Neil Gaiman Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”: One Master of Dramatic Storytelling Reads Another

in Literature, Poetry | December 16th, 2016

Which liv­ing writer stands as the heir to Edgar Allan Poe? A sil­ly ques­tion, admit­ted­ly: now, more than 160 years after his death, Poe’s influ­ence has spread so far and wide through­out lit­er­a­ture that no one writer’s work could pos­si­bly count as his defin­i­tive con­tin­u­a­tion. The most pop­u­lar and pow­er­ful mod­ern sto­ry­tellers owe more than a thing or two to Poe — or rather, have built upon Poe’s achieve­ments — with­out even know­ing it, espe­cial­ly if they hail from a dif­fer­ent part of the world and work a dif­fer­ent part of the cul­tur­al map than did 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca’s pio­neer of new and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly intense genre lit­er­a­ture.

Take, for instance, Neil Gaiman. “Every year, World­builders holds a giant auc­tion-char­i­ty-dona­tion thing, giv­ing peo­ple cool things and rais­ing an awful lot of mon­ey for a fan­tas­tic cause,” he says in the video above, which came out just this hol­i­day sea­son. “And every year, I seem to be read­ing a poem or book cho­sen by the peo­ple who pay mon­ey to World­builders.

This year, for rea­sons known only to them­selves, they have decid­ed I need to read Edgar Allan Poe’s ghast­ly, grue­some, dark, and famous poem ‘The Raven.’ So I’ve lit a num­ber of can­dles, fired up the fire, found a copy of the Oxford Book of Nar­ra­tive Verse, and I’m going to read it to you in a com­fort­able chair by the fire, as befits a poem told in the days of yore.”

Though many of his fans come to know him through his nov­els like Amer­i­can Gods and Star­dust, Gaiman’s writ­ing career has also includ­ed work in poet­ry, com­ic books, radio dra­ma, and movies, all of it using his sig­na­ture mix of fan­tas­ti­cal inven­tion, res­o­nant emo­tion, and pol­ished, wit­ty word­craft. When poten­tial col­lab­o­ra­tors on projects in these fields and oth­ers want to work with him, they want to tap not just his uncom­mon sto­ry­telling skill, regard­less of the medi­um in which he tells his sto­ries, but his abil­i­ty to sat­is­fy both wide audi­ences and crit­ics with those sto­ries.

Poe, too, knew how to do this, and indeed described “The Raven” in a mag­a­zine essay as a work delib­er­ate­ly com­posed to “suit at once the pop­u­lar and the crit­i­cal taste,” and since its first pub­li­ca­tion in 1845, the poem has only grown bet­ter-known and more beloved. Here, in Neil Gaiman’s ten-minute read­ing, we can see and hear one mas­ter of high-impact sto­ry­telling acknowl­edg­ing anoth­er over all those 171 years.

Gaiman’s read­ing will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Christo­pher Walken’s Won­der­ful Read­ing of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (on the Anniver­sary of Poe’s Death)

The Great Stan Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

James Earl Jones Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

Lou Reed Rewrites Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” See Read­ings by Reed and Willem Dafoe

John Astin, From The Addams Fam­i­ly, Recites “The Raven” as Edgar Allan Poe

The Simp­sons Present Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and Teach­ers Now Use It to Teach Kids the Joys of Lit­er­a­ture

Hear the 14-Hour “Essen­tial Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear 20 Hours of Romantic & Victorian Poetry Read by Ralph Fiennes, Dylan Thomas, James Mason & Many More

in Audio Books, Poetry | December 1st, 2016

john_keats_by_william_hilton

By the time William Wordsworth and Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge pub­lished their Lyri­cal Bal­lads in 1798, poets in Eng­land had long been celebri­ties and arbiters of taste in mat­ters polit­i­cal and lit­er­ary. The sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, for exam­ple, became known as the “Age of Dry­den,” for poet and lit­er­ary crit­ic John Dry­den’s tremen­dous influ­ence. John Mil­ton, Alexan­der Pope, Samuel John­son… these were lit­er­ary men whose writ­ing vied with the era’s philoso­phers and advised its nobil­i­ty and heads of state. By the Roman­tic peri­od of Wordsworth and Coleridge, no poet held such a posi­tion of author­i­ty and influ­ence as had those of the pre­vi­ous two cen­turies.

And yet, we might argue that poetry—and the exalt­ed fig­ure of the poet—became even more sacro­sanct and indis­pens­able to British cul­ture through­out the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry; that poets became, as Per­cy Shel­ley wrote in 1821, the “unac­knowl­edged leg­is­la­tors of the world.” Such a hyper­bol­ic state­ment may seem to con­flict with the aims Wordsworth stat­ed for Roman­tic poet­ry in the Lyri­cal Bal­lads’ pref­ace: “fit­ting to met­ri­cal arrange­ment a selec­tion of the real lan­guage of men in a state of vivid sen­sa­tion.” Yet when we think of Roman­tic poet­ry, we rarely think of the “real lan­guage of men.”

