Helen Adam

AG:    So..then.. oh I wanted to read, from…  "Willie the Weeper"...  Probably she knew… Helen Adam knew… one or two ballads by Helen Adam...which is the..?…if I can find it.. .
Best to have them done by her - (First off),  the  "Cheerless Junkie's Song" -  "a maudlin ballad"

"Seeking love upon a day, a day of summer's pride/I left Long Island's suburbs for the Lower East Side,/The train it roared and thundered,/And I sang above its scream./There's a cockroach coming towards me/But it cannot spoil my dream./Love! Love! and L.S.D./It shall not spoil my dream/ Blue moonlight over Tompkins Square./"Drop out, tune in, turn on"/The Village all around me/And Long Island's suburbs gone./In a pad down on Fourth Street/Soon I welcomed the approach/Of the rat that loves the twilight/And the nimble footed roach./"Love! Love! at eventide,/The grey rat and the roach."/ I'm always wheretheaction is//I blow my mind all day./While on Long Island's tennis courts/The bland suburbans play./And I was born suburban!/Who would ever credit that?/No chick who saw me frugging/With the cockroach and the rat./It's Ho! for Horse, or methedrine/ To spark the swinging mood/While rats run up my trouser leg/ Roaches share my food./Rats and roaches nuzzle me/ When it's dark and hot./Love! Love! It's all the same/Mixing Speed with Pot./First a rat, and then a roach./Or both as like as not./If I can't find a fix tonight/My marrow bones will rot./  Goodbye transcendent Tompkins Square/I haven't long to stay/A double jolt of heroin and I'll be on my way./Let rats and roaches bury me./They'll bury me in state,/As they march from Verrazano Bridge/Down to the Golden Gate/ Clear across the continent/Yonder let me lie/In the gutters of Haight Ashbury,/To freak the passers by,/Till all the tourists gape, and say,/"Brother! He died high!"/Let rat tails write my epitaph./Brother! He died high!"

She really can sing it and swing it, unaccompanied. We were looking for the tape of her chanting of it here. I'll see if I can find it. She's actually really authentic. There's also another she has, more recent. Somehow she's captured the sort of archetypal thing that you can put in a ballad of that situation.

[There follows a brief discussion about the apparently-missing Helen Adam tape -"It's listed in the library/alas! it is not there/perhaps somebody's walked away/carried it off in his hair!" - "Maybe somebody is typing it up or something. I don't know"..]

AG: (resumes with the second of the two poems - "Jericho Bar") -  "Last night there was a junkie at the Jericho Bar/A little junkie twanging an electric guitar/A great big, amplified,/Full bopped, way out wide/Hip as the high tide/Electric guitar,/Oh! Mother!/At the Jericho Bar" - She sings it, but it's a very complicated tune - Anybody remember that?

Student: (sings) "O Mother at the Jericho Bar"

AG: (likewise, attempts singing) - Last night there was a junkie at the Jericho Bar"/"A little junkie twanging an electric guitar./A great big, amplified,/ Full bopped, way out wide/Hip as the high tide/Electric guitar,/Oh! Mother!/At the Jericho Bar" 
AG continues singing:
"Over his shoulders his hair was so long/ And every strand of it so dark and so strong/ When he tossed his head, when he shook his hair/My heart was like a fish gasping for air/Hooked in the Jericho Bar"
"In the Jericho Bar, they sing loud.. they sing loud and late/In the Jericho bar near the harbor gate/When that little junkie sang, he was heard afar/Chanting to the throb of his electric guitar./His howling, whining, electric guitar/Beating up the Jericho bar."
"And when it howled and when it whined/My very heart strings trembled and pined/As though my heart strings felt what they would find/Dancing at thr Jericho bar."
"With a beatnik and a beggar and a queer, and a square,/With a soldier and a sailor, and a big blind bear,/With a hipster, and a hustler, and a drunk, and a dwarf/And a cold scaly mer-man from underneath the wharf/Dancing at the Jericho bar."
"I drank milk, Mother, in my sheltered home./I drank milk and I ate honeycomb/Now I'm eating goof-balls/drinking rum and gall,/Wine, and gin, and vodka, and wood alcohol./Give me ten Tequilas/a jigger full of stout,/And a little lap of Pepsi before I freak out/In the reeling Jericho Bar."
"Jericho bar, across the sandy flats/Among the greyest sea gulls/ And the boldest rats/There above the dark tide/ He sang to me/Lonely sorrow like the everlasting sea/ Thrilling his electric guitar…. " 
I think she had three choruses -  Yeah - "Forget your lonely sorrow./ Get high, get high, get high!/Laughing he sings, though he seems to sob and cry./Think of me, my Mother, while the night goes by/Till you watch the morning star sailing up the sky/Bright above the Jericho Bar."
" Oh! Mother, mother, so much I'll never see./The rising of the morninig star, the red rose on the tree/The blonde lily, it will not bud for me,/ In the dusty Jericho bar."
"Wade the creek, Mother, when the east grows light/When, in the Jericho, rats slip out of sight/At early dawn, when guitar strings break/Still my junkie's song I'll celebrate,/With a wild cat, and a were wolf/Frugging  fast in the dark,/With a pusher, a seducer,/A spiv, and a narc/With the Loch Ness Monster,/And an open-mouthed shark,/ Seeking love in the Jericho Bar."
"Oh! never hope to lure me home/ Before the break of day,/For this is where the action is/ And this is where I'll stay:/With Uppers and with Downers and with L.S.D. and pot/Till all the rats of Jericho/ Stampede to Camelot./Don't grudge me dreams, Mother,/ Dreams are all I've got/Swinging Single at the Jericho bar."
"Don't let my sister raise her listening head./Don't let my sister leave her lonely bed./Tell her not to follow where my feet were led/ By the fatal twang of his electric guitar/Across the sandy flats, lit by one white star,/ Where snarling waters flow/ Down by the Jericho Bar …"

