Meditation and Poetics - 47 (Alfred Stieglitz)

                                    [Georgia O'Keeffe, Hands, 1918 - Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz] 

AG: (Who here caught Reginald Ray's) presentation on Friday. Can you raise your hands? Raise your hands high. Okay, I won't go  over it again, though I think he gave a very coherent intellectual outline of stages of Buddhist awareness and penetration of mind. If you can, borrow notes or check it out with some classmates.
At this point, I want to (with a little last look back), wrap up the Samatha-Vipassana-Hinayana area that we've been dwelling in so far - the concentration of mind on focused, clear, accurate perception.

Peter (Orlovsky) and I went down to Santa Fe over the weekend, and over the course of that connected with two pioneers in American clarity of mind.  First, we saw Georgia O'Keeffe - went to visit her - she was married to Alfred Stieglitz (and I'd mentioned Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer, whose art scene in New York after the turn of the century was enormously influential on the Imagists and the Objectivists - on (William Carlos) Williams and other poets whose work we've been reading).

On the way I studied a little - a book called The Hieroglyphics of New Speech - Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams - Bram Dijkstra - D-I-J-K-S-T-R-A - which is actually a good historical survey.

One thing I mentioned before but I didn't really get into and I'd like to recap now is that the American modern mind experience after the turn of the century was very similar to whatever growing-up experience we have in introducing ourselves to mindfulness, or meditative state, or aesthetic mindfulness, or poetic mindfulness, in that the American culture had to break away from foreign models, foreign conditioning, and discover its own place, its own air, its own space, its own situ, its own situation. It had to become mindful of its own situation, its own language, its own mind.

And that was, like, the great effort of Stieglitz, particularly in the field of photography. Hitherto most photographers had been trying to imitate painting - imitate misty European painting with little ballet dancers, the paintings retouched, actually, to soften all the lines. Stieglitz, for the first time, said this is a modern machine thing, looking with clear eye, so he wanted photographs that were actually sharp, art photographs that were sharp instead of art photographs that were soft and vague and fuzzy in outline. like 1890's poetry.
So, actually, his big innovation was clarity and precision, just like in poetry, and because of his photographic interest in clarity and precision, Williams used to come around and visit him (because that was what Williams was interested (in)) - clarity and precision of outline of the image. 

So, checking through this book, I ran across a few passages which will give you the historical cultural recapitulation of what we've been discussing in personal phenomenological terms. Dig? In other words, America went through the same changes around the turn of the century. So, regarding Stieglitz's idea of photography (Georgia O'Keefe was married to Stieglitz, so she was one of that original group. I'll get to her painting):
"An unretouched painting is the record of a moment, its image fixed in an instant of time. Stieglitz therefore argued that it is the photographer's role to seize the moment in terms of its most opportune structure. He must select the single image which will represent the object under his scrutiny most effectively. The photographer therefore, more than any other artist, must be perfectly alert to the materials of the visible world. He is entirely dependent on what exists to the eye. He must see before he can create. He must, before all, in the most literal sense of the world, be a seer." - he [Dijskstra] said, and then - this is Stieglitz talking now:
"The moment dictates to me what I must do. I have no theory about what the moment should bring. I simpply react to the moment. I am the moment. The materials of the living moment are the things seen" - "Beauty is the universal seen" - (or, same as his friend, (the poet, Louis) Zukofsky - "Sight is where the eye hits") - Beauty is the universal seen"    
"Very early Stieglitz discovered [Dijskstra again] that a photographer mus not only be capable of seeing sharply and precisely in order to capture the living moment, but he must be unusually selective as well."

So, he moved, as Williams did and others, first to an awareness that he's dealing with a material, visible world (and) that he's got to see it precisely. But to avoid confusion as to what he's looking at, he's got to narrow it down so you see one thing -  one leaf, one rose, or just one scene inter-related.
And it was this selectivity among the sharp, precise images that his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe got to be a specialist in, so that for years she would paint, say, a lily, and for years would paint a cow skull, for years settle, like (the painter Paul) Cezanne, in one area in New Mexico and paint the same mountain over and over….as Cezanne painted Mount Sainte- Victoire over and over again. And also simplifying her image, smoothing everything until it's just that one shape or form that she was trying to bring out to the eye. Most of you are familiar with her work. It's been in Life magazine when you were ten! 

So that was interesting. First, precision, and then the need for some kind of simplification, or reduction, or selection, so that you actually look carefully at one thing. Just like the.. it's a similar process of precision about being here in the material world and then simplifying it down to begin the examination just with the breath. Beginning with a breath, like she began with a skull, or a flower, or the red rock canyon behind her home.

