Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 235

White Shroud

889 TIVOLI FARM: Catholic Worker. Contemplative rural commune founded 1930s by Dorothy Day, celebrated saint-like bohemian Catholic Pacifist.

890 SPRY OLD LADY: Here several of Berenice Abbott Changing New York Depression era photographs are described, from “buses” to “shoes.”

Reading Bai Juyi

908 After Rewi Alley’s Bai Juyi: 200 Selected Poems (Beijing: New World Press, 1983), p. 303.

909 The Secret of the Golden Lotus and Meditation Cushion of the Flesh, Chinese classic erotic handbooks.

909 JIANG JI: See latter’s text & Gary Snyder’s reply poem 1984.

909 QIN SHI HUANG: Emperor 2nd century BC, burned all Buddhist & Classic books.

COSMOPOLITAN GREETINGS OEMS 1986–1992

“I’m going to try speaking some reckless words,

and I want you to try to listen recklessly.”

Thanks to the hospitable editors, variants of these writings were printed first in: After the Storm; Allen in Vision; Alpha Beat Soup; The Alternative Press; American Poetry Review; Be Released in Los Angeles; Big Scream; Big Sky; Black Box; Bombay Gin; Boulevard; Break the Mirror; Broadway 2; [Brooklyn College] English Majors Newsletter; Brooklyn Review; Casse Le Mirroir; City Lights Review; Collateral Damage; Collected Poems; Core; Cottonwood Commemorative; River City Portfolio 1987; Cover; Culturas; Entretien; Ergo; Esquire; Exit Zero; Exquisite Corps; Fall of America; Fear, Power, God (recording); First Blues; First Line; Flower Thief; Gandhabba; A Garden of Earthly Delight; Gathering of Poets; The Ginsberg Gallimaufry (John Hammond Records); Gown Literary Supplement; Grand Rapids College Review; Harper’s; Holunderground; Howling Mantra; Hum Bom! (broadside); Hydrogen Jukebox (libretto); Inquiring Mind; Journal of the Gulf War; Karel Appel; Recent Work; Long Shot; Lovely Jobly; Man Alive!; Mill Street Forward; Moment; Moorish Science Monitor; Napalm Health Spa; Naropa Institute Summer Writing Program (1991); Nation; National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side; New Age Journal; New Censorship; A New Geography of Poets; New Letters; New Observations; New York Newsday; New York Planet; New York Times; Nigen Kazoku; Nightmares of Reason; Nola Express; La Nouvelle Chute de l’Amerique; Off the Wall; Organica; Paria; Pearl; Peckerwood; Personals Ad (broadside); Poem in the Form of a Snake (broadside); Poets for Life; Portable Lower East Side; Qualita di Tempo; Reality Sandwich; Riverrun; RuhRoh!; Sekai; Semio-text[e]; Shambhala Sun; Sixpack; Steaua; Struga; Sugar, Alcohol & Meat (recording); Sulfur; Supplication for the Rebirth of the Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche (broadside); Talus; Thinker Review (broadside); This Is Important; Threepenny Review; Tikkun; Underground Forest; Vagabond; Vajradhatu Sun; Venue; The Verdict Is In; Village Voice; Vinduet; Visiting Father & Friends (pamphlet); Vylizanej Mozek!; Washington Square News; Wiersze; World; WPFW 89.3 FM Poetry Anthology.

To

Steven Taylor

If music be the food of love, play on.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Author wishes to inscribe grateful thanks to friends who’ve collaborated to type, track, edit, and critique Cosmopolitan Greetings thru a decade:

Harry Smith: Archetype cover design, typeface choice & logo.

Bill Morgan: Bibliographic lucidity.

Mark Ewert: Comix inspiration.

Bob Rosenthal: Holistic project supervision.

Steve Taylor: Musical guidance, lead sheets.

Regina Pellicano, Jacqueline Gens, Peter Hale, Steven Finbow, Victoria Smart, and Vicki Stanbury: Sympathetic meticulous assembly typescript text.

Andrew Wylie & Sarah Chalfant: Wise deadline protection.

Terry Karten and HarperCollins: Trustful & patient fidelity.

PREFACE

Improvisation in Beijing

I write poetry because the English word Inspiration comes from Latin Spiritus, breath, I want to breathe freely.

I write poetry because Walt Whitman gave world permission to speak with candor.

I write poetry because Walt Whitman opened up poetry’s verse-line for unobstructed breath.

I write poetry because Ezra Pound saw an ivory tower, bet on one wrong horse, gave poets permission to write spoken vernacular idiom.

I write poetry because Pound pointed young Western poets to look at Chinese writing word pictures.

I write poetry because W. C. Williams living in Rutherford wrote New Jerseyesque “I kick yuh eye,” asking, how measure that in iambic pentameter?

I write poetry because my father was poet my mother from Russia spoke Communist, died in a mad house.

I write poetry because young friend Gary Snyder sat to look at his thoughts as part of external phenomenal world just like a 1984 conference table.

I write poetry because I suffer, born to die, kidneystones and high blood pressure, everybody suffers.

I write poetry because I suffer confusion not knowing what other people think.

I write because poetry can reveal my thoughts, cure my paranoia also other people’s paranoia.

I write poetry because my mind wanders subject to sex politics Buddhadharma meditation.

I write poetry to make accurate picture my own mind.

I write poetry because I took Bodhisattva’s Four Vows: Sentient creatures to liberate are numberless in the universe, my own greed anger ignorance to cut thru’s infinite, situations I find myself in are countless as the sky okay, while awakened mind path’s endless.

I write poetry because this morning I woke trembling with fear what could I say in China?

I write poetry because Russian poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin committed suicide, somebody else has to talk.

I write poetry because my father reciting Shelley English poet & Vachel Lindsay American poet out loud gave example—big wind inspiration breath.

I write poetry because writing sexual matters was censored in United States.

I write poetry because millionaires East and West ride Rolls-Royce limousines, poor people don’t have enough money to fix their teeth.

I write poetry because my genes and chromosomes fall in love with young men not young women.

I write poetry because I have no dogmatic responsibility one day to the next.

I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.

I write poetry to talk back to Whitman, young people in ten years, talk to old aunts and uncles still living near Newark, New Jersey.

I write poetry because I listened to black Blues on 1939 radio, Leadbelly and Ma Rainey

I write poetry inspired by youthful cheerful Beatles’ songs grown old.

I write poetry because Chuang-tzu couldn’t tell whether he was butterfly or man, Lao-tzu said water flows downhill, Confucius said honor elders, I wanted to honor Whitman.

I write poetry because overgrazing sheep and cattle Mongolia to U.S. Wild West destroys new grass & erosion creates deserts.

I write poetry wearing animal shoes.

I write poetry “First thought, best thought” always.

I write poetry because no ideas are comprehensible except as manifested in minute particulars: “No ideas but in things.”