AG: Thank you for your hospitality. I’ll begin with music and then read poems for three-quarters-of-an-hour or an hour, chronologically from the early ’50’s or late “40s, then take a break.
Allen begins in media res ….Now he (Blake)’s got the question, – “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” (asking the tiger). How many know that poem by William Blake, “The Tyger”? And how many have never heard of it?… (audience give a show of hands).. So a lot of people know. From a book called Songs of Innocence and Experience. And the early biographies of Blake pointed out that Mr Blake did actually sing the Songs of Innocence and Experience at his friends’ houses but the scholar-professors of the day failed to notate the melody. So I supplied tunes or a tune…(for) about twenty.. twenty-five.. of the forty-five songs for Songs of Innocence… and I’ll sing a few of them this evening. “The Tyger” – “Did he who made the lamb made thee?” – that is to say, “did he who made the lamb make Iraq (sic) or the nuclear bomb, or the wrath of mankind, the wrath of Saddam or the wrath of Bush, (either one)? And the answer was, it wasn’t made by God, we did it ourselves. The hammer, the anvil, the chain are all appurtenances of the blacksmith, which in Blake’s system is symbolic of the human imagination, creating out of the imagination, materializing and forging a reality and so the “he” who made is our own imagination. “He who created it, But before I begin, I should add – Can you all hear clearly in the back? Is there any problem with the sound? right now when I’m just talking? Raise your hand if you can’t hear clearly, if you cannot hear clearly, raise your hand.. [audience responds].. just one or two – does that mean we should do it louder? what do you think?…. The meter is trochaic or like heart-beat. [Allen proceeds to perform his rendition of Blake’s Tyger]
Next up – “NSA Dope Calypso”
I should probably dedicate (this to….) – A true account of dealing with… dope-dealings with the CIA under the present administration – (“Now Richard Secord and Oliver North hated Sandinistas whatever they were worth…:…” Does Noriega know Bush‘s company crimes?/In 2000 AD read the New York Times”)
(Jesse Helms – He believes he’s the) moral arbiter of these States. Anybody who does that is hiding something. What is the sin that Jesse’s hiding? Well, as you all know, he is the biggest.. one of the biggest.. licit dope proponents in America. He’s the mouthpiece for dope. the dope (that) is the most dangerous dope of all. (The statistics are that crack and bad junk, bad hard drugs, kill twenty-to-thirty thousand people a year in the United States. The second (killer) drug is alchohol, one hundred thousand people a year. and the biggest killer drug is Jesse Helms own nicotine – the latest count is four-hundred thousand people a year die of cancer, heart-attack, high blood-pressure, hypertension, so forth. So, though Helms objects to the taxpayer being forced to spend money without being asked on works of art, he doesn’t hesitate to spend government money, not asking the taxpayer, to subsidize his own North Carolina tobacco agriculture (something nobody has called him to account for and, as the basic dope pusher in America, he has put away there some sort of smoke screen to.. (well, “the best defense is offense”, as you might have read in battle tactics).So to avoid being fingered as the dope dealer that he is, he’s got this fixation on homosexuality (an obsession on it, he’s talking about it all the time, thinking about it all the time). You know, he’s sort of struggling with his closet, I guess. Well, anyone who has this preoccupation with homosexuality is obsessed with homosexuality. It’s rather simple. However, I won’t take up that aspect of his private life, I’ll just take a couple of parts up. So this is dedicated to Senator Jesse Helms – a non-smoking un-advertisement called “Put Down Yr Cigarette Rag“ {Allen proceeds to read , accompanying himself with claves (songsticks)} – (“Don’t smoker, don’t smoke…”..”don’t smoke, don’t smoke”)
Next, “A Crazy Spiritual” … Drawn from a dream, it’s like a prophetic dream about the nation, the national dream – (“A faithful youth/ with artificial legs/drove his jalopy/through the towns of Texas…”…”..”I promise to drive you/ home through America”)
Next, “Sunflower Sutra”
Moving in time to 1952 to 1955, some poems. based for those of you who’ve studied anthology poetry. It’s in most anthologies – the Sunflower Sutra – based on…. well “sunflower” as related to Blake’s poem, “The Sunflower” – How many here know that? “Ah! Sunflower” by William Blake? Some? – Footnote – William Blake, 1795 Songs of Innocence and Experience – [Allen proceeds to perform the poem accompanied by harmonium] (“Ah Sunflower! weary of time..”…”Where my Sunflower wishes to go.”)] – “Sutra” is a traditional Buddhist term for a transmission – suture – a joining – a joining of minds, meeting of minds, or joining of minds, putting together of minds, or suture – (A) Sanskrit word. and in American language has Indo-European roots going back to Sanskrit – “Sutra” – “Suture” – connection, going together, or joining together. are similar etymologically. So this is “Sunflower Sutra”, Berkeley 1955) – (I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern … “under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision”)
So. – Moving on from 1956 to 1968, a little brief quatrain written in Houston, April 24 (19)68 called “Kissass” (“Kissass is the Part of peace..”…”.Only pathway to peace kiss ass”).
