Rarities From the Naropa Archive 2 - (Ginsberg, Cage & MacLow)

Continuing with yesterday's "treasures" from the Naropa Archives, here's another one, another singularly early one, dating from August 1975 - "Visiting Poetics Academy Convention" (consisting of three separate components - a radio-interiew with Allen Ginsberg, a radio-interview with John Cage, and a talk by (with several instances of 
the participatory practice of) Cage-ian protege, Jackson Mac Low

[Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, and Jackson Mac Low]

Visiting Poetics Academy may be listened to in its entirety here  

The first part, a 1975 radio interview by Rick Fields ("Open Secret") - Allen discusses the relationship between Buddhist meditation  and American poetics and reads several poems by William Carlos Williams - has already been featured on the Allen Ginsberg Project. It can be accessed here.

The Cage Interview dates from the previous year (August, 1974) and was conducted prior to his appearance in Boulder, Colorado for the premier of Part IV of his Thoreau piece, Empty Words 
A transcription of that interview follows: 
(it starts approximately nine-and-a-half minutes into the tape and runs through to about eighteen-and-three-quarter minutes in)

Interviewer: We’re talking and I’ll say this morning, because it will be by the time this is broadcast, with John Cage, who stepped off a plane and a recording studio very kindly after spending about nine hours getting to Denver and I want to thank you for that first of all. Welcome to Colorado.

JC: I’m glad to be here Steve [sic].

Interviewer: And also Alden Jenks who’s going to be helping out with, as I understand it the technical aspects of the concert tomorrow. Is that correct?

AJ: Right 

Interviewer: Ok - And that concert, which we should get to first, is called Empty Words.

JC:  You know that with sound.. Although people objected at the beginning, after a while they didn’t object to each sound being audible by itself, and not making sentences out of sound.  So that we can now hear a piece of music and it doesn’t have to be recognizeable as “like Bach”, or “like Mozart”, or “like Beethoven”, but can be something that we hear like,  actually I think the sounds we hear when we’re not in a music concert, like the sounds around us, wherever we happen to be.

Well, when people saw that that was what I was doing with sound, they said “Yes, you can do it with sound but you can’t do it with words...tidily!".  (But) I’m doing it, in words, and the way I did it, I didn’t do it quickly. I… it has taken, taken some time. But I was asked (I forget just when it was, but it must have been (19)68 or (19)69) to write a column for that magazine in Minneapolis called Synthesis, and then there was concern with electronic music. And a few years before I had been introduced to The Journal of Henry David Thoreau,  by a poet in Kentucky, and I took to the Journal of..Thoreau just like a duck to water (or as I myself took to the country, when I moved to it, in (19)54, from the city). Reading Thoreau, I noticed that he looked the way modern painters look and he listened the way modern composers listen, or electronic composers, listen..

Interviewer: How’s that?

JC: To everything! – and not.. You don’t just listen to things that are major and minor but you listen…
Interviewer: Period.
JC: Every single sound is interesting

Interviewer: And now how are you incorporating that in what’s happening tomorrow?

JC: Oh, I, I.. it’s a long story..

Interviewer: Ok, I won’t rush it 

JC: The column about electronic music, then, was, simply, taking all the remarks that Thoreau made about sound or silence (or music) that are indexed in the Dover publication of the Journal (which is over a million words), (I then) subjected them to chance operations and divided  language into its several parts that I was able to discern. We can say that language has sentences, that it has phrase  (we won’t agree, of course, about what a phrase is, but I would say a phrase is a part of a sentence, it doesn’t give a complete idea). Then we have, after phrases, we have words, after words we have syllables, and after syllables we have letters. So when you have those five different things and you make the permutations of their being separate or combined, in pairs, or in triplets, or in quartets, or all five together, you have, I think it's something like twenty-seven possible things to do with language

Then, as you know, I work with chance operations, and I use the I-Ching. So when I know I have twenty-seven things to do, I ask the I Ching which one of the twenty-seven am I doing? – because, you’re doing the twenty-fifth one, and then I know exactly what I’m doing, and I say how long do I do it? and (it'd) say for sixty-five events  - (it wouldn’t say sixty-five because it works with the number sixty-four, so it would say thirty-seven, maybe, or something like that, unless I doubled the sixty-four and then it could say anything up to a-hundred-and-twenty-eight.

