China and the West

Wang Shenfu erhält den B.A. in English des Dartmouth College.

David Rafael Wang erhält den B.A. in English des Darmouth College.

Gary Snyder began to translate Han Shan.

Snyder, Gary. Endless streams and moutains. In : Orion ; vol. 14, no 3 (1955).
Commenting on a line from Kanglikui's colophon to the scroll, Snyder observes :
"The remark leads a viewer to turn the handscroll slowly and to journey through the streams and mountains and into the mists and clouds. The scroll is read from right to left and one is affected by the nature as if actually there. The journey a viewer makes through the canvas is marked clearly : There is a path that can followed even if, at times, there are alternate paths to create variety, and always along a passage, a reader experiences a harmony with nature."

San Francisco Renaissance and Beat Generation.
The San Francisco Renaissance poets tended to be characterized by an 'outdoor ethic', an interest in hiking, cycling and working as woodsmen to fund their studies. Natural meditation techniques tend to be preferred to synthesized drug use of the city Beats. Jack Kerouac appears to point towards the greater sobriety of the San Francisco scene when he noted that his contact with it helped to turn him from a 'hot' to a 'cool' hipster, in particular after he was engaged in Buddhist meditation.
For the early Beats, the significance of 'the 1955 Gallery Six Poetry Reading' lies in their discovery of Buddhism as a means of spiritual training and new poetic excitement. This discovers is, more or less, connected with Snyder's Zen Buddhist practice, his reading of Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese classics and poetry, and his mountaineering life. Allen Ginsbergs first meeting with Snyder in 1955 helped to expand his poetic vision to Eastern religions – Buddhism and Hinduism. Kerouac's close contact with Snyder pushed him to study Buddhist sutras systematically and he even planned to adopt a celibate, meditative life like a Chinese monk. The Gallery reading encouraged the early Beats to accept Buddhism as a valid alternative spirituality and to take the Chinese hermit-poet lifestyle as a valid mode of countercultural expression.
For the early Beats, the significance of 'the 1955 Gallery Six Poetry Reading' lies in their discovery of Buddhism as a means of spiritual training and new poetic excitement. This discovers is, more or less, connected with Snyder's Zen Buddhist practice, his reading of Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese classics and poetry, and his mountaineering life. Allen Ginsbergs first meeting with Snyder in 1955 helped to expand his poetic vision to Eastern religions – Buddhism and Hinduism. Kerouac's close contact with Snyder pushed him to study Buddhist sutras systematically and he even planned to adopt a celibate, meditative life like a Chinese monk. The Gallery reading encouraged the early Beats to accept Buddhism as a valid alternative spirituality and to take the Chinese hermit-poet lifestyle as a valid mode of countercultural expression.
Encouraged by Snyder, Kerouac wrote an original Buddhist-cum-Beat sutra The scripture of the golden eternity (1956), which was 'one of the most successful attempts yet to catch emptiness, nonattainment and egolessness in the net of American poetic language. His friendship with Snyder and others was portrayed in his novel The dharma bums, which merged Hand Shan and Snyder into one : an American Han Shan and a Beat hero. Kerouac's interest and belief in Buddhism came to his great spiritual and intellectual passions. Though a casual Buddhist practitioner, he was very serious and enthusiastic.
Kerouac's popularizing of Buddhism had a strong impact upon other Beats, among Ginsberg acknowledged his first knowledge about Buddhism. Not until the 1955 poetry reading, when Ginsberg met with Snyder and Philip Whalen he understand that Zen could be seen as part of a global cultural context with a deep resonance in relation to art and the human condition. Ginsberg started to attend D.T. Suzuki and Allan Watts's lectures on Zen Buddhism and was deeply impressed by 'satori' after he read Suzuki's writing. Whalen was much influenced by Snyder in almost every aspect.
Whalen, Snyder and Lew Welch began their poetic careers as the Reed campus trio and soon became influential figures within the San Francisco Renaissance. The were influence by William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Watts and Suzuki. After the 1955 poetry reading, Whalen, Snyder, Ginsberg and Kerouac became the main members of the San Francisco Beat scene.

