China and the West

Ginsberg, Allen. Poems.
1955
Howl. In : Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and other poems. (San Francisco : City Lights Pocket Bookshop, 1956).
http://staff.oswego.org/ephaneuf/web/Beat%20Miscellany/Ginsberg,%20Allen%20-%20Howl%20%28Complete%20Text%20with%20Notes%29.pdf.
… suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room…
Who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown rain…
Who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer…
Who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Roky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific…
Guguin isn't a painter, he has only made Chinese images…

1956
America
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. ..
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources. ..
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen…

1960
Kaddish In : Kaddish and other poems 1958-1960. (San Francisco, Calif. : City Lights Books, 1961).
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179391.
… and what comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom
Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed…
with your eyes of Russia
with your eyes of no money
with your eyes of false China…

1972
CIA Dope Calypso
In nineteen hundred forty-nine
China was won by Mao Tse-tung
Chiang Kai Shek's army ran away
They were waiting there in Thailand yesterday

1981
Airplane blues
Hanoi hates Peking
Where the God Mao has died

1982
A public poetry
The fact is, the Russians are sissies
And Chinese big yellow sissies too

1983
Arguments
You invaded Turkey and killed all the Amenians !
I did not ! You invaded China got them addicted to Opium !

1984
Black Shroud
Kunming Hotel, I vomited greasy chicken sandwiched in moldy bread, on my knees before the white toilet retching, a wave of nausea, bowels and bladder loose black on the bathroom floor like my mother groaning in Paterson 1937. I went back to bed on the twelfth floor, city lights twinkling north,
Orion in his belt bright in the sky, I slept again…

1984
I love old Whitman so
Middle aged thoughtful, ten thousand noticings of shore ship or street,
workbench, forest, household or office, opera –
that conning his paper book again to read aloud to those few Chinese
boys & girls…
I skim Leaves beginning to end, this year in the Middle Kingdom
marvel his swimmers huffing naked on the wave

1984
Improvisation in Beijing [ID D32486].
I write poetry because the English word Inspiration comes from Latin Spiritus, breath, and 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 a 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, Counfucius 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 parinivana in 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.

1984
In my kitchen in New York
This is the only space in the apartment
big enough to do T'ai chi…
Playing the guitar – do I haven enough $
to leave the rent paid while I'm
in China ?

1984
One Morning I Took a Walk in China
Students danced with wooden silvered swords, twirling on hard packed muddy earth
as I walked out Hebei University's concrete North Gate,
across the road a blue capped man sold fried sweet dough-sticks, brown as new boiled doughnuts in the gray light of sky, past poplar tree trunks, white washed cylinders topped
with red band the height of a boy—Children with school satchels sang & walked past me
Donkeys in the road, one big one dwarf pulling ahead of his brother, hauled a cart of white stones another donkey dragged a load of bricks, other baskets of dirt—
Under trees at the crossing, vendors set out carts and tables of cigarettes, mandarin Tangerines, yellow round pears taste crunchy lemony strange, apples yellow red-pinked, short bananas half black'd green, few bunches of red grapes—and trays of peanuts, glazed thumbsized crab-apples 6 on a stick, soft wrinkled yellow persimmons sat dozens spread on a cloth in wet mud by the curb— cookpots on charcoal near cornerside tables, noodle broth vegetables sprinkled on top
A white headed barber shook out his ragged towel, mirror hung on red nail in the brick wall where a student sat, black hair clipped at ears straight across the back of his neck
Soft-formed gritty coal pellets lay drying on the sidewalk and down the factory alley, more black mats spread,
Long green cabbages heaped by the buildingside waiting for home pot, or stacked on hand-tractor carts the market verandah a few yards away—
Leeks in a pile, bright orange carrots thick & rare, green unripe tomatoes, parsley, thin celery stalks awful cheap, potatoes & fish— little & big heads chopped or alive in a tub, tiny fresh babies or aged carp in baskets—
a half pig on a slab, two trotters stick out, a white burlap shroud covered his body cleaved in half— meat of the ox going thru a grinder, white fat red muscle & sinew together squeezed into human spaghetti—
Bicycles lined up along the concrete walk, trucks pull in & move out delivering cows dead and fresh green-stalked salad— Downstreet, the dry-goods door—soap, pencils, notebooks, tea, fur coats lying on a counter—
Strawberry jam in rusty-iron topped jars, milk powder, dry cookies with sweetmeats
inside dissolve on the tongue to wash down fragrant black tea—
Ah, the machine shop gateway, brick walled latrine inside the truck yard —enter, squat on a brick & discharge your earth or stand & pee in the big hole filled with pale brown squishy droppings an hour before—
Out, down the alleyway across the street a factory's giant smokestack, black cloud-fumes boiling into sky gray white with mist I couldn’t see that chimney a block away, coming home
past women on bicycles heading downtown their noses & mouths covered with white cotton masks.

