Baffling Combustions: Recent Episodes
Baffling Combustions
"Baffling combustions," Ted said, "are everywhere," and we aim to find and dance, however faultingly, in their light. Join hosts Andrew McCarron, Sam Truitt and Sparrow as they plumb the mundane and cosmic strange, mysterious and beguiling events of the human and natural. Please note that while we sometimes wrench and wrest, it's always inalienably with ourselves: or in these experiments, no idea is ever harmed, only nested.
Stress, the state and verb - we all have felt it and rode it yet do we know what we're talking about? Indeed, can we - past Freud/Jung (psyche), load, and our sensual experience abiding its edge - locate it quite (or is it quite there at all)? Whatever it is, we find here an eddy of it among us in words - with a nod to Yoko Ono and David Peel's AMERIKA, their 1972 anthem (with John Lennon abroad), an excerpt of which closes this session.
Here after a long summer, and then some, break we strike to the heart of the matter of what the hell we are doing with this enterprise via the 1992 essay "Theory as Liberatory Practice" by bell hooks.
Here's a link to the essay if you want to reach deeper: https://www.uwyo.edu/aded5050/5050unit12/theory%20as%20liberatory%20prac.pdf
The oath has been around, in numerous ways and at different levels of articulation, for a long time, and we will take ours in examining this verbal structure between us - ending now in a listen and look inside John Ashbery's poem "The Tennis Court Oath."
The oath has been around, in numerous ways and at different levels of articulation, for a long time, and we will take ours in examining this verbal structure between us - ending in a look inside John Ashbery's THE TENNIS COURT OATH.
The oath has been around, in numerous ways and at different levels of articulation, for a long time, and we will take ours in examining this verbal structure between us - ending in a look inside John Ashbery's THE TENNIS COURT OATH.
Here we waterlock on "Island" in this third in a series of sessions that seek to explore this geological state that has just as much applicability to our psychic experience as it does to our terrestrial one. We touch not only its linguistic evolution (and the mysterious, silent "s") but also its representations as a trope for a family of our experiences that may go back to the start of consciousness as we intuit it.
Here we waterlock on "Island" in this second in a series of sessions that seek to explore this geological state that has just as much applicability to our psychic experience as it does to our terrestrial one. We touch not only its linguistic evolution (and the mysterious, silent "s") but also its representations as a trope for a family of our experiences that may go back to the start of consciousness as we intuit it.
Here we waterlock on "Island" in a series of sessions that seek to explore this geological state that has just as much applicability to our psychic experience as it does to our terrestrial one. We touch not only its linguistic evolution (and the mysterious, silent "s") but also its representations as a trope for a family of our experiences that may go back to the start of consciousness as we intuit it.
Love, in all its zones, arguably remains the capstone emotion of our mortal journey, which in words - as we seek to prove - is infinite. In this "four-point-five," final number (note previous broadcasts, including a half broadcast combining "void" with the start of "love"), in a series of sessions, we seek among excursions to touch on as many as we are able and unable, from its classical taxonomy to our near-term obsession with its anticipation, making and sustenance.
Love, in all its zones, arguably remains the capstone emotion of our mortal journey, which in words - as we seek to prove - is infinite. In this "three-point-five" number (note previous broadcasts, including a half broadcast combining "void" with the start of "love"), in a series of sessions, we seek among excursions to touch on as many as we are able and unable, from its classical taxonomy to our near-term obsession with its anticipation, making and sustenance.
Love, in all its zones, arguably remains the capstone emotion of our mortal journey, which in words - as we seek to prove - is infinite. In this "one-point-five" number (note previous broadcasts, including a half combining "void" with the start of "love"), in a series of sessions, we seek among excursions to touch on as many as we are able and unable, from its classical taxonomy to our near-term obsession with its anticipation, making and sustenance.
Love, in all its zones, arguably remains the capstone emotion of our mortal journey, which in words - as we seek to prove - is infinite. In this "one-point-five" number (note previous broadcasts, including a half combining "void" with the start of "love"), in a series of sessions on love, we seek among excursions to touch on as many as we are able and unable, from its classical taxonomy to our near-term obsession with its anticipation, making and sustenance.
Here we combine the end of our perusal of "Void" (the third of a series of sessions in this non-domain) - pulling and pushing and stretching its application until it breaks into words, etc. - with the start of a series of sessions on the nature of "Love"(perhaps void's match).
