Gerrit Lansing talks with Charles Bernstein, and guest
Susan Howe,
at Lansing’s house in Gloucester, Mass. Lansing, a close friend of Charles Olson,
discusses the wild of Gloucester, the relation of the magic (and the magical) and the
occult to poetic practice, Nerval, queer politics and the poetics identity, New York in
the immediate postwar period, parapsychology at Harvard in the late 1940s, Gnosticism versus
neo-Platonism, Jewish mysticism, and his connections with Henry Murray, Harry Smith, Alan Watts, Aleister Crowley, Carl Jung, and John Ashbery.
Setlist: Planting the Amplitudes (last 9 lines), The Curve, Dusky, Auguries in Autumn, October Song, Honey from the Rock, New Commentary on an Old Tune, Section 3 from The Milk of the Stars from her Paps, Sunset as Early Warning System, Egg Breakfast, Tabernacles, In the American Forest, The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward.