Heard Africa sigh
Asia turned over in its sleepy bunk
blood ran down rocks in South America
Heard Central America squeeze its ribs through iron gates
the Middle East rumbled plates & spoons in wartime bomb rubble
Polynesians danced with bacteria
Heard Japonesia eat with chopsticks chewing rice & peapods
Heard Australia rattle song sticks singing in Simpson Desert at the end of the world
New York Dharmadatu, June 16, 1985, 3:33 P.M.
Things I Don’t Know
Dawn, a mastiff howls on the porch across the street behind the For Sale signed tree
Chatter Chirp Chirp Chatter Chirp Chir Chir Chic Chir chance birdie twitters in a maple tree branch, Twirp!
I wake, what bird’s that, what kind of dog moans so?
Is that a maple or an oak, on Mapleton Street? What flowers weeds & ferns, those in the backyard? What car goes by awhoosh? A Pontiac, swash up the street,
A Chevy, Ford, a Pinto, a Grammarian, a 4 wheel drive GM?
What star I saw last night when clouds lifted & Orion’s belt
Glittered gold on blue? or was that amber on azure? As my eye
followed his arrow past the North Star thru the void, was that a tiny galaxy shimmering?
Where’s Sagittarius, which way is the black hole at center of the Spiral Nebula?
Where’s Sahel where a million children starve? Where’s Libya where Wilson of the CIA trained terrorists?
How many times this century’d the Marines land on Nicaragua’s dirty flag?
Who killed Roque Dalton? What’s the size of U.S. national Debt?
& how much interest we pay each year till the Eighties end?
Now the bird’s quiet & the dog bark’s down, what’s differential calculus? How do you fix electric socket wires?
I used to know the names of all the minerals. I do remember Pectolite gave you like asbestos splinters.
How do people overcome panic driving cars? Are bird bones hollow? didn’t I once know the look of grackle & scarlet tanager?
Cirrus or cumulus, what cloud produces thunder, lightning, rain?
What makes electricity in a battery? How does my wind charger friction become electric?
When water pours into hydraulic ram, what makes it squirt uphill when the valve closes in the Pressure Chamber? Is that it? Something like that?
What’re the 12 pix in Conditioned Co-existent Emergence’s Chain?
Blind man, potter, monkey tree, boat world, house with seven windows, what comes next before the man with arrow in his eye?
What about banks? What’s common stock & preferred? What’s a futures?
How do you hang a door, frame a window? Hold a light chainsaw?
How fix a broken leg? Ease a heart attack, deliver a baby? Breathe in the mouth of a man dying at oceanside?
What kind of government ever worked? Who wrote English Choriambics?
This isn’t Trivia (how play that?) this is my life, I can’t remember
the name of the lawyer my fellow student, friends with me in college 40 years ago—
How make a living, if I couldn’t write poetry?
Would I know how to plant peas, tie up tomato stalks?
July 21, 1985
*Buddhist Samatha-Vipassana Sitting Practice of Meditation
Notes
The following notes to the poems in White Shroud originally appeared in Selected Poems 1947–1995. (HarperCollins Publishers, 1996). More exten sive notes to this section can be found online at www.allenginsberg.org.
Homage Vajracarya
850 Ven. Chögyam Trungpa, Vajracarya’s Shambhala Arts included mind training with Archery (Kyudo), Calligraphy, Tea Ceremony, etc.
Why I Meditate
851 MIRROR STREET: Dadaist original Cabaret Voltaire was on Zürich’s Spiegelgasse Strasse.
851 RUTHERFORD: William Carlos Williams. Manhattan: Charles Reznikoff.
851 CHICAGO’S TEARGAS SKIES: 1968 Democratic convention police riot.
851 UNBORN: Buddhist metaphor, universe & consciousness are “unborn,” i.e. not traceable back to any ultimate birthplace, source, cause.
851 ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Aesopean Stalinist word for Jew.
