from my imagination.
We will go riding
over the Rockies,
we’ll go on riding
all night long until dawn,
then back to your railroad, the SP
your house and your children
and broken leg destiny
you’ll ride down the plains
in the morning: and back
to my visions, my office
and eastern apartment
I’ll return to New York.218
There are many allusions here. I was reading a lot of William Butler Yeats, [in “Lapis Lazuli”] with his Chinamen, “their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay,” so that line about “like Chinese magicians can | confound the immortals | with our intellectuality | hidden in the mist.” And from “The Delphic Oracle Upon Plotinus,” “Behold that great Plotinus swim | Buffeted by such seas; | Bland Rhadamanthus beckons him, [AG has left out a line here: “But the Golden Race looks dim,”] | Salt blood blocks his eyes.” From Yeats was “We’ll shudder into Denver and endure | though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.” That’s a little paraphrase of Yeats’s “Delphic Oracle Upon Plotinus.”
The arrangement of the line was interesting because after fifty years of experimentation Williams has come to this approximation of a measure for his speech. [Robert] Creeley noticed it, I noticed, [Robert] Duncan noticed. It was a big deal. Williams was proposing this as the American line or the American measure. In 1953 I began experimenting with it, consciously, in a poem called “Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain.”
Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain
He drags his bare feet
out of a cave
under a tree,
eyebrows
grown long with weeping
and hooknosed woe,
in ragged soft robes
wearing a fine beard,
unhappy hands
clasped to his naked breast—
humility is beatness
humility is beatness—
faltering
into the bushes by a stream,
all things inanimate
but his intelligence—
stands upright there
tho trembling:
Arhat
who sought Heaven
under a mountain of stone,
sat thinking
till he realized
the land of blessedness exists
in the imagination—
the flash come:
empty mirror—
how painful to be born again
wearing a fine beard,
reentering the world
a bitter wreck of a sage:
earth before him his only path.
We can see his soul,
he knows nothing
like a god:
shaken
meek wretch—
humility is beatness
before the absolute World.219
That was also written in triadic and I read it with that slight pause between phrases. I decided I’d better leave New York, so headed out toward Mexico on my way to San Francisco to join Neal Cassady in San Francisco in 1953–54. On the way I stopped off in Cuba where I wrote a minor poem, sketches of Havana called “Havana 1953.” It was my 1953 imitation of Kerouac’s sketches put into Williams’s relative measured triadic line.
Havana 1953
I
The night café—4 A.M.
Cuba Libre 20c:
white tiled squares,
triangular neon lights,
long wooden bar on one side,
a great delicatessen booth
on the other facing the street.
In the center
among the great city midnight drinkers,
by Aldama Palace
on Gómez corner,
white men and women
with standing drums,
mariachis, voices, guitars—
drumming on tables,
knives on bottles,
banging on the floor
and on each other,
with wooden clacks,
whistling, howling,
fat women in strapless silk.
Cop talking to the fat-nosed girl
in a flashy black dress.
In walks a weird Cézanne
vision of the nowhere hip Cuban:
tall, thin, check gray suit,
gray felt shoes,
blaring gambler’s hat,
Cab Calloway pimp’s mustachio
—it comes down to a point in the center—
rushing up generations late talking Cuban,
pointing a gold-ringed finger
up toward the yellowed ceiling,
other cigarette hand pointing
stiff-armed down at his side,
effeminate:—he sees the cop—
they rush together—they’re embracing
like long lost brothers—
fatnose forgotten.
Delicate chords
from the negro guitarino
—singers at El Rancho Grande,
drunken burlesque
screams of agony,
VIVA JALISCO!
I eat a catfish sandwich
with onions and red sauce
20¢.220
Once in Mexico I lived in the rain forest of Chiapas for several months, working on a cacao plantation, still kind of lacklove. I wrote another little song, the second song I wrote.
Green Valentine Blues
I went in the forest to look for a sign
Fortune to tell and thought to refine;
My green valentine, my green valentine,
What do I know of my green valentine?
I found a strange wild leaf on a vine
Shaped like a heart and as green as was mine,
My green valentine, my green valentine,
How did I use my green valentine?
Bodies I’ve known and visions I’ve seen,
Leaves that I gathered as I gather this green
Valentine, valentine, valentine, valentine;
Thus did I use my green valentine.
Madhouse and jailhouses where I shined
Empty apartment beds where I pined,
O desolate rooms! My green valentine,
Where is the heart in which you were outlined?