Here we peruse "Void" (the second of a series of sessions in this non-domain), pulling and pushing and stretching its application until it breaks into words its physical, psychological and cosmic manifestation, with some salting of the metaphysical, to which the term seems to call.
Here we peruse the "Void" (the first of a series of sessions in this non-domain), pulling and pushing and stretching its application until it breaks into words its physical, psychological and cosmic manifestation, with some salting of the metaphysical, to which the term seems to call.
Here is another installment (no. 10) in our on-going examination of the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, written between the years 1798 and 1803. We look at the proverbs: "The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. The selfish smiling fool, & the sullen frowning fool, shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod. What is now proved was once, only imagin'd." To note, in these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things we're still working out.
Here is another installment (no. 11) in our on-going examination of the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, written between the years 1798 and 1803. We look at the proverbs: "The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit: watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant, watch the fruits. The cistern contains; the fountain overflows. One thought fills immensity." This session also includes a look at "Fowles in the Frith," an anonymous, short, lyric poem song of the Middle Ages. To note, in these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things we're still working out. To note, this session ends with the definitive proof of the statement, "A thought is a void."
In this session we swerve from the text of William Blake's PROVERBS OF HELL to what news we may find of its shape in Bob Dylan's "I Contain Multitudes," the title and refrain of which is lifted from a line in Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." We touch on these two guys, as well as Anne Frank, Emily Dickinson, Mr. Poe and Dr. Indiana Jones, as we seek to fathom as always the heart of the heart of the eternal dilemma.
From March 2020 (read "pandemic start"), we here look into what is "adult," the word and state, touching on various views philosophical, psychological and personal. This session includes the reading and discussion of a number of poems: "This Be the Verse" by Philip Larkin; "The History of My Life" by John Ashbery; and "Market Day" by Jonas Meckas (translated by Vyt Bakaitis).
Here is another installment (no. 8) in our on-going examination of the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, written between the years 1798 and 1803. We look at the proverbs: "Let man wear the fell of a lion, woman the fleece of a sheep." To note, in these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things we're still working out.
Here we discuss by turns St. Francis of Assisi's "Canticle to the Sun," most of which was composed in late 1224 while recovering from an illness. according to tradition. Further, the first time it was sung in its entirety was by Francis and Brothers Angelo and Leo, two of his original companions, on Francis' deathbed, the final verse praising "Sister Death" having been added only a few minutes before. From there to here, the Sun and all its raiments, rises here. This sessions ends with a reading of the song read in the native Unbrian language by Tony Cataldo of the All Souls Ecumenical Catholic Church. For more and the text of the Song we use (so you can read along): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_of_the_Sun
In this fast-paced, spontaneous, testy analysis, we examine the poem "Without" by Jo Harjo, published in the New Yorker magazine. This session includes Harjo reading the poem, courtesy of the magazine, the link to which (and its text) is here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/without
In this fast-paced, spontaneous, testy analysis, we examine the poem "Half-Life in Exile" by Hala Alyan, published in the September 20, 2021 edition of the New Yorker magazine. This session includes the background tuning of Steve Cohn and Carl Baugher's "Heliotropism" and Alyan reading the poem, courtesy of the magazine, the link to which (and its text) is here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/27/half-life-in-exile
Here's the second part of our far ranging and fetching session on the term "swerve," and here attempts to speak of and into its application to Lucretius and his brand of Epicurean thought. This was recorded in October of 2019 - a throwback to the dawn of Baffling Combustions, and no. 11 on our chronology. To connect with the first part, Swerve I, here's link (or use whatever accustomed podcast platform):
https://soundcloud.com/bafflingcombustions/swerve-1?si=564c31d32ec24549ba4af32f598a162c
In this fast-paced, spontaneous, testy analysis, we examine the poem "Tin" by Jane Hirshfield, published in the September 13, 2021 edition of the New Yorker magazine. This session includes Hirshfield reading the poem, courtesy of the magazine, the link to which (and its text) is here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/tin
Here is another installment (no. 7) in our on-going examination of the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, written between the years 1798 and 1803. We look at the proverbs: "The fox condemns the trap, not himself"; and "Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth." To note, in these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things we're still working out.
Ending in Howlin' Wolf's "If You Hear Me Howlin'" not-to-be-missed soundtrack from the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival, here is another installment in our on-going examination of the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, written between the years 1798 and 1803. We look at the proverb, "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man." To note, in these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things we're still working out.
