The 2014 AWP Conference and Bookfair was held in Seattle, WA, from February 27 - March 1, 2014. Among the panel discussions, one feature two of my favorites talking about "writing nature," Robert Hass and Gary Snyder. They were joined by poet and non-fiction author Eva Saulitis, with Peggy Shumaker acting as host and moderator.

Robert Hass, Eva Saulitis, & Gary Snyder: Writing Nature

Event Date: 02.28.14



Robert Hass, Eva Saulitis, & Gary Snyder: Writing Nature from Association of Writers and Writing Programs on FORA.tv
Author and marine biologist Eva Saulitis joins legendary poets Robert Hass and Gary Snyder for a reading followed by a conversation, moderated by Peggy Shumaker, about the task of writing about nature in a culture that often prizes easily commodifiable academic achievement over messier ways of knowing: the lyric, the spiritual, the sublime.

Bio

Robert L. Hass (born March 1, 1941, San Francisco) is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005.

Eva Saulitis, a writer and marine biologist, has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Alaska for twenty-five years. She is the author of a book of essays Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist, the poetry collection Many Ways to Say It, and Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas. She has received fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska State Council on the Arts and is an associate professor in the University of Alaska Low-Residency MFA program.

Peggy Shumaker's newest book is Toucan Nest: Poems of Costa Rica. Her memoir is Just Breathe Normally. A former Alaska State Writer Laureate, she edits the Alaska Literary Series and Boreal Books, publishing literature and fine art from Alaska. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop and the MFA at Pacific Lutheran University.

Gary Snyder, best known as a poet, is an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. He is the author of over twenty books, including Turtle Island, winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He served for many years as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis and has been a translator of ancient Chinese and modern Japanese literary texts into English.

Related Links

• About Eva Saulitis
• Robert Hass at The Poetry Foundation
• About Peggy Shumaker
• Gary Snyder at The Poetry Foundation
• About AWP Conference & Bookfair

The 2014 AWP Conference and Bookfair was held in Seattle, WA, from February 27 - March 1, 2014. Among the panel discussions, one focused and the life and poetry of Rumi, featuring Coleman Barks (one of the best known translators), Brad Gooch (author of a forthcoming Rumi biography), and Buddhist poet Anne Waldman (another of my favorites poets).

Song of the Reed: The Poetry of Rumi

Event Date: 03.01.14
Speakers: Coleman Barks, Brad Gooch, Anne Waldman


Song of the Reed: The Poetry of Rumi from Association of Writers and Writing Programs on FORA.tv
Thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi is now the most popular poet in the United States. In this event, leading Rumi interpreter, Coleman Barks, reads his beloved versions of the Sufi poet’s verse, biographer Brad Gooch shares research into Rumi’s lived experience, and poet Anne Waldman reflects on Rumi’s contribution to poetry’s ecstatic tradition.

Bio

Coleman Barks has taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty years. He is the author of numerous Rumi translations. His work with Rumi was the subject of an hour-long segment in Bill Moyers' Language of Life series on PBS, and he is a featured poet and translator in Bill Moyers' poetry special, "Fooling with Words." His own books of poetry include Winter Sky: Poems 1968-2008.

Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Biography of Flannery O’Connor was a 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times notable book. His short story collection Jailbait and Other Stories won the 1985 Writer’s Choice Award, sponsored by the Pushcart Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. A Guggenheim fellow in biography, he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and is a professor of English at William Paterson University. He is currently at work on a biography and translations of Rumi.

Anne Waldman is the author of more than forty books, including Fast Speaking Woman and Vow to Poetry, a collection of essays, and The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, an epic poem and twenty-five-year project. With Allen Ginsberg she co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics. She received a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and has recently been appointed a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Allen Ginsberg's great American poem, "Howl," was for me (like so many others before and after) a pivotal moment in my understanding of poetry, of art, and of America. Before reading "Howl," I had help William Carlos Williams (Ginsberg's mentor) and Robinson Jeffers as the poets I from whom I tried to learn the craft of poetry. Ginsberg changed that.

Here is some biography from The Academy of American Poets:

He was admitted to Columbia University, and as a student there in the 1940s, he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom later became leading figures of the Beat movement. The group led Ginsberg to a "New Vision," which he defined in his journal: "Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art."