Interviewer: Uh huh

JC: But, once I knew what I was doing and how many times I was doing it, then I started, I first started "Mureau" ("Mureau" means music from Thoreau - you see it's a word combining those two).  And after I finished that, it had four parts, and so did this text called Empty Words. Well, "Mureau" is published in my last book, and Empty Words was begun after that book was published. That book is called M. And the Empty Words begins because I.. and the way I thought of the title was, I let it be known to my friends (and even strangers as I wandered around the country) that what was interesting me was..making English less understandable. 
Because, when it’s understandable..well..people control one another and poetry disappears. And, as I was talking with my friend Norman O Brown, and he said syntax (which is what makes things understandable) is the army, is the arrangement of the army. So what we’re doing when we’re making language un-understandable is, actually, we’re de-militarizing it, so that we can do our living.

Interviewer: You're going back to sounds, you're not getting sounds confused with meanings.

JC: It’s a transition from music to language, certainly. And its bewildering at first, but it is extremely pleasurable as time goes on. And that’s what I’m up to. Empty Words begins by omitting sentences. It has only phrases, words, syllables and letters The second part omits the phrases, it has only words, syllables and letters. The third part omits the words (has only syllables and letters), and the last part, which is what I will read tomorrow evening, has only the letters and silences.  And going with it will be the projection of  (some drawings of) Thoreau. I think that he was a great artist, I mean graphic artist, and I don’t know of anyone else that’s saying or thinking that. Of course, by now, since this is not the first time that I’ve shown his drawings  (I’ve done in the South and in..and so forth, and now people are beginnng to see that he was a great graphic artist also).

Interviewer: Is the performance tomorrow going to be.. are you attempting to reproduce something ..or is this going to be a kind of recreation ..

JC: It will be the first reading of this last part

Interviewer: It will be?

JC: Yes.. of Empty Words..There will be quite long silences from time to time..and in that.. then will be of course that “Silence” piece that I wrote (what is it? twenty-two years ago?)

Interviewer: But that was for piano?

JC: No, it’s for any…any instrument ..and any number of musicians.

Interviewer: Okay! so the whole audience can play!

JC: They can all start playing!

Interviewer: Let me say first, before we go on, where this is going to be - at the Naropa Center, this evening (sic), it’s Thursday evening at eight o’clock, and the center is at 1645  Broadway, tickets two-fifty, and they will be.. you can purchase those at the door.

JC: Generally when I perform some people want to leave immediately, after.. when they see what they’re up against, so those people who don’t have two dollars should wait outside and..the ones going out, they should get their tickets..

Interviewer: Fair enough.   Do you find  you have time, as much time, to compose or do you feel that you are composing each time you give one of these performances, you are..

JC: No, I don’t perform very much anymore.

Interviewer: You don’t?

JC: I prefer to stay at home and do my work (which you’ve already surmised) , I reduce the number of times that I leave/

Interviewer: Are you doing any formal teaching?

JC: No, I’m very fortunate not to have to do that, I mean, to make a living, I.. my music is all published and I have a number of books, and I have ..with just a few engagements, and my royalties, I’m able to live in a modest fashion.


[Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951)]

Interviewer:  (Arnold) Schönberg once said something to the effect that his music wasn’t difficult to understand, it was only badly performed. Do you...
JC: Schönberg's music is getting to be very beautifully performed.
Interviewer: How about yourself? how about that in the things that you’ve done?

JC: Well, I think of myself as one thing and my music is something else, and now and then I think about it, how it’s getting alomg, it seems to me it’s getting along fairly well. There was a.., among the New York critics, the general idea that, when I die, my music will die with me, and that nobody will pay any more attention to it. And I don’t think that that’s quite the case, because I, after all, here I am, what am I? Sixty-two? Sixty-ne or two? or something like that, and I’ve spent forty years with my music and I haven’t been bored at all!  I don’t see how it could suddenly be boring to everybody else.

Interviewer: Who are the people, I wonder, the people that are performing now. Are there any centers, are there any places, in the 'States especially, where your music is being performed most frequently. or is general throughout the country?