1984
Reading Bai Juyi
I
I’m a traveler in a strange country
China and I've been to many cities
Now I'm back in Shanghai, days
under warm covers in a room with electric heat—
a rare commodity in this country—
hundreds of millions shiver in the north
students rise at dawn and run around the soccerfield
Workmen sing songs in the dark to keep themselves warm
while I sleep late, smoke too much cough,
turn over in bed on my right side
pull the heavy quilt over my nose and go back
to visit the dead my father, mother and immortal
friends in dreams. Supper's served me,
I can go out and banquet, but prefer
this week to stay in my room, recovering
a cough. I don't have to sell persimmons on the streetcurb
in Baoding like the lady with white bandanna'd head
Don't have to push my boat oars around a rocky corner
in the Yangtze gorges, or pole my way downstream
from Yichang through yellow industrial scum, or carry water
buckets on a bamboo pole over my shoulder
to a cabbage field near Wuxi—I'm famous,
my poems have done some men good
and a few women ill, perhaps the good
outweighs the bad, I'll never know.
Still I feel guilty I haven’t done more;
True I praised the dharma from nation to nation But my own practice has been amateur, seedy —even I dream how bad a student I am—
My teacher's tried to help me, but I seem to be lazy and have taken advantage of money and clothes my work's brought me, today I'll stay in bed again & read old Chinese poets—
I don't believe in an afterworld of god or even another life separate from this incarnation Still I worry I'll be punished for my carelessness after I'm dead—my poems scattered and my name
forgotten and my self reborn a foolish workman freezing and breaking rocks on a roadside in Hebei.
II
'Ignorant and contentious' I spent lunch arguing about boys making love with a student.
Still coughing, reclusive, I went back to bed with a headache, despite afternoon sun streaming through the French windows weakly, to write down these thoughts.
Why've I wanted to appear heroic, why strain to accomplish what no mortal could—
Heaven on earth, self perfection, household security, & the accomplishment of changing the World.
A noble ambition, but that of a pathetic dreamer.
Tomorrow if I recover from bronchitis
Ill
Lying head on pillow aching
still reading poems of Tang roads
Something Bai said made me press my finger
to my eyes and weep—maybe his love
for an old poet friend, for I also
have gray on my cheek and bald head
and the Agricultural poet's in the madhouse this week
a telegram told me, more historical
jackanapes maybe tragic maybe comic
I'll know when I come home around the world.
Still with heavy heart and aching head I read on
till suddenly a cry from the garden reminded me
of a chicken, head chopped off running circles spurting blood
from its neck on farm yard dirt, I was eleven years old,
or the raptured scream of a rabbit—I put down my book
and listened carefully to the cry almost drowned
by the metal sound of cars and horns—It was a bird
repeating its ascending whistle, pipe notes burst
into a burble of joyful tones ending wildly
with variable trills in swift succession high and low
and high again. At least it wasn't me, not my song,
a sound outside my mind, nothing to do with my aching brow.
IV
I lay my cheek on the pillow to nap and my thoughts floated against the stream up to Zhong Xian west of the Three Gorges where Bai Juyi was Governor.
'Two streams float together and meet further on and mingle their water. Two birds fly upward beneath the ninth month's cold white cloud.
Two trees stand together bare branched rooted in the same soil secretly touching.
Two apples hung from the same bough last month and disappeared into the Market.'
So flowed my mind like the river, like the wind.
'Two thoughts have risen together in dream therefore Two worlds will be one if I wake and write'.
