WNET (Koch and Ashbery) – Kenneth Koch

February 10, 2018Simon Pettet

Another of the WNET poetry films that we’ve been featuring. This weekend – Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery  – Today, the young  Kenneth Koch

KK: There’s an awful lot in my poems that I don’t understand at the time of writing them and if I understand them as I write them it’s usually a bad sign but I don’t think that’s ever happened.

“There are certain constants in my work and one is this interest in juxtaposing one thing against another in such a way that it’ll be dramatic and beautiful and funny and interesting. Incidentally, my work … Read More

WNET – Frank O’Hara & Ed Sanders –  Frank O’Hara

February 3, 2018Simon Pettet

Vintage WNET USA-Poetry continues. This weekend – Frank O’Hara and Ed Sanders (starting with Frank O’Hara) . This priceless footage (O’Hara died a few weeks after the shooting of the film) includes footage of him reading his ebullient, witty poem for Allen – “Fantasy (dedicated to the health of Allen Ginsberg)”.

The film begins, however, with a reading of “Mozart Chemisier” – (“Mozart Chemisier” is a poem I wrote after visiting David Smith, the great American sculptor, in his house in Bolton Landing and it’s really called.. (Chemisier”)  and the Mozart comes in because he was his favorite … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 249

December 18, 2015admin

 

Allen Ginsberg – Photograph by Cynthia Macadams

Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Reddit – on what is his favorite Allen Ginsberg poem – “Aunt Rose” because it’s a very touching, deep and profound expression of love and empathy of his old Aunt Rose. It’s even more powerful than his long poem [“Kaddish‘] about his mother.”

 
Harry Smith, Second Avenue and Twelfth Street (NYC), 1987 – Photograph by Brian Graham

John Wieners  (1934-2002)
… Read More

Kenneth Koch Q and A continued

October 18, 2015admin

 

                              [Kenneth Koch – Portrait of Kenneth Koch by Alex Katz] Kenneth Koch Q & A from 1979 continues KK:  Maybe we should have some more questions. What would you like me to tell you about? Student: What do you at Columbia? KK: I teach three courses there. I’m a regular Professor. I teach a writing course with twelve students. It’s, I mean, in this writing course, it’s not just a poetry-writing course,  I have people writing poems and stories and plays. I even usually have them write, sometime in the year, one long lonely piece of criticism, because … Read More

Kenneth Koch Q & A

October 17, 2015admin

 

         [Kenneth Koch (1925-2002)]

Two weeks ago, we featured transcript of “New York School” poet, Kenneth Koch speaking at Naropa (back in 1979). This weekend we continue that with transcript of the Q & A that followed his lecture

Student: You.. When you write, do you get edited at all?
 
KK: I’ve never allowed anybody to edit me at all. People don’t edit poetry. I mean, if they do, they’re loco, I mean in the… You know, it depends.. If, say, John Ashbery were editing a magazine, and I sent in a poem, and he said, “Kenneth, I don’t.. … Read More

Kenneth Koch’s 1979 Naropa Class

October 3, 2015admin

                                                               [Kenneth Koch (1925-2002]Kenneth Koch last week – Here’s transcription of Kenneth’s (Summer Academy of Practicing Writers) May 26, 1979 Naropa class

KK: [on being confronted with a tape-recorder] –  Am I registering alright on the future? – ”nothing must be lost” – I don’t know when anybody’s going to find time to listen to all the things that are being recorded in the present. They’ll be wasting their … Read More

(Tuesday April 7) Billie Holiday Centennial

April 7, 2015admin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Billie Holiday (1915-1959), New York, 1949 – Photograph by Herman Leonard]

Today, April 7, 2015 is the Billie Holiday Centennial

Billie Holiday was born, Eleanora Fagan, in Philadelphia exactly one hundred years ago today.

Allen Ginsberg, writing in 1947: “Billie Holiday is well-known in jazz circles as an amazing great woman. Little Jack (Melody) and Vicki (Russell), who know her, promised to arrange for me to meet her. I had long hoped and expected to meet her one time or another. … Read More

Meditation and Poetics – 25

January 5, 2015admin

 

Our serialization of Allen’s 1978 Naropa Institute lecture series, Meditation and Poetics continues with this class from July 24 1978 AG: So, heroic days, the (19)20’s and (19)30’s, with heroic figures making movements which are based on real philosophic ideas, which were themselves based on new notions of sense perception, sharpening and focusing of sense perception. Oddly enough, in the twentieth-century, there was this breakthrough . Maybe because everything was so confusing, so relative, the Industrial Revolution had gone so far and everything began changing so much that there was no intellectual standard, no God to appeal to anymore, … Read More

Expansive Poetics 93 – (Apollinaire & Frank O’Hara)

August 4, 2014admin

André Salmon

[Andre Salmon (1881-1969)]

[Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)]

Guillaume Apollinaire en novembre 1913 lors de son procès à Paris.

[Guillaume Apollinaire (1889-1918)]

AG: So the last thing we had in the anthology was a poem read (by Guillaume Apollinaire) at the marriage of Andre Salmon, and the reason I put that in is that, in addition to inaugerating double-sight Cubism juxtaposition modernity (of psychological modernity, as well as bellowing buses and tramcars and electric wires), he also inaugerated that “Personism“that Frank O’Hara writes of (as) his basic theory of poetry, which is that because the poet is the maker of the word, anything that happens to the consciousness of … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 183

July 25, 2014admin

“Jahweh and Allah Battle“. We thank our good friend Steve Silberman for his reminder about Allen’s “eternally prescient” 1974 poem

Jaweh with Atom Bomb Allah cuts throat of Infidels Jaweh’s armies beat down neighbouring tribes Will Red Sea waters close & drown th’armies of Allah?

Israel’s tribes worshipping the Golden Calf Moses broke the Tablets of Law.

Zalmon Schacter Lubovitcher Rebbe what you say Stone Commandments broken on the ground Sufi Sam whaddya say Shall Prophet’s companions dance circled round Synagogue while Jews doven bearded electric?

Both Gods Terrible! Awful Jaweh Allah! Both hook-nosed-gods, circumcised. Jaweh Allah which

… Read More