JC: Well, there’s.. I was telling Alvin Jenks.. there’s a very active and  energetic and good, very good, conductor, Dennis Russell Davies, who has a chamber orchestra in the Twin Cities , St Paul and Minneapolis, and he conducts the ensemble in New York City, and he tours with this St Paul Group to Europe and what-not, and he’s also the head of the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz (I'll see him shortly) and each… his concerts.. and the activity of this group.. it’s very active (what they do is, each year, they devote themselves to one dead composer and one live composer, and last year it was (Igor) Stravinsky and some dead one, ((George Frideric) Handel perhaps?), and this next year, it’s (Franz Joseph) Haydn and yours truly.


[Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)]

Interviewer: Good company!

JC: And so I’m writing a new piece for orchestra – because their orchestra is largely strings and they.. when I wrote for them, the other pieces I’ve written for orchestra need all the winds (which they don’t have), so I needed to write something to suit their situation.

Interviewer: Some people would say that experimental composers have formed their own rules and laws because they couldn’t cope with the ones that existed.

JC: Nonsense.

Interviewer: Well I thought you might say that but I wondered what.. if you would care to go any further, in terms of...?

JC: They said that in terms of modern artists. They said they couldn’t draw and that’s why they made abstraction. It’s not true. I saw a very amusing proof of that, (and this was years ago, in the late (19)30’s, in Portland, Oregon - where.. when modern art was really modern and the public was objecting like.. "expletive deleted")..  And that.. so what the museum did was to put a table with paints in the middle of the room and blank paper for the public to make their drawings, on one side, and then they put the modern art on the other. And anyone could see, immediately, the difference. No, the history of Western art, more than the history of Oriental art, is the history of changes.

Interviewer: Sometimes in a technical society it seems that when something becomes feasible, it almost inevitable, in terms of when someone conceives of, say, going to the moon, going beyond, there becomes this momentum toward accomplishing that fact. Now in the area say of experimental music, when new..when new techniques, new electronic techniques, are available, do you feel yourself drawn to those to see what will happen, see how many combinations, how many permutations of sound are possible?

JC: I’m the son of an inventor and I figure that my.. my.. what I can do is make some kind of discovery. If I can’t make a discovery, I’m not worth my salt. And when I see many people working with electronics then I don’t myself do it, because, well, for one thing, I might get a shock! and, for the other, all the.. many other good minds that are working in that field, and so, I’m now not working in that so much.


[Balinese Gamelan instruments]

Interviewer: You mentioned that you had not gone to (and I don’t know if that means you hadn’t studied) Indonesian music, although many people find great similarities between…especially (the works for prepared piano, gamelan..

JC: The reason is I don’t have a feeling for harmony and harmony was not characteristic of any of those Oriental musics either. So that when they hear my music which doesn’t have any harmony in it and it just has sounds, then they think, “oh, it sounds very Oriental”.
Interviewer: But not Oriental in general. I was..     
JC:  Indonesian, in particular?

Interviewer: Quite a lot of the dance music in Bali, in terms of the rhythms, the stops..

JC: I think it's much more dramatic than mine. Those stops in Balinese music are quite world-shaking and I don’t tend to shake the world.

Interviewer: Can we talk a little bit about setting up, how you go about setting up technically a performance like Empty Words?

AJ: Well, to tell you the truth, that still seems to be somewhat up in the air. John and I still have yet to talk about it.

JC : We haven't seen the place. Place now is very important when you use loudspeakers and microphones and so on. And how they work in a space determines very much what you do.
I might not do what I said I would do, I might do something else.

Interviewer: Keeps it fresh .. You’ve done this before I assume, Arlen, you've worked in other cities, setting up..

AJ: Oh yes, that’s.. that's how I earn my living.

JC: Since I don’t work very much with electronics, I’m very grateful for what other people do..because then they help me.

Interviewer: This evening at eight, at the Naropa Center, Empty Words, with and by John Cage, at 1645 Broadway in Boulder. Tickets are two-fifty, and, if you stand outside the door, (and) someone comes out, take their ticket and go in!  
Thanks very nuch for spending some time with us. Now you can have dinner.

