11 posts tagged “naropa”

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"

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 beautiful, beatific, beat.

as in Amiri Baraka "Ka'Ba":  "We are beautiful people."

as in 1923 William Carlos Williams Spring and All:  "rooted they/ grip down and begin to awaken."

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

as in 1934 Ezra Pound:  Make It New.

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

as in 1956 Allen Ginsberg: "I am America!"

as in 1959 Frank O'Hara Personism: A Manifesto: "Go on your nerve."

as in manifestari:  to make public.

as in 1960 Joanne Kyger The Japan and India Journals: "Mahalia Jackson swinging it."

as in 1962 Robert Creeley For Love:  "Into the company of love/ it all returns."

as in 1968 Ted Berrigan "Words for Love": "my heart still loves, will break."

as in 2001 Alice Notley Disobedience:  "I've taken care that this poem not be a nice [pulchritudinous] place."

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

as in a rolling stone.

as in 2001 Anne Waldman Lecture at Naropa University: "Darken your speech."

as in 2008 Hoa Nguyen Columbia Poetry Review:  "Make it pretty-ugly, ugly-pretty."

as in Simone Weil:  "Beauty always promises, but never gives anything."

as in the bridge of the moment sways as we speak.

Thomas Allen

Alice Notley Reading, June 24, 2008, 8 p.m., Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado

Appropriately, this review of Alice Notley's reading last night is accompanied by the pop-up noir art of Thomas Allen, an American artist who takes the covers of old pulp novels and cuts them up into three-dimensional dioramas.  Notley, herself a creator of dioramas, postcards, fans, handmade books, and other art which compliments her cross-genre writing, will surely appreciate this juxtaposition.

Notley read from the as-of-yet unpublished 2005 manuscript for NEGATIVITY'S KISS, a noir play almost libretto-like in its reminiscence of Anne Carson's Decreation, though Notley's manuscript preceded Decreation (which this reviewer saw performed by students at The University of Michigan and co-directed by Carson in 2004, subsequent to its debut the previous year in New York City).

Alice Notley

Here is a Descent of Alette-inspired collage of Notley's language from NK:  "I want to be clear"  "Even the avant garde is mannerly now"  "Visionary"  "Honey, there's no one in charge at all, anywhere"  "Hooded, will you be my boyfriend?"  "To be a poet is to be more than a celebrated body"  "We would be sorry if you got shot once more"  "God has to have the most money"  "He wants all of everyone's money"  "Who do you love?"

One cannot help but compare this reading with the 2001 reading that Notley gave of an excerpt from Alma, Or the Dead Women (Granary, 2007), which was equally fast-paced, intense, and riveting.  My 2001 record of that reading is missing, but I can still recall sitting on the edge of my seat, straining to comprehend the whirlwind of words that ascended into the air above the audience creating a complex and beautiful constellation.  I hesitate to say that I preferred that reading because it was of an entirely different subject matter, but I will note the presence in both readings of what might be called a nervy infectiousness.

One would be remiss if they did not give some mention of the other readers who accompanied Notley.  Eleni Sikelianos, Douglas A. Martin, Anselm Hollo and Reed Bye also gave outstanding, nuanced readings that deserve more attention and homage than I pay them here.  All of the readers above read from published or soon-to-be-published books of poetry--both Sikelianos and Hollo read poetry from books to be published by Minneapolis' Coffee House Press.  Sikelianos accompanied excerpts from Body Clock with images projected on the wall above her of drawings she created in tandem with her poetry when, she said, words wouldn't come.  Bye not only read excerpts from Join the Planets, but sang a song by Allen Ginsberg that was at once funny, bluesy, and profound.  It was natural for this reviewer to focus here on the prolific and chameleon-like Notley, Alice being a favorite poet of mine ever since I first read Pulitzer Prize finalist Mysteries of Small Houses.

Rauschenberg's Tracer

2 comments

Must remember to
put new work in
Anselm Hollo's box.

*

Cold is the way Chris Tysh was to me
even when I told her I was from
Michigan.  Warum?

*

"...a culture that flees for love..."
"...buy a big goddamn car..."
"...that'll confound their politics..."

*

We circulate an exquisite
corpse
during le panel boring.

*

"Imperialism:
a way of life
worth bombing for."

AnneWaldman2004

First:  Peter Warshaw audio clip from Naropa's Audio Archives (1990s)
on wilderness:  Romantic ideas are gone
"Do you accept landscape because it's beautiful or
because of the animals it supports?"
A sense of how wilderness has changed--
How do we describe wilderness--
with melancholy?  with anger?
[is an actual outside wilderness necessary
in order to maintain wilderness within the mind?]

Anne Waldman on the 'Outrider'
--presupposes a sort of parallel universe, e.g.,
Nelson Mandela, Gandhi...
which of our politicians inflict the least suffering?
There has to be accountability--
see recent Canadian apology to Native Americans
for taking their children away in the past...

The 3 Ns:
NSA
Natural World
Nuclear Problem

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/  

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