“Apprenticing with Allen Ginsberg: The Object Is to See Clearly” Naropa Bulletin, Fall 1980
Apprenticing with Allen Ginsberg: The Object Is to See Clearly
I:
When I arrived at Naropa Institute in November, 1979, I was told that Allen wanted to see me in the morning. But the next day when he opened the door and asked me in, it was immediately clear that he had no idea who I was at all. Still, he went about serving me tea and engaging me in polite conversation, the kind peculiar to people unexpectedly thrown together in a room. We searched for something in common.
I told him about my first “real” poetry reading. I was working in a bookstore and decided to set up a reading series. My poetry professor at the university recommended a particular local poet to start, and I called him and he said sure.
I was about twenty years old and had never met a “real” poet before and so when he arrived I nervously showed him to the reading table and fled outside. At first I was worried that no one would show up, and then I was worried that there wasn’t going to be enough room.
The poet that night was Jim Scully, and he read from a collection of poems (“Santiago Poems”) written after arriving in Chile the day after Allende was murdered. The poems told the chronological story of a young Quechean scholar arriving in the center of incredible horror—real horror—in a voice so restrained it was almost cold. The stories were of shadows walking down the center of the street after dark with their hands over their heads, of a human ear left on a table as decoration, of having to step over bloated and swollen corpses left by the river on his way to the Musee dex Beaux Artes, of barbed wire and broken glass and detention camps, the story of Victor Jara singing in the Stadio even after they’d cut off his hands, and of meeting Neruda’s widow, who sat waiting in a darkened window for her husband to return.
I listened so hard there were times I didn’t breathe. I had no idea where it would end or how much longer I’d be able to stand it.
When I tried to explain the affect it had on me to hear such loaded emotional information reported in such a matter-of-fact manner, that reminded Allen of a reading by William Carlos Williams in the early fifties at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At one point, Allen, in the middle of an ordinary sentence (the ordinariness of our conversations always lulled me into a false sense of security), suddenly leapt up and shouted the end of Williams’s poem “The Clouds,” which ascends through a series of comparisons, ending with “lunging upon/a pismire, a conflagration, a ……. “— and the poem ended with a gesture, a shrug of Allen’s shoulders, a confusion. Allen looked at me and said, “I realized he was talking, just talking.”
I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but I suddenly shouted out, “But beautiful talk!”
“NO!” Allen threw his hands over his head and bellowed. “No! No, no, no, no, NO! Not beautiful talk. Not beautiful talk! You missed the whole point! Just talk! TALK-talk!”
II:
Our second meeting never got around to looking at the poems I’d left him, but he’d read them over and written comments, which I took home to look over. One poem had a lightly-drawn “X” all the way through the second stanza. The poem was only three stanzas to begin with and, reading it over and over both ways, I was certain it didn’t work without the second and, in my mind, pivotal stanza.
When I asked him about it at our next meeting he said, “Well, there’s nothing in this stanza. These other stanzas have THINGS in them; this is just some abstraction about … it’s just some abstraction about other abstractions.” Then he got an idea: “What were you DOING when you thought this?”
I went back in my memory five years to the afternoon of the poem and began remembering details about the scene as they came to mind, describing the pictures in broken phrasing, staring into his white walls as if into a movie screen. Allen prodded my memory with a few precise questions about details; minute details of movement, placement, and color.
Then it was over and I turned and saw Allen bent over, writing surreptitiously under the cover of his desk. Then he looked up at me and handed me the piece of paper he’d been working on. “Well, it’s not great but it’s better.”
There were several lines of incomplete, unruly images, like a rapidly accelerating slideshow, which presented visually what I’d only tried to say. I was only using half of language. And, in addition, I was thrilled that Allen Ginsberg had written a stanza of a poem of mine. “Boy, I wish I could write like that!”
Allen screamed: “I just wrote down what you said! That’s the poem … this … I don’t know WHAT this is, but this is the poem.” Then he leaned forward and until we were eye to eye, “You’ve got to learn to be your own secretary. You’ve got to learn to accurately transcribe your own sense impressions.”
III:
Once I brought him a couple of ragged pages written the night before. I hadn’t even had a chance to go over most of it, except the first stanza, but I’d brought the entire poem. Allen didn’t stop where I asked him to, after the first stanza, but continued reading. There were uncorrected typos and I began to lose the structure in the middle of the poem—for entire pages the text wasn’t even arranged in lines, it was just gushes of language, thoughts, impressions, memories, emotions, events as I remembered them but all out of chronology, the references too personal to be understood.
