Allen Ginsberg’s 1976 Visiting Poetics Naropa talk continues from here
AG: By the time that I was twenty, twenty-one, I was still writing that same kind of verse, except that all of a sudden I had a funny kind of visionary experience, or a psychedelic experience, which completely changed my attitude toward poetry. I was influenced a lot by (William) Blake and heard Blake’s voice in a sort of interesting psychedelic hallucination, without any drugs, in 1948. So I was twenty-two, I guess. So I realized it was possible in a poem to reproduce some body rhythm which, if inserted in other people’s bodies, might catalyze a similar experience, because that’s what happened with me. The particular poems that turned me on in Blake were “The Sun-Flower” (“Ah! Sun-Flower”) and “The Sick Rose”.
“Ah! Sun-flower!, weary of time,/That counts the steps of the Sun:/Seeking after that sweet golden clime/Where the travellers journey is done./ Where the Youth pined away with desire/And the pale Virgin shrouded with snow/:Arise from their graves and aspire,/Where my Sun-Flower wishes to go.”
So, having had a visionary experience out of those, little poems like:
“Ah Rose thou art sick/.The invisible worm,/That flies in the night/In the howling storm:/Has found out thy bed/Of crimson joy:/And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy.”
So my reaction, poetically, to getting turned on totally, mentally, spiritually, by the poems, was to create little mysterious verses similar – “Many seek and never see,/anyone can tell them why./O they weep and O they cry/and never seek until they try/And never try until they … never try until they …” Can somebody check out of the library and get The Gates of Wrath?
“Many seek and never see,/anyone can tell them why./O they weep and O they cry/and never take until they try/and never some until they die/I ask many, they ask me./This is a great mystery.”
I thought I was making a sort of mystical riddle as to the nature of consciousness, but actually there’s no content in it. It’s just sort of like paranoiac reference, like going around staring at people’s eyes and saying, “Many seek and never see.” But I thought that was what poetry was supposed to do, penetrate the skull by some eyestare or some hypnotic rhythm.
“I cannot sleep, I cannot sleep/until a victim be resigned;/a shadow holds me in his keep/I bare the bones that he must find..” (quoting from his 1948 poem in The Gates of Wrath, “The Eye Altering Alters All” ) : “I cannot sleep, I cannot sleep/until a victim be resigned;/a shadow holds me in his keep/I bare the bones that he must find..” – Just same kind of rhyme like “Though like waves breaking it may be/Or like a changed familiar tree,/Or like a stairway to the sea/Where down the blind are driven.” – ( Allen quotes here the last four lines of Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Eros Turannos“)
It’s an echo of that insistent prophetic but very abstract sound rhythm with no specific imagery – no automobiles, no fingernails, no noses. I thought of poetry then as hermetic, in the sense of containing some kind of mystical secretive consciousness which would be referred to by symbols. If you talked about bones or if you talked about light that that would turn people onto the area of consciousness you were talking about. It might even catalyze that consciousness in them. By that consciousness I mean some big open mystical consciousness, like on acid. Though I hadn’t had acid at the time. Thanks.
to be continued