(An ) odd little poem, appropriate to the (global warming) (and the) Central Australian desert, a little memento of a trip in 1972, the Uhuru, which is the Ayers Rock or giant sandstone monolith, several thousand years of history as the central sacred place for central Australian desert aborigines since the porous sandstone always has water in it, and there’s always some skirt of water around the side, even in the most dry of years so that Aborigine families can come to perform sacred rituals there. And the method the Aboriginal poetics involves songsticks, something like these claves, [Allen displays claves] and when I was there visiting the Tear Drop, as it is called, I wrote this poem. The style is you repeat the main parts a few times, so I’ll repeat it a couple of times and go on. – [AG performs again with songsticks (claves)] (“When the red pond fills fish appear/When the red pond dries fish disappear…” …”When the raindrop dries, worlds come to their end”)
Meditation – quieting of mind – Samatha Vipassana – clarification – clear-seeing in space… Then to the poem that related to that silent sitting… So this is called “Do The Meditation Rock” – (“If you want to learn how to meditate… ” …”…”generosity, generosity!)
…too much, existence, in case you’re not sure.. that (in) Buddhism, existence contains suffering (naturally, you’re born and you’re gonna die, so there’s an element of discomfort in the situation that we’re all in). Existence contains suffering. All the characteristics of existence, all the constituents of existence, are transitory, (as Heraclitus pointed out. You can’t step in the same river twice, or, as the poet Gregory Corso pointed out, you can’t step in the same river once”). Finally, no permanent selfhood, no permanent, you might say, no permanent soul, no permanent Nobodaddy either (Also) says (Werner) Heisenberg. [Allen then proceeds to sing “Gospel Noble Truths”] (“Born in this world…”….”Die when you die”)
Next, “American Sentences”
Seventeen syllables are the classic haiku, but what I did was just wrote them straight out as a simple declarative sentence. So that whatever it is instead of being.. the punch, it’s got to be a simple statement, rather than some trick of putting it into three lines and making a dash, making a (book out of haiku). .So it’s obviously.. easy.
“Standing on the porch in my underwear shorts, auto lights in warm rain” – (I’ll repeat, I’ll read them all twice) – “Standing on the porch in my underwear shorts, auto lights in warm rain” – “Put on my shirt, (and) took it off in the sun, walking the path to lunch’ – “A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitos” (anybody understand why the seed floats? – cold updraft from the marsh grass) – “At 4 a.m the two middle-aged men sleeping together hold hands”. “In the half-light of dawn, a few birds warble up in the Pleiades – “Caught shoplifting, ran out of the department store at sunrise and woke up” – Tompkins Square Lower East Side, New York (“Four skinheads stand in the streetlight rain chatting under an umbrella”
The next one is a very complicated serious one, I went to Turkey last June with the composer Philip Glass (we were putting together an opera which is opening up this Spring at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (called “The Fall of America”, incidentally, the title of the opera). – [Editorial note – the title of the opera was subsequently changed to “Hydrogen Jukebox”]. We visited the Pythian oracle on the Turkish coastline, at the Aegean coastline, near where Troy, near Troy, where the oracle, Pythian oracle, sat on her tripod, I believe, and then did big oracles, made prophecies, That was the… that area Turkey (in ancient times) was the center of the mother-goddess, for thousands and thousands of years until.. until the Judeo-Christian-Islamic conspiracy imposed that Nobodaddy on everybody and a single authority (and that I think has been the curse of the planet for six thousand years. We now find ourselves fighting over the Holy Land and bombing the Garden of Eden). So, it’s a shame that the Mother Goddess was driven out and the Pythian Oracle driven out of the Temple of Apollo. The last prophecy of the Pythian Oracle 400 AD, when the Emperor of Rome went for prophecy. She, the oracle said that “the Gods have departed this place. Apollo no longer walks these columns”. The Gods no longer, Apollo no longer, walks these columns. That was the end of the Roman Empire. So the title of this is “Visting the Pythian Oracle at Didyma, Toward The End of The Second MilleniumAt Sunset, Hearing Muezzin Cry Allah – (and the word in there in “bawl”, b-a-w-l, that comes up, it’s like baby bawling?) – (“At sunset, Apollo’s columns echo with the bawl of the One God”)
More Sentences:
“The weary ambassador awaits his guests late at the supper table” – “Get used to your body….” (this is approaching Seoul by bus in heavy rain” – “Approaching Seoul (South Korea) by Bus In Heavy Rain” – (“Get used to your body, forget you were born, suddenly you’ve got to get out”) – The last one is a..well, actually, something I saw a little kid in a pram by the Tiber River in Rome – “To be sucking your thumb in Rome by the Tiber River among fallen leaves”. The last is a science-fiction haiku – “Bearded robots drink from Uranian coffee cups on Saturn’s rim”
I was in China and I had a series of dreams in which I saw my mother, my father, Jack Kerouac. shades of the dead, shadows of the living and dead people but many many dead including a teacher of mine William Carlos Williams and he gave me advice on writing poetry following William Carlos Williams who said the key for poetry for the future bards of America who would be following him should be candor, voluntary frankness, telling the truth, candid in other words, spontaneous frankness. So this is what William Carlos Williams in my dream said to me and I woke and wrote it down. It’s called “Written in My Dream by William Carlos Williams” (“As Is/ you’re bearing…”.. ” What began/ as desire/will end/ wiser”)
He concludes with “an odd and prophetic poem” , “written in China also in 1984, called “World Karma“, (“like a survey”) – “World Karma”. I was pissed off, I think that day”) – Christmas Eve, December 24, 1984, Midnight -12.49, in Kunming, China, (Southern China, near the Chinese border) (“China be China….”….. “Paradise the Western lands Heaven Pure Land Garden of Sky,/other side of Eternal Dreamtime I vote.. (for Australian Aborigines!) – [Poem/video cuts off here, at the very end of the poem, omitting the last two lines – “Let them run the world after Hi Tech’s annihilated all other species & genetic strains from whale to donkey sperm” ]