JC: Thank you very much.

Interviewer: Thank you all
AJ: A pleasure.. 




A full recording of the Empty Words concert (alongside the interview) is also available in the Naropa Archives on two tapes - here and here 
(it is also available here and here)

A later (1975) Munich studio recording of Cage performing "Mureau" is also available here (and here) 

Finally, Jackson Mac Low - Mac Low's complete talk, "The Poetics of Chance and the Politics of Simultaneous Spontaneity - or - the Sacred Heart of Jesus"  may be heard in three parts here, here, and here  (referring back to his performance here). 

A (revised) printed version may be read in Talking Poetics From Naropa Institute - Annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - Volume 1  (a version of Cage's Empty Words talk, along with "relevant material", is also included in this volume).

In this opening section, he (Mac Low) discourses on "chance operations" (systematic chance and impulsive chance, performer choice). At approximately forty minutes in (on this particular tape) he proposes his own "21, 21. 29 - The Fifth Biblical Poem" as an active example and proceeds to enact it in live performance (with the collaboration of Sharon Matlin, and Naropa student, Tom Savage) - "I'll talk a little more about why I do such a thing. I had been, for many years, in some ways, concerned with Taoism (I consider myself a Taoist), and later, in the middle (19)50's, partly through contact with friends of (John) Cage before I really knew him, I became interested in Zen Buddhism, and considered myself, for many years, a Zen Buddhist, and, in this context, the idea of trying to produce a kind of art that is not ego-ic seemed very important, and that's the main motive I would say, to let other things than one's self…" - Mac Low goes on to discuss silence, acasual connection, politics and dharma, pacificism and anarchism, the politics of performer choice, ego-tripping and virtuosity, and possibilities (vocabularies) created by names. The tape concludes (this particular tape) after approximately eighty-seven minutes of playing-time.

Peter Orlovsky & Jackson MacLow 1975 Naropa reading (with harmonious introduction by Allen Ginsberg)

Continuing with our choice selections from the remarkable Naropa Institute Archives. Here's Peter Orlovsky and Jackson MacLow from 1975. (Allen, accompanying himself on harmonium, chooses to improvise/ sing the introductions on this particular occasion).

A transcription of his introduction follows:

AG: (The) Kerouac Institute for the School of Disembodied Poetics will now continue its cycle of poetry readings by famous nuts and neurotics and people who watch their diet-etics/ two moralist vegetarians, years gone by, Jackson MacLow and Peter Orlov-sky. Peter's the Professor of Bucolic Poesy, a pastoral poet and  farmer boy is he, originally, also a Beatnik, as you know, who William Carlos Williams praised for his great lyric flow. Oddly, of all the poets of the mid 1955's, Peter Orlovsky was praised by William Carlos Williams as the best Beatnik lyric poet alive, his talent recognized by the old kind-eyed guru. Now Peter Orlovsky's, Bucolic Poetry Professor, teaching you. He taught his class this afternoon, tonight, his poesy he'll read into your ear...... or make up whatever he can think of might be.  
Participant in many poetry readings, historic events, from 1955 San Francisco to Chicago.  He has made a great golden angel in the poetic heavens of Amerikee - and so he'll be here at Naropa, for a Buddhist boy he also be. He took his refuge vows from Kalu and his bodhisattvas too, although he's been a bodhisattva decades long now, yes, a true blue. An original participant of the establishment of the dharma in the land. Peter Orlovsky, called by (Jack) Kerouac (as) a saint, has always had a hand in creating the ground and atmosphere for the suffering we know so well, and has spent many years rescuing his brothers from their hell, in mental hospitals, or cities, or the hells of amphetamine. Peter Orlovsky (has) wandered around and been the strong-arm man, the guardian angel of the poets, the great bicept-ed fool (for Peter Orlovsky, humble boy, has followed golden rule
         
