Concision – (Bunting/Corso)

“The mason stirs./ Words!/ Pens are too light/ Take a chisel to write” – Basil Bunting (from “Briggflatts” (1966)

Allen Ginsberg’s 1981 Naropa class continues from here

AG: Then you get the idea from (Basil) Bunting that heartfelt and sincere and goofy and curious and awkward and interesting as that (spontaneous composition) may be, it’s too long-winded and dissociated to survive in the memory – nobody could memorize it, because it’s too ungainly.  Nobody could actually commit it to memory and so preserve it that way.  When you examine it closely and see what sense it makes, sometimes it doesn’t make that much sense because you’ve got too many “and”‘s and “but”‘s, and it’s just somebody rambling to himself.  So in addition to having a gush, then you’ve got to step back and look at the thing and see if it’s there – to take a pitiless look as if you were Father Time and look through the eyes of Father Time and take your scythe out and start chopping at it, because it might be that the only thing that will survive is what is clear enough that it sticks in people’s minds and they remember it.  Because if they pull the plug on this civilization all the books will be gone and all the records will be gone and all the cassettes will be gone and there won’t be anything, maybe, except what people can remember and pass down in caves.  Which is the traditional way for poetry.  In which case (Bob) Dylan would do pretty good.  Some fragments of Dylan.  Bunting might do alright, for those who can remember “Rut thuds the rim.”

Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

So after that I began … let’s see.  Around that time I was writing poetry that later got into The Fall of America –  a long book  – and that was written on a tape machine, and then transcribed from tape machine to the page.  And then with Bunting in mind what I began doing is to try to condense it, keeping all of the major pictorial visual substantial elements, but eliminating all of the roundabout excess verbiage.  So as for that sentence it would be, “Keeping pictorial substance, eliminating …”  –  whatever, I forgot.  “Eliminating roundabout and/or.”  In other words, cutting – blue-pencilling.  Cutting the fat off the bones of the statement and keeping just whatever was muscular or boney and getting rid of all syntactical fat.  But this is very theoretical, so I don’t know.  I don’t really … I work it on by example.

Gregory Corso (1930-2001)

Gregory (Corso) is really good at that.  I picked up The Happy Birthday of Death on the way.  In certain of his poems he gets down to a kind of nubbin of.. just the.. thin lines that are cut down from a lot of talk. Like he’s got a poem called “Clown” that I was interested in lately.  Has anybody ever read that by Gregory?  It’s a really amazing poem, I think, because it’s a number of short sections, a lot of them (it’s a long, long poem done in many short little sections, and each section is like a funny condensed panorama, a picture, or parade, or stage scene).  It says here, one I thought … he wanted to get … I remember him working on this line.  It was one line in which he was trying to get the entire sound of a circus brass band, which came to “Tang-a-lang boom! Fife feef! Toot!”  “Tang-a-lang boom! Fife feef! Toot!”  I mean, he had a whole bunch of stuff – he had a long thing, like “Oom pah pah,” and everything like that, but he just got “Tang-a-lang boom! Fife feef! Toot!”

Student:  Weren’t those, each one representative of the instruments that a court jester would have…
AG:  Yeah.
Student:  … in the Middle Ages.

AG:   Yes. Some.  Yes.  You mean the instruments themselves?  Well, this is more of a Barnum thing – “Tang-a-lang boom! Fife feef! Toot!/ Spring welcomed by Barnum parade clears jammed melancholy/- traffic of a laughless age./  Girls skip, boys gather, dogs bound, cats leap…”

It’s very condensed. Gregory’s very good at condensation,  especially his later poems, tailoring.   Well anyway, the reason I was interested in having Tom Pickard come here (and now I get to the point, a point) and teach  was that he does represent that tradition of Bunting of condensation and familiarity with cutting, and tailoring (I don’t know anyone in America who has it exactly, there’s maybe (Robert) Creeley a little, but his material is more vaporous so there’s not so much to cut into. I mean, he begins anyway  with small so there’s not so much to cut – but – and the material itself is thought-words rather than pictures, cutting everything out except the picture or the pure sound, so a very Platonic ideal.

Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately forty-one-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-seven-and-a-quarter minute in

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