Sunday, June 16, 2013
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Monday, April 22, 2013
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Rimbaud's Systematic Derangement of the Senses
Rimbaud's Systematic Derangement of the Senses: The first task of the man who wants to be a poet is to study his own awareness of himself, in its entirety; he seeks out his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! . . . --But the problem is to make the soul into a monster, like the compachicos, you know? Think of a man grafting warts onto his face and growing them there.
I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary.
A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessence's. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist!
When the eternal slavery of Women is destroyed, when she lives for herself and through herself, when man--up till now abominable--will have set her free, she will be a poet as well! Woman will discover the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? She will discover strange things, unfathomable, repulsive, delightful; we will accept and understand them.
I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary.
A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessence's. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist!
When the eternal slavery of Women is destroyed, when she lives for herself and through herself, when man--up till now abominable--will have set her free, she will be a poet as well! Woman will discover the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? She will discover strange things, unfathomable, repulsive, delightful; we will accept and understand them.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Friday, April 12, 2013
Notes in the way of Allen Ginsberg's poetic genius... In 1990, I turned 16 and fell in love with Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" after a librarian at the county library suggested it as a research topic for my American English class. I asked her to direct me to a book on an American author for my research, and "Howl" is what she handed me in return. I suppose no one else wanted to check it out in our small town, simply because no one had a clue who Allen Ginsberg, the homosexual beatnik poet and left-wing Communist with Buddhist monk-like spirituality complimenting his orthodox Jewish upbringing...in New York City. Allen Ginsberg represented everything my home town community of Conway, SC-- in the Southern Baptist Bible Belt--ultra-conservative, Republican, Gentiles, white, with only one Jewish doctor in our entire town. That was the first and only time I remember hearing about the Beat Generation, however, the images and the words, and the energy I picked-up from researching "Howl" borrowed from the county library never left my subconscious mind. I have carried it with me like you would a fond childhood memory, as you can see I still remember it and although I did not have a computer as I do now to research all of Allen's dirty little secrets--the homosexual component of his identity and the communist affiliation never entered into the reading of the poem back then when all I had was a book, a very old book, it had to be censured in that I do not recall the obscenity or the sexual references at all. That is a life, long love affair with the Beatniks and their fun-loving lifestyle, at least I thought hanging-out in smoky jazz clubs with big-city poets, reading groovy books, and banging on the bongo drums to be way past the normal levels of cool achieved by most people I knew; and just as it was back then, so it remains, that coffee houses, modern art galleries, avant-garde poetry, experimental literature, jazz music, and clove cigerillos, and wearing all black with a little Frenchy-style baret and black shades indoors at night....well, that is a recipe for one cool cat, and might even go so far as being "...out-a-sight..." or "....groovy..." or "...way...far-out man...." Allen Ginsberg's queer? What? Why? Allen Ginsberg's genius confounds me. As does his entire generation of authors and poets with their personalities poised at the road ahead--always. They are too smart to look behind them chronologically--it would not be a pretty picture or poem, indeed. Allen Ginsberg's voice in "Howl" breaks as he hurries through the alliterations fighting cacophonies in his own design--genius sounds in his head while composing, but a devil to pronounce successfully as he did for decades. Notable stylistic qualities--on the surface and in the meanings of the poems would be that Ginsberg's epic social commentaries/poems are written, characteristically, with either containing a traditional, paragraph-style indention recurring throughout or with hanging indents of "blank" verse or "open" verse--keyword is "loosely" for another poetic device--designed or conceived of by the poet, himself, is preferable to a generalizing summary of Ginsberg or the poetic license he assumed while composing "Howl", "America", "A Supermarket in California", and "Sunflower Sutra". According to M.H. Abrams's A Glossary of Literary Terms (Kindle ed.) blank verse (30) or non-rhyming iambic pentameter--[hence,the word "blank" is added rather than "verse" alone]--if it were simply "verse" then connotations of music, lyrics, and regular nuances in alternating beats and syncopated meter or rhythm would apply. Allen Ginsberg's poetry really did not possess a rhyming couplet or a quatrain therefore my theoretical judgment weighs heavily on the side of stereotypes (which the poet hated--especially the stereotyping perpetuated by the media, television--mostly--and cultural prejudice Ginsberg witnessed daily in both NYC and San Francisco. On the William F. Buckley opposite Allen Ginsberg (1967?)interview [http://... youtube.com video archive from the sixties in our course's lecture notes] Ginsberg's social commentary on America's current "police state" style of control or government giving way to inhumane miscarriages of justice on the streets of NYC then spilling over into the rest of the country. Ginsberg's alarming poetic responses in "America" and "Howl" show a sensitive soul inside a benevolent man and mindful individual. Allen Ginsberg's spirit may haunt me should I place his ideals in a genre or school of thought, especially conventional instances of political right-wing conservatives furthering the state's lies with flowery propaganda appealing to the sentimentalities of those lesser creatures--the inferiors--the women. Allen Ginsberg's indifference to the plight of white Gentile women struck a note indicative of Ginsberg's sexual orientations, thus dismissing women as irrelevant, unstimulated, and just plain boring. He may have a jolly good time playing the fun-loving criminal and irresponsible poet with a bevy of Negro girls in Harlem on Saturday, but come Wednesday, he is sick of the boring, dishwater blonds he sees at the college libraries and in malt shops or soda fountains. Ginsberg's equivocally response to his "potty mouth" amounts to the offended ears of the non-poetical, UN-hip, white women is that theirs is a complacent, sheltered existence, without an inkling of a clue what his poetry meant or what virtues he stood for in writing then publishing . Allen Ginsberg's queer mentality it really made no difference to him what temperature one cooked meatloaf or when the episode of "Petticoat Junction" aired on television. The mainstream American values held in high regard during the 1950's were disseminated via media through "The Donna Reid Show" or "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and other similar comedies about American family values with little time or energy given to the inner-city minorities, like the mulatto Negroes, the gays, the Communist sympathizers, or the post-Holocaust Jewish communities. --albeit a loose pretense and hardly effectual and possibly very wrong on many aesthetic levels, my first ideas on Allen Ginsberg's poetry became lost to reasons that are just lost somewhere "out there" on time passing--maybe too much time passing since the middle of the last century. The last time I read "Howl" or heard the words of Ginsberg speaking "America" or "A Supermarket in California" was in 1990 and it would be seven more years before the author would die, and I have to ask myself, "...did he die of AIDS or complications from HIV or drug addiction?" He circulated through some very risqué crowds, and how ironic it seems for such an enlightened soul completely ignorant about matters of his own health--common sense that steers healthy people away from sex and drugs regardless of the "Red Scare" or the "Cold War". Janet-Alisa Ridout 1100The Microsoft Office Blog
Saturday, February 09, 2013
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