Jack Kerouac wrote a very strange book called Old Angel Midnight, and you can find it in the Collected Poems of Jack Kerouac. It's a long prose poem, unlike pretty much anything else he wrote. The project was based on some notebook entries that he wrote in the '50s and then collected much later. It began with Kerouac living in Lower East Side of New York, where initially he would stay up as late as he could and he heard sounds coming through the open tenement window. He wanted to listen to all the sounds of and the voices of people in the wash court below. He heard voices coming from kitchens and the other occupants in nearby apartment buildings, and he tried to set it down in Old Angel Midnight. His model was James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, if that's any help. He thought of this as sounds of the universe. It's very unlike the novelistic Kerouac that a lot of people read. He associated this kind of writing with the use of neologisms, made up words, mental associations, puns, word mixes, a plethora of languages and non-languages. That's the background. Let's start with just a general impression of how it sounds. Nex, what does it mean? What kind of project is this? Well, it's a project of listening rather than generating. In many ways if we think of a more traditional form of poetic production being allowing either if you go back the muse to speak through you or to try to put language to something beautiful or inspiring. This is a project of transcribing, of listening, of recording. I don't think it's strictly that, but I think that's what he's leading the reader to believe it is. Romantic era subjectivity such as Wordsworth, Lone Writer, lonely on a hill, contemplating flowers or whatever, creates an individualized subjectivity for the romantic era. Poem is going to be the expression of that individual's subjectivity. You move to a city and at first you get Whitman, trying to exploit that but then you get Kerouac and others, he's not the only one, who try this experiment of what poem is going to be most responsive to the concatenations and the multilingualism of what's in the city. It's not me and my thoughts and a flower, it is everything going on at once. If that's the ratio, we are in a period where even a non-urban poetry has to be aware. The poetry that the course admires in its own canon is a poem that tries to figure out how writing can accommodate all those other subjectivities. Having said that, who would like to find in here in this section, some expression of that. Gabe, what do you see? Give us an example of that. I think just this move from and towards the end. "For the sake of the reading and for the sake of the tongue and not just these insipid stories written insipid or entities and paranoyas blooming and why it the image, let's hear the sound of the universe sun and no more part total." That's perfect. Yeah. That's a nice moment in which you've got the showing and the telling of the line before that is really just full of sound. Then a line that's saying, "I'm trying to hear the sound of the universe. I'm trying to be the funnel." Just to really pull this out for the sake of reading and for the sake of the tongue. The old method would have been very reading focused, very visual on the page focused, poetry written, poetry on the page. He's still a page poet to be sure, although he really liked to fool around with sound. Still, ultimately the sound gets, he's still pitch. "But for the sake of reading and for the sake of capital T, Tongue." What is a poetry of multi-subjectivity and multilingualism got to do with the tongue? While you're thinking of how to answer that question, I will quote my favorite little piece of Kerouac and it's in Old Angel Midnight. I don't even know what's going on, but this is an example of him having heard this, various people talking. It goes like this. "Trying to think of a role in Sanskrit, Mama Sanskrit, sounding obviously twins coming in here, mill town, ecuanor, myopa part data what touch-up of p mona guava. You get sticky ring weekends and wash the tub. Bub, I'll be gentle like an iamb in the Bible. Now, iamb could be lamb, as gentle as a lamb, but it's gentle is an iamb. So he's not going to do anything that's iambic. I don't know what those words are. What is that? If it is a poetry of the tongue, he claims this is a total turning about. So that's an overstated claim but how do you respond to this tongue stuff? How do you respond to the sound of what I just read? Dave, what are you thinking? It seems like in a sense what he's really trying to strip away this denotation from the connotation, the connotation that's out there, all this other stuff that exists in the world that isn't just a specific object. I feel like "I am" in context with some of this religious signification makes me think of the Great I Am. Row flowing literature, the sound of the universe. In Eastern philosophy is the sound of the universe's own. There is this one primitive sound that encompasses all other sounds. The Tongue gives me speaking in tongues. So it's like we're trying to get to this state of enlightenment through, like Dave said, stripping away all of the context, the delineation of different languages, all of the conventions of language. Then at the end here we have this line, "The dream is already ended and we're already awake in the golden eternity." Where the poet comes back in and gives us this enlightened view. There's this very obvious like Finnegan's wake in like, every word in the world is here right now. But also just this wave like this fetishizing also of class that I think happens in Joyce and is happening here where it's like if you get enough working class people together talking in their working class way, eventually they will disclose some truths about God and religion and the world. That seems to be happening here too, where he's just listening in and he's hearing all this biblical talk of God and the devil and the angels, it's even called Old Angel Midnight. That's what makes it so modernist to me, I think is this attitude towards the Blab Of The Pave and really figuring the Blab Of The Pave as belonging to a certain people that are not also the writer. Then he's there to refine it or to extract like the Meaning from it. It strikes me very different from some of the more thoroughly postmodern stuff that the course does touch on where meaning is more allowed to emerge, it's not being extracted even when it is meaning that's emerging from say a blaby nonsense or listening situation. If you try to draw a line from this experiment forward to something like Week 9, Chapter 9.2 and some of the Alley Tory poetry. You get someone like Jackson Mac Low who is very severely, specifically involved in keeping his subjectivity as far away from possible as the result. Kerouac, as Molly and others have pointed out, he's trying not to keep the subjectivity away from it, he's happy to be part of what's going on. But he is more than previous writers listening. Amber Rose do you have a thought about this. From the point of,"For the sake of the Tongue, I was really caught by affect and effect." That's one of those things that for the sake of reading you can see the difference but that double e there, is one place where you can see really intentionally how he is shaping this for the sake of the tongue. Gabe you get the final fire work because you're giving me a face of, "I'm not sure what to think.". I guess what I wanted to say is I think here and I think in Whitman and I think in Mac Low is that hope for a writing process without process, which is very hard. I think we've talked a lot about how it's not possible, now it's contradictory, but in that formulation I'm hoping that you can make a writing process that doesn't have style, doesn't have process. The Tongue comes to stand in for that. Like the Tongue gets this work, a symbolic work applied to it, where the tongue might be more automatic, might be more real than the pen and so I think that's where this battle flow idea is coming from and why we get tongue with a capital T and that's all I have to say. Thank you-all. The work is Old Angel Midnight and it is worth listening to and you can get almost all of it on pencil.