"Mind is shapely, Art is shapely"

[The Sleeping Gypsy (La Bohémienne endormie) (1897) -  by Henri "Douanier" Rousseau - oil on canvas 51" x 79" in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York] 

AG: Yes?

Student: I was wondering if you were (suggesting poetry and meditation) in the same (breath as)  functions of the mind? I was wondering if you are saying that - that poetry is a function of the mind?

AG: Sure..

Student: You expanded on (Jack) Kerouac's...

AG: ...if you write it down.

Student: Can you expand on Kerouac's "If the mind is shapely, the poetry is shapely'? You said…

AG: "Mind is shapely, art is shapely"

Student: Right, that's what I meant.

AG: That's a corollary to "First thought, best thought"

Student: Can you expand on that - "Mind is shapely, art is shapely"?

AG: Well, because nobody understood what I meant by mind. They thought.. I don't know what they thought I meant by mind. Maybe they thought I meant your Oxford degree, rather than Douanier Rousseau, the painter, able to see his own mind or his own visions, or able to have his own original visions clearly manifest to himself and not (be) ashamed of them or scared of them.

"If mind is shapely" means (well, actually, we changed it to "Mind is shapely, art is shapely", originally it was "If the mind is shapely, the art will be shapely" - But Kerouac pointed out that mind is shapely - how could it be anything but?). Original mind is shapely, i.e.,  one thought follows another. What do you want? A different thought to follow that one? - He was also suggesting that there is some sort of inner logic to the sequence of thoughts, which there is, actually, if you follow them in this book [Mexico City Blues], for instance, or any succession of pure spontaneous writing. (I'm not talking about day-dream writing or automatic writing, I'm talking about full conscious writing, allowing all the thoughts that come in the window of the eye and ear to be expressed simultaneously).

On this point I had a conversation with (Chogyam) Trungpa (Rinpoche) about a year ago, as to which comes first, thought or word, and he says, that with certain poets and on certain occasions, thought and word are identical. In other words, the words come identical with the thought-forms. They're the same. There's no difference between thoughts and words (which is why (William) Burroughs method is interesting, because Burroughs' thoughts are not in words, Burroughs' thoughts are pictures. Burroughs' mind is primarily visual picture - phanopoeia - phanopoeic - visual pictures succeeding one another, which is why his writing is so picturesque, so full of pictures, whereas if you compare it to Kerouac, there's a lot more pure sound, assonance, and pure sound and verbal play (in Kerouac) - and, "Starspangled Kingdoms bedecked/ in dewy joint -" [17th Chorus] - that's the first thing -  "Starspangled Kingdoms bedecked/ in dewy joint -" - he was allowing that - And then, his comment, "DON"T IGNORE OTHER PARTS OF YOUR MIND" - like "Starspangled Kingdoms bedecked/ in dewy joint -")

Incidentally, the in-put - there is a lot of Shakespeare(an) sound. And a lot of the book is about his own sound - "(A)ll Picassos/ and Micassos and/Macayos/and/Machados/ and K e r o u a c o' s" (24th Chorus) - there's that Canuck "ack-ack", (the sound Peter (Orlovsky) mentioned before). Kerouac wrote a pure sound poem - [Editorial note - probaby, Allen here is referring to the poem at end of Big Sur] - "..arrac'h--arrache--/Kamarc'h Jevac'h"  - as the quintessence of the French-Canadian mouth. Kerouac  "Kamarc'h Jevac'h"- that sort of funny little "care-oh-ack" - heavy "yack-yack" consonants, with accents on the ends of the  words (which he associated also with bebop - "google-mop" - like long phrasings, ending with an upbeat - "Duh, day-dah-dot, duh, day-dah-dah, be-hoop-be-dope, dee-dope-beep" - from Charlie Parker, or Dizzy Gillespie. So he was seeing a correlation between the natural sound that the blacks were making in their jazz, his own natural Canuck vocal sound, and what was running through the other parts of his mind. 

Does that make sense? Yeah. So that's how he was drawn to this style. Not so much influenced, but drawn to it naturally. That was his natural sound. And he was affirming his natural sound as the fit medium for poetry (as William Carlos Williams was affirming his Rutherfordian tongue as the fit diction, as (Charles) Reznikoff, his second-generation Russian-Jewish… like in the line "the tugs drag their guts…" - what is it? - "greasy smoke'?  - ["..grease coils.."] -  like beetles stepped on"  - remember that phrase? - "like beetles stepped on" - were you here when I was reading Reznikoff? do you remember? - Well, there was that couplet about tug-boats on the East River which ended that they looked "like beetles stepped on" - and that's like Jewish-New York talk - ""like beetles stepped on". So what I'm saying is Reznikoff was affirming his own tongue, Williams, his own Rutherford tongue, and Kerouac his own Lowell, Massachusetts Canuck tongue.

