Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Subversive Art of Poetry: A Summer Reading and Writing Class

Where are Whitman’s wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with a sense of sweetness and sublimity,
where the great, new vision,
the great world-view,
the high prophetic song
of the immense earth
and all that sings in it

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti,  Populist Manifesto

 

Glory in the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will.
Generate collective joy in the face of collective doom.
Liberate have-nots and enrage despots.
Don’t put down the scholastics who say a poem should have wholeness, harmony, radiance, truth, beauty, goodness.
Stash your sell-phone and be here now.
Don’t ever believe poetry is irrelevant in dark times.
Dare to be a non-violent poetic guerrilla, an anti-hero.
Temper your most intemperate voice with compassion.

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, selected lines from Poetry as a Subversive Art

 

Dear Friends, 

This summer I invite you to join me in engaging the work and life of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of A Coney Island of the Mind (a million copies sold), publisher of world influential books (Allen Ginsberg’s Howl), owner of the Bay Area countercultural HQ, City Lights Books, a painter since the 1940s, and a translator (his translation of Jacques Prévert’s Paroles is a classic). 

Ferlinghetti died earlier this year and I recalled first reading him with appreciation in the 1980s during the the Reagan administration (his selected poems collected in Endless Life).  I later learned that he, too, had ventured to Nicaragua, target of Reagan’s terrorist wrath, like I and several friends from Louisville (Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre).  I cheerfully purchased his paperbacks  over the decades (published principally by New Directions) and always found new poems and perspectives to provoke and inspire me. I lived in Berkeley and Oakland in the 1990s and often visited North Beach to pop in at City Lights. Since 2015 I’ve done classes on poets such as Alice Walker, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman, and it’s high time I offer something on Ferlinghetti!

I imagine a group of us meeting weekly for two months,  having equal time for reading, writing and sharing.  I propose starting Monday 21 June at 7 p.m. Central Time. Each session should go for at least 90 minutes. If the only people interested in the class  are from St. Louis, I will attempt to arrange a place for our sessions.  If others from elsewhere in the USA and beyond are wanting to be a part of this, I am happy to utilize Zoom.  Following is some useful info—

• I strongly recommend you purchase LF’s Poetry as a Subversive Art.
• During the summer I encourage you  to go to City Lights online and order any  City Lights Publishers book that looks interesting to you.  You could start by browsing the Pocket Poet Series.
• I may ask you to watch online (somehow) the 2009 documentary, Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder.
• We will do free writing inspired by Ferlinghetti poems  during class sessions as well as during the week.  So, you’ll need a journal (a Fabriano or an old-fashioned $2 composition notebook) or a device, as you like.
• I invite people to zero in on a creative cultural project you’d like to  initiate during our class (or work on finishing one you have already started) .
• Tuition is $125 and you can mail a check to me  (4514 Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63110) or use the following email at Paypal.

Let me know  if you are interested:

markjchmiel@gmail.com

Feel free to forward this to any of our mutual friends who may be intrigued.

Palms together,

Mark

 

 

 

 

The Art of Living: Lights from Asia–A Spring-Summer-Fall Class 2021

Instead of going out of your way to seek the extraordinary, what if you could live in a more carefree way, just by subtly changing your regular, everyday life?
—Shunmyo Masuno, Japan

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. But I try to work one day at a time. If we just worry about the big picture, we are powerless. So my secret is to start right away doing whatever little work I can do. I try to give joy to one person in the morning, and remove the suffering of one person in the afternoon. That’s enough.
—Sister Chan Khong, Vietnam  

The study of the Scriptures and similar texts –provided it does not become an obsession—can be an aid towards the grasping of Truth. So long as what has been read has not become one’s own experience, that is to say, has not been assimilated into one’s own being, it has not fulfilled its purpose. A seed that is merely held in the hand cannot germinate: it must develop into a plant and bear fruit in order to reveal its full possibilities.
—Sri Anandamayi Ma, India

Love in Action: The Brothers Karamazov Reading Community 2021

“The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.” –Charles Swann, in Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

“Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be very frightened by your own bad acts. I am sorry that I can not say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.” —The Views of Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Book I, Part Two, Chapter 4)

 

I invite you to be part of a small group of readers to take on or get reacquainted with one of the world’s great novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  I will facilitate small and large group discussions; share resources on the novel, author, and contexts; assist in making connections to contemporary issues; and encouraging everyone to  pull what is most significant from the novel in the spirit of the following from George Steiner:  “In a manner evident and yet mysterious, the poem or the drama or the novel seizes upon our imaginings. We are not the same when we put down the work as we were when we took it up. To borrow an image from another domain: he who has truly apprehended a painting by Cézanne will thereafter see an apple or a chair as he had not seen them before. Great works of art pass through us like storm-winds, flinging open the doors of perception, pressing upon the architecture of our beliefs with their transforming powers. We seek to record their impact, to put our shaken house in its new order. Through some primary instinct of communion we seek to convey to others the quality and force of our experience. We would persuade them to lay themselves open to it.”