Here again, installment in on-going examination of the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, written between the years 1798 and 1803. We look at the proverbs "The nakedness of woman is the work of God"; and "Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps." To note, in these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things we're still working out.
In this fourth part of an ongoing session, we look at the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, arguable his first attempt - written between the years 1798 and 1803, coincident with the start and subsequent bending of the French Revolution - to articulate a personal philosophy. Here we spend all to puzzle out the proverb, among others, "Prisons are built of stones of Law, Brothels by bricks of Religion." In these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things were still working out.
In this third part of an ongoing session, we look at the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, arguable his first attempt - written between the years 1798 and 1803, coincident with the start and subsequent bending of the French Revolution - to articulate a personal philosophy. In these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things were still working out.
In this second installment on Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" we touch on Swendenborg and his influence on this work and then touch the electric wire of a single proverb: "No birds soars too high, if he soars on his own wings."
In this fast-paced, semi-spontaneous, testy analysis, we examine the poem "Spring" by Ishion Hutchinson, published in the June 7th, 2021 edition of the New Yorker magazine. This session includes Hutchinson reading his work, courtesy of the magazine, the link to which (and its text) is here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/spring
"Steal from the rich and give to the poor " - words we hope we may all come to thrive by - is in no figure better exemplified than one Robin Hood, for whom no introduction is necessary or adequate. Here we look into his historical origin in not-so-merry old England, sloughing through the Dark Ages of feudal society " - as well as what this beguiling Green Man might represent for us today in our lives stuffed with gadgets, distractions and more than anything else crises - including our imperiled natural world, the felicitous co-habitation with which (at least in imagination) Robin and his band in Sherwood Forest stand out as a happy model.
The first part of an ongoing treatment, we look here at the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, arguable his first attempt - written between the years 1798 and 1803, coincident with the start and subsequent bending of the French Revolution - to articulate a personal philosophy. In these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things were still working out.
This is our 2nd half of our light on "hell"--its sometime reality and persistence and future within our Western Civ. twist. We go into its historical analogs out of Europe and try to figure what it's place might be today.
Picking up where we left off, in Part 1, discussing a walking that doesn't involve walking, in Walking 2 we continue our reading of Thoreau's essay, touching on the monomyth, John Brown, Charles Olson, Emerson, the art of walking backwards, Robin Hood and Johnny Cash. Gilgamesh as well as the Australopithecus come up as well as Thoreau's sense of a new literature " or we haven't seen nothing yet.
"Walking" is from Henry David Thoreaus essay of that name, though alternatively he called it The Wild," so Walking the Wild takes us to what lurks inside it all, including the origins of revolution and ownership in the tyrannies of industrial time and privacy. We also here (in this first of a two-part discussion) talk about walking itself as an act and about getting lost as well as how, Thoreau writes, In wildness is the preservation of the world" which was to become the motto of the Sierra Club. Thoreau is a bewilderer who postulates things about 150 years ahead of his time and saw this work as an introduction to all I may write hereafter.
Here we turn our light on "hell"--its sometime reality and persistence and future within our Western Civ. twist. We go into its historical analogs out of Europe and try to figure what it's place might be today. To note, in our second transmission we will commit ourselves to an analysis of Blake's PROVERBS OF HELL.
In this last for now session of fan-proposed topics for examination we look at "blue" and all the ways this English word for a color is deployed in our everyday and extraordinary lives with particular emphasis on The Blues, including its mysterious origin and on-going persistent in what keeps us from totally cracking up. Great good thanks to the inestimable connoisseur of suchness Matthew Morse for the assist!
This is the second part of our "Unabomber" (Theodore Kaczynski) session. Again, special thanks to Paul Sigismundi for offering us this topic, which we seem to have fielded without totally losing it. This session concludes and is dedicated to the memory of Samson Gruber, the "Icarus of Bronx Science."
Following our jag of listener-instigated topics, which we fuse and defuse in as spontaneous a manner as we may fashion, this week we were given "Kaczynski," or (in the interests of disambiguation) the man the FBI termed the "Unabomber." Having found enough here to spread across two sessions - albeit fronting a storm of computer challenges (appropriate for cat who advocates the overthrow of technological society) - we track his traumatic story, philosophy and place in our collective, including touching on how Ted's today pacing out his life sentence in the super-max in Florence, Colorado. Special thanks to Paul Sigismundi for these sessions!