Some, some amazing rhythms she's got in there. And she also had a good tune, or some kind of tune that was more… or really precise - yeah?

Student:  What page?

AG: Well, I'll get you the first page - ("I'll gie ye the first page, lad!")

Student: Did she sing that a cappella?

AG: Yeah . A cappella, and every guitarist in the house wanted to get up and do it with her, it was so good. I don't think she's ever worked with a guitarist, though.

Student: She said she had a very good tune but she improvised too

AG: Yeah. She does it slightly different each time. This play was what (19)76 or something?..She's, like, getting on a swing, she's a great performer. Just by herself and that..and the Tompkins Suare. And she also has a lot of…ghoulish - she's Scots - she's got a lot of ghoulish things, and she's got illustrations to it. This book is in our library - Turn Again To Me & Other Poems by Helen Adam  - great ballads. She was in San Francisco, back in the (19)50's,part of the San Francisco Renaissance, and a great friend of Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer and that whole crowd of poets of that time

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately sixty-six-and-three-quarter minutes in and contimuing until approximately seventy-five-and-a-quarter  minutes in]

For previous Helen Adam posts on The Allen Ginsberg Project  - see here, here, here, here here here here and  here 

More Ballads (Thomas the Rhymer & Tam Lin)

["Under the Eildon tree Thomas met the Lady" - "illustration by Katherine Cameron from Thomas the Rhymer (retold by Mary MacGregor, 1908)]



AG:  "Thomas the Rhymer" is a very famous one. The first line is… (It) sort of echoes - "True Thomas lay o'er yon grassy bank" - you know that phrase? -  "True Thomas.."? - That's come through some kind of cultural unconscious, from this ballad, "Thomas the Rhymer". "O.." - and, in that, there's several great lines. He's going.. He's going to Elfland. He's being conjured, and tells what.., or seduced into Elfland - "“O see not ye yon narrow road,/So thick beset wi' thorns and briers?/That is the path of righteousness,/Tho after it but few enquires./“And see not ye that braid braid road,/That lies across yon lillie leven/That is the path of wickedness,/Tho some call it the road to heaven./“And see not ye that bonnie road,/Which winds about the fernie brae?/That is the road to fair Elfland/ Whe'r you and I this night maun gae" - "But Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,/ Whatever you may hear or see,/For gin ae word you should chance to speak/ You will neer get back to your ain country" - "He has gotten a coat of the even cloth,/And a pair of shoes of velvet green,/And till seven years were gane and past/True Thomas on earth was never seen."
So he went to Elfland for seven years. But, to get to Elfland, you had to wade for forty days and forty nights, with red blood up to the knee! - That's a great sort of.. little great movie, that little piece of it. -  "For forty days and forty nights/ He waded through blood above the knee/And he was neither sun nor moon,/But heard the roaring of the sea."

"Tam Lin" - I won't go through, but you might check that out, if you ever get the chance to read more ballads - "The Ballad of Tam Lin" was Helen Adam's favorite (I refer to her because she's maybe the greatest living ballad-maker among the poet-poets - aside from singers).