Allen read it with an interest he’d never shown anything I’d brought him before. Every once in a while he’d look up and ask me a quick, clarifying question—Was Henry in love with me? What did I mean Craig overdosed on L.S.D.? That’s impossible! Where did I get the image of the father reading in the kitchen? Did Michael’s mother really have cancer?—and be back to the poem before I’d finished answering. I was making apologies for it. I was really embarrassed.
“Well, I think you’ve got pay dirt here,” he said when he finished. But I couldn’t hear him because I was nervously trying to explain the piece as something I was working on, something I hadn’t yet turned into a poem.
“But it’s clear,” he said and began explaining actions and motives that I wasn’t even aware of—obscure motives and feelings that at first I thought were just Allen’s projections, but over the next couple of days I realized were absolutely true. My conscious mind, if it had tried to write the poem, didn’t have enough information. Or it didn’t have the right information. The answers were hidden from me but were present in my memories because I REMEMBERED THEM. Something about them had caught my attention. And, anyway, who cares if the story ten years on is rightly or wrongly remembered? Our memories are all we have—what could we replace them with? A blank? Someone else’s memories?
IV:
I’d written my first Chinook poem—one of those strange, sudden, powerful winds that rush across the plains and crash into the Rocky Mountains every January, tearing the roofs off of buildings. I woke up that morning to the curtains swirling into the room, knocking over a vase which poured a loud splash of water across the table and onto the wooden floor. The cowbells and wind chimes were all ringing and the windows rattled in their frames. Then, in slow motion, a candy wrapper floated up past my second-story window and into my field of vision. It hung there, buoyed by the wind, as if a paper wing.
I forget how I first described this image in a poem, but Allen wasn’t satisfied. We tried a couple of different ways and none seemed right. Then the phone rang and I waited, looking out the window, trying to come up with a fresh idea. I thought back to the candy wrapper floating past my window—the winglike folds, the sense of weightlessness, how it hung there about the size of a finch.
Allen got off the phone and sat down. “Well,” he said, moving papers around the desk, “where were we?”
“I was trying to describe a piece of paper drifting past my window.”
I pretended to think. Finally, in a downbeat and understated way I suggested, “Well, I thought maybe ‘drifting up past my window like a fragile bird.’”
There was always an undercurrent of tension in our meetings because I felt slightly uneasy, as if I wasn’t worthy of his attention or that I would melt under it and be exposed as a non-poet. It was a time in my life when I was doing a lot of pretending. For example, I was pretending to be cheerful. And I was putting a lot of energy into these bluffs, hoping no one would notice.
Alien looked at me with that odd smile of his where his right eye squints and his left eye opens wide and flat and sparkles, his left lip curling into a ridiculous smile. He looked at me as if I was completely exposed, as if he could see into the very core of me and it was something immensely amusing, and I didn’t like the feeling.
“You’re kidding.”
Never in my life has a phone rung at a better time.
I spent the first five minutes of that phone call going through an accelerating interior monologue that consisted of equal parts self-pity and anger, of variations on the theme “I try so hard, you expect too much, can’t you see how hard I’m trying?”
The phone call went on for days. I realized I wasn’t going to recapture my composure and if I tried to pretend nothing had happened I’d undoubtedly go insane and do something we’d both regret. So I picked up my papers and without saying good-bye, without even turning around, walked off his porch.
I spent a lot of time immobile over the next week—looking at windows, staring through walls, gawking at my dinner plate as if something alien and indecipherable. I stopped going to class. I couldn’t write. I fled from the phone. I didn’t see anyone. I’d been exposed. I lacked a “poetic eye.” I was a failure. An impostor. A fool.
After about a week of this I was still sitting on my bed staring into space when some part of me separated from my interior monologue long enough to realize I was really bored with it. And about the same time I became aware of an undercurrent to my thoughts in a part of me that had nothing to do with thought. Maybe I always translated this energy into thought in order to experience it but before it became words it seemed to be pure energy. This energy seemed to be the core of me, the beam of light that projected the movie of my life.
If there was a serpent in this garden it was that I immediately tried to turn it into a poem. I got out of bed and, trying too hard not to think, began to write from that part of me. I didn’t turn out to be much of a poem, but they were the first lines I’d written that came out of my chest and not my forehead—so honest that in typing them over I immediately began to censor them.
