'Nanda Pivano Note

                                 [Fernanda Pivano and Allen Ginsberg] 

Following a little detour on Shakespeare and Gregory Corso, Allen has a brief reminder for his 1980 Naropa "Rotating Shakespeare" class 

AG: And I was to remind you that 'Nanda Pivano will be teaching the Visiting Poetics class tomorrow, I think, a survey of  the impact of American Literature on Europe, (particularly Italy as an anti-authoritarian culture import or something like that. 

I don’t know what she’ll cover precisely but (there) will likely (be) recollections of Alice Toklas and (Ernest) Hemingway and Ezra Pound and. (to Fernanda Pivano). who else? - or what do you think you will be covering?

NP:  I don't know. I'll try to tell about how the Fascists were forbidding American Literature, how the Italian people tried to have a multi-cultural society..

AG: Yes. It’s interesting to me because (of) suspicions latent in Beat literature that it was supposed to be set up in advance as a bulwark against American Fascism, (which was my conscious effort, back in the (19)50s and  (19)60s - to leave behind some sort of literary time-bomb that would explode when people started closing down with police state, censorship, and all that, some time-bomb that was already placed in all the schoolbooks so that it would be there permanently, and, at least, stand as some sort of mental wall against American police state constriction.) 

She (Nanda) does have the actual experience of being in a fascist state and seeing the impact of a kind of funny free-thought of Hemingway, and other American writers, on the intellectual rigidity of the Fascists and then the social rigidity. And she’s had to live through that, so she actually has a history of, in a sense, what’s going to come to us,that might be useful to know, maybe.

"..Than other princes can.."  [Editorial note - Prospero to Miranda - "Here in this island we arrived; and here/Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit/Than other princes can, that have more time/For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful."]  

 Yes.. what time are you doing it? what time is that?

NP: They told me six o’clock.

AG: Yes. Okay.

Student: Where does it take place?

AG: Here, It’s the Visiting Poetics, I think.What room was that?

NP: 104. They told me 104.

AG: Yes, it’s the usual..  it’ll be the last meeting of the "Visiting Poetics".

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirteen-and-a-half minutes in, and continuing to approximately sixteen minutes in]

                                                [Allen Ginsberg and Fernando Pivano, 1961] 

A Gregory Corso Weekend

                            [Gregory Corso, Boulder, Colarado, July 1994 - Photograph by Seth Brigham]

[Gregory Corso - Self Portrait (undated)]

A Gregory Corso weekend.. It's Gregory's birthday. He would have been eighty-six today. 

We've featured Gregory many many times on the Allen Ginsberg, starting way back in 2010 with this birthday announcement. 
Gregory Corso Happy Birthday of Death (sic) can be found here
Corso 2013 Birthday celebration - here
Corso 2014 Birthday celebration - here
Corso 2015 Birthday celebration - here
Not Forgetting Gregory Corso - here

Two vintage  Naropa readings - one (with William Burroughs)  - from 1975, and one (solo), from 1981 (a reading from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit - that reading continues here) 

Original Beats, Francois Bernardi's film of Gregory and Herbert Huncke can be seen here  (additional footage from that movie - here) 

Here's more footage of Gregory



Here's Gregory reading The Bill of Rights on an East Village rooftop!
 
Die on Me is the extraordinary set of recordings put out in 2002 on Paris Records. A complimentary record, Lieders (with Marianne Faithfull) was also put out by Paris Records

Listen to to "Ah Roma!" (with Francis Kuipers)
(More Gregory-in-Rome here and here) 

Gregory heckling Allen? - It wouldn't be a proper Gregory memory if there weren't record of Gregory misbehaving. There's his famous 1973 interruption of Allen's uptown Y reading 

That same year, he wasn' t any less restrained at the Salem State Kerouac conference.