[Audio for the above may be heard here - beginning at the beginning of the tape and continuing to approximately seven minutes in]

Meditation and Poetics - 29 - Reznikoff 1

[Portrait of An Old Woman (1563) - Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525-1569) - oil on panel 22cm x 18cm at the Alta Pinakothek, Munich]

AG: Did I read any (Charles)  Reznikoff yet?

Students: No


[Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976)]

AG: Here. Okay. so on page 14 - "(7) - On Brooklyn Bridge I saw a man drop dead/It meant no more than if he were a sparrow./ Above us rose Manhattan/below, the river spread to meet sea and sky" 
- These are a series of little sketches, mostly the city. He hung around New York City, working as a legal researcher 
- "(9) - The shopgirls leave their work/quietly/ Machines are still, tables and chairs/ darken./ The silent rounds of mice and roaches begins" 
- This being probably 1915 that he wrote this.  So he wasn't interested in poetry, he was interested in mice and roaches. He was interested in what was in front of him. 
This is page 17: 
- "(19) - My work done, I lean on the window-sill/watching the dripping trees./The rain is over, the wet pavement shines,/From the bare twigs/rows of drops like shining buds are hanging"
- That's a very clear picture, almost like a photograph almost, in this case.

Student (I thought of  the early ones (of Ezra Pound's))

AG: Yeah. Now they were friends remember. Yeah. 

Then, poems, Rhythms II (it's his next book, published 1919 - he's getting better and better now)
 - "The winter afternoon darkens/The shoemaker bends close to the shoe/His hammer raps faster./An old woman waits,/rubbing the cold from her hands"
 - So these are almost like haiku. They're a little like Imagist poems. They're just little sketches, little fragmentary sketches of active perception - active language, active perception.

Now , finally, here's where it really gets total. And it's the first.. It's what I think is one of the first perfect… I don't know what you would call this? - Activist poems?, or Imagist poems?, or Mindfulness poems? - "(7) Scrubwoman - One shoulder lower/with unsure step like a bear erect" - (Well, that's a little poetic - "like a bear erect", but we'll buy it), ok - "One shoulder lower/with unsure step like a bear erect/ the smell of the wet black rags that she cleans with about her/ Scratching with four stiff fingers her half-bald head/ smiling" -  It's like a (Pieter) Breugel portrait, actually. But what's interesting here is, of course, you've got the photograph and you've got the actuality. But also the language - "the smell of the wet black rags that she cleans with about her". It's a little awkward there, but it's just the way you'd say it. It's like an old Jewish guy talking - "the smell of the wet black rags that she cleans with about her" - Yes?

Student: ((There was Oriental poetry) in translation (at that time) in 1917 or so?)

AG: Yes. (Ezra) Pound was, at the time, dealing with that

Student: And Reznikoff too?

AG: Yeah. They were all in touch. They were young people, like we are, in touch with each other. They were making movements. They were making big movements, as he would say. In those days they were making big movements, yes - [Allen continues reading Reznikoff] - "(9) - "The Idiot - With green stagnant eyes,/arms and legs/loose ends of string in the wind,/  keep smiling at your father." - It's sort of  like some horrible family insight in there - (18) "The imperious dawn comes/to the clink of milk bottles/and round-shouldered sparrows twittering" - That "round-shouldered sparrows" is terrific, actually. I don't think anybody before had actually been able to describe a sparrow by using.. it's somewhat of a human image - the round-shouldered man - but round-shouldered sparrows? - He noticed they were round-shouldered (and not even (William) Shakespeare noticed that!) - But that's something very definite that you can notice - "Sight is where the eye hits" ( - or strikes) - That's something he saw with his eyeball - he actually saw that it was a round-shouldered sparrow. After a thousand years of people writing about sparrows, this guy finally took a look at one. Okay, so that's the whole point. You take a look at it. 

Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately thirty-nine minutes in and continuing to approximately forty-four minutes in] 

Meditation and Poetics - 27

Student: (What changes did the so-called Imagist poets go through?) 

AG: Well, let’s see. I’m not clear what changes they went through. They apparently went through several changes. That same group of people and friends went through several changes in terminology as they refined their thought - and then there was a lot of literary politics.

