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
Allen Ginsberg born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian émigré, 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, élan 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.
May 26, 1968
After Words for The Fall of America
Beginning with “long poem of these States,” The Fall of America continues Planet News chronicle taperecorded scribed by hand or sung condensed, the flux of car bus airplane dream consciousness Person during Automated Electronic War years, newspaper headline radio brain auto poesy & silent desk musings, headlights flashing on road through these States of consciousness. Texts here dedicated to Whitman Good Grey Poet complement otherwhere published Wichita Vortex Sutra and Iron Horse. The book enters Northwest border thence down California Coast Xmas 1965 and wanders East to include history epic in Kansas & Bayonne, mantra chanting in Cleveland smoke flats, Great Lake hotel room midnight soliloquies, defeatest prophetics Nebraskan, sociable kissass in Houston, sexist gay rhapsodies, elegy for love friend poet heroes threaded through American silver years, pacifist-voweled changes of self in robot city, wavecrash babbling & prayers airborne, reportage Presidentiad Chicago police-state teargas eye, car crash body consciousness, ecologue inventory over Atlantic seaboard’s iron Megalopolis & west desert’s smog-tinged Vast. Back home, Mannahatta’s garbaged loves survive, farm country without electricity falltime harvest’s the illegal Indochina bomb paranoia guilt. Guru Om meditation breaks through onto empty petrochemical wonderland, & so adieu to empty-lov’d America. Book returns to Pacific flowered seashore with antibomb call, then across ocean great suffering starvation’s visible, bony human September on Jessore Road ends as mantric lamentation rhymed for vocal chant to western chords F minor B flat E flat B flat.
October 7, 1972
Back Cover for Mind Breaths
Australian songsticks measure oldest known poetics, broken-leg meditations march thru Six Worlds singing Crazy Wisdom’s hopeless suffering, the First Noble Truth, inspiring quiet Sung sunlit greybeard soliloquies, English moonlit night-gleams, ambitious mid-life fantasies, Ah crossed-legged thoughts sitting straight-spine paying attention to empty breath flowing round the globe; then Dharma elegy & sharp eyed haiku, pederast rhapsody, exorcism of mid-East battlegods, workaday sad dust glories. American ego confession & mugging downfall Lower East Side, hospital sickness moan, hydrogen Jukebox Prophecy, Sex come-all-ye, mountain cabin flashes, Buddhist country western chord changes, Rolling Thunder snow balls, a Jersey shaman dream, Father Death in a graveyard near Newark, Poe bones, two hot hearted love poems: Here chronicled mid-Seventies’ half decade inward & outward Mindfulness in many Poetries: Aboriginal rhetoric, mouth-page free verse-forms, Whitmanic-miltonic periods, Chinese-american imagery, scholarly politics apostrophe, dirty blues & racy ballads rocknroll & airy numbers musicked with lead-sheets, 3 line sparks, objective tombstones, & in narrative high style Oratory a Blakean Punk Epic with nirvanic Rune music the Contest of Bards.
September 23, 1977
Title poem combines scientific info on 24,000-year cycle of the Great Year compared with equal half-life of Plutonium waste, accounting Homeric formula for appeasing underground millionaire Pluto Lord of Death, jack in the gnostic box of Aeons, and Adamantine Truth of ordinary mind inspiration, unhexing Nuclear ministry of fear. Following poems chronologize Wyoming grass blues, a punk-rock sonnet, personal grave musing, Manhattan landscape hypertension, lovelorn heart thumps, mantric rhymes, Neruda’s tearful Lincoln ode retranslated to U.S. vernacular oratory, Nagasaki Bomb anniversary haikus, Zen Bluegrass raunch, free verse demystification of sacred fame, Reznikoffian filial epiphanies, hot pants Skeltonic doggerel, a Kerouackian New Year’s eve ditty, professorial homework, New Jersey quatrains, scarecrow haiku, improvised dice roll for high-school kids, English rock-and-roll sophistications, an old love glimpse, little German movies, old queen conclusions, a tender renaissance song, ode to hero-flop, Peace protest prophecies, Lower East Side snapshots, national flashes in the Buddhafields, Sapphic stanzas in quantitative idiom, look out the bedroom window, feverish birdbrain verses from Eastern Europe for chanting with electric bands, Beethovinean ear strophes drowned in rain, a glance at Cloud Castle, poems 1977–1980 end with International new wave hit lyric Capitol Air.
September 28, 1981