Student: Is the "one-eyed Ford" something you just made up now?
AG: No , the "one-eyed Ford" is afamous American-Indian twentieth-century.. It’s a great line! – It’s one of the great lines in America .. of the, as-yet, unacademicized poetry. The many many versions of the "one-eyed Ford" song (South-West - Oklahoma, actually - I heard it last year... last heard it (with Harry Smith) inAnadarko, Oklahoma) - “My one-eyed Ford”! – It’s a great line!
So… I don’t know. He [Basil Bunting] was suggesting.. each step is measure, each step is a measure, measure (of) the sounds that the body makes in time, that, with each step, from each step, you can measure the sounds that the body makes in time, as it steps. So the drums are.. (they) give you the ratio of those sounds, whetherthere’s spaces in-between, or how they relate to each other.
Student: There has been something written too on the relationship between the beat, drum sounds...
AG: Yeah. He’s just trying to figure what would be the first evidences of... Actually, what was interesting was measure - the idea of measuring, poetry as measured speech, so he was trying to find, what is the earliest measure? The angle that he’s coming from - what is poetry (as distinct from prose)? - and he was saying, having something to do, maybe, with the idea of repeated patterns of measured statement, measured articulation. I mean, some kind of measure - like syllable, oraccent, or.. stress. (He’s also saying we shouldn’t use the word “accent” for accent, we should use “stress”). It’s very sort of original, original, interesting, and pragmatic ideas that he had. So the measurement of the ratio between the sounds that the body makes, he was saying, would be the earliest, or would be the origin of poetic.. what do you call it? ..the anatomy (if you wanted to make a poetic anatomy of the dance, (it) would be the measure of the sounds the body makes while dancing, which would suggest drums, then accompanied by grunts and yowls, and then the grunts and yowls (turn into) words). So he was saying that a more or less orderly measure of time, a definite ratio of one time to another,is common. An orderly measure of time is common to dance, to music, and to poetry – that’s the common element – an orderly measure of time, or a definite ratio ofone time to another (time, being, like, the ratio of the sounds that the body makes in dancing). And music would spring out of dancing. Drums, being the first music, then, later, other instruments would come, earlier… earlier instruments, or sticks, song-sticks, like [the Aboriginal song sticks] I have.. to be continued
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-four-and-a-quarter minutes in]
Harry Smith's birthday today. Learn more about the unclassifiable maestro and treat yourself to a viewing of his remarkable Early Abstractions -here (and/or Heaven and Earth Magic - here)
"You shouldn't be looking at this as a continuity. Film frames are hieroglyphs, even when they look like actuality. You should think of the individual frame, always, as a glyph, and then you'll understand what cinema's about"
An example of an early Harry Smith painting (Algo Bueno, c.1951)
and two more recent paintings (Untitled, c.1977)
and (Enochian Tablet, circa 1979)
and here is Untitled, from the previous year
This past year has seen the publication of the first two volumes of The Collections of Harry Smith Catalogue Raisonne (we eagerly await more) Volume 1 is the Paper Airplanes
Wait Till I'm Dead, the eagerly-awaited new Ginsberg book, is officially out next Tuesday (the UK edition, cover seen here, has a pub date of the 25th of February)
Here's Rachel Zucker from the introduction: "When I first read Allen Ginsberg's poems as a teenager, they worked on me like a gateway drug. Leading me deeper and deeper into a life of poetry, Ginsberg's poetry woke me up and whet a poetic appetite I've spent years trying to satisfy. I saw the world differently after reading "Howl", "Kaddish", "Sunflower Sutra" and "America". Language became clamorous and mystical in my brain, words delicious and unwieldy on my tongue. Reading Ginsberg gave me the chutzpah to complain to the chair of my high-school English department that there wasn't enough poetry on the syllabus. The chair shrewdly offered to give me poetry on the side - as much poetry as I could manage. The poets he proffered - Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens - sounded tame or impregnable to my adolescent ears. The chair gave me Sylvia Plath, but even Plath failed to turn me on (then), failed to bother me the way Ginsberg did, the way I wanted poetry to bother me. No, no, no! I wanted POETRY!: disruption, danger, mind-blowing, dirty-talking, proselytizing prophecy! I wanted the kind of Talmudic Beat-babble queer broken-guitar-Bob-Dylan American song that only ALLEN GINSBERG had the nerve to sing!