The Lion For Real -- Allen Ginsberg

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul:

(Poem #1674) The Lion For Real 'Soyez muette pour moi, Idole contemplative...' I came home and found a lion in my living room Rushed out on the fire escape screaming Lion! Lion! Two stenographers pulled their brunnette hair and banged the window shut I hurried home to Paterson and stayed two days Called up old Reichian analyst who'd kicked me out of therapy for smoking marijuana 'It's happened' I panted 'There's a Lion in my living room' 'I'm afraid any discussion would have no value' he hung up I went to my old boyfriend we got drunk with his girlfriend I kissed him and announced I had a lion with a mad gleam in my eye We wound up fighting on the floor I bit his eyebrow & he kicked me out I ended up masturbating in his jeep parked in the street moaning 'Lion.' Found Joey my novelist friend and roared at him 'Lion!' He looked at me interested and read me his spontaneous ignu high poetries I listened for lions all I heard was Elephant Tiglon Hippogriff Unicorn Ants But figured he really understood me when we made it in Ignaz Wisdom's bathroom. But next day he sent me a leaf from his Smoky Mountain retreat 'I love you little Bo-Bo with your delicate golden lions But there being no Self and No Bars therefore the Zoo of your dear Father hath no lion You said your mother was mad don't expect me to produce the Monster for your Bridegroom.' Confused dazed and exalted bethought me of real lion starved in his stink in Harlem Opened the door the room was filled with the bomb blast of his anger He roaring hungrily at the plaster walls but nobody could hear outside thru the window My eye caught the edge of the red neighbor apartment building standing in deafening stillness We gazed at each other his implacable yellow eye in the red halo of fur Waxed rhuemy on my own but he stopped roaring and bared a fang greeting. I turned my back and cooked broccoli for supper on an iron gas stove Boilt water and took a hot bath in the old tub under the sink board. He didn't eat me, tho I regretted him starving in my presence. Next week he wasted away a sick rug full of bones wheaten hair falling out enraged and reddening eye as he lay aching huge hairy head on his paws by the egg-crate bookcase filled up with thin volumes of Plato, & Buddha. Sat by his side every night averting my eyes from his hungry motheaten face stopped eating myself he got weaker and roared at night while I had nightmares Eaten by lion in bookstore on Cosmic Campus, a lion myself starved by Professor Kandisky, dying in a lion's flophouse circus, I woke up mornings the lion still added dying on the floor -- 'Terrible Presence!' I cried 'Eat me or die!' It got up that afternoon -- walked to the door with its paw on the wall to steady its trembling body Let out a soul-rending creak from the bottomless roof of his mouth thundering from my floor to heaven heavier than a volcano at night in Mexico Pushed the door open and said in a gravelly voice "Not this time Baby -- but I will be back again." Lion that eats my mind now for a decade knowing only your hunger Not the bliss of your satisfaction O roar of the universe how am I chosen In this life I have heard your promise I am ready to die I have served Your starved and ancient Presence O Lord I wait in my room at your Mercy. -- Allen Ginsberg

        Paris, March 1958.

As long as we are doing poems about Poets and Lions....

This is easily one of my favourite Ginsberg poems - largely because I think
it captures so well the entire spirit of Ginsberg's poetic enterprise. It
has everything - a visionary idea worthy of Blake; sly touches of humour;
references to sex and drugs; references to Plato and the Buddha; a finely
crafted image of the raw power of a lion trapped in a small apartment; a
marvellously accurate description that brings out so clearly the sights and
smells of the beast's presence (sick rug full of bones wheaten hair falling
out); a metaphysical, almost mystic engagement with the world and to end it
all, a stanza of breathtaking, almost biblical proportion. A large part of
the brilliance of this poem is in the development - what starts off as a
clever gag turns into an intensely physical experience before finally
becoming a spiritual epiphany.

As an evocation of the Muse this is an almost unparalleled poem - combining
a sense of wonderous disbelief  and whimsy with a feeling of trapped
frustration and pathos mingled with majesty (just writing this sense makes
me review the many different emotions the poem not only conjures up but
manages to balance so perfectly). In Preludes, Eliot speaks of "the notion
of some infinitely gentle / infinitely suffering thing" - Ginsberg's muse is
more savage than that, but for all that no less exquisite.

