

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at seventy-two-and-three-quarter minutes in, through to approximately seventy-seven-and-a-half minutes in, plus from approximately eighty-one minutes in to the conclusion of the tape]

Expansive Poetics 93 - (Apollinaire & Frank O'Hara)

[Andre Salmon (1881-1969)]

[Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)]



[Guillaume Apollinaire (1889-1918)]

AG: So the last thing we had in the anthology was a poem read (by Guillaume Apollinaire) at the marriage of Andre Salmon, and the reason I put that in is that, in addition to inaugerating double-sight Cubism juxtaposition modernity (of psychological modernity, as well as bellowing buses and tramcars and electric wires), he also inaugerated that "Personism"that Frank O'Hara writes of (as) his basic theory of poetry, which is that because the poet is the maker of the word, anything that happens to the consciousness of (the) poet is history, and so anything he thinks of, (or) anything that occurs to him (particularly anything poignant that occurs to him in his lifetime, for his lifetime) is just as important as Caesar's victories over Gaul, or dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, because those occasions of the poet - his marriages, his bar mitzvahs, his fist getting laid, his discovering his own toenails - are universal discoveries that everybody makes, that only the poet reveals out loud like a newspaper headline, or, like Ezra Pound said, "Poetry is news that stays news", and the kind of news that stays news is also personal happenings.

So this is "Poem Read at the Marriage of Andre Salmon",  (Poème Lu au Mariage d'André Salmon) which is like a prophecy of the poem that Frank O'Hara will write to Mike Goldberg, or to his friends. July 13 1909, so this is all pre-1910, I'd say, then. [Allen begins to read Apollinaire's poem] - "Seeing the flags this morning.." - [ Oh yeah, the other good thing about it, if you check it out against Anne Waldman's poetry, my poetry,  that poetry called "List Poetry", or poetry that has that anaphoric return always back to (where) you say something and then you add on to it - like "the blackboard which is filled with the green sunyata, the blackboard which is full of white dots, the blackboard which is scratched by Buddhist fingernails, the blackboard which is composed of late substance made out of the oils of Arabia. So, the "list poem" - [Allen then reads Apollinaire's "Poem Read at the Marriage of Andre Salmon", in its entirety - ("Seeing the flags this morning I didn't say to myself/Those are the rich garments of the poor/Nor does democratic modesty wish to veil from me its grief..." ["En voyant des drapeaux ce matin je ne me suis pas dit/Voilà les riches vêtements des pauvres/ Ni la pudeur démocratique veut me voiler sa douleur….] … "Nor because rooted in poetry we have rights over the/words which make and unmake the world/ Nor because we can cry without ridicule and because we /know how to laugh/ Nor because we smoke and drink as in the old days/ Let us rejoice because the director of fire and of/poets/ Love which like light fills/ All solid space between the stars and the planets/ Love desires that my friend Andre Salmon should get/married today" ["Ni parce que fondés en poésie nous avons des droits sur les paroles qui forment et défont l’Univers/ Ni parce que nous pouvons pleurer sans ridicule et que nous savons rire/Ni parce que nous fumons et buvons comme autrefois/Réjouissons-nous parce que directeur du feu et des poètes/L’amour qui emplit ainsi que la lumière/Tout le solide espace entre les étoiles et les planètes/ L’amour veut qu’aujourd’hui mon ami André Salmon se marie"] ) - So it's this great vigorous affirmation that, actually, comes out of Walt Whitman and all the breakthroughs of the nineteenth-century and out of all the psychological modernities to lead to some kind of self-acceptation and realization that every moment of this life is eternity, that the ordinary mind is eternal, that the poem can be composed of an eternal understanding of ordinary mind - marriage, such as this 1909 marriage between poet-critic Andre Salmon and a lady.

