Allen Ginsberg 1981 Naropa class continues from here
AG: And in the poetry of Samuel Greenberg, which anybody might know? Might not know? Anybody ever hear of him? Anybody here ever hear of Samuel Greenberg? You?.
Student: I’ve heard the name, but I just couldn’t….
AG: He was a 23-year-old kid when he died, I believe, and he.. World War I or earlier.. and he had tuberculosis and was living on Welfare Island, or some little island where immigrant kids (or) immigrant hospital-ese tuberculosis cases stayed in New York, and he wrote a lot of poems in little notebooks, and sent some to his brother. And then his manuscripts were collected by the family when he died, young. His last poem is a postcard to his brother.
“There is a loud sound of death/ Where I lay;/ There was a loud sound of death/ Far away/ Again the stain has come/ For me;/ Again the stain has come For thee” – About three verses like that. Really beautiful. Musically nice and completely direct. They have a kind of raw quality of somebody writing to himself or to his brother. [Editorial note – The poem “To Dear Daniel” is Greenberg’s last-dated poem in the manuscript, written on a postcard, dated March 14, 1917. Allen is recalling it from memory. The actual poem reads: “There is a loud noise of Death/ Where I lay;/ There is a loud noise of life/ Far away./ From low and weary stride/ Have I flown;/ From low and weary pride/ I have grown./What does it matter now/ To you or me?/ What does it matter now/ To whom it be?/ Again the stain has come/To me;/ Again the stain has come/For thee.“]
Those manuscripts were then collected and discovered by somebody and shown to Hart Crane in the ‘Twenties, and Hart Crane fell in love with them, because they were really strange language – that kind of raw, strange, imaginative language – and Crane began paraphrasing them and imitating them and constructing poems out of them. And published some great poems that everybody gave him big prizes for. Then in his biographies it was discovered that he was actually copying these poems from Samuel Greenberg.
So, in 1945, there was an edition of the Collected Poems of Samuel Greenberg (Poems of Samuel Greenberg) published by Holt and Company, with a preface by Allen Tate. And we have a copy of it in xerox in the library – Samuel Greenberg.
Student: Do you know … is there a title of….
AG: Well, Samuel Greenberg – Collected Poems or Selected Poems
And recently there’s a kid from San Francisco named Raymond Foye (sic), who was hanging around City Lights and edited the last issue of Beatitude, who went to the NYU Library and found all the collected manuscripts of Samuel Greenberg in the Special Collections, and read through them for a couple of months, copied them and has a whole new set of poems, drawings, self-portraits. Like little self-portrait sketches in school copybooks from 1912 or something. So City Lights is going to put out a Selected Greenberg with a Preface by (Philip) Lamantia. [Editorial note – this didn’t happen, however in 2020 New Directions published Poems From The Greenberg Manuscripts, edited with an essay by James Laughlin, and in a new expanded edition, edited by Garrett Caples]
to be continued
Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approximately thirty-four-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-seven-and-quarter minutes in