Even ecstasy is a made thing

Al Filreis

The first "lesson" people seem to learn about Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is that it is spontaneous, follows the rule of "first thought, best thought," and all this talk about its natural language leaves one with the impression (intentionally enhanced by the poem's own rhetoric) that it was composed in a white heat, a burst, and then left to be its now-canonical self.

When I teach the poem I use the first (mis)impression to my advantage (I mean, as a teacher who wants to convey, among other things, that there is no such thing as a poem consisting of natural language — that poems are made things). A lesson simple enough. After a while — after a discussion of the students' sense that the poem was composed in a flash of "inspiration" and ecstasy — I show them the marked-up typescript. You see a page below. If you click on the image, it will enlarge just enough for you to be able to see some of the careful revisions Ginsberg made as he worked this poem toward perfection — toward the impression of natural speech he wanted to create.

[inserted between lines 1 and 2] who sat all nite rocking & rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish

[inserted in the left margin near line 9] * Meat truck egg

[inserted by line 10] lunged out of subway windows, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, Cried al over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed their phonograph records of European 1930's German jazz finished the whisky &

[inserted in line 11] groaning

[inserted in line 15] got hi [canceled]

[inserted in left margin by lines 20–21] See p 1 [Ginsberg is proposing a shift here to page 1]

[inserted in left margin by lines 23–26] After free Beer [Ginsberg is proposing to move this so that it follows "not ever one free beer" above]

May 4, 2008

< previous post next post >

RSS feed | subscribe by email

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.