Conference to commemorate the centenary of the publication of Leaves of grass by Walt Whitman in Beijing, Nov. 25 (1955).
Speech by Zhou Yang : "In Whitman's poetry, democracy, freedom, and equality are his fundamental ideas. Victory and happiness are his persisten beliefs which mankind will eventuall achieve." In : Wen yi bao ; no 22 (Nov. 1955).
Forum in Shanghai.
Speech by Ba Jin : "Whitman's poetry is still a great inspiring impetus to the Chinese people who are marching towards socialism today." In : Jie fang ri bao ; Dec. 4 (1955).

[Whitman, Walt]. Cao ye ji xuan. Chu Tunan yi. [ID D29782].
Li Xilao : Chu Tunan said in his preface that Whitman is 'the most distinguished poet of realism and democracy because of his strong opposition to slavery, his aversion to racial discrimination, his love for the laboring people, and his deep sympathy for the oppressed, and what is more, his recognition of the hyprocisy of bourgeois democracy and his extolling of the European revolution and the struggle of the proletariat'.
Mark Cohen : The first postface made no mention of Whitman's style or form. The postface of the 1978 edition at least mentions that Whitman created a new 'structure and style'. The original edition suggested that Whitman's poetry 'serves as a warning flare to ward off America's ruling reactionary groups'. The 1978 edition recognizes that these same 'reactionary groups' have since become China's ally. In its place it states that Whitman was not only against 'corrupt bourgeois culture', 'racial oppression' but also 'hegemony'. Hegemony is the Chinese byword for the Soviet Union. New notations of the translator included Whitman's working class background, especially the various professions he worked in, and also his portrayal of Whitman as cognizant of 'the hypocrisy and trickery of the bourgeois' as well as the 'power and greatness of the European revolutions and Paris Commune'.

Yuan, Shuipai. Chang qing de cao ye [ID D29891].
"When we are reading the poems in which Whitman believed that mankind would reach a better state, we feel intimately as if he were our contemporary. As he imagined a century ago, we feel that his spiritual hand, transcending time and space, was touching our bodies softly."

Zhou, Yang. Ji nian Cao ye ji he Tang Jihede [ID D29894].
Zhou Yang keynoted Whitman's 'revolutionary character', 'the progressive significance' of his poetry, and 'the most wonderful contribution' he made to the world culture.

Wilder, Thornton. John Marin 1870-1953. In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays [ID D30361].
The great artist teaches us a new entrance into the visible world, a new homage, and a new knowledge. Each of the master landscapists has informed our eyes… the geography, the geology, the history of the earth that lies behind the surface of city and valley ; the Chinese masters, the landscape as background for a philosopher's meditation…

William Faulkner was invited by the Chinese government to come to Beijing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of grass. Faulkner declined the invitation.

Graves, Robert. The troll's nosegay. In : Graves, Robert. Collected poems, 1955. (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1955).
http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/robert_graves_2004_9.pdf.
By Heaven he hated tears: he'd cure her spleen -
Where she had begged one flower he'd shower fourscore,
A bunch fit to amaze a China Queen.

Graves, Robert. The China plate [ID D31742].
From a crowded barrow in a street-market
The plate was ransomed for a few coppers,
Was brought gleefully home, given a place
On a commanding shelf.
'Quite a museum-piece' an expert cries
(Eyeing it through the ready pocket-lens)-—
As though a glass case would be less sepulchral
Than the barrow-hearse!
For weeks this plate retells the history
Whenever an eye runs in that direction:
'Near perdition I was, in a street-market
With rags and old shoes.'
'A few coppers'—here once again
The purchaser's proud hand lifts down
The bargain, displays the pot-bank sign
Scrawled raggedly underneath.
Enough, permit the treasure to forget
The emotion of that providential purchase,
Becoming a good citizen of the house
Like its fellow-crockery.
Let it dispense sandwiches at a party
And not be noticed in the drunken buzz,
Or little cakes at afternoon tea
When cakes are in demand.
Let it regain a lost habit of life,
Foreseeing death in honourable breakage
Somewhere between the kitchen and the shelf—
To be sincerely mourned.