So this poem leads to all the exhibitionistic poetry of the New York School, actually. All the poems that say, "Well, I went downtown today and I bought a tootsie roll, and then I put a nickel in the 1902 subway, and then I went upstairs to see my mother and her in-law and we discussed the price of eggs on the market. Then I went downstairs to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Picasso show [Editorial note - in 1980, the previous year, MOMA had hosted its comprehensive Picasso retrospective]  and then I walked down 57th Street admiring my new shoes and then I discovered that there were all these funguses growing on the subway platform which looked like mushrooms, and then I went out, walked to the end of the block and looked at the towers of Hoboken which reminded me of bulbous church towers of Russia". In other words, the ordinariness of these is simultaneous, of these images. Making high poetry out of the ordinary events of your life, which is (if you ever read an essay by Frank O'Hara called... "Personism". That was his theory of poetry (which he set up as  against the "Beat", "Beatnik-ism", or "Surrealism", or "Existentialism", or "Communism", or "Anarchism", or "Capitalism", or "Futurism", or "Acmeism", or "Dadaism", or.."Macho-ism", or "Feminism", or "Homosexual-ism" - "Personism". Whatever happens to him is eternal, because he's only here once, and that's eternal. And so, every detail is of utmost magical significance and importance (which is a lesson that everybody could learn, because there's lots of people who think that every detail that happens to them is totally unimportant, and in fact, the most execrable excrement of the universe, instead of being the only universe they've got). Since it's Frank O'Hara's only universe, or Andre Salmon and Apollinaire's only universe , therefore that's the mythic universe to celebrate..

..which fits in with one of  (Chogyam) Trungpa (Rinpoche)'s slogans - "Things are symbols of themselves" - i.e. the one and only marriage that you're going to have is obviously your one and only marriage in this universe, so therefore it's the one cosmic marriage you're going to experience. So if it isn't taken as sacramental and cosmic and poetic, then it'll be taken as something else, it's strictly up to you in your own perception.

So that twentieth-century poetry rises out of Apollinaire in the sense that he accepted the images of modernity and he accepted his own events and mythologized those. And so, in some respects, you can even trace (Jack) Kerouac back to Apollinaire, in the sense of self-mythologizing - the Romantic self-mythology.

[ Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately sixty-three minutes in and continuing until approximately seventy-two-and-a-half minutes in]

Expansive Poetics - 91 Apollinaire - Le Pont Mirabeau)

[The voice of Guillaume Apollinaire, recorded at the laboratory of Abbé M. Rousselot, December 24th, 1913, reading his poetry - "Le Pont Mirabeau" and "Marie"] 


AG: Incidentally, there's a recording of (Guillaume) Apollinaire's voice. I don't have it  [Allen is speaking in 1981]-  The only place I ever heard it was the Musee de Sonore [maybe the Archive de Parole?] - the Sound Museum in Paris, where there's (also) a recording of Count Tolstoy, the writer - Tolstoy and Apollinaire - that far back - those do exist (just as the recordings of (Sergei) Esenin and (Vladimir) Mayakovsky (remarkably) exist.

And the thing that he (Apollinaire) is reading  is his poem, "Le Pont Mirabeau", I think (which is a very pretty poem, so I'll read it - It's just a traditional lyric, with great sonority, so I'll read it in French) [Allen proceeds to read the poem in its original French, followed by a version of the same poem in English] - "Under Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine/And flows our love/Must I remember/Joy always comes after pain/ Comes the night, rings the hour/Days go, I stay/ Let night come sound the hour/Time draws on, I remain.." - [But the French is "Vienne la nuit" - comes the night - "sonne l'heure" - rings the hour - "Les jours s'en vont" - the days go - I stay - "je demeure" - That's pretty - Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure/Les jours s'en vont je demeure" - "Hand in hand let us stay face to face/ While past the/ Bridge of our embrace/ Flows one long look's weary wave./ Time comes, clock sounds/Days go, I stay/ Love moves on like that water current/Love passes by/How slow life is and/Like hope (or expectation) how violent/ Night comes, hour sounds,/Time flows,I stay.." - Passent les jours et passent les semaines - Pass the days and pass the weeks/Neither time past/Nor love returns - Nor time that's past, nor love comes back/ Under Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine/Let night come, sound the hour/ Time draws on, I remain." 

[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately fifty-five-and-a-half minutes in (Allen's reading of "Le Pont Mirabeau" begins at approximately
fifty-six-and-a-half minutes in), concluding ar approximately fifty-nine-and-a-half minutes] 

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine/ 
Et nos amours/ 
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
/ La joie venait toujours après la peine.

 Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure/
Les jours s'en vont je demeure/

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face/
Tandis que sous/
Le pont de nos bras passe/
Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse/

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure/
Les jours s'en vont je demeure/

L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante/
L'amour s'en va/
Comme la vie est lente/
Et comme l'Espérance est violente

/Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure/
Les jours s'en vont je demeure/

Passent les jours et passent les semaines/
Ni temps passé
 Ni les amours reviennent
/Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine/Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure/
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Under Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine/And flows our love/ Must I remember/Joy always comes after after pain/Comes the night rings the hour/Time draws on /I remain/  Hand in hand let us stay face to face/While past the/Bridge of our embrace/Flows one long look's weary wave/Comes the night  rings the hour/The days go  I stay/ Love moves on like that water current/Love slips by/ How slow life is and/Like hope how violent/ Comes the night          rings the hour/Time draws on  I remain/Pass the days and pass the weeks/Neither time/Past nor love returns/Under Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine/Comes the night          rings the hour/Time draws on  I remain

Expansive Poetics 90 - (Apollinaire and TS Eliot)

[Allen Ginsberg's Annotated Copy of The Waste Land]

AG: The comparison to "The Waste Land" of this (Apollinaire's "Zone"), particularly, "You are alone the morning is almost here/The milkmen rattle their cans in the street" ( "Tu es seul le matin va venir/ Les laitiers font tinter leurs bidons dans les rues") - does that remind you of (T.S.) Eliot? - "Wipe your hands across your mouth and laugh,/ In the vacant allotments women gathering garbage",  or something. Do you know the line? [Editorial note - Allen is quoting here, (slightly misremembering), the concluding lines from Eliot's "Preludes" - "Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh,/The worlds revolve like ancient women/Gathering fuel in vacant lots"] 

And the panoramic aspect is very similar to lines in "The Waste Land" - Eliot has the line- "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many./ Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled/And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,/Flowed on the bridge and down off the bridge and up St. Williams/To where St Mary Woolnoth Church kept the hours/With a dead stroke on the final stroke of nine." - Let me find it... "Flowed up the hill and down King William Street/To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours.." - [Editorial note - Allen, again, from memory, slightly misremembers the line] -  You know that passage in "The Waste Land" that was itself an imitation or adaptation of Dante's vision of hordes of the dead moving in Hell [Canto III, verses 55-57) - Si lunga tratta/Di gente, ch'io non avrei mai credito/Che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta" - "Such a long stream/Of people, that I should never have believed./That death had slain so many…")], another paraphrase of which we heard was Jerome Rothenberg's - the hordes of the dead moving around the Ring Street in Vienna, the other night). [Editorial note - the allusion here is to a poetry-reading given by Rothenberg, one of the "Visiting Faculty" at Naropa that summer] 

Let me see if I can find "The Waste Land". How many here have read "The Waste Land"? - Just about everybody knows a little bit. Yeah - page one-seventy-nine - Yeah - "Unreal City.." (which is a paraphrase of (Charles) Baudelaire, originally  the first modern.. Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves." [Editorial note - Allen is quoting from the opening line of Baudelaire's poem, "Les Sept vieillards" in Fleurs du Mal ]-  does anyone know French? - "Fourmillante"? - cité pleine de rêves - sort of like mass moving, massive moving, bubbling city, city full of dreams) - "Unreal City,/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn/A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many./ Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled/And each man kept his eyes before his feet.." - That's a direct quote or paraphrase or translation of Dante moving through (the) Inferno - " Flowed up the hill and down King William Street/To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours/With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine." - [This is that one panoramic vision of the twentieth-century city as a city of the dead, or as a city where the dead flowed over the bridges, and where the traffic is a phantom traffic. So you get that first in Eliot. 

Here - the little influence of Apollinaire's "Zone" - "Unreal city/Under the brown fog of a winter noon/ Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant/Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants.. ["currants" would be current drafts, or bank drafts, I take it?] - "C. i. f. London - documents at sight/ Asked me in demotic French/To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel/Followed by a week-end at the Metropole" - So it's (that's) very similar to.
(Apollinaire's) "Here you are in Marseilles amid the watermelons/Here you are in Coblenz at the Hotel of the Giant". ("Te voici à Marseille au milieu des pastèques/Te voici à Coblence à l'hôtel du Géant") If you check through Eliot and check back to Apollinaire you'll see the relationship, which is celebrated, and which then goes back, as you'll remember, to (Arthur) Rimbaud (remember when we had that kind of discontinuity and juxtaposition in Rimbaud, as well as some element of modernity? - and you also get the modern city in (Charles) Baudelaire, who's what? - eighteen-twenty? thirty? forty?  around the time of (Edgar Allan) Poe? or just after Poe? [Editorial note - Fleur du Mal was published in 1857]

