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.

50. Proverbs of Hell III

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).

60. Adult

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.

Void I

64. Void I

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.

Void II

65. Void II

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.

68. Love 2

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.

Island 1

71. Island 1

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)”…

26.January.20

3. Silence

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: 

1. 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)

2. 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.

15. Quarantine IV - Red Shift

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.

2020

16. Quarantine V - Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice

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.

MANUSCRIPT

"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.

50. Proverbs of Hell III

Baffling Combustions

Related tracks