Kenneth Rexroth and China : general.
Quellen :
Anthologie raisonnée de la littérature chinoise. [Ed. par] G[eorges] Margouliès [ID D7077].
Ayscough, Florence. Travels of a Chinese poet Tu Fu [ID D32199].
Ayscough, Florence. Tu Fu : the autobiography of a Chinese poet, A.D. 712 [ID D10473].
Cent quatrains des T'ang. Trad. du chinois par Lo Ta-kang [Luo Dagang] [ID D32200].
Du, Fu. Du Du xin jie. (Beijing : Zhonghua shu ju, 1961). 讀杜心解
Du, Fu. Du shi jing quan. (Taipei : Yi wen yin shu guan, 1971). 杜詩鏡銓
Hervey de Saint-Denys, Léon. Poésies de l'époque des Thang [ID D2216].
Hung, William. Du shi yin de = A concordance to the poems of Tu Fu. Vol. 2. [ID D10218].
Hung, William. Tu Fu : China’s greatest poet [ID D10264].
Mathews, R[obert] H[enry]. A Chinese-English dictionary dictionary [ID D8646].
Payne, Robert. The white pony [ID D32201].
Florilège des poèmes Song, 960-1277 après J.-C. Traduit du chinois par George Soulié de Morant [ID D7180].
Tu, Fu [Du, Fu]. Gedichte. Übersetzt von Erwin von Zach [ID D4951].

Sekundärliteratur
1984
Ling Chung : Kenneth Rexroth has never taken any formal lessons in the Chinese language. He has perceived an important aspect of Chinese poetics. Chinese landscape poetry often presents nature in its pure, original forms, and the interference of the poet's subjective consciousness is reduced to a minimum. As a result, the reader is brought to a closer contact with nature itself and is put in a state of mind quite similar to being placed in what Rexroth called a 'poetic situation'. He not only applies this rule to the writing of his own poetry, but also to the translation of Chinese poetry.
1988
Shu Yunzhong : Kenneth Rexroth not only translated and imitated Chinese poetry conscientiously but also argued strongly for the merit of Chinese literature in his literary criticism. As a poet, he repeatedly admitted he had saturated himself with Chinese poetry for decades, especially with the poetry of Du Fu. Rexroth's deviation from the original poem in both his translation and imitation of Chinese poetry is contextual and cultural rather than textual. More significantly, because of Rexroth's influence in contemporary American literature, study in this line can further lead us to understand how classical Chinese poetry was adapted to the contemporary American literary milieu.
Underlying Rexroth's poetry and translation is the central concept of 'communion'. This concept to Rexroth means a sensual, personal relationship between human beings. Poetry, including translation of poetry, is an expression of embodiment of this communion. Rexroth was an indefatigable critic of the conformist impulses that dominate the contemporary world. Influenced by an existentialist concept of alienation, he thought that in contemporary society human beings become more like things than persons, and the individual, as a result of his alienation from other human beings as well as from himself, loses himself in the end. Poetry, it seems to him, is a remedy that can deliver people from this plight.
Rexroth finds that Chinese literature, especially Chinese classical poetry, is very much to his taste because it possesses many characteristics which fit into his concept of 'communion'. The most important characteristic in Chinese poetry, it seems to him, is its humanness.
The Chinese philosophers Rexroth liked to talk about are Laozi and Zhuangzi. At first it seems that this is because these two Taoist philosophers deal with the concept of communion in their writings. In Rexroth's poetry the universe does not have its own meaning without human intervention. Ironically, he thinks this is a genrally held idea in Chinese culture. Once we realize the separation between man and the universe in Rexroth's poetry, we can better understand his cosmology which, at first glance, seems to bear some resemblance to Taoism because he sometimes uses Taoist terminology.
We may conclude that Rexroth's understanding of classical Chinese poetry is based on his central concept of 'communion', which is conditioned by his Western cultural heritage as well as by a perception of existential need in the contemporary social situation. Therefore his deviation from the Chinese original texts in both his translation and imitation of classical Chinese poetry should be explained in terms of his social milieu, personal philosophy and political learning.
2004
Lucas Klein : Every life in poetry is in some ways a development of a voice, and aesthetic identity that marks a poem as written by a certain poet. Even when poets actively rebel against the limits of a single unity, they are nonetheless working within the confines this voice entails. For Rexroth, whose stylistic shifts are soft and whose aesthetic is remarkably steady throughout his poetic career, each poem can illuminate all other poems in a cross-referencing art of light, as each poem benefits from the creation of the context to which it contributes. The reader who approaches this oeuvre is then granted a full view, and my task has been to show how, via prose and translation and notes, Du Fu and Li Qingzhao constitute a significant portion of Rexroth's complete aesthetic context. The key works are sensibility, sexuality, and spirituality. In focusing on these elements in the poetry of Du Fu and Li Qingzhao, Rexroth in turn shifts the focus into these elements within his own poetry. For Rexroth, and for the development of his poetics, the focal point of his contextual arc is his sensibility – his nervous system as completely open as Du Fu's – towards the combination of the sexual and the spritiual, creating a body of work whose love poems are, like those of Li Qingzhao, actually mystical.

