Democratic Vistas, 1871
THE FALL OF AMERICA
Vajracarya
Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
Poet
“Guru Death your words are true
Teacher Death I do thank you
For inspiring me to sing this Blues”
MIND BREATHS
Lucien Carr
for friendship
all these years
PLUTONIAN ODE
Acknowledgments
Author wishes to imprint thanks to poets & editors who initially published these writings. A wild gamut of literary magazines & papers rose to manifest renaissance of vernacular poetry in postwar II USA, invented by the World War I generation. W. C. Williams & Ezra Pound prophesied an American poetic mode measured to the variety of contemporary body english, speech and mind. Individuation of idiom was followed by individuation of print form. Poetic “Mimeograph Revolution” coincided (mid-1950s) with a “San Francisco Poetry Renaissance” and the names of publications improvised became a poem in itself.
A.G.
Adventures in Poetry, A Hundred Posters, Allen Verbatim (ed. Gordon Ball, McGraw-Hill), Alternative Features Syndicate, Alternative Press, Alternative Press Broadside, American Dialogue, American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Aquarian, Ark/Moby, Ashok Shahane, A Shout in the Streets, Athanor, Auerhahn/Haselwood Press, A Year of Disobedience
Bad Breath, Bastard Angel, Beatitude, Berkeley Barb, Berkeley Tribe, Bernerzeitung, Between Worlds, Big Sky, Big Table, Birthstone, Black Mountain Review, Bombay Gin, Boulder Express, Boulder Monthly, Boulder Street Poets, Brahma, Brandeis Folio, Brown Paper, Buffalo Stamps, Bugger (Fuck You/a Magazine of the Arts supplement), Burning Bush
’C, Cambridge Review (i.e.), Capella Dublin, Caterpillar, Che Fare, Cherry Valley Editions, Chicago, Chicago Review, City Lights Anthology, City Lights Books, City Lights Journals, Clean Energy Verse, Coach House Press, Cody’s Bookshop Calendar, Coevolution Quarterly, College Press Service, Colorado North Review, Columbia Jester, Columbia Review, Combustion, Concerning Poetry, Coyote, Coyote’s Journal, Cranium Press Broadsides, Creative Arts Book Co.
Dakota Broadsides Montreal, Desert Review, Dirty, Do-it
Earth Day Folio, Earth Magazine, East Village Other, El Dorado H.S. Newspaper, Evergreen Review, Expressen, Expresso
Fervent Valley Digest, Fifth Estate, Firefly Press, Fits, Floating Bear, Folger Shakespeare Library Broadside, Folio, Four Seasons, From Here Press, Fruit Cup, Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts, Fulcrum Press, Fuori!
Gay Sunshine Press, Gemini, Georgia Strait, Gnaoua, Gotham Book Mart, Grabhorn Press, Grecourt Review, Greenpeace, Grey Fox Books, Grist, Grove Press,
Hard & Hardly Press, Hard Times, Harvard Crimson, Harvard Magazine, Hasty Papers, High Times, Hika, House of Anansi
Ice & Frice, Il Tarocco, Ins & Outs, Intrepid, Isis, Izvestia
Jabberwock (Sidewalk), Jack Albert’s Boston Newspaper, Jargon 31, Jerusalem Post, Jonathan Cape-Golliard Press
Klacto 23, Kuksu, Kulchur
Lama Foundation: Bountiful Lord’s Delivery Service, Lampeter Muse, L.A. Staff, League for Sexual Freedom Leaflet series, Lemar Marijuana Review, Liberation, Liberation News Service, Life, Literaturnya Gazeta, Loka, London Times Literary Supplement, Look, Los Angeles Free Press, Los Angeles Times, Lowenfel’s Anthology, (lower) Eastside Review
Mag City, Mahenjodaro, Mattachine Review, Metronome, Mikrokosmos, Mojo Navigator, Mutantia, My Own Mag
Nadada, Neurotica, New Age Journal, New American Review, New Departures, New Directions Annuals, New York Free Press, New York Quarterly, New York Times, Nomad, Notes from the Garage Door, Notes from Underground, Now, Nuke Chronicles
Oyez poster