                                                                      [Helen Adam (1909-1993)] 

to be continued

[Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approximately forty-two-and-a-half-minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-four-and-a-half minutes in]

Basic Poetics - (Ballads continued - Two Sisters)

Allen Ginsberg lecturing on the early English Ballad tradition continues

AG: Basically a ballad is a narrative. It tells a story. It tells it fast . it might have a stop-frame or freeze-frame in it (where there's a lament and a repeat of various lines). Jump-cuts, very fast collage, like highlights, starting with the beginning and swiftly moving into the action, then jumping, with great ellipses (like a haiku), so tremendous time and space or tragedy or action, so, jump to the end of the action, or climax of the action and then show the result - somebody..the knight goes out, the next stanza he's dead with the crows plucking at his eyes; the next stanza, his lady is mourning for him on the castle wall, as fast as that. So, in a way, it's surreal, (we're not talking about any specific poem yet), in a way it's Surrealist (from a twentieth-century point-of-view), because it moves so fast, as fast as the mind moves when the mind recollects. So, in some ways, it could be considered a very modern form, as it has been used in modern times by (Bob) Dylan, or by any of the ballad-makers (but Dylan particularly excellent in fast jump-cuts.) - "Jump-cut"?  Familiar phrase? from cinema? - that you're looking at one thing and, all of a sudden, there's a fast jump to.. 

The jump cut is the..  In the melodrama, when the choo-choo train is coming down on the tracks, and the lady is bound down on the tracks, and you see the train coming and, all of a sudden you see the lady, and then you see the guy riding on his horse to get her, and then you see the train coming closer, and then you see the guy approaching the bridge, and then you see the lady on the track, and you see the guy jumping off his horse and running to the bridge, and then you see the train coming from the other side of the bridge, and the guy's running to the middle, and then you see the lady, and then the next thing, they're both.. they both have jumped off the bridge and are slowly diving into the water, and the train is going off - So it's a series of jump-cuts. So ballad has some of that fast action to it.

                                                                 [Helen Adam  (1909-1993)] 


also… Ballads, apparently, have an interesting magical quality (that one of the poet-teachers here [at Naropa], Helen Adam specifically dug). And there are some lectures on ballad in the library that Helen gave here and are worth listening to, with her Scotch (sic) voice reading them [Editorial note - these have now been transcribed and are available as part of our Allen Ginsberg Project archive - see November & December of 2012]

[There follows a brief discussion about the location of the tapes in the Naropa library - Editorial note - these tapes have now been digitalized and made readily available - see here - "So they'll be in the library and they're worth hearing. If you want to check out ballads, if you get into ballads, there's that archive we have at the library (so ask George (sic)  for it or…."   "Ok, maybe we'll try and listen to that, (the Helen Adam tape) maybe Thursday I'll bring it in]

The thing that, the sort of thing that Helen liked (which turns me onto it also). in 
"The Two Sisters", (on page eighty-one), was at the end (And I'm assuming that we've read a little of this, anyway, so I can skip to the highlights - (It) was the blonde sister, the youngest sister, as I remember, was pushed into the water by her eldest - "The youngest stood upon a stane/The  eldest came and threw her in" (stanza nine), and she cries to her sister, "O sister, sister, save my life/I swear I will never be no man's wife" - and "Sometimes she sank, sometimes she swam,/ she came down here on bonny mill-dam" - 
"O out it came the miller's son/ And saw the fair maid swimming in".  Then, she's washed up, she's dead.
"And by there came a harper fine/ That harped to the king at dine/When he did look that lady upon./He sigh'd and made a heavy moan/ He's ta'en three locks o' yellow hair/(And) with them strung his harp so fair/ The first tune he did play and sing/ Was,"Farewell to my father the king"/The next tune that he did play and sing/Was, "Farwell to my mother, the queen" The lasten tune that he play'd  then/Was, was "Wae to my sister, fair Ellen" 
 - So the hair of his drowned maiden is being used as the strings of a harp  to prophesy - or just to make prophecy. 
So it's, like, really outlandish, garish, fantastic, pretty, magicak, gossamer.

A ballad, apparently, is a form that you can use your imagination on and get frantic within, push to the limit of dream surrealist imagination, without violating the form. In other words, it's a form that encourages that. So if you do want to write ghostly magical poetry, ballad is a good form to use. There was one that I had in Gates of Wrath - "I rose at midnight in the dark" (it begins with the first line - "I rose at midnight in the dark". If you want to see what I did with it, when I was twelve, or twenty, twenty-two..

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

Poetry In Motion

Ron Mann's groundbreaking 1982 film, Poetry In Motion, (we have featured, in the past, snippets, including Allen's enthusiastic "Capitol Air" performance) is now available, in its entirety, on the incomparable UbuWeb. 

From their informative notes:
 "It was re-released in 1994 in an innovative format on CD-Rom..and, in 2002, as a DVD. Poetry In Motion 25 was also made available ("a one-hour television special featuring outtakes from Poetry In Motion with many of the artists featured in the original film", (different poems, different settings), "plus a bunch of new faces (including Peter Orlovsky, Alice Notley, Jerome Rothenberg, Philip Whalen and others - original participants included Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Amiri Baraka, Ed Sanders, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Helen Adam)"). 

Director, Ron Mann is interviewed about the film by Daniel Nester here, a couple of years back, on the web-site for The Poetry Foundation.