Gregory's more measured words on Kerouac (from 1986's What Happened to Jack Kerouac?) here:



Allen and Gregory bickering over Shakespeare - here,
confessing he's in error - here 
and sparring with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, way back in 1975,  in a hilarious series of posts (eight of them in all) starting here - ("He wants to be like me - famous! - and Allen. He wants to get into the poetry racket, that's what he wants to do") 

That year (1975), indeed for many years, Gregory gave classes at Naropa. The Allen Ginsberg Project has featured several extensive transcriptions. The 1975 classes (serialized in seven parts) begin here (after "Two Shots From Gregory Corso"). This is followed by a four-part serializaton, (posted February 2012),  "More Corso At Naropa"  

Gregory interviewer and interviewee - 1961 -  the Journal For The Protection of All Beings interview - Gregory and Allen interview William Burroughs
From 1959, Gregory and Allen and Peter Orlovsky are interviewed by Studs Terkel
(plus a later radio interview with Allen and Gregory) 

Speaking of interviews, there's now this essential volume:

Gregory, the "great list poet". Allen evokes some of Gregory's longer works here
(and offers a shorter note - here)

in 1978 (in a four-part sequence) he joins Allen with a line-by-line reading (almost) of Whitman's revealing and foolishly neglected poem, "Respondez!"  

and there's more….

Happy Birthday, Gregory Nunzio Corso!

more tomorrow!

   [Gregory Corso,  September, 1959, in Athens, Greece, at the Acropolis - (for more from that particular occasion - see here] 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 245

 [Allen Ginsberg's desk in his bedroom in New York, 437 East 12th Street , 1986 - Photograph by Dave Breithaupt]

Michael Schumacher's  The Essential Ginsberg has not been getting the attention we had hoped for, so we were pleased to find this notice in Ralph magazine this week. 
That word "essential" isn't used lightly. Buy this book!

And here's a "sneak preview" (from Harpers)  from the next Ginsberg book - "1/29/84" , one of the poems in Wait Till I'm Dead, a volume of uncollected poems that will be published by Grove-Atlantic this coming February.



Meanwhile, out next week (pub. date November 25), this little collection, from Il Saggiatore - Diario Indiano 1963 - sections from the Indian Journals (the Jan 28, 1963 section) - translated by Leopoldo Carra and Monica Martignoni, with an introduction by Leopoldo Carra 
  

Who's that dark Neanderthal ominous figure staring out from the back jacket?
 - Jon Gray/Gray 318's cover-drawing

 Anne Waldman, speaking in New York last night. Read an interview with her - here 

                                                      [Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg]

John Giorno, earlier this week in Paris - see here  (and more about his show at the Palais de Tokyo - here)

John Pitcher's review in the Nashville Scene of Nashville Opera's recent staging of the Ginsberg-Glass opera, Hydrogen Jukebox - "thought-provoking".."skillfully staged", "terrifically sung".  You can read more about that here 

& the Eastman Opera Theatre in Rochester, New York, also recently mounted a production.  More information about that presentation here.  

Charleville, birthplace of Rimbaud - the town now boasts a brand new Rimbaud museum.
For notes on Allen's 1982 visit to Charleville in the company of Simon Vinkenoog - see here

                                                      [Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) 

                                                            [Fork and Spoon belonging to Arthur Rimbaud - Photo by Patti Smith]

The Thai Allen Ginsberg? - Zakariya Amataya - "the Thai Allen Ginsberg"

David Amram's 85th birthday. Happy Birthday David! - Details of birthday celebrations (including a  free NYC birthday concert) here

We're not sure about the soundtrack (Steppenwolf? The Pusher?) but Francesco Carlo Crespolti's illuminating Allen-in-Italy photos have been animated here (continuing attention to that beard hair!)
                          



More Crispolti on Ginsberg images, from 1968 -  here and here 

                                                              [Allen Ginsberg - Photograph by Francesco Carlo Crispolti] 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 230

Yesterday was Diane Di Prima's 81st birthday.