In a Baffling Combustions' first we invited one of our fans to propose our topic: Freud, with particular attention to his contemporary relevance, which we managed to find while mulling how little practically his ideas seem to have found register in contemporary mental health therapies. Also, in this session we reveal Freud's actual very last words - never before revealed! Our thanks to Charles Paikart!
We turn here to "salt," touching in this first of two podcasts on not only its crystal constitution but also (mostly) its esoteric sense as a metaphor that we all need to keep it together. This podcast carves a particular jag through Maurice Nicoll's THE MARK in which he explores the concept "sin" as manifest in the Gospels, a most salty text.
Here we toss more salt into the gap opened in our first SALT session, boldly proposing, modestly withdrawing and sideways implying this crystalline structure is not just essential to our collective human anatomical - the destroyer and preserver of organic creation itself - but also our soulistic integrity.
Enjoy the conclusion of our our session on novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1936 essay "The Crack-Up," in which he writes with aching candor on his psychological collapse and fragmentary, absent spirit, psychic reconstitution. Here's a link to Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up":
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up/
What better could follow on HEALTH (our two-part treatment) than CRACK-UP 1 (also in two parts), our session on novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1936 essay "The Crack-Up" in which he writes with aching candor on his psychological collapse and fragmentary, absent spirit, psychic reconstitution? To note: This session includes reference to the Cave Canem Foundation, dedicated to African-American poetry and poetics. Fitzgerald concludes his essay with reference to that Latin phrase (trans., "Beware of dog"). The Foundation's name came from a sign the poet Toi Derricotte spotted while visiting the House of the Tragic Poet in the volcanic ash-covered city of Pompeii. Here's a link to Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up":
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up/
In HEALTH 2, we continue where we didn't leave off and manage as ever to leave other leavings left off, which might be one face of health - to know what to forget. This session includes a semi-mini-biography of Sparrow's exemplary father, who will turn 102 in February.
In this first of a two-part session, we examine the nature of health and what exactly (and otherwise) it might be - including the mystery of the relative absence of its definition within western psychological science. This is a broad-ranging - and we hope far-fetched - discussion that concludes, temporarily, that, like love, there may be an infinite range of health states.
In this session (the second of two) we tackle Andre Breton's Second Manifesto of Surrealism, publishing in 1929—to find ourselves not unexpectedly floored, though we manage to stand again, chastened. BE AWARE: This session ends with the Frankfurt School and the Orgone Box. Here’s a link to Breton's manifesto: http://theoria.art-zoo.com/second-manifesto-of-surrealism-andre-breton/
In this session (the first of two) we go in and out, through and around Andre Breton's First Surrealist Manifesto (Le Manifeste du Surralisme), publishing in 1924. (To note, this session ties in with our discussion of Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation" in Steintime 1 and 2. Below is a link to a translation of Breton's text.
https://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/F98/SurrealistManifesto.htm
"NOW 2" starts where one (NOW 1) in this series was abandoned, and as it occurs on our 2020 Election Day its attention's magnetized to its cultural and political nuances, with no small amount of fragmentary presence. This session concludes with a recording from Claudia Rankine's "December," a multi-vocal film performance from The Shed in New York.
Here in this first of a two-part series we tackle "now" from numerous vantages, among others including as a word with all its practical denotation and connotations as well as its application to "being in the present," as popularly voiced by Eckhart Tolle. It includes the beginnings of a near-term historical perspective in its use from the 1960s as it's evolved into a pseudo-secular faith call. FAIR WARNING: Reflecting our attempt to get to now, this session's quiet points have been struck and/or shrunk to induce a rapid fire (an element of combustion).
Here in this first of a two-part series we tackle "now" from numerous vantages, among others including as a word with all its practical denotation and connotations as well as its application to "being in the present," as popularly voiced by Eckhart Tolle. It includes the beginnings of a near-term historical perspective in its use from the 1960s as it's evolved into a pseudo-secular faith call. FAIR WARNING: Reflecting our attempt to get to now, this session's quiet points have been struck and/or shrunk to induce a rapid fire (an element of combustion).