Around this time, Ginsberg also had what he referred to as his "Blake vision," an auditory hallucination of William Blake reading his poems "Ah Sunflower," "The Sick Rose," and "Little Girl Lost." Ginsberg noted the occurrence several times as a pivotal moment for him in his comprehension of the universe, affecting fundamental beliefs about his life and his work. While Ginsberg claimed that no drugs were involved, he later stated that he used various drugs in an attempt to recapture the feelings inspired by the vision.

In 1954, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco. His mentor, William Carlos Williams, introduced him to key figures in the San Francisco poetry scene, including Kenneth Rexroth. He also met Michael McClure, who handed off the duties of curating a reading for the newly-established "6" Gallery. With the help of Rexroth, the result was "The '6' Gallery Reading" which took place on October 7, 1955. The event has been hailed as the birth of the Beat Generation, in no small part because it was also the first public reading of Ginsberg's "Howl," a poem which garnered world-wide attention for him and the poets he associated with.

In response to Ginsberg's reading, McClure wrote: "Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America..."

Shortly after Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956 by City Lights Bookstore, it was banned for obscenity. The work overcame censorship trials, however, and became one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two languages.

Below is the first ever recorded reading of "Howl," a major find for lovers of poetry, especially Beat poetry.

Hear the Very First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading His Epic Poem “Howl” (1956)

June 12th, 2013

Occasionally I slip into an ivory tower mentality in which the idea of a banned book seems quaint—associated with silly scandals over the tame sex in James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence, or more recent, misguided dust-ups over Huckleberry Finn. After all, I think, we live in an age when bestseller lists are topped (no pun) by tawdry fan fiction like Fifty Shades of Grey. Nothing’s sacred. But this notion is a massive blind spot on my part; the whole awareness-raising mission of the annual Banned Books Week seeks to dispel such complacency. Books are challenged, suppressed, and banned all the time in public schools and libraries, even if we’ve moved past outright government censorship of the publishing industry.

It’s also easy to forget that Allen Ginsberg’s generation-defining poem “Howl” was once almost a casualty of censorship. The most likely successor to Walt Whitman’s vision, Ginsberg’s oracular utterances did not sit well with U.S. Customs, who in 1957 tried to seize every copy of the British second printing. When that failed, police arrested the poem’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and he and Ginsberg’s “Howl” were put on trial for obscenity. Apparently, phrases like “cock and endless balls” did not sit well with the authorities. But the court vindicated them all.



The story of Howl’s publication begins in 1955, when 29-year-old Ginsberg read part of the poem at the Six Gallery, where Ferlinghetti—owner of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore—sat in attendance. Deciding that Ginsberg’s epic lament “knocked the sides out of things,” Ferlinghetti offered to publish “Howl” and brought out the first edition in 1956. Prior to this reading, “Howl” existed in the form of an earlier poem called “Dream Record, 1955,” which poet Kenneth Rexroth told Ginsberg sounded “too formal… like you’re wearing Columbia University Brooks Brothers ties.” Ginsberg’s rewrite jettisoned the ivy league propriety.

Unfortunately, no audio exists of that first reading, but above (or via these links: Stream – iTunes ) you can hear the first recorded reading of “Howl,” from February, 1956 at Portland’s Reed College. The recording sat dormant in Reed’s archives for over fifty years until scholar John Suiter rediscovered it in 2008. In it, Ginsberg reads his great prophetic work, not with the cadences of a street preacher or jazzman—both of which he had in his repertoire—but in an almost robotic monotone with an undertone of manic urgency. Ginsberg’s reading, before an intimate group of students in a dormitory lounge, took place only just before the first printing of the poem in the City Lights edition.

The recordings listed above all appear in our collection of 525 Free Audio Books. Just look for the Poetry section.

Related Content:

• Allen Ginsberg Recordings Brought to the Digital Age. Listen to Eight Full Tracks for Free
• Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats”
• James Franco Reads a Dreamily Animated Version of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’

~ Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Gary Snyder - Just One Breath: The Practice of Poetry and Meditation

Here is a wonderful article by poet and Buddhist, Gary Snyder, recipient of the Pulizter Price in literature for his poetry collection, Turtle Island (1975), and he is also the author of an excellent collection of essays, Practice of the Wild (1990). His 2008 collection of poems, Mountains and Rivers Without End: Poem, is probably one of my favorites.

This essay comes from the Tricycle Wisdom Collection.