Aseem.

P.S. I'm not really sure where the epigraph for this poem comes from.
Anyone?

A Vow -- Allen Ginsberg

Guest poem sent in by Aseem Kaul

(Poem #1223) A Vow I will haunt these States with beard bald head eyes staring out plane window hair hanging out in Greyhound bus midnight leaning over taxicab seat to admonish an angry cursing driver hand lifted to calm his outraged vehicle that I pass with the Green Light of common law. Common sense, Common law, common tenderness and common tranquility our means in America to control the money munching war machine, bright lit industry everywhere digesting forests & excreting soft pyramids of newsprint, Redwood and Ponderosa patriarchs silent in Meditation murdered & regurgitated as smoke, sawdust, screaming ceilings of Soap Opera, thick dead Lifes, slick Advertisements for Gubernatorial big guns burping Napalm on palm rice tropic greenery. Dynamite in forests, boughs fly slow motion thunder down ravine, Helicopters roar over National Park, Mekong swamp, Dynamite fire blasts thru Model Villages, Violence screams at Police, Mayors get mad over radio, Drop the Bomb on Niggers! drop Fire on the gook China Frankenstein Dragon waving its tail over Bayonne's domed Aluminium oil reservoir! I'll haunt these states all year gazing bleakly out train windows, blue airfield red TV network on evening plains, decoding radar Provincial editorial paper message, deciphering Iron Pipe laborer's curses as clanging hammers they raise steamshovel claws over Puerto Rican agony lawyers screams in slums. -- Allen Ginsberg

Watching the images from Iraq on CNN this is the poem I keep coming
back to - not because it's my favourite war poem, but because it
expresses better than anything else this frustrated sense of rage I
feel for the arrogance of America. I love it because it brings out so
beautifully the contradiction, the hypocrisy at the heart of the
American way - the freedom it arrogates to itself and then, drunk on
its power, denies to others; the deliberate placidity of a world where
an angry taxi driver is the most dangerous thing you have to worry
about while the rest of the world burns to ashes to feed your
industries.

Ghost of Ginsberg, it's time.

Aseem Kaul

Death News -- Allen Ginsberg

(Poem #1133) Death News "Visit to W.C.W. circa 1957, poets Kerouac Corso Orlovsky on sofa in living room inquired wise words, stricken Williams pointed thru window curtained on Main Street: "There's a lot of bastards out there!" Walking at night on asphalt campus road by the German Instructor with Glasses W. C. Williams is dead he said in accent under the trees in Benares; I stopped and asked Williams is Dead? Enthusiastic and wide-eyed under the Big Dipper. Stood on the Porch of the International House Annex bungalow insects buzzing round the electric light reading the Medical obituary in "Time". "out among the sparrows behind the shutters" Williams is in the Big Dipper. He isn't dead as the many pages of words arranged thrill with his intonations the mouths of meek kids becoming subtle even in Bengal. Thus there's a life moving out of his pages; Blake also "alive" thru his experienced machines. Were his last words anything Black out there in the carpeted bedroom of the gabled wood house in Rutherford? Wonder what he said, or was there anything left in realms of speech after the stroke & brain-thrill doom entered his thoughts? If I pray to his soul in Bardo Thodol he may hear the unexpected vibration of foreign mercy. Quietly unknown for three weeks; now I saw Passaic and Ganges one, consenting his devotion, because he walked on the steely bank & prayed to a Goddess in the river, that he only invented, another Ganga-Ma. Riding on the old rusty Holland submarine on the ground floor Paterson Museum instead of a celestial crocodile. Mourn O Ye Angels of the Left Wing! that the poet of the streets is a skeleton under the pavement now and there's no other old soul so kind and meek and feminine jawed and him-eyed can see you What you wanted to be among the bastards out there. Benares, March 20, 1963" -- Allen Ginsberg

Call me morbid, but some of my favourite poems are poems written by one
poet about the death of another (Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"
[Poem #50] or Shelley's Adonais or Wilbur's Cottage Street, 1953
[www.sylviaplathforum.com/forum-poems/46.html] - to name but a few) - and
this one ranks right up there. Part of it, of course, is just Williams and
the way for me his persona looms over this poem, so that Ginsberg's amazed
repetition of the line "Williams is dead" becomes an echo of my own sudden
sense of loss. But I also love the way Ginsberg moves from the
conversational to the elegaic (from "walking at night on asphalt campus
road" to "Mourn O Ye Angels of the Left Wing!") taking us step by step
through the experience of William's death.

