Student: Can I go back and ask you a question? We were talking about entering the imagination and making it manifest..
AG: Yeah, well, the reason I read this (Christopher Smart’s “A Song to David”), incidentally, was, obviously , he had to sit down and work on it. And it must have been fun.
Student: For you, what’s left after this manifest I mean, that’s not totally off-the-wall..
AG: What’s left?
Student: Yeah. Inside.
AG: Inside? – Inside? It’s only.. You plumb … Read More
A vintage Naropa reading from July 21 1985 in two parts for this weekend.
Today, the first part, features Eric Mottram and Philip Whalen. Anne Waldman gives the introductions.
Allen Ginsberg tomorrow.
AW: We’re pleased to have Eric Mottram, Philip Whalen and Allen Ginsberg reading – and Eric and Philip will be reading first and then we’ll have a short break and Allen will complete the evening
I have a couple of announcements to make. Please no smoking in this room and no flash photographs and also I’d like to announce there’ll be copies of this … Read More
Remembering today one of the great Buddhist teachers, Suzuki Roshi, Shunryu Suzuki, influential Soto Zen priest and founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center (the first Soto Zen training monastery in the United States and one of the very first Buddhist training monasteries to be established outside of Asia)
Suzuki was also the author of the hugely popular Zen Mind, Beginners Mind (1970). a key book from a key figure in the spreading in the West of the dharma.
Here’s Allen – from an interview, circa.1996, with David Chadwick:
DC: Can you remember the … Read More
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
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
Charles Reznikoff: Oh I say., May I suggest, isn’t … Read More
Continuing from yesterday.
AG : Then, 1972 Trungpa Rinpoche invited me to Boulder to give a poetry reading to raise money for Rocky Mountain Dharma Center along with Robert Bly and Gary Snyder. So I was really pleased to go out and see him in his home territory and went out there and he invited … Read More
A real treat this weekend – with gratitude to Robyn Brentano and students from the NYU Ethnographic Film Program – “Buddhism and the Beats.”. “In 1993, Allen Ginsberg spoke to a gathering of students of the Tibetan Buddhist monk, Lobsang Samten, about the impact of Buddhist thought and practice on himself, the Beat writers, and American culture at large”. The full hour-and-a-half tape is transcribed below (continuing tomorrow, and with the Q & A session to be featured here next weekend)
AG: Well, good evening, Rinpoche [Lobsang Samten Rinpoche] and I met very recently at the house … Read More
Interviewer: So we want to figure out what’s best, you know, what will be most comfortable for you. What I want to do is an oral history of the ‘Sixties and Austin’s an interesting area because there’s a major university with a lot of anti-war… There was a segregtion case, a very famous law case here in 1959. There’s been an awful lot of work with the valley farm workers and Chicanos, plus we”ve got the Rothschilds here [sic], we’ve got all of LBJ‘s legacy. Basically, Austin’s sort of conservative but with the university and the State Capitol here, … Read More
AG: The other poem of (Edward) Carpenter‘s we might as well do, while we’re on Carpenter, is “The Secret of Time and Satan”. The reason I brought him up is he’s one of the children of (Walt) Whitman and one of the people who applied Whitman’s method of realistic all-inclusiveness, notation in present time, empathy in space, empathy and sympathy going out in space to make notions in present time. (It’s) a more philosophical poem based on theosophical ideas. It has Whitman’s basic impetus and … Read More
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Philip Whalen: Senryu is the comical and obscene and..
AG: vulgar?
Philip Whalen: ..vulgar, that type of thing. Also, there’s a..
AG: A two-volume history of haiku Philip Whalen: Yes, a two-volume history. Then there’s another book that’s called Oriental (Wit and) Humor [Oriental Humor], which is also..(a book of) senryu, and other jokes and song, and… (A)