Hugo House Organic Poetry Course April 26, 2007

Course Outline

Week III: Denise Levertov, Anne Waldman, Joanne Kyger.

1)      Madlib III

2)      Group thoughts after two weeks.

3)      Denise Levertov – born in Ilford, Essex, England, in 1923. She was privately educated and served as a nurse in London during World War II. She emigrated to America in 1948 after she married Mitchell Goodman. They had one son Nikolai Goodman who is an artist and writer. (He lives here in Seattle.)  Upon arrival in the U.S. she found herself in a rich literary setting which was responding to the T.S. Eliot-inspired New Criticism with movements such as the Beat movement, the Berkeley and later San Francisco Renaissance and the New York and the Black Mountain Schools. Though she never attended Black Mountain or any other college, she was considered part of the Black Mountain school of poets, along with Charles Olson and Robert Creeley and was inspired powerfully by their forerunner William Carlos Williams, with whom she had a long and fruitful correspondence. Her correspondence with Robert Duncan is also one of the most important exchange of letters in 20^th century poetics.

a)      Gelpi on intro from Centering The Double Image. (Handout)

b)      Read With Eyes in the Back of our Heads, The Jacob’s Ladder, The Mutes. Selection from Some Notes on Organic Form. (Handout). Salt and Honey (Handout).

c)      She died on December 20, 1997.

4)      Writing Exercise I – Write a title. Go Outside and write that poem in 7 minutes.

5)       Anne Waldman -

a)      Born in Millville, NY, April 2, 1945. B.A. from Bennington (a creative thesis on Theodore Roethke.) Attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965. Director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1968 – 1978. Co-Founded (with A.G.) the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at what is now Naropa Uninversity. Following AG’s urging that she write long poems, and after Marina Sabina (the Mazatec poet-Priestess who helped facilitate rituales diositos) published Fast Speaking Woman in 1975-1978.

b)      Read Fast Speaking Woman.

c)      Influenced by Buddhism, is considered a Beat poet and a 2^nd generation NY School poet,

she has edited many anthologies including Nice To See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan.

d)      Play Anne reading Dark O’ Night.

e)      Read Oppositional Poetics from Vow to Poetry. Other interview cuts.

6)      Writing Exercise Two – List Poem. (I am _________ woman (or man). 7 minutes.

7)      Joanne Kyger - 

a) Born November 19, 1934 in Long Beach. Studied at Santa Barbara College before graduating and started to hang out in North Beach in the poetry scene that included Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. Moved to Japan in 1959 with then husband Gary Snyder. Has lived in Bolinas since 1968 and has published more than 20 books of poetry and prose.

b) Michael Rothenberg said “Joanne’s love for poetry manifests itself in a grander scheme of consciousness-expansion and lesson but is always in the realm of the everyday. Or ‘just space.’ She sees all days in every day, where mythologies become the root system. She uses the journal as a hothouse for poetry, where the journal is a place for poems as well as the poem itself.”

c) Of that literary milieu of North Beach in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s David Meltzer said: “…formalism’s top hats were joyously snowballed by the speech-based vernacular verse allied to William Carlos Williams. The post-war maelstrom and radioactive pastures opened up the end of traditional Western civilization as all had known and believed in it, and young people were there to pick up the pieces and make new sense of everything and nothing.”

      d) Read: Philip Whalen’s Hat and Anything that is created… from Just Space, Narcissus from As Ever, poem from page 69 of All This Every Day, excerpt from Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Bad Bombs from Night Palace broadside.

Writing Exercise Three – Shared List Poem. Start a poem with a title and one line about it to start. Cats (for instance). The pass to the left. When you get the poem, look at the title, then write the first thing, image, or perception that comes to mind in one line then pass it to your left.