Allen Ginsberg 1981 Naropa class continues from here
AG: (Philip) Lamantia has a little of that funny quality of thinking out loud, or arriving at his thought on the paper out loud. Who else? (Jack) Kerouac has it… It’s something you get in European … pardon me?
Student (Joel Lewis): Were you influenced by any of the proletarian poets of the ‘Thirties, that kind of.. Kenneth Fearing...?
AG: Some, but not too much. There was one – Ben Maddow – who has a long poem called “The City” in the old Oscar Williams anthologies.
Now, I’m just talking about certain quality of crudeness, of really interesting artistic crudeness, where it’s like catching somebody totally sincere, out loud, writing utterest truths to themselves. You get a little bit of it in Emily Dickinson. A lot of that quality of Emily Dickinson of a note to herself that nobody else was necessarily going to read. So there’s this sort of.. kind of a … another example … well, what is the quality that you … what is that quality? Do you know what I’m talking about in Emily Dickinson?
Student: Yes
AG: It’s very crude. It’s crude. It’s awkward. She’s not writing a poem for people to read, she’s just writing a note to herself. And so it’s got that quality of inwardness and ungainliness, almost, in the syntax. “So well that I can live..”, say, [Editorial note – “456”] – and then – “I could not see to see.” Or, “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” – [Editorial note -These are the final line and first line respectively of Dickinson’s poem “465”] – “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” It’s weird thoughts that people have by themselves. That quality of weird thoughts that people have by themselves.
In Hart Crane there is a prose poem called “Havana Rose.” Does anybody know that? If you get a chance to look at it, it’s a little prose poem that sounds as if he wrote it when he was drunk in his cabin alone at midnight and everybody had put him down and he went into his cabin and before he fell asleep by some lamplight he wrote down a note to himself while he was drunk, saying, “As a doctor said yesterday, you have no way of perceiving the large pattern, so must be doomed to the incompletion of your own futility. Rats wreath the rose. Ring around a rosey, the rats are on the basement bassinette… By I have seen the palm trees in the….” [Editorial note = the poem actually begins – “Let us strip the desk for action-now we have a horse in Mexico./ .. That night in Vera Cruz – verily for me “the True Cross” – let us
remember/ the Doctor and my thoughts, my humble, fond remembrances/of the great bacteriologist. … The wind that night, the clamour/ of incessant shutters, trundle doors, and the cherub/watchman-tiptoeing the successive patio balconies with a typical pistol -/trying to muffle doors-and the pharos shine-the mid-wind….” – and continues – “….The rats played ring around the rosy (in their/basement basinette) the Doctor supposedly slept, supposedly…” – and, later, – “..Poets may not be doctors/ but doctors are rare poets/when roses leap like rats – and too, when rats/ make rose nozzles of pink death around white teeth…“]
You know, some funny musing to himself, not for anybody else. And it has quality of a note. The kind of notebook that you would keep just for yourself, that all students have and all students get to it, actually. Most early student writing has just a little electrical thing in it, because it’s their first thoughts to themselves.
What else? What other samples? Well, you get it all over (William) Blake. Lots of it in Blake in his notebooks. I guess it was a quality that I thought was real interesting and started picking up on and trying to extend and make a whole art form out of.
So this is on the subject of what’s good about spontaneity, or what is interesting about spontaneity. I’m still trying to locate samples or examples of spontaneous style or spontaneous practice. That tends to lead you into wordiness, because if you’re just talking to yourself, it doesn’t make any difference.
to be continued
Audio for the above can be. heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-seven-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately. forty-one-and-a-half minutes in