Beat Soundtrack #5: David Cope
In which prominent Beat figures, writers and critics, historians and academics, fans and followers, talk about the relationship between that literary community and music
Anne Waldman once described David Cope as one of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘heart sons’ and Cope’s recent book, The Correspondence of David Cope & Allen Ginsberg 1976-1996, is proof of an enduring friendship that began as the gifted yet troubled punk and his mentor, grew to a relationship of peers designing poetry conferences at Naropa University and ended with Allen’s farewell call to David while on his deathbed.
Ginsberg and Cope also developed a twenty-year discussion of literature and poetics, which provided a flair to the letters, and, long after the death of Ginsberg, his ‘postcard poem’, translated by Professor Zhang Ziging in 1985, led to a flurry of Chinese translations of Cope’s work that earned him a place at the 2019 Suining International Poetry Week conference. He comments: ‘Allen was truly “the gift that keeps on giving” even decades beyond his death.’
What attracted you to the Beats? When did you first encounter them? Do you have a favourite text, novel or poetry?
In the summer of my junior year of high school in 1965, my dear friend Jim Groening hitchhiked out to New York and came back with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. We thumbed our way to downtown Grand Rapids and I went crazy buying books – not only Kerouac, but Allen’s Howl and Other Poems, along with Thomas Parkinson’s A Casebook on the Beat and Elias Wilentz’s anthology, The Beat Scene, a fine selection of poets and poems which included photos of the poets in recitation and amid wild parties by Fred McDarrah. I loved these books, as they gave me windows into my own life, especially in the case of ‘Howl’. I was an angry punk, pissed off after my father deserted the family, adrift with other young punks, and Allen’s poem spoke directly to us – we were all ‘starving hysterical naked’ yet also freed to chant ‘Holy the super-natural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!’
I had already taught myself how to research the references in Eliot and Pound, and to appreciate the vocal styles of Pound, Williams, and Dylan Thomas through recordings, as well as attending to the long lines of Whitman as exercises in sound waves rolling into the shore, vocal modulations worthy of a prophet, so we sat up on the beds in a little cabin in the woods that we’d built, reading the poem aloud together.
I have many favourite poems by poets identified as Beats – Gary Snyder’s Riprap, that poem ‘Axe Handles’ and his translations of Han-Shan, Cold Mountain Poems, Kerouac’s ‘He is your friend, let him dream’, Gregory Corso’s ‘Bomb’, ‘Dear Villon’ and ‘I Held a Shelley Manuscript’, Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras (GRAH! GRAH! GRAHH! GREEER!), Ferlinghetti’s ‘Pound at Spoleto’, ‘Adieu à Charlot’ and ‘Constantly Risking Absurdity’ and, during the darkest of the Vietnam War years, Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. Diane became a great friend, sending me her poems and the poems of her most brilliant students, for my Big Scream indie journal – I published many of her later poems and still treasure them as the earned jewels of an elder genius.
What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connect(ed)?
Most obviously, Kerouac’s fascination with Charlie Parker and Jack’s adaptation of the jazz solo in concocting his ‘spontaneous bop prosody’, as well as Allen’s visits to the Five Spot to hear Thelonious Monk, Corso’s ‘For Miles’ and his ‘Requiem for “Bird” Parker, Musician’. Kerouac’s sessions with Steve Allen are a natural follow-up to Ken Rexroth reciting Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk, followed years later by Allen Ginsberg’s recording with experimental jazz musicians, The Lion for Real. Allen was very close with Bob Dylan and recorded with the Clash on Combat Rock. Also, Ferlinghetti read a hysterical short poem in the Band’s farewell concert, The Last Waltz, while Michael McClure’s recital from Chaucer’s ‘Prologue’ was enough to make me wince at its clumsy grasp of the rhythms of Chaucer’s lines.