Our earlier (2011) posting about the film can be accessed here 

Spontaneous Poetics (Ballads) - 24 (Tam Lin)

AG: Okay, what else do we have (besides) "Thomas the Rhymer"?

Bruce Martin; We have "Tam Lin".

AG: Okay, "Tam Lin".

BM: Alright. "Tam Lin:. Has anyone ever heard "Tam Lin"

AG: I never did.

Student: Sure.

BM: Oh, great. 

AG: You know it?

BM: It's a...

AG: Who else? [to student] - Do you know music? Are you a musician?

Student: Fairport's, (its a song of Fairport's), that's what it is.



BM: Fairport Convention's (version is) probably the easiestly accessible (one) is in this country. The Watersons do a version of it on Topic Records which, if you know anybody in England, you can get.

Student: You can get some of these records through the Denver Folklore Center  and there's a couple of places in town. Have you heard the version that Ray Fisher does?

BM: That's really good too. It's a great, great tune and the only trouble being that it's longer than anything (Bob) Dylan ever wrote. It's real long, but it's.. [Bruce Martin starts singing] - "Oh I forbid you maidens all/ That wear gold all in your hair/ To come and go by Carterhaugh/ For Young Tam Lin is there, my love,/ Young Tam Lin is there/  There's none that goes by Carterhaugh/ But they leave him a wad..."

AG: "They leave him a wad..?"  

BM: "..Either their rings or their green mantles/ Or else their maidenheads, my love,/ Or else their maidenheads.."  Let's see, I had these (verses) checked off at one time..

AG: For special..

BM: For performance, yeah, of about twelve of them.

AG: Let me read just a little bit. I just want to see what the sound is [Allen starts reading]  - "She's let the seam drop to her foot,/ The needle to her toe/ She's gone away to Carterhaugh/ As fast as she can go" - [Allen continues] - "She had not pulled a red red rose,/ A rose but barely three/ When up there started young Tam Lin/ Said, "Let the roses be"./ "Why pull through the rose, Margaret/ And why breaks thou the wand?/ And why com'st thou to Carterhaugh/ Withouten my command?"/  Carterhaugh it is my own,/ My father gave it to me/ And I will be at Carterhaugh/ And ask no leave of thee"/ He catched her by the milk-white hand/ Among the leaves so green/  And what they did I cannot say/ The green leaves were in between./ Now since you had your will of me/ Come tell to me your name... - Okay, there's that jump, that jump-cut - "..(W)hat they did I cannot say/ The green leaves were in between./ Now since you had your will of me/ Come tell to me your name" - [Allen continues with the next six stanzas] - "May Margaret's kilted her green, green skirt/ A little above her knee" - I haven't (quite) got the rhythm there - "Out then spoke an old grey knight..." Nah, you'd have to sing it, I guess. [Allen continues with the next  five stanzas] - "Now hold your tongue yon ill-faced knight..".."The horse that my true love rides on/ is lighter than the wind/ With silver he is shod before/ With burning gold behind" -  
No wonder  she liked that. It's really good.I mean Helen (Adam) really likes that, because the lines are good. [Allen concludes his reading of "Tam Lin", reading the remaining 36 (sic) stanzas] - "Up then spoke her mother dear/ And ever alas said she...".."If I'd had but half the wit yestereen/ That I have bought today/ I'd have paid my tithe seven times to hell/ Ere you'd been won away." - Really good. (A) great dream.

Student: Expansive

AG: That's really (Helen Adam's) style. I can see where Helen Adam gets her violence.    

Helen Adam (1909-1993)

We've been featuring these past two weeks now, Allen in conversation with the balladeer, Helen Adam.  Here's rare footage of her performing one of her own ballads, the classic (and hilarious!)  "Cheerless Junkie's Song"  (from Ron Mann's 1982 movie, Poetry In Motion)  




and here's the audio from her June 1976 Naropa Institute reading with Robert Duncan. Allen, in his introduction, confesses and declares:

"Helen Adam's work was always a puzzle to me when I first got to San Francisco because she was writing straight classical rhymed ballads and I had come off my own father's rhymed lyric verse and found it antipathetic and was revolting against it, and so, I, taking over Robert (Duncan)'s course, (his) poetry workshop at the San Francisco State College in  1955, I beat Helen Adam over the head with my idea of what modern poetry should be, after William Carlos Williams' form.. But, fortunately, she resisted my malevolent influence, and continued writing ballads and songs, which she was trained to do by ear (and which she does exquisitely), so that, finally, many years later, I find myself writing rhymed ballads and songs, and looking to Helen Adam for encouragement and advice, and find her one of the most sympathetic ears for poetry (sympathetic listeners), and one of the most outrageously..self-right (sic) writers among my contemporaries and elders."