This session calls to the process-hung state of the "manuscript" and not just in its conventional meaning - a typically hand-written original document - but also its supplemental, philosophical, ontological,poetical and existential associations. It's not as dry as it sounds - or if dry its combustible material to which we touch fire to light the way ahead.
This session calls to the process-hung state of the "manuscript" and not just in its conventional meaning - a typically hand-written original document - but also its supplemental, philosophical, ontological,poetical and existential associations. It's not as dry as it sounds - or if dry its combustible material to which we touch fire to light the way ahead.
Sometimes that with which we are most familiar to us is, paradoxically, most strange, such as breath. Here we breathe on it, expanding on and contracting in its practical qualities as well as teasing out some of its wild and dear associations.
In this second of two podcasts we augur further into, and maybe a little way through, Gertrude Stein's essay "Composition as Explanation," originally delivering into human time in the winter of 1925-26 in England as a lecture and subsequently published as a text the following year. In this second approach we look through some holes we knocked out in the first round. This work is dedicated to Marcus DeCosta, the American educator, who died in early August of 2020. Here's a link to the text:
www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/694…-explanation
In this first of two podcasts we augur into Gertrude Stein's essay "Composition as Explanation," originally delivering into human time in the winter of 1925-26 in England as a lecture and subsequently published as a text the following year. In this first approach we knock around various notions that seek to light the way toward some interpretation of what Stein means in her numerous time registers, though they admittedly remain elusive, which of course we love.This work is dedicated to Jonathan Oppenheim, the American film and television editor and producer, who died in July 2020. Here's a link to the text:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69481/composition-as-explanation
Made in February, a month before the business launch of the Trump Virus, we look at the “Algorithm,” it’s early history and its late incarnation as the fuel source of “the Mammon of mechanized greed” (D.H. Lawrence). Here by some remove we hear from a host of human males whom it touched (if not scarred): Leibnitz, Turning, Freud, Cocteau, Whitehead, Hilbert, Yeats, Harari ("'Algorithm' is arguably the single most important concept in our world"), Bradbury, Darwin, Boyd and Rodney Dangerfield. This podcast is dedicated to Sparrow’s father, Dr. Jack Gorelick, who had recently celebrated his 101st birthday.
We were going to call this podcast "Podcastism,” which means nothing — even to us — yet we wanted to mark this as somehow different from what this (Baffling Combustions) is as we explore the nature, origin and future of this medium that took off with the introduction of the iPod in the early ‘00s and shows no sign of sunsetting (unlike its initial vehicle of transmission). Highlights include riffs around the “perfect podcast” (this might be it!), 2001: A SPACE ODDYSSEY, William Burroughs (the “cut up” method), the exigencies of Ambitheism (Sparrow’s religious homebrew), Rodney Dangerfield and John Cage. This podcast was recorded a few days after the death of the sage Ram Dass on December 22, 2019 (before our world turned upside down).
In this second LAFAYETTE session we continue our riff on the Marquise and the Square that bears his name with more context, Lafayettean lore and grace notes around his words resonant with the BLACK LIVES MATTER protests: "When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties."
In this first of two sessions, Sam Truitt, Andrew McCarron and Sparrow X. Carter talk about “Lafayette,” both the historical figure (French Marquise and a US founder) and the square in Washington, DC that bears his name. The latter particularly has featured in the news recently: both as the site of the teargas-stun-grenade attack on BLACK LIVES MATTER protestors (that cleared it for Agent Orange’s bizarre march across it to bible thump at a nearby church); and as a sudden “no man’s land,” with its six-block entirety barricaded with eight-foot, chain-link fencing. The latter has been taken down, though not the questions its erection calls up. We touch on those, while filling out the Marquise’s patently heroic life and touching on what words he left us.
In this first of two sessions we talk humbly about, around, and through Robert Creeley by way of examining two poems: "The Immoral Proposition" and "Kore" (with more to come in our next session). This talk is characterized in part by our coming to terms of our inability to come to terms with what Creeley left us past deep appreciations and some loose holds on his poetics, intermixed with wonder at how much he was able to enjamb into the finitudes of his practice: "O love,/where are you/leading/me now?"