Apparently a very interesting poet named Amy Lowell picked up on the idea of Imagism and the ideas of Chinese poetry, and began somewhat vulgarizing it, and formed a school, and declared herself the head of it and I think she made an anthology called Des Imagistes, excluding (Ezra) Pound, perhaps. [editorial note - Allen is a little confused here, Des Imagistes was the Pound-edited anthology of Imagism, Some Imagist Poets was the title of Amy Lowell's anthologies] 

 And so Pound got mad at Amy Lowell and he decided to change the name, perhaps, and say “Activist” – because she wasn’t being precise in her images, actually. He didn’t feel that she understood what was going on, really. He felt that she thought it was all supposed to be, like Chinoiserie, something that looks Chinese - or with funny clipped Chinese-laundry baby-talk (well, no, I’m being sloppy here)

There was an enormous fight between them. She had some money and she had magazines of her own (or she influenced magazines and could get books published), whereas he was poor and he was in England, but he was in touch with much more elegant and intelligent writers, and so I think there was an abandonment of the whole movement called “Imagism” on account of (the fact that) Amy Lowell had invaded it with her big bosom and her perfume and her money and her Boston connections. Something like that, probably.

Also, probably, they'd finally gotten to the notion of active language – not merely sort of passive description, but active language actively presented. They perhaps came to the term “active” for “presentative”.

Student: “…The Metro” poem would (that) be Imagist?

AG: Yeah, I think that was one that was considered… 

Student: What would be an Activist Pound?

AG: I think in the Active Anthology. I’ve forgotten which poems he put (in) but there was one that ended “the shadowy flowers of Orcus/ be with thee" [editorial note - "Remember thee"] - "Be in me as the eternal moods/of the bleak wind.." was the beginning of it. It's got a little Greek title and it's in Personae, I think - "And not as transient things" - "Be in me as the eternal moods/ of the bleak wind, and not/ As transient things are - gaiety of flowers". Then it ended “the shadowy flowers of Orcus/ Remember thee” (Orcus is Hades, actually).

Probably anything in the (19)20’s would be Activist for Pound. I think that, among them, there were probably more precise distinctions and in my mind there aren’t.  What I do generalize it all to become is a sharp focus, mindfulness, a presentation, elimination of inactive phrasing, direct treatment of the object, “no ideas but in things”, concrete particulars, minute particulars, diction of everyday speech or ordinary mind,  things symbols of themselves, natural objects always adequate symbol. I’m afraid I’ve probably generalized all these different historic movements into just one working principle or one attitude.

[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting approximately thirty-two minutes in and ending at approximately thirty-six minutes in] 

Meditation & Poetics - 26

Allen's July 24 1978 Meditation and Poetics class continues…


AG: I was, I think, mentioning (Ezra) Pound's distinction between presentation and reference.  [to Students] Did I do that here with you?  

Students: No

AG: Okay. Pound was saying (that) if you want to present your image do it as directly as possible. You present the details, you present the minute particulars, you don't just refer to them. Like, not "lady" walking down the street", but "middle-aged lady with a large flower-hat and a purple dress" walking down the street. That is, you present her a little bit, you present a little bit of the detail. You don't settle for a total abstraction. You remember what you saw and present it. With the poets I've been working through individually I've gone through this so often that I get confused whether I've done it in class..

But.. so.. (William Carlos) Williams'  "parsley-/ crisped green" is presented. He doesn't say there was "a vegetable" in the kitchen. He says that there was a water-glass filled with "parsley-/ crisped green" on the grooved draining-board. He doesn't say "In the house there was some green vegetables". He actually delineates it. He delineates it in sufficient detail so it gives you a mind's eye picture. So that's presenting.
Reference would be not presenting it but just saying that there was a vegetable in there.Or, "I came down and I saw the vegetables, and then my mind went off to the ballet, and then I came down and saw the vegetables again". So he actually presented the "crisped green" parsley. So that's presentation.

When I first sent my own poems to Williams (a book called Empty Mirror,  or poems from Empty Mirror), he said, "These are good" and "This is it" and "Have you got any more like this?". And then (for) a couple of poems, he said, "However, a couple of these are long. You can't tell the active material from the inert. And it's better to have one active phrase or one active line than pages of inert, inactive material". And by "active", I interpreted him to mean ("(parsley-/) crisped green") - presented.

And I thought that word - "activist" - like The Active Anthology - has to do with that. active language - that is to say, language that actually does present a picture in the mind's eye that's clear enough to see with the mind's eye. 

