AG: And then the text to use is, there’s only one really good text, prepared also by David Erdman, for Doubleday, Complete Poems and Prose of William Blake. [revised and updated 2008 – see here] The reason the text is important is if you don’t use the Erdman text you’ll be … you’ll wind up with a text that somebody else has punctuated and put capitals and cleaned up Blake’s syntax, or cleaned up Blake’s capitalization and punctuation so you miss Blake’s original nervous system imprints. Erdman has preserved that, as the Oxford Blake, the big book of complete Blake, Oxford (University) Press, changes it and I think … I don’t know what they do here, let’s take a look at “Tyger” – “Tyger” is, for instance, yeah! If you look at “Tyger” here (Editorial note – Ginsberg is now referring to the version of the poem in The Norton Anthology of Poetry), here you have “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright” in the first stanza and in the last stanza you have “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright.” Now, in the original manuscripts it’s completely different. Blake has “Tyger tyger, burning bright” I think as the first one. “Tyger tyger,” or some mark, or a period, “burning bright” but not exclamation points and the two “tygers” are together as one breath. In the last it’s “tyger, tyger burning bright.” And if you’re singing it you realize you really need that extra breath.
Student: (I think he meant there to be a comma)
AG: Really? No, I bet you not, because I think there is … I don’t think there’s … or, we’ll see. I don’t have the original here, actually, so I don’t know what they’ve got.
Student: (They’ve got a comma)
AG: In the first or last?
Student: First time.
AG: Okay, and now the last. Same in the last? Okay, so, look, what’s (in) your book?
Student: It’s Western Wind by (Anonymous)…
AG: So, dig, some dopey anthologist, not knowing the difference, has got “Tyger, tyger,” another anthologist here has got “Tyger! Tyger!” and the original has “Tyger tyger, burning bright”. So it’s (Allen begins singing) “TY-ger – TY-ger – BURNing – Bright” – that’s how..you’d follow the breathing. It’s important to know the breathing. It’s important to follow the punctuation, to know the punctuation in order to replicate or reproduce the breathing that Blake intended consciously, ’cause he’s as smart as any of these guys that punctuate. He knows what he’s doing. And any poet you follow his punctuation you’ll get the cadence proper. ‘Cause you … generally. (Maybe. Maybe the poets here at Naropa don’t, are too sloppy to notice where they’re slushing around their punctuations and commas and exclamation points, but after you graduate here you’re supposed to know that if you’ve got a comma you mean it, and if you don’t have a comma you don’t mean to have a comma and that you’ve got a blank space. So consciousness of punctuation is one of the bardic attributes, because consciousness of punctuation is consciousness of breath, and consciousness of breath is the substrate of the poetry. In some of the poems we’ll read the breath is the whole subject, not only the substrate but the subject itself.
to be continued