Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 210
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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 lyrics.
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 emigre, 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.
August 28, 1963
Back Cover for Reality Sandwiches
“Wake-up nightmares in Lower East Side, musings in public library, across the U.S. in dream auto, drunk in old Havana, brooding in Mayan ruins, sex daydreams on the West Coast, airplane vision of Kansas, lonely in a leafy cottage, lunch hour in Berkeley, beery notations on Skid Row, slinking to Mexico, wrote this last nite in Paris, back on Times Square dreaming of Times Square, bombed in NY again, loony tunes in the dentist chair, screaming at old poets in South America, aethereal zigzag Poesy in blue hotel rooms in Peru—a wind-up book of dream notes, psalms, journal enigmas & nude minutes from 1953 to 1960 poems scattered in fugitive magazines here collected now book.”
1960
Back Cover for Planet News
Planet News collecting seven years’ Poesy scribed to 1967 begins with electronic politics disassociation & messianic rhapsody TV Baby in New York, continues picaresque around the world globe, elan perceptions notated at Mediterranean, Galilee & Ganges till next breakthrough, comedown Poem heart & soul last days in Asia The Change 1963; tenement doldrums & police-state paranoia in Manhattan then half year behind Socialist Curtain climaxed as Kral Majales May King Prague 1965, same year’s erotic gregariousness writ as Who Be Kind To for International Poetry Incarnation Albert Hall London; next trip West Coast U.S. & voyage back thru center America midwest Wichita Vortex Sutra which is mind-collage & keystone section of progressively longer poem on “These States”—here Self sitting in its own meat throne invokes Harekrishna as preserver of human planet & challenges all other Powers usurping State Consciousness to recognize same Identity, thus ‘I here declare the End of the War.’ Back dwelling on East Coast local psyche notes, elegy for O’Hara dead friend poet & worship for all Gods; at last across Atlantic Wales Visitation promethian text recollected in emotion revised in tranquillity continuing tradition of ancient Nature Language mediates between psychedelic inspiration and humane ecology & integrates acid classic Unitive Vision with democratic eyeball particulars— book closes on politics to exorcise Pentagon phantoms who cover Earth with dung-colored gas.
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