Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Granelli, Naropa 1981

[Allen Ginsberg]

                                                                  [Jerry Granelli]

Allen Ginsberg and jazz drummer Jerry Granelli team up this weekend on a vintage recording made in 1981 at Naropa

The recording begins with (as warm up) two improvisations on Hart Crane and William Blake

                                                                  [Hart Crane (1899-1932)]

AG: We'll improvise one - "The Hurricane" by Hart Crane - a dochmiac meter -  bom bom ba-da-da bom bom ba-da-da bom  bom-ba-da  bom ba-da-da– bom-ba-da-da bom-bom (that's the basic rhythm, hurricane rhythm)  - ("Lo, Lord, thou ridest!/ Lord, Lord, thy swifting heart"…."Thou ridest to the door, Lord!/Thou bidest wall nor floor, Lord!") - Well, we were making it up as we went along…Okay, what's next? - "Tyger, Tyger" - So I'll read that and Jerry will.. I'll read it acapella, then Jerry will take off on a drum solo with the trochaic meters with his own back-beats, sub-divisions, and then I'll come back in with te vocal - ("Tyger, Tyger, burning bright .."… "What immortal hand or eye,/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?")
  

[At approximately seven minutes in, Jerry Granelli introduces the evening]

JG:Good evening. Glad there’s so many of you here for this momentous occasion (may not be to you but it is to us) I’d like you to please welcome Mr Allen Ginsberg

AG: And please welcome Mr Jerry Granelli

JG: We’re going to read and play, play and read various works. We even had a rehearsal

AG: And a half

JG: And a half, actually, a rehearsal and a half , it’s a new record!  So I think we’ll begin. You want to introduce this poem?

AG: Yeah. What we’re going to do is embark on an enterprise fraught with all sorts of emergencies and dangers and delights. We’ll start with a text by (Jack) Kerouac, myself and (Neal) Cassady, called “Pull My Daisy”, Jerry Granelli on hand drum, Ginsberg on vocal, which will feature a run-through of the text on drums and then improvisation on the same rhythm and then a reduction of… a little solo?

JG: Yes

AG,,and then a reduction into da-da-da-da-da-da da  da-da-da-da - No, da-da-da-da-da-da-da  da-da-da-da-da-da-da - you start or I start? - da-da-da-da-da-da-da  da-da-da-da-da-da -  “Tip my cup.. all my doors are open.” 

(From approximately eight-and-three-quarter minutes in to appoximately eleven-and-a-half minutes in, Allen delivers an extended and improvised version of "Pull My Daisy" - 

"pretty good, Jerry"]

AG: Next is "The Shrouded Stranger". We do that on the...  next is "The Shrouded Stranger of the Night".  This is a text 1949, which is now a rock n roll hit in Hungary, played by the Hobo Blues Band, as of 1979. Every kid in Hungary knows this, in Hungarian, now! – It’s true! – strictly from Hungary!  - (“Bare skin is my wrinkled sack/When hot Apollo humps my back"…"Who'll look into my hooded eye/Who'll lay down under my darkened thigh?") 

Next (beginning approximately fourteen-and-a-half minutes in ) "CIA Dope Calypso" (Allen to Jerry Granelli - want to set up here?) - ("In nineteen-hudred-and-forty-nine/ China was won by Mao Tse-tung"…"Subsidizing the traffickers to drive the Reds away/Till Colby was the head of the whole world CIA")

This is followed (at eighteen-and-three-quarters in) by an entirely spontaneous improvisation - “Shine Shave Haircut  - Six Bits"   

AG: "I don’t know what I’m going to say/ but anything I say I'll say anyway./Sometimes I see a pretty boy/ and sometimes it turns out to be a dead toy/Sometimes I see a pretty girl/ and sometimes it’s nothing but an old spit curl/Sometimes I find myself walking into class/ and sometimes I fall down on my ass/Sometimes I think my name is Andy Clausen/and then I don’t know what I’m doing and I’ve got no cause on/Sometimes I get down on my knees in front of Chogyam Trungpa/and sometimes I don’t know what I'm going to do, like an elephant dunkin'/Sometimes, Jerry, he plays quite quiet/ and sometimes he blows his stack like a riot/ Sometimes in down in El Salvador,/ they start another dirty old war/ You think in Nicaragua they're gonna invade again?/You think they’ll bring us with bombs and with pen/You think in Honduras they’ll make us endure us /Another Vietnam? just like Uncle Sam?/You think in El Salvador they’ll give you a haircut,/with a shine and a shave just for your old six bits?/Now we might go playing with our long machines, or we might go coming on clean/ or we may go out and do a little calligraphy/, but sometimes we’ll stay at home and study United States geography/If I had a little pretty boy,/ I guess I’d fuck him and make him my toy/If I had a little girl,/ I think I’d make a baby whirl/ Now I hear that Chogyam’s being saying that I oughta/ have a little boy or have a little daughter/'Cause I don’t know what my powers might be/ if I came out in eternity/but I’m already a little busy already as it is/ and taking care of kids’d be another busy whiz/I just don’t know, I’d go out of my wits/ if I had a little baby to suck at my tits/ Shine Shave Haircut - Six Bits."