The nine­teenth cen­tu­ry saw the ascen­den­cy of the British Empire to its height dur­ing Victoria’s reign. Whether effect or cause of the hubris of the times, both Roman­tic and Vic­to­ri­an poetry—all the way to the end of Alfred Tennyson’s 12-cycle series Idylls of the King in 1885—gave us myth­i­cal epics filled with grandeur of expres­sion and image, and no small amount of bom­bast. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (from the Lyri­cal Bal­lads) and strange “Kubla Khan” showed the way. Keats tells an out­sized tale of the Titans’ fall from Olym­pus in Hype­r­i­on. Shel­ley gave us the bleak impe­r­i­al relics of “Ozy­man­dias.”

There were also, of course, the qui­et love and nature poems of Wordsworth, Keats, John Clare, and Wal­ter De La Mare, all won­der­ful­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a Roman­tic pas­toral tra­di­tion reflect­ing a nos­tal­gia for a rapid­ly trans­form­ing Eng­lish coun­try­side. There were the Ori­en­tal­ist poems of exot­ic won­der, and hero­ic poems of mil­i­tary val­or and rev­o­lu­tion. The lat­er nine­teenth cen­tu­ry revealed even more vari­ety as these strains yield­ed to greater spe­cial­iza­tion, and to expand­ed roles for women poets.

Kipling’s colo­nial­ist vers­es reas­sured British sub­jects of their supe­ri­or sta­tus in the scheme of things, and enter­tained them with fables and moral­i­ty plays. Oscar Wilde refined the aes­theti­cism of Keats with a deca­dent eroti­cism. Broth­er and sis­ter Dante Gabriel Ros­set­ti and Christi­na Ros­set­ti took the Roman­tics’ anti­quar­i­an­ism into the ter­ri­to­ry of medieval and Goth­ic revival. Hus­band and wife Robert and Eliz­a­beth Bar­rett Brown­ing looked also to the Mid­dle Ages, and to Italy. Swin­burne and Ten­nyson upheld the tra­di­tion of the epic, imbu­ing it with their own strange pre­oc­cu­pa­tions. Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins did things with lan­guage nev­er attempt­ed before.

All of these poets appear in the Spo­ti­fy playlists here, titled “The Roman­tics” and “The Vic­to­ri­ans,” though you’ll notice that these aren’t mutu­al­ly exclu­sive cat­e­gories. Eliz­a­beth Bar­rett Brown­ing appears in both lists. Ten­nyson, per­haps the longest-lived and most famous poet of the age, spans almost the entire cen­tu­ry.  Keats, whose ear­ly trag­ic death con­tributed to his rock star sta­tus with lat­er read­ers, died most assured­ly a Roman­tic. But the terms hard­ly tell us very much by them­selves, mark­ing con­ven­tion­al ways of divid­ing up the lit­er­a­ture of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.

What we might notice about the Eng­lish verse of these two peri­ods on the whole is its ten­den­cy toward exag­ger­at­ed, often florid and over­ly for­mal dic­tion and syn­tax, and its sen­ti­men­tal­ism, high seri­ous­ness, and deco­rum. These are qual­i­ties we often learn to asso­ciate with all poet­ry, or learn to think of as insin­cere and pre­ten­tious.  In the near­ly 20 hours of skilled read­ings here—including some by famous names like James Mason, Dylan Thomas, John Giel­gud, Sir Ralph Richard­son, Boris Karloff, and Ralph Fiennes—we hear a great deal of nuance, sub­tle­ty, irony, and beau­ty. Learn­ing to appre­ci­ate the poet­ic voic­es of over a cen­tu­ry past not only requires famil­iar­i­ty with unusu­al idioms and ideas; it also requires tun­ing our ears to very dif­fer­ent kinds of Eng­lish than our own.

Both playlists will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings from Harvard’s Rich Audio Archive: From W.H. Auden to Dylan Thomas

Library of Con­gress Launch­es New Online Poet­ry Archive, Fea­tur­ing 75 Years of Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings

Rare 1930s Audio: W.B. Yeats Reads Four of His Poems

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Photography of Poet Arthur Rimbaud (1883)

in Photography, Poetry | November 30th, 2016

rimbaud_in_harar

Arthur Rim­baud, far-see­ing prodi­gy, “has been memo­ri­al­ized in song and sto­ry as few in his­to­ry,” writes Wyatt Mason in an intro­duc­tion to the poet’s com­plete works; “the thumb­nail of his leg­end has proved irre­sistible.” The poet, we often hear, end­ed his brief but bril­liant lit­er­ary career when he ran off to the Horn of Africa and became a gun­run­ner… or some oth­er sort of adven­tur­ous out­law char­ac­ter many miles removed, it seems, from the intense sym­bol­ist hero of Illu­mi­na­tions and A Sea­son in Hell.

