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 Laurel side of New York where initially he would step 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 Finnegan's 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, and it is really more aligned with poetry and poetics, particularly let's say Whitman's idea of putting everything into the poem, "the blab of the pave." The chief plot of the book is the phrase "sounds of the universe". He associated this writing with the use of neologisms, made up words, mental associations, puns, word mixes, a plethora of languages and non-languages. So the only other point I'd make here is that when this was first published by some students at the University of Chicago, we have a student here from the University of Chicago, the long line of obstreperous people. The students Paul Carroll and Irving Rosenthal, Paul Carroll became an important poet, wanted to publish this in the Chicago Review and the University of Chicago English Department said, "That's a bad idea," and they decided not to publish it. So they created a magazine called Big Table, famously. Big Table published this, and a judge, Judge Julius Hoffman, he's a infamous judge in Chicago, said, "Basically they put Big Table on trial." The judge referred to this work, Old Angel Midnight, as a "prose picnic", which actually doesn't sound like such a negative thing but it was meant to think, "Let's put these people in jail." So that's to say that in its time it was odd and controversial. So that's the background. Let's start with this. Just a general impression of how it sounds. Again, he says in this piece, "I want to hear the sounds through the window." Let's just back up and say, what does it mean to create a prose poetry consisting of amazing, nonsensical raves, "sounds through the windows". Who wants to start with that? Next. What does it mean? What kind of project is this? 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 to "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. Molly, what's your reaction to a project like this? Setting yourself up in a Laurel-side tenement and just recording what you hear at 2:00 AM? It sounds really on-brand. I can't reckon for the time. On-brand but also not, because On the Road isn't it always. I think it's really revolutionary and it's a step towards found language, and having that be a jumping off point for a work of art. I wonder if we could connect, the Whitman of is it Canto 8, The blab of the pave? The Whitman who wants to create in the sound of words, the excitement of the city street to, as Molly just referred, the more contemporary poetry, which is looking to unoriginally pull phrases and language from the ambiance. I can take that. You want to do that? Yeah. I think to me, the difference between Whitman's blab of the pave and this is that in Canto 8 of Song of Myself, Whitman steps out onto the street and he just records everything that he's seeing, and there's a lot of the scuff of boot soles and the cries of women who spontaneously go into labor and disappear inside. This is in the Whitman, yeah? Yeah, the Whitman. So there's a lot of the sounds there, but you still very much feel like Whitman is the figure moving through the city, transcribing all these sounds. What's happening here is, to me at least in my ear, hearing this and reading it is that, Kerouac has taken all the sounds, he's internalized them, and then translated it, and to use his own phrase into this poetize and horseshit, what a move that is? Like Whitman, we're very aware this is a figure that's looking out and taking all this and like, "Look at this. This is all poetry. All this city motion is all poetry." Whereas Kerouac is taking all of these people's lives and languages and snippets of conversation and conflicts and his own poetize and horseshit, and just reproduce that on the page. To me those feel like different moves, politically and poetically. Typically. Davy. Something that's similar about this moves for the important ways that they're different is that they're both interested in using the form of the poem to deal with the fact that cities are overwhelmingly simultaneous, that a thing that a poem can do is to be these like, 15 things are happening at the same moment and if I'm interested in describing the texture of being in urban space, I'm going to have all these frenetic things happen at once. For me, the Kerouac freneticism is a little more frenetic and a little more nonsensical from a Whitmanian freneticism, which means a little more curated, this is made my cute city diorama with these ladies, and these boot soles, and these very attractive dudes doing lots of important manual labor. This is invested in a chaos. Canto eight, to me, feels like a stage set, of if I imagined a city, [inaudible] the movie happening. You could make a movie on it. Exactly. The inability to extricate, I don't know who's saying this thing, I don't know where one person's speech begins and someone else's ends, I don't know how much of it is like I heard the sound of this word, but I don't actually know what it was. There is a difference in representational mastery. Whitman is like, "I see all this and can identify." I can do the work of describing it for you. Even if it's a list, it's