Next (at twenty-two minutes in) - "I'll read a poem (because the evening is vocal) - so I'll read a poem because it sounds aloud and has some rhythm. From 1973, "What Would You Do If You Lost It?" - ("What would you do if you lost it/said hard truth-teller Rinpoche Chogyam Trungpa Tulku in the marble glittering apartment lobby in New York/looking at my black hand-box full of Art. "Better prepare for Death"… "No song for the hearer/No more words for any mind")

                                                  [ "Rinpoche Chogyam Trungpa Tulku"  (1939-1987)] 

[Allen and Jerry follow this (at approximately thirty minutes in) with "The Mumbles" - 

AG:  .… Well, I think we start with "the Mumbles”, yeah (to Jerry Granelli)  You want to say what "the Mumbles" is?
JG: Oh we can talk about that
AG: Ok 

JG: We’re going to spend the next few minutes.. (Keyboard sounds - AG: uh-huh, yes, that's what we're going to do, yes yes)
laying the blues  (AG: You gonna tell 'em?, shall I tell em?) 
(AG and JG both here, in the introduction and in the delivery of the song, purposely mumble) 
JG: The old blues singers used to do a thing called “mumbles”..mumbles..which was basically designed so no one could understand what they were saying (AG: glub glub glub glub) say all kind of obscene things about (AG: My ass!) …whoever you chose, mostly the club-owner, probably, and still in the form of the blues, so they would say….
[Allen and Jerry, improvising, proceed to perform "The Mumbles"  (drug and meditation references - "have a stick of samatha"..
and,  starting at approximately thirty-five-and-a-quarter minutes in:

"O  Mama, what, did you go away?/ O Papa, where's your face today?/ Father Guru, what did Mother say?/ Ah brother, how's your little lover?/Ah sister, how's your aging mister?/ Ah nephew, how's your meat-bone now?"/ "Hey Aunty, you still there in your panties?/ Uncle Abe, you still play with your fancy?/ Aunt Rose, how's your worm man, Sam? - Ah Honey,I hope you got lots of money/ Ah  Aunt Clara, how's your dead tempter, Harry? /Ah Eugene, when you last saw cousin Joey?/ Was he sad? his sweet heart had gone bad?/ heavy weight? was it too much he ate?/ Dear Doctor/ I'm willing to cooperate./ Connie dear, have no fear, your children grew up very near/ A Church - a  place to meditate/ A Methodist choir no one could hate/ O Truth, around us/ white as the sky/ O Love, that will not leave us with a lie/ O World, we come back to/only to die./ O Honesty, who but ourselves are betrayed/ When we rot in a dream in silk pomp foolery/ Virginity, what took you so long to get laid? / O Sex, gimme all you can spare/ O Love, try me out for what you'd never dare/ O Ass, I'm thankful I still got my share."

Allen next "performs" a right-wing journalists op-ed piece decrying the $10,000  award  from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to Peter Orlovsky for his book, Smiling Vegetables and Clean Asshole Poems  

“A Filthy Waste" – Government  spends your tax dollars on obscene poetry. Your tax dollars are supporting obscene poetry. The National Endowment for the Arts has handed over ten thousand dollars of your tax money to help finance a poet whose main previous work was a book of obscenities and unintelligible gibberish, gibberish, gibberish, gibberish. "It's a disgrace", charges Minerva Cannon, an internationally known poet and a member of the Poetry Society of America, "It's a slap in he face to all true poets that this man should get ten grand for such filth. And, a New York poetry professor, who asked not to be identified, fumed, "It makes me sick when I see garbage like this being rewarded by our government. You don't give ten thousand dollars to someone to write this kind of junk. Any six year old... could have probably done that and probably done it a great deal better. The grant was awarded to poet Peter Orlovsky on the basis of his book of poems filled with obscene descriptions and useless babblings. The fact that the title of the book cannot even be published in a decent newspaper is because the language is foul - Quote - The book Orlovsky wrote is just gibberish and absolute garbage." said the Professor, said the Professor, said the Professor, absolute garbage, said the Professor, absolute garbage said the Professor said the Professor. Added Cannon added Cannon, I think, I think, I think it's,
I think it's, I think it's, I think it's denigrating, I think its denigrating to poetry. I think it's denigrating to poetry. Young poets seeing this will think all they have to do is write a string of filth, all they have to do is write a string of filth, all they have to do is write a string of filth they can think of, all the filth, all the filth they can think of, and they'll get ten thousand dollars from the government,  and they'll get ten thousand dollars from the government,  and they'll get ten thousand dollars from the government. If it comes to that we can all hide our heads in the ground and not write another line except four letter words four letter words". And Representative Larry McDonald, Democrat of Georgia, Democrat of Georgia, protested, "It's a disgrace to the nation", it's a disgrace to the nation, it's a disgrace to the nation, a disgrace to the nation , the nation, a disgrace, a..

