Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 4

Syntax punctuation Capitalization remain idiosyncratic, retaining the variable measure of nervous systematics. In many poems, semi-irregular indentation of verse conforms to divisions of original notation or spacings of first thought-speech mindfully recollected. “Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.”

Nevertheless some touches are added here and there, adjustments made after years of reading works aloud, changes few and far between. Defective passages or words are excised from several poems, including “Sunflower Sutra” and “Wales Visitation.” Author has altered a dozen or more phrases that consistently annoyed him over years, eliminated half-dozen foggy adjectives or added a half-dozen factual epithets to clear up the sense of dated verses, notably in “America.”

Typographical errors, misalignment of verse on pages of previous printings, and unintended grammatic quirks are corrected. Apparent solecisms were judged, approved or cast out.

Assembled Appendixes

“Notes” transmit cultural archetypes to electronic laser TV generations that don’t read Dostoyevsky Buddha bibles. Karma wants understanding, Moloch needs noting. Mini-essays hint further reading for innocent-eyed youths. Author took opportunity to verify ephemera in his poetry, interpret recurrent reference images for peers and elders.

Dante, Milton, Blake and Smart footnotes were made by scholars. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote extensive commentaries for Percy Shelley’s posthumous collections. Wordsworth and Eliot favored readers by composing their own notes; their practice had precedents.

The back of this book preserves old title-page “Epigraphs” and “Dedications,” artifacts of original pamphlets which played their part in the drama of breakthrough from closed form to open form in American poetry. A small-press culture revolution helped change hyper-industrialized public consciousness from provincial wartime nationalist-history-bound egoic myopia to panoramic awareness of planet news, eternal view of both formal charm and empty nature of local identity. “Acknowledgments” alphabetize an extravagant list of publications that first printed these poems throughout three decades of explosive humor during which legal censorship broke down. Present gratitudes find place here. Artisans who collaborated on this volume are specified. William Carlos Williams’s “Introductions” to two early books are retained, as well as “Author’s Writ,” jacket-blurb prose-poetries once composed as precis for each book.

“Index of Proper Names” is designed to make this large volume “user friendly.” Collected Poems may be read as a lifelong poem including history, wherein things are symbols of themselves. Cross-reference between texts and notes can serve as rough concordance to the book’s mythic actualities, from Cassady to CIA to Sakyamuni. “Index of Proper Names” and “Index of Titles, First Lines, and Original Book Sources” complete the work.

ALLEN GINSBERG

New York City

June 26, 1984

* “White Shroud,” 1983, dream epilogue to “Kaddish” and title poem of book subsequent to Collected Poems, is late work of true inspiration in this sequence.

I

EMPTY MIRROR:

GATES OF WRATH

(1947–1952)

In Society

I walked into the cocktail party

room and found three or four queers

talking together in queertalk.

I tried to be friendly but heard

myself talking to one in hiptalk.

“I’m glad to see you,” he said, and

looked away. “Hmn,” I mused. The room

was small and had a double-decker

bed in it, and cooking apparatus:

icebox, cabinet, toasters, stove;

the hosts seemed to live with room

enough only for cooking and sleeping.

My remark on this score was understood

but not appreciated. I was

offered refreshments, which I accepted.

I ate a sandwich of pure meat; an

enormous sandwich of human flesh,

I noticed, while I was chewing on it,

it also included a dirty asshole.

More company came, including a

fluffy female who looked like

a princess. She glared at me and

said immediately: “I don’t like you,”

turned her head away, and refused

to be introduced. I said, “What!”

in outrage. “Why you shit-faced fool!”

This got everybody’s attention.

“Why you narcissistic bitch! How

can you decide when you don’t even

know me,” I continued in a violent

and messianic voice, inspired at

last, dominating the whole room

Dream New York-Denver, Spring 1947

The Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour

Two bricklayers are setting the walls

of a cellar in a new dug out patch

of dirt behind an old house of wood

with brown gables grown over with ivy

on a shady street in Denver. It is noon

and one of them wanders off. The young

subordinate bricklayer sits idly for

a few minutes after eating a sandwich

and throwing away the paper bag. He

has on dungarees and is bare above

the waist; he has yellow hair and wears

a smudged but still bright red cap

on his head. He sits idly on top

of the wall on a ladder that is leaned

up between his spread thighs, his head

bent down, gazing uninterestedly at

the paper bag on the grass. He draws

his hand across his breast, and then

slowly rubs his knuckles across the

side of his chin, and rocks to and fro

on the wall. A small cat walks to him

along the top of the wall. He picks

it up, takes off his cap, and puts it

over the kitten’s body for a moment.