Richard Lovelace (Althea and Lucasta)

January 3, 2018Simon Pettet

[Richard Lovelace (1617-1657)]

Allen Ginsberg, continuing his 1980 Basic Poetics class at Naropa – here

AG: Well, he lives only..  (Richard) Lovelace lives only forty years. The commentator here says,  “a life of only forty years spent in such vicissitude give little opportunity for that retirement from the world that art and scholarship require” – So, now, Lovelace has written a couple of classics, that everybody knows, by heart actually  – “To Althea From Prison” – maybe… who would like to read that? – does anybody know this poem? – Remember “Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 330

August 25, 2017Simon Pettet

Allen Ginsberg on tv, May 7 1968 on Firing Line With William Buckley

from the Letters column in last weekend’s New York Times Book Review

“Reading Ann Douglas’s review of Allen Ginsberg’s “The Best Minds of My Generation” (Aug. 6) reminded me of a chance meeting with Ginsberg in the early ’60s. After a performance of Genet’s “The Blacks” at a small theater in the East Village, I waited in front for my then-fiancée. Also standing there was Allen Ginsberg. I mentioned a poem by his father, Louis Ginsberg, that appeared in the textbook I used to teach … Read More

July 12 1995 – Part One (Ginsberg, Blaser, Brown)

July 12, 2017Simon Pettet

Anniversaries. We love anniversaries.  July 12, 1995.  The above group-reading at Naropa, twenty-two years on. The above six were joined by Steven Taylor (on several pieces, as accompanist) and Andrew Schelling and Max Regan giving introductions).  The tape begins in media res with Allen reading  from his “visionary dream”  of the past January (January 14. 1995) , followed by “Newt Gingrich Declares War On “McGovernik Counterculture” , “The Ballad of the Skeletons”  (“Skeleton Keys”),  and “New Stanzas For Amazing Grace”

Allen Ginsberg: “(Poetry America was born before us & will live after us — and would’ve been visible … Read More

Robert Creeley – 1

February 6, 2017Simon Pettet

allenginsberg_0111-630x429

[Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley. Photograph by Laure Leber]

continuing with transcription of  Allen Ginsberg’s Basic Poetics class from February 1980 (Feb 27) at the Naropa Institute  

AG: Who’s got the right time?…  So, last time we were.. so..  what you were just doing before was Ted (Berrigan), Ted’s class. How many of you are in Ted’s class? So what happens?, There’s a half an hour wait in between? Is that a heavy shot to go through, two long hour- and-a-half (classes) in the evening. How does that work out? I was wondering. Are we creating.. (putting) too much on, … Read More

Expansive Poetics- 67 (Symbolism & Imaginism)

June 17, 2014admin

Allen’s Summer  July/August 1981 Naropa class on “expansive” poetry (most especially, early twentieth-century Russian poetry) continues today with some preliminary “theoretical bullshit”

AG:  (So). Going back. I want to go back and remind us of a poem that we had read which was by (Osip) Mandelstam, which is not in our (class) anthologies, and I’ll give you a version of that, and then an echo of that years later. That line, “We shall gather again in Petersburg.” [“B Петербурге мы сойдемся снова”], (because that begins to take on more poignance, when you realize that, by 1930, … Read More