But there are two poets here tonight. The second who will read is Jackson MacLow in the red shirt and several pairs of beads. Jackson MacLow's bibliography includes many a beautiful rare book - 22 Light Poems, Black Sparrow, L.A, 1968 - take a look! - The Pronouns, London, (19)71, from Tetrad Press, issued forth, 4 Trains from Burning Deck, Providence, in 1974. Stanzas for Iris Lesak, from Barton, Vermont, Something Else Press is one of the thickest volumes of chance poetics that you'll ever find. 36th Light Poem, Permanent Press, (19)75. Several of these volumes Jackson's brought, and so, you or your wife can buy then here at Naropa, if you want to see his latest work. As well as if you look it up in the library - An Anthology (edited by La Monte Young, in 1963). Don't shirk the proper study of the poets we bring here. You'll find that, of his work, it is among the most earliest and dear of the chance operation poetics and music practiced in Amerikee - 1954,  with John Cage, he worked on that thing which is eternally a representation of the first simultaneous spontaneous event. The '5 biblical poems" he did , in 1955, for three voices  (for Henry Cowell) was one of the first chance operational poems presented in America that we know. It influenced John Cage's chance operations to include language. So, Jackson is one of the fathers, yes, a father is MacLow. He's also been influenced by Dao and (I Ching) The Book of Changes too. A pacifist anarchist, he was the first man to sit down and refuse to join the air-raid drill and hide his ass underground. That was back in 1955 - City Hall Park, New York. (That's a piece of anarchist resistance that goes back, for true work, almost as long as the deep record of William Merwin [Merwin is there in attendance] and early men, at that too - refusing to take shelter from the Bomb - amazing! - wouldn't you spend a couple of days in jail for refusing the air-raid drill) - and in that chance operation he as well influenced Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater, those days, which began a huge and beautiful pacifist wave. 

Kabbalah('s), also, Jackson MacLow's music in the back of his brain. He also, like Orlovsky, fled from sorrow's reign to Kalu Rinpoche for his vows, refuges (and) bodhisattva too. And now I'll end my song, and the poets will speak and sing to you."   

Peter Orlovsky begins the reading, "I'll read the first poem I wrote in Paris, 1957" - "Frist Poem" - "Then I wrote another poem called "Morris", about a young kid in a mental hospital in New York City, where I worked in 1959" [Peter reads "Morris"] - "This is a sex experiment in Tangier - making love with Allen (and I got the typewriter to write it down) -  [reads from "Sex Experiment"] - "This is a poem I wrote ten years later, after having been in India, 1961 - Benares ("When in Benares, in 1961, Summer, I was so lazy"..."the last bastard of a selfish human creep sleep") - Then this is a poem I wrote recently - "But because the military now gets a hundred million dollar budget for war study...")
Peter reads next "Poems From The Subway" -  ("There goes Adam and Eve.." .."let the subway be our Greek meeting-place.."..) - That's a poem I wrote taking cough syrup ( I was addicted to cough-syrup for years - like an idiot!), so you go into a funny reverie.. 
reads next - "Second Poem" ("Morning again. Nothing has to be done. Maybe buy a piano or make fudge..".."..walking over a bridge of flowers"), then "Snail Poem" ("Make my grave the shape of a heart.."), then "My Bed is Covered Yellow" ("O sun, I sit on you..".."O yellow bed, all the news lay on you at one time or another") - "I got a phone call from my heart".."I waited in fear" - concluding with "Scrambled Leaves Poem" ("There's our small country dump with ten thousand pounds of township leaves..."..."...and that it's not good  to smoke, he thinks")