And then, of course, there is Ginsberg himself - the merciless grit-jaw
voice of the greatest of the Beat poets; the Whitmanesque flavour of the
words as they roll of your tongue, the sense of desolation so lucid, so
clear-eyed; the terrible jazz of his poetry its own willing narcotic. And
of course, the ability to throw in that one line, that single phrase that
is so right you can never forget it ("kind and meek and feminine jawed and
him-eyed" - having read him can you really picture WC Williams any other
way?). It almost makes up for all those bastards.

Aseem

Howl -- Allen Ginsberg

An excerpt from

(Poem #293) Howl I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night, with dreams, and drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time in between Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in the submarine light of Bickford's, floated out and sat through the stale beer afternooon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago... -- Allen Ginsberg

The dedication reads 'for Carl Solomon'.

'Howl' is not a poem that could ever be described as beautiful, or evocative, or
inspiring, or mystical, or any of the myriad other adjectives that reviewers
like myself are wont to use. Indeed, it doesn't seem to be very 'poetic' (in the
traditional sense of the term) at all; it's unstructured to the point of
incoherence, violent, bizarre, crude, sprawling, energetic ... all told, more of
a delirious rant than a poem.

Yet poem it is, and a brilliant one at that. In the sheer _scale_ of its
undertaking it has very few peers [1], while the mode of expression is both
stunningly original and perfectly suited to the underlying emotion / theme /
state of mind.

An incredibly wild ride...

thomas.

[1] Dylan's 'Desolation Row' springs to mind, as does T. S. Eliot's 'The
Wasteland'.

[Digression]

'Howl' in its entirety is a very long poem indeed, and I meant to run only a
dozen or so versets... as it happened, each time I picked a good place to stop,
I'd discover something new and magical a line or two downstream, and would feel
compelled to extend my selection. I guess it just goes to show...

[Minstrels Links]

In previous posts I've mentioned Ginsberg's inheritance of Whitman's mantle;
you can read more about the former at poem #244, and about the latter at
poem #246.

'Desolation Row' can be read at poem #227

[Notes from the Net]

Allen Ginsberg's monumental poem was first heard in a series of famous readings
that
signaled the arrival of the Beat Generation of writers. The first of these
readings took place in October 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. It was
Allen Ginsberg's first public performance, and it made him instantly famous at
the age of twenty-nine.

The poem is part Walt Whitman, part Old Testament hellfire ranting, and
hundred-percent performance art. The lines in the famous first part of the poem
tumble over each other in long unbroken breaths, all adding to a single endless
sentence...

Ginsberg is describing his fellow travelers, the crazy, lonely members of his
community of misunderstood poet artists, unpublished novelists, psychotics,
radicals, pranksters, sexual deviants and junkies. At the time that he wrote
this he'd seen several of his promising young friends broken or killed...
[various lines in the poem] describe real-life events by people Ginsberg knew,
but the poem is especially dedicated to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg's crazy-insane
hyper-intellectual friend who he'd met in a mental hospital years before:

    -- [broken link] http://www.charm.net./~brooklyn/Poems/Howl.html

To accusations that "Howl" is a negative and destructive poem, Ginsberg
responded by saying:

"The title notwithstanding, the poem itself is an act of sympathy, not
rejection. In it I am leaping out of a preconceived notion of social 'values',
following my own heart's instincts - allowing myself to follow my own heart's
instincts, overturning any notion of propriety, moral 'value', superficial
'maturity', Trilling-esque sense of 'civilization', and exposing my true
feelings - of sympathy and identification with the rejected, mystical,
individual, even 'mad'.

