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Allen Ginsberg
(1926-1997)
Haiku
221 Syllables at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center
Allen
Ginsberg Death Notes
by Andrew Schelling
The
Prajna Paramita Sutra
as translated by Allen Ginsberg
Haiku
objective images written down outside mind
the result is inevitable mind sensation
of relations.
Never try to write of relations themselves just the images
which are all that can be written down on the subject.
- Allen Ginsberg
Allen
Ginsberg
Mostly
Sitting Haiku
1st ed. (Xtras, no. 6) Paterson, N.J.: From Here Press, 1978.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Allen
Ginsberg
White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985
Harper and Row,
1986.
221
Syllables at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center
[13
Haiku on p. 41.]
Headless husk legs wrapped round a grass spear, an old bee trembles in sunlight.
Since yesterday noon two Brown-eyed Susans stand before the outhouse door.
Tail turned to red sunset high on a spruce crown one lone chickadee tweets.
Moonless thunder – yellow dandelions flash in fields of rainy grass.
Mad at Oryoki in the shrine-room – Thistles blossomed late afternoon.
Put on my shirt and took it off in the sun walking the path to lunch.
A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitos.
Empty clouds drift above me, birds chirp, a plane roar falls down through blue sky.
Electric noon – pine bough cicadas buzz outside the mashineshop door.
At 4 A.M. the two middleaged men sleeping together hold hands.
In the half-light of dawn a few birds warble under the Pleiades.
Sky reddens behind fir trees as larks twitter and sparrows cheep cheep cheep.
July 1983
Caught shoplifting ran out the department store at sunise and woke up.
August 1983
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Allen
Ginsberg
Haiku (Never Published)
Journals,
Mid Fifties 1954-1958
[Haiku
composed in the backyard cottage
at 1624 Milvia Street, Berkeley
1955,
while reading R.H. Blyth's 4 volumes, "Haiku."]
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/3746/
http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Allen_Ginsberg/3687
http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/haiku.txt
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6613&poem=84803
Drinking
my tea
Without sugar-
No difference.
The
sparrow shits
upside down
--ah! my brain & eggs
Mayan
head in a
Pacific driftwood bole
--Someday I'll live in N.Y.
Looking
over my shoulder
my behind was covered
with cherry blossoms.
Winter
Haiku
I didn't know the names
of the flowers--now
my garden is gone.
I
slapped the mosquito
and missed.
What made me do that?
Reading
haiku
I am unhappy,
longing for the Nameless.
A
frog floating
in the drugstore jar:
summer rain on grey pavements.
(after Shiki)
On
the porch
in my shorts;
auto lights in the rain.
Another
year
has past-the world
is no different.
The
first thing I looked for
in my old garden was
The Cherry Tree.
My
old desk:
the first thing I looked for
in my house.
My
early journal:
the first thing I found
in my old desk.
My
mother's ghost:
the first thing I found
in the living room.
I
quit shaving
but the eyes that glanced at me
remained in the mirror.
The
madman
emerges from the movies:
the street at lunchtime.
Cities
of boys
are in their graves,
and in this town...
Lying
on my side
in the void:
the breath in my nose.
On
the fifteenth floor
the dog chews a bone-
Screech of taxicabs.
A
hardon in New York,
a boy
in San Fransisco.
The
moon over the roof,
worms in the garden.
I rent this house.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Allen
Ginsberg Death Notes
by Andrew Schelling
I first visited The Naropa Institute as guest faculty in summer of 1990. Someone
introduced me to Allen and told him I was teaching a class on Sanskrit poetics.
"What do you know about metrics of the Gayatri hymn?" he immediately
asks. Gayatri is the name of an old Vedic sun benediction comprised of twenty-four
syllables which orthodox Hindus regard as a literal goddess and some take as a
great poetry Mother. This must have been shortly after he found with delight that
the mighty Buddhist mantra from the Heart Sutra, recited all over the world, has
a count of seventeen syllables.
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
I think he was trying to locate something comparable in the Hindu mantra which millions of Brahmans chant each dawn in India. What fascinated him in about the Heart Sutra mantra was the formal connection to haiku, Japan's 17 syllable lyric poem form rooted in Zen awareness of particulars. Allen was a veteran haiku practitioner. After all haiku exhibits the sort of irreducible clarity of perception Blake had called for, as well as a humble alternative to mythopoetic and epic bombast. Then, there is the equally irreducible effect of the Heart Sutra's closing mantra, which relies far more on shamanic traditions of sound-magic. Impressed by the synchronicity of syllable count (Allen probably knew more about metrics than any other contemporary poet, though he wore this expertise lightly) he began his series of "American Sentences," bright perceptive heartbreaking funny and thoroughly American 17 syllable poems that come at you from the page as if exercising squatter rights on derelict Asian traditions.