Duncan, in the course of the reading, re-introduces her:

"..I think I will present Helen Adam. If Allen portrayed us [he and Adam] as august stars of a sky we, after all, designed, and, while we might have been charitable and put someone else there as stars, unfortunately, we're entirely human, and so, when we built the sky, lo and behold, we did the same things (that) the gods did when they built the sky, we put ourselves in there, and then we tried to see to it that it didn't become something ghastly, like..the stars..the sky of our southern hemisphere, (where there are so many stars of the first order that nobody wants to memorize them all). Helen Adam, however, in my universe, is a star.. above the first order, must be a star of the magical zero order (if any of you know your tarot cards, (you) know that that is the generative egg that began the world, and it seems valid, of course)".

Approximately sixteen-and-three-quarter minutes in, Adam begins with a recitation of her poems "Dog Star Run" ("Where are you running to..?)  and "Song For A Sea Tower", followed by "a Scotch one" (sic), "Kiltory", (not of her invention). This is followed by "one with quite a lot of Scottish words in it, but I don't think it's too difficult, it's more or less broad Scots", "Counting Out Rhyme". She continues with, "a little reincarnation poem", "Coming Back Blues" ("a very nasty little poem that, really"), before reciting her poem, "Limbo Gate" ("This is a grim little poem that I have about the end of the world..I'm sure you all agree with me that the crack o' doom is very near (but it doesn't really matter, because we'll all (going to) be reincarnated in different forms!)). She concludes her first set with a few selections from her 1963 musical, "San Francisco's Burning" ("I used to sing it around the coffee houses, doing all the parts myself, and then it was produced, of course, with actors and things, who did it, but I always enjoyed doing it all, in a greedy way"). She performs "The Hanged Man" "The Kept Young Man", and two memorable characters, "Neil Narcissus" and "Loving Lily Babe". 
Following comments from Allen, she continues with a second set - "In and Out of the Hornbeam Maze" ("This is a poem that I've just written about a maze, and, in Scotland, there are still old mazes in sort of deserted gardens here and there, and some of them used to be called "Troy-town", because it was something to do with the falling of the walls of Troy, and usually on May-day, the village people would run round and round, inside the maze, and there was something to do with circling inside (a) maze that always seemed to me very mysterious"), "A Swordsman From France" ("I just found out quite recently that terrible King Henry VIII, when Queen Anne Boleyn was awaiting execution in the tower.. in those days the best swordsmen were supposed to come from France. And King Henry was too mean to send for a swordsman from France, and she had to sell the jewels he had given her to get one.."), "Bone Bright" ("I was reading about tantric Buddhists contemplating in the charnel field, and they visualize their own bodies as one suppurating sore, of which nothing remains but a skeleton, until finally, from that skeleton, the core and essence of man, a flame shoots out.."), "Pounding Bone Blues" ("This is skeletons again") and, finally ("(In) this last one, you have to imagine me as a sort of teenage hippy-boy, with a great mop of hair, you know, and a very beaten-up guitar"), "Cheerless Junkie's Song"        

The invaluable Naropa archives also has audio of two classes, three years later, in 1979.
In the first (July 1979), she "focus(es) on the appeal of narrative verse" - "Topics include the works of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with a list of the great narrative poems and discussions of aspects of witchcraft and the darkness of Scottish border ballads". It may be accessed here.   
The second (August 1979 - in two parts) - looks at the function of repetition and "poets as music makers and (the tradition of) the ballads" (and includes illustration from Percy Bysshe Shelley, W.H.Auden, Rudyard Kipling ("A Smuggler's Song"), as well as further examples from the English ballads, and a Q & A session) and may be accessed here and here.     

Another essential spot is Susan Howe's 1978 WBAI-Pacifica radio program (She performs her work and is heard in conversation with Susan Howe and Charles Ruas - here)  
(Charles Ruas, it was, incidentally, who had produced, the previous year, a radio presentation/revival of "San Francisco's Burning" - That may be listened to here).

The essential text (with much of the original work out-of-print) remains Kristin Prevallet's 2007  A Helen Adam Reader, published by the National Poetry Foundation at The University of Maine. Intelligent reviews of that book (by Richard Price (originally in the TLS) and Ange Mlinko (in The Nation)) may be read here and here.

Here's (from 1987, one of Bob Holman's WNYC-TV's "Poetry Spots") another Helen Adam video - "Deep In The Subway".

Nobody quite like Helen!

Spontaneous Poetics (Ballads) - Helen Adam 7

Student: Isn’t it [the jump cut in the ballad form] a model of the mind essentially, because the mind jumps like that?

AG: That’s the way the mind works, yeah. The reason that poetry’s like that is because it’s faithful to the actual operation of the mind. Mind goes like that. 

