Citation

Ginsberg, Allen. “Meditation and Poetics.” Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing, edited by William Zinsser, Houghton Mifflin, 1988, pp. 143–65.

Quotes

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Collations

Poetry as probe into the nature of reality and the mind

Real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness, or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with a phenomenal universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it.

Classical poetry is a “process,” or experiment—a probe into the nature of reality and the nature of the mind.

For most of “The Moderns,” as with the Imagists of the twenties and thirties in our century, the motive has been purification of mind and speech.

I’m taking the word “probe” for poetry—poetry as a probe into one subject or another—from the poet Gregory Corso. He speaks of poetry as a probe into Marriage, Hair, Mind, Death, Army, Police, which are the titles of some of his earlier poems. He uses poetry to take an individual word and probe all its possible variants. He’ll take a concept like death, for instance, and pour every archetypal thought he’s ever thought or could recollect having thought about death and lay them out in poetic form—making a whole mandala of thoughts about it.

To write poetry just for publication is less interesting than treating it as a probe

Real poetry isn’t consciously composed as “poetry,” as if one only sat down to compose a poem or a novel for publication. Some people do work that way: artists whose motivations are less interesting

Poets who treated their poetry as a probe

Shakespeare, Dante, Rimbaud, and Gertrude Stein, or of certain surrealist verbal alchemists—Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Antonin Artaud—or of the elders Pound and William Carlos Williams, or, specifically in our own time, of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.

20th-century modern poetry is meditation (i.e., probe of consciousness)

Western fine art and other meditation practices are brother-and-sister-related activities.

Major works of twentieth-century art are probes of consciousness—particular experiments with recollection or mindfulness, experiments with language and speech, experiments with forms. Modern art is an attempt to define or recognize or experience perception—pure perception.

So I’m speaking about the ground of poetry and purification of motive.

Beat generation used poetry to probe "new reality"

Kerouac and I, following Arthur Rimbaud and Baudelaire, our great-grandfathers among hermetic poets and philosophers, were experimenting naively with what we thought of as “new reality,” or “supreme reality.”

the phrase “new consciousness” circulated among Beat Generation writers as our poetic motif in the early fifties. The specific intention of that decade’s poetry was the exploration of consciousness, which is why we were interested in psychedelic or mind-manifesting substances

Kerouac’s motive for his probe was disillusionment

Spontaneity can make poetry feel new

A few Buddhist dharma phrases correlate charmingly with the process of Bohemian art of the twentieth century—notions like “Take a non-totalitarian attitude,” “Express yourself courageously,” “Be outrageous to yourself,” “Don’t conform to your idea of what is expected but conform to your present spontaneous mind, your raw awareness.” That’s how dharma poets “make it new”—which was Pound’s adjuration.

Renunciation to probe your own consciousness

You need a certain deconditioning of attitude—a deconditioning of rigidity and unyieldingness—so that you can get to the heart of your own thought. That’s parallel with traditional Buddhist ideas of renunciation—renunciation of hand-me-down conditioned conceptions of mind. It’s the meditative practice of “letting go of thought”—neither pushing them away nor inviting them in, but, as you sit meditating, watching the procession of thought forms pass by, rising, flowering and dissolving, and disowning them, so to speak: you’re not responsible any more than you’re responsible for the weather, because you can’t tell in advance what you’re going to think next. Otherwise you’d be able to predict every thought, and that would be sad for you. There are some people whose thoughts are all predictable.

Meditators have formulated a slogan that says, “Renunciation is a way to avoid conditioned mind.” That means that meditation is practiced by constantly renouncing your mind, or “renouncing” your thoughts, or “letting go” of your thoughts. It doesn’t mean letting go of your whole awareness—only that small part of your mind that’s dependent on linear, logical thinking.

It means expanding the area of awareness, so that your awareness surrounds your thoughts, rather than that you enter into thoughts like a dream. Thus the life of meditation and the life of art are both based on a similar conception of spontaneous mind. They both share renunciation as a way of avoiding a conditioned art work, or trite art, or repetition of other people’s ideas.

Cultivate kindness to your own thoughts

So it requires cultivation of tolerance towards one’s own thoughts and impulses and ideas—the tolerance necessary for the perception of one’s own mind, the kindness to the self necessary for acceptance of that process of consciousness and for acceptance of the mind’s raw contents

To write well, it is useful to develop negative capability

“Negative capability,” he wrote, “is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching out after fact and reason.” This means the ability to hold contrary or even polar opposite ideas or conceptions in the mind without freaking out—to experience contradiction or conflict or chaos in the mind without any irritable grasping after facts.

The really interesting word here is “irritable,” which in Buddhism we take to be the aggressive insistence on eliminating one concept as against another, so that you have to take a meat-ax to your opponent or yourself to resolve the contradictions

Form and emptiness is one

A basic Buddhist idea from 150 A.D. is that “Form is no different from Emptiness, Emptiness no different from Form.”

That formulation is one that Keats and all subtle poets might appreciate. The American poets Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Kerouac and Burroughs in their work do appreciate this “highest perfect wisdom,” both in their own intuition and from their study of Prajnaparamita texts.

Direct treatment of a thing

As part of “purification” or “de-conditioning” we have the need for clear seeing or direct perception—perception of a young tree without an intervening veil of preconceived ideas; the surprise glimpse, let us say, or insight, or sudden Gestalt, or I suppose you could say satori, occasionally glimpsed as esthetic experience.

In our century Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams constantly insist on direct perception of the materials of poetry, of the language itself that you’re working with.

Pound: “Direct treatment of the thing.”

Don’t treat the object indirectly or symbolically, but look directly at it and choose spontaneously that aspect of it which is most immediately striking—the striking flash in consciousness or awareness, the most vivid, what sticks out in your mind—and notate that.

“Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective,” is a famous axiom or principle that Pound pronounced around 1912. He derived that American application of twentieth-century insight from his study of Chinese Confucian, Taoist and Japanese Buddhist poetry.

To have it you’ve got to have “direct treatment of the thing.” And that requires direct perception—mind capable of awareness, uncluttered by abstraction, the veil of conceptions parted to reveal significant details of the world’s stage.

“Write about things that are close to the nose.”

Why direct perception of objects is easy in Chinese

“The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” Fenollosa/Pound pointed out that in Chinese you were able to have a “direct treatment” of the object because the object was pictorially there via hieroglyph. Pound recommended the adaptation of the same idea: the Chinese poetic method as a corrective to the conceptual vagueness and sentimental abstraction of Western poetry. In a way he was asking for the intercession of the bodhisattvas of Buddhist poetry into Western poetics because he was calling for direct perception, direct contact without intervening conceptualization, a clear seeing attentiveness, which, as you may remember, echoing in your brain, is supposed to be one of the marks of Zen masters, as in their practice of gardening, tea ceremony, flower arranging or archery.

Pound's Western influences

Pound also drew from advanced Western models—old Dante to the French modernist poets Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbière and Rimbaud.

The tradition was initiated by Baudelaire, who had updated the poetic consciousness of the nineteenth century to include the city, real estate, houses, carriages, traffic, machinery.

No ideas but in things

William Carlos Williams’ famous “No ideas but in things.”

“No ideas but in facts.” Just the facts, ma’am. Don’t give us your editorial; no general ideas. Just “give me a for instance”—correlate the conception with a real process or a particular action or a concrete thing, localized, immediate, palpable, practicable, involving direct sense contact.

You don't have to make a conclusion if you catalogue

You don’t need to make the generalization if you give the particular instances.

A poet is like a Sherlock Holmes, assembling the phalanx of data from which to draw his editorial conclusion.

William James’ notion was of “the solidity of specificity.” Kerouac’s phrase for it was, “Details are the life of prose.”

Thursday by William Carlos Williams

I have had my dream—like others —
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky—
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose—and decide to dream no more.

that one single poem is the intersection between the mind of meditation—the discipline of meditation, letting go of thoughts—and the Yankee practice of poetry after William James, where the poet is standing there, feeling the weight of his body in his shoes, aware of the air passing in and out of his nose.

Breathing

“spirit” comes from the Latin spiritus, which means “breathing,” and that the spiritual practices of the East are primarily involved with meditation, and that meditation practices usually begin with trying to increase one’s awareness of the space around you, beginning with the fact that you’re breathing. So generally you follow your breath, in Zen or in Tibetan style.

Things are adequate symbols

“The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” You don’t have to go chasing after far-fetched symbols because direct perception will propose efficient language to you.

Chögyam Trungpa: “Things are symbols of themselves.”

Pound means that the natural object is identical with what it is you’re trying to symbolize in any case.

Trungpa is saying that if you directly perceive a thing it’s completely there, completely itself, completely revelatory of the eternal universe that it’s in, or of your mind as it is.

Focus on minute details

Kerouac advised writers: “Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better.”

William Blake’s similar slogan is: “Labor will the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones.”

take care of the little baby facts.

A classic example of William Carlos Williams in America seeing minute particulars clearly, precisely, thoroughly, is in the famous and most obvious of Imagist poems, “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

But it became a sort of sacred object.