rimbaud-pics-2

Rim­baud’s break with poet­ry was so deci­sive, so abrupt, that crit­ics have spent decades try­ing to account for what one “hyper­bol­ic assess­ment” deemed as hav­ing “caused more last­ing, wide­spread con­ster­na­tion than the break-up of the Bea­t­les.” What could have caused the young lib­er­tine, so drawn to urban voyeurism and the skew­er­ing of the local bour­geoisie, to dis­ap­pear from soci­ety for an anony­mous, root­less life?

rimbaud-pics-3

On the oth­er hand, in revis­it­ing the poet­ry we find—amidst the grotesque, hal­lu­cino­genic reveries—that “trav­el, adven­ture, and depar­ture on var­i­ous lev­els are the­mat­ic con­cerns that run through much of Rim­baud”: from 1871’s “The Drunk­en Boat” to A Sea­son in Hell’s “Farewell,” in which the poet writes, “The time has come to bury my imag­i­na­tion and my mem­o­ries! A fit­ting end for an artist and teller of tales.”

rimbaud-pics-4

He was only 18 then, in 1873, when he wrote his farewell. Two years lat­er, he would final­ly end his vio­lent tumul­tuous rela­tion­ship with Paul Ver­laine, and embark on a series of voy­ages, first by foot all over Europe, then to the Dutch East Indies, Cyprus, Yemen, and final­ly Abyssinia (mod­ern day Ethiopia), where he set­tled in Harar, struck up a friend­ship with the gov­er­nor (the father of future Emper­or Haile Selassie), and became a high­ly-regard­ed cof­fee trad­er, and yes, gun deal­er.

rimbaud-pics-5

Rim­baud may have left poet­ry behind, decid­ing he had real­ized all he could in lan­guage. But he had not giv­en up on approach­ing his expe­ri­ence aes­thet­i­cal­ly. Only, instead of try­ing “to invent new flow­ers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues,” as he wrote in “Farewell,” he had evi­dent­ly decid­ed to take the world in on its own terms. He doc­u­ment­ed his find­ings in essays on geog­ra­phy and trav­el accounts and, in 1883, sev­er­al pho­tographs, includ­ing two self-por­traits he sent to his moth­er in May, writ­ing, “Enclosed are two pho­tographs of me which I took.”

rimbaud-pics-6

You can see one of those por­traits at the top of the post, and the oth­er, in much worse shape, below it, and a third self-por­trait just below. The “cir­cum­stances in which the pho­tographs were tak­en are quite mys­te­ri­ous,” writes Lucille Pen­nel at The Eye of Pho­tog­ra­phy.

Start­ing in 1882, Rim­baud became fas­ci­nat­ed with the new tech­nol­o­gy. He ordered a cam­era in Lyon in order to illus­trate a book on “Harar and the Gal­las coun­try,” a cam­era he received only in ear­ly 1883. He also ordered spe­cial­ized books and pho­to pro­cess­ing equip­ment. The planned sci­en­tif­ic pub­li­ca­tion was nev­er real­ized, and the six pho­tographs are the only trace of Rimbaud’s activ­i­ty.

“I am not yet well estab­lished, nor aware of things,” Rim­baud wrote in the let­ter to his moth­er, “But I will be soon, and I will send you some inter­est­ing things.” It’s not exact­ly clear why Rim­baud aban­doned his pho­to­graph­ic endeav­ors. He had approached the pur­suit not only as hob­by, but also as a com­mer­cial ven­ture, writ­ing in his let­ter, “Here every­one wants to be pho­tographed. They even offer one guinea a pho­to­graph.”

The com­ment leads Pen­nel to con­clude “there must have been oth­er pho­tographs, but any trace of them is lost, rais­ing doubts about the degree of Rimbaud’s engage­ment with pho­tog­ra­phy.”

rimbaud-pics-7

Per­haps, how­ev­er, he’d sim­ply decid­ed that he’d done all he could do with the medi­um, and let it go with a grace­ful farewell. His­to­ry, pos­ter­i­ty, the cement­ing of a reputation—these are phe­nom­e­na that seemed of lit­tle inter­est to Rim­baud. “What will become of the world when you leave?” he had writ­ten in “Youth, IV”—“No mat­ter what hap­pens, no trace of now will remain.” In a his­tor­i­cal irony, Rimbaud’s pho­tographs “were devel­oped in ‘filthy water,’” notes Pen­nel, mean­ing they “will con­tin­ue to fade until the images are all gone. They are as fleet­ing as the man with the soles of wind.”