So, from Baudelaire to Rimbaud, then Rimbaud to Laforgue, and Laforgue to Apollinaire, is a huge influence of modernity and modern consciousness acknowledging the modern city which then spreads from the continent to (Ezra) Pound and (T.S.) Eliot, and influences (William Carlos) Williams, and other also (Williams' application to America was to try and be totally up-to-date and just look outside, Pound and Eliot were picking up from classic writers and from French sources more, and trying to adapt Laforgue and Apollinaire into English). 

[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately  forty-nine-and-three-quarter minutes in, to approximately fifty-five-and-a-half minutes in ]  

Addenda: and here's Allen's hero, Bob Dylan reading a few lines from Eliot's Waste Land -

    

Expansive Poetics - 89 - Guillaume Apollinaire's Zone

[translated in 1950, this is the cover to the 1972 Dolmen Press, Dublin edition of Guillaume Apollinaire's Zone translated by Samuel Beckett, the first seperate appearance of the text to appear in print]



















  







[Pierre de Gasztold - illustration from   "Les poètes voyagent de Baudelaire à Henri Michaux" -  Henri Parisot,  Delamain et Boutelleau, Paris, 1946]


AG: (So) then we have (finally) "Zone" - "You are tired at last of this old world/ O shepherd Eiffel Tower the flock of bridges bleats at the morning/ You have had enough of life in this Greek and Roman antiquity/ Even the automobiles here seem to be ancient/Religion alone has remained entirely fresh religion/Has remained simple like the hangars at the airfield" - [Now, you'll notice that there are no commas (or) punctuation, so that the thoughts are enjammed, or come together, or are sutured together, so that actually (I'm) reading it as a stream-of-consciousness, or as if one thought (is) following another without a gap, and then a break, and then another thought. But it's a thought juxtaposed wih no stop] - "Even the automobiles here seem to be ancient/Religion alone has remained entirely fresh religion/Has remained simple like the hangars at the airfield" - [Well, for one thing, "Religion alone has remained entirely fresh religion" is one line, no punctuation ("La religion seule est restée toute neuve la religion") - but this is nineteen-when? - I don't know what year this is. This is 1912, I guess, the poem, I'm not sure.  Maybe before World War I - "(R)eligion/Has remained simple like the hangars at the airfield" is a completely srtange thought to have in the turn of the century. I mean, it's a completely modernized thought, like the whole archetypal mass of imagery and consciousness completely retooled for the twentieth-century. For the airfields and the railways and the pharmacies. So you can see the lineage between (Jules) Laforgue and Apollinaire and (T.S.) Eliot.] - [Allen continues with the poem - "You alone in all Europe are not antique O Christian faith…"…"It is Christ who soars in the sky better than any aviator…"…"The eagle rushes out of the horizon giving a great cry/From America comes the tiny humming-bird/From China have come long supple pihis/Which only have one wing and fly tandem.." - [that's supposed to be funny] - "Then the dove immaculate spirit/Escorted by the lyre bird and the ocellated peacock.." 

AG: Do you know what the pihi is by looking at it?   
Student (CC): Yes
AG: Is there such a thing? - "From China have come long supple pihis/Which only have one wing and fly tandem.."   - Is that mythical, or is that…
Student (CC): No, it's a natural bird, but it's just a strange..
AG: Oh really, it's  real.
Student (CC): Yes
AG: Ah
Student (CC): And then… very strange birds that are.. that are in mating, they're just always flying together and just constant whirring their wings (somewhat like a humming-bird) so it might give the effect of having one wing.
AG: Ah, They actually have two
Student (CC): They actually have two wings
AG: And it's called a Pihi?
Student (CC): No, it's… it's..well, the bird that I think that he's describing is the hoopoe
AG: Hupu?
Student: That's what I think he's describing
AG: It might be pihi in French