Just One Breath: The Practice of Poetry and Meditation

Gary Snyder 

Wisdom Collection

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IN THIS WORLD of onrushing events the act of meditation—even just a "one-breath" meditation—straightening the back, clearing the mind for a moment—is a refreshing island in the stream. Although the term meditation has mystical and religious connotations for many people, it is a simple and plain activity. Attention: deliberate stillness and silence. As anyone who has practiced sitting knows, the quieted mind has many paths, most of them tedious and ordinary. Then, right in the midst of meditation, totally unexpected images or feelings may sometimes erupt, and there is a way into a vivid transparency. But whatever comes up, sitting is always instructive. There is ample testimony that a practice of meditation pursued over months and years brings some degree of self-understanding, serenity, focus, and self-confidence to the person who stays with it. There is also a deep gratitude that one comes to feel for this world of beings, teachers, and teachings.

No one—guru or roshi or priest—can program for long what a person might think or feel in private reflection. We learn that we cannot in any literal sense control our mind. Meditation cannot serve an ideology. A meditation teacher can only help a student understand the phenomena that rise from his or her own inner world—after the fact—and give tips on directions to go. A meditation teacher can be a check or guide for the wayfarer to measure herself against, and like any experienced guide can give good warning of brushy paths and dead-end canyons from personal experience. The teacher provides questions, not answers. Within a traditional Buddhist framework of ethical values and psychological insight, the mind essentially reveals itself.

Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies. Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally into it. Poems are a bit like this too. The experience of a poem gives both distance and involvement: one is closer and farther at the same time.

TRADITIONS OF DELIBERATE ATTENTION to consciousness, and of making poems, are as old as humankind. Meditation looks inward, poetry holds forth. One is private, the other is out in the world. One enters the moment, the other shares it. But in practice it is never entirely clear which is doing which. In any case, we do know that in spite of the contemporary public perception of meditation and poetry as special, exotic, and difficult, they are both as old and as common as grass. The one goes back to essential moments of stillness and deep inwardness, and the other to the fundamental impulse of expression and presentation.

People often confuse meditation with prayer, devotion, or vision. They are not the same. Meditation as a practice does not address itself to a deity or present itself as an opportunity for revelation. This is not to say that people who are meditating do not occasionally think they have received a revelation or experienced visions. They do. But to those for whom meditation is their central practice, a vision or a revelation is seen as just another phenomenon of consciousness and as such is not to be taken as exceptional. The meditator would simply experience the ground of consciousness, and in doing so avoid excluding or excessively elevating any thought or feeling. To do this one must release all sense of the "I" as experiencer, even the "I" that might think it is privileged to communicate with the divine. It is in sensitive areas such as these that a teacher can be a great help. This is mostly a description of the Buddhist meditation tradition, which has hewed consistently to a nontheistic practice over the centuries.

Poetry has also been part of Buddhism from early on. From the 2,500-year-old songs of forest-dwelling monks and nuns of India to the vivid colloquial poems of Kenji Miyazawa in 1930s Japan, there is a continuous thread. Poetry has had a primary place of respect in Chinese literary culture, and many of the best-known poems of the Chinese canon are touched with Ch'an and Taoist insight. Some of the finest poets of China were even acknowledged Ch'an adepts—Bai Juyi and Su Dungpo, to name just two.

Although the Chinese Ch'an masters liked to say "The lowest class of monk is the one who indulges in literature," we have to remember that blame is often praise in the Ch'an world. The Ch'an training halls, with their unconventional dharma discourses and vivid mimed exchanges, and the tradition of the Chinese lyric poems, shih, with their lucid and allusive brevity, were clearly shaping each other by the early Tang dynasty.

Ch'an teachers and students have always written their own sort of in-house poems as well. In formalgung-an (koan) study, a student is often called upon to present a few lines of poetry from the Chinese canon as a proof of the completeness of his or her understanding—an exercise called zho-yu, "capping verses" (jakugo in Japanese). Such exchanges have been described in the book A Zen Forest by Soiku Shigematsu, a Japanese Rinzai Zen priest. Shigematsu Osho has handily translated hundreds of the couplets as borrowed from Chinese poetry and proverb. They are intense:

Words, words, words—fluttering drizzle and snow.
Silence, silence, silence—a roaring thunderbolt.
Bring back the dead!
Kill the living!
This tune, another tune—no one understands.
Rain has passed, leaving the pond brimming in the autumn light.
The fire of catastrophe has burned out all
Millions of miles no mist, not a grain of dust!
One phrase after another
Each moment refreshing.

