William Burroughs – Creative Reading continues – 6 (on Books & Films)

February 25, 2017Simon Pettet

220px-treasuremadre

William Burroughs on Books and Films

WSB: I’ve got The Treasures of Sierra Madre on here. Now that, it’s sort of axiomatic that good films are not made from good books. The Treasures of Sierra Madre, I think, is a much better film than it was a book (that is, I read the book after seeing the film. I found the book quite a disappoinment, it didn’t have the punch that the film had at all) . I was trying to think of a case of a really good book that has been made into a good movie, … Read More

Expansive Poetics – 37 (Lawrence and Whitman)

March 13, 2014admin

Allen’s Expansive Poetics lectures continue

AG: These specimens in American poetry of open-form verse are not that easy to find. Even after (Ezra) Pound and (William Carlos) Williams – 1905 or so – most American poets continued writing in the more archaic, nineteenth-century, iambic patterns. And when I first discovered free verse, working with William Carlos Williams, it was an adventure going out and trying to find poets in America or England who had written in an open form and had done it well (not just sloppy free verse, but poets who had some kind of electricity in the line).… Read More

Expansive Poetics 36 (Shakespeare and D.H.Lawrence)

March 6, 2014admin

File:Howard-TimonAct4.jpg

[William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens – Act IV Scene 1 – Timon renounces society –  Engraving by Isaac Taylor (1803), after a painting by Henry Howard]

Allen’s Expansive Poetics class continues…  class reconvenes, July 2nd 1981

Allen begins with a reading (Timon’s speech)  from William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens) AG:  “Let me look back upon thee, O thou wall,/That girdlest in those wolves, dive in the earth,/ And fence not Athens! Matrons, turn incontinent!/ Obedience fail in children! slaves and fools,/ Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench,/ And minister in their steads! To general filths/ Convert, … Read More

Spontaneous Poetics – 112 – Whitman 4)

August 1, 2013Peter Hale

[Walt Whitman in New York, 1887, aged 68, photograph by George C.Cox]

AG: (Late Whitman) – “Songs of Parting”, now, however…

[Allen begins by reading Whitman’s “As the Time Draws Nigh” – “As the time draws nigh glooming a cloud/ A dread beyond of I know not what darkens me/ I shall go forth/I shall traverse the States awhile, but I cannot tell whither or how/long/ Perhaps soon some day or night while I am singing my voice will/suddenly cease./ O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this?/ Must we barely arrive at the … Read More