Aiken, Conrad. A letter from Li Po [ID D30880].
I
Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind
announces autumn, and the equinox
rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.
Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,
looking for friendship or an old love's sleeve
or writing letters to his children, lost,
and to his children's children, and to us.
What was his light? of lamp or moon or sun?
Say that it changed, for better or for worse,
sifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk
a slant of witch-light; on the pure text
a slant of genius; emptying mind and heart
for winecups and more winecups and more words.
What was his time? Say that it was a change,
but constant as a changing thing may be,
from chicory's moon-dark blue down the taut scale
to chicory's tenderest pink, in a pink field
such as imagination dreams of thought.
But of the heart beneath the winecup moon
the tears that fell beneath the winecup moon
for children lost, lost lovers, and lost friends,
what can we say but that it never ends?
Even for us it never ends, only begins.
Yet to spell down the poem on her page,
margining her phrases, parsing forth
the sevenfold prism of meaning, up the scale
from chicory pink to blue, is to assume
Li Po himself: as he before assumed
the poets and the sages who were his.
Like him, we too have eaten of the word:
with him are somewhere lost beyond the Gorge:
and write, in rain, a letter to lost children,
a letter long as time and brief as love.

II
And yet not love, not only love. Not caritas
or only that. Nor the pink chicory love,
deep as it may be, even to moon-dark blue,
in which the dragon of his meaning flew
for friends or children lost, or even
for the beloved horse, for Li Po's horse:
not these, in the self's circle so embraced:
too near, too dear, for pure assessment: no,
a letter crammed and creviced, crannied full,
storied and stored as the ripe honeycomb
with other faith than this. As of sole pride
and holy loneliness, the intrinsic face
worn by the always changing shape between
end and beginning, birth and death.
How moves that line of daring on the map?
Where was it yesterday, or where this morning
when thunder struck at seven, and in the bay
the meteor made its dive, and shed its wings,
and with them one more Icarus? Where struck
that lightning-stroke which in your sleep you saw
wrinkling across the eyelid? Somewhere else?
But somewhere else is always here and now.
Each moment crawls that lightning on your eyelid:
each moment you must die. It was a tree
that this time died for you: it was a rock
and with it all its local web of love:
a chimney, spilling down historic bricks:
perhaps a skyful of Ben Franklin's kites.
And with them, us. For we must hear and bear
the news from everywhere: the hourly news,
infinitesimal or vast, from everywhere.