Pacific Nation, Painted Bride Quarterly, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Passaic Review, Peace News, Pearl, Peninsula Skyway, Pequod Press, Piazza, Planeta Fresca, Playboy, Poetry London/Apple, Poetry London-NY, Poetry on the Tracks, Poetry Review London, Poetry Toronto, Poets at Le Metro, Poets-and-Writers, Poet’s Press, Portents, Provincetown Review, Pull My Daisy
Quixote
Rain, Ramparts, Read Street, Red Osier Press, Residu, rhinozeros, River Run, River Styx, Rocky Flats Truth Force, Rocky Ledge, Rolling Stone, Rolling Thunder Review Phantom Newsletter
Salted Feathers, San Francisco Free Press, Saturday Morning, Schism, Scrip Magazine, Seven Days, Sing Out, Soho News, Something, Southwest Review, Spradie im Technisehen Zeitalter, Stone Press Weekly, Stupa: Naropa Student Newsletter, Sun Books Australia, Swank, Synapse
Takeover, Telephone, The American Pen International Quarterly, The American Poetry Review, The Beat Scene, The End Magazine, The Grapevine, The Marijuana Review, The Nation, The Needle, The New Yorker, The Outsider, The Paris Magazine, The Raven, The Seventies, The Stone, The Sunflower (Wichita State), The Unspeakable Visions of the Individual, The Villager, The Workingman’s Press, The World, The Yale Literary Magazine, Throat, Title I, Toronto Waves, Totem/-Corinth Books, Transatlantic Review
Underdog, Unmuzzled Ox Encyclopedia, Utigeverij 261
Vajradhatu Sun, Vancouver Express, Vancouver Vajradhatu, Variegation, Venture, Vigencia, Village Voice, Voices
Walker Art Center Broadside, West Hills Review, White Dove, Wholly Communion, Wild Dog, Win, W.I.N. (Workshop in Nonviolence) Magazine, Writer’s Forum
Yugen
Zero
Nancy Peters, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Annie Janowitz & Bob Sharrard helped prepare texts for City Lights Books.
Ted Wilentz, Amiri Baraka, Winston Leyland, Barry Gifford, Stuart Montgomery, Miles, Mary Beach, Claude Pelieu, Charles Plymell, Diane DiPrima, R’lene Dahlberg, Dave Haselwood and Marshall Clements helped edit other books of prose and poetry from which poems were drawn for this collection.
Don Allen consistently offered refined advice. Lucien Carr formulated “The Archetype Poem” and “How Come He Got Canned at the Ribbon Factory” anonymously three decades before this due acknowledgment of his wit and lifelong editorial prescience. Andrew Wylie shepherded this volume to New York.
For preparation of Collected Poems the sangha of editors at Harper & Row headed by Aaron Asher working with Carol Chen, Sidney Feinberg, Dan Harvey, Marge Horvitz, Lydia Link, William Monroe, Joe Montebello, and Dolores Simon provided essential sympathetic skills.
Kenneth A. Lohf, Director of Manuscripts and Rare Books, Bernard Crystal, Assistant Director, and Mary Bowling, librarian in charge of manuscripts at Special Collections Division, Butler Library, Columbia University, preserved author’s papers since 1968. Librarians at Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, conserved letters and notebooks useful in assembling manuscript.
Various typescripts were assembled at Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics by apprentice poets Walter Fordham, Jason Shinder, Sam Kash-ner, Helen Luster, Denyse King, Gary Allen, Alice Gambrell and Randy Roark among others, 1974–83.
Gordon Ball and Miles editing notebooks, journals and bibliographic papers retrieved texts and aided relatively precise chronology of poems.
Bill Morgan’s bibliographic survey of author’s work-spaces and Columbia Special Collections made possible ordering and retrieval of many writings in early script and book forms. Raymond Foye edited appropriate images from photo archive.
