Ginsberg Naropa transcripts. We take a break (temporarily) from Ginsberg-on-Blake to focus on a more contemporaneous appreciation, Jack Kerouac, and in particular, Jack Kerouac’s poetry. Beginning today, transcription of his August 14, 1980 class.
Allen begins by announcing his proposed plan
AG: Today we’re going to pick up on Kerouac’s poetry, and what I did was I prepared some sections from reading that Kerouac did before he wrote – that is to say, his influences – and then sections of tape of his own voice reciting some of his poems – poems and parts of The Subterraneans, and then my favorites out of Mexico City Blues to continue with. Some of the material might be in your Don Allen anthology, but not much of it, so I don’t know whether that’ll be of very much use. There are five people I wanted to read who are (were) big influences on Kerouac’s prose style. One was Thomas Wolfe, one was Herman Melville, one was Jean Genet, one was Louis Ferdinand Céline and one was James Joyce. I’ll read little pieces, a page each, of crucial paragraphs that I remember Kerouac being fond of. So these are the specific key for these writers, who wrote orchestral, symphonic, melodious prose. These are key paragraphs that influenced him and contributed to his style, both in prose, and then into poetry.
(Firstly), from Thomas Wolfe … we don’t have “Oh lost and by the wind grieved ghost,“ … Dan?
Student: Yeah?
AG: Do we have that section, “Oh lost and by the wind grieved ghost” from Thomas Wolfe. [Editorial note this is the opening of Of Time and the River]
Remember that italicized section? Well, we’ll have to retrieve it again, I guess. –
“The train toiled slowly….” – (This is Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, page 25, Orestes, flight before fury) – “The train toiled slowly around the mountain grades, the short and powerful blasts of its squat funnel sound harsh and metallic against the sides of rocky cuts. One looks out the window and sees cut, bank, and gorge slide slowly past. The old rock wet and gleaming with the water of some buried mountain spring. The train goes slowly over a perilous and dizzy height of a wooden trestle. Far below the traveller can see and hear the clean foaming clamors of rock-bright mountain water. Beside the track, before his little hut, a switchman stands looking at the train with a slow, wondering gaze of a mountaineer. The little shack in which he lives is stuck to the very edge of the track above the steep and perilous ravine. His wife, a slattern with a hank of tight drawn hair, a snuff stick in her mouth and the same gaunt, slow, wondering stare her husband has, stands in the door of the shack, holding a dirty little baby in its arms. It is all so strange, so near, so far, so terrible, beautiful, and instantly familiar that it seems to the traveller that he must have known these people forever, that he must now stretch forth his hand to them from the windows and the rich and sumptuous luxury of the pullman car that he must speak to them, and it seems to him that all the strange and bitter miracle of life, how, why, or in what way he does not know, is in that instant greeting and farewell, for once seen and lost the moment that he sees it. It is his forever and he can never forget it. And then the slow, toiling train has passed these lives and faces and is gone, and there is something in his heart he cannot say. At least the train has breached the great wall of the soaring ranges, has made its slow and sinuous descent around the powerful bends and corkscrews of the shining rails, which now he sees above him seven times, and toward the dark, the lowland country has been reached. The sun goes down behind the train, a tremendous globe of orange and pollen. The soaring ranges melt swiftly into shapes of smoky and enchanted purple. Night comes, great-starred and velvet-breasted night. And now the train takes up its level pounding rhythm across the Piedmont swell and convolution of the mighty state…”
So you can begin (to see) a cadence and post-Whitmanic cadence in prose and a verbal invention like the sun “a tremendous globe of orange and pollen.” – “And now the train takes up its level pounding rhythm across the Piedmont swell and convolution of the mighty state.” – It’s a real breath, a real mouthful of breath at the end of the line.
“Who has seen the fury riding in the mountains? Who has known furies striding in the storm. Who has been mad with fury in his youth, given no rest or peace or certitude by fury, driven on across the earth by fury, until the great vine of the heart was broke, the sinews wrenched, the little tenement of bone, blood, marrow, brain and feeling in which great fury raged was twisted, wrung, depleted, worn-out, and exhausted by the fury which it could not lose or put away. Who has known fury, how it came? How it would breed them, drunk him, eaten fury to the core, until we have him in us now and cannot lose anywhere we go. It is a strange and subtle worm that will be forever feeding at our heart. It is a madness working in our brain. A hunger growing from the food it feeds upon, a devil moving in the conduits of our blood. It is a spirit wild and dark and uncontrollable forever. Oh, thou whose radiance doth inherit me.”
It’s the same breath as Hart Crane and Shelley.
Student: Yeah.
“Dark and uncontrollable forever swelling in our soul. And it is in the saddle now, horsed upon our lives, rolling the spurs of its insatiate desire into our naked and defenseless sides, our owner, master, and the mad and cruel tyrant who goads us on forever down the blind and brutal tunnel of kaleidoscopic days at the end of which is nothing but the blind mouth of the pit and the darkness and no more.”
That’s a real single-paragraph sentence. A single-sentenced paragraph. It’s really beautiful, actually, as sound and ahs rolling period. Miltonic or biblical or Whitmanic, you could say. And in the prose these long cadenzas of pure composition, invention, melodiousness, leading at the end to sometimes occasional cadenzas that are repeated, as in music.
“He never knew. It may have been a rock, a stone, a leaf, the moths of golden light as warm and moving in the place of magic green. It may have been the storm wind howling in the barren trees, the ancient fading light of day in some forgotten summer, and the huge unfolding mystery of undulant, on-coming night.”
to be continued
Audio for this class can be heard – here, beginning at the start of the tape and continuing until approximately eight-and-a-quarter minutes in