Feeling we may benefit from a work both far away and near, about isolation and home building and care (even in words), Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England” came to mind. Below is a link to the poem (with a recording of Bishop reading the poem), and otherwise listen here to us mull what Bishop made of Daniel Defoe’s most famous, seventeenth-century castaway’s experience and reflections—a timeless poem. She writes: “The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun/rose from the sea,/and there was one of it and one of me” – as Ted would say, “just like all of us!”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48287/crusoe-in-england
Here we steer into Bernadette Mayer's "Eve of Easter," leaving what wakes - the "shocking resurrection idea" included and all that that might freight. The poem was first published in Mayer's GOLDEN BOOK OF WORDS (Angel Hair, 1978) and republished in EATING THE COLORS OF A LINEUP OF WORDS: THE EARLY BOOKS OF BERNADETTE MAYER (Station Hill Press, 2015). This podcast also includes a Public Access Poetry recording of Mayer reading the poem on April 26, 1978. (There's a lot of ambient sound in that recording, sorry). One program note: We fail to mention that the poet John Milton's first wife was named Mary (Powell), as was one of their daughters (born October 25, 1648).
Here we speak of Alice Notley’s “Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice,” published in Selected Poems of Alice Notley (Talisman House, Publishers, 1993). Abetted in part by Sparrow having been Notley’s student in the mid-1980s, we turn up what insights we may glean about this work of dictation, actual or implied, from the departed Kerouac, touching on his life story and late challenges with the Beat movement he in part set in motion. This brings us to some discussion of the exigencies of the Lower East Side of New York’s '80s poetry forty years back, the New York School poetry “kit” and Notley’s seeming inveighing against scholasticism. We look into the virtues of the “knotty” poem, gender identifications (and ambiguities), the practice of channeling/clairvoyance, Mark Tansey’s “Triumph of the New York School,” Samuel Beckett’s poem “What is the Word?,” Dave Smith’s THE ONE PURE WORD, his critical essays on the poetry of James Wright, and speculations on the emergence of the universe (again). This podcast includes the sound of an undated video on YouTube of Notley reading the poem.
Four weeks into our collective Great Pause, the Bafflers examine “Red Shift,” Ted Berrigan’s iconic New York School poem. This close reading – distinguished in part by our own Sparrow having been Berrigan’s student - proceeds from the astrophysical definition of “redshift” to speculations into what attributive meanings to which Berrigan might allude. This includes a broad look into the nature of time as surfaced in the poem and in part depth charged in Berrigan situating the poem “at 8:08 p.m.” (the Eight-Fold Path, I-Ching and Hubble’s insights into an exploding universe). We touch on his forebearers – Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery - as well as Berrigan’s friends and allies, including Joe Brainard, Dick Gallup and Ron Padgett (including a nod to the latter’s memoir TED). We look to his nineteenth-century antecedents in the Transcendentalists and Whitman as well as how Berrigan self-identified as a late Beatnik. We touch on the role the song “California Dreaming” plays in the work and Berrigan’s working-class poetics, among other ruminative forays, including the Esopus River, the poets Jorie Graham, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh and Robinson Jeffers, as well as what existential insight might be disguised in a Harris Tweed jacket. SPECIAL FEATURE: We embed a recording of Berrigan reading the work at Naropa University, 1982, from EXACT CHANGE Yearbook 1995 no. 1 (Ed. Peter Gizzi).
ADDENDUM:
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The chronological early publishing history of THE SONNETS is correctly listed below: C Press — c1963. Mimeograph edition Grove Press — c1967 United Artists — 1982 (With seven additional sonnets not in original)
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This podcast includes speculation around Berrigan's financial straits and schemes as well as the circumstances around his death. We regret and ask forgiveness for any inaccuracies, and please listen with an open heart.
In our on-going inquiry into the nature of the Great Pause, this third QUARANTINE session trains itself on John Ashbery’s much ballyhooed poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” an ekphrasis composition taking its frame and flame from the painting of the same name by Italian Renaissance artist Francesco Parmigianino (1503-1540). Without wandering too far from the work, we cite and sometimes linger on Raymond Roussel, Lisa Jarnot, Charles North, Kenneth Koch, the soul and its shapes, the appearance of “sequestered,” Walt Whitman, Jonathan Swift, W.B. Yeats, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” the word “speculum,” Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham and, once more with feeling, The Tetragammaton.