JG: Allen, tell them what newspaper that's from

AG: Oh  - The National Enquirer, February 24, 1981

[At approximately forty-three-and-a-half minutes in, the program continues ]
AG to JG):  Will you take a solo?  What do you want to do? Want to take an intermission? Raise your hands – [ a little show of hands] - Okay- the next will be Jerry Granelli on percussion, solo 

[ Granelli's percussion solo lasts from approximately forty-four-and-three-quarter minutes in until fifty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in]

AG:  The next number on the program will be “The Congo” by Vachel Lindsay, a poem written in the (19)20’s and circulated around the country by voice by Vachel Lindsay. In three parts, or three movements, vocal and percussion’ - "“The Congo Part One 

 “Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room.."…. mumbo jumbo hoo-doo you"
- Pretty good! - “Atlantis” next

Atlantis – next, verbal rhapsody by Hart Crane, at the end of “The Bridge”  - [Atlantis   (with background music of piano/keyboard)  begins approximately sixty minutes in] - ("Through the bound cable strands the arching path/Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings" ….” …”Whispers antiphonal in azure swing")

[Allen concludes with  "A more lengthy new poem .. we begin with (Capitol Air) - ("I don’t like the government where I live/I don't like dictatorship of the Rich"…"Breathe together with an ordinary mind/Armed with Humor Feed & Enlighten Woe Mankind" )  

[Audio for the above can be heard here]

Ginsberg on Late Auden

                                                              [W.H.Auden (1907-1973)]  

[Allen (at Naropa in 1980) continues his survey through a xeroxed classroom anthology of the Sapphic form, paying particular attention today to the late work of W.H.Auden]

AG: So from that (from Robert Bridges),  we get into, I think you have the Vernon Watkins and the..

Student: Auden

AG: There's Auden (W.H.Auden), and then from the front, mixed up in the front there's Vernon Watkins and Louis MacNeice .. had rough Sapphics - (it's way up front, we don't need it now). Auden, however, is.. funny. So I think I'll take two brief Auden Sapphics - "Circe" (page 54 ) - and the next page on the left -  "(For) Orlon Fox" - (I'll be done in a minute, has anybody got to run?) . The Sapphic poem was basic to Auden's practice - and to MacNeice and that whole group of English poets of before the war, the new poets, the modern poets who followed after the great generation of (Ezra) Pound and (T.S.) Eliot . There was Stephen Spender, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Isherwood, and then a younger group, David Gascoyne,Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas (younger than Auden, actually). So, Watkins, we have a sample of.

Of Auden, his last book leaned very heavily on Sapphics and very boring statements of boring everyday thoughts (actually, a little bit dumb in that way, except brilliantly written, very witty, but sort of negative). Here, in the introduction (for Orlon Fox) if you've got it - the next page - "For Orlon Fox" - "Each year brings new poems of Form and Content,/ new foes to tug with: At Twenty, I tried to/ vex my elders., Past sixty, it's the young whom/ I hope to bother" - So that's a little cantankerous, actually - "the young" (very preoccupied with "age-ism", so..  - and it's an attack on the young in "Circe" - it's an attack on the Hippies of the "Sixties

Student: on Women

AG: ..On the Hippies of the 'Sixties  - Well, maybe. On women too, but.. You know the story of Circe in The Odyssey is that she turns men into pigs. You know, because of sheer lust, and she refuses their lust, and they turn into pigs, they slobber and grovel in a swineyard. Meanwhile, Odysseus is not turned into a pig but he enjoys Circe's bed - "Her Telepathic-Station transmits thought-waves/the second-rate, the bored, the disappointed/and any of us when tired or uneasy/are tuned to receive/ So, tough unlisted in atlas or phone-book/Her Garden is easy to find. In no time/one reaches the gate over which is written/ large: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR" - "large:MAKE LOVE NOT WAR" - If you notice, he's not paying any attention at all to the rhythm of that hendecasyllable and adonic. It's all… He's just counting syllables - Eleven and five.. Eleven, eleven, eleven, and five. And you'll find that's mostly.. They'll either do.. The way that the British, twentieth-century British, are so lax, but are still interesting - they all went to Oxford or Cambridge, and they all studied Greek and Latin, and so they're all studied, - and they're all fairies, so they've all read Catullus and Sappho. So there are two ways they handle it. One is to have a mixed line that has hendecasyllables that aren't eleven but ten, thirteen, twelve, sometimes eleven, coming back to eleven, and adonics that are maybe four, five, six (four, five, or six), but not really sharp. 

