We’ve been serializing here on the Allen Ginsberg Project Allen’s 1993 Oslo interview with Audun Engh – see here. It concludes with a reading/performance of two (related) poems – “Why I Meditate” and “Do The Meditation Rock”
Why I Meditate – (which is a sitting practice of meditation)
Why I Meditate –
I sit because the Dadaists screamed on Mirror Street on Spiegelgasse
I sit because the Surrrealists ate angry pillows
I sit because the Imagists (William Carlos Williams and Charles Reznikoff, poets) breathed calmly in Rutherford and Manhattan
I sit because 2400 years
I sit in America because Buddha saw a Corpse in Lumbini
I sit because No because
I sit because the Yippies whooped up Chicago’s teargas skies once
I sit because I was unable to trace the Unborn back to the womb
I sit because it’s easy
I sit because I get angry if I don’t
I sit because they told me to
I sit because I read about it in the Funny Papers
I sit because I had a vision also dropped LSD
I sit because I don’t know what else to do like my friend, poet, Peter Orlovsky
I sit because after Lunacharsky got fired & Stalin gave Zhdanov a special tennis court I became a rootless cosmopolitan
I sit inside the shell of the old Me
I sit for world revolution.
&
I’ll sing a song – “Do The Meditation Rock”
see here for “Do The Meditation Rock”