"Howl is the first discovery as far as communication of feeling and truth, that
I made. It begins with a catalogue sympathetically and humanely describing
excesses of feeling and idealization."

"Only if you are thinking an outmoded dualistic puritanical academic theory
ridden world of values can you fail to see I am talking about realization of
love. LOVE."

"To call it work of nihilistic rebellion would be to mistake it completely. Its
force comes from positive religious belief and experience. It offers no
'constructive' program in sociological terms - no poem could. It does offer a
constructive human value - basically the experience - of the enlightment of
mystical experience - without which no society can long exist."

    -- [broken link] http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~slatin/20c_poetry/projects/gh/eberhart.html

[Afterthought]

This, by the way, is one poem that I'd _strongly_ advise you to read out loud.

A Supermarket in California -- Allen Ginsberg

(Poem #244) A Supermarket in California What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? -- Allen Ginsberg

A brilliantly hallucinatory poem - the images are almost Blakean in their
combination of dazzling brightness and strange mysticism... I keep thinking of
this marvellous photograph I once saw of Brian Wilson [1] in pinstriped pyjamas,
looking sublimely peaceful, in the aisle of a California health food store...

Allen Ginsberg has always shown remarkable facility in capturing the rhythms of
speech and action in sprawling and baroque (but never flabby) acres of words.
This quality is especially pronounced in today's poem: in paying homage to his
spiritual forebear Walt Whitman, Ginsberg comes closer to Whitman's grand oral
tradition than any other 20th century American poet (with the possible exception
of Carl Sandburg). You have only to compare the ebb and flow of his masterpiece
'Howl' [2] with the works of other practitioners of the art to realise how
effortlessly natural and graceful Ginsberg's words are. Beautifully and
powerfully done.

thomas.

[1] He of Beach Boys fame.
[2] Which, unfortunately, is far too long to use on the Minstrels... maybe I'll
run an extract from it some time...

[Critical Assessment]

Starting from William Carlos Williams' idea of a new American idiom and measure,
then reaching back to Whitman, Ginsberg arrived at what he calls his 'romantic
inspiration -- Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath'. What this means ... is the
freedom to be exuberant and incantatory, to catalogue at will, and to employ
free association of ideas in the context of sweeping religious utterance.
Ultimately, Ginsberg is the natural heir to Whitman, in his further exploration
of Whitman's long line [as in today's poem - t.], and in his preoccupation with
transcending the ego by containing, or partaking of, all experience, in a kind
of osmosis of the imagination.

... [Ginsberg] wanted to create a poetry that would not be literary, but would
make full use of everything in our daily lives. "When you approach the Muse,
talk as frankly as you would with yourself or your friends".

    -- 20th Century Poetry and Poetics, ed. Gary Geddes

[Biography]

Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926, in Paterson, New Jersey, to Naomi Ginsberg, a
Russian immigrant, and Louis Ginsberg, a lyric poet and schoolteacher. His life
from age seventeen until the publication of 'Howl and Other Poems' in 1956
included Columbia University, the merchant service, dishwashing, market
research, book reviewing, drugs, and travel to Texas, Denver, Mexico City and
the Yucatan. Between 'Howl' and 'Kaddish and Other Poems' (1961), Ginsberg
travelled to the Arctic by sea, to Venice, Tangiers, Amsterdam, Paris and
London, and read his poems at Oxford, Columbia and Chicago. After 'Kaddish', a
long poem written about the death of his mother, he recorded his poems in San
Francisco and departed for the Orient.

[Links]

This is actually the first Ginsberg poem I'm running (I know, very remiss of
me). But you can check out some of his roots and influences by navigating
through the links below:
Carl Sandburg's Chicago is the canonical example of Whitmanesque free verse in
the 20th century; you can read it at poem #5
William Blake's influence on modern poetry is incalculable; my favourite Blake
poem is Jerusalem, which you can read at poem #26
Although we haven't covered any of Walt Whitman's truly epic poems, an old
favourite is Oh Captain, My Captain, at poem #157