III
Sole pride and loneliness: it is the state
the kingdom rather of all things: we hear
news of the heart in weather of the Bear,
slide down the rungs of Cassiopeia's Chair,
still on the nursery floor, the Milky Way;
and, if we question one, must question all.
What is this ‘man'? How far from him is ‘me'?
Who, in this conch-shell, locked the sound of sea?
We are the tree, yet sit beneath the tree,
among the leaves we are the hidden bird,
we are the singer and are what is heard.
What is this ‘world'? Not Li Po's Gorge alone,
and yet, this too might be. ‘The wind was high
north of the White King City, by the fields
of whistling barley under cuckoo sky,'
where, as the silkworm drew her silk, Li Po
spun out his thoughts of us. ‘Endless as silk'
(he said) ‘these poems for lost loves, and us,'
and, ‘for the peachtree, blooming in the ditch.'
Here is the divine loneliness in which
we greet, only to doubt, a voice, a word,
the smoke of a sweetfern after frost, a face
touched, and loved, but still unknown, and then
a body, still mysterious in embrace.
Taste lost as touch is lost, only to leave
dust on the doorsill or an ink-stained sleeve:
and yet, for the inadmissible, to grieve.
Of leaf and love, at last, only to doubt:
from world within or world without, kept out.

IV
Caucus of robins on an alien shore
as of the Ho-Ho birds at Jewel Gate
southward bound and who knows where and never late
or lost in a roar at sea. Rovers of chaos
each one the ‘Rover of Chao,' whose slight bones
shall put to shame the swords. We fly with these,
have always flown, and they
stay with us here, stand still and stay,
while, exiled in the Land of Pa, Li Po
still at the Wine Spring stoops to drink the moon.
And northward now, for fall gives way to spring,
from Sandy Hook and Kitty Hawk they wing,
and he remembers, with the pipes and flutes,
drunk with joy, bewildered by the chance
that brought a friend, and friendship, how, in vain,
he strove to speak, ‘and in long sentences,' his pain.
Exiled are we. Were exiles born. The ‘far away,'
language of desert, language of ocean, language of sky,
as of the unfathomable worlds that lie
between the apple and the eye,
these are the only words we learn to say.
Each morning we devour the unknown. Each day
we find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose,
a sunflower splendor of which none knows the source.
This cornucopia of air! This very heaven
of simple day! We do not know, can never know,
the alphabet to find us entrance there.
So, in the street, we stand and stare,
to greet a friend, and shake his hand,
yet know him beyond knowledge, like ourselves;
ocean unknowable by unknowable sand.

V
The locust tree spills sequins of pale gold
in spiral nebulae, borne on the Invisible
earthward and deathward, but in change to find
the cycles to new birth, new life. Li Po
allowed his autumn thoughts like these to flow,
and, from the Gorge, sends word of Chouang's dream.
Did Chouang dream he was a butterfly?
Or did the butterfly dream Chouang? If so,
why then all things can change, and change again,
the sea to brook, the brook to sea, and we
from man to butterfly; and back to man.
This 'I,' this moving ‘I,' this focal ‘I,'
which changes, when it dreams the butterfly,
into the thing it dreams of; liquid eye
in which the thing takes shape, but from within
as well as from without: this liquid ‘I':
how many guises, and disguises, this
nimblest of actors takes, how many names
puts on and off, the costumes worn but once,
the player queen, the lover, or the dunce,
hero or poet, father or friend,
suiting the eloquence to the moment's end;
childlike, or bestial; the language of the kiss
sensual or simple; and the gestures, too,
as slight as that with which an empire falls,
or a great love's abjured; these feignings, sleights,
savants, or saints, or fly-by-nights,
the novice in her cell, or wearing tights
on the high wire above a hell of lights:
what's true in these, or false? which is the ‘I'
of 'I's'? Is it the master of the cadence, who
transforms all things to a hoop of flame, where through
tigers of meaning leap? And are these true,
the language never old and never new,
such as the world wears on its wedding day,
the something borrowed with something chicory blue?
In every part we play, we play ourselves;
even the secret doubt to which we come
beneath the changing shapes of self and thing,
yes, even this, at last, if we should call
and dare to name it, we would find
the only voice that answers is our own.
We are once more defrauded by the mind.
Defrauded? No. It is the alchemy by which we grow.
It is the self becoming word, the word
becoming world. And with each part we play
we add to cosmic Sum and cosmic sum.
Who knows but one day we shall find,
hidden in the prism at the rainbow's foot,
the square root of the eccentric absolute,
and the concentric absolute to come.