If we wish to see them in per­son, the time is short. The pho­to at the top of the post now resides at the Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France. The oth­er six are housed at the Arthur Rim­baud Muse­um in Charleville-Méz­ières.

via Vin­tage Anchor/The Eye of Pho­tog­ra­phy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Brief Won­drous Career of Arthur Rim­baud (1870–1874)

Great 19 Cen­tu­ry Poems Read in French: Baude­laire, Rim­baud, Ver­laine & More

Pat­ti Smith’s Polaroids of Arti­facts from Vir­ginia Woolf, Arthur Rim­baud, Rober­to Bolaño & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Great 19 Century Poems Read in French: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine & More

in Audio Books, Poetry | November 27th, 2016

baudelaire

Here’s how Smith­son­ian Folk­ways describes this 1961 album now made avail­able by Spo­ti­fy. (If you need their free soft­ware, down­load it here):

Paul A. Mankin recites the most famous French poet­ry from the 19th Cen­tu­ry. Gérard de Ner­val, Vic­tor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamar­tine, the main poets from the roman­tic peri­od are rep­re­sent­ed, as well as pre­cur­sors of Sym­bol­ism, Paul Ver­laine and Stéphane Mal­lar­mé. In addi­tion, the album includes poems writ­ten by the tor­tured Charles Baude­laire and the unclas­si­fi­able Arthur Rim­baud.

Note: The image above is of Charles Baude­laire.  This album will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free. Oth­er albums fea­tur­ing Mank­in’s read­ings can also be found there, includ­ing:

  • Mul­ti­ple Authors — 20th Cen­tu­ry French Poet­ry, Nar­rat­ed by Paul Mankin — Spo­ti­fy
  • Mul­ti­ple Authors — French African Poet­ry, Read in French by Paul Mankin — Spo­ti­fy

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free French Lessons

13 Lec­tures from Allen Ginsberg’s “His­to­ry of Poet­ry” Course (1975)

Hear Bill Murray’s Favorite Poems Read Aloud by Mur­ray Him­self & Their Authors

 

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New Animation Brings to Life a Lost 1974 Interview with Leonard Cohen, and Cohen Reading His Poem “Two Slept Together”

in Animation, Life, Music, Poetry | November 21st, 2016

Leonard Cohen was graced with a dis­tinc­tive slow burn of a voice, a man­ly purr well suit­ed to the louche mys­ter­ies of his most famous lyrics.

His death prompt­ed a post-elec­tion out­pour­ing from his already crest­fall­en fans, who sought cathar­sis by shar­ing the myr­i­ad ways in which his music had touched their lives.

As Cohen remarked in a 1995 inter­view with the New York Times: 

Music is like bread. It is one of the fun­da­men­tal nour­ish­ments that we have avail­able, and there are many dif­fer­ent vari­eties and degrees and grades. A song that is use­ful, that touch­es some­body, must be mea­sured by that util­i­ty alone. ‘Cheap music’ is an unchar­i­ta­ble descrip­tion. If it touch­es you, it’s not cheap. From a cer­tain point of view, all our emo­tions are cheap, but those are the only ones we’ve got. It’s lone­li­ness and long­ing and desire and cel­e­bra­tion.

Rolling Stone dubbed Cohen the Poet Lau­re­ate Of Out­rage And Roman­tic Despair. It’s far from his only nick­name, but it man­ages to encom­pass most of the oth­er 325 that super fan Allan Showal­ter col­lect­ed for his Cohen­cen­tric site.

Have you used Cohen’s music to “illu­mi­nate or dig­ni­fy your court­ing” (to bor­row anoth­er phrase from that Times inter­view)?

If so, you deserve to know that those seduc­tive lyrics aren’t always what they seem.

For one thing, he nev­er got car­nal with Suzanne.

Dit­to the “Sis­ters of Mer­cy.” Turns out they real­ly “weren’t lovers like that.” Cohen var­ied the facts a bit over the years, when called upon to recount this song’s ori­gin sto­ry. The loca­tion of the ini­tial meet­ing was a mov­ing tar­get, and ear­ly on, van­i­ty, or per­haps a rep­u­ta­tion to uphold, caused him to omit a cer­tain crit­i­cal detail regard­ing the night spent with two young women he bumped into in snowy Edmon­ton.

The 1974 radio inter­view with Kath­leen Kendel, above—straight from the horse’s mouth, and fresh­ly ani­mat­ed for PBS’ Blank on Blank series—brings to mind that pil­lar of young male sex com­e­dy, the close-but-no-cig­ar erot­ic encounter.

PBS’ Blank on Blank ani­ma­tor, Patrick Smith, wise­ly employs a light­ly humor­ous touch in depict­ing Cohen’s wild imag­in­ing of the delights Bar­bara and Lor­raine had in store for him. Whether or not they looked like the Dou­blemint Twins is a ques­tion for the ages.

