Comments on: Postcard from America: On the Road, Alan Ansen, part one

By: rachel hadas

rachel hadas — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 15:06:15 +0000

Alicia, In your lovely tribute to our mutual friend Alan Ansen there were a couple of points I found
personally relevant and helpful, though notdoubt they weren’t intended for me – but isn’t that how poetry itself often works? One, that AA’s attitude toward poetry – lack of personal vanity or careerism but ambtition for and love of the art itself – is something we should all come back to and ponder as we can. And two, your point about Alan’s comfort with awkward silence. Living with my husband, whose dementia keeps him from being able to speak much and from initiating any conversation at all, I have found it helpful not to fear silence; and I have learned that sooner or later poetry will provide some good news, shed some light – not necessarily poetry as a conversation piece, though that too sometimes but poetry as “a friend to man,” as Keats puts it. I can absolutely count on poetry to come to my aid sooner or later. I believe Alan felt the same way, and that was part of what in his tutorials he had to teach.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:17:29 +0000

Interesting to compare Jack’s advice to writers with Auden’s, which I assume Alan Ansen would have heard in one form or another:
1) In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
2) Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.
3) The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.
4) Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
5) Every student would be required to look after a domestic animal and cultivate a garden plot.
— W. H. Auden
By the way, here’s a brief guide to Ansen’s work.
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By: Steve Mackin

Steve Mackin — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:52:12 +0000

Two things Jack related:
1. Here is a link to Jack in 1959, at his height, in fighting trim, reading on TV, with piano accompaniment by Steve Allen – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ_Nk_aPWnE
2. Here is something I take to heart, though I could never think or write this way, and I’ve tried, believe me. “First thought best thought.” I try but it doesn’t work for me. Anyway, here is Jack’s poetic statement:
Jack’s thirty rules of Bop Prosody (on his 85th birthday):
Belief and technique for modern prose
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
As ever,
Jack
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:25:45 +0000

A lovely tribute, Alicia. It’s a great pity that Alan Ansen’s fascinating Table Talk of W.H. Auden is hard to find nowadays, but happily, Dalkey Archive still makes available his own work, in the volume Contact Highs: Selected Poems, 1957-1987.
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By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:26:36 +0000

PS–I put “part one” because I am hoping to come back with some Alan Ansen table talk. But we’ll be travelling over the next couple of days, so I may be scarce for a bit…
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