Hear Allen Ginsberg’s Short Free Course on Shakespeare’s Play, The Tempest (1980)

in Education, Poetry | March 28th, 2014

Image by Michiel Hendryckx, via Wikimedia Commons

Ginsberg Class One

Ginsberg Class Two

Like so many great poets, Allen Ginsberg composed extemporaneously as he spoke, in erudite paragraphs, reciting lines and whole poems from memory—in his case, usually the poems of William Blake. In a 1966 Paris Review interview, for example, he discusses and quotes Blake at length, concluding “The thing I understood from Blake was that it was possible to transmit a message through time that could reach the enlightened.” Eight years later, Ginsberg would begin to midwife this concept as a teacher at the newly-founded Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg taught summer workshops at the school from 1974 until the end of his life, eventually spending the remainder of the year in a full-time position at Brooklyn College. The Internet Archive hosts recordings of many of these workshops, such as his lectures on 19th Century Poetry, Jack Kerouac, Spiritual Poetics, and Basic Poetics. In the audio lectures here, from August 1980, Ginsberg teaches a four-part course on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (parts one and two above, three and four below), a play he often returned to for reference in his own work.

Ginsberg Class Three

Ginsberg Class Four

Ginsberg’s method of teaching Shakespeare is unlike anyone else’s. He’s not interested in exegesis so much as an open conversation—with the text, with his students, and with any ephemera that strikes his interest. It’s almost a kind of divination by which Ginsberg teases out the “messages” Shakespeare’s play sends through the ages, working with the rhythmic and syntactical oddities of individual lines instead of grand, abstract interpretative frameworks. Ginsberg’s pedagogy requires patience on the part of his students. He doesn’t drive toward a point as much as arrive at it circuitously as by the chance operations of his meditative mind. His first of four lectures above, for example, begins with a great deal of futzing around about different editions, which can seem a little tedious to an impatient listener. Give in to the urge to fast-forward, though, and you’ll miss the diamond-like bits of wisdom that emerge from Ginsberg’s discursive exploration of minutiae.

Ginsberg explains to his class why he thinks the Penguin G.B. Harrison edition was the best available at the time because it draws from the original folio and has “more respect than the actual arrangement of the lines for speaking as determined by the editions printed in Shakespeare’s day.” Harrison’s text, he says, recovers the idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare’s lines: “Since [Alexander] Pope and [John] Dryden and others messed with Shakespeare’s texts—straightened them out and modernized them and improved them—they’ve always been reproduced too smoothly.” Such was the hubris of Pope and Dryden. Ginsberg spends a few minutes “correcting” the punctuation of a line for students with more modernized editions. One can see the appeal of the first folio for Ginsberg as he insists that its text is “not all exactly properly lined up pentametric blank verse but is more broken, more irregular lines, more like free verse actually, because it fitted exactly to speech.” Much like his own work in fact, and that of his fellow Beats, whom he reads and draws into the discussion of The Tempest’s poetics throughout the course of his lectures. The Allen Ginsberg Project has more on the poet’s teaching of Shakespeare during his Naropa days.

When Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School with Anne Waldman in 1974, he and his fellow Beats had not taught before. They simply invented their own ways of passing on their poetic enlightenment. Invited to create the school at Naropa University in Boulder by his spiritual teacher and Naropa founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Ginsberg seemed to combine in equal parts the Buddhist tradition of spiritual lineage with that of Western literary filiation. He distilled this synthesis in his elliptical 1992 text “Mind Writing Slogans,”: “two decades’ experience teaching poetics at Naropa Institute” and a “half decade at Brooklyn College,” Ginsberg writes, “boiled down to brief mottoes from many sources found useful to guide myself and others in the experience of ‘writing the mind.’” This document is an excellent source of Ginsberg’s eclectic wisdom, as is his “Celestial Homework” reading list for his class “Literary History of the Beats.”