The ani­ma­tion kicks off with a read­ing of his 1964 poem, “Two Went to Sleep,” an ellip­ti­cal jour­ney into the realm of the uncon­scious, a set­ting that pre­oc­cu­pied Cohen the poet. (See the far less pla­ton­ic-seem­ing “My Lady Can Sleep” and “Now of Sleep­ing” for starters…)

You can hear the inter­view Blank on Blank excerpt­ed for the above ani­ma­tion in its entire­ty here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Inter­view: Record­ed by David Rem­nick of The New York­er

How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Bud­dhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlight­ened Life

Ani­mat­ed Video: John­ny Cash Explains Why Music Became a Reli­gious Call­ing

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er, Leonard Cohen fan and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven: Watch an Award-Winning Short Film That Modernizes Poe’s Classic Tale

in Film, Poetry | November 8th, 2016

In 1909, ear­ly cin­e­mat­ic auteur D.W. Grif­fith offered his sev­en-minute inter­pre­ta­tion of Edgar Allan Poe com­pos­ing his acclaimed and wide­ly-read poem “The Raven.” In 2011, film­mak­er Don Thiel offered his twelve-minute inter­pre­ta­tion of an encounter between a writer named Poe, appar­ent­ly young and not long out of the mil­i­tary, and a state­ly talk­ing raven — an encounter that takes place not in the mod­ern day, nor in the first half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry dur­ing which the real Poe lived, but in the win­ter of 1959, over a cen­tu­ry after Poe died — and in a Hol­ly­wood room, no less.

Poe made his name on tales of mys­tery and imag­i­na­tion; Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven adds anoth­er lay­er of mys­tery and imag­i­na­tion atop it all. The effort won the film sev­er­al awards, includ­ing Best Short at the H.P. Love­craft Film Fes­ti­val.

That might at first seem like an odd place for an adap­ta­tion of a poem of long­ing like “The Raven,” how­ev­er delib­er­ate­ly skewed, to earn its hon­ors. But you could see Love­craft, who launched his own life’s career in elab­o­rate explo­rations of dread beyond man’s direct com­pre­hen­sion almost exact­ly a cen­tu­ry ago, as Poe’s lit­er­ary heir.

But then, unlike Poe and “The Raven,” Love­craft nev­er claimed to have writ­ten any­thing delib­er­ate­ly and sin­gle­mind­ed­ly to max­i­mize the sat­is­fac­tion of the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence. Indeed, Love­craft’s work, how­ev­er influ­en­tial on that of lat­er imag­i­na­tive writ­ers, remains in the shad­owy realm of the “cult,” while Poe’s has ascend­ed onto the plane of required read­ing. Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven, which envi­sions Poe’s most famous piece of work with booze, cig­a­rettes, yel­low­ing pat­terned wall­pa­per, lurid light­ing, eight-mil­lime­ter film, a Coro­na type­writer, and oth­er arti­facts of mid­cen­tu­ry dis­so­lu­tion, shows us that they’ve done so in part by tran­scend­ing time and place. Long­ing, it seems, nev­er gets old.

Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

The First Biopic of Edgar Allan Poe: 1909 Film by D.W. Grif­fith Shows the Hor­ror Mas­ter Writ­ing “The Raven”

Edgar Allan Poe Ani­mat­ed: Watch Four Ani­ma­tions of Clas­sic Poe Sto­ries

The Simp­sons Present Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and Teach­ers Now Use It to Teach Kids the Joys of Lit­er­a­ture

Hear the 14-Hour “Essen­tial Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Immersive Audio Tour of the East Village’s Famed Poetry Scene, Narrated by Jim Jarmusch

in History, Life, Podcasts, Poetry | October 21st, 2016

Allen_ginsberg_erads howl

Image by Michiel Hendryckx, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A peek at the pho­tos on a realtor’s list­ing for a New York City one bed­room apart­ment for­mer­ly occu­pied by Beat poet Allen Gins­berg is a dispir­it­ing reminder of how much the East Vil­lage has changed.

And that list­ing is over six years old!

Daniel Mau­r­er, the edi­tor of Bed­ford + Bow­ery, and a Gins­berg fan whom his­to­ry has com­pelled to take over a por­tion of his hero’s for­mer­ly sprawl­ing digs, wrote amus­ing­ly of shod­dy ren­o­va­tions and his upstairs neigh­bor, punk rock icon Richard Hell:

Orlovsky’s name is still on the mail­box – which is just about the only thing still around from his day. After his death, the place was gut ren­o­vat­ed with lux­u­ri­ous mod­ern ameni­ties like a mini fridge that comes up to mid-thigh and a stove that’s so tiny and inef­fec­tu­al I just use it for cook­book stor­age. Soon after I moved in I took a trip to Ikea and rec­og­nized my kitchen cab­i­nets there.