We will meet via Zoom on Tuesdays  at 7 pm Central Time and go for 90 minutes.  Our first introductory  session will be Tuesday 26 January. Thereafter, we will meet on the second and fourth Tuesdays from February through July with a concluding session the second Tuesday of August.  Each session we will deal with one of the twelve books that make up the novel.

A Public Reflection on Tonight and on Hope’s Beautiful Daughters (as Shared on Social Media) by Rachel Sacks

For six months I’ve gotten to read and learn and grow with a real sweet group of folks. Mark Chmiel is such a generous teacher, and the communities he builds, so loving and expansive.

An observer might ask, you read what during a pandemic? Like, nbd, just a book club rife with tales of human rights abuses to cushion your pandemic/election season combo and its fascist undertones, right?

Maybe it’s something in the Catholic social justice tea, but you’d never guess how much more often we talked of love than of evil.

Maybe it’s something in the radioactive earth Svetlana walked, the jungles Arundhati delved deep into, the trees Wangari planted, or the war diaries Iris found—you’d never guess how much more uplifting it is to read of faith in humanity, etched into action: depicted in a photograph mirrored against its negative of inhumane potential. How much more hopeful it is to share these stories, than to hear a loved one doubt the impact of a union, or a vote, or a phone bank.

From stories of the most painful grips of humanity, together we drew out the love that insistently buoyed their storytellers, Hope’s Beautiful Daughters. Like the one safe stripe from radiated ore. Like prayer from a trench. Like water from stone.

Writing Our Own Histories: A Fall Class

This is the second time this year I am facilitating a course on this  do-it-yourself theme, which comes from  Allen Ginsberg, “You have to write your own history, nobody’s going to do it for you.“  

I invite you to become acquainted with authors and works that  I have found engaging, energizing, and intriguing. We will examine the structure and content  of  accessible books by three people who’ve been immersed in the Zen tradition:  Kazuaki Tanahashi and Mayumi Oda, artists who came  to the U.S. from Japan, and Robert Aitken, who lived long stretches of time in Japan.  We will experiment with  creative imitation, for example, writing off of Aitken’s “miniatures,” which could  lead to fresh inspiration for embarking on new work or for reclaiming work we’ve been putting off.   

A Love Letter to Grief by Jessi Dyer

Grief you motherfucker,
You robber of joy,
You thief in the night,
Stealing and killing.
Burning my village to the ground.

Grief, you backpack full of rocks,
You unrelenting burden I bear
Just when I think the weight has lightened, you get heavy again
And again,
And again,
And again,

Grief, you incessant mosquito buzzing in my ear.
You lingering bug bite, swollen and itchy.
Just when I think you are gone, you itch again

Grief, you scab,
You scaly piece of shit
A kiss on my skin I never wanted,
A reminder I never asked for.

Grief, you bastard,
You unwelcomed visitor that won’t leave,
Filling my home with rotten fruit and flies.
Drawing the shades and blacking out my windows.

Grief, you rapist,
I did not consent to you being here,
I did not consent to the constant envy of new mothers with new babies,
The envy of perfect families
The envy of those who have never known loss.
The deep ache of a mother’s empty arms,
I did not consent to this unrepairable womb,

Grief,
You motherfucking cocksucker.

Jessi is participating in the class, Writing Our Own Histories.

Writing Our Own Histories/Untitled by Gail Piva

And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is hundreds of years of oppression 
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the violent sobs of my soul
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the images of black men dying
And now I can’t breathe the knee on my neck is the voices of women pleading 
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is my blood splattered thoughts 
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the fear that I could be next
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the silence of good men
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the ignorance of my white friends 
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is America’s ripened racism
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the burden of fatherless children
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is a perception of my black meaningless life
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the sound of sirens pulling me over
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is watching another cop go free
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is captured cell phone videos
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is a confederate flag being carried through the streets
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is waking up to nigger written on my driveway
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is having to work twice as hard with an illusion of getting ahead 
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is a white woman’s fear and crying
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is another televised funeral procession
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is a white man standing behind a podium making racism look sexy
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is an article in the New York times
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the sight of peaceful bodies bombed with tear gas
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the exhaustion of running this endless race
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the absence of phone calls from my white friends
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the virus that they refuse to test me for
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the continuous sound of a propeller circling my block
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the disproportionate rate of imprisonment 
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is an underfunded inferior education system
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is a check cashing place on every corner
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is the lack of nearby grocery stores 
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is repeatedly being accused of stealing from a store
And now I can’t breathe, the knee on my neck is being crowded into a concrete jungle
And now I can’t breathe, and the knee is the deep pounding of my heart
And now I can’t breathe, and the knee is the nausea producing knots of my stomach 
And now I can’t breathe, and the knee is the weariness in my bones
And now I can’t breathe, and the knee is being born with brown skin
And now I can’t breathe, and the knee is the realization that my voice is now heard only from a distance 
And now I can’t breathe, and the knee…
Mama…mama…
Mama…I…can’t…
Breathe…

Writing Our Own Histories: A Spring/Summer Class

“First We Read, Then We Write”
–title of Robert D. Richardson’s study on Emerson’s creative life

“Something that you feel will find its own form”
–Jack Kerouac, U.S. novelist and poet

“You have to write your own history, nobody’s going to do it for you. “
—Allen Ginsberg, bard, activist, professor

This class invites you to experiment with several creative forms that I have found engaging, energizing, and intriguing. The practice of imitation can lead to fresh inspiration for embarking on new work or for reclaiming work we’ve been putting off.