Here's the extraodinary class she gave last May (with Professor Steven Goodman) at the California Institute of Integral Studies - in two parts, here and here 





Earlier Diane Di Prima birthday shout-outs on the Allen Ginsberg Project here, here, and here


Here's a two-part story on another prominent Italian-American - Lawrence Ferlinghetti - here and here

and  an excerpt from his forthcoming book - Writing Across The Landscape
(a further excerpt may be found - here)

& keeping the Italian theme, Gregory Corso's Gasoline appears in a new edition in Italian

Here's Fred Misurella and George de Stafano considering Gregory's Italian-ness and reviewing The Whole Shot

Here's Gregory on Italian tv (appearing approximately half-way through - he's interviewed (he speaks in English), and reads ("The Whole Mess..Almost"), appearing in a sympathetic forum, ("Blitz" - un programma innovativo"), alongside the great and much-lamented Fabrizio de Andre)  

Another wonderful piece of vintage footage on You Tube -  William S Burroughs and Alex Trocchi, in London in the early 'Sixties, in a seemingly well-attended Project Sigma gathering - "I'd like to make a rather unpopular statement here..." 
Burroughs suggests a true "underground" figure should consider dressing like him, straight, invisible, inconspicuous - Trocchi's not buying it.
  



Jonah Raskin's review of the Philip Whalen biography, Crowded By Beauty, appeared this week in the San Francisco Chronicle

Beat fetishists - check out these items  

                      [Jack Kerouac inscription to Joyce Johnnson's presentation copy of On The Road]

and - (Beat exploitation corner) - oh, dear, oh dear !


Not to be perceived as a thanato-blog - but it (inevitably)  keeps happening - the "best minds" - (Lee Harwood last week) - keep fading away. Ken Irby's passing to report on this week (he actually died eight days ago, but we omitted mention last week). 

         [Ken Irby (1936-2014) - Photograph by Robert Amory from the 2005 exhibit, The Light of Others] 

The magisterial Collected Poems - The Intent On was expertly and lovingly compiled by Kyle Waugh and Cyrus Console for North Atlantic Books in 2010. Kyle was also instrumental in the gathering (along with William J Harris) in 2014 of a special feature for Jacket .

Invaluable are his readings on Pennsound (Lee Harwood is featured there too) 

and Irby poems and commentary - here and here.   A chronology - here,   
- recent memories from Steve Dickison Tom Raworth, Pierre Joris & others

Expansive Poetics - 30 (The Spirit of Romance)

AG:  To make a long story short, (Ezra) Pound went to Venice, (and) studied some classical languages and Renaissance, and Provencal poetries, specializing in two areas - one, where the language moved, from Latin to a provincial language, that is to say, where writers made the transition from writing in classical Latin to writing in French Provencal, or troubadour language, or.. what other languages?..in Italy, that was...

Student: It's Provencal in the south of France, and koine for northern Spain and Italy.

AG: What was it called?

Student: koine

AG: [phonetically] ko-ee-nay

Student: K-O-I-N-E  It's a common language..

AG Northern Spain?

Student: But the lower... and, uh.. the whole south of France.. and then the Italian poets learned it and wrote in that language rather than Italian.

AG: Who was the first to.. what did Petrarch write in ?

Student: He wrote in Italian.

AG: Was he the first to shift?

Student; No, he was the last of the troubadours.

AG: Uh-huh.. So who was the first of the...

Student: William of Aquitaine. He died in 1127.



[William IX Duke of Aquitaine (1071-1126) - from a 13th Century miniature in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris]

AG: Um-hmm.  And then Dante sort of climaxed all of that by making formal Tuscan language?

Student: Well the.. first Italian poetry was composed at the court of the Emperor Frederick II who died in 1250. So those first decades there..

AG: Yeah

Student:   ....saw the origin of Italian poetry...

AG: Yeah

Student: ...but most of the terminology was adapted from Provencal to Italian.

AG: Um-hmm - So (Ezra) Pound's special study was Provencal, and he translated many of the troubadours, minstrels, and German minnesingers, His interest was that cultural change where people wrote in idiomatic languages rather than in the official language, in Latin. He was also interested in going back and researching the measures of ancient Greece and Rome, (because we got our nomenclature and our structure of prosody from the old Greek. As I said, the Greek prosody specialized in quantity or the length of the vowel rather than stress).  