During July of the next six years-Naropa's summer writing program season-we'd sometimes put our heads together over the Heart Sutra. Allen worked for years refining a translation he had undertaken with his companion and Buddhist teacher Gelek Rinpoche. They of course worked the Tibetan, Gelek's native tongue. But Allen wanted to know how the Sanskrit went, since that was the Sutra's original tongue, and Sanskrit metrics, vocabulary, and sound values are interlayered, complex and magical. Furthermore, the Gate Mantra always remains in original Sanskrit no matter what language the Sutra's gone into-Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, English-since those precise words and none other are "the great bright mantra that relieves suffering."
Mantra power resides (old Hindu yogic tradition) in exact recitation. Allen was both exhilirated and anxious about his translation project. Which makes sense. It's like toying with plutonium. This is probably why he wanted to check in with me-touch in with the Sanskrit-on particular poetic coinages. He was delighted, and a bit edgy, about his line "free of all topsy-turvy mindsets," topsy-turvy a good and etymologically exact rendering of the original word,viparyasa. Turned about or upside down. Or "imagining what is illusory or false to be real or true." Topsy-turvy gets into tender American vernacular the Buddhist sense, and is quite free of the sanctimony which sours a few translations with terms like "perverted views."
Allen's excitement around Hindu and Buddhist texts of liberation must have baffled a lot of listeners when he first began to chant mantras at poetry readings to the accompaniment of Tibetan finger cymbals or Indian shruti box (harmonium). Professors considered him silly. News magazines made fun of him. But more than anyone else he helped us see those magic early texts as poetry, and lead us away from the peculiar Occidental weirdness which wants its religion safe in church, but sends poetry adrift and lonely to street or classroom.
Poetry and enlightenment, no difference!
If he didn't come to it on his own he would have inescapably found it in India, 1962-1963. Everywhere you go in India you meet the Sufi tradition of kirtan or the Hindu bhajan-both of them big hootenanny sing-ins of religious music held on holy days or that erupt spontaneously and go through the night in village squares, neighborhood temples, or at grave of some Muslim mulla. Dour white Protestant America needed a touch of music & ecstasy, and Allen helped bring it here.
*
After visiting Naropa in summer of 1991 several Austrian writers from Vienna started a poetry school, the Schule fur Dichtung im Wien. Allen sort of served as their presiding genius. I saw him insist on several occasions to the directors that they include "a meditation component" in their curriculum or he'd lose interest. There are lots of poetry programs out there, he said, and many want him. Unless this one kept Buddhist mind discipline open as a possible influence, he wouldn't know how to distinguish it from the others.
As well as regularly inviting Allen to Vienna, Ide Hintz and Christine Huber, the Schule's directors, bring a range of other USA poets and Naropa faculty to teach in their spring and autumn two-week seasons. I went in September 1993, my first time in Europe in a dozen years. The school runs at high speed, more demanding a schedule than even the summers at Naropa, which mirror Allen's youthful high-activity style. During my stay, there was a reading staged at Vienna's big university in a cavernous basement lecture hall. Three of us read-myself, Dorothea Zeeman, a spitfire Austrian prose writer in her eighties, and Allen.
As usual Allen's presence sold out the hall. An Austrian friend says about 700 people can fit into seats. Allen read with characteristic animation, playing or beating time on the harmonium and Australian aborigine songsticks he travels with. Afterwards a group of the Schule's faculty, administrators, friends and associates went out to eat. It was quite late and we ended up at the Beograd, a Serbian restaurant down a little street and very close to the hotel the Schule had put us up in. This was the height of the war in Bosnia and there was always a nagging concern the Beograd might not be safe. Vienna lies a short automobile drive from the splintered former Yugoslavia. One of our students, a wealthy Bosnian Muslim of impeccable manners, excused himself.
The Beograd seems quintessentially Eastern, more Turkish than the "Turks" who are so despised-hung claustrophobically with intricate dark oriental carpets and no windows in the dining rooms. Brass samovars, or hammered metal wine urns on shelves. Decorative scimitars and shields, big dishes of meat grilled by waiters over a flame at your table on an actual sword. Three Ukranian kids about seventeen or eighteen had come nearly penniless to Vienna to hear Allen read. They looked like big handsome blond kids you'd find anywhere in the world, wearing leather jackets and blue jeans and boots. Quite delighted by their attentions Allen had invited them along and was buying them dinner.