Ginsberg and company’s relationship to Trungpa’s Shambhala Buddhist school, and to the artistic community of Boulder, was not without its detractors. Poet Kenneth Rexroth and others accused Ginsberg and his teacher of a kind of cultic exploitation of Buddhist teachings, of “Buddhist fascism.” The conflict between Ginsberg’s guru and poets like W.S. Merwin—who apparently had a humiliating experience at Naropa—is documented in Tom Clark’s polemical The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. Others remember the Naropa founder much more fondly. Two documentaries offer different portraits of life at Naropa. The first, Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds (above)—filmed in 1978 and narrated by Ginsberg himself—presents a raw, in-the-moment picture of the anarchic Kerouac School’s early days. Former Naropa student Kate Lindhardt’s “micro-budget” Crazy Wisdom, below, offers a more detached look at the school and asks questions about what she calls the “institutionalization” of creativity from a more feminist perspective.

Ginsberg’s Tempest course will be added to our collection of 875 Free Online Courses; the films mentioned above can be found in our collection of 640 Free Movies Online. The Tempest and poems by Ginsberg can be found in our collection of Free eBooks.

Allen Ginsberg’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit: The Poet’s Final Days Captured in a 1997 Film

Allen Ginsberg Recordings Brought to the Digital Age. Listen to Eight Full Tracks for Free

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Orson Welles Reads From America’s Greatest Poem, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1953)

in Literature, Poetry | March 13th, 2014

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass often makes its way into the hands of oversized American characters of, shall we say, uncertain repute. We learned, for example, under scandalous circumstances, of Bill Clinton’s admiration for the book, and we’ll never forget the role it played in the rise and fall of similarly alliteratively named, power-mad Walter White.

Another fictional mastermind—Sideshow Bob—quotes gleefully from Leaves of Grass in a recent Simpsons episode. And perhaps the most outré character of them all—the florid speech of the rogue and pimp Al Swearengen in HBO’s Deadwood—derives in part from the “barbaric yawp” Whitman describes as his native tongue in the poem from which the book’s title comes, “Song of Myself.”

One of the many reasons this particular poem from Leaves of Grass captures the imagination of outlaw intellectuals (and narcissists) may be Whitman’s invention of a new American poetic idiom for the eloquent assertion of stridently defiant personal identities. (As Ezra Pound put it, Whitman “broke the new wood.”) The Guardian placed “Song of Myself” at the top of a 10 best American poems list for the “peerless self-performance” of the poem’s hypnotic cadences. Who better to interpret those lines than another self-invented American contrarian, Orson Welles?

During some difficult times in the fifties—in part due to Welles’ IRS trouble—the great actor/director/multi-media impresario found work on radio plays in England, including The Lives of Harry Lime (based on his character in The Third Man) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (as Moriarty). In 1953, the BBC contracted with Welles to record an hour of readings from “Song of Myself.” BBC 3 broadcast the session, and it later saw release as an LP, now sadly out of print. Fortunately, however, much of this recording has been digitally preserved. At the top, hear Welles read section VI of the poem, and directly above, hear him read the heretical section XLVIII. The Mickle Street Review, an online journal of Whitman studies, hosts a small part of Side 1 and, it appears, all of Side 2 of the record, below. The text of the poem was too long for a full treatment, and Welles, it seems, abridged and adapted some of the work himself. His reading was apparently very well received by the UK press.

Side 1:

Side 2:

While the BBC commissioned the recordings—and Welles no doubt needed the money—he already had an affinity for Whitman. In the same year he completely re-invented American film with Citizen Kane, he also began broadcasting the Orson Welles Show on CBS Radio, on which he and his guests gave dramatic readings from drama, poetry, and fiction. Welles produced 19 episodes, though only 8 have survived. One of the lost episodes, from December 1, 1941, featured Welles reading from Leaves of Grass. As further evidence, we have this photograph of Welles reading Gay Wilson Allen’s The Solitary Singer, a critical biography of the poet.

What draws Welles, and restless personalities like him, to Whitman, and especially to Leaves of Grass? One answer lies in Whitman’s own life. Early on, PBS’s American Experience tells us, Whitman staked out “radical positions… putting him in near constant opposition to society’s prevailing sentiments.” He never moderated his views or his voice, though faced with charges of blasphemy, obscenity, bad writing, and various other public vices at the time. Whitman’s steadfast commitment to his political and artistic vision brought him worldwide acclaim, as well as censure, in his lifetime. A particularly scathing 1882 Atlantic review of the second printing of Leaves of Grass catalogues Whitman’s literary abuses and concludes that “the book cannot attain to any very wide influence.” Despite this terribly wrongheaded prediction, the reviewer at least recognizes Whitman’s “generous aspiration,” a quality held in common by all of Whitman’s admirers, be they heroes, villains, or just average people responding to the poet’s raw self-assertion and capacious, grandiose, and particularly American, form of longing.

