Allen Ginsberg’s 1981 Naropa class continues from here. Allen quizzes his students.
AG: Does anybody ever sit and write for more than three hours at a time, continuously?
Student: Yes.
AG: You do. And you have.
Student: Have (had).
AG: And is it… did you ever get anything … did it amount to anything that you liked later?
Student: … Yes, I … after a while, it … it. (I) really surprised myself.. while I was writing.
AG: Because it was that good or…?
Student: Yeah – or it seemed to me.
AG: Yeah.
Student (Randy Roark): What I thought happens is something (somebody) said ..happens when you have to memorize your own poems. You can only memorize something that’s good…After you write for a while, you don’t want to write anything that’s not good anymore..You’re almost tired of writing, you want to just get the right stuff …..on the page, and you don’t have the energy to fool around with the bullshit, the stuff that doesn’t hit the mark..
AG: What did you write that was…?
Student (Randy Roark): It’s all prose. Prose.
AG: When?
Student (Randy Roark): Recently …
AG: Uh-huh. Huh. Up all night type of thing, or what?
Student (Randy Roark): Well, I work nightshift, so … all by myself, so I just write prose.
AG: You? Who else did that? (to Student) You say you did, Gary (sic)?
Student (Gary): I did it a long time ago.
AG: What kind of results did you get?
Student (Gary): Well, I wrote this novel when I was in junior high school.
AG: Um-hmm. And how was it? Are there any purple passages still good?
Student (Gary): I don’t know. I’ll look. I made a few copies of it and it’s missing now.
AG: Hmm.
Student (Gary): And I don’t know what I think of it now. It was… I liked it at the time.
People thought it was alright. Fourteen-year-old writing.
AG: Um-hmm. You? (to Student) What was yours?
Student: It was actually more of an essay-type thing.
AG: Oh, that’s where you get in trouble. Soon as it goes off into abstraction and generalization. One can write all night, and then, you know….
Student: At one point, though. I was writing, making references to American literature, and just pulling out different quotes… and images and just how… What was surprising was how … how well those images fit in with the whole theme of the essay. And it was just after… and it was without trying to search them out… It was just … once that flow was going it just kind of popped in.
AG: Yeah. So there is a flow. You’ve experienced and you’ve experienced. (to another Student) What was yours?
Student: I was working on this pro. pro.. prose piece about the arts and so forth.
AG: Pro?
Student: Pro… [Editorial note – Randy Roark notes that this student, David, he recalls, had a particularly pronounced stutter]
AG: Probe?
Student: Prose piece.
AG: Prose about God.
Student: About God
AG: When?
Student: Um.
AG: I mean, was it long ago, or when you were fourteen or last night?
Student: No, it’s still going on
AG: Pardon me?
Student: It is still going on every now and then.
AG: Um-hmm.
Student: (I) just add on
AG: You just add on to it.
Student: But the flow…
AG: Yeah.
Student: And usually I don’t start until about three o’clock.
AG: In the morning?
Student: Yeah. That’s when it starts to really get going
AG: Yeah
to be continued
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately seventy-and-a-half minute in and concluding at approximately seventy-one-and-a-half minutes in
Uh ah oh ooooh boy. The monkeys in my head can find Shakespearean eloquence but only when I’m not looking. Or lustening. And I’m actually not a big fan and the monkeys are a pain in my ass