March the 1st, it’s the birthday of Basil Bunting (1900-1985) – see here – and for a more extensive posting, from 2015, on the occasion of the publication of a monumental book of his poetry – see here
Hear Bunting’s lectures on poetic origins, at the University of Newcastle, 1979 – here and here
& read Allen’s observations on those lectures – here, here, here and here
Hear Bunting reading from his masterpiece, “Briggflatts”
Hear – you really have to hear – Bunting reading
– “The Spoils” – here and here
“Chomei at Toyoma” – here
Jonathan Williams interviews Basil Bunting in 1963
Hugh Kenner interviews Basil Bunting in 1980
Tom Pickard interviews Basil Bunting in 1981
More on PennSound’s remarkable Bunting page
The Basil Bunting Poetry Center at Durham University can be accessed here
Tom Pickard’s very special relationship – he was Bunting’s apprentice, friend, publisher, propagandist, disseminator, drinking-companion, and more – is detailed here, in
“To Show Me How It Was Done”, an article written for Poetry, in 2016, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Briggflatts.
“The Improbable Life and Prescient Poetry of Basil Bunting“, Christopher Spaide‘s profile and review of Bunting in The New Yorker, appeared that same year.
More Pickard on Bunting – here (1981, from the archives of the Naropa Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics)
We’ll have more on Tom tomorrow.