Auden, I think, will, generally, try to stay to eleven and five -  "large:MAKE LOVE NOT WAR" is five - "pinks-and-blues-and-reds" - but I.. you know, it reduces the rhythms to "pinks and blues and reds", da-da, da-da, da - "the rendering, schmaltz", "splintered main-mast/ of the Ship of Fools". Why did Auden do that? That was because Marianne Moore, earlier in the century, had decided that because the problem of American rhythm (and English rhythm) is so complicated  and insuperable that (William Carlos) Williams' idea of trying to pay attention to little cadences of American speech,  (or) (Ezra) Pound's idea of trying to adapt to approximate classical quantity is just hopelessly self-conscious. So what she said was "I'll write it as brilliantly, concisely as I can, sticking to the facts, and I'll just snip the lines off, arbitrarily, according to a fixed count of syllables. So, she fabricated stanza-forms of arbitrary.. say eleven syllables, seven syllables,thirteen syllables, five syllables.. And the next stanza would have to be the same. And there would be a run-on line completely. But there was no interest..not no interest, there was no count, for the verse. There was no count of the cadence, no accounting of the cadence. The angle was to have the strict carpentry of the number of syllables counted (arithmetic-like) and then the rhythms of the speech would run slightly counter to that and syncopate. Auden picked it up from Marianne Moore and does the same thing - he's just talking like he's talking - " So, although unlisted in atlas or phone-book/Her Garden is easy to find. In no time/one reaches the gate over which is written large: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR."- So that the cadences of speech contradict  the artificial snipping of the lines  counting the syllables of the lines just by arithmetic. That has.. If you get to do that, that has a funny ear. If you can develop an ear that way. And other poets that do that - Kenneth Rexroth is one, famously. I do it, as I mentioned, in some early poems 

Student; With that kind of stanza would you pause at the end of the line?

AG: No. If you hear Auden, he doesn't pause, doesn't pause, but then he can. See, you notice the way John (Burnett) read. It wasn't very dramatic, but he didn't pause at all, so you couldn't tell where one line began and another line ended As distinct from Ed (Sanders). Now Ed was pausing at the end of each line, which is probably wrong. The way the original would go, I imagine, is that the rhythmic.. that the tones, pitch, tones, melody, the melos, melody, and the length make the rhythm (which was repeated line-by-line so you could hear the variations very clearly, but you didn't have to pause to know it, see - because they are run-on lines in Greek - just like in Auden and in Marianne Moore). So it's the run-on of an actual speech that goes on by the breath, and then within that there are the repeated cadences that we're beginning to get familiar with of   [Allen sounds them out - "da-da, da-da   da-da-da, da-da da - da - da-dum da-da" -  So probably "da-da, da-da,  da,  da-da-da-da  da-da da-da - da da da-da-da, da da, da-da, da-da ,da, da-da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da"] , without a pause for the lines that you'd have to know it because they repeat the surge of the cadence repeat - That make sense?

So the perfect poem would be where the surge of the cadence repeats but where the cadence in itself is a single continuous thing throughout the whole stanza of someone saying something without realizing it's going to be lines, or without intending a breath-stop for lines. In other words, you wouldn't know it was poetry, except it has this repeated cadence, wouldn't know it was poetry by the fact that they stopped at the end of the line, that is to say. That make sense?  That would be the ideal poetry where you wouldn't have to stop at the end of the line to hear the rhythm, if the rhythm was strong enough.  

Well, [returning to Auden] - "Inside…" (inside the gate) - "Inside it is warm and still like a drowsy/September day though the leaves show no sign of/turning. All around one notes the usual/pinks and blues and reds,"/  A shade over-emphasized - [in other words, the day-glo colors] - "..the rose-bushes/have no thorns. An invisible orchestra/plays the Great Masters: the technique is flawless/the rendering, schmaltz./ Of Herself, no sign. But, just as the pilgrim/is starting to wonder, "Have I been hoaxed by/a myth?" He feels her hand in his his and hears Her/murmuring: "At last!"/ With me, mistaught one, you shall learn the answers./What is conscience but a nattering fish-wife,/ the Tree of Knowledge but the splintered main-mast/ of the Ship of Fools?"/Consent, you poor alien, to my arms where/sequence is conquered, division abolished:/soon, soon, in the perfect [Reich-ian] orgasm, you shall, pet,/be one with the All/ She does not brutalize Her victims (beasts could/ bite or bolt). She simplifies them to flowers,/sessile fatalists who don't mind and only/can talk to themselves - (that's very much like Chogyam Trungpa's view of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, you know, poking fun at the…what's the phrase he uses? the… "idiot compassion" - poking fun at idiot compassion - "you shall, pet,/be one with the All" (there's that line of Hart Crane - "O answerer of all" - and then he jumped off of the ship and committed suicide!) - "She simplifies them to flowers,/sessile fatalists who don't mind and only/can talk to themselves/All but a privileged Few, the elite She/guides to Her secret citadel, the Tower/where a laugh is forbidden and DO HARM AS/ THOU WILT  is the Law" - [that must be (Charles) Manson] - "Dear little not-so-innocents, beware of/Old Grandmother Spider; rump her endearments - [turn your ass on her endearments] - "She's not quite as nice as She looks, nor you quite/as tough as you think."

