6 posts tagged “allen ginsberg”

Market

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
          In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
          What peaches and what penumbras!  Whole families
shopping at night!  Aisles full of husbands!  Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

          I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
          I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops?  What price bananas?  Are you my Angel?
          I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
          We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

          Where are we going, Walt Whitman?  The doors close in
an hour.  Which way does your beard point tonight?
          (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
          Will we walk all night through solitary streets?  The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

          Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
          Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Allen Ginsberg, Berkeley, 1955

During Naropa University's Summer Writing Program of 2001, I had the great opportunity to study with Joanne Kyger. Her workshop—INVESTIGATIVE POETICS—introduced such fellow writers as Ed Sanders, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn and Alice Notley. We read from Ed Sanders’ 1968: A History in Verse, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn’s epic poem “Gunslinger,” and Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses. Joanne repeated Spicer’s notion that poetry is a form of magic, most potent when spoken aloud. Joanne also told us about Spicer’s Poetry As Magic workshop that included Robert Duncan. She would probably approve of this statement made by Spicer in 1949 :

Live poetry is a kind of singing.
It differs from prose, as song does,
in its complexity of stress and intonation.
Poetry demands a human voice to sing it
and demands an audience to hear it.
Without these it is naked, pure,
and incompletely - a bore.*[1]

Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 & attended Santa Barbara College. One day in January 1957 she drove up to San Francisco with [her] Siamese cat. She arrived at the height of the Howl obscenity trial, and a friend introduced her to The Place, the bar that was headquarters for Jack Spicer and other poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. She attended the Sunday Meetings lead by Spicer and Robert Duncan and gave her first reading at the Bread and Wine Mission in 1959 before moving to Japan with Gary Snyder. Joanne and Gary married in Japan, living there & also travelling to India (with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlofsky), events that are chronicled in Kyger's Japan and India Journals 1960-64. Kyger returned to San Francisco and published her first book The Tapestry and The Web. She moved to Bolinas in 1968 where she continues to reside, writing poetry, editing the local newspaper, and teaching at Naropa University and The New School in San Francisco.

Joanne Kyger’s writings include:

Phenomenological
Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
All This Everyday
Mexico Blonde
The Japan and India Journals
As Ever
Just Space: Poems 1979-1989
Again: Poems 1989-2000

About Now:  Collected Poems

In her essay "Joanne Kyger's Poetry" in Coming After:  Essays on Poetry,

Alice Notley states:

Kyger's influence on my own practice--and on many other women's--has been considerable; she's one of the women who's shown me how to speak as myself, to be intelligent in the way I wish and am, rather than suiting the requirements of established intellectuality.  Universities are frightfully conservative because they love their traditions and especially their language; idiomatic truth can't get born there, or anything that has to be new, not just wants to be.

*

           Yuppy Wittgensteins Arise!

She writes

and drinks

coffee

and writes:

                "I want to point out that I am not up tight"

                                 "You believe this stash of writing is 'scholarly'?"

"Oh Man is the highest type of animal existing..."

and

I

love

her dailiness, which is to say her everyday manner of setting down

her life, one day at a time.  Visiting Gary's [Snyder] house last night...  I was

no longer in waiting as this world I called my own opened out.

                She is full of personality and pizzazz, she is witty:  It was suggested

by Robert Duncan that we all write/ Cock Poems for the next class.  Splendid!

Like Anne Waldman, I wish she was my neighbor.  As she is still alive, and as 

I took a class with her, I have a mind to write to her.  I once

sent her a beautiful wave painting that my friend Robin made and

I like to think it is on her window ledge in her writing shed where sit:

               Tiny light grey moth

                      New Delhi bronze rabbit

                                Roy de Forest dog

                                              Kwan Yin

             Joanne Kyger once wrote "The Life of Naropa   for Ted Berrigan," in which

she told about the sentient blissful brilliant light that was Naropa.  (Ken

gave me her Collected Poems for my birthday, but also, I have the limited edition 

Just Space, printed in Ann Arbor, which she signed: 

Write in your journal

every day! 

           And Joanne wrote It's terrible what's happening in this war

atmosphere when 'your' government lies to you and neglects the people...and:       

                           "The expression of my thoughts

             in music as natural

                    and easy as breathing

                           my greatest consolation

                                   to this day."

Here is Joanne Kyger reading at UC Berkeley in April of 2007:

In honor of Joanne Kyger,

may her work flourish.

Above photo by Allen Ginsberg, 1963

EPC page on Joanne: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/kyger/  

Bio Notes & Publications

Poem after Howl

For Allen Ginsberg

I saw my friends’ shining faces and I wanted to be like them, wanted to shine like them in the blue house that we lived in, on Lawrence Street in Ann Arbor.

I saw my friends’ intelligence and wanted my intelligence to be as intelligent as I perceived theirs to be.

I saw my friends living like hobos, living in rooms they’d painted themselves, living despite our circumstances.

I saw my friends at dinner, smoking cigarettes, watching movies, at parties and on balconies.

I saw my friends and what I saw was partly me in my friends, partly me emulating my friends and wanting to be like them.

I saw my friends lose it—saw them weeping uncontrollably—saw how they would not be soothed.

I saw my friends at their happiest, saw their faces, ecstatic, luminous. [They were bound by nothing and at their free-est].

I saw my friends studying their asses off, going without showers, and living on toast.

I saw my friends at their most innocent, exposing themselves and all their ideas.

I saw my friends for what they were—ordinary brilliant people trying to survive in the world.

Lately I've been wondering what it means to have a voice in America.  Is it simply the right to vote--or is it more?  Do we make our voices heard by what we consume--through our clothes, cars, other possessions?  I've been thinking about voice because I'm writing lesson plans about Voice in Modern American Poetry.  I'm planning to incorporate Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and Gertrude Stein's "A Completed Portrait of Picasso."  Many people have heard of "Howl," but few have actually read it and so I'm including a link to it here:  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308

Ghost Ranch

Creosote, Lavender, Echinacea
Mt. Pedernal in the distance
Chama River
Gorgeous trees changed yellow
Red earth
Amazing rock formations
Prairies & mountains

Uploaded on December 30, 2006 by Daulphin

View mr_wahlee's map

Taken in (See more photos here)

Inside G. O'Keeffe's house at Abiquiu, N.M.
Uploaded on October 25, 2005 by mr_wahlee

*
*
*
South porch of Ghost Ranch house
Allen Ginsberg sits with O’Keeffe
Shows her how he meditates,
Crossed legs, straightened back, closed eyes—
Breathe slowly, other instructions
But she doesn’t mimic him.
He asked, “What do you believe?”
She outstretched her arm
Palm up in a semi-circle
In front of her toward Pedernal,
“It’s hard to say.”
Fragrant sage, clouds, blue sky
Rocks she had gathered
Beauty around her everywhere.
Later driving Allen & Peter to Santa Fe.
Allen said he was surprised
How little money she had.
I explained simple surroundings did not
Show her wealth. No need.
—C.S. Merrill