Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 349

January 19, 2018Simon Pettet

Opening tonight in New York, at the New York Public Library, You Say You Want A Revolution – Remembering the Sixties – a comprehensive exhibition, drawn from the library’s holdings, “exploring the breadth and significance of this pivotal era—from communal living and forays into expanded consciousness to tensions around race, politics, sexuality, and the environment”.  Items on display, include manuscripts from Allen, (and from Burroughs and Kerouac), “Changing of the Guards”, (an original typescript by Bob Dylan),  and notations from Timothy Leary on his LSD research, (alongside much else).

It’s Edgar Allan Poe‘s birthday today! – … Read More

More Robert Duncan – 5

January 17, 2018Simon Pettet

Robert Duncan at Novato, California,in 1976, continues  – (see previous Duncan video from this reading/lecture – here and here)  

RD: So, here we go, we’re back.  And we’re in a very much later “Passages”, and there are two of them that came, after having two attacks of sciatica and a considerable life-depression because I’d also seen a picture of what my spine looks like (my stomach muscles are holding me up, because there’s nothing going on in there (my spine) that can be doing it at the present round, or ought to be doing it at least).  I … … Read More

More Robert Duncan – 4

January 16, 2018Simon Pettet

Robert Duncan at Novato, California,in 1976, continues.      

RD: I want to take you through a… oh, there’s one more poem I’ll read from Bending the Bow, that was requested, and that’s the poem, “My Mother Would Be A Falconress” – People keep asking me why don’t I write good poems like that all the time? Well, this one landed on top of me, so I…. I’d never be able to do it myself is the only answer to it! I’ll read you the little Preface [“A Lammas Tiding”]  that goes with it, which is sort of a description … Read More

More Robert Duncan – 3

January 15, 2018Simon Pettet

More Robert Duncan.   This is the second of three videos.  The first (along with a transcript) is available – here (and continues – here)

RD: How do you feel the first time that you ask for a job? Is it you that does the interview? – No, I think it’s one of these daily persons like the dream-person, like the.. and so forth… And so I have at least these three (sic) realms I’m familiar with. And then we ‘ve got testimony that people live in the realm that religious people live in. We know there’s that other … Read More

More Robert Duncan – 2

January 14, 2018Simon Pettet

Robert Duncan at Novato, California, 1976,  continuing from – here

AG: Well, lets now for… to move onto a few more poems from this book [Bending the Bow]. It’s the first book also in which the contemplation of the meaning of our American experience emerges very strongly and it’s nice in our solemn bicentennial year (1976 (sic) – Duncan is speaking in 1976),   I haven’t got an American flag hanging in the background, But if poets came out roaring when the inequities of America appeared at full blast in that Vietnamese War, it was not because they weren’t American, it … Read More

More Robert Duncan – 1

January 13, 2018Simon Pettet

Following on from last week’s posting on Robert Duncan, here’s another one.

From 1976, from that remarkable Bay Area Writers series that took place at Novato, California that we’ve featured  before. (See , for example, here and here, here. here and here)

RD: (I have (currently) three books) ..in print with New Directions. Bending the Bow was published in 1968, and I’ve set the date for my next volume with New Directions as being fifteen years from that publication of Bending The Bow. So that makes it 1983, and I don’t have to worry about whether … Read More

Wieners/Duncan – 2 – Wieners

January 7, 2018Simon Pettet

[John Wieners (1934-2002)]

Richard O Moore’s WNET’s USA Poetry transcript continues. Today – John Wieners

For a period during the 1950’s, Robert Duncan, along with the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (In) 1954 John Wieners, the founder and editor of the magazine Measure was a student of Robert Duncan’s at Black Mountain. Weiners work deeply reflects that exploration which is so common to the work of Duncan, Creeley and others, the very personal inward exploration of the mind and body of love.

John Wieners reads from his ”Address of … Read More

Wieners/Duncan -1 – Duncan

January 6, 2018Simon Pettet

This weekend marks the birth dates of two important figures in American poetry – John Wieners (born January 6) and Robert Duncan (born January 7). The two were featured together in 1968 in Robert O Moore’s groundbreaking WNET Poetry USA series.

Here is the video and a transcript of this particular episode (arguably, in the”wrong” order – Robert Duncan today, John Wieners will follow tomorrow)

“This program is dedicate to the work of Robert Duncan and John Wieners

This is the poet Robert Duncan born 1919, Oakland, California. Of his work, Duncan has written, “I make poetry as other men … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 332

September 8, 2017Simon Pettet

[Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and John Ashbery – (Photographer Unknown)]

“….exquisite mind cartoons that could be heard with eyes closed, the voice perfectly ordinary with the slight edge of extravagant conversational camp, a mind artifice not unnatural to hypnagogic revery, deceptive, till you hear the chasm landscapes and awkward universes created and contradicted in vast gas-deposit shocking trivial universal mind.”

Allen Ginsberg – from an introduction to a reading by John Ashbery, at Naropa Institute, 1975.

Hear Ashbery’s reading (along with W.S.Merwin) on that occasion here

John Ashbery’s passing last weekend continues to send shockwaves.

A selection of … Read More

Rose-Cheek’d Laura’s Centrality

September 28, 2016admin

[Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore]

AG: So you’ll find in the twentieth-century,  (Ezra) Pound, (Basil) Bunting, (Louis) Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, some of (Robert) Creeley, all derive from this poem or from the practice of this poem. It’s sort of like the secret inner measure of their work, the kind of attempt that Campion is getting into here or the territory he’s getting into. And that was related to the idea of William Carlos Williams of finding a measure that would be an American … Read More