That’s why I was amused to read a piece in the Wall Street Jour­nal … in which my upstairs neigh­bor, Richard Hell, talked about his rent-sta­bi­lized two-bed­room apart­ment and its “funk­i­ness that you don’t find in Man­hat­tan much any­more.”

Hell describes his “worn unvar­nished wood floors that groan when you walk on them, cracks in the plas­ter walls, sag­ging orig­i­nal mold­ings.” That’s exact­ly what I was look­ing for in an apart­ment two years ago.

Mau­r­er is far from alone in the desire to edge clos­er to a bygone cul­tur­al moment. Radio pro­duc­er Pejk Mali­novski spent three years craft­ing Pass­ing Stranger, a site-spe­cif­ic audio tour of the East Vil­lage poet­ry scene, below.

A Dane who relo­cat­ed to New York in 2003, Mali­novs­ki was intrigued by the scene-relat­ed anec­dotes of his friend, poet Ron Pad­gett, who point­ed out his for­mer haunts on strolls about the neigh­bor­hood. His inter­est piqued, Mali­novs­ki immersed him­self in Daniel Kane’s All Poets Wel­come, The Low­er East Side Poet­ry Scene in the 1960’s, anoth­er his­to­ry that comes for­ti­fied with archival audio clips.

Film­mak­er Jim Jar­musch, a long­time Low­er East Side res­i­dent who stud­ied with poet Ken­neth Koch in his youth, was tapped to pro­vide the audio tour’s nar­ra­tion, with music com­pli­ments of com­pos­er John Zorn, the artis­tic direc­tor of The Stone, an exper­i­men­tal East Vil­lage per­for­mance space. Below, Jar­musch explains what attract­ed him to the project:

No mat­ter if geo­graph­ic con­straints pre­vent you from down­load­ing Malinovski’s tour for a two mile, 90 minute amble around the much-changed East Vil­lage. In some ways, the vir­tu­al tour is bet­ter. Rather than try­ing to take it all in in a sin­gle, pre-plot­ted ses­sion, you’re free to wan­der at will, enjoy­ing such inter­ac­tive fea­tures as maps and pho­tos, in addi­tion to inter­views, read­ings, and rem­i­nis­cences.

The 10th stop on the tour deposits you across the street from 437 East 12th Street, Ginsberg’s afore­men­tioned for­mer res­i­dence, on the steps of a church that no longer exists. Mary Help of Chris­tians Roman Catholic Church was demol­ished short­ly after Pass­ing Stranger hit the streets, but its mem­o­ry lives on thanks to its cel­e­brat­ed appear­ance in Ginsberg’s work:

Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writ­ing Let­ters

Pigeons shake their wings on the cop­per church roof 

out my win­dow across the street, a bird perched on the cross 

sur­veys the city’s blue-grey clouds. Lar­ry Rivers 

‘ll come at 10 AM and take my pic­ture. I’m tak­ing 

your pic­ture, pigeons. I’m writ­ing you down, Dawn. 

I’m immor­tal­iz­ing your exhaust, Avenue A bus. 

O Thought, now you’ll have to think the same thing for­ev­er!

- Allen Gins­berg, New York, June 7, 1980

Gins­berg him­self is brought to vivid life by his sec­re­tary and fel­low poet, Bob Rosen­thal, who recalls how vis­i­tors would call up from the street, then wait for Gins­berg to toss down keys, wrapped in a dirty sock. He also name checks Mr. Buon­giorno, the 437 East 12th St neigh­bor who served as Mary Help of Chris­tians’ bell ringer.

You can hear those bells in the back­ground of your Pass­ing Stranger tour, though pro­duc­er Mali­novs­ki uses ambi­ent sound spar­ing­ly, to avoid over­whelm­ing those using the tour on the noisy streets of the actu­al East Vil­lage.

You can down­load the full walk­ing tour of Pass­ing Stranger—named for Walt Whitman’s open­ing salu­ta­tion in “To a Stranger”—here.

Explore Pass­ing Stranger’s triv­ia-filled inter­ac­tive website—featuring audio from Amiri Bara­ka, Het­tie Jones, Eileen Myles, and Jack Ker­ouac, among oth­ers—here.

Poems includ­ed on the Pass­ing Stranger audio tour of the East Vil­lage, in order of appear­ance:

Ken­neth Koch, “To my Audi­ence” (excerpt)

Frank O’Hara, Ode to Joy (To hell with it) (excerpt)

Ted Berrri­g­an “Dear Margie, Hel­lo”

Ron Pad­gett “Poe­ma del City from Tou­jours l’amour”

Walt Whit­man, “To a Stranger”

Tay­lor Mead, “Motor­cy­cles”

Bernadette May­or, “Son­net (You jerk, you did­n’t call me up)”

Diane Di Pri­ma, “Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Let­ters” (excerpt)

Gal­way Kin­nell, “The Avenue Bear­ing the Ini­tial of Christ” (excerpt)