Souls and nights and dollars and wine,
Old love and remembrance—I resign
All cities, all jazz, all echoes of Time,
But what shall I do with my green valentine?
Much have I seen, and much am I blind,
But none other than I has a leaf of this kind.
Where shall I send you, to what knowing mind,
My green valentine, my green valentine?
Yesterday’s love, tomorrow’s more fine?
All tonight’s sadness in your design.
What does this mean, my green valentine?
Regret, O regret, my green valentine.221
While I was in Chichén Itzá and Palenque, cities of the old Maya empire on the Yucatán peninsula, I thought that [it] would be interesting to treat them as if they were the great ruins of Greece that Shelley and Keats wrote about. Why couldn’t the Americans use those Central American ruins for the same nostalgia and classical reference, the same sense of the eternal, time in eternity? I wrote [a long poem, “Siesta in Xbalba”] during the six-month period traveling through Mexico. I was living in the jungle area, rain forest near Chiapas.
Once I arrived in California I moved in with Neal Cassady in San Jose. I’d trained with Williams in t
he sense that I had some idea of direct concrete pictures, objectivity, I had somewhat mastered that. The earlier poems that I’d been writing up to 1955 were examples of that, like “Song” and “In Back of the Real,” which Williams liked quite a bit.
In “Song: the weight of the world is love” I talk about a return to my own body, getting back into my own skin. This is straight out of Williams, the idea of isolation, “Yes, yes, that’s what I wanted.” It’s actual speech, real talk, intense fragments of spoken idiom. Later, Louis Zukofsky noticed this poem. Although he ignored “Howl,” ignored everything else of mine, this he dug. I was pleased, because this was the basis of everything I was doing, this kind of hearing and balancing. I was trying to do it with longer lines as well. “Song” is considered by that era of poets to be an excellent example of this kind of poetry, where everything is divided up right and the poems are balanced by the ear. Most of the lines indicate a new breath, each pause is a new breath. You especially find it in Creeley, and Olson, and in Williams, and the words “breath stop” I first heard from Williams. You halt the line at the end of the breath or use the breath as the measure of the verse line. That could mean a long, long line with a long breath, or it could be a short breath. That’s the way you divide your line, depending on the way that you breathe it.
In Back of the Real
railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman’s shack.
A flower lay on the hay on
the asphalt highway
—the dread hay flower
I thought—It had a
brittle black stem and
corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus’ inchlong
crown, and a soiled
dry center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that’s been lying under
the garage for a year.
This was just a description of a thistle, the center tuft of a dried thistle.
Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World222
“Great yellow rose” is a reference to Dante’s rose of paradise, at the end of the thirty-fourth canto of Paradiso. What I was interested in was the “brittle black stem and corolla of yellowish dirty spikes like Jesus’ inchlong crown.” I thought that was the best poetry I had written up to that date. It was the most focused and exact and clear and funny at the same time. Williams dug that, comparing a flower to an old used shaving brush that had been lying around in a garage for a year.
Williams’s later work, like “Pictures from Brueghel,” experimented with this kind of verse, like a used shaving brush that’s been under the garage for a year. Around 1948 to 1950 we were interested in trying to arrange it on the page so that it was measurable free verse with some meter or some measure. “Measure” was his word. He got sick of the looseness of free free verse in a sense that there didn’t seem to be any basic principle of regularity in it. As people were using it in that day it was sloppy, undisciplined in the sense of no order within it and no sense of proportion and balance. Unbalanced minds writing unbalanced poetry. He became interested in balancing the phrases on the page, weighing them and balancing them, like a mobile, maybe. Something that would have balance within each line. He tried to divide each lengthy line into three parts, triadic, as in the poem “To Daphne and Virginia.” It’s relatively abstract, but it’s an old man talking.
This is 1954 and I was interested in these poems because I was working in a somewhat similar vein. Williams had made an advance in his prosody and was now beginning to arrange his lines in this peculiar way and I was trying to figure out why he was doing it and whether I could use it. I was imitating that.
To Daphne and Virginia
The smell of the heat is boxwood
when rousing us
a movement of the air
stirs our thoughts
that had no life in them
to a life, a life in which
two women agonize:
to live and to breathe is no less.
Two young women.
The box odor
is the odor of that of which
partaking separately,
each to herself
I partake also
. . separately.223
He divided his lines that way. It could be written in prose, however, the mind’s attention and the eye’s attention would go through it so rapidly it would miss certain subtle divisions of phrase. It’s the way he talked. Around that time he was saying that he thought American speech tended toward anapestic, or rising verse, as it is called. There are certain phrasings that you could emphasize when you divide it up. There’s some kind of humor about the way it is balanced.