These bits of poems are not simply bandied about between Zen students as some kind of in-group wisdom or slangy shorthand for larger meanings. They are used sparingly, in interviews with the teacher, as a mode of reaching even deeper than a "personal" answer to a problem, as a way of confirming that one has touched base with a larger Mind. They are valued not for the literary metaphor but for the challenge presented by the exercise of physically actualizing the metaphor in the present. They help the student bring symbols and abstractions back to earth, into the body. Zen exquisitely develops this possibility—yet it's not far from the natural work of poems and proverbs anyway.

The Buddhist world has produced numerous poets and singers of the dharma whose works are still admired and loved. Milarepa, whose songs are known by heart among Tibetans, and Basho, whose haiku are read worldwide, are perhaps the most famous.

I STARTED WRITING POETRY in my adolescence, to give voice to some powerful experiences that I had while doing snowpeak mountaineering in the Pacific Northwest. At first I wrote "directly as I felt." Then I discovered the work of Robinson Jeffers and D.H. Lawrence. Aha, I thought, there is more to poetry. I became aware of poetry as a craft—a matter of working with materials and tools—that has a history, with different applications and strategies all over the world over tens of thousands of years. I came to understand poetry as a furthering of language. (Language is not something you learn in school, it is a world you're born into. It is part of the wildness of Mind. You master your home tongue without conscious effort by the age of five. Language with its sinuous syntax is not unlike the thermal dynamics of weather systems, or energy exchanges in the food chain—completely natural and vital, part of what and who we are. Poetry is the leap off of [or into] that.)

I ran into a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins with the lines,

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep

This helped me realize that literal mountains were not the only place to climb. I was recovering at the time from a little frostbite suffered on a winter ascent of Mt. Hood. (It should be said that mountaineering is not simply some sort of challenging quest. It has that aspect, but for dedicated climbers the strategy, the companionship, and the cooperation is what makes climbing the game it is.) Climbing also opened me up to the impermanence, the total scariness, the literal voidness under my feet, the exposure, as we say, of consciousness itself. What deep and soulful thoughts that witnessing the gulf below can give you.

MY INTEREST IN WRITING brought me to the twentieth-century modernists and Chinese poetry; and my thoughts on nature and wilderness brought me to Taoism and then to Zen. This growing awareness of Zen was also interwoven with the discovery of Chinese landscape painting. I studied classical Chinese with Peter Boodberg and Shih-hsiang Chen at Berkeley. I learned of the poet Han-shan in seminars with Professor Chen and began a little translating of my own. I came to see that some of the finest of the Chinese poems had a mysteriously plain quality, and I wanted to understand where that came from. I started doing sitting meditation, zazen, by myself at home. These various strands got drawn together in the summer of 1955 when I was a trail-crew worker in the High Sierra of California. I started writing poems out of the labor on the trails that echoed the crispness of classical Chinese poems and also had the flavor of my nightly meditations up on the cliffs.

On those clear nights in the High Sierra I saw the stars as further rocks and trails leading onward and out. Although I had written dozens of poems before, these were the first I could acknowledge as entirely my own. They are in the collection Riprap. I made plans to travel to Japan, to learn more of meditation. A year or so later, in Kyoto, I asked my teacher Oda Sesso Roshi, "Sometimes I write poetry. Is that all right?" He laughed and said, "It's all right as long as it comes out of your true self." He also said "You know, poets have to play a lot, asobi." That seemed an odd thing to say, because the word asobi has an implication of wandering the bars and pleasure quarters, the behavior of a decadent wastrel. I knew he didn't mean that. For many years while doing Zen practice around Kyoto, I virtually quit writing poetry. It didn't bother me. My thought was, Zen is serious, poetry is not serious. In any case, you have to be completely serious when you do Zen practice. So I tried to be serious and I didn't write many poems. I studied with him for six years.

IN 1966, JUST BEFORE ODA ROSHI DIED, I had a talk with him in the hospital. I said, "Roshi! So it's Zen is serious, poetry is not serious." He said "No, no—poetry is serious! Zen is not serious." I had it all wrong! I don't know if it was by accident or it was a gift he gave me, but I started writing more, and maybe I did a little less sitting, too. I think I had come to understand something about play: to be truly serious you have to play. That's on the side of poetry, and of meditation, too. In fact, play is essential to everything we do—working on cars, cooking, raising children, running corporations—and poetry is nothing special. Language is no big deal. Mind is no big deal. Meaning or no-meaning, it's perfectly okay. We take what's given us, with gratitude.

