Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 209

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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 Chogyam 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.

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