I enclose these poems. The first shows you where I was years ago. The second, a kind of dense lyric I instinctively try to imitate—after Crane, Robinson, Tate, and old Englishmen. Then, “The Shroudy Stranger” less interesting as a poem (or less sincere) but it connects observations of things with an old dream of the void—I have real dreams about a classic hooded figure. But this dream has become identified with my own abyss—and with the abyss of old Smokies under the Erie R.R. tracks on Straight Street—so the shroudy stranger speaking from the inside of the old wracked bum of Paterson or anywhere in America. This is only a half made poem (using a few lines and a situation I had in a dream). I contemplated a long work on the shroudy stranger, his wanderings. Next an earlier poem, Radio City, a long lyric written in sickness. Then a mad song (to be sung by Groucho Marx to a Bop background). Then an old style ballad-type ghost dream poem. Then, an ode to the setting sun of abstract ideas, written before leaving the hospital, and last an Ode to Judgment, which I just wrote, but which is unfinished. What will come of all this I do not know yet.
I know this letter finds you in good health, as I saw you speak at the museum in N.Y. this week. I ran backstage to accost you, but changed my mind, after waving at you, and ran off again.
Respectfully yours,
A.G.212
Then I sent him those poems and he wrote me back, no, they wouldn’t do. Then I went to my journals and took concrete direct prose statements from my journals and sent that to him, like “Marijuana Notation.”
Marijuana Notation
How sick I am!
that thought
always comes to me
with horror.
Is it this strange
for everybody?
But such fugitive feelings
have always been
my métier.
Baudelaire—yet he had
great joyful moments
staring into space,
looking into the
middle distance,
contemplating his image
in Eternity.
They were his moments
of identity.
It is solitude that
produces these thoughts.
It is December
almost, they are singing
Christmas carols
in front of the department
stores down the block on
Fourteenth Street.213
It takes an interior rumination and then suddenly [there’s] a switch and the attention goes to the external world from the interior illumination and bullshit. As with marijuana or just plain ordinary mind, suddenly waking up out of interior rumination and putting attention into the external world. Finally I came back to myself or located myself in space and time with a specific image and it was that jump from the interior to the observation of external ground or detail or fact that really struck me. I was high on grass and so it was triply awesome or doubly awesome, the realization that the mind could be spaced out and then come back and focus. That was also an aspect of the notion of a gap or jump from one phase of consciousness to another, one unconscious daydreaming to a real place, a focus on the external phenomenal world.
That is one of the poems I still read a great deal when I give readings, trying to expound where I came from and what I’m doing, and that’s very much under the influence of William Carlos Williams’s clamp the mind down on objects or get to actuality. At least that’s the basis of my poetry. So I put together a bunch of poems for Williams like these. The whole point is that from the subjective babble, meandering, thinking, and daydreaming you’ve got reality all of a sudden, shifting and becoming aware of the actuality outside, just like Williams was writing about actualities. That he dug immediately.
A couple other little things that I sent him were:
A Meaningless Institution
I was given my bedding, and a bunk
in an enormous ward,
surrounded by hundreds of weeping,
decaying men and women.
I sat on my bunk, three tiers up
next to the ceiling,
looking down the gray aisles.
Old, crippled, dumb people were
bent over sewing. A heavy girl
in a dirty dress
stared at me. I waited
for an official guide to come
and give me instructions.
After awhile, I wandered
off down empty corridors
in search of a toilet.214
Instead of getting hung up on metaphysical visionary Rimbaud derangement of the senses, I started looking, like Williams, to ordinary-mind observations for visionary perception. To look at ordinary fact rather than supernatural fact. Then “The Trembling of the Veil,” the trembling of the veil of consciousness. The title is taken from an essay by William Butler Yeats in the 1890s on the trembling of the veil of civilization. So “trembling of the veil” means coming on with some big revelation.
The Trembling of the Veil
Today out of the window
the trees seemed like live
organisms on the moon.
Each bough extended upward
covered at the north end
with leaves, like a green
hairy protuberance. I saw
the scarlet-and-pink shoot-tips
of budding leaves wave
delicately in the sunlight,
blown by the breeze,
all the arms of the trees
bending and straining downward
at once when the wind
pushed them.215
I was working under the influence of William Carlos Williams’s example, who said “direct contact with external phenomenal world is the only way you can, in describing what your perception is of objective reality outside of you, it’s the only way you can make a coordinate point where others can see, compare their perceptions with your perceptions.” If you describe accurately what you see outside of yourself, you will transmit your mind that way rather than try to do it by means of symbolic or rehash of esoteric symbols, but direct contact with the external world will give you a coordinate to work with other people’s perceptions. You present what you perceive through your senses and others will be able to compare their own sense experience with yours, and thus you present your mind. Then I began writing in a more up-to-date modern style, at the same time mixed up with writing rhymed lyrics and straightforward modern poems modeled on Williams. It was just a little animistic description of nature, but taken from fact rather than making a big trip. He immediately wrote back saying, “How many more of these do you have? I shall see that you get a book.” He was amazed that somebody understood the quick shift of perception that he was into.
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
sid
e 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.