In this second QUARANTINE session we range over where we are and where we’re not, looking back to glimpse the way ahead and what the unknown feels like, through ruminations on THE CAVE IN THE SNOW, the memoir of a 12-year spiritual retreat by Tenzin Palmo (English born Diane Perry), Dag Hammarskjold’s MARKINGS, the web and the Zoom, hand wringing over hand washing, Sparrow’s dictum that “staying home is the new activism, and Jack Spicer’s poem “It is Forbidden to Look”—-where our discussion in and on the Great Pause took a pause. Following the form of the Spicer poem, which in part occurs within the myth of Orpheus and his descent to the underworld—-in Spicer case, following the screenplay of Cocteau’s “Orfe,” via a wall mirror-—to Eurydice back to life, after a few days we reflect on what we had said as well as keep going, touching on Ginsberg’s first reading of HOWL in 1955 and its 1980, 25th-anniversary performance, Greg Masters’ collaborative poem with Steve Levine “Well Hello” (for Arthur Rimbaud), the play “He Who Gets Slapped” by Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev, the nature of masks and marks, and a homage to women, who it turns out outstrip men as our current essential workforce.
We owe the word “quarantine” to the Venetians who in 1377 instituted a policy of keeping ships from plague-stricken countries waiting off its port for 40 days. While hard athwart those among us with COVID19, the quarantine sense is felt by all of us as an echo as we pass through this time of more or less world-wide social isolations, distancings and lock downs. Here we touch on and grapple with some of its immediate practical realties, associations from the past, and speculations on the shape of things to come as we discuss the Dead Sea Scrolls, John Donne, the parable of the “appointment at Samara” (as well as the John O’Hara novel by that name), Buckminster Fuller, Aristotle’s POLITICS (Book Two), the “Wild Child of Avignon,” Jung, Robert Duncan”s “Childhood’s Retreat,” a passage from THE BOOK OF DANIEL, John Prine, Hal Willner, Sonny Rollins, Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed. We’re going to do a series of sessions within the quarantine universe, broadly speaking—so settle in. Also, this podcast includes numerous, aspirational refrains to Sparrow’s fabulous 101-year-old father sequestered in Brooklyn.
In this far ranging and fetching introduction to the term “swerve”—the first of two (saving its application to Lucretius and his brand of Epicurean thought to our next meeting)—we carve around the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (79 CE), the nature of sermons, the polysemy nature of the term, Brancusi’s “Bird in Space,” the Bill Murray-cast film adaption of “The Razor’s Edge,” Ross Macdonald’s short story “The Guilt-Edged Blond,” Paul Davies’ HOW TO MAKE A TIME MACHINE, The Hardy Boys, Dashiell Hammett’s “Flitcraft Parable,” the literary term “volta,” Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex,” John Ashbery, chance and chaos processes, and variation on a line by Robert Creeley. To note, this call to swerve chronologically is our first session.
We open “gift” with a definition: “it is a displacement outside (or deep inside?) the realm of exchange that operates mysteriously, as distinct from ‘present’ it comes out of nowhere.” What we find inside is Charlie Haden and Kenny Barron’s “Night and the City,” Lewis Hyde on “Lucky Find,” Pauline theology, the moor behind the Bronte’s house, Ted Berrigan, Augustine, the gift of the knife, Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” a reading from an unpublished ms. by Peter Lamborn Wilson on the Yazidi religion, Zeus and Hermes-Thoth, John Clare, Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell’s “The Gift” (the film), the Sabbath, a mantra of Brahmin bathing, the philosopher C.S. Pierce and a whiff of Vladimir Nabakov’s novel THE GIFT. This podcast ends with the word “ventilator,” or what we need now.
As we enter the Great Pause, here is a cast from last December wherein we reach into the depths and gonads of Earth/earth and its uncanny relationship to what’s “Ur,” including — among our personal earthly musings — Louis Untermeyer’s “Caliban in the Coal-Mines,” the nature of the Golem, Earthworks, Earthships, the Gaia Hypothesis, Essentialism, Chiffon margarine, THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG, The Penguins’ “Earth Angel,” Walt Whitman’s “Urge, Urge, always the procreative urge!” (misquoted), the Laudato Si encyclical by Pope Francis on ecological consciousness, Pete Seeger and the Clearwater, Robin Hood, “The Mountains—grow unnoticed—” (757) by Emily Dickinson, moss and the moon. This session is dedicated to Baba Ram Dass - the American spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author of the ovarian BE HERE NOW - who had died the week of its making.