VI
The thousand eyes, the Argus ‘I's' of love,
of these it was, in verse, that Li Po wove
the magic cloak for his last going forth,
into the Gorge for his adventure north.
What is not seen or said? The cloak of words
loves all, says all, sends back the word
whether from Green Spring, and the yellow bird
'that sings unceasing on the banks of Kiang,'
or 'from the Green Moss Path, that winds and winds,
nine turns for every hundred steps it winds,
up the Sword Parapet on the road to Shuh.'
‘Dead pinetrees hang head-foremost from the cliff.
The cataract roars downward. Boulders fall
Splitting the echoes from the mountain wall.
No voice, save when the nameless birds complain,
in stunted trees, female echoing male;
or, in the moonlight, the lost cuckoo's cry,
piercing the traveller's heart. Wayfarer from afar,
why are you here? what brings you here? why here?'

VII
Why here. Nor can we say why here. The peachtree bough
scrapes on the wall at midnight, the west wind
sculptures the wall of fog that slides
seaward, over the Gulf Stream.
The rat
comes through the wainscot, brings to his larder
the twinned acorn and chestnut burr. Our sleep
lights for a moment into dream, the eyes
turn under eyelids for a scene, a scene,
o and the music, too, of landscape lost.
And yet, not lost. For here savannahs wave
cressets of pampas, and the kingfisher
binds all that gold with blue.
Why here? why here?
Why does the dream keep only this, just this C?
Yes, as the poem or the music do?
The timelessness of time takes form in rhyme:
the lotus and the locust tree rehearse
a four-form song, the quatrain of the year:
not in the clock's chime only do we hear
the passing of the Now into the past,
the passing into future of the Now:
hut in the alteration of the bough
time becomes visible, becomes audible,
becomes the poem and the music too:
time becomes still, time becomes time, in rhyme.
Thus, in the Court of Aloes, Lady Yang
called the musicians from the Pear Tree Garden,
called for Li Po, in order that the spring,
tree-peony spring, might so be made immortal.
Li Po, brought drunk to court, took up his brush,
but washed his face among the lilies first,
then wrote the song of Lady Flying Swallow:
which Hsuang Sung, the emperor, forthwith played,
moving quick fingers on a flute of jade.
Who will forget that afternoon? Still, still,
the singer holds his phrase, the rising moon
remains unrisen. Even the fountain's falling blade
hangs in the air unbroken, and says: Wait!

VIII
Text into text, text out of text. Pretext
for scholars or for scholiasts. The living word
springs from the dying, as leaves in spring
spring from dead leaves, our birth from death.
And all is text, is holy text. Sheepfold Hill
becomes its name for us, anti yet is still
unnamed, unnamable, a book of trees
before it was a book for men or sheep,
before it was a book for words. Words, words,
for it is scarlet now, and brown, and red,
and yellow where the birches have not shed,
where, in another week, the rocks will show.
And in this marriage of text and thing how can we know
where most the meaning lies? We climb the hill
through bullbriar thicket and the wild rose, climb
past poverty-grass and the sweet-scented bay
scaring the pheasant from his wall, but can we say
that it is only these, through these, we climb,
or through the words, the cadence, and the rhyme?
Chang Hsu, calligrapher of great renown,
needed to put but his three cupfuls down
to tip his brush with lightning. On the scroll,
wreaths of cloud rolled left and right, the sky
opened upon Forever. Which is which?
The poem? Or the peachtree in the ditch?
Or is all one? Yes, all is text, the immortal text,
Sheepfold Hill the poem, the poem Sheepfold Hill,
and we, Li Po, the man who sings, sings as he climbs,
transposing rhymes to rocks and rocks to rhymes.
The man who sings. What is this man who sings?
And finds this dedicated use for breath
for phrase and periphrase of praise between
the twin indignities of birth and death?
Li Yung, the master of the epitaph,
forgetting about meaning, who himself
had added 'meaning' to the book of >things,'
lies who knows where, himself sans epitaph,
his text, too, lost, forever lost ...
And yet, no,
text lost and poet lost, these only flow
into that other text that knows no year.
The peachtree in the poem is still here.
The song is in the peachtree and the ear.

