AG: So there’s a book called Empty Mirror which I loaned to somebody, I forgot who. Somebody here? I loaned it the other day so I don’t have (it).. That might be useful if, let’s see, is Al (sic) here?
Anne Waldman: Al just went out.
AG: Yeah. Empty Mirror Can you get it?
So the effort there was something that I noticed in a lot of younger students – the difficulty they have of turning their minds aside from an idealized notion of the visionary perception or the social revolutionary perception that they’re seeking, turning away from an abstract presentation of that and settling for what’s closest to the nose, settling for what they can actually see in front of them as a subject for poems; actually settling on what they can say without exaggerating, without lying and without being referential, settling on what they can present. And I’ve noticed it in a lot of the student poetry I’m getting now and I’ve gotten all along (and I see a lot of poetry coming, floods of it, floods of visionary, revolutionary, post-Beatnik, post-hippie, post-psychedelic poetry. coming across my desk) and the problem is, almost everywhere, the same problem that I had of using referential language, referring to some other vision out of mind, or something that has been realized but the poet is not presently in that state and violently demanding a breakthrough into a state of universal consciousness, but not presenting any details from the state of universal consciousness.
(“Long Live The Spider’s Web”)
“Seven years’ words wasted/waiting on the spiderweb:/ seven years’ thoughts/harkening the host,/ seven years’ lost/ sentience naming images,/ narrowing down the name/ to nothing,/seven years’:/ fears/ in a web of ancient measure;/the words dead/flies, a crop/ of ghosts,/ seven years’/the spider is dead.”
That was a comment on this whole Gates of Wrath and, further,
“I attempted to concentrate/ the total sun’s rays in/ each poem as through a glass,/but such magnification/ did not set the page on fire.”
So I had to move on. To what?
(Marijuana Notation)
“How sick I am!/ that thought/always comes to me/ with horror./ Is it this strange/ for everybody?/ But such fugitive feelings/have always been/ my metier….”
See, now, of course, here’s a shift of diction and approach of poetry to (something) more realistic. I’m still day-dreaming, still talking about my own thoughts, but at least talking about it in a normal tone of voice that you can understand. – “Is it this strange/for everybody?” – (Of course it was, I knew it. That’s why this line is funny – “Is it this strange/for everybody?/But such fugitive feelings/have always been/my metier…”/
” Baudelaire – yet he had/ great joyful moments/ staring into space,/ looking into the/middle distance,/ contemplating his image/in Eternity./They were his moments/of identity./It is solitude that/produces these thoughts./ It is December/almost, they are singing/Christmas carols/in front of the department/stores down the block on/ Fourteenth Street.”
So that was my big breakthrough, finally. It’s called “Marijuana Notation”. It took a little grass to make me realize that I had been ignoring other parts of my mind. In attempting to magnify the sun’s rays in each poem as through a glass, I’d been ignoring everyday perceptions, or the more familiar perceptions so here from the daydream churning up of the nature of consciousness directly to the Christmas Carol singing. And I remember this poem as being a big deal for me, because it was the first time I actually had a real, literal, physical object from my own world enter into a poem.
to be continued