Miquel Piñero, “A Low­er East Side Poem” (excerpt)

Jack Ker­ouac, “Amer­i­can Haiku” (excerpt)

Bill Berk­son / Frank O’Hara, “Song Heard Around St. Bridget’s”

John Ash­bery, “Just Walk­ing Around, from A Wave”

Joe Brainard, “I Remem­ber” (excerpt)

Alice Not­ley, “10 Best Com­ic Books”

WH Auden, “Sep­tem­ber 1, 1939” (excerpt)

Anne Wald­man, “Fast Speak­ing Woman” (excerpt)

Lewis Warsh, “Eye Con­tact” (excerpt)

Dick Gallup / Ted Berri­g­an, “80th Con­gress”

Abra­ham Lin­coln, “My Child­hood-Home I See Again” (excerpt)

Leroi Jones, “Bang, bang, out­ish­ly” (excerpt)

Het­tie Jones, “Ode to My Kitchen Sink”

Bren­da Coul­tas, “A Hand­made Muse­um” (excerpt)

ee cum­mings, ”i was sit­ting in mcsorley’s…”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Footage of Allen Gins­berg, Jack Ker­ouac & Oth­er Beats Hang­ing Out in the East Vil­lage (1959)

Hear Allen Gins­berg Teach “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”: Audio Lec­tures from His 1977 & 1981 Naropa Cours­es

Iggy Pop Con­ducts a Tour of New York’s Low­er East Side, Cir­ca 1993

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Aleister Crowley & William Butler Yeats Get into an Occult Battle, Pitting White Magic Against Black Magic (1900)

in Poetry, Religion | October 10th, 2016

crowley-yeats

Aleis­ter Crow­ley—Eng­lish magi­cian and founder of the reli­gion of Thele­ma—has been admired as a pow­er­ful the­o­rist and prac­ti­tion­er of what he called “Mag­ick,” and reviled as a spoiled, abu­sive buf­foon. Falling some­where between those two camps, we find the opin­ion of Crowley’s bit­ter rival, the Irish poet William But­ler Yeats, who once pas­sion­ate­ly wrote that the study of mag­ic was “the most impor­tant pur­suit of my life….. The mys­ti­cal life is the cen­ter of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

Crow­ley would sure­ly say the same, but his mag­ic was of a much dark­er, more obses­sive vari­ety, and his suc­cess as a poet insignif­i­cant next to Yeats. “Crow­ley was jeal­ous,” argues the blog Rune Soup, “He was nev­er able to speak the lan­guage of poet­ic sym­bol with the con­fi­dence of a native speak­er in the way Yeats def­i­nite­ly could.” In a 1948 Par­ti­san Review essay, lit­er­ary crit­ic and Yeats biog­ra­ph­er Richard Ell­mann tells the sto­ry dif­fer­ent­ly, dri­ly report­ing on the con­flict as its par­tic­i­pants saw it—as a gen­uine war between com­pet­ing forms of prac­ti­cal mag­ic.

Hav­ing been eject­ed from the occult Theo­soph­i­cal soci­ety for his mag­i­cal exper­i­ments, writes Jamie James at Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly, Yeats joined the Her­met­ic Order of the Gold­en Dawn, “an even more exot­ic cult, which claimed direct descent from the her­met­ic tra­di­tion of the Renais­sance and into remote antiq­ui­ty.” At var­i­ous times, the order includ­ed writ­ers Arthur Machen and Bram Stok­er, Yeats’ beloved Irish rev­o­lu­tion­ary Maud Gonne, and famous magi­cians Arthur Edward Waite and Crow­ley. (Just below, see a page from Yeats’ Gold­en Dawn jour­nal. See sev­er­al more here.)

yeats-journal

“When Crow­ley showed a ten­den­cy to use his occult pow­ers for evil rather than for good,” Ell­mann writes, “the adepts of the order, Yeats among them, decid­ed not to allow him to be ini­ti­at­ed into the inner cir­cle; they feared that he would pro­fane the mys­ter­ies and unleash pow­er­ful mag­ic forces against human­i­ty.” Crow­ley’s ouster lead to a con­fronta­tion in 1900 that might make you think—depending on your frame of reference—of the war­ring magi­cians on South Park or of Susan­na Clark’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Nor­rell, or both. “Crow­ley refused to accept their deci­sion,” writes Ull­mann, and after some astral attacks on Yeats,

.… in Highlander’s tar­tan, with a black Crusader’s cross on his breast… Crow­ley arrived at the Gold­en Dawn tem­ple in Lon­don. Mak­ing the sign of the pen­ta­cle invert­ed and shout­ing men­aces at the adepts, Crow­ley climbed the stairs. But Yeats and two oth­er white magi­cians came res­olute­ly for­ward to meet him, ready to pro­tect the holy place at any cost. When Crow­ley came with­in range the forces of good struck out with their feet and kicked him down­stairs.