Allen’s ‘Big Beat’ and ‘Portland Coliseum’ are his clear paeans to the Beatles, and in later years he performed ‘Ballad of the Skeletons’ with Paul McCartney on bass. His ‘Eroica’ celebrates a performance of Beethoven’s third symphony at Dubrovnik, ending when a rainstorm sends musicians and audience into confused flight from the storm. For years, Allen toured with his squeeze-box, chanting many of his poems to basic tunes, sometimes accompanied by the great Manchester-born guitarist, Steven Taylor, who once taught several of us to sing parts in songs by Thomas Campion and John Dowland in Allen’s apartment in Boulder, Allen taking the bass. So the Beats definitely had their ears to the ground to whatever music was available in a given era, and participated in their own way.
Latterday Beats and post-Beats have continued this pattern, as seen finally in Ed Sanders and The Fugs’ wild rock adaptations of their song-poems, ranging from their version of Blake’s ‘Ah, Sunflower, weary of time’ to Plato’s ‘When the Mode of the Music Changes [the walls of the city shake]’, as well as Ed’s tongue-in-cheek ‘Ramses II is Dead, My Love’ and ‘Claude Pelieu and J. J. Lebel Discuss the Early Verlaine Bread Crust Fragments’. Anne Waldman has also made her mark with ‘Uh Oh Plutonium’ and Jim Cohn has recorded many experimental albums mixing musical sound with his own lyrics, notably Antenna and Homage. Finally, Kirpal Gordon has recorded his jazz lyrics with backing by the Claire Daly Band.
As a writer or poet have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?
Defining ‘Beat’ is difficult enough, given that it can mean so many things, ranging from ‘beatific’ to ‘beat down and broken’ to the claim that it’s a commercial tag meant to sell the works of certain writers. Kerouac, writing of the frenzy in a jazz bar with musicians doing wild solos, gives a view of his generation: ‘[I]t’s the beat generation, it’s beat, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilisations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat.’ For me, ‘Beat’ is less a set of experiences than a kind of open aesthetic re form and content, but also clarity re freedom of expression, a refusal to bend to power and presumed authority, and nurturing one’s spiritual centre on our journey toward the sunset.
That said, I was attracted by Allen Ginsberg as a great poet, defining in his work a major shift away from the cool classical precision of the earlier modernists which was favoured by a whole generation of ‘new critics’. I came at poetry even in my early years with the desire to know all traditions, and quickly centred on Dante, Shakespeare and their contemporaries, as well as Blake, Whitman and Dickinson, Yeats, William Carlos Williams (ah!) and those objectivist/realists of the thirties, Reznikoff, Oppen, and Rakosi. Allen’s work had the necessary panache, tenderness and suffering that spoke directly to me, and so when he headlined the National Poetry Festival at Grand Valley College back in 1973, I showed up and got to know the works of the three objectivist poets, reunited after 35 years, Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, and Allen first hand, through their dialogues and recitations. I was yet too timid and uncertain of my work to show it to any of them, but I asked Allen for his address, intending to find my way to my own personal vision of the world. When I finally had something that I thought I could share – my 36-page chapbook Stars – I sent it to him and was surprised to hear back from him with a cheque and a request for copies to send to famed editors and poets.
The rest is history for me – learning to take chances when offered, being thankful to those who show kindness, and learning from the great variety of styles and approaches to content that are represented in Allen’s generation of writers such that I should, as an editor and writer, seek out many styles, many genders, a great gallimaufry of works for my magazine. Early on, I determined I would avoid undue repetition of a format or formulaic approaches to my work, returning to an earlier approach only when subject matter warranted it. I have also relied on my own cadre of friends and poets of many generations to send me the works of gifted poets they’ve come across, and to follow a poet’s work for as long as she or he will have me as an editor and friend. There is also that demand that poets be honest and clear re the freedoms we have inherited, to stand for truth and right behaviour and to speak truth to power.
Who are your own favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?
I’ve divided this question into several responses: classical and jazz, blues and its mad child, rock, earlier and later bands or albums. I think all these fuel my own understanding of music and its relationship to melopoeia or sound and rhythm, though there is seldom a one-on-one comparison—both poetry and song begin when one taps one’s toe. This response may not be a direct statement on whether my grasp of music represents ‘Beat ideas’; as a poet and scholar, I have an infinite curiosity in pursuing my loves, one of which is a wide appreciation of the many kinds of music that inhabit my heart, as is true of poets in general.