[While living in San Francisco] I had a retrospective dream of the late Joan Burroughs who had been killed in Mexico in 1951 just after I visited and I’d been haunted by her memory, because I knew her well. I wondered about what her attitude would be about her husband who had shot her and so had a dream apparition in which I had a chance to interrogate Joan about it. This was the last poem I wrote before I wrote “Howl” and is in a sense a survey or summary of what might be called the major characters of the Beat Generation as of that date. The style of the poem is more formal. It was a literal record of a dream I had.
Dream Record: June 8, 1955
A drunken night in my house with a
boy, San Francisco: I lay asleep:
darkness:
I went back to Mexico City
and saw Joan Burroughs leaning
forward in a garden chair, arms
on her knees. She studied me with
clear eyes and downcast smile, her
face restored to a fine beauty
tequila and salt had made strange
before the bullet in her brow.
We talked of the life since then.
Well, what’s Burroughs doing now?
Bill on earth, he’s in North Africa.
Oh, and Kerouac? Jack still jumps
with the same beat genius as before,
notebooks filled with Buddha.
I hope he makes it, she laughed.
Is Huncke still in the can? No,
last time I saw him on Times Square.
And how is Kenney? Married, drunk
and golden in the East. You? New
loves in the West—
Then I knew
she was a dream: and questioned her
—Joan, what kind of knowledge have
the dead? can you still love
your mortal acquaintances?
What do you remember of us?
She
faded in front of me— The next instant
I saw her rain-stained tombstone
rear an illegible epitaph
under the gnarled branch of a small
tree in the wild grass
of an unvisited garden in Mexico.224
This was a literal record of a dream. Burroughs had shot his wife in a William Tell accident in Mexico and I had been with Joan until about two days before she died. This is now five years later and suddenly she returned in a dream. I was beginning to investigate my dreams, waking up in my dreams and becoming conscious inside the dream. I was aware enough that I could turn the dream in the direction that I wanted. I realized that she was dead and this was my chance to find out straight [from] the mouth of the dead what they knew and how much they could remember. The answer w
as this quick cut, jump cut, to a graveyard, “an illegible epitaph under the gnarled branch of a small tree in the wild grass of an unvisited garden in Mexico.” I woke up with a kind of shock, like a total satori, because I had asked those questions and I got the answer. It wasn’t an answer I expected at all. The answer was an implacable tombstone rather than charming Joan leaning forward explaining.
What I found interesting here, besides the sociology and literary history, was the intense frame [of] the dream to the poem. The key seemed to be, as in dreams, the shift from a vivid living image to a montage. Or a jump cut from the image of the person talking to the question “What do you remember of us?” The next thing just a rain-stained tombstone bearing an illegible epitaph under the gnarled branch of a small tree in the wild grass. What I was trying to do was transcribe that almost cinematically, as swiftly as possible. I was interested in the notion of a gap between thoughts, or the gap between words as creating positive and negative holes between two thoughts through which the mind connected the disparate imagery, like lightning flash flint spark. Your mind can fill in the relationship, or in Yeats’s phrase, “out of the murderous innocence of the sea.” Your mind fills in the gap between murderous and innocence. Or “O ant climb up Mount Fuji, but slowly, slowly.” Your mind fills in the gap between the tiny ant and the vast slope of Fuji.
From that I got an idea about the nature of haiku and the nature of poetry and the nature of metaphor. That still sticks with me and is the basis of the rhetoric in “Howl,” which has the same immediate jump cuts. They are condensed so that they jump in between the words themselves rather than just scenes like this. I worked on this poem and sent it to Burroughs who was really startled by it.
I also sent a copy to Kenneth Rexroth with a letter explaining my theory. [I said that] what gives the charge or the visionary aspect of poetry is when you present one clear picture and then without any explanation jump to another completely clear picture. The gap or space in between those pictures is a kind of mind space or gap in time or a gap in consciousness or a gap in vision. As in movies, the poignancy or charge or visionary aspect or satori or sunyata or mental electric comes from setting up one pole of thought form or word or picture and then setting up another pole. Then the mind has to fill in the space between by connecting them. The connection that the mind makes is like an electric charge between the two poles. The thought rises naturally in order to connect the two polarized images, disparate images, perhaps even opposite images, perhaps even contradictory images. One minute it’s somebody talking, the next minute it’s a tombstone.
Best Minds of My Generation Page 34