[Audio for the above can be found here, starting approximately twenty-nine-and-a-quarter minutes  in  and concluding approximately thirty-two minutes in]

Meditation and Poetics - 25

Our serialization of Allen's 1978 Naropa Institute lecture series, Meditation and Poetics continues
with this class from July 24 1978

AG: So, heroic days, the (19)20's and (19)30's, with heroic figures making movements which are based on real philosophic ideas, which were themselves based on new notions of sense perception, sharpening and focusing of sense perception. Oddly enough, in the twentieth-century, there was this breakthrough . Maybe because everything was so confusing, so relative, the Industrial Revolution had gone so far and everything began changing so much that there was no intellectual standard, no God to appeal to anymore, nor any State to appeal to, nor any dignity to appeal to (especially after World War I), no stable social environment to rely on, no family ((the family structure) breaking up with all modern transportation and communication). So finally, people began saying, "What's going on? What is the reference point? What is the standard?" So finally they had to… Especially in America, where everyone had to invent their own culture, especially after (Walt) Whitman. European culture (was) kind of worn out, and there was this new American industrial scene, with no previous history, just stuck there on a new continent, with the original natives killed off and a bunch of European people melted together in a melting pot, with strands of different cultures, but all of them contradictory, like old Jews in fur hats and old Spanish ladies with rosaries and (Greenwich) Village atheists cursing everybody. So what do you have to rely on?  

So what you've got to rely on, finally, is what's close to the nose, some pragmatic William James matter of what-you-can-actually-see-yourself? What can you contact with your eyes, nose, tongue, skin, ear and mind?

So the Imagists' and Objectivists' poetic practice rose out of that chaos, actually, as people began to define their universe through what they could perceive themselves directly,
without recourse to large abstractions that had been handed down before. Particularly, abstractions of God and country. You see, God was exploded, country was exploded, by World War I. God was exploded by World War I or World War II, in a way. Everybody got the idea that there ain't no just God around, it's just a lot of implacable atoms floating in space.  So.. Finally, people, actually, had to make it all up by themselves. And that was (William Carlos) Williams' whole point too - that he had to make up his prosody, his language, his perceptions, his whole poetic world, by himself, with no help, no recourse to any previous tradition. It all had to be done, (be) composed, out of the raw materials of the speech he heard around him and out of the direct perceptions he had with his own senses.


[William James (1842-1910)]

Now this fitted in with earlier American philosophies, like William James' pragmatic studies. It was actually a kind of pragmatism - an abandonment of everything known and a testing of senses and direct contact. It got to be that later Charles Olson would theorize that history is just what we know, it's our gossip. The only real true history is like Herodotus', or our own gossip. (Herodotus wrote a lot of gossip down, but at least it was what he heard directly from other people not what he read in books. So it was all a human universe, with direct personal contact, and had a kind of emotional reality, and probably (just) as much accuracy as any scholarly text)


[Charles Olson (1910-1970)]

So Olson was seeing that history is, well, our own behavior, in a sense, our own behavior and what we know of our friends' behavior. And, in a way, you get that in Frank O'Hara too, in his poetry - history (or poetic history) is just what he had for lunch (it's the only thing you can know, and it's the most romantic thing - the most important thing in the world is what did you have for lunch, because, at least that was real, it wasn't like the.. (President, Jimmy) Carter refusing to go on with the reduction of atomic armaments on account of he's mad at what the Russians are doing to [Soviet dissident] Alexei Ginzburg (a piece of jerry-built logic - that's all irrational anyway - that particular newspaper history is completely empty and irrational). So what Frank O'Hara had for lunch is, actually, a solid fact that you could rely on, as a piece of history.

So, Imagists, the school of "Imagism" and the school of "Objectivism" (and then) "Activism" - that phrase. You understand what "objective" means here - it means the thoughts in your head, too, are objects - so, "objective". - "Activism" - that's an interesting word for poetry too.

[Audio for the above can be found here, starting approximately  twenty-three-and-three-quarter minutes in  and concluding approximately twenty-nine-and-a-quarter minutes in]

Meditation and Poetics - 24

AG: So there was the first Imagist school which said, "Sight is where the eye strikes", "Direct treatment of the object" (that's from (Ezra) Pound's little easy, "How To Read" - "Direct treatment of the object, with as few fuzzy words as possible. As we concentrate on the breath, or as we're one with the breath, so one is absorbed in clearly seeing a situation, a person, a look, a broken flower in a vase - or "so much depends/ upon/ a red wheel/ barrow/ glazed with rain/ water /beside the white/chickens" - you know that? (William Carlos) Williams? - "so much depends/ upon/ a red wheel/ barrow/ glazed with rain/ water /beside the white/chickens" - So much. So much of one's own consciousness depends on seeing it clearly, or rendering it clearly, or being there with it precisely in some way that it's clear. It's not just a vague thought but you actually see it and not try and day-dream up another universe,

So that was sort of..sort of..Imagism. Then Objectivism was the next literary school, which said you don't just have to look at wheelbarrows, you can also include your thoughts because your thoughts are objects just like wheelbarrows. So that was Objectivism.  Does that make sense?

Student:  Yeah.

AG: Yeah?