Meanwhile it is darkening as if to rain
and the wind on top of the trees in the
street comes through almost harshly.216
So I’m looking out the window, direct observation, with a kind of erotic projection as you may notice. I was looking at what was going on outside and trying to sketch it, as a painter makes a little sketch. The description of the bricklayer is a bit awash with erotic feeling and the interest in what he did with the little kitty. Then, all of a sudden, this glimpse of the panorama of the space in the sky beyond. It’s a jump of attentiveness of the mind from a small thing to awareness of a giant panorama, just like there was a jump in the marijuana notation from thinking about how sick I am to suddenly realizing “It is December almost, they’re singing Christmas carols in front of the department stores down the block.” Clamping the mind back down on objects, getting back to reality. That was what Williams noticed and dug in the poems that I sent him.
“A Poem on America” was another one. We were all reading Dostoyevsky’s Raw Youth, his penultimate novel, in which there’s a character, Versilov, and so I wrote, “America is like Russia. Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.” That was a painting described in the novel.
A Poem on America
America is like Russia.
Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.
We have the proletariat too.
Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.
Versilov wore a hair shirt
and dreamed of classical pictures.
The alleys, the dye works,
Mill Street in the smoke,
melancholy of the bars,
the sadness of long highways,
negroes climbing around
the rusted iron by the river,
the bathing pool hidden
behind the silk factory
fed by its drainage pipes;
all the pictures we carry in our mind
images of the thirties,
depression and class consciousness
transfigured above politics
filled with fire
with the appearance of God.217
Well, I don’t know about the end. The alleys, the dye works, Mill Street in the smoke, the sadness of long highways. Kerouac loved it and then Williams immediately recognized that and liked it. It was just simple realistic stuff.
CHAPTER 41
Ginsberg and “The Green Automobile”
That was still not energetic enough, it was still like a setting sun in a sense, the notions are still lacklove, haunted, defeat. What was necessary was some kind of a discovery of my own imagination. And that comes out in a poem called “The Green Automobile,” which is 1953. Basically it is a reaction to—if I could do what I want, then what would I do? Green is a gay color of Roman togas, or Roman galavant. The poem is prophetic because there’s a miraculous college of the body mentioned, which likely enough is an inkling of the Buddhist school Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
The Green Automobile
If I had a Green Automobile
I’d go find my old companion
in his house on the Western ocean.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I’d honk my horn at his manly gate,
inside his wife and three
children sprawl naked
on the living room floor.
He’d come running out
to my car full of heroic beer
and jump screaming at the wheel
for he is the greater driver.
We’d pilgrimage to the highest mount
of our earlier Rocky Mountain visions
laughing in each other’s arms,
delight surpassing the highest Rockies,
and after old agony, drunk with new years,
bounding toward the snowy horizon
blasting the dashboard with original bop
hot rod on the mountain
we’d batter up the cloudy highway
where angels of anxiety
careen through the trees
and scream out of the engine.
We’d burn all night on the jackpine peak
seen from Denver in the summer dark,
forestlike unnatural radiance
illuminating the mountaintop:
childhood youthtime age & eternity
would open like sweet trees
in the nights of another spring
and dumbfound us with love,
for we can see together
the beauty of souls
hidden like diamonds
in the clock of the world,
like Chinese magicians can
confound the immortals
with our intellectuality
hidden in the mist,
in the Green Automobile
which I have invented
imagined and visioned
on the roads of the world
more real than the engine
on a track in the desert
purer than Greyhound and
swifter than physical jetplane.
Denver! Denver! we’ll return
roaring across the City & County Building lawn
which catches the pure emerald flame
streaming in the wake of our auto.
This time we’ll buy up the city!
I cashed a great check in my skull bank
to found a miraculous college of the body
up on the bus terminal roof.
But first we’ll drive the stations of downtown,
poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail
whorehouse down Folsom
to the darkest alleys of Larimer
paying respects to Denver’s father
lost on the railroad tracks,
stupor of wine and silence
salute him and his saintly suitcase
of dark muscatel, drink
and smash the sweet bottles
on Diesels in allegiance.
Then we go driving drunk on boulevards
where armies march and still parade
staggering under the invisible
banner of Reality—
hurtling through the street
in the auto of our fate
we share an archangelic cigarette
and tell each other’s fortunes:
fames of supernatural illumination,
bleak rainy gaps of time,
great art learned in desolation
and we beat apart after six decades . . .
and on an asphalt crossroad,
deal with each other in princely
gentleness once more, recalling
famous dead talks of other cities.
The windshield’s full of tears,
rain wets our naked breasts,
we kneel together in the shade
amid the traffic of night in paradise
and now renew the solitary vow
we made each other take
in Texas, once:
I can’t inscribe here. . . .
• • • • • •
• • • • • •
How many Saturday nights will be
made drunken by this legend?
How will young Denver come to mourn
her forgotten sexual angel?
How many boys will strike the black piano
in imitation of the excess of a native saint?
Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high
schools of melancholy night?
While all the time in Eternity
in the wan light of this poem’s radio
we’ll sit behind forgotten shades
hearkening the lost jazz of all Saturdays.
Neal, we’ll be real heroes now
in a war between our cocks and time:
let’s be the angels of the world’s desire
and take the world to bed with us before we die.
Sleeping alone, or with companion,
girl or fairy sheep or dream,
I’ll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:
all men fall, our fathers fell before,
but resurrecting that lost flesh
is but a moment’s work of mind:
an ageless monument to love
in the imagination:
memorial built out of our own bodies
consumed by the invisible poem—
We’ll shudder in Denver and endure
though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.
So this Green Automobile:
I give you in flight
a present, a present