That’s why (William) Burroughs’ cut-ups, (which are jump cuts or juxtapositions)  are so appropriate to 20^th century Einstein-ian measurements of mind. That’s why haiku are so clear, because it jumps one image to another image, almost disconnected (although the mind makes up the connection, or sees the connection, or there’s a flash between the poles of different images). Since this [Naropa] is a Buddhist Academy, then the equivalent Buddhist terminology, or the equivalent American-ese Buddhist terminology used by Chogyam Trungpa, is “the gaps between thoughts”. The “gaps” in between thoughts, or in the meditation practice, you will notice (those of you who have taken meditation practice) – and, incidentally, how many here do know the local form of meditation practice? Raise your hand if you do, And how many do not? Well, another assignment for the class (because we’re studying the operation of the mind in relation to poetry), please, as homework, check in with Naropa register people, and have somebody sign (you) up to teach you how to sit and meditate, so you can observe your mind, and do it for five minutes, or ten minutes, or half an hour. At least learn the meditation form here, because it is related to what we’ll be talking about in poetics when we get to (Jack) Kerouac or my own work, or of (Charles) Olson or (William) Burroughs, or (Ezra Pound), or even (William Carlos) Williams, we’ll need to know self-phenomenology – the observation of mind. Or (Philip) Whalen – “My poetry is a graph of the mind moving”. So, in order to write poetry, please check out meditation. Do you know about that? I think it’s in the Student’s Handbook – instructions where to go if you gotta find out how to sit. Learn how to sit just as homework, whether you sit or not. Helen (Adam) did (just) the other day.

HA: Yes I did. It’s wonderful.

AG: Both students and teachers.

HA: It really was. I loved it.

AG: So, “the jump cut” would be, in Chogyam Trungpa’s terminology, “the gap”, what he speaks of as a gap between thoughts. There’s a tantric practice connected with it. The purpose of meditation is to widen the gap in between the thoughts, to observe thoughts, sort of like a movie, and see the rising of thought flowering and its vanishment, and then the little space in between before the next thought rises.

Student: Is the gap between thoughts that naturally rises in your mind the same as the gaps in the stories?

AG: Sure

Student: The minimal gaps that we need for understanding a story?

AG: I think the storyline that has gaps and jumps is basically modeled on actual narrative, person-to-person, and those narratives rise out of the nature of the tongue, talking, or the nature of the mind, remembering, and thinking, and going from point to point.

Student: One or the other?

AG: One or the other what?

Student: I don’t know that they’re the same. Are they?

AG: But which?

Student: The tongue and the mind.

AG: Tongue and mind are the same.

HA: Um-hmm?

AG: Tongue and mind are exactly the same.

HA: Nonsense! Tongue is just an instrument for mind to use

AG: Tongue and mind are the same.

HA: Allen!

AG: I got it from the horse’s mouth. From this point of view – that without – if we’ve got to get onto this footnote – without, at least in terms of narrative in story and poetry, in terms of that – you can’t have a thought unless it comes in words (if it’s a thought thought), you can’t have a narrative thought unless it is in words. You might have a few pictures and rhythms and sounds, but, as far as the mind, the question is, as far as the visualization of narrative story, I think that would all come in language, practically, and the jumps of thought in mind, because, I think it would be primarily verbal thought. Unless you were visualizing without any words – and I doubt it The only one on earth who does that is William Burroughs, which is why he’s William Burroughs, because he's the only person who thinks without words, or the only one I know of, who thinks aesthetically, you know, narratively, in pure picture.

HA: Um-hmm

AG: And that's his genius and champion-hood, I think. So some other people do.

Student: I think there is a difference between some kinds of jump cuts in stories and (jump cuts) in the blues, because, for example, if you listen to what actually happens...(and you're following) the action or dialogue, whereas in the ballads...

AG: No, no, no, no. Jump cuts. Don't rationalize them - and don't try to make them logical. It's a great poetic mistake to try and make yourself or anybody think that they have to be logical or have to be related, because the best is when they jump and they jump way out of the scene into totally other universes. And it happens in blues. And I know it happens in ballads. The moderately interesting ballads, or maybe the perfect ballads, have logical jump cuts, but it really gets great when, in the dread vast and middle of time, there's a complete switch, where there's a.. What's your thought on that, Helen?

HA:  Oh, I agree with you, Allen, absolutely.

AG; The wilder the cut, the madder the jump, the more aesthetically interesting and the more like the human mind it is.

Student: I'm not saying they're logical at all..

AG: Yeah

Student: ..just that they're (different), usually a certain kind of thing.

AG: What kind of thing? - Well, what I'm trying to say is that the kind of thing they are, are contradictions.

HA: Uh-huh

AG: From one scene to another, that completely contradicts it. Maybe from Earth to Heaven, or from a love story to the jackals eating the bones, or from "Merry Christmas" to the cockroach - like, really wild jumps are the best. What I'm trying to encourage (is) not a rational jump but a jump like where the subconscious..  or the (a) Surrealist jump, or, like, a really nasty jump, or "ruthless cut". That ruthlessness is what's so great in the poetry. In other words, what I'm trying to discourage is dependency on some kind of logic or even reasonableness. The more unreasonable the jump, the better. Just change poems in mid-stream!    