My experience of music is complex, beginning with youthful loves of classical works, from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which I absorbed during an early reading of Dante’s Commedia, to Beethoven’s sixth and ninth symphonies, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Shostakovich’s seventh and tenth; Erik Satie taught me the pleasure in the silences that punctuate the playing of his notes, which very much reminded me of William Carlos Williams’ notion of the variable foot in poetry – that meditative space giving more weight to the notes or words that surround the silences
My tastes in classical music have changed over the years. During my graduate and teaching years (I taught Shakespeare for nearly twenty years at two different colleges), I did extensive studies of medieval works from Palestrina to Hildegard of Bingen, later picking up on Morley, Byrd, Campion and John Dowland’s work (among others) as the music of Shakespeare’s time. Campion’s two treatises on English music, Observations in the Art of English Poesie and A New Way of Making Fowre parts in Counter-Point were important poetics texts to be added to Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie, thus completing my grasp of English renaissance poetics underlying such greats as Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson.
In my later years, I have gravitated to string quartets and quintets, cello sonatas, and the like, following the work of Jacqueline du Pré, Yo Yo Ma, and Scott Yoo in his two seasons of exploring the roots and lives of classical greats on his PBS show, Now Hear This. Current recorded favourites: Bach Trios by Yo Yo Ma, Chris Thile, and Edgar Meyer, Benjamin Britten’s complete string quartets, by the Britten Quartet, Yolanda Kondanassis and Jason Vieux, harp and guitar on Together, and two recordings that Yo Yo Ma made with Kathryn Stott on piano, as well as recordings by jazz great Bill Evans, which could easily be seen as classical in their own right.
I first encountered jazz in its full glory while working as a second shift custodian in an elementary school in the poorest ghetto neighbourhood in the city of Grand Rapids. Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew (an unfortunate title for a great album) was being played in homes and on porches throughout the neighbourhood as I laboured to clean an ageing school that was scheduled for demolition in the following spring – this was 1973. I quickly glommed onto Davis’ Kind of Blue and set about picking up work by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and other greats from the bebop era which also spawned Kerouac’s prose. Eventually, I found the great beauty of Duke Ellington’s work closest to my heart, and I well recall a four-hour drive bringing my daughter Jane home from her classes at the University of Michigan in an ice storm, playing ‘Diminuendo and Crescendo in C’ with its many choruses by Paul Gonsalves building to a climax in the performance in Ellington at Newport (1956). Ellington – and his band in its various incarnations – holds, along with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans – the standard by which I know what the art form involves at its best.
As for rock and blues – the music closest to me – the subject is so vast that I might only suggest favourites. I was a young teenager when the Beatles’ first album came to stores in my hometown, a month after the murder of President Kennedy, and they came as a breath of hope to my generation, which was still reeling at the loss. When they played The Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, news reports noted the absence of crime in the streets of New York during the show, and, in the morning, all but a few of the boys in my class had washed the grease out of our hair and combed it down in imitation of our new idols. They remained my favourite band through much of the sixties, though the Rolling Stones dogged them through that entire decade, ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Play with Fire’, ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown’ and ‘Paint It, Black’ showing the dark, bluesy side of the music that appealed to that side of my own life.
I am recording this interview only a day after the death of Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts, so my responses here must in some way reflect fifty-seven years of living with the boys’ music, finding masterful songs on every album, reflections of my own experiences – from the political horrors of the times to both romantic and darker sides of Eros and amour, to those songs as edgy and satirical as the best work of the Kinks. Mick and Keith have written two of the greatest rock elegies of all time – ‘Paint It, Black’ and the elegy for Brian Jones, ‘Shine a Light’ – and I expect that with time Charlie Watts will find his way into a song as poignant as the others in its perfection and beauty.
The Stones were directly responsible for two other great loves in the field of popular music. First, there is the band’s insistence on hosting the great Chicago bluesman, Howlin’ Wolf, on the British teen pop show Ready Steady Go, and the fact that, in their first American tours, they visited the Apollo Theatre in Harlem and Chess Records in Chicago, staying with Ronnie Spector’s family and with the Wolf and Muddy, getting to know them as people, away from the stage. I saw early on that they were true students of the music on a rather deep level, which added to their charm.