This almost slap­stick van­quish­ing became known as “the Bat­tle of Blythe Road” and has been immor­tal­ized in a pub­li­ca­tion of that very name, with accounts from Crow­ley, Yeats, and Gold­en Dawn adepts William West­cott, Flo­rence Farr and oth­ers. But the war was not won, Ell­mann notes, and Crow­ley went look­ing for converts—or victims—in Lon­don, while Yeats attempt­ed to stop him with “the req­ui­site spells and exor­cisms.” One such spell sup­pos­ed­ly sent a vam­pire that “bit and tore at his flesh” as it lay beside Crow­ley all night. Despite Yeats’ super­nat­ur­al inter­ven­tions, one of Crowley’s tar­gets, a young painter named Althea Gyles, was “final­ly forced to give way entire­ly to his bale­ful fas­ci­na­tion.”

kuntz-the-battle-of-blythe-road

Ellmann’s both humor­ous and unset­tling nar­ra­tive shows us Crow­ley-as-preda­tor, a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion the wealthy Eng­lish­man had appar­ent­ly earned, as “respon­si­ble gov­ern­ments exclud­ed him from one coun­try after anoth­er lest he bring to bear upon their inhab­i­tants his hos­tile psy­chic ray.” [Bren­da Mad­dox at The Guardian gives a slight­ly dif­fer­ent account of the Bat­tle, in which “Yeats, with a bounc­er, saw him off the premis­es, called in the police and end­ed up (vic­to­ri­ous) in court.” ] Yeats and the oth­er mem­bers’ dis­taste for Crow­ley sure­ly had some­thing to do with his preda­to­ry behav­ior. But the rival­ry was also indeed a poet­ic one, albeit extreme­ly one-sided.

As Crow­ley biog­ra­ph­er Lawrence Sutin writes, “the earnest­ness of the young Crow­ley could not com­pen­sate, in Yeats’ mind, for the tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties and rhetor­i­cal excess­es of his verse.” Yeats’ opin­ion “infu­ri­at­ed Crow­ley,” who indulged in the mag­ic of pro­jec­tion, writ­ing “What hurt him [Yeats] was the knowl­edge of his own incom­pa­ra­ble infe­ri­or­i­ty.” Crow­ley’s remarks are both “ridicu­lous,” Sutin com­ments, and apply “far more con­vinc­ing­ly to Crow­ley him­self.” Nev­er­the­less, Crowley’s “Mag­ick,” con­tin­ued to make Yeats uneasy, and he may have invoked Crow­ley in his famous line about the “rough beast” slouch­ing toward Beth­le­hem in 1919’s “The Sec­ond Com­ing.”

While the mag­i­cal bat­tle between them might pro­voke more laugh­ter than curios­i­ty about their dif­fer­ent brands of mag­ic, Sutin notes a cru­cial dif­fer­ence that dis­tin­guish­es the two men: “where­as Crow­ley placed him­self in the ser­vices of the Antichrist ‘the sav­age God’ of the new cycle, Yeats’s fideli­ty was to ‘the old king,’ to ‘that unfash­ion­able gyre.’” The gyre, so cen­tral an image in “The Sec­ond Com­ing,” stands for Yeats’ the­o­ry of time and his­to­ry, and it belongs to an old mys­ti­cism and folk­lore that for him were syn­ony­mous with poet­ry.

Crow­ley viewed the occult as a source of per­son­al power—his rev­e­la­tions filled books devot­ed to explain­ing the phi­los­o­phy of Thele­ma (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will); ” Yeats was cer­tain­ly more of an “orga­ni­za­tion man… in his occult activ­i­ties,” writes Mad­dox, and sought to prac­tice mag­ic as a holis­tic activ­i­ty, ful­ly inte­grat­ed into his social, polit­i­cal, and aes­thet­ic life. His “pub­lic phi­los­o­phy,” as he called it, writes James, “pro­pounds an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly con­vo­lut­ed sys­tem that aims to inte­grate the human per­son­al­i­ty with the cos­mos.”

To under­stand Crowley’s mag­i­cal think­ing, we can prob­a­bly skip his poet­ry and attempt as best we can to the deci­pher his sev­er­al arcane, tech­ni­cal books full of invent­ed terms and sym­bols. To under­stand Yeats, as much as that’s pos­si­ble, we need to read his poet­ry, the purest expres­sion of his mys­ti­cal sys­tem and sym­bol­ic thought.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aleis­ter Crow­ley: The Wickedest Man in the World Doc­u­ments the Life of the Bizarre Occultist, Poet & Moun­taineer

Rare 1930s Audio: W.B. Yeats Reads Four of His Poems

W.B. Yeats’ Poem “When You Are Old” Adapt­ed into a Japan­ese Man­ga Com­ic

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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