Spontaneous Poetics - 132

Student: I'd like to ask you and Philip Whalen what languages that you read poetry in besides English and in what ways you find it useful?

AG: I read Spanish - (Federico Garcia) Lorca and (Pablo) Neruda, and Saint John of the Cross, and various little odd things in Spanish - and I was influenced a good deal by Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman" - the rhythm and sort of the general attack of it - viejo hermosa Walt Whitman,/he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas,/ni tus hombros de lana gastados pro la luna.." - "Not for one single moment, beautiful  old Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies/your corduroy shoulder, worn by the moon./Your voice like a pillar of ashes,/ancient and beautiful as the mist" - So I got a little Spanish and a lot of French (which I learnt by reading the Louise Varese (translated) New Directions bilingual version of Rimbaud's Season in Hell, while taking French in school. I would recommend that as a great way of getting into French!) - Rimbaud got built into my ear, and then from Rimbaud I went to a little (I had a little) (Charles) Baudelaire that I read in French, and a lot of (Guillaume) Apollinaire that I picked up in French (particularly the poem "Zone", which, since very few of you have read any Apollinaire, you might check out - "Zone" (translated by Roger Shattuck in the New Directions Collected (Selected) Apollinaire.

Philip Whalen: Roger Shattuck did a very interesting book called The Banquet Years...


AG: Yeah

Philip Whalen: ..which nails down the funny period of total fermentation and hoopla that started in with the people like the Douanier Rousseau, and going through Alfred Jarry, and.. I forgot who all else (is) in it.

Student: (Eric) Satie

Philip Whalen: Satie

AG: Yes

Philip Whalen: All sorts of funny people

AG: There was a place called the Bateau-Lavoir (where) Picasso lived and where (he) was visited by Marie Laurencin, who was a painter  - and I guess Apollinaire came through there. Their favorite character was Douanier Rousseau, the "primitive" painter  (you know? the painter of "The Sleeping Gypsy"?) - And so one day they all got together, and all these great literate intelligent Parisian 20th century innovators gave a banquet to Rousseau, naive Rousseau, toasted him, put him at the head of the table, and made him play his violin for them. So it was called "The Banquet Years" after that, I guess.

Philip Whalen: No, no

AG: I think it was from there, wasn't it?

Philip Whalen: No, no there was some..

AG: No?

Philip Whalen: There was some other big political and literary ones.. The greatest account, and supposedly the most infamous account, of that particular banquet is the one that Gertrude Stein wrote up in The Autobiography of Alice B Tolkas, that made everybody mad, everybody in Paris who had anything to do with that place and time were enraged by her account of that particular occasion, and how drunk Marie Laurencin was, and what all else happened, who else got out of hand, and how Frédé  at Lapin Agile brought his trained, but un-house-broken, donkey to the party, and so on.. it's terrible mess..


[Frédé and Lolo] 

AG: That's a good book of gossip.

Philip Whalen: Yeah?

AG: What other good books of gossip are there?




Philip Whalen: Well, The Autobiography of Alice B Tolkas is a marvelous book of gossip about..

Student: (And Everybody's Autobiography)

,

Philip Whalen: Yeah. That's sort of a sequel to it. But it's not quite as lively.

AG: The best (gossip) I ever read was Being Geniuses Together by Robert MacAlmon...

Student: Yeah

AG: ...which has been reprinted, re-edited, and added to, by Kay Boyle was it?

Philip Whalen: I think so.


AG: Being Geniuses Together is actually terrific - because that's the real inside dope on who was screwing who, who ran off with what lesbian's wife. MacAlmon was rich at the time, and was a friend of Hart Crane, and a friend of Eliot and Pound and Hemingway (I think he figures in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as one of the characters), so he really knew everybody and was very intelligent.. and wrote this thick, thick, thick brilliant detailed account...

Philip Whalen: He's the guy that married Bryher..

AG: Yeah he married Hilda Doolittle, H.D., the Imagist..

Philip Whalen: No, no, no , no. He married Hilda's friend Bryher!

AG: No, I (was about to say) he married Hilda Doolittle's girlfriend..

Philip Whalen: Yeah, yeah.

AG: ...who loaned him a lot of money..

Philip Whalen: Hilda was married to that other fellow...Richard Aldington..

AG: That was one of the most influential (books) that I ever read - Being Geniuses Together. That's what determined my particular attitude toward companionship in the Beat Generation.

Student: Who wrote that book?

AG: Robert MacAlmon [sic] - M-A-C-Capital A-L-M-O-N. Capital M-A-C, Capital A-L-M-O-N. It showed all the mistakes they made and all the sort of funny times they had.