So we’ve been serializing these past months Allen’s 1976 “Visiting Poetics” Naropa, class with its specific focus on “Visionary Experience”. We began that sequence here – and continued (and concluded) it here. Ever grateful for the initial transcriptions by Randy Roark, who made these and numerous other transcriptions of Naropa tapes.
The chronology and organization of the tapes, however, is not always clear.
As he explains:
“It is not certain that this (next) tape is the final portion of the preceding class. The two tapes are indexed quite differently and this tape is dated and labeled as part of the “Spontaneous Poetics” series, while the first is undated and labeled “Visiting Poetics”.
But there are several reasons for believing this is a continuation and conclusion of the “Visiting Poetics” class and not a portion of a “Spontaneous Poetics” series.
The main reason is textual, as the discussion clearly picks up where the last tape left off. Secondly, there is no tape catalogued as part 1 of a June 15th “Spontaneous Poetics” class and there is no tape catalogued as part 2 of the “Visiting Poetics” class. Furthermore, the dates of Ginsberg’s “Spontaneous Poetics” class would not allow for a class on this date, as the tape is dated 15th and the previous class was on the 14th (a Monday) and the next on the 16th (a Wednesday). Finally, in Ginsberg’s class of the 14th he details how he will continue at their next class, specifically mentioning that it will be on Wednesday. His description also reflects the contents of the tape of the 16th, and not the 15th.”
So – from Wednesday June 16, 1976, “Visiting Poets”, (Visionary Experience), we continue:
Student: Okay, it’s going.
AG: By 1950 I was already sufficiently disillusioned to be hip to the fact that I was stuck on a broken record, mentally. There are couple of self-pitying poems in a way saying goodbye to the whole experience. “An Imaginary Rose in a Book” – by this time I was seeing the experience as an imaginary or hallucinatory experience or beginning to be willing to see it as that. “Oh dry old rose of God,” – “The Sick Rose“, “O Rose Thou Art Sick.”
“Oh dry old rose of God,/that with such bleak perfume/changed images to blood….” – (Changed poetry to reality, changed prophetic mind thoughts to three-dimensional, stuck in the universe.) – “Oh dry old rose of God,/that with such bleak perfume/changed images to blood/and body to a tomb,/what fragrance you have lost,/and are now withered mere/crimson myth of dust/ and recollection sere/ of an unfading garden/whereof the myriad life/ and all that flock in blossom,/ none other met the knife – (Meaning that I just finally had to cut that whole set of thoughts out. [as an aside] Maybe do that later.
By 1951, a poem on my 24th year:
“Now I have become a man/and know no more than mankind can/and groan with nature’s every groan,/transcending child’s blind skeleton/and all childish divinity,/while loomed in consanguinity/the weaving of the shroud goes on./. No two things alike; and yet/first memory dies, then I forget/one carnal thought that made thought grim:/but that has sunk below time’s rim/ and wonder ageing into woe/later dayes more fatal show:/ Time gets thicker, light gets dim./ And I a second Time am blind,/all starlight dimmed out of the mind/that was first candle to the morn,/and candelabra turned to thorn./ All is dream till morn has rayed/the Rose of night back into shade,/ Messiah firmament reborn./Now I cannot go be wild/ or harken back to shape of child/chrystal born into the aire/circled by the harte and bear/and agelesse in a greene arcade,/for he is down in Granite laid,/or standing on a Granite stair./ No return, where thought’s completed;/ let that ghost’s last gaze go cheated:/I may waste my days no more/pining in spirituall warre./Where am I in wilderness?/What creature bore my bones to this?/Here is no Eden: this is my store.”
This is all done in symbolic language, but the whole point is that I was getting grounded again or thinking in terms of becoming grounded again – “Time gets thicker, light gets dim.” – (Just born into my body again). – “(T)he weaving of the shroud goes on.” – ( In other words, faced with an actual death rather than an imaginary, spiritual death). So actually I just gave up about that time, age twenty-five, having gone through a whole cycle of inspiration and dead end (and that probably is a traditional or characteristic cycle that a lot of people go through)
to be continued