…" And, confronted by the UnCollected: "What a delight it is to read these old-new poems! It's a bit like watching a memorial slideshow of someone I loved dearly. How beautiful he was in younger years! How innocent-looking! How wise! One marvels at what has come back into fashion or never went out of fashion, at the images that feel familiar but are, actually, seen for the first time. "Of course!" one thinks. Or, "I never knew!" I'm so grateful for these unearthed poems, for the moreness of them, which is not just memory but new connection, new discovery. I love Ginsberg's fearsome prolificity, but the massiveness of his published oeuvre makes it difficult to get a sense of Ginsberg's development across time…" Zucker concludes: "In an age so full of fear, so obsessed with quarantine, isolation and self-protection, an age in which educators are instructed to provide trigger warnings to students about potentially disturbing material in the classroom and our government issues color-coded advisories about our current threat-level, Ginsberg's poems remind us that art must infect, contaminate, upset, disturb, question, invade, threaten and excite. Ginsberg's poems have always done that and continue to do so. They are dangerous. They are fearless. We need them."
Neal Cassady's birthday's coming up. Theannual (seventh!) Neal Cassady Birthday Bashwill take place on Saturday in Denver at the Mercury Cafe - "At the event, local poets, family members and other devoted artists like Jami Cassady,Molina Speaks and Jennifer Dunbar Dorn will pay tribute to the man with live performances. David Amram, a longtime friend of Cassady's and an acclaimed composer and avant-garde musician who connected with the Beats back in Cassady's heyday - will perform with his quartet". More on Amram here (and, for that matter, here)
Ed's friend and fellow Woodstock resident, Raymond Foye writes: "During the writing of the book he told me he learned a valuable lesson: Never do anything for the money. But then at the end of the process he told me he was glad he did it, because he wanted to give people a portrait of a woman who he truly admired, a really talented comic actress. And also he felt the need to fulfill Sharon Tate's mother's request that he please explore the case more fully, as she never accepted many of the claims made (for example, that the murder was committed to set off a race war). Her mother felt there wasa connection with Sirhan (Sirhan) and the RFK assassination. For that story you must read the book...".
[Sharon Tate and Her Mom - illustration (from Sharon Tate- A Life by Ed Sanders) by Rick Veitch]
[Allen Ginsberg and Basil Bunting, 1965] Speaking of Poetry -"New York to San Fran", the longest poem in Allen's new book, an epic 1965 airplane meditation, first published in the City Lights Journal, will be published, in its entirety, in next month's issue of Poetry magazine
The concluding section of Nick Sturm's excellent two-part series for Fanzine on Ted Berrigan's art writing recently appeared and can be accessed here (the first part, that appeared last July on that forum, can be accessed here)
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti on Reddit- on
what is his favorite Allen Ginsberg poem - ""Aunt
Rose"because it's a
very touching, deep and profound expression of love and empathy of his old Aunt
Rose. It's even more powerful than his long poem ["Kaddish']
about his mother."
Just out this month, from Blackberry Books, Franco Beltrametti's posthumous collection, From Almost Everywhere Gary Snyder on Franco Beltrametti: "Franco Beltrametti's smooth-barked Muse leads him across the grids of latitude and longitude to the source of good medicine poems. A suavity masks these elemental songs - or rather, gives these elder faces a modern "human" mask. Civilized in the best sense". and Joanne Kyger: "From "a crowded place called "future" Franco Beltrametti arrives, once again, with subtle eloquence to surprise us with his unexpected nuances and turns. These poems give us his presence….calling up poets and ancestors of every sort and show us the transparency and modesty of his world."