Well, that was Auden..  Then finally, (Bob Dylan)  "William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll", ("The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"),  which I would… If you look at it you can compare it to the (other texts)..  And on the next page, there's a little thing on how you can…three different arrangements of hendecasyllables.. and the rest is...you'll find them.. and (find) ways of getting in and out of it. Alright, I think we'll move on from the Sapphics… 




[Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approximately fifty-seven-and-three-quarter minutes in and ending at approximately sixty-six-and-a-half minutes in]

Allen Ginsberg on Jack Kerouac - 1982 Naropa continues

                 [Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) at a "Beat"party, 1959 - Photograph by Burt Glinn./Magnum Photos]

Continuing here from yesterday's posting - Allen annotates Jack Kerouac's "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose"    

"2. Submissive to everything, open, listening" - so that's an attitude of mind of..  submissive to any thought that comes along - about fucking your mother, or about...I don't know, anything it is that is most.. common, and most forbidden, anything that comes along  in your mind that is.. fucking God, if you want to, anything that you wouldn't want, necessarily, anybody to hear, but you hear yourself, and so, "submissive to everything" ("submissive" meaning, to.. an attitude, like tender, lamb-like, innocent openness to..
 when you're writing, openness to the world, so that you.. so you're not trying.. so you get in as much as possible, that you understand as much as possible, because you're not laying a trip and not resisting and not insisting but actually open-handed, open-hearted, listening to the promptings of your own nature, your own mind, your thoughts, (reading your thoughts, actually, the thoughts that rise spontaneously) 

"3. (this is Kerouac's own medicinal prescription) - "Never get drunk outside yr own house" (because he would go into New York and get really drunk and get fucked up and lose his notebooks and..) - 4. (this is really important) - "Be in love with yr own life" (which is to say, Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau , or me, or Gregory Corso, or Buddha, or.. whoever it is that really digs his own existence, appreciates his own existence, "find(s) no fat sweeter than that which sticks to (his) own bones " ["I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones"], like Walt Whitman). The line is "Be in love with your life. In Kerouac's case, and lesser in mine, but strong in his case was the fact that he saw his whole life as a giant heroic myth and so he was able to write about any part of his life because it was all part of the giant heroic myth, just like, say, if you saw this whole week as part of a giant heroic myth, any little conversation in the bathroom would be fascinating, any minor escapade with a mouse in the corner would be an event of enormous historic importance as a footnote. So, all the footnotes of your own life. So, "be in love with yr own life", be in love with life. So that's.. In other words, you can't take a doleful attitude and say, "Oh well, I don't like myself and I'm a shit. I want to write so I can get myself better than I am, or maybe somebody will like me then, or maybe it'll be a..maybe I'll make some money." But just imagine the energy if you actually thought that you were the hero of your own existence and that when you died, there was no more going to be that hero in your existence. So you're the hero of your own existence because nobody else could possibly be the hero of your existence. So therefore you have to be in love with your life, or you'd have to take the attitude towards your own life that it's writ in golden letters - "the one and only life". This is your life, and so therefore that attitude, this is (my) life is the proper attitude, which means straight back (like you're sitting on a horse, riding on a horse in eternity through life, throwing thunderbolts ) - "Be in love with yr life"

5 - Something that you feel will find its own form - So you get an idea and you write it down, without worrying if you're going to make it a sonnet or quatrains (unless you have so mastered blues, or quatrains, or sonnets, that you can write them as swift as you can play "Chopsticks" on the piano, unless you're so good and swift at rhyming or terza rima, or rondeaux, or sonnets). There's nothing wrong with forms as long as you don't have to force yourself , yeah? - or rock 'n roll songs (I find I can write almost as fast and rhyme for rock 'n roll as write free verse so it doesn't make any difference - like at the dance last night, I was carrying on, making up rhymed verses).