Bob Rosenthal provided years of logistical support to author and fellow archive workers. Juanita Lieberman contributed many hours.
Parts of Collected Poems were written & assembled during periods of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, N.Y. State Creative Artists Program Service, Inc., and Rockefeller Foundation grants to author.
Collaborative Artisans
Calligraphy AH by Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche.
Wheel of Life: Block Print, source unknown.
Tag lines for Returning to the Country for a Brief Visit: Moments of Rising Mist, a Collection of Sung Landscape Poetry, Mushinsha/Grossman, 1973.
Steven Taylor: lead sheets; Walter Taylor: lyric calligraphy.
/> Harry Smith: Illustration to Journal Night Thoughts (p. 274), and three fish one head cover insignia designed after incision on stone footprint of Buddha, seen by author at Bodh-Gaya, India, 1963; other version (p. 328).
Robert LaVigne: Illustrations, pp. 123, 143, 363, 766.
Diligent reader will find 22 additional poems rhymed, many with lead sheets, published as First Blues: Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs 1971–1974, Full Court Press, N.Y., 1975, to correlate with poems of that decade, supplementing the volume of musical inspiration.
Songs from Collected Poems and First Blues are vocalized solo on First Blues, Folkways Records, N.Y., 1981; and with musicians, First Blues, Double album, Hammond/C.B.S., N.Y., 1983.
Introduction by William Carlos Williams to Empty Mirror
The lines are superbly all alike. Most people, most critics would call them prose—they have an infinite variety, perfectly regular; they are all alike and yet none is like the other. It is like the monotony of our lives that is made up of the front pages of newspapers and the first (aging) 3 lines of the Inferno:
In the middle of the journey of our life I (came to)
myself in a dark wood (where) the
straight way was lost.
It is all alike, those fated lines telling of the mind of that poet and the front page of the newspaper. Look at them. You will find them the same.
This young Jewish boy, already not so young any more, has recognized something that has escaped most of the modern age, he has found that man is lost in the world of his own head. And that the rhythms of the past have become like an old field long left unploughed and fallen into disuse. In fact they are excavating there for a new industrial plant.
There the new inferno will soon be under construction.
A new sort of line, omitting memories of trees and watercourses and clouds and pleasant glades—as empty of them as Dante Alighieri’s Inferno is empty of them—exists today. It is measured by the passage of time without accent, monotonous, useless—unless you are drawn as Dante was to see the truth, undressed, and to sway to a beat that is far removed from the beat of dancing feet but rather finds in the shuffling of human beings in all the stages of their day, the trip to the bathroom, to the stairs of the subway, the steps of the office or factory routine the mystical measure of their passions.
It is indeed a human pilgrimage, like Geoffrey Chaucer’s; poets had better be aware of it and speak of it—and speak of it in plain terms, such as men will recognize. In the mystical beat of newspapers that no one recognizes, their life is given back to them in plain terms. Not one recognizes Dante there fully deployed. It is not recondite but plain.
And when the poet in his writing would scream of the crowd, like Jeremiah, that their life is beset, what can he do, in the end, but speak to them in their own language, that of the daily press?
At the same time, out of his love for them—a poet as Dante was a poet—he must use his art, as Dante used his art, to please. He must measure, he must so disguise his lines, that his style appear prosaic (so that it shall not offend) to go in a cloud.
With this, if it be possible, the hidden sweetness of the poem may alone survive and one day rouse the sleeping world.
There cannot be any facile deception about it. The writing cannot be made to be “a kind of prose,” not prose with a dirty wash of a stale poem over it. It must not set out, as poets are taught or have a tendency to do, to deceive, to sneak over a poetic way of laying down phrases. It must be prose but prose among whose words the terror of their truth has been discovered.
Here the terror of the scene has been laid bare in subtle measures, the pages are warm with it. The scene they invoke is terrifying more so than Dante’s pages, the poem is not suspect, the craft is flawless.
