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Foto gallery Meditation on poetics The 4 subjects of poetry

Meditation on poetics Allen Ginsburg This talk by Mr. Ginsberg, originally entitled “Poetry or Fiction,” was delivered during a panel discussion entitled “American Poetry and Fiction” at the the 1987 Annual PEN Congress in New York. I’d like to begin by reading a poem related to what I want to present, by Jack Kerouac, the “17th Chorus” from Mexico City Blues: Starspangled Kingdoms bedecked in dewy joint-DON'T IGNORE OTHER PARTS OF YOUR MIND, I think, And my clever brain sends ripples of amusement Through my leg nerve halls And I remember the Zigzag Original Mind of Babyhood when you'd let the faces crack & mock & yak & change & go mad utterly in your night firstmind reveries talking about the mind The endless Not invisible Madness rioting Everywhere

As we’ve noticed this week, from many eminent and experienced intelligences, we are all living in a state of great ideological uncertainty. This is the very nature of our conference: “the Imagination of the State and the Imagination of the Writer.” Some identify their self and consciousness with the state, some identify who they are with some notion of individual self; but, then one doesn’t know who or what one’s self is. “Who am I?” is the most ancient question. And there has been some confusion or emotions and panic, and some defensiveness and digression here, because of that. In my own case, I’ve been very active in circulating a petition in support of Nicaraguan independence from American military pressure, and I’m not even sure whether that’s right or wrong, whether that’s good or bad, whether I’ll help create or resolve chaos with it, whether I’m condemning some Nicaraguans to permanent slavery or saving them from enslavement to the United States. I give this just as a case in point which everybody has got ear of who has been attending to the politicized and generalized but, at the same time, honest statements of social confusion, that have been expressed here on the subject of the imagination of the State and the imagination of the writer. So here we all are sitting with our own panic, or, if not panic, certainly with our own confusion. And those of us who are sensitive to our own minds are aware of that confusion, acknowledge it, and in fact perhaps even make use of it as a ground for both public discourse and private thought, and for poetry, which could perhaps be described as private thought in public space. For what is there to do with that confusion except acknowledge it, and be inquisitive as to its texture—which arises from the texture of our own minds—and so begin to take stock of the elements of the confusion, the contradictions of our own minds? Walt Whitman asked, “Do I contradict myself?” and answered, “Very well, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” John Keats proposed similar notions of the poet when he spoke of Shakespeare, and the characteristic of the great poetic mind to be open to “negative capability,” the capacity to entertain contrary notions without an irritable reaching-out after fact and reason. And the keyword there, I would say, is “irritable.” Certainly one would reach out after fact and reason, but if you reach out irritably, then you become just another dictator. So what is there to do with that confusion, except to acknowledge our vulnerability, which is built into our condition on earth? We’re born in bodies, and that in itself is a vulnerable situation. Mind wanders around in this doll of meat. Certainly there’s no sense of permanent, solid security for us in either our body or speech or mind. So where to go for a ground? Where to establish some Archimedean point to begin, as poet or as citizen or as lover—as someone on earth? In the twentieth century, I think our sophistication in Europe and America has evolved to a point where we are beginning to inspect the mind itself and the texture of mind. As Kerouac said, “Don’t ignore other parts of your mind.” So poetry began to model itself on the nature of mind. At least, this is my interpretation of the history of twentieth century poetry, or my relation to that history, or my working ground or hypothesis for my own writing. And I believe this is so for many poets that I like and read.