[ 14th Century Troubadours - Anon via Archiv fur Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin]

He also went to study Chinese a little bit, because Chinese had a picture-language, which was visually clear, like Imagism, so you couldn't get away with bullshit - writing big poems about truth and beauty without defining them. Whereas in Chinese those words had a pictorial, functional definition - a process rather than an abstraction.  

Marianne Moore decided that what she would do would be to count the number of syllables in each line, arbitrarily - make a stanza-form that would have five syllables, and then the next line ten syllables, and the next line two, and the next line twelve, say. It was a little bit like a butterfly's wing, sort of arbitrary-looking. Then she would repeat the same syllable count and stanza form from stanza to stanza. With her, it was taking the mechanical count of the syllables and then having the rhythm of the speech run counter to that, so you get a little syncopation that way. And I worked a little bit with that in an early book, Empty Mirror, and that syllable-count is one thing that everybody should practice, because to get an ear for syllables is very good. And also many of the classical lines are syllable, hendecasyllable...

(tape stops here)

(to be continued..)


[Audio for the above may be heard here starting at approximately forty-two-and-three-quarter minutes, and concluding at approximately forty-six and a half minutes]

Friday Weekly Round-Up - 109

Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg. The long-awaited Kill Your Darlings opens at the Sundance Film Festival today. More on that in the days ahead. And more too on the adaptation of Kerouac's Big Sur (also opening in the coming weeks at Sundance).



Still with the movies, Chris Felver's documentary, Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder, debuts in select US theaters, February 8th, featuring Ferlinghetti, Allen,
Michael McClure, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, and a host of others. Here's the trailer.


  
(The trailer for Felver's earlier Ferlinghetti film, incidentally, can be seen here.)

And, talking of trailers, (or "teasers", in this particular case), Francesco Tabarelli's on-going work on the Beats in Italy (I figli dello stupore - La beat generation italiana) continues to work towards completion. A taste of that film (featuring Gianni Milano, Marcello Baraghini, Matteo Guamaccia, John Sinclair and John Giorno) may be had here:




Two big Ginsberg events this past week in NYC - the opening of the (revised and travelling) Ginsberg photo show at NYU  - Flavorwire presents 25 of the 94 iconic images here

and last Wednesday-night, the launch of Ginsberg Recordings latest - a limited edition of vinyl First Blues. Regretfully, Lou Reed and Steven Taylor had to cancel, but there was plenty of others on hand to celebrate the bard, amomg them -  David Amram, Anne Waldman, Hettie Jones and Arthur's Landing

Michael McClure's poem "Memphisto 20" is published this week in The New Yorker. Rebecca Foresman interviews him "about the striking interplay between Thoreauvian transcendentalism and Old Testament fatalism" in the poem.

Steve Heilig's piece Beat Poets, Acid Gurus, the Governor and Me (on Ginsberg and Snyder and also Timothy Leary and Jerry Brown) is also well worth reading.

For Homer - (Gregory Corso)

Twelve years to the day since Gregory Corso passed away. We celebrate his autochthnic spirit! 

This footage (above) of Corso, reciting his poem "For Homer", with music by Nicholas Tremulis and featuring footage of Corso, Tremulis, and poet, Ira Cohen, dates from 1993.

and here's a photo of  Gregory's grave-site in Rome (buried close to his beloved Shelley)

Friday Weekly Round-Up - 101

Mexican heart-throb actor, producer, director Diego Luna brings, once again, his acclaimed rendition of Allen's "Howl" to the stage, tomorrow night (Saturday the 24th) (along with musical accompaniment by Jaime Lopez) as part of the 2012 Festival Internacional de Teatro Puebla Héctor Azar (Héctor Azar International Theater Festival, in Puebla, Mexico).  Here's an audio taste of it.

