20 Pearls (10) by Richard Tuttle

Notes from Richard Tuttle Lecture/ Naropa/ July 3, 2008, 1:30-3pm

[Richard wears bright hibiscus-pink button-down over sea-blue t-shirt--he's been reading poets in Latin--Ovid, Catullus, Virgil--Mei Mei wears interesting yellow-green snake-skin slippers with drab jeans silver watch cuddles toy poodle holds head in her hands]

*

The 3 Types of Writing Are:

1.  To dig something out.
2.
3.  To point toward what cannot be said.

*

from Richard Tuttle's reading (read in a very halting, cadenced voice):

"the flowering evil...  why should people be annoying to each other?...  there was never a romantic solution...  I can please myself then I can please you...  the rigorous green that makes the world round...  I do not do this to make sense...  sacrifice to the hidden gods...  I don't feel ok...  yes we can take it back...  colossal...  even the forest empty in what you say...  take care of something small...  we see with our own eyes...  my pleasure is there what would you do?...  a novel progressive enough...  I would do anything to know an angel like that...  even if no one watching...  they don't care because they're not artists"

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Pieces

                    Could write of fucking--
                    rather its instant or the slow
                    longing at times of its approach--

                    how the young man desires
                    how, older, it is never known
                    but, familiar, comes to be so.

                    How your breasts, love,
                    fall in a rhythm also familiar,
                    neither tired nor so young they

                    push forward.  I hate the metaphors.
                    I want you.  I am still alone,
                    but want you with me.

                    .     .     .

                    AMERICA

                    America, you ode for reality!
                    Give back the people you took.

                    .    .     .

                    Allen's saying as we fly out of NYC--the look of the city
                    underneath us like a cellular growth, "cancer"--so that
                    senses of men on the earth as an investment of it radiates
                    a world cancer--Burrough's "law" finally quite clear.

                    .     .     .

                    CITIZEN

                    Write a giggly ode about
                          motherfuckers--Oedipus--
                    or Lysergic Acid--a word
                          for an experience, verb

                    .    .    .

                    "But now it's come to distances..."
                                                   --Leonard Cohen.

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I am nothing more than a poet:  I love all of you.
Let none think of me.
Let us think of the entire earth
and pound the table with love.
I don't want blood again
to saturate bread, beans, music:
I wish they would come with me:
the miner, the little girl,
the lawyer, the seaman,
the doll-maker,
to go into a movie and come out
to drink the reddest wine.
I did not come to solve anything.
I came here to sing
and for you to sing with me.

--from "Let the Rail-Splitter Awake"

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The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka Lecture/ Naropa University/ July 1, 2008, 3:30-5pm

Prelude:  Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" & "Knocking on Heaven's Door"

Akilah Oliver introduces Amiri, mentions his Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Amiri: 

We are containers of
what contains us.

*

Who runs this shit and who
makes money off of it?

*

Whose side are you on? is a class question.

*

Racism/Classism/Sexism
are profitable.

*

There's no fundamental change until you
ORGANIZE.

*

Every power on earth should be used to develop
alternate fuel sources.

*

Part of the environment is Propaganda:
lies about the environment.
The lies cause us to act irrational.

*

Why do we do the things we do?
Why do we think the things we think?

*

The economy:  the most fundamental means of being alive.

*

We don't even know the questions to ask
and that is a pitiful situation.

*

Most of the things we think
have been given to us.

*

The very forces responsible for the problems
can make us think we did it.

*

The media is merely
the mouthpiece of the rulers...
Death to Ignorance!

*

See the book Living on the Ice Shelf:
evolution has been forced into
another trajectory.

*

Ethanol
just deprives people of corn to eat.

*

See The House of Bush and The House of Sau
for connections between Bush and Saudi Arabia.

*

Change
cannot
just
be
wished.

*

Racism/Sexism/Classism
will never end under capitalism.

*

Go to Denver for the DNC
and act like your natural selves.

*

Ask Obama about Cuba and Palestine.

*

McCain is a basic fool--
he even voted against MLK day!

*

The White House
also known as
The Caucasian Crib.

*

YOU CAN EITHER LEAD PEOPLE
OR GET IN THEIR WAY.

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El Corazon

Pulchritudinous from the OED:  Beautiful, graceful, or fine in any way.
 
as in 1912 L.J. Vance Destroying Angel xv. 217, I love my love with a P because he's Perfectly Pulchritudinous and Possesses the Power of Pleasing.

as in 1949 Chicago Tribune 21 Feb. I. 28/5 By us the hippopotamus..Is never counted pulchritudinous.

as in 1975 Bookseller 20-27 Dec. 2720/1 An ageing tycoon and a pulchritudinous blonde half his years but nearly equal to him in experience.

as in a father's childhood nickname:  pulchritudinous hippopotamus.

as in beautiful, beatific, beat.

as in he/she possesses a beautiful (pulchritudinous) mind.

as in anti-beauty beauty.

as in Hoa Nguyen:  "Make it pretty-ugly, ugly-pretty."

as in Alice Notley:  "I've taken care that this poem not be a nice [pulchritudinous] place."

as in Anne Waldman: "darken your speech."

as in Pound: "make it new."

as in O'Hara: "go on your nerve."

as in Dada-Dada-Dada-Dada-Dada-Dada-Dada-Dada-Dada.

as in a rolling stone.

as in Obama.

as in manifestari:  to make public.

as in Spring and All.

as in "Mahalia Jackson swinging it" (Joanne Kyger).

as in Ginsberg: "I am America!"

as in "my heart still loves/ will break" (Berrigan).

as in Amiri Baraka.

as in Simone Weil.

as in For Love.

as in the bridge of the moment

sways as we speak.

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Saul Leiter, Lanesville, 1958

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Boulder Creek by Cosmography

and brown like
           morning coffee
                    pouring and pouring itself

forward, forward
            pulling along sticks, leaves
                     detritus.

The old, old rock
            good place to sit
                     dangle feet in water

watch splash of
            water meeting
                     rock--

I remember Joanne
            Kyger poem about
                    a stone from Boulder Creek.

I remember Lorine
            Niedecker's "Paean to Place":
                    'And the place was water.'

The water flows
            downward, goes
                     back to its source.

I flow with it, know
            I can sit
                    by it without thought

of anything pulling
           at me or making
                    me do.

The water flows
           from mountains, from reservoirs
                    full of melted snow--

not for swimming, those reservoirs
           but my inner
                   reservoir

I draw from
           like Lorine's
                   'fish and fowl'.

I draw from the water, sip
            pristine liquid,
                    laugh.

And if my reservoir
            is drained
                    how to refill it?

Can I draw from
            the mind-reservoir
                    and not deplete it?

Can I sit by the water
            and take nothing
                    from it?

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Vajrasattva & Consort

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Cat Power

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Ginsberg&Co

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