The poet in us can be seen at both the beginning and the end of a life. Everybody knows a child can come up with a rhyme, a song, a poem that will delight us. At the same time, the old priest on his deathbed will write a poem, his last act. The most refined and accomplished people will express their deepest understanding in a poem—and the absolute beginner will not hesitate to try to express a transient transcendent moment. There is no sure way to predict which poem will be better than the other.

Poetry is democratic, Zen is elite. No! Zen is democratic, poetry is elite. Which is it? Everybody can do zazen, but only a few do poetry. Everybody can do poetry but only a few can really do zazen. Poetry (and the literary world) has sometimes been perceived as dangerous to the spirit career, but also poems have been called upon to express the most delicate and profound spiritual understanding.

We can appreciate Ikkyu's probing poem:

Ridiculing Literature 

Humans are endowed with / the stupidity of horses and cattle.
Poetry was originally a / work out of hell.
Self-pride, false pride, / suffering from the passions,
We must sigh for those taking this path / to intimacy with demons.

Ikkyu, a fifteenth-century Japanese Zen master and a fine (and strikingly fearless) poet himself, laughingly ridiculed his fellow poets, knowing as he did the distractions and temptations that might come with literary aspirations. His "intimacy with demons" is not to be seen in the light of the occidental romance with alienation, however. In Japanese art, demons are funny little guys, as solid as horses and cows, who gnash their fangs and cross their eyes. Poetry is a way of celebrating the actuality of a nondual universe in all its facets. Its risk is that it declines to exclude demons. Buddhism offers demons a hand and then tries to teach them to sit. But there are tricky little poetry/ego demons that do come along, tempting us with suffering or with insight, with success or failure. There are demons practicing meditation and writing poetry in the same room with the rest of us, and we are all indeed intimate. It didn't really trouble Ikkyu.

On seeing Ikkyu's poem (and these comments) my friend Doc wrote me from his fish camp:

Ikkyu says, "Humans are endowed with the stupidity of horses and cattle."
I think Ikkyu is full of shit.
Humans are endowed with a stupidity all their own.
Horses and cattle know what to do.
They do it well.
He is right about poetry as a work out of hell.
We ought to know.
Phenomena experience themselves as themselves.
They don't need poetry.
We are looking at a mystery here.
How do these things have such an obstinancy and yet are dependent on my consciousness?
When I practice fishing with two teenagers
poetry never occurs to me.
But later it does.
I can go over the whole day.
Hooray! That's what being human is all about.
It is just as much a weakness as a strength.
You say a language is (a wild system born with us.)
I agree.
It is wilder than wild.
If we were just wild we wouldn't need language.
Maybe we are beyond wild.
That makes me feel better. 

-Doc Dachtler
Kanaka Creek

BEYOND WILD. This can indeed include language. Poetry is how language experiences itself. It's not that the deepest spiritual insights cannot be expressed in words (they can, in fact) but that wordscannot be expressed in words. So our poems are full of real presences. "Save a ghost," you might be asked by your teacher—or an owl, or a rainforest, or a demon. Walking that through and then putting a poem to it is a step on the way toward realization. But the path has many switchbacks and a spiritual journey is strewn with almost as many land mines as a poet's path. Let us all be careful (and loose as a goose) together.

SPENDING TIME with your own mind is humbling and broadening. One finds that there's no one in charge, and is reminded that no thought lasts for long. The marks of the Buddhist teachings are impermanence, no-self, the inevitability of suffering, interconnectedness, emptiness, the vastness of mind, and the provision of a Way to realization. An accomplished poem, like an exemplary life, is a brief presentation, a uniqueness in the oneness, a complete expression, and a kind gift exchange in the mind-energy webs. In the No play Basho (Banana Plant) it is said that "all poetry and art are offerings to the Buddha." These various Buddhist ideas in play with the ancient Chinese sense of poetry are part of the weave that produced an elegant plainness, which we name the Zen aesthetic.

Tu Fu said, "The ideas of a poet should be noble and simple." In Ch'an circles it has been said "Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary." This plainness, this ordinary actuality, is what Buddhists call thusness, or tathata. There is nothing special about actuality because it is all right here. There's no need to call attention to it, to bring it up vividly and display it. Therefore the ultimate subject matter of a "mystical" Buddhist poetry is profoundly ordinary. This elusive ordinary actuality that is so touching and refreshing, all rolled together in imagination and language, is the work of all the arts. (The really fine poems are maybe the invisible ones, that show no special insight, no remarkable beauty. But no one has ever really written a great poem that had perfectly no insight, instructive unfolding, syntactic deliciousness—it is only a distant ideal.)

