Well, we’d contend that this posting here is possibly our definitive Ginsberg-Basil Bunting post (thanks to the wonderful video provided by Tom Pickard) but we wanted to update our honors, on the occasion of the anniversary of his birth, with the addition of this remarkable video (courtesy Steve Dickison and the SFSU Poetry Center‘s incomparable digital archives.
Basil Bunting reading at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art April 29 1976.
He reads in its entirety, his celebrated long poem “Briggflatts” and, by request, an earlier long poem, “Chomei at Toyama,”
As the SFSU website observes:
“Sitting in a chair with a tableside floorlamp and being fitted with a necklace-style microphone (“Like a coronation, isn’t it?”), the poet notes that he typically provides some introductory explanation when he reads “Briggflatts”. However, he says he’s “become extremely bored with (his) little lecture on the subject,” and crediting his San Francisco audience as “probably quite bright enough to supply all that for itself,” Bunting says: “At any rate, if you aren’t, I’m entirely happy if you merely enjoy the noise it makes.”