still me in control. Right. Kerouac is hearing this and saying, "I don't know if this was the word. I don't know what language this was in. I am trying to record a set of sounds as a form of knowledge of urban space." Yeah,. "I can't really tell you very much about what those sounds are." I'm going to take from what you said and create a ratio, it may be a little reductive, forgive me if it is, and ask others to comment on this ratio. You did something big, literary historical there. So the implicit thing, and it has to do with the poetry of the city, so romantic era subjectivity such as words with 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 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. So if that's the ratio, we're in a period where even a non-urban poetry has to be aware. I don't know how many ModPo poems are not taking place in cities, probably not too many, but we need to think about that. But the poetry that, and sorry for the use of the word we, but let's say the poetry that the course admires in its own canon is the 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, some evidence of that? Davy already mentioned it, but I think it would be worth looking and finding something. Gabe, what do you see? Give us an example of that. Yeah, 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 aridities, and paranoias blooming, and why yet the image, let's hear the sound of the universe, son, and no more part twaddle." 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, and then a line that's saying, "Hey, I'm trying to hear the sound of the universe. I'm trying to be the funnel." So just to really pull this out, for the sake of reading and for the sake of the Tongue, so 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, he still, page quote, "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, and 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 rule in Sanskrit Mamma Sanskrit sounding obviously twins coming in here Milltown Equinell Miopa Parte Watacha Peemana Kowava. 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, gentle as a lamb, but it's gentle as an Iamb. So he's not going to do anything that's Iambic and I don't know what those words are. "Twins coming in here, Milltown Equinell Miopa Parte Watacha Peemana Kowava. You get sticky ring weekends and wash the tub. Bub, I'll be gentle is an Iamb in the Bible." 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 do you think? It's a turning about, but it's also a deep revival, which I found interesting. Of? Exactly, I'm not even sure. He says of world robe flowing literature. Right. So I'm not even sure. It's magic, irrational. I'm not even sure. This really confuses me, Kerouac confuses me a lot, in general. I'm just trying to deal with it and 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'm still trying to process this one. Ally, when he says no more part twaddle, what does he mean? Does he mean I'm all in with twaddle, we're going to get total twaddle? It's hard to know what he means there, "But then we get twaddle, purely, purely, [inaudible] tic, tac, birds in front of them." Well, I also wonder if twaddle to him is exactly the opposite of purely, purely, like if twaddle to him is actually his consciousness. I'm really interested in how this project doesn't work in lines where Kerouac's subjectivity and consciousness does come in, and part of that is how this poem and this project challenges our own suspension of disbelief in the narrative impulse. But burrows in Ginsburg were asleep and you lay on the couch in that timeless moment in that little red bulb-like bus and saw drapes of returnee per inferred," etc. That's a little of a Kerouac novel thrown into it. Exactly. You would have to be Kerouac or someone in that milieu to have burrows in Ginsburg in the poem. Even I am in the quote that you cited, that is essentially the way a poet would hear that word regardless of what it is. I'm just really interested in the limitations of this exercise, and I think that Kerouac also has that interest and is acknowledging that here. So getting back to twaddle, it calls into question, is the nonsense the twaddle, or is the sense the twaddle? Molly. I feel like that I am in context with some of this religious signification makes me think of the great I am, rope flowing literature, the sound of the universe in Eastern philosophy is this how the universe has Om. There's this one primitive sound that encompasses all other sounds. The capital T tongue gives me speaking in tongues. So it's like we're trying to get to this state of enlightenment, 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 worldview. I didn't say in my little intro, but I should have that Kerouac at this point was reading and studying Buddhism, and so this is his attempt at throwing in some of those ideas. Max, what are you thinking? I'm thinking about how aggressively joy seeing it is. For a few different reasons, there's this very obvious, like Finnegan's Wake, and like every word in the world is here right now. But also just this wave, this fetishizing also of class that I think happens in joys and is happening here where if you get to know of working-class people together talking in their working-class way, eventually they'll