So I lifted my head from my pillow and Woke to find I was a sick guest in a vast poor kingdom A famous visitor honored with a heated room, medicines, special foods and learned visitors inquiring when I'd be well enough to lecture my hosts on the musics and poetics of the wealthy Nation I had come from half way round the
V
China Bronchitis
I sat up in bed and pondered what I'd learned while I lay sick almost a month:
That monks who could convert Waste to Treasure
were no longer to be found among the millions
in the province of Hebei. That The Secret of the Golden Lotus
has been replaced by the Literature of the Scar, nor's hardly
anybody heard of the Meditation Cushion of the Flesh
That smoking Chinese or American cigarettes makes me cough;
Old men had got white haired and bald before
my beard showed the signs of its fifty-eight snows.
That of Three Gorges on the Yangtze the last one downstream is a hairpin turn between thousand-foot-high rock mountain gates. I learned that the Great Leap Forward caused millions of families to starve, that the Anti-Rightist Campaign against bourgeois 'Stinkers' sent revolutionary poets to shovel shit in Xinjiang Province a decade before the Cultural Revolution drove countless millions of readers to cold huts and starvation in the countryside Northwest.
That sensitive poetry girls in Shanghai dream
of aged stars from Los Angeles movies. That down the alley
from the stone bridge at Suzhou where Jiang Ji spent
a sleepless night wakened by the bell of Cold Mountain Temple,
water lapping against his boat a thousand years ago,
a teahouse stands with two-stringed violin and flutes
and wooden stage. That the gold in the Sun setting
at West Lake Hangzhou is manufactured from black Soft Coal.
That roast red-skinned juicy entire dogs with eyes
bulging from their foreheads hang in the market at Canton
That So-Chan meditation's frowned on and martial health
Qi-Gong's approved by Marxist theoreticians. That men in
deep-blue suits might be kind enough to file a report
to your Unit on gossip they've heard about your secret loves.
That 'Hang yu hang yu! ' song is heard when workmen labor yodeling on bamboo scaffolds over the street outside all night. That most people have thought 'We're just little men, what can we count' since the time of Qin Shi Huang.
Tho the body's heavy meat's sustained
on our impalpable breath, materialists
argue that Means of Production cause History:
once in power, materialists argue what
the right material is, quarrel with each other,
jail each other and exile tens of millions
of people with 10,000 thoughts apiece.
They're worse than Daoists who quibbled about immortality. Their saving grace this year's that all the peasants are fed.
VII Transformation of Bai's 'A Night in Xingyang'
I grew up in Paterson New Jersey and was just a virginal kid when I left forty years ago. Now I'm around the world, but I did go back recently to visit my stepmother.
Then I was 16 years old, now I'm fifty eight—
All the fears I had in those days—I can still see myself
daydreaming reading N.Y. Times on the Chinese rug on the living room floor on Graham avenue. My childhood houses are torn down,
none of my old family lives here any more,
mother under the ground in Long Island, father underground
near the border of Newark where he was born.
A highway cuts thru the Fair Street lot where I remember our earliest apartment, & a little girl's first kiss. New buildings rise on that street, all the old stores along Broadway have disappeared.
Only the Great Falls and the Passaic river flow noisy with mist then quietly along brick factory sides as they did before.


1984
World Karma
China be China, B.C. Clay armies underground the First Han Emperor's improvement on burying his armies alive Later Ming tombs buried excavator architects
& Mao officially buried 20,000,000 in Shit Freeze & Exile, much Suicide especially bilingual sophisticates in the molecular structure of surfaces, machine-tool engineers and Poetic intelligentsia questioned his Imperial vision of Pure Land future communist afterworld…
In 200 years America'll have a billion people like neon China…