Jackson MacLow: "I'm going to do a variety of things tonight. For about twenty years, I've been working in the interface between music and other arts, poetry and other arts, especially music, but also theater, dance, video and drawing (and) painting, and at this interface one can do various conversions, and one thing that we're [sic] going to do tonight is take something that is a drawing consisting of 960 words that are derived from the name of a friend of ours - Peter Innisfree Moore, a great photographer. We're going to play these words as well as say them, by playing the letters, by a sort of translation system, and we produce a piece by a combination of having to keep the actual pitches that are indicated by the words, but making free choices of how we do it, by listening intensely, and being aware, in every respect, of all aspects of the situation. So we're going to be doing three pieces of this sort. the first one I'll be doing as a duo with Sharon Mattlin, and then I have a group of people (who's names I have, I hope, on this list) who will be helping me in the first piece and then the piece that will come at the end. The people who are helping me are... [Jackson enumerates a list of his collaborators] - I guess that's it, did I leave anything out?. Now the first piece is a piece which I call a "gatha", in which I take the letters of a mantram [sic - singular of mantra] (in the case of this first one it's the mantram of Chenrezi) - aum mani padme hum -  and, as Allen mentioned, I was initiated into that by Kalu Rinpoche, (and so I'm dedicating at least that aspect of this reading to Kalu Rinpoche). So, we've.. once, this..  You have the mantram, and then a chance-given roll of "A's", "U''s and "M''s. By using random digits produced by a computer. I find places to put, first the row of "A'''s, "U"'s, "M"'s, and then repetition of the mantram  Where the letters of the mantram cross the "A"'s, "U'"s and "M'"s, where "A"'s, "U''s and "M"'s occur in the mantram. Other chance operations assign places to the mantram. So once we have this configuration, you get a number of them, any number of mantram. We each perform and follow as a path from any letter, any square, to saying letter sounds, saying letter names, saying the words, finding other words, syllables, and so on, and falling silent in silent spaces. So this is the Chenrezi Gatha - Aum mani padme hum - Sharon Mattlin and myself. [MacLow and Mattlin perform the Chenrezi Gatha] - (next),  "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree" Moore, which was, as I say, produced by finding 960 words spelled from the letters of this man's name and then using chance operations to draw them from the list and to place them on the drawing, and then the people on the stage work freely from these materials, but always either saying the word or playing letters that correspond, playing notes, that correspond to the letters - [Group performance of "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore"] - pause - " hello..ok..I'm going to a different kind of piece now. This is the "36th Light Poem", in 1962 and (19)68, I wrote a number of poems based.. drawing their basic images from a chart of 288 kinds of light, that I made up in 1962, and these poems I call "Light Poems" and, after the first 22 of them were published by John Martin and the Black Sparrow Press, in (19)68, I continued to write more of them, and so, on New Years Day, 1972, I wrote a "Light Poem" - "In Memoriam Buster Keaton - It's the 36th Light Poem - "In Memoriam Buster Keaton", and this was just published in London (England), when I first got over there, in May, by Robert Vas Dias from the Permanent Press). So just a little pamphlet - [Jackson reads "36th Light Poem" ("As a mad scientist, Buster lights a bunsen-burner flame that starts a series of processes..." .."your karmic residue dissolves in joyous shouts")  [continues]- So, since I like to go from one extreme to the other, this is "A Phoneme Dance, For (And From) John Cage" - It's from him in the sense that all the sounds are just sounds in John's name - and subtitled "A Word-Event For John Cage", (it) was written, September of (19)74 [note here (in "A Phoneme Dance.."), Jackson's use of pauses] - (then) - "Since (19)54, I have been writing poems that are both syntactical, with words and without (words), non-syntactically with words, as well as syntactically..