Orson Welles Meets H.G. Wells in 1940: The Legends Discuss War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane, and WWII

Hear Walt Whitman (Maybe) Reading the First Four Lines of His Poem, “America” (1890)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot Become Unexpected Pen Pals, Exchanging Portraits & Compliments (1961)

in Comedy, Poetry | February 9th, 2014

Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot: they’ve got to rank as one of the twentieth century’s most surprising pair of pen pals. More intriguingly still, they first got in touch — as luminaries seem to do — out of the spirit of mutual admiration. Marx took the praise beyond Eliot’s poetry to his looks: “Why you haven’t been offered the lead in some sexy movies I can only attribute to the basic stupidity of the casting directors.” This he wrote in the letter of June 19, 1961 above, after having received a portrait of the poet, from the poet, in exchange for a portrait of the comedian, from the comedian. This constitutes only part of what The Economist calls “among the strangest and most delightful epistles ever created.” That same article quotes a darker observation on Eliot from Anthony Julius’ T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form: “Anti-Semitism supplied part of the material out of which he created poetry.”

There we have only one of the reasons to believe that the author of The Waste Land counted as no friend of the Jewish people. Yet at least in correspondence, between 1961 and 1964, he did befriend one particular Jewish person. “Enter Groucho,” the Economist article continues, “whose wit was as uniquely Jewish as it was universally comic. Where Eliot was the famous defender of tradition, order and civilised taste, the crux of Groucho’s humour was flouting tradition, fomenting chaos and outraging taste. ‘I have had a perfectly wonderful evening,’ he once said to a host, ‘but this wasn’t it.’ ” The famous quip could well have come at the end of Marx and Eliot’s first, and last, meeting in person, a dinner at the Eliot house. “There were awkward lulls in the conversation,” according to Anna Knoebel at The Outlet. “Neither man was inclined to discuss his own work, while the other was eager to praise it. They stopped writing shortly thereafter.”

T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Editor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trotskyite” Novel Animal Farm (1944)

T.S. Eliot Reads His Modernist Masterpieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Read Two Poems David Foster Wallace Wrote During His Elementary School Days

in Literature, Poetry | February 3rd, 2014

Some readers discover David Foster Wallace through his fiction, and others discover him through his essays. (Find 30 Free Stories & Essays by DFW here.) Now that the publishing industry has spent more than five years putting out everything of the late writer’s leftover material they can reasonably turn into books, new DFW fans may arrive through more forms still: his interviews, Kenyon commencement speech, philosophy thesis, etc.. And though he produced too few of them to appear collected between covers, Wallace once wrote poems as well, though judging by the handwriting of the two shown here, he seems to have both started down and abandoned that particular literary avenue in childhood. Still, that very quality — and the opportunity it holds out to see the linguistic formation of a man later regarded as a prose genius — makes them all the more intriguing. First, we have the untitled poem above, a sympathetic paean to the labors of motherhood:

My mother works so hard
And for bread she needs some lard.
She bakes the bread. And makes the bed.
And when she’s threw
She feels she’s dayd.

Second, we have ”Viking Song”, which he probably wrote later. (The Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin, where the text resides, believes he was 6 or 7 when he wrote the poem.)

Vikings oh! They were so strong
Though there warriors won’t live so long.
For a long time they rode the stormy seas.
Whether there was a great big storm or a little breeze.
There ships were made of real strong wood
As every good ship really should.
If you were to see a Viking today
It’s best you go some other way.
Because they’d kill you very well
And all your gold they’ll certainly sell
For all these reasons stay away
From a Viking every day.