(That was (Roger) Shattuck).  (Here's) the other translation, by Samuel Beckett - "From China, the long and supple one-winged pihis that fly in couples" - I always thought that that was an esoteric Cubist joke - or just playfulness - just having fun - "just having a little bit of fun, mother" - [Allen continues] - "Then the dove immaculate spirit/Escorted by the lyre bird and the ocellated peacock/The phoenix that pyre which recreates itself/Veils everything for an instant with its glowing coals/Sirens leaving their perilous straits/Arrive all three of them singing beautifully. And everything eagle phoenix and Chinese pihis/Fraternize with the flying machine…"…"Now you are on the shore of the Mediterranean/Under the lemon trees which blossom all year"…"Astonished you see yourself outlined in the agates of St Vitus/You were sad enough to die the day you saw yourself in them/You looked like Lazarus bewildered by the light/The hands of the clock in the Jewish quarter turn backwards/And you go slowly backwards in your life/Climbing up the Hradchin and listening at night.." - ["Hradchin" - Hradchin is a hill in cenral Prague, in old Prague, the old castle hill] - Climbing up the Hradchin and listening at night/In taverns to the singing of Czech songs"… [Allen continues, reading through to the end of the poem] - "Adieu, adieu/Soleil cou coupé/ Sun's neck cut" - [ or, "Sun the severed neck" - "The neck of the sun cut" - that's a famous line - "Sun corseless head", says Samuel Beckett - corseless? - corpseless - head]

Student: (Are there other translations?)

AG: "Sun slit throat - Anne Hyde Greet  - And Ron Padgett - "Sun throat cut" - but, "Soleil cou coupé" - "Sun throat cut" - "Soleil" - sun - "cou" - throat - "coupé" - slit, or cut, or cutted . Cut 

Well you get some sense of the panorama and panoramic grandeur of the poem - The juxtaposition - one moment you're in "Here..in Marseilles amid the watermelons/ Here you are in Coblenz at the hotel of the Giant/Here you are in Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree.." - It's almost cinematic. - The consciousness of the flash-back (or the flash forward-flashback) or fade-in-fade-out is like a scenario - a shooting-script.
So the idea of jump-cut, seeing one scene and then a jump-cut to another and gaps in-between, that's completely modern and new, and Cubist-style, in poetry. You get a little bit of it in Laforgue, but here ( it's) in full-bloom, full-face, the swift movement of the mind from one place to another. Or as (William) Burroughs says, at the beginning of Naked Lunch, "I am not American Express". It is not my business to transport the reader from London to Tangier or to Morocco, the mind can do that - so Burroughs says the poet doesn't have to be American Express and provide the transportation because the transportation is natural to the mind, in any case - or the jump is natural to the mind).     
So Cubism, in the sense of, rather than a linear progression, including the ship or the train from Marseilles to Coblenz, you simply have the "jump-cut", you simply have the different angles seen almost simultaneously, or in such rapid succession (that) it's like the Cubist method. That actually came in, in that part of the century, by importation of haiku and Japanese landscape painting  (and Japanese prints, particularly). (Henri) Toulouse-Lautrec and (Vincent) Van Gogh (and) the precusors to Picasso, in fact, (were) so influential that Cezanne put down Van Gogh. He said "Ah, he's not a painter. All he does is make Chinese images (because Van Gogh was imitating Chinese and Japanese painting for a while in order to get that funny perspective in which various depths seem to be occuring on the same optical level, on the same plane)


[The Courtesan (after Eisen)  (1887) - Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890),  oil on canvas, 105.5 cm x 60.5 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam]  

Student (CC): Well, the Japanese were doing wood-block printing
AG: Yeah
Student (CC): And many of their lacquered works, which were being imported, and spices which were being imported, into Europe were coming in wrapping paper, similar to our newspaper (in the way that you'd wrap up your china before moving, or such goods as ceramics). And that was where it came from. It actually came from these…
AG: From the wrapping paper?
Student (CC):.. from the wrapping paper of these…
AG: Uh-huh. So it must have been…
Student (CC): …fine articles.
AG: …been disseminated into the bourgeois class who were buying chinoiserie in the department store…
Student (CC): Yes, that's exactly the source.



[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately thirty-three-and-three-quarter minutes in, to approximately forty-nine-and-three-quarter minutes in]