How do you learn forms? - Well, I learned forms as a kid. My father was a high-school English teacher and so I read the Untermeyer anthologies and saw all the forms in the high-school books (they didn't have many in those days, they didn't know very many, you know, it was, like a standard nineteen-twenties, very provincial idea of what forms were, not big extensive ones - that it was iambic.. Well, first of all, I learned how to count iambic and trochaic meters - Does everybody know how to count? - heavy and light accents - Does everybody know what an iambic meter is? - Raise your hand if you do (now) raise your hand if you don't (raise your hand if you don't, please) . So it's about a third to a half . Well, how do you learn it? Somebody's gotta tell ya, I guess. You gotta ask. Well that's a whole question ofthe classical forms, whether to take it up now, I don't know, we might take it up next time.Next time I.. for the next class, I will bring in a single page which has every one of the classical meters and pass it out - from Greek and Latin - Trochee, Spondee, but also Cretic, Amphibrach, well, the two-syllable meters, the three-syllable meters, the four-syllable meters, like da-da-da-da, de-da-da-da, de da-da-da, and there are five-syllable meters like boom-boom-ba-da-da, boom-boom-ba-da-da - "Lo, lord, Thou rightest", "Droop herbs and flowers/Fall fruits and showers" (Ben Jonson for the last two, and "Lo, lord, Thou ridest" - Hart Crane's Hurricane). (I've) forgot what the name of that is. It's used by the Greeks in the height of their plays when they want to make ecstatic choruses. - Da da de-da-da - But, I'm sorry, I'm getting lost, because I'd like to talk first about the mind-attitude, rather than the..  the mind-attitudes towards writing, and later on, maybe, we'll get into forms, ok? - But if you want to learn forms, I'll bring in a sheet which will give you all the forms, not all of them, (all of the meters, rather) and we can talk about forms. But I want to talk about open form for the moment (and also, you can always get them out of a book, or out of a regular teacher, a regular poetry teacher in high school - High School, the old 1930's high-school books had lots, and there, the old college anthologies, in the back, usually had big expositions of dimeter, monometer, trimeter, quadrameter, (tetrameter), four-beat lines. I grew up on it so my ear is good but I found that I had to get rid of it, had to get rid of the classical forms, in order to notate my own tongue as it went along in my own mind. Something that you feel will find its own form, Kerouac says, which is to say that the thoughts that occur to your mind in the sequence that they occur, and for that it would be useful to read the essay "Projective Verse" by Charles Olson in the anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. How many are familiar with that book, the Don Allen anthology? - And how many are not? - okay, almost a majority are not, so I'd recommend that as a survey of the poetry that surrounded Kerouac and the Beat Generation, Grove Press.  Grove Press. The New American Poetry. It's just been re-issued (originally it was The New American Poetry 1945-1960, edited by Don Allen). And if you can get it in a second-hand bookstore, the old edition, that's the real authentic one. This year [1982] a new edition of  The New American Poetry edited by Don Allen was issued by Grove Press which dropped some poets and added some more.
But, at the end of it, they have a lot of essays by the poets on how they found their own form and how they wrote their poems, essays by Kerouac, essays by Gary Snyder, essays by Robert Duncan, by me, by Gregory Corso, and those are worth looking at, and the one I'm recommending from that book is "Projective Verse" by Charles Olson. And the thing that Olson says is that "one perception must immediately lead to another". In other words, don't get hung up trying to fill up a flash, write down your flash and go on to the next flash, next flash-thought.. Keep the mind moving, keep the perceptions.. that is to say because your mind is having new perceptions every half-minute, don't get hung-up on one of themand try to get stuck with it because you'll set-up a feed-back. Instead, junp from one thing to another fast, jump from one thought to another fast, as the thoughts rise during the time that you are writing, and don't go looking for a thought that you had a half an hour ago or before you started writing, just the thoughts that you have while you're writing, because that, clearly, is much easier to do. Otherwise you stop the natural flow of what's going on as you're writing and you short-circuit it trying to retrieve something that you thought two days ago or half-an-hour before, or try and think up something smarter than the thing you thought. And to try and think of something smarter than what you're thinking, than what you actually thought, is just a waste of time, because if you just hang around and take downthe thoughts you're thinking of at the moment, sooner of later you'll think of something  smarter than the last thought anyway. It's funny, if you stop the whole process of thought to think of something smarter, all you do is think of the word -"smarter","smarter","smarter".  So you set-up a feed-back.  So the thing is '"one perception must immediately lead on to another", or follow your perceptions. And Robert Creeley contributed the phrase to Olson in that essay, "Form is never more than an extension of Content" and that means the same as something you will feel will find its own form -  "Form is never more than an extension of Content" - like..  I was thinking of  a poem of Philip Lamantia... (So if that were a line of poetry - "Form is never more than an extension of Content - like".. colon on the page - "like, colon , like.. I was thinking of  a poem of Philip Lamantia" - The form of those three lines is exactly as said,  in other words, is identical with their content. And there's a great poem by Philip Lamantia that goes.. from his Selected Poems, City Lights ( I paraphrase it, because I don't have it here)  - "I long for the  super essential light of the darkness, I long for Christ on the cross, I long for the blood of the beauteous heavens, I long for the immense vegetable turnips of Jesus Christ's victory, I long for.. it is nameless what I long for". And the line goes "I long for the - blank, stop, go down to the next line, continue - "It is nameless what I long for". "I long for the… it is nameless what I long for",  It's just the way his mind went. So that's an example of a thought finding its own form on the page, or an example of what Kerouac says, "Something that you feel will find its own form" - Is this clear?  Is there anybody who doesn't understand what I was just saying? Please, if you don't understand, let me know, because it means that I haven't said it clearly, it doesn't mean that you're dumn