So here is a poem I wrote in 1958, in which I translated, using some numbers system.. I translated from one book of Joseph Conrad('s) to another - one was a... the novel, The Arrow of Gold, where there's a principal that.. ..it deals with.. a.. Don Carlos rebellion and gun-running. He was actually involved with, and one of the ring-leaders of this, the main ring-leader was a lady named "Dona Rita", and this was a real.. he based this novel on a real period in his own life when he was actually gun-running, and he tells about this in The Mirror and the Sea, where he tells about the real character, "Dona Rita", who really did organize, help organize, the rebellion against the.. there was a collateral branch of the Spanish Royal Family that many people supported in Don Carlos and so this was.. they had little rebellions every so often..
So I translated one into another and I call the poem "Dona Rita Joseph Conrad" - So I drew words from The Arrow of Gold  by translating the passages in The Mirror and the Sea, his autobiography, that tell about the actual gun-running [Jackson performs/reads his Conrad-into-Conrad experiment -  "hair grey.."]  
ok, what comes up next is another "Light Poem", another memorial "Light Poem", it turns out, and this was the "42nd Light Poem In Memoriam Paul Goodman", and it was written a little after he died, in August of 1972. [Jackson reads the "42nd Light Poem"]
So I'll do one more solo, I guess, and then we'll do the last piece.. 
Well, one other kind of translation thing (that) I like to do is to work from notations of music to words by... just as we translated the letters of the words into music, in these poems, I translate the notations for.. tones in.. it so happened that I'd done it more often in works of Ancient Music, (although I did a part of a Beethoven bagatelle once, also). So I translate the words, or the features, of a modern notation of an ancient work of music, into a list of words.. usually, from a book called "Bilby's Natural History For Young People" (from the 1880's). So I first did this about the time I was first working with chance operations and early (19)55 with something by M.. - And then a few years ago, I went back to this system and did it to a motet by Dufay, the 15th century motet. So this is.. this is (for anybody who knows it) a translation of the beginning, I didn't work out the whole thing, you see (and) (but) I'd prefer to read the shorter version. It's the beginning of the Gloria [Jackson sings it out - or part of it out - in Latin  - "(Gloria in excelsis Deo), et in terra pax hominibus (bonae) voluntatis. (Laudemas te Benedicimus te, Adorams te, Glorificamus te. Gratias agimus tibi)" - that one!  - Anyway, this is "Dufay" - and you can hear, for instance..   It's for voices and two wind instruments. (We did it on a radio station in New York [WBAI] with two trombones) - doo-doo-doo doo-doo - [Jackson tries to demonstrate the melodic effect] (and) I'll tell you afterwards which lines translate back. Here's "Dufay". It was written in 1969. [Jackson performs "Dufay" ("the Underwood", "whithersoever"..] 

The last one will be..well, I'm going to do a section of, something, part of which was published recently here in Boulder by Jack Collom in (his poetry magazine), "the", and that's..a poem.. in (19)69 in the summer I was brought out to Los Angeles by the Los Angeles County Museum to work in their Art and Technology project, and I worked with a programmable film-reader at Information International, and produced a series.. what I.. I won't go into what I actually was trying to produce but what actually I have left of it is a series of about 14 poems, of which I have a great deal of print-out from each poem, I (keep) fed in certain materials and the computer fed it out using certain randomizing routines, and I'm going to read part of the print-out of one of the runs of print outs from "the" (there are other parts, there are other parts I think it might be of the same run, that are in the current issue of "the" (number 13) and that's available around town here, or ask Jack. Okay, this is print-out from "the", 14, a PDP3 poem (the name of the computer used). 
[Jackson begins reading, but tape ends and cuts him off]   

Audio note: Allen begins his musical introduction approximately eight seconds in, and concludes at approximately eight-and-a-quarter minutes in, Peter Orlovsky, reading first, reads from this point through to approximately thirty-seven minutes in, 

Jackson MacLow's reading begins approximately thirty-seven-and-a-half minutes in     and runs on to the end of the tape (approximately eighty-five minutes. The audio may be accessed here 

Peter Orlovsky with Steven Hall and Arthur Russell

"The Poetry Project burns like a red hot coal in New York's snow". Our good friends in New York at the St Marks Poetry Project spotlight Allen's high praise of that venerable and beloved institution (and rightly so!). For their fund-raiser earlier this year, they teamed up with the equally-venerable Anthology Film Archive, to present first-time-ever showings of selections from a remarkable trove of old video-tapes - Public Access Poetry, produced, as the organizers are quick to point out, by the poets themselves, "with little or no broadcasting experience", for the nascent local cable-access tv channel. "Even if you were watching the innovation called cable tv in 1977 and 1978, what are the chances that you saw a show called Public Access Poetry?". How many people, we wonder, tuned in on January 26, 1978 to witness the remarkable spectacle of Peter Orlovsky accompanied by Steven Hall and Arthur Russell? (and, in the very same program, Jackson Mac Low and Sharon Mattlin too!). Fortunately this footage has been preserved (and plenty of other remarkable moments too) and is now freely available, at the click of a button, from the remarkable resource that is PennSound.

Readings there also (rare footage) from a passing-through-town Joanne Kyger, not to mention

Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Lewis Warsh, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Rene Ricard, Simon Pettet, Bob Rosenthal, Michael Scholnick - the list goes on..

Scroll down about half-way down the page to access the Orlovsky-Mac Low tape.