Delicatessen Intellectual – a delightful account by poet Sharon Mesmer (“Teachers on Teachers”) is our lead-in story this week. (We would also draw your attention to an earlier video account (“Poets on Poets”). Sharon learned to appreciate and got to know Allen well.
She first met him back in Chicago in 1982 -“My best poet-friend and I groupied him after a reading and breathlessly described our idea to kidnap him so we could get ourselves on the cover of Time magazine. (He was all for it, asked what newspapers we’d contacted, and said he had names if we needed any. Too bad we didn’t have a plan.)”
She subsequently became his MFA Student at Brooklyn College
“Near the end of the workshop, Allen gave us an in-class writing exercise: write a pledge of allegiance to someone or something… My hands were shaking as I read my pledge to my old Chicago neighborhood, Back of the Yards. “That line about the lagoon full of dead secretaries,” Allen declared, “reminds me of Apollinaire. Who’s next?” I couldn’t believe he compared my line to Apollinaire. It made me think we’d get along just fine…”
“He loved to assign forms and made recommendations about which best suited each student…He used his own poems as examples of how to deploy these forms and frequently referred to the texts that informed the four parts of “Howl.” Even though he’d been steeped in poetry long before he wrote that poem, his theories about his most famous work’s underpinnings felt like they’d coalesced after the poem was published because so many people kept asking him about it. Personally, I loved hearing him discuss it because I loved that poem, but I also wished he’d try to meet us where we were coming from and imagine where we wanted to go with our work.”
During her second year, she progressed to having private tutorials
““The word ‘stanza’ means ‘room’ in Italian,” he said. “So look around the room—is there something interesting you’re not seeing yet? Maybe left out? Something the lines need in terms of visuals or music?” He leaned over and pulled his briefcase up from next to the bed, fishing out the 11-page course pack and flipping to “Thirteen Steps for Revising.” He read #10 out loud: “‘Review it for weak spots you don’t like, but just left there for inertial reasons.’”
Sharon continues, noting Allen’s extraordinary compassion and generosity, not ignoring his weak spots (women! – and ego!) – “he talked more about his life than my poetry – probably because I kept asking questions – but this was where I learned the most from him”.
She recalls the lost opportunity of interviewing him at the very end of his life (“I didn’t want to impose on his time”) – “I could’ve asked him anything. If I had, it would’ve been one of the last interviews he did. Maybe the last. I’d forgotten his advice to look around the room and discover the interesting thing I wasn’t seeing yet. Had I looked, I would’ve found a million things to talk to him about.”
The full essay (Sharon has plenty of things to talk about) can be found – here
Material Wealth-Mining The Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg – We’re thrilled to announce that author Pat Thomas was one of the winners of the 35th Annual PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Awards for Excellence We send on our congratulations.
A full list of the 2024 recipients will be published soon.
The PEN America Literary Awards “annually honor outstanding voices in literature across genres, including fiction, poetry, drama, science and writing, essays, biography, and children’s literature.”
The PEN Oakland writing/author award (what the New York Times somewhat patronizingly refered to as “the Blue Collar PEN”) began in 1989 – founded by writer and activist Ishmael Reed. alongside Floyd Salas, Claire Ortalda and Reginald Lockett
Ginsberg’s Inscriptions – Andy Wilson in his Substack, The Traveller in the Evening, looks back at last May’s London, England, gathering for Allen, organized by Stephen Coates and The Bureau of Lost Culture (one of the evenings was the book-launch for Material Wealth – there was also discussion with Barry Miles and Iain Sinclair)
– “Ginsberg’s Blake Inscriptions for Miles – Where Are the Revolutionary Freaks When You Need Them?”
“I am not a Ginsberg scholar”, he writes, “and the interest I had in the inscriptions was because they seem to touch, even if only lightly, on some key moments of the (William) Blake-Ginsberg conjuncture..”
“I noticed the letters ‘AH’, within a radiant star and at the centre of a flower. I guessed that the letters had to do with the book they were inscribed in, the Annotated Howl. But they are drawn within the sun and a flower, so we are probably talking about Blake’s poem “Ah! Sunflower”, which has a key role in Ginsberg’s mythology, according to which, while living in Harlem in 1948, he experienced the presence of Blake..”
He goes on: “Ginsberg litters his inscriptions with stars. I notice that he uses both five- and six-sided stars (Star of David), he is (almost) consistent within a given image in terms of which star he uses, with the notable exception of the final image here, the second of the White Shroud inscriptions, where the stars are all five-pointed except for the one in the tail of his sunflower, and the one in the cusp of the moon, at the top right”
More inscriptions (wonderful inscriptions! – check them out) – here and here
– and here and here
Eric Van Loon, mastermind behind the recent Rotterdam Corso manifestations, brings his energies to the US again this weekend with the 4th Downtown Poetry Festival (22 events in 4 different cities, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore). Edgar Allan Poe is the focus this year. For full details (and there are many of them) – see here
Speaking of Poe, Poe will be lauded in Lowell, Massachusetts, this upcoming Thursday
Banned Books week in America this week (closing on Saturday) – what a sad thing to have to consistently point out the enormity (increasing enormity) of literary (and by extension political) censorship. Next month (October 3) marks the (67th) anniversary of the Howl verdict, a milestone in the history of free expression, Judge Clayton Horn ruling that the poem could not be so summarily stifled, (tho’ attempts at such censorship continue),
that it was not, absolutely not, obscene.
See also his earlier notes on “See You Later Allen Ginsberg”
‘Hard Rain”, Bob Dylan 1976 at Fort Collins (was recently uploaded) – see here