(7) "Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind" - In other words, allow any thought - "8. Write anything you want bottomless from bottom of the mind - "Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind - what you realy want to write about instead of what you think you're supposed to write about - "9. The unspeakable visions of the individual" - that's such a funny phrase - "the unspeakable visions of the individual" -  something, more or less, probably derived from an amphetamine high - "the unspeakable visions" - so..  because Kerouac at that time did write a good deal on amphetamine (and it wasn't so good an idea, (he) burned his body out doing that, made it harder to write novels later, because it's more of an ordeal to take a lot of amphetamine and then go write for twenty days on amphetamine, and then get totally physically exhausted and have to not write again for another year, and not write a.. one single work, but to accomplish a single work he did it in intense bursts and for several years he was using amphetamines to complete.. like in The Subterraneans) -"The unspeakable visions of the individual" is the title of a series of archive, books, put out by some guests here, the Knights, archives of Beat writers, taken from this little phrase, "the unspeakable visions of the individual". (10.) "No time for poetry but exactly what is" - This is what I was talking avout before. No time for deliberate "I'm going to write something that they can put up in a museum or in an anthology", "No time for poetry but exactly what is", what is in your mind - (11) "Visionary tics shivering in the chest" - "That beautiful cute boy I saw yesterday!" - "Visionary tics shivering in the chest"  - (12) "In tranced fixation dreaming before object before you" - In other words, you set up the picture in your mind of what it is you want to describe, somebody's face (I think Kerouac has an "old tea-cup for a face"  or "a trip across America") -  I think he would sit first, figure out (the) picture in the mind, picture it in his mind, the whole thing that it was going to be into, get it all together, and then.. then write, letting the picture suggest the words - (13) "Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition". In other words, like Philip Lamantia said, "I long for the… It is nameless what I long for", or William Carlos Williams has a funny line at the endof a poem called "The Clouds" where he breaks off in he middle of the sentence because he couldn't.. can't say any more (he's talking about the people getting abstract and not being down to cases, not talking about "for instance"s and not being down to earth, saying their imaginations plunging on a moth, a butterfly, a pismire, a….. - and he ends "a", dot dot dot dot dot, or in the poem "For Eleanor and Bill Monahan" - "The moon which was latterly the poets planet they have..rediscovered, or they've taken over for scientific purposes..the fools, what do they think they will find..that death has not already shown them/Those ships should be directed inward upon/but I'm an old man , I've had enough…" - That was, just as you would talk, just as you would say it, just as you would think it, with a break. He didn't have to finish the sentence, he already said it - Those ships should be directed inward upon/but I'm an old man , I've had enough…" - (14) "Like Proust, be an old teahead of time" -  "Like Proust, be an old teahead of time" - In other words, as Proust had the total recall, or conducted a total recall of all of the details of his life, very appreciatively, like a tea-head who had, having sipped a little grass and gottten very high was begining to appreciate all the cracks in the china bowl and all the tiny little flowers blooming in his back yard out the window, and appreciating the purple drapes and the paisley coverings for the sofa, and remembering the paisley coverings of the sofa in his aunt's house and the taste of tea and little crackers, way back when he was a kid visiting suburbs, to visit his aunt, so remembering all the details -  "Like Proust, be an old teahead of time" - (15)  "Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog" -  the way you would think it to yourself -  "Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog" - (16) "The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye"  (I'll xerox these up for you by tomorrow, so you don't have to worry about it, unless you're speed stenographers, or something) - (17) "Write in recollection and amazement for yourself" - Kerouac wrote all that stuff.. I remember he used to, before it was published, he had it all lined up, neatly-typed, on his shelf, and he said, "I want to have something so I can read something, something interesting in my old age - "Write in recollection and amazement for yourself" - (18) "Work from pithy middle eye, swimming in language sea" - In other words, stumbling over your own tongue to tell the story, as if you were talking to your best friend, in bed. (19) "Accept loss forever" - that's a basic Kerouac tragic Buddhist idea - Accept loss forever - because his first big book was about his father dying and his second book was fare-thee-well-beloveds, you and your kids, On The Road, and then the third or fourth book, Visions of Gerard, is about the death of his nine-year-old, or six-year-old, elder brother. So "Accept loss forever", and actually, for prose that really is, if you write with a realization that you're writing about a world that'll be gone in the twinkling of an eye by the time the book is published, so you're writing about a ghost world, you "accept loss forever" .It gives poignance and emotion to your view of the world that you're writing about when you realize you're already writing.. you're already writing about already ghosts. Life is a dream already ended. That was Kerouac's phrase. (20) "Believe in the holy contour of life" -  So that would be the same as "Be in love with your life", or similar, but, in terms of the novelist, or the life-time poet tracing year after year the changes and contours of his own mind and his own soul and his own loves and his own works and his own moves from cities to cities - contour.. Be in love.. ""Believe in the holy contour of life"