Do the Meditation Rock
863 Buddhist Samatha-Vipassana Sitting Practice of Meditation instructions according to the Ven. Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. See his Meditation in Action (Boston: Shambhala Press, 1991).
863 UNCLE DON: 1930s U.S. radio father-figure tale-teller.
Arguments
885 PARAQUAT: Agricultural poison dust sprayed by U.S. on Sonora, Mexico, cannabis fields.
White Shroud
889 TIVOLI FARM: Catholic Worker. Contemplative rural commune founded 1930s by Dorothy Day, celebrated saint-like bohemian Catholic Pacifist.
890 SPRY OLD LADY: Here several of Berenice Abbott Changing New York Depression era photographs are described, from “buses” to “shoes.”
Reading Bai Juyi
908 After Rewi Alley’s Bai Juyi: 200 Selected Poems (Beijing: New World Press, 1983), p. 303.
909 The Secret of the Golden Lotus and Meditation Cushion of the Flesh, Chinese classic erotic handbooks.
909 JIANG JI: See latter’s text & Gary Snyder’s reply poem 1984.
909 QIN SHI HUANG: Emperor 2nd century BC, burned all Buddhist & Classic books.
COSMOPOLITAN GREETINGS OEMS 1986–1992
“I’m going to try speaking some reckless words,
and I want you to try to listen recklessly.”
Thanks to the hospitable editors, variants of these writings were printed first in: After the Storm; Allen in Vision; Alpha Beat Soup; The Alternative Press; American Poetry Review; Be Released in Los Angeles; Big Scream; Big Sky; Black Box; Bombay Gin; Boulevard; Break the Mirror; Broadway 2; [Brooklyn College] English Majors Newsletter; Brooklyn Review; Casse Le Mirroir; City Lights Review; Collateral Damage; Collected Poems; Core; Cottonwood Commemorative; River City Portfolio 1987; Cover; Culturas; Entretien; Ergo; Esquire; Exit Zero; Exquisite Corps; Fall of America; Fear, Power, God (recording); First Blues; First Line; Flower Thief; Gandhabba; A Garden of Earthly Delight; Gathering of Poets; The Ginsberg Gallimaufry (John Hammond Records); Gown Literary Supplement; Grand Rapids College Review; Harper’s; Holunderground; Howling Mantra; Hum Bom! (broadside); Hydrogen Jukebox (libretto); Inquiring Mind; Journal of the Gulf War; Karel Appel; Recent Work; Long Shot; Lovely Jobly; Man Alive!; Mill Street Forward; Moment; Moorish Science Monitor; Napalm Health Spa; Naropa Institute Summer Writing Program (1991); Nation; National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side; New Age Journal; New Censorship; A New Geography of Poets; New Letters; New Observations; New York Newsday; New York Planet; New York Times; Nigen Kazoku; Nightmares of Reason; Nola Express; La Nouvelle Chute de l’Amerique; Off the Wall; Organica; Paria; Pearl; Peckerwood; Personals Ad (broadside); Poem in the Form of a Snake (broadside); Poets for Life; Portable Lower East Side; Qualità di Tempo; Reality Sandwich; Riverrun; RuhRoh!; Sekai; Semio-text[e]; Shambhala Sun; Sixpack; Steaua; Struga; Sugar, Alcohol & Meat (recording); Sulfur; Supplication for the Rebirth of the Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche (broadside); Talus; Thinker Review (broadside); This Is Important; Threepenny Review; Tikkun; Underground Forest; Vagabond; Vajradhatu Sun; Venue; The Verdict Is In; Village Voice; Vinduet; Visiting Father & Friends (pamphlet); Vylizanej Mozek!; Washington Square News; Wiersze; World; WPFW 89.3 FM Poetry Anthology.
To
Steven Taylor
If music be the food of love, play on.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Author wishes to inscribe grateful thanks to friends who’ve collaborated to type, track, edit, and critique Cosmopolitan Greetings thru a decade:
Harry Smith: Archetype cover design, typeface choice & logo.
Bill Morgan: Bibliographic lucidity.
Mark Ewert: Comix inspiration.