Student: "The Red Wheelbarrow", that's more nebulous than Imagism, because it's "so much depends upon.." - so that's being included as a personal thing, whereas  Pound's thing..

AG: "The apparition of these…"
Student: "..faces in the crowd"
AG: "Petals on a wet, black bough". Okay, Pound was trying to be really totally objective, Imagistic. Totally objective. So his sample great Imagist poem was, as quoted, can you quote it again?
Student: (How does it begin?)
AG: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd.." 
Student: "White petals on a…"
AG: "Petals on a wet.."
Student: ("..wet..")
AG: "..black bough". It's in all the anthologies. It's the period piece, sort of, (like Williams' "Red Wheelbarrow')

But you're right, Williams included a thought - So much depends upon - a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens. So that's what made it an Objectivist poem, because he included his thought. But, there again, the point I'm trying to make is that thoughts, since you can wake up from them, drop them, separate yourself from them and observe them, thoughts themselves, then, can be treated as objects, just like wheelbarrows and trees, right? - Does that all make some sense? Is there anybody who has some practical objection? 
Okay, well, it's not very precise really. It's what they were saying in 1923 or (19)30 or (19)40..actually, what were the years of the Objectivists? That would be (the) (19)30'

So Louis Zukofsky put together what he called an Objectivist anthology (Pound had put together, in 1923, an Activist  (Active) anthology, I believe). I don't know if any of those books are available [here in Boulder, Colorado]. They might be in the University of Colorado Library, and they're really, historically, interesting. If you go back, you'll see what those active groups were doing and how they got together and it'll give you some insight into what's going on now when groups of poets get together to form a school or make an anthology or make a magazine. They're sort of modern twentieth-century standards, high standards, for that kind of activity, because they actually sharpened perception among a group of poets and were like a sharp axe which went into the public head. (They) actually did make changes in perception in the larger social community. So there's the Activist Anthology by Pound and (an) Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine edited by Louis Zukofsky. Some of this is recapitulated in a recent anthology by Jerome Rothenberg. Does anybody know the name of it? Anybody?

Student: Versions of the Sacred?
AG: No, no
Student: Technicians of the Sacred?
AG: Technicians of the Sacred  is..
Student: Versions of…
AG: No, [pointing to Student] - what was it you had?
Student: America- A Prophecy
AG: No, there's another odd little book. I think Rothenberg did it. I think it's in our library here. Do you know, Sam? [points to Student, Sam Kashner] - It's sort of, like, an anthology of (19)20's and (19)30's
Student (Sam Kashner): I think it's Revolution of the Word
AG: Right. Is that Rothenberg? - an anthology called Revolution of the World -  That was what? - the phrase used by Eugene Jolas, who edited Transition magazine, which was the big magazine, publishing a lot of (T.S.) Eliot, a lot of Pound, James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (at that time known as "Work in Progress") 

[Audio for the above can be found here, starting at approximately eighteen-and-a-half minutes in, and concluding at approximately twenty-three-and-three-quarter minutes in]

   

Meditation and Poetics - 23

["I Saw The Fgure 5 in Gold" - Charles Demuth, 1928 (after the poem by William Carlos Williams) - oil, graphite, ink and gold leaf on paperboard, 35 1/2 x 30 ins - included in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]  

Imagism. So. In pursuit of similar focus and concentration and presence and prescience and perception and awareness that we've been discussing the last three months here, there was a similar breakthrough of awareness around the turn of the century, connected with the minds of the Dadaists and the Futurists, early spiritual poetic schools, pre-World War I, the Futurists and the Dadaists during World War I. Dada-ists. 

(Ezra) Pound and Wyndham Lewis, another writer, and various friends in London before World War I, got  together hearing the winds of the Futurist Manifestos. (The) Russia (poets, Vladimir) Mayakovsky and (Serge) Esenin were involved in (the) Futurist poetry movement (created by the Italian poet, Filippo Marinetti. There were tendencies in Germany. Wyndham Lewis in London.