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately nineteen-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately forty minutes in]

to be continued

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 229

[Spiderman and Allen Ginsberg cartoon - Tom Gauld]

From the current issue of Poetry magazine  – more Howl parodies – (we've featured several such before -  -  Amy Newman - “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by wedding 
planners, dieting, in shapewear,/ dragging themselves in cute outfits through the freezer section for the semifreddo bender/blessed innovative cloister girl pin-ups burning to know the rabbi of electricity in poverty, obedience, in the dream stick of opium and the green Wi-Fi fuse.."

From the Paris Review - "Supplication to the Muses on A Trying Day" - quite a discovery!  - a hitherto unpublished Hart Crane poem - "Thou art no more than Chinese to me, O Moon! A simian chorus to you/and let your balls be nibbled by the flirtatious hauchinango…" 

Ai Weiwei being finally granted a passport – a not insignificant cultural moment. We send you back to 2011 and the Allen Ginsberg Project  here and here - and here

Auction news -  Christies First Open On-line auction this week (Post-War and Contemporary Art) featured three of Allen's Chinese photos (from his visit there in 1984). Here's one of them: 

[Caption: "Downtown Baoding, across from Department store, behind walled gate, this huge public garden's kept up - it was attached to some rich Merchant-official before Revolution - Photo snapped by student interpreter, everyone seemed interested. I liked the moon-bridge's mirror-mouth oval - November 1984.  Allen Ginsberg"]

The above photo went for an estimated selling-price of three-to-five-thousand-dollars 

The Kerouac letter from 1968 that we reported on earlier, in another auction (to Sterling Lord, detailing plans for his never-completed book, Spotlight), surprisingly, didn't sell, failing to meet its reserve price (ten-to-twelve-thousand-dollars). Another item, a 1953 photograph of him by Allen (with typically-detailed hand-written caption added), however, did sell (that one, for just over five-thousand-three-hundred-and-sixty dollars) 

On The Road mapped out and more. See more about Richard Kreitner and Steven Melendez's quaintly obsessive map-making here  

Sad news - the death this past weekend, aged 76, of the great English poet and translator, Lee Harwood. Robert Sheppard remembers him - here,  John Harvey - here.  Shearsman Books in 2004 published his Collected Poems (and his Selected Poems in 2008).  
Most recently, The Orchid Boat appeared from Enitharmon Press in 2014

Here's John Yau, from last November, on "Why I Am A Member of the Lee Harwood Fan Club"  -   Rest in peace, Lee.

                                                            [Lee Harwood (1939-2015)] 

Congratulations, Anne Waldman for the Lifetime Achievement Award  in this year's (Before Columbus Foundation's)  American Book Awards!

Congrats Levi Asher on twenty-one years of Literary Kicks!

Jonah Raskin on Peter Coyote

                                                                    [Peter Coyote]

Jed Birmingham on Carl Weissner

                                                                   [Carl Weissner (1940-2012]

& the new Beatdom - Beatdom #16 - is just out ( it's "the Money Issue").  Among the articles - Delilah Gardner - "Ginsberg in the Underground, Whitman, Rimbaud and Visions of Blake"; editor David S Wills on "The Burroughs Millions"; Hilary Holladay on Herbert Huncke, and essays on two key "Beat women", Hettie Jones and Bonnie Bremser, as well as a review of a book of Gregory Corso interviews (see our note on this tomorrow) 

Another of our film-recommendations - American Rimpoche - "exploring America's introduction to Tibetan Buddhism" (we've noted it before in the context of Gelek Rinpoche - but see further notes on it, a portrait of Allen's (and Philip Glass)'s teacher - here).

                                                          [Philip Glass, Gelek Rimpoche & Allen Ginsberg]