Sometime into the night as we sat at a cluster of tables Allen placed his harmonium in front of him and asked the poet Bernhard Widder, seated alongside, to turn the pages of a book while he sang. Then looking the Ukranian kids in the face with immense tenderness he played his 1971 ballad "September on Jessore Road." It's a tragic and terrible poem about refugees, mostly poor rural Hindus, fleeing East Pakistan with its war and damnable starvation for Calcutta during the Bangladesh War. That Bosnian refugees were at that moment a very cruel concern to Austria added an immediate dimension to the song. Allen put everything into it. Later I questioned a few others about the moment, which I'd found unprecedented. Yes, definitely-many had never heard him so soulful.
And I realized then how little all the fame and media attention, crowds, travel, glory meant to him when he had caught the shimmering moment of no past and no future. Three handsome teen kids from the Ukraine, saying not a word, had pulled a richer, more resounding performance out of that poetry Bodhisattva than the crowd of 700 cheering him through the early evening. Everyone's world shifted a little during the ballad. When he finished and the harmonium trailed off-that mournful sound half song half locomotive whistle it makes-the group of us, maybe thirty, sat wordless. An archaic impulse, the oldest-Eros-had brought Allen to that moment-moment when love first comes over you and all the powers rise up-and I knew then that no matter what else-the politics, the goofiness, grouchiness of his later years, silly critics or fawning media-for him like for all poets Love is the original language. The body we're born to.
You think moments like that could go on forever. But humans are inestimably foolish. Only our topsy-turvy mindsets pretend such sweetness can linger. Because no sooner had Allen finished then a round gray-haired man about his own age in dusty worn-out tuxedo with a scarlet cummerbund-the house musician, a gypsy-came hustling over with a violin in his hands. Eyes impassioned and bright, he called energetically to Allen in loud German that everyone in the restaurant could hear. Now it was his turn, he let us all know. Allen had lit the place up with music. It was this man's turf, he was house musician, and now he would match the performance with what he could do.
Theatrically he released one string from his violin, then stretching it out with his left hand while he fixed the instrument tightly under his chin, he lifted dozens of weird sounds, hundreds, as he bobbed and bent and stretched and tormented that one string with his bow. Someone told me he was a longstanding practice, the evocation of bird sounds-calls, squawks, chirps, croaks, caws. He was terrific. Everyone cheered and he bowed with the largesse of a man at home.
That night I had a dream which in outline I jotted down. A week or two later I wrote it up.
Vienna Dream
I
meet the poet Allen Ginsberg at a Vienna cafe. He has hidden himself
off at
a side table, behind a potted palm. Huge Egyptian fronds bend over and his
black harmonium sits on the table. "No difference between poetry and
meditation," he is saying distractedly as I squeeze onto a bench alongside.
"They
work the same way. Poetry and mediation." His eyes are painfully
sad. I don't
think he wanted to reach this conclusion. He looks so small and
orderly in
shirtsleeves and conservative tie, almost a college professor.
I should be polite
but I'm too young, he knows it, his eyes get sadder. I'm
too young for what he's
trying to say-
"But
you meditate to end suffering," I protest, "calm your heart, keep the
guru's command." Allen sighs, he knows what's next. "While poetry-"
I'm too
strident, something's wrong, "you write poetry to get famous,
travel, have fun,
sleep with boys, be glamorous...." It's terribly difficult,
his shoulders are
slumped. I've gone too far. There's something I don't get.
He stares at the
marble tabletop under the palm fringes, very gloomy, like
Freud, he knows too
much, we're in Vienna, some political disaster's about
to occur. "Poetry and
meditation. No difference." He hunches over
his coffee. I realize he's trying to
warn me about something....
The old coyote! A cranky Bodhisattva up to familiar tricks. Pushing the inseparability of poetry and wisdom. His gloom to counter my tendency to be over serious. Not so different from early days when he wanted me to show him metric of the Gayatri hymn so he could maybe elicit another poem from time-honored Sanskrit pattern of three lines eight-syllables each. Now he'd come and slipped past gates of the dream to make an old point.
In Buddhism the teachers often show up in what's called the sambhogakaya, the enjoyment body. You could actually call it a body of eros without stretching things much since sambhoga literally means sexual coupling. An apparition body, described in the texts as mutable, shapeshifting, dreamlike. Check out the biography of Milarepa, or the abundant tantric tales of teachers and students zipping around in dreams and trance. Or consider the Sutra of Vimalakirti, who lives in a "ten-foot room" but seats tens of millions of sentient creatures inside, without any jostling, to hear a few choice words of poetry wisdom. These people are Allen's proper companions now I suppose.
How we'll miss him. Summers at Naropa, no longer big classes singing Blake or Shelley in white tent on dry lawn. No burgundy Mont Blanc pen looping careful thoughts at seminar table for student instruction. No Allen off evenings at summer residence Varsity Townhouse boiling up macrobiotic meals-soups or cauldrons of grain & organic root vegetables. Always obligatory to eat a bowl when you stop by for talk. He wanted to feed everyone. And each dish from every pot was indescribably bland in the same exact way. "One taste," the local Buddhists declare. What they mean is-good / bad, hot /cold, pleasure / pain-the practitioner should indifferently accept. But Allen, your generous cooking brought new life to old adage! One taste. I blow this thought after you into the shimmering void.