Tomorrow, in Hackney, London, at the Apiary Studios, is the UK launch of "the first ever bespoke Brion Gysin Dreamachine". The night will include talk, films, music, and.. dreamachines! - Featured performers include Terry Wilson, Stewart Home, Ian MacFadyen, and others..  

Two brief obituary notices (that you may have missed)
 -  maverick American poet Jack Gilbert

from Rita Signorelli Papas review/recognition in World Literature Today

“Although he once hung out in San Francisco with Allen Ginsberg (he is said to have helped Ginsberg write “Howl”) and has won some of the higher poetic accolades in the American poetry world, he essentially shuns fame and publicity, is affiliated with no university, and has spent much of his life living in seclusion here [in the U.S] or abroad. This relative isolation has been instrumental in shaping a poetic style of uncommon lucidity, a voice that speaks directly and with philosophical force.”

and Patrick Creagh, another maverick, Allen’s sometime translator. It was he who invited him to the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto in 1967, and he who’s (Italian) translation of “Who Be Kind To” (for Harry Fainlight) “was so faithful to the spirit of the original that Ginsberg was questioned by police for three hours, then arrested for obscenity”.  

Nanao Sakaki - How To Live On The Planet Earth

So we're delighted to announce the publication of Nanao Sakaki's Collected Poems from Gary Lawless and Beth Leonard's estimable Blackberry Books ((Blackberry Books, 617 East Neck, Nobleboro, Maine 04555. USA) - How To Live On The Planet Earth. An essential book.

See our last year's posting on Nanao here.

See these links and memorial notices on Crooked Cucumber
(including this).

Here's a brief glimpse of footage of Nanao and Allen

- and here's Nanao in Venice in 2001 (including Italian translation - and
song!)

Castelporziano

Castelporzia

Andrea Andermann's film, "Castelporziano Ostia dei poeti") (1981) immortalizes the chaos and extraordinary happening/event that was the Primo Festivale Internazionale dei Poeti, in 1979, the International Poetry Festival, at Castelporzia.

Eleanor Mannikka writes:

"This documentary was shot at a three-day celebration of poetry (a "Poets' Festival") at the beach of Castelporziano near Rome in the summer of 1979. Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed on this beach a few years earlier and his murder is commented on by Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the beginning of the documentary. On the first day of the event, the camera focuses on both poets and audience, and reveals a striking reality: the audience is not only indifferent, it is increasingly antagonistic, and when one of the least-liked of the minor poets is booed off the stage, he flashes the audience in response. As the day wears on, objects go flying through the air, catcalls abound, and the self-styled poets seem to be taking their life in their hands when they get up in front of the microphone. Back at the hotel where they are staying, Allen Ginsberg, Le Roi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Yevtushenko and others discuss whether or not to go on with the planned third day. Meanwhile, as the camera pans across nearby beaches and out into the harbor, there is obviously no one around who realizes that this international event is taking place right next to them. Have the poets lost their touch in communicating with the world at large -- or has the world become a place that is inhospitable to poets of any range of ability? The documentary raises these issues and lets the viewers formulate their own, individual opinions."

For those too impatient to watch Andermann's portrait in its entirety (and watch the festival mayhem in its context and unfurling), there's a key moment (about 49 minutes in) when Allen is seen chanting ("OM"), trying to tamper down somewhat the already out-of-control energies of the huge crowd

- and then, (at approximately 63 minutes in) - footage of him declaring, "We will begin the poetry-reading tonight" (this would be the third and final night). "There are 22 poets from all countries (here) to read. Each poet (including myself, Allen Ginsberg) will read for 7 minutes" - The film then goes on to show glimpses of Yevtushenko ("poet-orator of modern Russia'', as Allen describes him), Peter Orlovsky (reading "America, Give A Shit"), Ted Joans, Brion Gysin, Miguel Algarin, Amiri Baraka.. Allen is the last of the American poets shown, performing "Father Death Blues" (further attempts to quiet things).

"Lunatics, Lovers and Poets" was this film's (alternative) European title.