Bob Rosenthal: Holistic project supervision.
&nbs
p; Steve Taylor: Musical guidance, lead sheets.
Regina Pellicano, Jacqueline Gens, Peter Hale, Steven Finbow, Victoria Smart, and Vicki Stanbury: Sympathetic meticulous assembly typescript text.
Andrew Wylie & Sarah Chalfant: Wise deadline protection.
Terry Karten and HarperCollins: Trustful & patient fidelity.
PREFACE
Improvisation in Beijing
I write poetry because the English word Inspiration comes from Latin Spiritus, breath, I want to breathe freely.
I write poetry because Walt Whitman gave world permission to speak with candor.
I write poetry because Walt Whitman opened up poetry’s verse-line for unobstructed breath.
I write poetry because Ezra Pound saw an ivory tower, bet on one wrong horse, gave poets permission to write spoken vernacular idiom.
I write poetry because Pound pointed young Western poets to look at Chinese writing word pictures.
I write poetry because W. C. Williams living in Rutherford wrote New Jerseyesque “I kick yuh eye,” asking, how measure that in iambic pentameter?
I write poetry because my father was poet my mother from Russia spoke Communist, died in a mad house.
I write poetry because young friend Gary Snyder sat to look at his thoughts as part of external phenomenal world just like a 1984 conference table.
I write poetry because I suffer, born to die, kidneystones and high blood pressure, everybody suffers.
I write poetry because I suffer confusion not knowing what other people think.
I write because poetry can reveal my thoughts, cure my paranoia also other people’s paranoia.
I write poetry because my mind wanders subject to sex politics Buddhadharma meditation.
I write poetry to make accurate picture my own mind.
I write poetry because I took Bodhisattva’s Four Vows: Sentient creatures to liberate are numberless in the universe, my own greed anger ignorance to cut thru’s infinite, situations I find myself in are countless as the sky okay, while awakened mind path’s endless.
I write poetry because this morning I woke trembling with fear what could I say in China?
I write poetry because Russian poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin committed suicide, somebody else has to talk.
I write poetry because my father reciting Shelley English poet & Vachel Lindsay American poet out loud gave example—big wind inspiration breath.
I write poetry because writing sexual matters was censored in United States.
I write poetry because millionaires East and West ride Rolls-Royce limousines, poor people don’t have enough money to fix their teeth.
I write poetry because my genes and chromosomes fall in love with young men not young women.
I write poetry because I have no dogmatic responsibility one day to the next.
I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.
I write poetry to talk back to Whitman, young people in ten years, talk to old aunts and uncles still living near Newark, New Jersey.
I write poetry because I listened to black Blues on 1939 radio, Leadbelly and Ma Rainey
I write poetry inspired by youthful cheerful Beatles’ songs grown old.
I write poetry because Chuang-tzu couldn’t tell whether he was butterfly or man, Lao-tzu said water flows downhill, Confucius said honor elders, I wanted to honor Whitman.
I write poetry because overgrazing sheep and cattle Mongolia to U.S. Wild West destroys new grass & erosion creates deserts.
I write poetry wearing animal shoes.
I write poetry “First thought, best thought” always.
I write poetry because no ideas are comprehensible except as manifested in minute particulars: “No ideas but in things.”
I write poetry because the Tibetan Lama guru says, “Things are symbols of themselves.”
I write poetry because newspapers headline a black hole at our galaxy-center, we’re free to notice it.
I write poetry because World War I, World War II, nuclear bomb, and World War III if we want it, I don’t need it.
I write poetry because first poem Howl not meant to be published was prosecuted by the police.
I write poetry because my second long poem Kaddish honored my mother’s parinirvana in a mental hospital.
I write poetry because Hitler killed six million Jews, I’m Jewish.
I write poetry because Moscow said Stalin exiled 20 million Jews and intellectuals to Siberia, 15 million never came back to the Stray Dog Café, St. Petersburg.
I write poetry because I sing when I’m lonesome.