disclose some truths about God and religion in the world. That seems to be happening here too where he's just listening in and he's hearing all of these. That's a biblical talk of God, and the devil, and the angels. It's even called Old Angel Midnight, and I don't know, that's what makes it so modernist to me. I think this attitude towards the blab of the pave and really figuring the blab of the pave as belonging to a certain kind of people that are not also the writer. Then he's there to refine it or to extract like the capital M meaning from it. It strikes me as very different from some of the more thoroughly postmodern stuff that the course does touch on where I think meaning is more allowed to emerge. It's not being extracted even when it is meaning that's emerging from, say, a blabby, nonsensical, 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 [inaudible] poetry, you get someone like Jackson Mac Low where he's severely specifically involved in keeping his subjectivity as far away from possible as the result. Kerouac is not trying to keep his, 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. Let's just get some final thoughts on this. I hope that a couple of you will stress the line from this work unusual among the Beats. Forward to later works, or we'll talk about this idea of writing poetry for the sake of the tongue, which we don't talk enough about, I think, in ModPo. So Ambrose, do you have a thought about this? Yeah. One thing that I'm just thinking about is these dashes. How much I love these dashes. Obviously, anytime I see dashes, I think of Emily Dickinson. But the many uses of these dashes, how they interrupt, how they tie things together without it having to be super clear. But on 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's shaping this "for the sake of the tongue." Good. Thank you. Further follow up thoughts, Dave. Something that I keep thinking about as we're having this conversation, and especially bringing up this phrase, world flowing literature. Building on, Molly, you were saying about the way that a person with a rigorous Buddhist practice make here the phrase, sound of the universe. Something that I can't make a decision about in my own reading of this poem, is whether Kerouac's interest in representing language beyond his language fluency or capacity is rigorously orientalizing or interested in a project of thinking about the limits of representation. That's certainly something that we see in Week's 9 and 10 of thinking broadly about the politics of representation. Whose experience can and should you represent. What can that range of representation look like. How do you represent the limits of what feels ethical to represent or what you have the capacity to represent. I think that there's a relationship, like the phrase, "The blab of the pave" is so interesting because "blab" is a nonsense word. There's a tension for me between where identifiable words and identifiable language appear. Where sounds that seem to be mimicking a language that exceed Kerouac appear. What gets to make meaning, and what gets reduced from meaning-making in another language context into nice sounds of the city to Kerouac. That's something that I want to recognize as part of the complexity of this poem, and is necessarily part of a poet whose grounding is really in a couple of languages to represent the soundscape of languages outside of his command. Yeah. Also, we have to recognize especially later in the course, that there's no such thing as a pure on originality. There's always going to be a curation, some selections, and that's where subjectivity comes back in. Micklow and Caves thought they built such a machine, but if somebody could build a poem poetizing machine that would take everything in, then there's no orientalizing possible. But even just staying up till 2:00 AM on a Friday night, opening your window on the east-side tenement and recording what you hear, you are doing a certain site-specific curation. The phrase there, "I'll be gentle, like an I am in the Bible." So Molly, you said, "I am," and when you said "I am," I was thinking of the great biblical fiery scene of Moses facing God, which is the tautological moment of "I am who I am." That is, God says, "You don't really need to know much more about me other than that I am." The idea that when you combine biblical sweetness, which is mostly a New Testament thing, and the tradition of the "I am," which is what you learn at Columbia as he did, how to become a poet. That's the opposite of road flowing. That "I am" is against what he's trying to do. He's trying to break the "I am". The irony is that "I am" itself is iambic. So you can never really get away from it. Anyway, Gabe you get the final fire work because you're giving me a face of, "I'm not sure what to think." No, I guess, what I wanted to say is, I think here, and I think in Whitman, and I think in Micklow, is there's a 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. The tongue gets a symbolic work applied to where the tongue might be more automatic, might be more real than the pen. So I think that's where this babble flow idea is coming from and why we get Tongue with the capital T. 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 PennSound.
