Entries published at 02/02/2010

Fugs Second Album.

Recent threads on The Fugs have brought to mind my early encounter with their music, and the band itself, during my first visit to the St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, November 1965. When asked for a short statement on the Poetry Project for Anne Waldman’s anthology Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–91, I wrote:

Thinking back on the Poetry Project, I am reminded of an absurdist question posed by Gerard Malanga to Charles Olson in The Paris Review: “A school is place where one can learn something. Can a school lose by giving away its knowledge?” From my first involvement with it in about 1972, The Poetry Project seemed a place where a school of poetry—the New York School—was physically embodied in a group of writers who felt free to develop in the confidence of their mutual (and contending) assumptions, and I certainly learned something from that. … More