The Unborn

Vividness is self-selecting. In other words, he didn’t prepare to see it, except that he had had a life’s preparation in practicing awareness “close to the nose,” trying to stay in his body and observe the space around him. That kind of spontaneous awareness has a Buddhist term for it: “the Unborn.” For where does a thought come from? You can’t trace it back to a womb, a thought is “unborn.” Perception is unborn, in the sense that it spontaneously arises. Because even if you tried to trace your perceptions back to the source, you couldn’t.

The capture a poem, you have to be practiced in poetics and ordinary mind

To catch the red wheelbarrow, however, you have to be practiced in poetics as well as practiced in ordinary mind.

Technique: Narrow down perception and concretize it

Flaubert was the prose initiator of that narrowing down of perception and the concretization of it with his phrase “The ordinary is the extraordinary.”

Per Olson, attentiveness is important when writing free verse because the poem declares its track

Charles Olson, in his essay “Projective Verse.”

This is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is especially confronted by. And it evolves a whole series of new recognitions. From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION [Olson means the field of the mind] . . . he can go by no track other than the one that the poem under hand declares for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined.

Form is an extension of content

The principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composition and when obeyed is the reason why a projective poem can come into being. It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.

right form, in any given poem is the only and exclusively possible extension of the content under hand.

By “content” I think Olson means the sequence of perceptions. So the form—the form of a poem, the plot of a poem, the argument of a poem, the narrative of a poem—would correspond to the sequence of perceptions.

Per Olson, when writing free verse, one perception must immediately and directly lead to another

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.

get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split-second acts [the decisions you make while scribbling], the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you set up as a poet, USE, USE, USE the process at all points. In any given poem always, always one perception must, must, must [as with the mind] MOVE INSTANTER ON ANOTHER!

Per Ginsberg, letting one perception go after another is similar to letting go of thoughts to allow new one to arise

I interpret that set of words—“one perception must move instanter on another”—as similar to the dharmic practice of letting go of thoughts and allowing fresh thoughts to arise and be registered, rather than hanging onto one exclusive image and forcing Reason to branch it out and extend it into a hung-up metaphor. That was the difference between the metaphysically inspired poetry of the thirties to the fifties in America after T.S. Eliot and the Open Form, practiced simultaneously by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and later by Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. They let the mind loose.

So don’t cling to perceptions, or fixate on impressions, or on visions

So we have, as a ground of purification, letting go—the confidence to let your mind loose and observe your own perceptions and their discontinuities. You can’t go back and change the sequence of the thoughts you had; you can’t revise the process of thinking or deny what was thought, but thought obliterates itself anyway. You don’t have to worry about that, you can go on to the next thought.

“I can’t revise my steps once I’ve taken them.”

Writing in the present moment

Gertrude Stein’s writing, which was writing in the present moment, present time, present consciousness: what was going on in the grammar of her head during the time of composition without recourse to past memory or future planning.

To avoid repetition and obsession of your own thoughts, rely more on chance

Poets can avoid repetition of their obsessions. What it requires is confidence in the magic of chance.

Chögyam Trungpa phrased this notion, “Magic is the total delight in chance.”

chance thought, or the unborn thought, or the spontaneous thought, or the “first thought,” or the thought spoken spontaneously with its conception—thought and word identical on the spot.

To purify one's writing requires courage

It requires a certain amount of unselfconsciousness, like singing in the bathtub. It means not embarrassed, not jealous, not involved in one-upmanship, not mimicking, not imitating, above all not self-conscious. And that requires a certain amount of jumping out of yourself—courage and humor and openness and perspective and carelessness, in the sense of burning your mental bridges behind you, outreaching yourself; purification, so to speak, giving yourself permission to utter what you think, either simultaneously, or immediately thereafter, or ten years later

That brings a kind of freshness and cleanness to both thought and utterance.

Spontaneous spoken poetry

“Why do you need a piece of paper? Don’t you trust your own mind? Why don’t you do like the classic poets? Milarepa made up his poems on the spot and other people copied them down.”

That’s actually the classical Buddhist practice among Zen masters and Tibetan lamas, like the author of “The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa.”

The method, again, was spontaneous mind, on-the-spot improvisation on the basis of meditative discipline.

Kerouac, who also urged me to be more spontaneous, less worried about my poetic practice. I was always worried about my poetry.

If you allow the active phrase to come to your mind, allow that out, you speak from a ground that can relate your inner perception to external phenomena, and thus join Heaven and Earth..

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