Here we throw words at the chariot, beginning with a review of this classic “supreme military weapon” emerging out of Eurasia about four thousand years back, before tackling its various archetypal, literary and artistic deployments. These include Plato’s chariot evocation as a way of explaining the soul’s construction; Emily Dickinson’s poem posthumously titled and adulterated as “The Chariot” (though we include a reading of its original lineation, words, and a missing stanza (no. 475)); the seat of Arjuna and Krishna’s conversation in the BHAGAVAD GITA; the Tarot card of this name; Erich von Däniken’s CHARIOTS OF THE GODS; Duchamp’s “Large Glass”; the Circus Maximus race in the film “Ben Hur”; the deployment of chariot in the 1915 parade of Suffragette’s up Fifth Avenue in New York City; and Bob Dylan's "115th Dream." You won’t want to miss our touching on much more ancient and contemporary lore as we seek to plumb the ongoing human fascination with this machine of imagination and violence.
In ANGEL we discuss this winged, pre-, supra- and post-human—-and needless to say fabulous--entity of primordial origin, touching on the Cone of Silence, the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Book of Enoch, Paul Tillich, Milton, the incarnation of evil, and Al-Hallaj, the Persian Sufi mystic martyred for proclaiming, in so many words, “I am Allah.” We speak of angelic sexual practice (if they have gender), the thesis of angels as representative of an influence field—-including Rilke’s meeting and intermingling with it—-and conclude with a reading of Bob Dylan’s “Three Angels.”
In BLAKE we touch and sometimes reach the work of the poet William Blake by way of his “Introduction” to his SONGS OF EXPERIENCE as well as “The Echoing Green” and “The Blossom” (from SONGS OF INNOCENCE), among others, as they may intersect with reference to Juliana Spahr, Robert Graves, Swedenborg, Bob Dylan, Druidism, child labor and the “dawn poem” (or Alba) as well as the importance of the “transvaluation of values” to what it means to turn our worlds around and look again around that which has no map except the one we speak into lines that transverse them.
Before too much time lapses on the election clock, we impart our recent WARREN - that is Elizabeth Ann Warren - in which we discuss, among other things, nothing you ever wanted to know about her and never thought to ask. Through the unique perspectives of astrology, William Irwin Thompson and some murky political calculations, etc., we examine her "fight," conversion experience - from capitalist water carrier to down-trodden champion - her nickname ("Datum'), comparisons to other candidates and current and former presidents - and generally thing having not much to do with Allen Ginsberg. Take heed, this session includes an insider's look from our very own former presidential contender, Sparrow. To note, there is here profane speech (bleeped), sorry.
"Walking" is from Henry David Thoreau’s essay of that name, though alternatively he called it “The Wild”—so “Walking the Wild” takes us to what lurks inside it all, including the origins of revolution and ownership in the tyrannies of industrial time and privacy. We also here (in this first of a two-part discussion) talk about walking itself as an act and about getting lost as well as how, Thoreau writes, “In wildness is the preservation of the world”— which was to become the motto of the Sierra Club. Thoreau is a bewilderer who postulates things about 150 years ahead of his time and saw this work as “…an introduction to all I may write hereafter.”
Picking up where we left off, in Part 1, discussing a walking that doesn’t involve walking, in “Walking 2” we continue our reading of Thoreau’s essay, touching on the monomyth, John Brown, Charles Olson, Emerson, the art of walking backwards, Robin Hood and Johnny Cash. Gilgamesh as well as the Australopithecus come up as well as Thoreau’s sense of a “new literature” — or we haven’t seen nothing yet.
Our “silent” exploration takes us from the word’s Latin origin and Medieval carryover into English in which it rooted and grew in at least two attitudes—the edgy and fuzzy—that appear to wrestle. How do we use silence and how does it use us? Excursions include, among others: The Lollards, penology/shunning, cosmic consciousness, mystical union, the New York City subway system, the Parsis’ Towers of Silence, “The Science Behind Why Awkward Silence Works,” the Bhagavad Gita and readings of John Ashbery’s “Some Trees” and Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” (a little tricked out). Warning: This podcast includes swathes of “(silence)”…
Sometimes that with which we are most familiar to us is, paradoxically, most strange, such as breath. Here we breathe on it, expanding on and contracting in its practical qualities as well as teasing out some of its wild and dear associations.
There's nothing there until there is - or silence is recollection and so doesn't exist. Or it does here, where we least expect, faster than thought or then we ever did. Find out.