Transcription of Allen Ginsberg’s 1995 lecture/reading at Georgian Court University, Lakewood, New Jersey, (on English Romantic poetry) continuing from here
AG: Gregory Corso, as a poet, was very much involved with the inspiration of Shelley.
I think that’s another interesting word – “inspiration”. You can inspire and you expire, (breathing, coming from spiritus again), from breathing. So poetic inspiration is a state of unobstructed breath, like when the body is like a hollow reed, so to speak. If anybody of you have ever seen photographs of a very famous Indian saint, Ramakrishna, a 19th century Indian holy man. There’s a very famous photograph of him in, supposedly, in a state of ecstasy, where he’s..
. You can tell that his body is full of air. It’s like a hollow tube of air and it’s unobstructed breath. So, in a state of inspiration, you could say. Poetic inspiration means more or less that physiological state of unobstructed breath, where the breath is completely clear and the thoughts flow spontaneously and almost clairvoyantly. It’s not a transcendental excitement so much as it is a physical state of total relaxation and total clear unobstructed breath, (as distinct from a more neurotic, you know, holding yourself in). It’s more opening out to the phenomenal world (rather than sheltering and protecting yourself). So it means a certain amount of vulnerability, but at the same time the kingly or imperial attitude of proclamation, like a king giving a proclamation to his subject or to the phenomenal world, or the poet or bard trumpeting his thought out into the outer.. outside of his subjective realm, or revealing his subjective realm to the space which encompasses everybody’s consciousness.
So, since the.. I thought that would be an interesting thing to begin with since you’re into the Romantic, the study is Romantic. Usually, “romantic” is taking to mean “dreamy”, or neurotically fantastical, rather than totally present, totally in your own body, totally at one with your own skin and body and breathing. And at its best romantic can be total presence, total prescience, presence and awareness of the space that you’re in and the vastness of the space. So probably the key is that this sense of being awake, completely awake, rather than be taking off, and as some.. as one awake, aware of the space around, – (including the fact that there is plenty of space down here to sit!) – So, observant of what’s going on in the phenomenal world around you rather than daydreaming and escaping it, and not only aware of the present space but of the surrounding space or the panoramic awareness, that we’re in a room, somewhat artificially lit, but above us is a sky, Lakewood area in New Jersey, and we’re on a planet in the solar system at the edge of a spiral nebula in an infinitely vast space.
And that consciousness of vast-ation, or panoramic awareness, is probably characteristic of the romantic ecstasy that you’ll find in some of Shelley, and some of Wordsworth, like his sonnet on the Westminster Bridge, which might, since it is such a good example of that sense of panoramic awareness, might pick up on that. [To student] Could you look that up and let me know – Wordsworth’s sonnet on Westminster, (lines) “Composed on Westminster Bridge” is the title. Check that out maybe, make use of that as a specimen. You’ve done.. have you done that in the Wordsworth studies? But it would be interesting to look at from this angle of presence and awareness. [to Students] (Has) somebody got it there? Somebody got a copy of the book that… pardon me.
So, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.” So, it’s located in time.
My contention, in a way, is that what you get a glimpse from in this poem is a glimpse of vast space. “Earth has not..” Westminster Bridge is in the middle of London, you know, from Westminster to…
[At approximately twenty-two-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-three-and-a-half minutes in, Allen reads Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3rd, 1802” in its entirety]
So, what you get is the panorama of the “rooftops, ships, towers, domes, theaters, temples lie/ Open onto the fields into the sky”, and all of a sudden, the gaze lifts and you have the entire… the lower part of the visual panorama. You have the “ships, towers, domes.. temples”, and all of a sudden in the.. imagine the third.. in your mind’s eye, you get the blinds open onto the sky so you get this vast thing which is much vaster than London, and so you get this little glimpse of panoramic awareness, a little bit like a Chinese scroll landscape in a sense. So, if you look at a lot of the specimens of, records of, some romantic or ecstatic or aesthetic or mystical experience as expressed in the Romantics, you might find some reference to some sense of oceanic vastness, or panoramic awareness, or sudden wakening in the depths of space and the depths of the cosmos and realizing the vast vastness. And so, as a poetic practice, for those of you who are interested in writing poetry, or improving your mind, one very interesting thing to do is several times a day empty your mind into the sky. Literally stop where you are, stop your mechanical thinking of, you know, “I got a parking ticket”, or “I got to get class”, and just, like, look into the sky with no particular purpose except, oh well let us say dissolving your thought in empty space, in the blue empty space or cloudy empty space. It’s as good as getting high on acid! I think that’s all you do when you get high on acid is really your mind is dissolving into space, but you can do it (for) free without the need of cops on your shoulder, the Moral Majority saying you’re not supposed to have mystical visions, or something!
So, if you get to Kerouac in his writing, from his first book The Town and City on, you’ll see that kind of panoramic awareness glimpse through over and over again. You’ll be in the middle of a, maybe in the middle of a description of a football field and suddenly as if the camera will pan back and from the detail, you’ll suddenly see the entire football field and you’ll see the high school around it and the city streets around it and then the trees and the rest of the cityscape and then the sky. In its verbal description of the scene beginning with a detail within the scene or if you look at paintings by Bruegel or some of the Rembrandt landscapes, you also get that sense of panoramic awareness or vastness of everything going on human, underneath. There is even more of that sky. So, I’m just thinking this as I came in, as being maybe the characteristic of Romantic poetry. Some sense of you know, cosmic, cosmos, but in a very literal way, a visual glimpse of cosmos, a visual glimpse of immensity. We get that in Hart Crane, which I know is [turns to Eric Wurmser (teacher)] one of your favorite poets, particularly in his poem “The Bridge.” You get it a lot in Burroughs. And then in my own poetry I try to reproduce it (you can get it in a one line even). The Japanese haiku that can give you that sense. A very famous one “Oh ant / climb up Mount Fuji / but slowly slowly!”[Allen is quoting from Issa here]– So, you have the vast slope of Fuji and a little tiny ant. You suddenly get some sense of space. Or, “A wild sea / And stretching out toward the Isle of Sado / the Milky Way.” [Allen is quoting from Basho] – So you got, you know, The Great Wave, the Japanese painting with a great wave, with a boat in “a wild sea”, then, you know, the Isle of Sado is ahead, but then stretching out from the Isle of Sado, the Milky Way. Suddenly the glimpse lifts, and you got the whole Milky Way, the entire heavens above your head. So, in one line, as in a haiku, you can get that space glimpse.
Of my own attempt to imitate that I had some haiku in a recent book, [“221 Syllables at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center” in “White Shroud“] but I called them “American Sentences.” (The haiku got to be a corny you know – “Sitting in front of a microphone/ Smelling the last Hitler saliva/.. I think…” – yeah..no, no …) – [Allen looks for some of his haiku] – “In the half-light of dawn…” – (this is an imitation of the wild sea stretching out to the Isle of Sado of the Milky Way) – “In the half-light of dawn a few birds warble under the Pleiades.” – “In the half-light of dawn a few birds warble under the Pleiades.” – So, you have the horizon, birds in the trees, then suddenly “under the Pleiades”.
Or, in another sense the trans-shifting of time – “Caught shoplifting ran out of the department store at sunrise and woke up.” – Here the space is not the space of sky, but the spaces between dream and waking, a sudden shift, so that sudden expansion from the claustrophobia of “caught shoplifting”. Then, there’s a transition they “ran out of the department store”. Still, you have the pursued criminal in a claustrophobic dream. “At sunrise”- well that opens it a little and “woke up”- then, it opens it completely, opens the mind space completely.
to be continued