V:
We were going over some of the poems I’d transcribed out of his journals when we came to a line that went something like “Icicle branches and frosted windows, but warm beside my rattling kitchen radiator.” He stared at it for a long time and then looked up and said, “What should that be—‘but’ or ‘and’?”
I was caught by surprise and kind of panicked. I wanted to have the right answer—the best answer—but as I went through the drawers in my head they were all empty. Finally, I ran out of drawers and ended in this empty mental space and I heard a voice in my head saying, “Well … read the line!” So instead of looking in my head for the answer I decided to read the line a couple of times: “Icicle branches and frosted windows, but warm beside my rattling kitchen radiator.” “Icicle branches and frosted windows, and warm beside my rattling kitchen radiator.” … Suddenly I knew the answer. “Well, if you use ‘and,’ it’s like you have what’s on both sides of the line—you have the icicles and the frost and you also have the radiator and the warmth in your kitchen as one picture—but if you use ‘but’ it’s as if you cancel out everything in the first half of the line and you just have the warmth.” Allen leaned over and read the line again and said, “Yeah, you’re right,” and he changed the “but” into an “and” in pencil and we went on as if nothing extraordinary had happened.
VI:
For the last session of the Basic Poetry class, Allen brought in three guitarists. The idea was that we would go around the room, spontaneously composing blues lyrics for “fun.”
It didn’t sound like fun to me. I hated the whole spontaneous thing because I was so bad at it. And so, as Allen made his way down the first row, I tried to think of a way to leave the classroom without being noticed. But I was in the last row (as always) and nobody was leaving and so I was trapped.
By the time he was in the second row, I had mentally divided the elapsed time by the number of presentations thus far in order to get the average length of each presentation, and then I multiplied that figure by the number of students left to determine the chance that we might run out of time before it was my turn. But it was a 3-hour class and the math was not in my favor, so I began to compose my “spontaneous” lyric in my head. I pretended to watch Allen as he moved through the classroom, student to student, laughing, bouncing, shouting out encouragement, but all the time I was repeating my “improvised” lyric in my head over and over again, cutting and polishing and rearranging the words, or trying out a new lyric entirely.
Two hours later, he was finally in my row—and then he was three students away, and then he was two students away, and then I was Next. Susan Edwards sang her verse and Allen nodded and then he was standing next to me, and the guitar line was coming to an end, and Allen’s fingers were on my shoulder. I tilted my head, gazing off into infinity, and recited my memorized lyric as if I were composing on the spot: “When people are unhappy, it’s you they criticize … when people are unhappy, it’s you they criticize . . . uh . . . but when people sing of beauty, the beauty’s in their eyes.” And then it was over, I’d done it. I heaved a great theatrical sigh of relief. “No,” Allen said, “Do another.”
VII:
The last meeting of the term was several hours of work on some journal transcriptions. I was burnt out and wanted to go home. Allen put the papers away and said, “Well, what did you bring today?” We tinkered a bit and Allen asked if I knew the work of Charles Reznikoff. I wasn’t very familiar.
He went to the bookshelf and pulled his chair beside me in the fading light of the living room window. He flipped through the first few pages. Then he began to read, looking up occasionally as some line or image or word struck him. His voice was clear and when he looked up his eyes were bright. His reading voice was identical with his speaking voice but stronger, richer. Nothing separated his reading from our conversation of only a moment ago except that this was an extremely refined and condensed monologue.
I began to shiver a little. There was something strange about this. I found that I could “lean into” what he was reading and whenever I did I felt bursts of energy in my chest and head. In fact, relaxing all the way and sinking into it was too much; I felt literally in danger of some sort of seizure. So, instead I’d relax and lean into it and then get a buzz and get scared and back off and then, feeling stronger, relax into it further.
And through it all Allen’s rich voice and Reznikoff’s poetry, a poetry of intense emotional ocean rolls in a quiet, understated, almost urban voice: Movies of gray and off-white and deep, cracking black.
When he looked up between poems I was afraid he’d notice my hands shaking and my heels tapping the floor. And then my head falling forward and the thought crossed my mind that I was a short step away from completely losing control, that I was in danger of falling forward onto the floor. And since Allen had pulled his chair so close to mine, I realized if I fell it would be right into his lap.
Allen read for more than twenty minutes. Everything in the room seemed calm, clear, and very real; the color of the words, the wind that moved through Allen as he read, the coming dark. He stopped and brought the covers of the book together. “Well,” he said, “that’s it.”
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