Moving A Piano
June 14, 2018
Every so often, we’ll beg your indulgence with a fragment of transcript that’s pretty incidental, but kind of fun. Here’s Allen, at the very end of his 1980 “Basic Poetics” Naropa lectures (the penultimate one, we’ll be concluding it next week), making arrangements (including arrangements for assistance in moving a piano) AG:[…]
Barry Farber Interview – 5 (continues)
April 21, 2018
[On May 4, 1970, four unarmed students at Vietnam War protests at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, were killed by National Guardsmen – the iconic image here shows, on the ground, one of the deceased, Jeffrey Miller, shortly after the shooting – Student Protest –  “After Kent State, after Kent State,[…]
A List of List Poems
December 21, 2017
AG:  But by this anaphoric rapture, or anaphoric repetition, it {Crashaw’s poem “The Flaming  Heart”] actually builds up to rapture. So this is what Anne Waldman calls “a list poem”, actually, an early list poem. I taught a little poetry workshop this weekend and checked out list poems and the samples I[…]
Allen and Louis and the Vietnam War – November 1965 Letter
November 29, 2017
A passionate letter today from 1965  (at the height of the Vietnam War), Allen, in San Francisco, on this day (November 29), writing to his father. The naivety, indeed myopia, on his father’s side exasperated Allen (the simplicity of the goad that he was a “Communist”  that the “Commies infiltrated and used[…]
Original Emotions/Archetypal Rhythms
November 23, 2017
continuing from yesterday Student: Would it do any good to know what these rhythms are if you don’t have the capability of voicing that feeling or that emotion that ends up being one of these., AG: Well, I think that these cadences and these emotions are natural, so I don’t think that[…]
More on Metrics – 3
November 15, 2017
AG: Well, it’s not that that you need to be able to understand it  to write a poem. It’s not perverting your speech to get those rhythms. Rather, it is that speech does have those rhythms, and that you can follow the cadences with those rhythms, that when we were[…]
More on Metrics – 2
November 14, 2017
Allen Ginsberg continues, lecturing his Naropa students on metrics AG: “Moloch who’s eyes….. da da-da da, da-da da da , da-da da ,da-da da-da da, da-da.. And if you have a gang of choruses going bop-pa-pa-bom, bop-pa-pa-bom, you’ve got something very powerful[…]
More on Metrics
November 13, 2017
continuing from here MORE ON METRICS Allen’s pedagogical insistence on quantative prosody, on the minutae of classical prosody, was something he came back to again and again with his students at Naropa  (see, for example  – one of many examples – here).[…]
Allen Ginsberg 1974 San Francisco tv Interview – “I Believe” – part 2
October 8, 2017
continuing from yesterday – (transcript of Allen Ginsberg and Father Mike S Riley’s 1974 conversation picks up approximately sixteen-and-a-half minutes in) MR: What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing with all of the Christian metaphors and analogies?. It’s just “Christ,” “Jesus, “”the Church”, “Crucifixtion”… AG: Well, what I’ve been talking (except[…]
Ginsberg and China
September 9, 2017
  Allen Ginsberg in China is our focus this weekend. Allen and China – great news! -.a new (first-time!) edition of his Collected Poems is due out very soon in that country  (hopefully in November)  […]