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
Andrew Schelling
9
April 1997
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The
Prajna Paramita Sutra
as translated by Allen Ginsberg
from Haight-Ashbury
in the Sixties
MA
KA HAN NYA HA RA MIT TA SHIN GYO
Great Prajna Paramita Sutra
KAN
JI ZAI BO SATSU GYO JIN HAN NYA HA RA MIT TA JI SHO KEN GO
Avalokitesvara
bodhisattva practice deep prajna paramita when perceive five
UN
KAI KU DO ISSAI KU YAKU
skandas all empty. Relieve every suffering.
SHA
RI SHI SHIKI FU I KU KU FU I SHIKI SHIKI
Sariputra, form not different (from)
emptiness. Emptiness not different (from) form. Form
SOKU
ZE KU KU SOKU ZE SHIKE JU SO GYO SHIKI YAKU
is the emptiness. Emptiness is
the form. Sensation, thought, active substance, consciousness, also
BU
NYO ZE
like this.
SHA
RI SHI ZE SHO HO KU SO FU SHO FU METSU FU KU FU JO
Sariputra, this everything
original character; not born, not annihilated not tainted, not pure,
FU
ZO FU GEN ZE KO KU CHU MU SHIKI MU JU SO GYO
(does) not increase, (does) not
decrease. Therefore in emptiness no form, no sensation, thought, active substance,
SHIKI
MU GEN NI BI ZETS SHIN NI MU SHIKI SHO KO MI SOKU HO MU GEN
consciousness.
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; no color, sound, smell, taste, touch, object;
no eye,
KAI
NAI SHI MU I SHIKI KAI MU MU MYO YAKU MU MU MYO
world of eyes until we come
to also no world of consciousness; no ignorance, also no ignorance
JIN
NAI SHI MU RO SHI YAKU MU RO SHI JIN MU KU SHU
annihilation, until we come
to no old age, death, also no old age, death, also no old age, death, annhilation
of no suffering, cause of suffering,
METSU
DO MU CHI YAKU MU TOKU I MU SHO TOK KO BO DAI SAT TA E
nirvana, path; no wisdom,
also no attainment because of no attainment. Bodhisattva depends on
HAN
NYA HA RA MIT TA KO SHIN MU KE GE MU KE GE KO MU U KU FU ON RI
prajna paramita
because mind no obstacle. Because of no obstacle no exist fear; go beyond
I
SSAI TEN DO MU SO KU GYO NE HAN SAN ZE SHO BUTSU E HAN
all (topsy-turvey views)
attain Nirvana. Past, present and future every Buddha depend on prajna
NYA
HA RA MIT TA KO TOKU A NOKU TA RA SAN MYAKU SAN BO DAI
paramita therefore
attain supreme, perfect, enlightenment.
KO
CHI HAN NYA HA RA MIT TA ZE DAI JIN SHU ZE DAI MYO SHU
Therefore I know Prajna
paramita (is) the great holy mantram, the great untainted mantram,
ZE
MU JO SHU ZE MU TO DO SHU NO JO IS SAI KU SHIN JITSU FU KO
the supreme mantram,
the incomparable mantram. Is capable of assuaging all suffering. True not false.
KO
SETSU HAN NYA HA PA MIT TA SHU SOKU SETSU SHU WATSU
Therefore he proclaimed
Prajna paramita mantram and proclaimed mantram says
GYA
TE GYA TE HA RA GYA TE HA RA SO GYA TE BO DHI SO WA KA
gone, gone, to the
other shore gone, reach (go) enlightenment accomplish.
HAN NYA SHIN GYO
NEGA
WA KU WA KO NO KU DO KU O MOTTE A MA NE KU ISSAI NI OYO
What we pray, this
merit with universally all existence Pervade,
BO
SHI WARE RA TO SHU JO TO MI NA TO MO NI BUTSUDO O JYO ZEN KO TO
we and sentient
being all with Buddhism achieve
this
(What I pray is that this merit pervade universally and we Buddhists and all sentient
beings achieve
Buddhism.)
JI
HO SAN SHI I SHI HU SHI SON BU SA MO KO SA
Ten directions past, present and
future all Buddhas The world honoured one. Bodhisattva, great Bodhisattva,
MO
KO HO JA HO RO MI
great Prajna-paramita.
----------------------------------------
Links
A
Chronology of the Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg
Scrap
Leaves
Poetry: 1947-1997