Though not what we would call mature works, these two poems still offer much of interest to the dedicated DFW exegete. “Note Wallace’s uncommon phrasing in ‘so hard and for bread,’ ” writes Justine Tal Goldberg of the first. “I can’t think of a single child who would opt for this phrasing over, say, a more simple ‘so hard to make bread,’ ” a choice that demonstrates he “was already exhibiting the masterful grasp of language for which he would later become famous.” Alex Balk at The Awl calls “Viking Poem” “ ‘charming and tragic,” adding that “the obvious enthusiasm with which he wrote it makes me reflect on the joys of childhood that we tend to forget.” Wallace’s biographer D.T. Max goes into more depth at the New Yorker, identifying “moments in these poems that herald (or just accidentally foreshadow?) the mature David’s American plainsong voice.” I’ve heard it asserted that every child has a natural capacity for poetry, but the young Wallace, preternaturally perceptive even then, must have soon realized that his textual strengths resided elsewhere.

30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web

David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview (2003)

David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Read Ezra Pound’s List of 23 “Don’ts” For Writing Poetry (1913)

in Poetry | January 30th, 2014

1922 image by Alvin Langdon Coburn, via Wikimedia Commons

Ezra Pound was a key figure in 20^th century poetry. Not only did he demonstrate impressive poetic skill in his Cantos; he also proved to be a crucial early supporter of several famous contemporaries, championing the likes of Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and H.D.. Before deservedly being condemned for his fascist politics and antisemitism, Pound established himself as one of the leading literary critics of his time. David Perkins, in A History of Modern Poetry, wrote, “During a crucial decade in the history of modern literature, approximately 1912–1922, Pound was the most influential and in some ways the best critic of poetry in England or America.”

Early in the 20^th century, Pound helped found the Imagist poetry movement, which abided by three key laws:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

In 1913, Pound wrote an essay entitled “A Few Don’ts.” Its rules, enumerated below, provide young poets with a much-needed reminder to reign in their egos and apply themselves assiduously to their craft.

In a nutshell, the rules state that each verse should be lean and purposeful, with no frills or filler to provide padding. They also emphasize the importance of possessing an awareness of the work of previous poets, and of using this understanding in the creation of new work.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.
Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.
Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace’. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.
What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow. Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Don’t allow ‘influence’ to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of ‘dove-grey’ hills, or else it was ‘pearl-pale’, I can not remember.
Use either no ornament or good ornament.
Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language, so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g. Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare — if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.
It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert.
Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them.
Don’t imagine that a thing will ‘go’ in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose.
Don’t be ‘viewy’ — leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don’t be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it.
When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.
Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap. The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are ‘all over the shop’. Is it any wonder ‘the public is indifferent to poetry?’
Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause. In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.
Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning. It is improbable that, at the start, you will he able to get a rhythm-structure strong enough to affect them very much, though you may fall a victim to all sorts of false stopping due to line ends, and caesurae.
The Musician can rely on pitch and the volume of the orchestra. You can not. The term harmony is misapplied in poetry; it refers to simultaneous sounds of different pitch. There is, however, in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base.
A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure, it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all.
That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the original.
Consider the definiteness of Dante’s presentation, as compared with Milton’s rhetoric. Read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem too unutterably dull. If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon, Heine when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid; or, if you have not the tongues, seek out the leisurely Chaucer. Good prose will do you no harm, and there is good discipline to be had by trying to write it.
Translation is likewise good training, if you find that your original matter ‘wobbles’ when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to be translated can not ‘wobble’.
If you are using a symmetrical form, don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush.
Don’t mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in terms of another. This is usually only the result of being too lazy to find the exact word. To this clause there are possibly exceptions.

To read Pound’s complete essay, alongside several other works of his criticism, head over to Poetry Foundation.

Texts and readings by Pound can be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

Ezra Pound’s Fiery 1939 Reading of His Early Poem, ‘Sestina: Altaforte’

Pier Paolo Pasolini Talks and Reads Poetry with Ezra Pound (1967)

Ernest Hemingway Writes of His Fascist Friend Ezra Pound: “He Deserves Punishment and Disgrace” (1943)

by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Read Allen Ginsberg’s Poignant Final Poem “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)”

in Life, Poetry | January 24th, 2014

Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997. Less than a week before, after the long terminally ill poet had made parting phone calls to nearly everyone in his address book, he wrote the poem above, “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias).” He once called all his work extended biography, and we might call this particular work a piece of biography extended into speculation, comprising all the places (Tibet, Morocco, Los Angeles), people (composer Philip Glass, noted Tangier expat Paul Bowles, his own relatives), and things (attending concerts, teaching students, smoking various substances) he knew he would never experience again, or indeed for the first time — items left over, in short, from what we might now call Ginsberg’s bucket list. The transcript runs as follows:

