Reassembling Perception

September 7, 2017Simon Pettet

[Pablo Picasso. Skull and Leeks 1945]

AG: So you assemble, you reassemble, all these objects and you get the sensation that you had at the time. So it’s almost like a precise science.. won’t you believe it?

Student: Well, it seems like you’re taking a real classical approach that these things that come in on you can be.. can all be put in an organized sentence, in an elegant way.

AG: Okay

Student: But after…   I mean, don’t you think a..  I mean, a McLuhan-esque term, “the mosaic thinking”,  that just sometimes just lists of images would  be more accurate … Read More

Ginsberg on Mind Flow (Wittgensteinian Linguistic Analysis)

August 17, 2015admin

Allen continues to elucidate the thirty precepts that comprise Jack Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” AG:  “(21) “Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in your mind” –  That’s the real key, or that’s the main slogan here – Struggle – well, I wouldn’t say a struggle – but, “sketch the flow that already exists intact in your mind” – in mind.  So what he’s saying is there already is an interior monologue, or interior talk, or interior movie going on, you’re always seeing movies inside, you’re always dreaming movies, daydreaming movies. If you’re a novelist, … Read More

Spontaneous Poetics 83 (Edward Marshall – 3)

June 5, 2013Simon Pettet

[The conclusion of Gary Snyder’s “Myths & Texts Part III – Burning” opposite the opening of Edward Marshall’s “Leave The Word Alone” in The New American Poetry (1945-1960), Evergreen/Grove Press, 1960 – edited by Donald M Allen – Marshall and his poem were omitted from the revised edition of this book subsequent published as The Postmoderns, 1994]

Poet, Ted Berrigan is sitting in on Allen’s class and he chimes in

Ted Berrigan: Well, Allen, there he (Edward Marshall)’s using the word “they” (“they are/ dangerous”)…

AG: Yeah

TB: …to refer to “word”, “Bible” and “barbed wire”…

AG: Okay

TB: …and … Read More

Spontaneous Poetics – 75 (“This Is Just To Say”)

May 15, 2013admin

[William Carlos Williams’ poem, “This Is Just To Say”, displayed as a tattoo]

July 2, 1976, Allen’s summer lecture at Naropa continues

AG: I’m going to continue with the different considerations of mindful arrangement of open verse forms, the original subject I was on before, which is how you arrange your mind on he page. We have covered the echo of syllabic count the impulse of accents, the tone-leading of the vowel, the breath-stop as a measurement of the line, measurement of units of phrasing from the mouth as a division of line, divisions of mental ideas (as parts of … Read More

Spontaneous Poetics – 74 (Deep Stenography)

May 14, 2013admin

AG: Well, I still want to get back to where we started which was, what’s your phenomenology of mind? What’s the phenomenon of what we call consciousness? or what we call language? How does it arrive to you? and what’s the best way to notate that? Can you be a good secretary of yourself? Can you be a good stenographer? (And the difficulty there is between superficial stenography and deep stenography, in discerning what’s actually going on, and not accepting some of the trash that’s thrown up to the social brain. There’s a social brain while writing, and then there’s … Read More