So there will never be some one sort of identifiable "meditation poetry." In spite of the elegant and somewhat decadent Plain Zen ideal, gaudiness and novelty and enthusiastic vulgarity are also fully real. Bulging eyeballs, big lolling tongues, stomping feet, cackles and howls— all are there in the tradition of practice. And there will never be—one devoutly hopes—one final and exclusive style of Buddhism. I keep looking for poems that see the moment, that play freely with what's given,

Teasing the demonic
Wrestling the wrathful
Laughing with the lustful
Seducing the shy
Wiping dirty noses and sewing torn shirts
Sending philosophers home to their wives in time for dinner
Dousing bureaucrats in rivers
Taking mothers mountain climbing
Eating the ordinary

appreciating that so much can be done on this precious planet of samsara.

Gary Snyder lives in the northern Sierra Nevada and Practices in the Linji Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist tradition. Pulitzer prize-winning poet and essayist, his most recent book is Practice of the Wild (North Point Press).

Adapted from the Introduction to Beneath a Single Moon: Legacies of Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry. Edited by Kent Johnson and Craig Paulenich. (Shambhala Publications)

Images © Allen Ginsberg (1) and Mayumi Oda (2 and 3).

Very cool - it's too bad this collection of tapes is incomplete.

“Expansive Poetics” by Allen Ginsberg: A Free Course from 1981

These lectures were recorded at Naropa University in Boulder, CO in the summer of 1981.

Tape 1 – The first class in an Allen Ginsberg course on Expansive Poetics. Ginsberg opens the class with a brief history of the topics of courses he has taught in the past. He then explains his expectations for this course and the material he plans to cover in the sourcebook/anthology he is compiling. He then reads Geza Roheim’s "Children of the Desert," Shelley’s "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," "Ode to the West Wind," and the end of "Adonais." The class discusses rhythm and the expansive breath and how it influences one’s work.

Tape 2 in an 11 tape series of a class taught by Allen Ginsberg on Expansive Poetics. Subject matter includes background on the Russian Futurists as well as the reading of works by Paul Klebnikov.

Tape 3 in an 11 tape series of a class taught by Allen Ginsberg on Expansive Poetics. Subject matter includes some discussion of the Russian Futurists and two short readings by Russian Futurist writers.

Tape 4 of an 11 Tape series of a class taught by Allen Ginsberg on Expansive Poetics. Subject matter includes background on the Futurists, Dadaists, and other literary movents as well as readings of work by such writers as Vladamir Klebnikov and Kurt Schwitters.

Tape 5 of an 11 tape series of a class taught by Allen Ginsberg on Expansive Poetics. Subject matter includes background on such movements as the Futurists, Acmeists, and Imaginists as well as readings of work by various artists including Osip Mandelstam, Jorge Ivanov, Nikolai Gumilev, William Carlos Williams, and Anna Akhmatova.

Tape 6 of an 11 tape series of a class taught by Allen Ginsberg on Expansive Poetics. Ginsberg discusses the lives and writing of Anna Akhmatova and Sergey Yesenin.

Tape 7 Not available. (But we’re looking into it.)

Tape 8 of an 11 tape series of Allen Ginsbergs class on Expansive Poetics. Subject matter includes background on Surrealism and concepts of language and the imagination as well as readings of works by such writers as Tristan Tzara, Philip Lamantia, Andre Breton, Robert Desnos, Vitezslav Nezval, Philippe Soupeau, Francis Picabia, and Benjamin Perret.

Tape 9 Not  available.

Tape 10 Not available.

Tape 11 of an 11 tape series of Allen Ginsberg’s class on Expansive Poetics. Subject matter includes background on such Russian writers as Kaysin Kuliev and Sergei Yesenin. Also included are readings of work by Gordon McVay, Vladimir Klebnikov, and Sergei Yesenin.

You can find the course listed in the Literature section of our big collection of 500 Free Online Courses.

Helen Vendler - Wallace Stevens as an American Poet

From Stanford University, Helen Vendler (one of our greatest living literary critics) speaks about Wallace Stevens, one of our greatest poets.

Wallace Stevens as an American Poet

January 17, 2012 - Helen Vendler, one of the leading American poetry critics, as well as a distinguished professor in Harvard University's Department of English, discusses Wallace Stevens, the poet. She dives into some of his work in order to show why he is one of the finest American poets to set ink to paper. Wallace Stevens was born in 1879 and died in 1955 and was awarded a Pulitzer prize that same year.