Never go to Bulgaria, had a booklet & invitation
Same Albania, invited last year, privately by Lottery scammers or
recovering alcoholics,
Or enlightened poets of the antique land of Hades Gates
Nor visit Lhasa live in Hilton or Ngawang Gelek’s household & weary
ascend Potala
Nor ever return to Kashi “oldest continuously habited city in the world”
bathe in Ganges & sit again at Manikarnika ghat with Peter,
visit Lord Jagganath again in Puri, never back to Bibhum take
notes tales of Khaki B Baba
Or hear music festivals in Madras with Philip
Or enter to have Chai with older Sunil & Young coffeeshop poets,
Tie my head on a block in the Chinatown opium den, pass by Moslem
Hotel, its rooftop Tinsmith Street Choudui Chowh Nimtallah
Burning ground nor smoke ganja on the Hooghly
Nor the alleyways of Achmed’s Fez, nevermore drink mint tea at Soco
Chico, visit Paul B. in Tangiers
Or see the Sphinx in Desert at Sunrise or sunset, morn & dusk in the
desert
Ancient sollapsed Beirut, sad bombed Babylon & Ur of old, Syria’s
grim mysteries all Araby & Saudi Deserts, Yemen’s sprightly
folk,
Old opium tribal Afghanistan, Tibet — Templed Beluchistan
See Shangha again, nor cares of Dunhuang
Nor climb E. 12th Street’s stairway 3 flights again,
Nor go to literary Argentina, accompany Glass to Sao Paolo & live a
month in a flat Rio’s beaches and favella boys, Bahia’s great
Carnival
Nor more daydream of Bali, too far Adelaide’s festival to get new scent
sticks
Not see the new slums of Jakarta, mysterious Borneo forests & painted
men and women
Nor mor Sunset Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, Oz on Ocean Way
Old cousin Danny Leegant, memories of Aunt Edith in Santa Monica
No mor sweet summers with lovers, teaching Blake at naropa,
Mind Writing Slogans, new modern American Poetics, Williams
Kerouac Reznikoff Rakosi Corso Creely Orlovsky
Any visits to B’nai Israel graves of Buda, Aunt Rose, Harry Meltzer and
Aunt Clara, Father Louis
Not myself except in an urn of ashes

March 30, 1997, A.M.

Allen Ginsberg

As much of a final statement as it sounds like, “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)” remains, in a way, a work in progress, given the manuscript’s semi-decipherable hand. “Although many of his poems’ first drafts looked like this,” say the caretakers of AllenGinsberg.org, “if anything was unclear, we could just ask. That, obviously, wasn’t an option after April 5 that year.” Ten of Ginsberg’s associates passed the paper around, Google- and Wikipedialessly trying to piece together all of his characteristically far-flung references. The Caves of Dunhuang “went incorrectly transcribed for the first edition as ‘cares of Dunhuang’, since none of us were aware these were caves,” and “when we got to the ‘antique lands of Hades Necromanteion,” we couldn’t find a single reference to it anywhere, and in the end simply stated ‘Hades Gates.’ That’s how it’s published today — still. Till the next edition that is.”

Hear the Very First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading His Epic Poem “Howl” (1956)

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats”

James Franco Reads a Dreamily Animated Version of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Jeremy Irons Reads T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

in Poetry | January 23rd, 2014

In 1914, T.S. Eliot moved from his birth country, the United States, to England at the age of 25 and soon thereafter established himself as one of the most influential poets of this generation, writing some of the best known poems of the 20th century including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925).

Yet Eliot considered his Four Quartets cycle to be his finest. Published individually over the course of six years, the series consists of four poems – Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942) – that are profound mediations on time, the cosmos and the divine.

Eliot discussed the cycle with the Paris Review in 1959. “I’d like to feel that they get better as they go on. The second is better than the first, the third is better than the second, and the fourth is the best of all. At any rate, that’s the way I flatter myself.”

The BBC has produced an audio version of Eliot’s Four Quartets with none other than Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons serving as a reader. The video above is a clip of that reading, taken from Burnt Norton.

