More Q & A from the 1995 Georgia Court reading continues from here
Student (3): How can we have renunciation and a great love of beauty? And does beauty have an ultimate value in renunciation?
AG: Well, renunciation can mean not clinging to thoughts. Not having an irritable insistence on maintaining one thought or another. Letting your thoughts go, taking a friendly attitude toward your mind, observing your thoughts and letting them go. As for the instructions on that would come from Blake, which are the same as the Zen instructions: “He who binds to himself a joy / Does the winged life destroy / He who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s Sunrise”. So, in other words, another way of putting it, is a favorite Blake poem that Bob Dylan asked me about a year ago or so – “I asked a thief to steal me a peach: / He turned up his eyes / I ask’d a lithe lady to lie her down: / Holy and meek she cries / As soon as I had gone / Along came a thief / And ‘twixt earnest and joke / Had a peach from the tree / And without one word spoke / still as a maid / enjoy’d the lady”
So, it’s “twixt earnest and joke.” So, Buddhism says that beauty, your attitude, your beauty is renunciation, “twixt earnest and joke.” Don’t try and cling to it. On the other hand, if you don’t cling to it, it passes like all things that offend you, but then more comes along. As you cling to it, turns ugly and clogs your mind: “I want that girl! That’s the girl I wanted all along! I won’t have anybody but her! I’m going to kill her if she doesn’t love me! I’ll kill myself!”
So, the Buddhist attitude is non-clinging and renunciation but on the other hand it doesn’t mean non-enjoyment and non-appreciation. And so, the Buddhist view is that art is a major mode of meditation. That artwork and appreciation of art is a major way of mind training. It’s different from maybe some of the puritanical Western views of Buddhism (or Marxism for that matter). “I can’t be a great writer until I’m a member of the proletariat”. “I can’t be a great writer unless I’ve been blessed by a vision of Christ”. “I can’t be a great Buddhist writer unless I’ve already attained nirvana”. There is no nirvana, according to the Sutra I was just describing, (The Heart Sutra) “no attainment because no non-attainment,” so you’re free.
You had your hand up?
[Video at this point is available, continuing from the initial video here – see here]
Student (4 ): Yes, you had just (spoken of) … William Carlos Williams and communicated his style.(I was) just wondering when you would get there..
AG: To Williams?
Student (4): ..Yes, and whether you would get there, and how you felt about him and his poetry. And I was thinking particularly in terms of the haiku, a little red wheelbarrow and the plums in the refrigerator. Tell me a little bit more on William Carlos Williams.
AG: Well, everybody has read some William Carlos Williams here? How many have? So, great, welcome to New Jersey! A homeboy! I would say most of modern poetry, not Beat poetry necessarily, but most of modern poetry whether it’s Black Mountain (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson) or San Francisco Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, or Robert Duncan, or myself, or (Gregory) Corso – or “The New York School” –(Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler) – all refer back to William Carlos Williams as a mentor, for us all. So, the question is why? Because Williams had the idea of clamping his mind down on objects. “No ideas but in things”—giving for-instances, so to speak, instead of generalization to these specific for-instances, and he brought everybody down to ground in this. Set us – set an example of it in many ways. One in perception and observation, like “So much depends / upon // the red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens.” – So much of what? So much of his own clarity of perception depends or writing, depends on him able to being able to appreciate that and see it as a new-shining, new-found, new-born object. As if you were high on acid or something. You know, a moment, a mystical experience, in an ordinary moment. As if, ordinary mind concluded highest eternal perceptions. Ordinary mind and eternal perceptions are the same, could be the same, in the same mind; whereas his friend believes it, Zukofsky says, “Nothing is better for being eternal, nor so white as the white that dies of a day.” – [Editorial note – Allen is quoting from Louis Zukofsky’s “A.”]
It’s like pretty Jewish down there -“Nothing is better for being eternal” [Allen affects mock Jewish accent] – “Nothing is better for being eternal, it would do you some good if it’s eternal?” – “Nothing is better for being eternal, nor so white as the white that dies of a day.” – So, it’s again, the similar Buddhist thing, the appreciation of transitoriness, the appreciation of what’s right in front of you now, this is a Zen matter too. So, Williams has that, but it’s also beyond that in language. He appreciated the current language of Rutherford, New Jersey, New Jersey-esque, and he wrote in a New Jersey-esque speech. I remember the first time I visited him, written on his doctor’s prescription pad – “I’ll kick yuh eye.” – Y-U-H. There’s some guy around Rutherford saying that. Then how can I write that down in iambic pentameter? You can’t. You just got to use those intense fragments of spoken idioms, intact as specimens in the poem. You build your poem out of the way you talk really here in New Jersey, and the actual speech of the streets, or the household, or your mother, or your wife, or children. You write the way you talk with a living tongue and that’s also what the Romantics did. Because Wordsworth in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” and, along with Coleridge, was pointing out that, you had to update the diction or the use of words and the way you talk, so it just didn’t sound like a rehash of older poetry but with the intelligent speech of intelligent people right now in the present. It didn’t necessarily just remind you of, recycled old buzzwords from poetry. They had a breakout from what? Pope? more, you know, basically they had a break from rhyming couplet, what the straight jacket was, I guess, around that time. Is that right? ‘[Allen turns to Eric Wurmser]
Eric Wurmser: Yeah …Wordsworth (attempted)…
AG: Yeah, and there were some great innovators that broke. Like Blake, particularly, with the long line, denounced rhyme in the long line and denounced the heavy measure of the rhyming couplet and wrote his books in long, long verse lines. We had to do that in our century too. and Williams really accomplished that. Like, as a pediatrician, he, similarly midwifed the birth of a new language and a new poetic. So, everybody refers back to him and that’s his role. Along with several other poets who are not so well known, who are very great, like Charles Reznikoff and Carl Rakosi, were also members of that same school Activist or Objectivist, and their allies were found before them.
to be continued