During class sessions we will examine the structure of works by Alice Walker, Svetlana Alexievich, Eduardo Galeano, and Joe Brainard. We will cover each book in two sessions. We will do relevant writing practices in and outside of class, for example, getting in touch with our vast storehouse of memories (Brainard). Also, by the end of each session we will make plans for writing on our own in the week ahead. Possible areas for exploration are personal and collective memoir and autobiography. Participants will be encouraged to connect during the week, and share how the writing and reading processes inter-are. I will be happy to meet up, listen, and share when it is convenient for you.

Cultivating Attention and Animating Conscience: Reading Thoreau in Desperate Times

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”

“On reading the words of Thoreau
I vow with all beings
to cherish our home-grown sages
who discern the perennial way.”
–Robert Aitken

Being a human being means benefiting from rich cultural traditions—not just our own traditions, but many others—and becoming not just skilled, but also wise. Somebody who can think—think creatively, think independently, explore, inquire—and contribute to society. If you don’t have that, you might as well be replaced by a robot.
–Noam Chomsky

In this course we will explore Henry David Thoreau’s prophetic and spiritual writings as a resource for living, in poet Marge Piercy’s words, “consciously, conscientiously, concretely, [and] constructively” in this time of domestic disparities and global crises.

We meet on eight consecutive Wednesdays from February 26 to April 15. We are hosted by Dianne Lee and Bill Quick at their home in Richmond Heights. We gather at 6:45 and go till 8:15. Sessions will have time for paired sharing, writing exercises, discussions of Thoreau’s works, announcements of the local scene, poetry recitations, viewing of documentaries, and more. A class blog will enable us to share our various responses in between classes.

Some Essentials—
An outgoingness of heart
“Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will” [Antonio Gramsci]
A notebook, tablet, or laptop
These two books— Henry David Thoreau, The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform, with an introduction by Howard Zinn and Tim Flinders, ed., Henry David Thoreau: Spiritual and Prophetic Writings (Modern Spiritual Masters).

Tuition is $150, payable to me by check or Paypal.
Email me if you are interested —markjchmiel@gmail.com.

Anne Waldman on The Art of Writing, Reading, and Sharing—Winter Class/Arco-Online 2020

Imagine you are not alone. Consort with other writers. You are in a League of Writing. You are part of a conspiracy to lift the discourse and practice of writing higher. Think of your writing as a way to alleviate the suffering of yourself and others. To make the world more beautiful and interesting.
—Anne Waldman, “Creative Writing Life”

If you writing life needs a recharge, if you want to reconnect with your writing practice and other kindred spirits, please join us in this class as we will engage the accumulated wisdom of Anne Waldman, poet, teacher, cultural activist, anthologist, and subverter of the patriarchy.

In her inspiring book, Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews, & Manifestos, Waldman has short chapter entitled, “Creative Writing Life.” It’s nine pages long and this will be the chief text for our class. Each week we will read, discuss, and write off of a page of Anne’s prompts–both friends who want to share via a class blog, and those who can meet up in St. Louis. We will spend our time in and outside of class experimenting, practicing, and integrating what she has to offer (I count 136 specific suggestions). Perhaps you will discover that 10 of these are really what you matter to you at this time in your life.

For Saint Louisans, outside of a 90 minute weekly class, you will need at least another 1.5 to 2 hours. Friends joining us via the class blog count on 2 to 3 hours a week. Make room in your schedule for cultivating creativity, clarity, and community.

We meet on Thursdays from January 30 to March 17, 6:45 to 8:15 p.m. at the home of Andrew Wimmer, 4400 Arco Avenue 63110. Online participants will receive an agenda on Friday mornings to direct their activities for the week.I will be frequently in touch with you, and try to connect people in the same city. The more we share, the greater our learning and expansion!

All you need are your writing materials and/or devices and, ideally, a copy of Vow to Poetry, or one of Anne’s other books, such as Fast Speaking Woman, Beats at Naropa, Civil Disobediences, or Outrider. Check out your bookstore or public library, or contact me for assistance–I have access to university libraries.

Tuition for St. Louisans, $100.
For online participants, $50.
You can send tuition to me by Paypal or by check at the first class.

For those of you who have done a class with me before and found it worth your time, please pass along this announcement to anyone you know who may be interested in this class, especially the online version.

Penny Smith, Northwest Coffee, Central West End

Start a club/”study group” around the work of a deceased writer or writers or a literary movement or a book. Meet once a month and plan to read aloud (or translate), write “off of,” and examine texts. The Sappho Club, the Niedecker/Zukovsky Salon, the H.D. Room, the Beat Trope Circle, Robert Duncan Lab, New York School Gallery, Black Arts Solarium…
–Anne Waldman, “Creative Writing Life”