Picking up on our 1979 Naropa class conversation. Allen returns to the William Blake text – Vala
“And then they wanderd far away she sought for them in vain, / In weeping blindness stumbling she followed them o’er rocks and mountains/ Rehumanizing from the Spectre in pangs of maternal love..”
Peter Orlovsky: It’s all one line?
AG: No, three lines. This is page nine, line one, two, three
PO: I don’t have that. I got the other book. I got Keynes.
AG: It’ll still be the same.
Student: Plate 9.
AG: I think. We’ll start with it. Because it’s an average line. Three average lines. How would we read this? Now, you wouldn’t say, “And then they wanderd far away she sought for them in vain”. Although underneath there you can hear it. “And then they wanderd far” – dah-duh dah-duh dah-duh dah-duh, dah-duh dah-duh dah-duh. “And then they wanderd far away she sought for them in vain.” However, you’d say – “And then they wanderd far away… she sought for them in vain.” So first of all, there’s a caesura of some sort. That’s one thing that you could say. “And then they wanderd far away – she sought for them in vain.” He doesn’t have any kind of capital here at all. Any kind of division mark. Well, partly it’s his original manuscript anyway. So copied from his original manuscript in our text – “And then they wanderd far away she sought for them in vain.”
You’ll find the same kind of run-on without a capital, without periods and without commas, used a great deal in (the) modern poetry in T.S. Eliot. I think the first big example was Apollinaire’s poem “Zone”, where, rather than using heavy punctuation, he might have two statements in the same line connected. Disparate statements but connected, but let it go because it’s one thought-line. It’s sort of one zap of thought through the brain, so it doesn’t need punctuation.
“And then they wanderd far away she sought for them in vain.” It’s a funny kind of … “And then they wanderd far away she sought for them in vain.” It could be one thought-line. But speaking, “And then they wanderd far away … she sought for them in vain/In weeping blindness stumbling….” So, “And then they wanderd far away she sought for them in vain/In weeping blindness stumbling….” Or, “In weeping blindness stumbling she followd them o’er rocks & mountains.”
Student: There’s also a thing that Blake does by putting the word “stumbling” – he uses the present participles a lot. – It could be “In weeping blindness stumbling”… or it could be “In weeping blindness, stumbling she followd them.”
AG: Yes. Yes.
Student: So it gives you that option a lot of the time. It makes you….
AG: Oh, yeah, “In weeping blindness, stumbling she followd them.” Or she followed them, “In weeping blindness, she followd them, stumbling.” Or “weeping blindness, stumbling she followd them.”
What I was saying (was), Yes, you could do that. Then you could also have the syntactic pun – “She sought for them in vain/In weeping blindness stumbling.”
Student: Yeah. Right.
AG: So because he doesn’t … because it’s handscript anyway.
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately sixty-three-and-a-quarter minutes in and continuing until approximately sixty-six-and-a-half minutes in