OntheWilderSide

I officially declare today the annual day of mindblowingly amazing discoveries.  While I was wondering around I heard the song at the bottom of this post playing in a food establishment.   It took a few minutes to understand what I was listening too, and when I did I was blown through the walls.  It was like the first time I saw an actual Van Gogh in a museum.

An top of that my best bud DAK sent me this link for Ginsberg’s outline on writing poetry.  I was lucky enough to see him read at Adelphi University.  Very incongrous.  The weather was bad, but I am eternally grateful to my younger self that I went.  I remember him telling a story of being mugged.  They took his briefcase. Looked inside.  And threw it back at him complaining that there was only poetry inside.  Here is the post that contains his notes on writing poetry:

I think I have posted excerpts in drips and drabs of this before, and maybe someone has shared this elsewhere. Here’s a copy of a packet Allen Ginsberg used in his Poetics Practicum at Brooklyn College and probably Naropa, in the mid-1990s. It’s not mine; I got it from a poet friend, copied it, and made a PDF of it a couple years ago. Much of this is posted and published elsewhere, but to see this whole thing together makes me 1. wish I had him as a teacher, 2. miss him dearly, and 3. want to write poems again. Hopefully you might feel the same or just find it useful. Some technical notes: I took people’s names off it it and tried to OCR the puppy in my full version of Acrobat. I don’t know if text recognition works, but gave it the ole college try.

Allen Ginsberg, Poetics Practicum packet, c. 1995 [pdf]

via Allen Ginsberg, Poetics Practicum packet, c. 1995 [pdf]. « We Who Are About To Die. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quveWDT89mU]

Filed under: music, News, politics Tagged: | Adelphi University, allen ginsberg, Aretha Fanklin, Brooklyn College, Eleanor Rigby, jack kerouac, Naropa, Poetics Practicum, poetry, queen of soul, the Beatles