Episode 099, Recorded on May 7, 1968 Guest: Allen Ginsberg For more information about this program, see: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6033 For more information about the Firing Line broadcast records at the Hoover Institution Archives, see: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt6m3nc88c/dsc/#c01-1.2.11.1 © The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University is prohibited and strictly enforced.

Suppose it were true, as an early Greek poet had conjectured, that Helen never was of Troy; that Helen had been spirited away to Egypt and that there, later, that Achilles was never killed at Troy, and that later, he had met her, in Egypt, on a beach. H.D. a very old woman, who not only should be the model for Lady Chatterley, but maybe if God is a woman, God should sound something like this..... Stan Brakhage

The increasingly philosophic poet Gertrude Stein seems to have influenced the increasingly poetic philosopher Martin Heidegger, stylistically & thematically. "One knows what effect that one wants to produce to that one, to any one, in that one existing, in the daily living that one has for living. That one does not feel that one as a finished thing, that one works from something that one is knowing pretty quickly to something that one has been not really knowing and then that comes to be to that one a known thing and then that one sticks there in that thing. That one does not want to be conspicuous in living but does want to be intelligent and elegant. This then is a personal ideal, that that one has for daily living and so this one has feeling of being always creating all the daily living, the being in that one, really that one is going from something that one has been knowing to something that one has not quite been certainly knowing and sticks there in that thing." —Gertrude Stein "What gives us food for thought ever and again is the most thought-provoking. We take the gift it gives by giving thought to what is most thought-provoking. In doing so, we keep thinking what is most thought-provoking. We recall it in thought. Thus we recall in thought that to which we owe thanks for the endowment of our nature—thinking. As we give thought to what is most thought-provoking, we give thanks. To the most thought-provoking we devote our thinking of what is-to-be-thought. But this devoted thought is not something that we ourselves produce and bring along, to repay gift with gift. When we think what is most thought-provoking, we then give thought to what this most thought-provoking matter itself gives us to think about." —Martin Heidegger

Views poet Robert Creeley in his home and introduces his poetry. Describes the influences of other literary figures on his works and explains his own method of working. Creeley reads from several of his poems, including La noche, The first time, The place, and Someplace.

Robert Duncan documentary film. Robert Duncan is a major poet from the beat generation and spent most of his career in San Francisco. This documentary is filmed by Richard O. Moore, another major San Francisco poet and co-founder of KPFA. (1975)

Clip taken from Ron Mann's Poetry in Motion Vol 2, originally released as a CD-Rom supplement to the 1982 film.

World-renowned poet Diane di Prima, one of the preeminent writers to emerge from the Beat generation, wrote in Manhattan for many years before relocating to San Francisco, where she has been for nearly four decades. Her 43 books of poetry and prose have been translated into over twenty languages. Series: "Lunch Poems Reading Series" [5/2008] [Humanities] [Show ID: 13564]

Robin Blaser emerged from the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s and '50s along with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and later established himself as one of Canada's foremost experimental poets. In addition to numerous works of poetry, criticism, and translation, Blaser has also penned an English and Latin opera libretto entitled The Last Supper in collaboration with Sir Harrison Birtwistle.