More Blake – Tiriel – 1
September 24, 2018
Allen Ginsberg on William Blake continues This tape (from January 18 1979) begins in media res with Allen lecturing on William Blake’s narrative poem, Tiriel AG:  … pointing out that “Ijim” is an idiot belief in reality, or[…]
Contextualizing William Blake
July 18, 2018
title-page illustration to William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) –  “Lo to the vault/Of painted heaven” Allen Ginsberg continues and concludes his first (Jan 8, 1979) Naropa class on William Blake (and his Poetic Sketches) here AG: Well, you can already see at the age of fourteen what an[…]
Allen Ginsberg’s Psalm
March 20, 2018
continuing from yesterday AG: Okay, I’ll finish this (poem) , it’s not that much, I’m going to read it through and we’ll have it – “And I write shadow changes into bone/To[…]
Early Ginsberg – 3 – Two Sonnets
March 7, 2018
AG: Then I tried some combination… then Shakespeare , then I tried a Shakespeare sonnet (again, the same year (1948). The occasion was  reading the entire manuscript of Kerouac’s The Town and The City, and because it was so monumental and poderoso,  […]
Pull My Daisy (Collaborative Poem)
February 13, 2018
AG: And another one of the similar.. well, of a similar theme, just a crazy (crazy).. – the mad song?  you know, just the idea of the madman’s song?, was – “Pull My Daisy”,  (which began as a little lyric that I wrote, “Pull my daisy/tip my cup…”) – “Pull my daisy/tip[…]
Pound and Waller (“Go dumb-born book”)
November 20, 2017
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[…]
A Brief Anthology of English Lyric
November 2, 2017
Allen at Naropa on “Basic Poetics” continuing from here AG: So we’ll go back to Edmund Waller or do a bit more of (John) Milton. But I would like to get to Edmund Waller for a while, for a brief while. Is that alright? Is that… “Go, lovely rose”  (on page three-oh-five).[…]
Composition and Condensation – 1
August 21, 2017
AG:  And then there was another thing.. I was talking with…Rachel …with Rachel..and we were talking about composition and condensation of poems and ..some ideas crystallized that might be useful. I’ve talked about it before I thought but apparently I had never said it[…]
Herrick and Tom o’ Bedlam
August 2, 2017
“All the sprites that stands by the naked man/In the book of moons, defend ye” – Zodiac Man (illustration from a 1580 Almanac)] AG: Then, I don’t know if you remember,.. there’s an interesting rhythm here, like the “Tom o’ Bedlam” lyric that I read last year – “From the hag and[…]