Introduction by Eric Wurmser
EW: This is one of the larger meetings of our Romantic Poetry class. I don’t think we had quite this many people in our class. When we set up the Romantic’s class, we wanted to include some modern poets and prose authors, which were (Jack) Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. When we originally thought this up, we decided it might be.. we might have the good fortune of having Mr. Ginsberg come here and indeed he did. Mr. Ginsberg is a New Jersey boy. He was born and raised in the Paterson area, as I think you all know, and his curricular vitae is a book in itself. I really won’t go into that. He’s extremely well-known.
I think what is particularly important with Mr. Ginsberg is the fact that he shows the power of a poet. He was with a small group of creative men in the ’50’s and these men have really changed society. And if we look and see what has happened between the ’60s and the ’70s, I think you can easily track that. It is with great respect and great honor that I introduce to you Mr. Allen Ginsberg.
AG: Good evening, so how many in here are in the actual class?. Can you raise your hands? And the class is on Romantic poetry, (part of it I understand), so you dealt with some Blake? some Keats?…
EW: We haven’t gotten to Keats yet… but that’s..
AG: Shelley, Wordsworth…Wordsworth? Shelley?
EW: Just Coleridge. We haven’t dealt with Shelley yet
AG: Byron.
EW: Byron.
AG: Right. Does anybody have a Norton anthology? or an anthology here that would have some British Romantic poets? I wonder if we could.. (if that is a part of the subject).
EW (to Student/Audience Member) – Do you have the..
Student: I have the text.
AG: Who has the text?
Student: I have the text.
Ginsberg: Can I borrow it? Thank you
Student: Knock yourself out.
AG: Whatever you got will do. So I thought maybe… (Allen is handed the book). What have we got here? – English Romantic Writers . So, what I thought as a preface to what I’m doing, would be, maybe, to read aloud Shelley – “Ode to the West Wind” and then move on to . . . just got to find it here. And the rest of you who are sitting in, are you part of the school? or, the neighbors?
How many here know the “Ode to the West Wind?” Raise your hands. When I went to school, (which was a quite a long while ago, in high school in the ’30’s), that was taken for granted that everybody would have some Shakespeare, (some Macbeth, or), some Blake and some Shelley, and a few of the Romantic poets, a little bit of the “Ode to the West Wind” or Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy”, Wordsworth’s Sonnet on Westminster Bridge – and those are all a part of high school studies. A lot of that has been lost and…
Let me focus on this and find what I am looking for [Allen looks through the book, Student calls out the page number]
Student: 1026…1026.
AG: Yeah, I hear you.
So, the purpose of my reading this is to draw some parallels between my own writing and writing by Gregory Corso or Kerouac or other of the Beat writers and the old tradition of Shelley.
But one problem is that there are people that are without seats, up there and there [Allen points to the location and begins re-organizing the seating]. Any of you younger people, there’s plenty of room up front here if you want to come up here and sit down and make room for some older people to come into the house. We have this space so let’s make use of it. Plenty of room up here, you can sit down on the stage, or on the ground. Make yourself comfortable. There may be a few extra chairs around. Are there any extra seats in the audience there? [points further into the auditorium] Three or four seats over there that are not being taken if you want to sit down. Just go around there – the one, two, three, four, sixth row.
So, what I would like to do is read aloud a poem called the “Ode to the West Wind” by Shelley. The subject of the poem is wind, or breath, or spirit – Latin – spiritus, breathing, so spirit is really breath, or he is using the wind, the west wind as the breath of earth so to speak. And the subject of this poem, as in a number of poems, is the breath itself. Where there’s breath, there’s life. Where there’s breath, there’s spirit. So, the breath as the breath of life and Shelley’s idea of launching his own mind and his thoughts out on his breath in this poem is really interesting because if you read this poem aloud, following the punctuation to indicate where you should breathe, you are really taking into your body Shelley’s breathing and replicating his physiological nervous system in your own body and you can get high on it, or hyperventilate. (It’s not high, but it’s also a great piece of music, or a great piece of rhythm, a great piece of timing, and a great set of breath, great sound).
Then.. so..I would say this one poem is an icon that Jack Kerouac knew from grammar school and high school, that William Burroughs knew, that Gregory Corso the poet knew – that I knew very well, because my father taught it in high school in Paterson, New Jersey. So, I knew it when I was a kid around the house, and it sort of entered into my own physiology as breathing, as rhythm, (and Kerouac’s). So, it’s a touchstone, or icon, for us, for a tradition of ecstatic poetry, or exhilaration of poetry, or exuberance in poetry, and deep breath in poetry. He wrote it, I guess a year or so before he died, one or two years before he died, (and) actually prophesizes his death by drowning. Well, no, he gets to that in “Adonais” …For those who are interested, his other elegy for Keats called “Adonais” at the end, has that prophecy of his own drowning by being blown into the sea, winds blowing his sailboat into the ocean.
[ From approximately nine-and-a-half minutes in to fourteen minutes in, Allen reads Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” here in its entirety]
What you see is a kind of ecstatic exuberant energy measured on the breath. So, it’s sort of like the joining of Heaven and Earth, in the sense of the Earth, or the body, the breath. Physical breath comes from the body and it’s a physical thing, the thoughts come more from the mind, (the heavenly, the impalpable, the non-material), and they go out as proclamation on the vehicle of the breath. So, there is the old Daoist Chinese, or Oriental, notion of the Emperor joins Heaven and Earth – Or, the poet, or speech, joins mind and body, or speech synchronizes mind and body, or, you might say speech is a proclamation from the throne, or can be, if it’s the right chutzpah, the right courage, the right proclamation, the right sense of imperial straight-back, straight head-and-shoulders, proclaiming the mind outside into the phenomenal world. So poetry as proclamation, as one aspect of poetry. Here like trumpets, in a sense, trumpet-call of enunciation, really, done on the breath itself. (this is interesting), done just by breath. So, the subject matter of this poem is interesting because it is the breath itself, the wind, the West Wind – wanting to identify his own breath with the breath of earth, or the wind, the West Wind itself.
AG (to Students/Audience): What is the West Wind anyway? Anybody know? What particular thing? What was that verse..?. What’s the difference between West and East Wind? Is there any symbolic difference in the Western tradition? There is probably some symbolic difference.
EW: (The) West Wind is (a) clearing wind and bringing cold, cool air, and refreshing.
AG: Okay that’ll be good – renovation, yeah, renewal, or resurrection, the resurrection of spirit, resurrection of soul. So, that’s a kind of interesting shot.
to be continued