We’ll begin the serialization/transcription today of a really early Naropa lecture of Allen’s, (dating from June of 1976) – his 1976 “Visiting Poetics” lecture. The lecture is a significant one, he gets to speak at length on and describe his legendary youthful visionary experience, his Blake vision
The original transcriber of this recording (Randy Roark) notes
“There is a long discussion preceding Ginsberg’s lecture on various Naropa Poetic Department news and events chaired by Anne Waldman, which I have not transcribed).
Allen begins with some biographical background:
AG : My father wrote what was called, in the ‘twenties, “lyric poetry”. I got my ear from him to begin with. The major exponents of that kind of poetry were people like Elinor Wylie Edna St. Vincent Millay, that is, in the ‘twenties, Edward Arlington Robinson. A.E. Housman was a huge influence then. The standard anthology that was used by poets who belonged to the Poetry Society of America, which was an organization in New York that had kicked out Maxwell Bodenheim for pissing on the floor at a public meeting in 1927, or something like that, had a standard notion of style. At its best it’s in Edward Arlington Robinson. I don’t know if you know Robinson’s work. His “Miniver Cheevy”, and “Eros Turannos” which is a great poem, but it has a peculiar power – “Meanwhile we do no harm; for they/That with a god have striven,/Not caring much for what we say,/Take what the god has given;/Though like waves breaking it may be/Or like a changed familiar tree,/Or like a stairway to the sea/Where down the blind are driven.” – That’s the end of “Eros Turannos”,
a series of linked stanzas that have a very powerful clanging rhyme.
But by that time the Louis Untermeyer anthology was put together. Has anybody ever seen those anthologies, anthologies by Louis Untermeyer? Has anybody not? Yeah, well, they were the standard things, just like Oscar Williams in the ’50s was a standard anthology used in colleges. Nowadays, say, the Don Allen anthology, or the Hall/Pack/Simpson anthologies are popular. Untermeyer was, I guess, the anthology king and tastemaker and his taste was for his own style of poetry. I’ll get a copy of that anthology and put it in the (Naropa) library.
Untermeyer’s own verse was very similar to my father’s. One famous one (is) called “Caliban in the Coal Mines”. Just very simple rhymed statements. So I picked up on iambic rhyme, lyric verse, and was brought up on it. For my high school graduation book
I wrote a sonnet which I’ve forgotten by now but which has something like “We face the future, dah-dah-dee, and off into our maturity … off we go,” or something. [Editorial note – “We leave the youthful pennants and the books… Ready are we to meet the challenge hurled/To battle, conquer, and rebuild the world”] – Just, like, a jejune high school sonnet. Valedictorian’s poem. So all the poems I wrote when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, were like sleep-walking – repetitions of sounds that I’d heard in Robinson or Edna Millay and their sounds were like sleep-walking repetitions of sounds that they had read in (Sir Thomas) Wyatt or (Sir Walter) Raleigh or Shakespeare. The whole form had degenerated, yet it was still called “lyric poetry.” Originally lyric because it was done with strings, with a lyre. Those poems were songs at one time. Those forms were songs at one time, but then people stopped singing and they did stop singing (until (Bob) Dylan, probably), in those forms, at least as far as the general public knew, and as far as most poets were involved. (W.B.) Yeats wrote lyric poetry but he always had a tune in his head, but he was one of a very few people that did.
to be continued