1952
Introduction by William Carlos Williams to Howl
When he was younger, and I was younger, I used to know Allen Ginsberg, a young poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, where he, son of a well-known poet, had been born and grew up. He was physically slight of build and mentally much disturbed by the life which he had encountered about him during those first years after the first world war as it was exhibited to him in and about New York City. He was always on the point of ‘going away’, where it didn’t seem to matter; he disturbed me, I never thought he’d live to grow up and write a book of poems. His ability to survive, travel, and go on writing astonishes me. That he has gone on developing and perfecting his art is no less amazing to me.
Now he turns up fifteen or twenty years later with an arresting poem. Literally he has, from all the evidence, been through hell. On the way he met a man named Carl Solomon with whom he shared among the teeth and excrement of this life something that cannot be described but in the words he has used to describe it. It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.
It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages. The wonder of the thing is not that he has survived but that he, from the very depths, has found a fellow whom he can love, a love he celebrates without looking aside in these poems. Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith—and the art! to persist.
It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha, from that charnel house, similar in every way, to that of the Jews in the past war. But this is in our own country, our own fondest purlieus. We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own—and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and affrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem.
Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.
1955
Author’s Cover Writ
Hindsight for Gates of Wrath
Gates of Wrath’s first sonnets, “Woe to Thee Manhattan,” were inspired by first reading ms. of Kerouac’s triumphant record of youth family The Town and the City. All poems hermetic “The Eye Altering” thru “A Western Ballad” refer to breakthru of visionary consciousness 1948 described elsewhere prosaically: early mind-manifesting flashes catalyzed by lonely despair I felt at sudden termination of erotic spiritual marriage mutually vowed by myself and Neal Cassady The “Earlier Poems,” 1947, were love poems to N.C., though love’s gender was kept closet. “Sweet Levinsky” (counterimage to Kerouac’s tender caricature) thru “Pull My Daisy” were written Jack much in mind ear. “Pull My Daisy”’s form grew out of J.K.’s adaptation of “Smart Went Crazy” refrain: recombining images jazzier as
Pull my daisy,
Tip my cup,
All my doors are open—
from my more wooden verse.
Jack brought this verse into York Ave. coldwater flat—I remember his athletic pencil-dash’d handscript, notebooked. I replicated that form and Jack dubbed in more lines—about a third of the poem was his. One line “How’s the Hicks?” was tossed to us as we walked into Cassady’s midnite NY parkinglot 1949 asking Neal “What’s the Hex, Who’s the Hoax?”
“Sometime Jailhouse” poems to “Ode 24th Year” reflect early dope-type bust & subsequent hospital rehabilitation solitude-bench dolmen realms so characteristic of mental penology late 40s contemporary. The letter to W.C.W. enclosing poems was answered thus: “In this mode perfection is basic.” The poems were imperfect. I responded by sending Williams several speedworthy notations that form the basis of book Empty Mirror, texts written roughly same years as these imperfect lyri
cs.
Gates of Wrath ms. was carried to London by lady friend early fifties, it disappeared, and I had no complete copy till 1968 when old typescript was returned thru poet Bob Dylan—it passed into his hands years earlier. By coincidence, I returned to this rhymed mode with Dylan’s encouragement as fitted for musical song. Tuned to lyric guitar, composing on harmonium, chant or improvising on rhythmic chords in electric studio, I began ‘perfecting’ use of this mode two decades after W.C.W.’s wise objection, dear reader, in same weeks signatured below.
December 8, 1971
Jacket for Howl
Allen Ginsberg born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian émigré, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and schoolteacher, in Paterson, N.J. High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver, copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. … Carl Solomon, to whom Howl is addressed, is an intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet.
1960
Hindsight for Kaddish
In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experienced so rarely I took it to be supernatural and gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over the mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own our unchanging desire for each other. These poems almost un-conscious to confess the beatific human fact, the language intuitively chosen as in trance & dream, the rhythms rising on breath from belly thru breast, the hymn completed in tears, the movement of the physical poetry demanding and receiving decades of life while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many mind-worlds the self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self.