Franco Beltrametti can be seen, talking in eternity, on video - here
A full run of mini , "the smallest review in the world", that he edited, can be found here
The Franco Beltrametti Archive (plenty to look at) may be accessed here. Franco would be amazed by this - "More than two hundred previously-unknown poems by leading Edo period (1603-1867) haikuist and artist Yosa Buson have been found in an anthology at the Tenri Central Library" Blackberry Books, incidentally, are also the publishers of the wonderful Collected Poems of Nanao Sakaki - How To Live On The Planet Earth
Randy notes: "Another manuscript poem with Allen's corrections. This one points out one of his mannerisms - to turn a phrase like "the root of his cock" into the more condensed "his cock root", which I often, as in this case, find an affectation. I'd have a lot more to work with as an orator in the cadence of "the root of his cock" than the awkward "his cock root"."
Next Wednesday October 7 is the 60th Anniversary of the legendary Gallery Six reading, the first public performance of "Howl", the pioneering reading-event (Kerouac in the audience, carrying that jug of wine) that got the whole thing going Celebratory events are being planned in Australia, London, Paris, Boulder, San Francisco, New York City, and elsewhere… Here's one in Kingston, Ontario (Canada) (Eric Folsom hosts local poets Mary Cameron, Jennifer Londry and Bruce Kauffman)
The following day (Thursday the 8th) - and through the coming weekend - it's, once again, the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac celebrations in Kerouac's New England home-town. David Amram, Andy Clausen,Pamela Twiningand four days of activities.A full schedule of events can be found here Emory in Atlanta just acquired a trove of rare Jack Kerouac materials, including "manuscripts and correspondence dating from the 1940s to the 1960s". This (from an August 11, 1954 note) - Jack: "Cher Allen, Pourquoi tu n'ecrit pas?". You seem to be writing to every Tom Dick N Harry except me. You betray your ambition - but please remember, Sage, a useless tree is never cut up into a coffin. Enuff nonsense, I'm just 'pulling your leg" like Neal, [sic] uck, uck, uck."
Michael McClure(one of the original readers at the Gallery Six reading) will be in town (Lowell) earlier in the week and will be reading, Monday October 5th, at the UMass Lowell (seehere) - (He'll also be presenting the Charles Olson lecture for The Gloucester Writers Center tomorrow evening at the Cape Ann Museum)
…and, looking ahead at things, don't forget too - a week from Saturday, a week from tomorrow (Oct 10) Manchester, England's exciting Howl-at-60 event - "Still Howling" -
[Rosebud Feliu-Pettet (1946-2015) and Allen Ginsberg]
Rose "Rosebud" Feliu-Pettet, a long-time friend of Allen's, author ofthe definitive account of Allen's passing, passed away herself this week. She'd been suffering from a particularly virulent form of cancer, bile duct cancer.She was 69 For more of Rosebud on Allen - see here: "Well, I met Allen a long time ago, about 1964, I was living in this crazy dinky kind of collective called Kerista, a sort of benign Manson family [sic] . There were about eighteen people living in a store front on Ludlow Street [on New York's Lower East Side], and one day Allen came by…I didn't have a clue who he was, although I'd read Howland been wildly impressed, so when this oddball beard guy appeared & was so sweet, I got down & laughed & sat on his lap & tickled (him) and asked him his name. Allen was pretty surprised I think that some school girl liked him, just for being a fine guy." "So, he said, "If you ever need a place to stay, come over to my flat", (5th Street then and Avenue C), and I did, for a year or two. He was always like Uncle Allen, the guy you borrow a cup of sugar from down the hall. Sweet. But he worked always, hard, every day. Locked in the bedroom. Refuse(d) the phone - Wrote for two to three hours - Always reminded everyone to WRITE DOWN THEIR DREAMS"... "I think of Allen at hisfarm in Cherry Valley, Allen in gumboots, Allen eager for rock & roll, Allen being considerate to all the folks who ask him for favors, Allen being a dirty dog with all the pretty boys. I love this guy"
Another "fan" of Allen's - the new U.S. Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera. From a profile piece this week in The Guardian: "When he (Herrera) speaks of Ginsberg now, it's in the reverent tones of a worshipper: "He didn't back up, he didn't shy away, he didn't censor himself, he wasn't afraid of his body, he wasn't afraid of being gay, he wasn't afraid of exposing what was not exposable in society…" "He was right about the poem being a mind-breath, Herrera adds, "Each word depends on how your mind breathes." .