It was a perception of a modern mechanical electronic space-age apocalypse, somewhat as we have now - the twentieth-century and so they saw themselves as Futurists, for the first time having to admit machinery into poetry. So the music began to include machinery (like Edgar Varese begun putting sirens and foghorns in his music). Concrete music began arriving in people's ears - concrete poetry as well, (that is to say, pure sound, poetry as pure sound, as letters)  - "priimiitittiii tisch/tesch/ priimiitittiii tesch/ tusch/ priimiititiii tischa/tescho/priimiitittiii tescho/tuschi/ priimiitittiii/ priimiitittiii/ priimiitittiii too/ priimiitittiii taa/ priimiitittiii too/priimiitittiii/taa/ priimiitittiii toota…" - being (Kurt) Schwitters, a little after World War I probably. "Priimiitittiii"- a Dada work, sound poetry, letterism (having some relation to mantra, actually. Tristan Tzara, who was involved in Dadaism, referred in his Dada Manifestos to Buddhist mantra). Antonin Artaud, in the (19)20's, who was one of the Surrealist heroes wrote a notorious Letter to the Dalai Lama (and another one to the Pope) demanding they do their duty immediately to the twentieth-century and save the world, (actually, Artaud, calling the Pope a dog, and asking for the Dalai Lama to come out and teach (as he's doing now, so to speak, symbolically, here [Naropa]) 

So there was a break-up of mind. (Cubism - as you know of - people seeing things six different ways at once), a break-up into a relative mind, subjective mind being discovered. (The) realization that objectivity was subjective anyway, since, as (Albert) Einstein said, the measuring instrument determines the shape of the universe. Your eyeball determines that everything is watery circles., mandalas. With the discovery of that kind of relativity as a twentieth-century measuring point, or as realizing there is no objective external world (and) there is only our eyeballs (and) our senses which shape the world, and with theories of indeterminancy that later developed that if you stop a wave to observe it, it isn't a wave anymore. So, finally, when you get down to the bottom, everything is indeterminate. You can't fix it. Or observation impedes function, in that sense, no objectivity - everything becomes subjective again.

But if you observe subjective facts, like we're observing our minds, the thoughts in our head are as objective as the furniture outside. Those are parts. In other words, our thoughts are objects. Subject is object. Self is object. Self itself is object. Subjectivity is objectivity because that's all you know, and if that's all you know, then it's objective. What else do you want? If you can't know more than what you know then what else can (you know)? You can't know any more than what you know, so what you know is what you know and that's totally objective. And anybody who pretends to be objective is pretending to be objective.

I think that point is basically clear - that all we know is subjective. All we know is what we know and that's subjective. You might be able to check it out externally and get some kind of correlation with the external world but it's still pretty much a rule-of-thumb process. Nobody really knows anything but what they know directly and what you know directly is the only thing you can really know, what you can taste, smell, touch, what you know with your senses.

In a certain sense, the only thing that we really know is our own home territory and our own family and our own selves and our own noses and everything else is television and newspaper abstraction or bookish abstraction, generalization. The only thing we can know is like a farmer - what's close to the nose - and know it in the sense that you know - it looks like rain, or, (if you) put a seed in the ground, it'll grow up - or (it) won't. So with that, you can know your own thoughts, but, thereby, if you know them like objects and are not lost in them..

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at approximately ten minutes in and concluding at approximately eighteen-and-a-quarter minutes in] 

Meditation and Poetics - 18 (William Carlos Williams and Vipassana)

[Two Kittens in Silhouette -  a snapshot circa 1926,  by, presumably, William Carlos Williams (included in his papers at the Yale Collection of American Literature Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library]


AG:  The next stage, classically, in Buddhist thought, in Buddhist structure, is Vipassina.  Does everybody know what that is?  From Samatha to Vipassina.  Raise your hand if you do. Raise them.  Come on.  If you don't, raise your hand.  Okay.  So the majority don't know that Samatha-Vipassana philosophy distinction, which is like a great subtle, very interesting shot.

Vipassina means insight. Samatha means quietening. Vipassana means insight. So what's the relation? Well, the whole point is you shut up, you're not pushing, you're not trying to make up a poem, you're not trying to make up a universe. You're open, attentive, awake, drifting off occasionally and then coming back into this space, because the breath is leading you out into the space. So, after sitting for some time, or after paying attention for some time, pretty soon the noise of the traffic would begin to present itself in all its empty fury - the sounds (I was beginning to get into this last time), sounds would begin to present themselves with a clarity and sharpness of their own nature. Since you wouldn't be trying to interpret the sounds but they would simply be rising, flowering and disappearing, they would have that quality of completeness. Because if you're not trying to complete the sound by interpreting it or figuring out what it means particularly, beyond what it represents, it has a funny kind of roundness and sharpness.

That quality is called, in Buddhist terminology, the "unborn" quality. "Unborn" in that you're not trying to trace its roots. It's just there, like a flower in the air. So, in that sense, the whole universe is unborn. That… It isn't that the universe is called "unborn", not because it's unborn. It's just that if you tried to figure out where it got born from, you'd be like a ten-year-old kid walking down the block, saying, "Well, now God created it,, but who created God? And who created God before God created God? Or, if there was no God, then it must have been the first atom. Well, but who created the first atom? the first wave that went all the way back down?". You'd never get to the end of it. So you finally wind up being in the middle of something which, in the twentieth-century they called "Existential". It was just hanging there, just hanging there.  