In this way, poetry can be made simply by taking those disparate and contradictory elements in the mind, those confusions and discontinuities of consciousness, and notating or assembling them in one order or another which will actually place in the public space the sensation of consciousness or, at any rate, a model of that consciousness—including its discontinuities, contradictions, and its “unborn nature.” Buddhists speak of the “unborn nature” of the mind, and even the universe itself as “unborn”— because you can’t trace a thought to its womb. Nor do we know where a thought rises from, or where it goes. There’s the old poetic image from Japan of the thought vanishing like the imprint of a bird on the sky. And this holds equally true when we are inspecting our field of consciousness, and trying to ground our Self in its “minute particulars,” in what this ordinary mind experiences all the time, in the thoughts that pass through our heads, in the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches and thoughts—of the six senses. So in order “to roll up a sum of the particulars,” as Williams said, many poets came to the conclusion that it might be best to leave out general ideas about experience, but try to describe or reproduce it, simply by making use of the senses, of what we see, primarily, and what we hear— and of the minute particulars of our own ordinary speech too, by making use of the rhythms of our everyday thought forms. And to go for the detail, precisely and clearly presented, of what we see, beginning with small things. So from the first decades of the century, we have a number of axioms based on the practice of the older people who had to make this change, from a more rigid nineteenth-century form of verse, from a diction worn out by over-use, and from a syntax which was not the kind we use when we’re talking to our mothers, but a literary syntax inherited and imitated from other poets. So, like Williams, who said “No ideas but in things,” Pound proposed that the natural object is always the adequate symbol for some impalpable emotion, let us say, or sensation of the vast. The natural object is always the adequate symbol. And later, Buddhists, poetic theoreticians developed this, and said, “Things are symbols of themselves.” In this way, one might make a ground for poetry by beginning to record just what goes on, actually, in your mind—by not trying to write “a poem,” really, but just trying to be somewhat of a scientist or investigator, scanning your own consciousness, noticing things, and then noticing what you noticed. Finally, you might say that this process does simply consist of noticing what you notice, or adding another observer, or an observer-consciousness to the person walking around in your body, so that you observe how you think, and what thoughts rose when—maybe recollecting them, or re-collecting your thought—rather than trying to invent a “fine” thought: re-collecting what thought rose on its own from “the unborn,” because the mind is continuously active, and is also discontinuous, so there’s an endless variety of impression and generalization, language flowing through the head, pictures flashing, somewhat like MTV. The mind and MTV are not that dissimilar, in the sense of discontinuity and jumping from one image to another. And so poetry rose—a class of poetry rose with that structure, jumping from thought to thought. And if we read William Carlos Williams’ Patterson or Ezra Pound’s Cantos, with their ideogrammatic method, we see that it is a question of not following a narrative line, not explaining your explanations, but presenting sensation after sensation—or image after image, or

picture after picture—in precise detail, and juxtaposing them, as they are juxtaposed in the mind. So with Dadaism, Surrealism, and even the naturalistic writing of the Imagists, we arrived at something that looks very complicated, but is actually just really simple-minded, if it’s read that way, as merely a model of how you think. This method of composition provides a way of dealing with almost any situation, accepting the chaos and confusion of mind, and making use of this confusion as the primary material, rather than attempting to resolve it ideologically or “aesthetically,” in the sense of making it neat, or making it a package, or even making it satisfactory—or even making it a poem! It might be important not to write poetry, but simply to write your mind, or write writing. “Write your mind,” is a good short way of saying it. Whitman began the process when he broke up the old form, and actually did write his mind, beginning with, “I celebrate myself and sing myself, for every part of me”—how is the next line?—“celebrate myself and sing myself, for every part of me as good belongs to you.” I.e., we are all the same in the sense of the confusion of mind. And having minds. That sums up my proposal. By presenting an accurate picture of actual mind acting in public, by making a model of his own mind in public, the poet inadvertently and unintentionally serves a public function. The public arena is usually filled with mind disguised, or mind covered over. The language of politics or advertising or war attempts to take all that real stuff and texture of mind, and put them in a can, for packaging, selling, or bombing. So that in displaying his mind and its imaginings, as well as his sensational noticings, in the public arena, the service the poet renders is expressed in the old notion, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” The presentation of actual mind in public then reveals the fakery or falseness of false mind, false language, false imagery—and of all attempts to make up public speech, acts and forms out of things you didn’t really think of, but would like other people to think that you think of. Weblished: 8 December 2006, 11:19 Copyright by Richard Tietjen