That beginning was augmented by my close friendship with a local guitar legend, Frank Salamone, who introduced me to the delta country blues, including Charlie Patton, Son House, Blind Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, and the greatest of the bluesmen, Robert Johnson. My education in this great American cultural form continued throughout my twenties and thirties, culminating in such masterful performances as the London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions and Taj Mahal’s The Real Thing, a spirited live performance of classics with the New York Horns, a tuba band backing Taj on banjo or slide guitar with enormous gusto.
The other gift that the Stones gave me was a deep appreciation for my birth-town’s music: Motown records and all the legendary performers who grew up in Detroit, starting with Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, the Supremes and the Temptations (the latter of which the Stones have periodically covered throughout their career). Aretha was certainly the queen of soul, and when my wife Sue and I visited the Charles Wright Museum of African American History in the week preceding the remembrance ceremony for her after her death, we were astounded by the kind reception we received as new members and guests. It was a testimony to the museum staff’s professional décorum, but also a reflection of their respect for the queen herself. Keith Richards once summed up his respect for her when he said, ‘when Aretha calls, you come.’
We had, of course, built collections of the great women blues singers, starting with Ma Rainey (whose music Allen listened to while dying) and the incomparable Bessie Smith – celebrated by my former poetry prof at the University of Michigan, Robert Hayden, in his ‘Homage to the Empress of the Blues’. I have also been smitten by the superb, nuanced voice of Billie Holiday (memorialised in Frank O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died’, a poem whose grief exists as subtext to the stuff of a busy day until finally we reach the last two lines, wherein it surfaces in toto.
Other women singers who have moved us include the great Janis Joplin and the poet-singer Patti Smith, about whom I wrote for your own Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture. Patti figures in The Correspondence of David Cope & Allen Ginsberg 1976-1996, too; she had performed for Gelek Rinpoche’s Jewel Heart Community with Allen Ginsberg at Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, in 1994, 1995, and 1996, and had meant to repeat the performance with new songs in 1997, but found that, like so many of us, she had to rethink the ceremony as a ‘closing the bardo’ performance celebrating Allen’s life (see pp. 118-120).
I have, of course, lived through decades of the development of all these forms of music, and figure I should touch on some favourites from several decades paired with notable recordings, beginning with Bob Dylan, whose albums throughout the sixties and seventies caused fundamental changes in songwriting and performance across the spectrum; The Kinks, whose savage guitars on ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night’ taught my hips to move in the wildest rhythms on the dance floor, but also the exquisite beauty of ‘Waterloo Sunset’, and the ferocious satire of cultural erosion and the profiteering that destroyed a whole community (a theme later echoed in the Clash’s ‘Something About England’) in Muswell Hillbillies.
The Who joined the chorus about that same time with a series of memorable works (Who’s Next, Quadrophenia, Who Are You and Pete Townsend’s Empty Glass and White City); Jeff Beck, the greatest rock guitarist and car mechanic of all time (see his PBS documentary, The Jeff Beck Story, for an overview of his extraordinary career); David Bowie, whose artistic life has spanned early masterworks to the great recordings that preceded his death in 2016 (‘Aladdin Sane’, that great suite of songs based on Orwell’s 1984, Diamond Dogs, ‘The Secret Life of Arabia’, ‘Blue Jean’, ‘Ashes to Ashes’, ‘Under Pressure’ (with Freddie Mercury), ‘Where Are We Now’ and his entire final album, Black Star; and Bruce Springsteen – The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
After these, there are the Clash, the Talking Heads, and others. The song remains even when the singer or the drummer is silenced. I have been lucky to live in such a time, both Beat and wildly rocking and rolling into the twilight of my own poetry.
Note: The Correspondence of David Cope & Allen Ginsberg 1976-1996 (2020) is published by Giant Steps Press, Freeport, NY. Rock and the Beat Generation wrote about Cope’s recent collection on September 5th, 2021. See: ‘Men (or women) of letters?’