Allen Ginsberg – Ars Poetica – Dallas Texas 1980 – Joe Stanco Interview

October 14, 2017Simon Pettet

Following on from last weekend, and complimentary to an earlier tape that we featured (from Richmond College, Dallas Texas), another video gem from the Stanford Archives – Ars Poetica – An Interview with Allen Ginsberg conducted by Joe Stanco

[The participants begin, caught in conversation, in media res]

JS: Oh. – My name is Joe Stanco and I’m talking today with Allen Ginsberg and, at the moment, we were discussing Ezra Pound who’s certainly..in fact you said, at one point, “the most important American poet since Whitman”

AG: I guess. Yeah. Well… (Because ) he had more effect … Read More

Williams, The Haiku, and the Natural Sequence

September 5, 2017Simon Pettet

[William Carlos Williams – Collected Poems – published by The Objectivist Press. 1934, Williams’ first “collected”  edition]

continuing from yesterday

AG: So, now , the reason I was coming on to all of this was that the short form of the haiku or the long form of the (William Carlos) Williams sentence all say the same thing, which is – if you try to weave a series of discrete haiku-like perceptions in (Jack) Kerouac -ian-sketchy-sketch style, if you try to weave them in to one single continuous cadence of breath and a single continuous syntactical order, you’ll have … Read More

More Haiku Thinking

September 4, 2017Simon Pettet

“Old pond/Frog jumps/kerplunk!”

continuing from AG’s 1980 Naropa class – see here

AG  It’s [Trungpa Rinopoche’s tri-partite philosophy of the haiku] real interesting.  It got me onto noticing what was wrong with a lot of my haiku(s), and so I found that most of my haiku(s) just had, you know, a flash, and then some location or picture. or comment, or flash and recognition, but no zappy comment, that zapped the whole thing out, that made it, So, in other words, haiku, three short parts. Does that make sense?

Student: Yeah, It’s interesting to think of a … Read More

On The Composition of Haiku

August 24, 2017Simon Pettet

[Heaven-Earth-Man Calligraphy]

continued from yesterday,   1980 Naropa classroom –  Student is refering to another student’s writing that Allen has just analyzed

Student:  For a while there, it seeemed like, like she was saying, it seemed like,  I don’t know how many syllables there were, but they seemed they were pared down, to the length of haiku,  almost

AG: The way she did it? – Yeah.  Yeah, but it didn’t work. It was sort of like awkward haiku(s) and no single one of them made a big deal except maybe, “the rhythmic twang of the steel cord slapping against the flagpole”,  … Read More

Objectivism at Michigan Poetry Conference , 1973

August 19, 2017Simon Pettet

Our feature today – the extraordinary gathering on Objectivist poetics that took place in 1973 in Allendale Michigan and Allen’s participation in it. We are indebted to the labors (both with video and transcription) of Steel Wagstaff. His introduction to the occasion (on the poetry-site, Dispatches)  may be read here. Below is some transcription of Allen’s contribution (his engagement with Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and George Oppen). For a complete transcript (provided by Wagstaff) – see here

[Seidman House, Grand Valley State College, Allendale, Michigan, 1973]

Charles Reznikoff: Oh I say., May I suggest, isn’t … Read More

Allen Ginsberg Reading at The Intersection, San Francisco, 1971

July 29, 2017Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg, 1971]

Another archived reading today (courtesy the irreplaceable PennSounds) – Allen Ginsberg reading at The Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco in 1971

AG: I’ll begin. Most of what I’ll read tonight is poetry from the last twelve months (sic), but I want to begin, prefatory, by a poem written in 1949, part of a book called Gates of Wrath, which will be published by Four Seasons Press, “Stanzas Written at Night in Radio City”      (“If money made the mind more sane…”…”Man runs after his own shadow”) – “Gary Snyder Reading Poesy … Read More

Allen Ginsberg at Cheltenham 1993

May 27, 2017Simon Pettet

Allen Ginsberg, in 1993, reading at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in England. The feature today on The Allen Ginsberg Project. Allen reads a selection of poems, (mostly from White Shroud and the, subsequently-published Cosmpolitan Greetings

Introduction: Good evening everybody and some of you I’m sure came to the event where Allen Ginsberg was being interviewed by John Calder here today and will have suffered as Mr Ginsberg did the problems of the weather and British Rail. Years ago Allen Ginsberg wrote of Jack Kerouac that he was the sole full-moving thing, earlier today I’m afraid Allen Ginsberg was the sole … Read More

Spontaneous Poetics- 129 (Blyth and Haiku)

September 4, 2013Simon Pettet
 AG: I got some complaints that last time (that) I was  getting up in the air, reading too much and boring people, (which is probably true, because my attention wavered occasionally when I was reading through the Wordsworth – most of the time I was there and present, but my attention waved too, as your attention must have –  partly out of desperation, because, actually, (with Wordsworth) I’ve sort of run out of things to teach! – except the things that I knew already, like “Tintern Abbey”, or “Intimations of Immortality..”  I would, if I had it, read through … Read More

Spontaneous Poetics – 64 (William Carlos Williams 8)

April 23, 2013admin

[William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)]

Ginsberg on Williams continues:

AG: There’s lots of short poems (of Williams) that might be looked at. What does he do (for example) when he gets into a violent scene, where all perceptions are jarred? [Allen proceeds to read William Carlos Williams’ poem, “The Last Turn” – “Then see it! in distressing / detail – from behind a red light/at 53rd and 8th/ of a November evening, the jazz/ of the cross lights echoing the/crazy weave of the breaking mind:/ splash of half purple, half/ naked woman’s body whose jeweled/ guts the cars drag up

… Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 122

April 19, 2013admin
[cover for On Tibetan Buddhism, Mantras and Drugs – Interviews with Allen Ginsberg by Paul Lobo Portuges,  published by Word Palace Press, San Luis Obispo, California, 2013]

[Cover illustration for the recently-published Brazilian (Portuguese) edition of Spontaneous Mind (Mente Espontanea) Selected Interviews 1958-1966, published by Novo Século (New Century) in São Paulo, Brazil, 2013]

[Cover illustration for original US edition of Spontaneous Mind – Selected Interviews 1958-1996, published by HarperCollins, New York, 2001]

A follow-up on last week’s post about philistinism, and ignorance about Allen, in Arica, Chile. The controversy, it seems, has now effectively been resolved by … Read More