So that quality of "hanging there" with no qualifications, no explanations, no ancestry, no root to trace, no way of tracing it back, is a quality which is poetically called the unborn quality of sounds of the universe, of sights, and of thought forms, as well.  Thought forms are referred to sometimes as "unborn" because you couldn't figure out where (they) came from. Even if you were a microbiologist looking through a Freudian eyeball you still would wind up with waves somewhere at the bottom, with indeterminate waves.  The unborn. 
So, actually, to a certain extent, the quality of unborn, fresh, completely clear presence has always been a quality of poetic imagery. If you realize that it's unborn it's a lot easier to arrive at than if you think you can make it up by fucking your mind with words over and over  to synthesize to. Once you realize that it's a magical operation that just appears in the air, or appears in your mind in terms of phrasing - like turning on the water (tap) to freshen the water, turning on the spigot and waiting for the water to freshen, is a line of (William Carlos) Williams. Where does the word "freshen" come from? It's a very accurate word. It's another poem (that) I'll get to.

So, from emptying, and not grabbing to thoughts and impressions, many rise, unobstructed, disappear unobstructedly, maybe some gap in between them and then another thought rises. Then, maybe, in between the gaps, where there's no particular thought being pushed, you might hearm see, smell, and taste, and think, more sharply. Your sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, might become clearer to the moment, or (you'll) get a profile of it, you get a profile of mental activities, and you're constant waking up from these unborn thoughts. And as you wake up.. you'll remember.Unlike a dream, where you go into the dream and you go from room to room in the dream and it takes hours, and when you wake up all you remember is you said goodbyeto the dragon but forgot what was going on in Turkey in the previous scene or where you were in China before that, or how it started in childhood - All in one dream. Because you didn't wake up in the different scenes. You could only remember the tail-end of the dream. So maybe you go through fantasy - sexual fantasies, say - go through twenty-five people before you realize you're in the middle of a sexual fantasy but you can only remember the last one. So if you're constantly waking up from your thought forms then you have, actually, more access to what it was you were thinking. So the mindfulness cultivated then, is a mindfulness of what your thought forms were, as well as some mindfulness of the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches  outside you. Your five senses plus the mind become somewhat clarified if you shut up and observe. So all this is just saying, "Shut up, listen, and observe".

The Vipassana part, the inside part, comes when you've sunk deep enough into shut-up silence that you hear things sharply outside. So the great exponent of Vipassana (if you call it that - I'm putting a labl on it now - of American Vipassana, or insight detail accuracy) is William Carlos Williams (and his brother Imagist Objectivist poet, Charles Reznikoff.   

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning approximately thirty-one and a half minutes in and continuing until approximately thirty-eight-and-a-half minutes in  

Carl Rakosi

[Carl Rakosi (1903-2004)] - Photograph by Gloria Graham]

Two introductions by Allen Ginsberg and one by Anselm Hollo to readings by Carl Rakosi (who shares the same birthday as the compiler of these notes) and who lived to be a spry one hundred. He would have been one hundred-and-eleven today!

Allen Ginsberg's Introduction to Carl Rakosi's reading at Naropa on June 30, 1987 (with David Cope) comes first

(the entire reading can be listened to, in two parts - here - and here) 

AG: Carl Rakosi was born in Berlin in 1903. He was, for those of you who don’t know, a practicing psychologist, a psychotherapist and social worker for many many years, went through a long radical period as a Marxist, allied with a group of other poets who in the late (19)20’s, or early (19)30’s actually, were called (the) Objectivist Group, among them George Oppen, who recently died. (William Carlos) Williams as an elder was part of that lineage, Louis Zukofsky, a person who was very much interested in quantitative measure and syllable sound. When I was interested in open-form American-style verse in 1950 to (19)53, occasionally seeing William Carlos Williams, there was not much of a body of this kind of direct contact with the outer world, some basic image from which the poet took off, that you could follow, and that was simple (a little like David Cope’s) . There was.. It was very rare to find work that wasn’t just poetry-poetry, following (T.S.) Eliot or Wallace Stevens (great as they were)/ It didn’t give an example of what was plain simple American talk and American sight. So Williams recommended Carl Rakosi among others and.. as well as another poet you may not have read, Marsden Hartley , for local place, particular detail, and finding your own actual, personal family voice. And as I’ve been reading some (of) Carl Rakosi’s Collected Poems, which were published  just a year ago, I think, by the National Poetry Foundation in Orono, I’m amazed, over and over again, at the way he gets at his own talk , and is able to.. he knows a good thing when he sees it (or hears it), and you know it too, that it’s genuine, someone genuinely talking, not just somebody writing poetry but somebody actually talking, clearly, who’s got the ironic wit to actually zero-in on his own sound, (and common sound, and American sound at the same time) with a fine mind, and, at his age, a tremendous amount of experience . So since this Kerouac School has some Zen flavor to it, and Buddhist  flavor, and since, inadvertently, whether he likes it or not, Carl Rakosi is a kind of national-treasure Zen master, for being.. (for) paying attention to particulars, it’s a really happy occasion for him to read here, again (this is his second visit to Naropa and third to Boulder) ,and I’m pleased to see him read with David Cope who has some of the same personal humane clarity of American place

