Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 359

March 30, 2018Simon Pettet

[Carl Solomon at home in the Bronx, 1991 – Photo: Allen Ginsberg, courtesy Stanford University Libraries]

Today, Friday March 30th. is Howl dedicatee, Carl Solomon‘s birthday. For last year’s Carl Solomon posting (“Remembering Carl Solomon”) – see here)

It’s also the anniversary of Rimbaud‘s lover, the poet, Paul Verlaine‘s birthday.  (For a posting on Verlaine’s “Chanson d’Automne” – see here)

And, while we’re on the subject of anniversaries – Our dear friend Bob Creeley died on this date thirteen years ago. Much missed, thinking of you, Bob.

David S Will’s Beatdom continues to deliver challenging A.G. … Read More

Gershom Scholem

December 5, 2017Simon Pettet

[Gershom Scholem (1897-1982)]

Gershom Scholem,  from  On Jews and Judaism in Crisis – Selected Essays

“The poet Allen Ginsberg once visited me. A likeable fellow. Genuine. Strange, mad, but genuine. I took a strong liking to him.My wife and I had a very interesting conversation with him, and in her inimitable way she asked him. “Why don’t you come to live here?” (I never ask anyone this question. People know whether and when it is time to come; that’s basic. If people want to come then it’s possible to talk to them about it. But I don’t have it in … Read More

Pound and Waller (“Go dumb-born book”)

November 20, 2017Simon Pettet
[Ezra Pound]
[Edmund Waller]
AG: Then (Ezra) Pound (on page one thousand and six). He thinks it [Waller’s “Song”} ‘s so good that it’s his high-water mark, so he wants a... And, in Pound, it’s amazing, it’s one of the few cases in the history of English poetry where somebody made an imitation that’s really just as good as the original, because Pound’s “Envoi” of 1919 is actually as beautiful, I think, as the Waller [“Go, lovely rose“] –
So “Go dumb-born book’ – but was..  it.. you know..  Pound’s specialty was this long.. was quantitative meter,
… Read More

More on Metrics – 3

November 15, 2017Simon Pettet
AG: Well, it’s not that that you need to be able to understand it [Greek prosody] 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 taught in drama-school and high-school primary rhythms, it was very rare that anything was taught beyond the four variants of iamb, trochee, anapest and dactyl.  – that seemed to be the range of  the English ear, or awareness of rhythm, or American high-school awareness of rhythm, … Read More

Allen Ginsberg – Richland College reading – part 2

October 1, 2017Simon Pettet

Allen Ginsberg’s 1980 Richland College reading – continuing from yesterday

AG: So I would say now move on to.. 1956- moving on from 1956 to 1976. I have a series of poems which will require some music also – “Father Death Blues” – if we can get together on the stage –

My father died in 1976 in midsummer and I wrote a series of poems while he was alive because I spent a lot of time with him during the previous..during the winter that he was wasting, He was quite old and not in pain because it was a … Read More

Granelli & Sompa and basic rhythms

April 26, 2017Simon Pettet

[Photo: Jazz drummer, percussionist, Jerry Granelli]

Student: (Rhythm.. rhythms)

AG: But – wait a minute – but, if you did a little bit of work with Titos Sompa [Congolese-Californian teaching at Naropa] and [jazz-drummer] Jerry Granelli in analyzing, not analyzing, just learning, the basic Afric rhythms that they use ( you’ve heard them play, haven’t you?)

Student: (Sure).

AG: Have you heard Titos Sompa? – What are their names, Titos and..?

Student: Bemba..

AG: Bemba..  They are teaching basic African rhythms, (which are not very different from this kind of five.. five-beat rhythms – in fact, what they are … Read More

Breath Moves

December 21, 2016Simon Pettet

screenshot-2016-12-15-12-17-44

AG: …However, it’s all shadow there, and so.. anyway, what we get from Samuel Daniel, page one-ninety –  “Are there shadows that we see?/And can shadows pleasure give?/Pleasures only shadows be/Cast by bodies we conceive/And are made the things we deem/In those figures which they seem/ But these pleasures vanish fast /Which by shadows are expressed;/”Pleasures are not, if they last…” – What is beauty but a breath? – Pleasures are not if they last.

Pleasures aren’t pleasures if they last – they don’t exist unless they.. If they last, pleasures don’t exist, they’re on a breath – … Read More

Q & A – 2 – (Poetry and Revision)

August 4, 2015admin

 

Cover for “First Thought Best Thought “ Chögyam Trungpa’s book of poems, published in 1983 by Shambhala

AG: Yeah? Student: ( I had some difficulty with your statement about poetry when you said (you advised not to) repeat again (that) you can’t go back and review) AG: Yes. (I’m just repeating for the mic), you had difficulty with my statement last time when I said that.. “just write what comes down into your mind , you can’t go back and revise”. Student: Right 

AG: What was…. Student: I had difficulty with that, because I felt that maybe somebody who … Read More

Plutonian Ode, 1978, (The Robert Creeley Recording)

April 25, 2015admin

 

[ Robert Creeley (1926-2005) – Photograph by Michael Romanos]

Last weekend, we featured Allen reading (from “Kaddish” and other poems) as part of the Robert Creeley audiotape collection, (now lovingly engineered and digitalized and made available on the incomparable PennSound site).   This weekend, we spotlight another one, a reading, some years later, from 1978, (in the Kiva Room at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where Creeley was then teaching, the first recipient of the chair of David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters – he would later be promoted to the position of … Read More

1979 Allen Ginsberg Reading in Toronto (Plutonian Ode & other poems)

February 21, 2015admin

 

 

More vintage footage this weekend (courtesy Don Rothenberg)  – Allen Ginsberg (with Steven Taylor) in Toronto, in April 1979, on the occasion of the World Symposium on Humanity event there. The main feature – (following some brief explication) – a reading, in its entirety, by Allen, of his recently-composed “Plutonian Ode” The footage can be viewed here

The  tape begins in media res with Steven Taylor on guitar accompanying Allen (on aboriginal songsticks) in a version of “Put Down Your Cigarette Rag“. This is followed, at approximately three-and-three-quarter minutes in, (“for loud voice, oratorical “), … Read More