They all go to Rosetta’s house to have a drink. They have a good time together, get a little drunk, kind of a little paradise between them that night, a “moment in eternity”. They happen to get together and start talking. So they’re all sitting along by the bar, thinking their own thoughts. So it’s Malin, Emble, Quant and Rosetta – various people. A young soldier on leave, a navy intelligence man of some sort (maybe gay but in the closet), a Jewish woman, not-so-young anymore, but on the town, looking for someone to sleep with or talk to, and a sort of straight middle-aged man, who is, actually, sort of the hero, at the end of the evening goes home alone and has a long soliloquy which I’ll read It is a situation during the war, late at night, in a bar on Second Avenue, New York City. So, maybe we’ll get him here sooner or later. his big thesis was a thesis on the prosody, the metrical schemes and the prosody, related to music in theWagner Ring cycle. He knew German well in those days (and) French well enough to do… he did. PO: Well, I only went to one class, but.ĪG: He’s been studying Hebrew and Arabic and Persian and Sanskrit. It meets about two hours, once a week – makes fifty dollars, and he’s teaching (Ezra) Pound, (T.S.) Eliot. PO: He’s teaching at the American Center college in Athens. So Ansen typed up “Age of Anxiety” – and one of the people we’re going to be trying to get here – You saw him this summer?ĪG: What’s he doing? What’s he doing now? Also I’d known Chester Kallman, his boyfriend, and Alan Ansen, his secretary. So, he gave me a little note to go visit Auden, and I went to see him. despite the fact that Auden was using older English forms and strict counted meter, he thought, every single line of Auden was different at least, it wasn’t as if they were metronomic and repetitive and boring. The discussion was over prosody and meter between us, open-form prosody, and. Later, I think, Williams sent me to see Auden. Auden, who was living in New York on Seventh Avenue and… I guess Seventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street, near the Chelsea Hotel. One, to go to a more open form like (William Carlos) Williams, who was just breaking through then and writing his best work, beginning “ Paterson” then, an American meter. There was a struggle at that time between various schools of poetics. It’s Auden at the height of his energy and power, and also his scholarship, also his crankiness – that he went back. “A Baroque Eclogue” ( sic) – (“Baroque”, because he’s using a great many fancy complicated meters). It’s during the war, and “Age of Anxiety”, a really prophetic poem.
William Burroughs and Alan Ansen – Photograph by Allen Ginsberg So I picked out some passages that I remember from the (19)40’s – to the (19)80’s, that almost thirty-five years have stuck in my mind, so I guess they still are good.
So we were all very familiar with it, back in the (19)40’s – mid-‘Forties and late-‘Forties and some early (19)50’s – and I haven’t looked at it since, until today – again – (I) went over to the Boulder Library and picked up a copy (because I remembered it was written in the alliterative meter) and it really is great. And Alan Ansen, who was a friend of (Jack) Kerouac’s and mine, and Neal Cassady, was Auden’s secretary when he wrote this huge epic poem. was a big queer, who lived out in Woodmere , New York, and had huge learned correspondence with Thomas Mann about the prosody in Wagner’s Ring operas (because Wagner was into prosody, as was Auden, as was Stravinsky, as was Chester Kallman, as was Alan Ansen), prosody, like the measurement of word and music together, or the music of the language or the measure of the language, the measure of the line.
stayed with Auden in a house in Brooklyn Heights in (19)39 when Auden first came over from England, and there was a brilliant, eccentric, strange guy named Alan Ansen, who, at the time. I remember, at the time, I was living with ( Jack) Kerouac and with (William) Burroughs near Columbia University on 115th Street. Auden around about that time was a really great poet and is, remains, a great poet. I think it came out in… wait a minute, let’s see.(19)44 maybe?. So I thought I would read some of that (and there’s one copy that I got out of the Boulder library which I’ll put in our own (Naropa) library for a couple of weeks, and then I have my own copy here, so if anybody wants to take a look at this at leisure, do so). Allen, continuing with his “Basic Poetics” class at Naropa – January 7, 1980ĪG: So Auden – W.H.Auden, the… who, incidentally, it was his anthology that I was reading from originally – the… it’s the first thing in his five-volume anthology of English poetry, poetry of the English language (which we’ve talked about before) also, in the (19)40’s, during World War II, wrote a very great poem called “Age of Anxiety” in old Germanic and Anglo-Saxon alliterative meters.
0 kommentar(er)