You can read along to Iron’s leonine narration:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden.
Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner.
Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush?
Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

The complete cycle read by Irons is on the BBC website for a limited time. (If you want to skip the program’s lengthy introduction, start at the 7:45 marker.)

And if you want to hear the Four Quartets read by T.S. Eliot himself, check out the video below. More readings can be found in our collection of Free Audio Books.

via The Poetry Foundation

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Modernist Poem The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Editor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trotskyite” Novel Animal Farm (1944)

T.S. Eliot Reads The Waste Land

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Sonic Youth Guitarist Thurston Moore Teaches a Poetry Workshop at Naropa University: See His Class Notes (2011)

in Music, Poetry | January 22nd, 2014

It’s not unusual for introspective indie songwriters to make forays into poetry. Some do it rather successfully, like Silver Jews’ Dave Berman; some, like Will Oldham, stir up the poetry world by turning against poetry. Then there are indie stars like the indefatigably youthful Thurston Moore—formerly of Sonic Youth, currently of Chelsea Light Moving—who was asked to teach at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Better known for his numerous ventures in the New York experimental art world, Moore led a three-day poetry workshop at the Boulder, Colorado school’s summer writing program in 2011.

Moore was very much in demand. Anne Waldman, co-founder of Naropa’s writing program with Allen Ginsberg, said at the time, “We’ve been trying to get him for a while. We need him.” (Poetry teacher Kenneth Goldsmith recalls that the only one who wasn’t impressed with Moore was the recently departed Amiri Baraka, who said “he needs to work on those poems.”) Thanks to some very chatty students, we have detailed descriptions of Moore’s teaching style, as well as scans of his class notes. See the first page of Moore’s notes to himself for “Poetry / Music Workshop #1” at the top and a transcription of his elliptical, idiosyncratic method below:

Teacher improvises on electric
guitar while
     students write single words
each to his/her own sense of
     space and Rhythm and evocation
For 4 minutes
     the guitar is recorded on
        cassette recorder
       or computer
Recorded music played back
      through amp. while students
   Read aloud their writing
Simultaneously, All recorded
by cassette rec’r or comp.

MAKE CASSETTES

Student Katie Ingegneri, who interviewed Moore, brings us the page of text as well as the video above of Moore reading at Naropa. According to another one of Moore’s former students with the unlikely name Thorin Klosowski, the first day of the workshop consisted of a “rambling, three-hour introduction” during which Moore “revealed that when he initially moved to New York in the ’70s, it was not to make music, but rather to be a writer.” Klosowski’s piece includes additional pages of Moore’s notes, like that above, which cites countercultural hero Emmett Grogan’s autobiography, Ringolevio. Klosowski tells us that once things loosened up, Moore “did a better job of teaching than when he was pretending to be a lecturer.” The workshop also included some “gossipy tidbits”:

For instance, did you now that Kim Gordon had a texting relationship with James Franco? That Stephen Malkmus hates slam poetry? Or that even after years of being out of print, Moore’s list of ten essential free jazz records he wrote for Grand Royale was still brought into record stores (Twist & Shout and Wax Trax included)?

Moore had visited Naropa once before. In 2006 at a benefit for Burma Life and La Casa de la Esperanza, he read from his books Alabama Wildman, What I Like About Feminism, and Nice War and played some songs from Sonic Youth’s Rather Ripped. Hear the audio of that event above.

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats”

“Expansive Poetics” by Allen Ginsberg: A Free Course from 1981

William S. Burroughs’ Short Class on Creative Reading

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear Allen Ginsberg’s Short Free Course on Shakespeare’s Play, The Tempest (1980)

Orson Welles Reads From America’s Greatest Poem, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1953)

Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot Become Unexpected Pen Pals, Exchanging Portraits & Compliments (1961)

Read Two Poems David Foster Wallace Wrote During His Elementary School Days

Read Ezra Pound’s List of 23 “Don’ts” For Writing Poetry (1913)

Read Allen Ginsberg’s Poignant Final Poem “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)”

Jeremy Irons Reads T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Sonic Youth Guitarist Thurston Moore Teaches a Poetry Workshop at Naropa University: See His Class Notes (2011)

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search