HA: Wonderful!

Student: The reason I can't equate my speech and my mind is that I have such difficulty saying what I mean

AG: Well, you couldn't mean anything if you can't say it in words. It doesn't mean anything. That's the whole point. .

Student: What about.. 

AG: So don't worry about it!

Student: What about meaning what I do? -  or meaning what I draw on paper? - or meaning of just the sound...

AG: Okay, this is what this class is about, basically. And I would say the basic practical motto that we've developed over the last two years here, working from the point of view of Buddhist mental phenomenology and poetic phenomenology, trying to examine mind from the point of view of poetics and from Buddhism, is "First thought, best thought" - first occurrence to mind of a conception arriving in language, the first form that it arrives...

Student: In language?

AG: ...the first language form that it arrives in (and, generally, you find that most thought does arrive in language, and the language is identical with the thought). Generally, you see, the problem is that one doesn't want to accept that thought. One thinks that thought is unworthy, or embarrassing, or wrong, or it could be bettered, or it could be refined, or it could be made to look better from the outside.. 

HA: But Allen..

[Tape ends here - Original transcriber (Randy Roark)'s note - "Although there is obviously (a little) more to this class. No further tape or tapes have been uncovered)

Spontaneous Poetics (Ballads) - Helen Adam 6

Allen Ginsberg's 1976 Spontaneous Poetics class at NAROPA Institute on ballads (with guest-lecturer Helen Adam) continues

Student: Are the old ballads conforming to the old speech?

AG: “Why does your brand sae drap wi’ bluid, Edward, Edward?” . Sure. Just like Kerouac conformed to Okie speech, the old ballads confirmed to their speech. Probably a certain amount of inversion, but, I think, when you hear them pronounced vigorously, they sound about right for talk. In other words, if you keep your ear into talk, too, when you’re rhyming, you get something interesting.

Student; Wasn’t there sometimes, though, more choices on how a word could be pronounced?

HA: Yes, yes

AG: You could do it.

Student: (“Why doth yon brand so droppe wi’ bloode?")

AG: Sure

HA: Well, there really are quite a lot of different ways to pronounce them. I just myself do the one that seems bes t to me, but it probably isn’t  always correct. They really should be sung by, or spoken by, someone that can speak broad Scotch well.

Student: Well, I mean in the time (that) they were written

HA: Oh, in the time they were written

Student (I’m talking more about the) pronunciation

HA: Oh, I see. Well, it may have varied by.. you know, usually, speech does change, or the words, the meaning of the words, sometimes meant.. like (Robert) Duncan was talking about (the word), “silly” yesterday, you know, and all the different meanings for “silly”. “Silly” is not really at all what it means now. I hadn’t really thought of that. It’s interesting, but I don’t actually…

AG: There was a change from shire to shire, just like it does now

HA: Yes, it probably did

AG: Spelling changed, spelling, or orthography, they call it. Spelling was variable, I think.. 

AG: Did we do "Sir Patrick Spens"?

HA: No, How long have we?

AG: I’ve got five after, so we (still) have half an hour.

HA: Oh great. Yeah.

AG: What are the great classics that they (the students) wouldn’t have heard of?, is what I’ve been thinking of.

HA: They’re not in these books.

AG: “Sir Patrick Spens” is obviously.

HA: The ones I like best are “May Colvin” and  "Young Tam Lin"..

AG: Okay.. what are your… can you give us an assignment?

HA: .. (and) “Thomas the Rhymer”

AG: Okay.

HA:  “May Colvin”

AG: How do you spell that?

HA: C-O’L-V-I-N

AG: And Tamblin?

HA: Tam Lin – T-A-M L-I-N – “Young Tam Lin”

AG: Yeah.

HA: They’re all very long ballads actually, but they’ve got gorgeous things in them, especially “Young Tam Lin:, which is a pure fairy-tale thing, and “May Colvin” again says so much in so little – and it’s completely ruthless. You know, he’s…

AG: Ruthless?

HA: Yeah

AG: That was the word you used – “ruthless”?... Ruthless.?. The.. what do you call those things again, the jumps?

Student: “The jump cut”

AG: “Ruthless jump cuts”

HA: Uh-huh – I’d never heard “jump cuts” before. It’s lovely, I must say.

AG: Ruthless jump cuts. So the whole point is to write a ballad in your own language with ruthless jump cuts.

HA: Yes, that would be (will be) so exciting to hear them!

AG: Yeah.

HA: Will they have written ballads by next week, or something?

AG: By tonight.

HA: Oh.

AG: I’ll have mine ready tonight. With ruthless jump cuts!