I write poetry because Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
I write poetry because my mind contradicts itself, one minute in New York, next minute the Dinaric Alps.
I write poetry because my head contains 10,000 thoughts.
I write poetry because no reason no because.
I write poetry because it’s the best way to say everything in mind within 6 minutes or a lifetime.
October 21, 1984
PROLOGUE
Visiting Father & Friends
I climbed the hillside to the lady’s house.
There was Gregory, dressed as a velvet ape,
japing and laughing, elegant-handed, tumbling
somersaults and consulting with the hostess,
girls and wives familiar, feeding him like a baby.
He looked healthy, remarkable energy, up all night
talking jewelry, winding his watches, hair over his eyes,
jumping from one apartment to another.
Neal Cassady rosy-faced indifferent and affectionate
entertaining himself in company far from China
back in the USA old 1950s–1980s still kicking
his way thru the city, up Riverside Drive without a car.
He hugged me & turned attention to the night ladies
appearing disappearing in the bar, in apartments
and the street, his continued jackanapes wasting his time
& everyone else’s but mysterious, maybe up to something
good—keep us all from committing more crimes,
political wars, or peace protests angrier than wars’
cannonball noises. He needed a place to sleep.
Then my father appeared, lone forlorn & healthy
still living by himself in an apartment a block up
the hill from Peter’s ancient habitual pad, I hadn’t
noticed where Louis lived these days, somehow obliterated
his home condition from my mind, took it for granted
tho never’d been curious enough to visit—but as I’d no place
to go tonight, & wonder’d why I’d not visited him recently,
I asked could I spend the night & bed down
there with him, his place had bedroom and bath
a giant Jewish residence apartment on Riverside Drive
refugees inhabited, driven away from Europe by Hitler,
where now my father lived—I entered, he showed me his couch
& told me get comfortable, I slept the night, but woke
when he shifted his sleeping pad closer to mine I got up
—he’d slept badly on a green inch-thick dusty
foam rubber plastic mattress I’d thrown out years ago,
poor cold mat upon the concrete cellar warehouse floor—
so that was it! He’d given his bed for my comfort!
No no I said, take back your bed, sleep comfortable
weary you deserve it, amazing you still get around,
I’m sorry I hadn’t visited before, just didn’t know
where you lived, here you are a block upstreet
from Peter, hospitable to me Neal & Gregory &
girlfriends of the night, old sweet Bohemian heart
don’t sleep in the floor like that I’ll take your place
on
the mat & pass the night ok.
I went upstairs, happy to see
he had a place to lay his head for good, and woke in China.
Peter alive, though drinking a problem, Neal was dead
more years than my father Louis no longer
smiling alive, no wonder I’d not visited this place
he’d retired to a decade ago, How good to see him home, and take
his fatherly hospitality for granted among the living
and dead. Now wash my face, dress in my suit
on time for teaching classroom poetry at 8am Beijing,
far round the world away from Louis’ grave in Jersey.
November 16, 1984, 6:52 A.M.
Baoding, P.R.C.
You Don’t Know It
In Russia the tyrant cockroach mustache ate 20 million souls
and you don’t know it, you don’t know it
In Czechoslovakia the police ate the feet of a generation that can’t walk
and you don’t know it, you don’t know it
In Poland police state double agent cancer grew large as Catholic
Church Frankenstein the state itself a Gulag Ship
and you don’t know it, you don’t know it
In Hungary tanks rolled over words of Politician Poets
and you don’t know it
In Yugoslavia underground partisans of the Great Patriotic War
fought off the Great Patriotic Army of USSR
and you don’t know it,
you know Tito but you don’t know it
you say you don’t know it these exiles from East Europe complaining about someday Nicaragua Gulag
’cause you don’t know it was the Writers Union intellectuals of Moscow Vilnius Minsk Leningrad and Tbilisi
saying “Invade Immediately” their Curse on your Revolution
No you don’t know it’s not N.Y. Review of Books it’s bohemian Krakow Prague Budapest Belgrade E. Berlin
Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 75