Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 199

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The author setting forth from hotel with throne and crown on flatbed truck to Prague Culture-Park for May King election; May 1, 1965. Note formal-dressed students for May Day holiday. Photographer unknown.

360 GURU: Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur. See “Wichita Vortex Sutra.”

Kraj Majales

361 KRAL MAJALES: May King. Traditional May Day festival, suspended after German occupation prior to WWII. Previous years’ student disturbances persuaded Czech government to restore May King and Queen crowning ceremony in 1965, the occasion of massive public park demonstration by festive Prague populace. Nominated by Polytechnic students, author was elected May King by 100,000 citizens; ministers of culture and education objected. A week later, detained incommunicado, his Prague notebook confiscated, author was deported by plane to London, poem scribed en route.

361 KABIR: (1450?–1518) Illiterate Benares mystic poet-singer, weaver, disciple of Saint Ramanand, comparable to Blake: “If I heard love in exchange for the head in market is being sold,/I shall lose no time in entering the bargain and instantly sever my head, and offer it.” (Sufis, Mystics and Yogis of India, trans. Bankey Behari [Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1962], p. 224.) See Kabir poems also translated by Tagore, Bly, Linda Hess.

361 BOUZERANT: (Czech slang) Homosexual.

361 AND I WAS SENT FROM HAVANA: Author was deported from Cuba, February 1965 for private criticism of speech at Havana University in which Fidel Castro denounced homosexuals and ordered purge of theater school. Detained in hotel room, held incommunicado from Casa de las Americas, which hosted the month-long Interamerican Poetry contest he’d been invited to help judge, author was expelled by plane to Prague.

361 JOSEPH K: See Kafka, The Trial.

362 BUNHILL FIELDS: Chief nonconformist burial ground of Old London. Site where Blake’s bones are buried, adjacent to gravestones of Daniel Defoe, John Wesley and Isaac Watts.

362 HAMPSTEAD HEATH: “The great old piece of uncultivated common land and woods whose ancient oaks were protected by Royal Charter in North London, haunt of painter John Constable and poet John Keats, who wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in a house which still stands at the heath’s edge in Hampstead.”—Tom Pickard

Guru

364 Poem occasioned by a nap at dusk on the site of Druid mysteries, the grassy crest of London’s Primrose Hill, overlooking London’s towery skyline.

Who Be Kind To

367 HARRY: Harry Fainlight (see “Today” note).

369 MONK IN THE 5 SPOT: Thelonious Monk (1918–1982) Genius of spare precise “out” piano harmony and innovator of “bop” rhythm, long denied by drug bureaucracy the necessary police “cabaret card” permit to work in N.Y., returned early 1960s to play many months at Bowery’s Five Spot, jazz club.

Studying the Signs

371 STUDYING THE SIGNS: 360-degree panorama sketch of Piccadilly Circus composed after midnight conclusion of Albert Hall International Poetry Incarnation.

371 BRIGGFLATTS: Late long poem by English master Basil Bunting (1900–1985), who’d suggested to Ezra Pound that Poetry be equated with Condensation, as in Briggflatts verse describing a Northumbrian road cart: “Rut thuds the rim …” See his Collected Poems, Oxford University Press, 1980.

VIII

THE FALL OF AMERICA

(1965–1971)

Thru the Vortex West Coast to East (1965–1966)

A Methedrine Vision in Hollywood

388 TITLE: See Earl of Rochester’s satire “Upon Nothing”: “Ere time and place were, time and place were not, / When primitive Nothing something strait begot, / Then all proceeded from the great united—What?”

Wichita Vortex Sutra

403 PRAJNAPARAMITA SUTRA: Highest Perfect Wisdom Sutra, central to Zen and Tibetan Buddhist practice. It includes the phrase “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” and mantra “Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha.”

404 LA ILLAHA EL (LILL) ALLAH HU: “There is no god but God [Allah],” Sufi chant for trance dance as taught by Bay Area Sufi Sam circa 1967.

405 WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN: (1860–1925) Congressman, presidential candidate 1908. Later involved in Baby Doe silver mine speculation; leader of populist silver monetary movement: “Thou shalt not crucify Mankind upon a Cross of Gold.” See Vachel Lindsay’s poem “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” (1919):

I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,

Candidate for President who sketched a silver Zion,

The one American who could sing outdoors …

Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,

Whose name the few still say with tears?

Gone to join the ironies with old John Brown,

Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.

Where is that Boy, the Heaven-born Bryan

That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West?

Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,

Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadors rest.

—Vachel Lindsay, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 96.

405 WHO DIDN’T WANT TO BE A MONKEY: John T Scopes disobeyed 1920’s Tennessee law prohibiting high-school teaching of Darwin evolution theory. Defended at trial by Clarence Darrow, he was, interestingly, opposed by Biblical fundamentalist W. J. Bryan, who maintained that God created Adam and Eve in 4004 B.C.

406 AIKEN REPUBLICAN: George D. Aiken (1892–1984) Vermont senator from 1940 through Vietnam War, author, Pioneering with Wildflowers, 1933, other nature books. Interviewed by newsmen on Face the Nation broadcast through Midwest heard by author (through Volkswagen radio) February 20, 1966, on Kansas roads. Senator Aiken pronounced the entire Indochina war involvement “a bad guess” by policymakers who had predicted in 1962 that “8,000 American troops could handle the situation.” Defense Secretary McNamara contended that U.S. was defending South Vietnam from invasion by North Vietnam. “China Lobby” ideologues saw Chinese expansionist plot behind Hanoi and urged nuclear bombing of China.

Senator Aiken argued that the quarter-million South Vietnamese Viet Cong guerrilla army outweighed Hanoi’s troops in confounding the U.S. technologic army then massing toward half-million men. That month, Senator Strom Thurmond backed nuclear arms to win the war.

Later, General Curtis LeMay urged America to “bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age.” Carpet bombing of north did take place, and Mekong jungle cover was saturated with Agent Orange.

In mid-’70s chaos after American withdrawal, North Vietnam dismantled and bypassed what was left of the same South Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government (P.R.G. or Viet Cong) political infrastructure U.S. had rejected 1966. Traditional hostilities were renewed between Vietnam and China at disputed border areas. By then, U.S. was allied with China. Doves & hawks both lost the war, always “a bad guess.”

406 MCNAMARA: Robert S. McNamara (b. 1916) Defense secretary under President LBJ during 1960s Vietnam War, brought managerial sophistication to Pentagon mechanized warfare, though privately doubted its purpose.

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