HA: Ah, it’s marvelous

Student: Jump cuts? What exactly..? Can you give an example of jump cuts?

AG: Juxtapositions. The jump cut example I gave when I was singing was “Merry Christmas, don’t hang yourself with a rope/ Happy New Year, don’t take too much hard dope/ Manhattan reborn after we all gave up hope/ Radiator cockroach waving your horn at the wall/ What’ll I eat when I don’t eat meat at all/ Go tell the bedbug he better stay out in the hall” – It’s just a total cut from the Christmas thing to something that happens in New York, or right in the middle of New York- “radiator cockroach waving your hands at the wall”

HA: Um-hmm. Happens all the time in New York.  

AG: While I was writing the song, when I got to “after we gave up all hope” and I was thinking..actually, it’s connected - the whole city is like a mess, cockroaches and bed-bugs in every direction…and, (then), suddenly I saw a cockroach on the radiator next to my desk, waving his..

HA: Waving his..?

AG: ..antannae at the wall…

HA: Ah-hah

AG: So I immediately jumped to that. The camera eye goes from the idea of  “Merry Christmas”  immediately to the factual detail of what’s going on in New York, because the last line is “After we gave up all hope” – so there’s actually a real, logical connection, because it’s even better than logical because when it is going from the generalization about “Merry Christmas” and all that, suddenly (it’s) right focused on a specific cockroach..

HA: Waving its horns.

AG: …December 23, 1971, in my room, in New York, next to my desk. So it’s actually an exemplification of what was all hope given up about.

HA: Well, a cockroach did something worse to me, once. We had guests for dinner..

AG: A cockroach was inspiration, my muse.

HA: ..and one of the girls had put down her wine glass, and there was this cockroach poised on the edge of the wine glass, taking little slips, you know.

AG: And that happened to a guest in your house, how awful

Student: Can you give an example of a jump cut in the ballad?

AG:  Do we have one here? Well, let’s see..(from) the ones that we did already.. 

HA: There are lots of them

AG: Yeah, okay, a funny kind of jump cut in “Lord Randal” was.. they’ve got the stanza – “O I fear you are poisoned, Lord Randal, my son!/ I fear you are poisoned, my handsome young man!/ O yes, I am poisoned, mother, mak my bed soon,/ For I’m sick at the heart, and fain wad lie down”. And you’d think she was going to ask, “Well, what happened?” or “Who did this?” (but instead she says) “ What d’ye leave to your mother, Lord Randal, my son?”. That’s like a big gap.

HA: What’s he thinking…?

AG: .. while listening to your mother.

Student: I’ve seen versions where she does ask him what happened, and he talks about his love poisoning him.

HA: In a different version, you know, sometimes…

AG:  There’s a big..  In “Mary Hamilton” that I read the other day, there are a lot of jumps.  And “Sir Patrick Spens” is actually like a movie, speeded up or with fast still shots. Why don’t we do “Sir Patrick Spens because I think there are jump-cuts in that..

HA: Uh-huh



AG: ..and I’ll raise my hand every time I hear a jump cut,

[Helen Adam reads/sings/recites the first seven stanzas of “Sir Patrick Spens” – “The King sits in Dumferline town/Drinking the blude-red wine/ "O whare will I get a skeely skipper/ To sail this new ship o' mine...” -  and then stops – oh, they’ve left out a very good verse here, I must say – “To Noroway, to Noroway/ To Noroway o’er the foam/ The king’s daughter on Noroway/ To we men bring her home” – then continues with the remaining four stanzas]

AG: That was the most ruthless jump cut of all, right at the very end. It’s just like movie cinema, the cinematic quality there. A jump cut is really very good, because there is a cinematic quality from…in jumping from the King’s writing a letter, the next thing Sir Patrick Spens is on the sands reading the letter, the next thing he laughs at the first line and then all of a sudden he realizes that it means his death, and the next line is a tear, the next line he’s gathering his sailors and he’s complaining – “Who dare,who put me up, who did this to me?”  The next thing, after first complaining, “Who put me up to sailing on the sea this time of year?’, the very next stanza he’s already ordering the sailors on the boat. That’s a real jump. He’s standing on the strand, reading the letter, realizing it’s his doom, and you’d think logically he’d refuse, and then the real poignant thing is “Mak ready, mak ready, my merry men a'”. He’s obeying. He’s doing it. And then the big jump of the maid talking about the evil, the ill moon prophecy, the next stanza, the noble Scots were not eager to wet their shoes. The next thing their hats are swimming on the ocean (within the same stanza). And then the next stanza, the ladies are sitting with their fans and the author is saying, “They’re going to sit there forever before those guys come back”. And the next stanza is “fifty fathoms deep”. So there’s jump, jump, jump – very fast, very swift (which is like my blues thing – “Manhattan, after we gave up hope” – and then a waving cockroach – totally (some place) else).