AG: “Tonite all is well … What a….” – So I was at this point in a out of a bughouse and back home, actually in a very good state in the sense of being aware of the situation and moving toward a more realistic approach to my mind and to poetry, but looking at the worst.
“Tonite all is well … What a/ terrible future. I am twenty-three,/year of the iron birthday,/gate of darkness. I am ill,/I have become physically and/spiritually impotent in my madness this month./I suddenly realized that my head/is severed from my body;/I realized it a few nights ago/by myself,/lying sleepless on the couch.”
At that point there was a certain humor entering in about my own situation, and dealing with it a little bit more … the terrible idea of being so totally freaked out that my head was separated from my body seemed alright as long as I could talk about it sensibly.
In the same room, on the same couch, looking out the window. There’s a poem by (W.B.)Yeats, or a section of essays by Yeats called “The Trembling of the Veil” meaning, I guess, or I interpreted that (as) the trembling of the veil of perception, trembling of the veils of eternity, so I took that title and the sort of homely everyday instance of the trembling of the veil or the change of perception was:
(The Trembling of the Veil)
“Today out of the window/the trees seem like live/organisms on the moon./Each bough extended upward/ covered at the north end/with leaves, like a green/hairy protuberance. I saw/the scarlet-and-pink shoot-tips/of budding leaves wave/delicately in the sunlight,/blown by the breeze,/all the arms of the trees/bending and straining downward/at once when the wind/pushed them.”
What I was doing there was just looking out the window and trying to describe a little piece of actuality with detail, to fix my mind, or to root my mind, ground my mind somewhere in a common place that other people could see. I figured that if I was in eternity of if I was a poet or if I was a spiritual angel or if the mind was open, there wasn’t anything I could do about it except maybe look at something specific and describe that. That if other people could see through my eyes whatever virtue I had would shiver in their brain. In other words, the only way I could actually communicate the sense of eternity that I had, or might have or wanted to have, was through concrete particular detail, grounding my mind. Taking the opposite direction of the apocalyptic light-hunger poetry that I’d been churning up before; taking exactly the opposite direction (and) turning around to face everyday universe, be human. So (I) wrote a series of real simple poems dealing with that, and also looked over all my old writing to see if I had anything in my prose or in my journals that was real, that actually did cover day-to-day perceptions. I found a couple of things that I’d written and put them into lines and sent them on to (William Carlos) Williams and his immediate reaction was “This is it! Do you have many more things like this?”
to be continued