CR: Well thank you Allen for promoting me to Zen Master!

And then, six years later, 1993, another Naropa reading, this time, with Bobbie Louise Hawkins 
 (audio, mistakenly identifying the additional participation of Michael Ondaatje, here)

AG: The original program at Naropa Institute’s School of Poetics was  to combine the wisdoms of the East and West in the forms of contemplative or meditative Tibetan-style spontaneous crazy wisdom and Western common-sense - Yankee spontaneous crazy wisdom, also. And in the lineage of the Western clear intelligence, there were these schools that descended from (Walt) Whitman through (Ezra) Pound to William Carlos Williams and the Imagists and Objectivists, and one of the great practitioners of the .. what was called, superficially, the School of Objectivism, Carl Rakosi, is now middle-aged (sic) and willing to address us. It’s a repeat visit to Naropa (he’s been here before), and in some respects, he’s the senior American poet, or elder statesman in American poetry now [1993]. So his work is available (as an elder statesman’s should be - at least it’s available – but by the rare National Poetry Foundation up in Maine, Orono – Collected Prose, Collected Poems, and, recently-issued and just presented to the library Carl Rakosi – Man and Poet, a kind of festschrift, or collection of essays and examinations of his work and anecdotes]. So, young, calm, spry voice, spry figure, Carl Rakosi.

[Carl Rakosi  "listening to music" - Photograph by Olivier Brossard]

Anselm Hollo introduces him, five years later: "The word "history" is one US-American culture has trouble with. It is commonly understood as something that is over and done with, as in the expression, "You're history!" - or the title of a recent vogue-ish volume, The End of History, but in a truer, more sophisticated sense, history and her-story do go on, and we go on it in, with all our various narratives. On the great narrative ferris-wheel of US-American poetry, Carl Rakosi rides in an absolutely unique gondola. In the third and fourth decade of this century, Carl was already, in Andrew Crozier's words, "connected with the most resolutely intelligent tendency in American poetry" and occupied, (again quoting Andrew (Crozier)),"center-stage in the effort to site Modernism in America itself". Despite all the talk of post-this and post-that, the Modernism of Carl Rakosi and his fellow Objectivists is a project that is still continuing, both in his work, and in the work of many younger poets and artists of all kinds, despite the remarkable resistance that large tracts 
of even the more or less sentient population of this land, have been, (and still are), putting up against all its forms. (To concretize that a bit - just take a look at what passes for public  sculpture on Boulder's Pearl Street!) - Carl Rakosi's Collected Poems and Collected Prose were published in the (19)80's by the National Poetry Foundation. In 1995 Sun and Moon brought out Poems 1923-1941, which won the PEN award that year. His most recent book is The Earth Suite from Etruscan Books in England (1997), and Etruscan will also  publish his next collection, The Old Poet's Tale. Carl Rakosi has received three NEA awards, a lifetime achievement award from the National Poetry Aassociation, and an award from the Fund For Poetry for his "contributions to contemporary poetry". He lives [this is 1998] in San Francisco, and we are delighted to have him back here as absolutely contemporary as ever.

Kimberly Bird's long oral history interview, begun in 2002, for the University of California Regional Oral History Office is a remarkable thing and can be accessed  here 

Here's a brief video-clip from it, Rakosi recollecting: 

Here's his 99th Birthday celebration (including audio from a reading) 2002 at the Kelly Writer's House 

& here's Rakosi's PennSounds page

More Rakosi reading, this, much earlier (a reading, and an interview with Charles Amerkhanian) from his KPFA show, Ode To Gravity, 1971



Here's a 1999 conversation with Steve Dickison

Here's Tom Devaney's interview, recorded in 2001

Here's some further brief excerpts from (earlier) interviews

His  essay, "A Note on Music and the Musical", and several other related materials are available here 

Literary critic Marjorie Perloff discusses his achievement - here  -