IX
The winds of doctrine blow both ways at once.
The wetted finger feels the wind each way,
presaging plums from north, and snow from south.
The dust-wind whistles from the eastern sea
to dry the nectarine and parch the mouth.
The west wind from the desert wreathes the rain
too late to fill our wells, but soon enough,
the four-day rain that bears the leaves away.
Song with the wind will change, but is still song
and pierces to the rightness in the wrong
or makes the wrong a rightness, a delight.
Where are the eager guests that yesterday
thronged at the gate? Like leaves, they could not stay,
the winds of doctrine blew their minds away,
and we shall have no loving-cup tonight.
No loving-cup: for not ourselves are here
to entertain us in that outer year,
where, so they say, we see the Greater Earth.
The winds of doctrine blow our minds away,
and we are absent till another birth.

X
Beyond the Sugar Loaf, in the far wood,
under the four-day rain, gunshot is heard
and with the falling leaf the falling bird
flutters her crimson at the huntsman's foot.
Life looks down at death, death looks up at life,
the eyes exchange the secret under rain,
rain all the way from heaven: and all three
know and are known, share and are shared, a silent
moment of union and communion.
Have we come
this way before, and at some other time?
Is it the Wind Wheel Circle we have come?
We know the eye of death, and in it too
the eye of god, that closes as in sleep,
giving its light, giving its life, away:
clouding itself as consciousness from pain,
clouding itself, and then, the shutter shut.
And will this eye of god awake again?
Or is this what he loses, loses once,
but always loses, and forever lost?
It is the always and unredeemable cost
of his invention, his fatigue. The eye
closes, and no other takes its place.
It is the end of god, each time, each time.
Yet, though the leaves must fall, the galaxies
rattle, detach, and fall, each to his own
perplexed and individual death, Lady Yang
gone with the inkberry's vermilion stalk,
the peony face behind a fan of frost,
the blue-moon eyebrow behind a fan of rain,
beyond recall by any alchemist
or incantation from the Book of Change:
unresumable, as, on Sheepfold Hill,
the fir cone of a thousand years ago:
still, in the loving, and the saying so,
as when we name the hill, and, with the name,
bestow an essence, and a meaning, too:
do we endow them with our lives?
They move
into another orbit: into a time
not theirs: and we become the bell to speak
this time: as we become new eyes
with which they see, the voice
in which they find duration, short or long,
the chthonic and hermetic song.
Beyond Sheepfold Hill,
gunshot again, the bird flies forth to meet
predestined death, to look with conscious sight
into the eye of light
the light unflinching that understands and loves.
And Sheepfold Hill accepts them, and is still.

XI
The landscape and the language are the same.
And we ourselves are language and are land,
together grew with Sheepfold Hill, rock, and hand,
and mind, all taking substance in a thought
wrought out of mystery: birdflight and air
predestined from the first to be a pair:
as, in the atom, the living rhyme
invented her divisions, which in time,
and in the terms of time, would make and break
the text, the texture, and then all remake.
This powerful mind that can by thinking take
the order of the world and all remake,
will it, for joy in breaking, break instead
its own deep thought that thought itself be dead?
Already in our coil of rock and hand,
hidden in the cloud of mind, burning, fading,
under the waters, in the eyes of sand,
was that which in its time would understand.
Already in the Kingdom of the Dead
the scrolls were waiting for the names and dates
and what would there irrevocably be said.
The brush was in the hand, the poem was in the love,
the praise was in the word. The ‘Book of Lives'
listed the name, Li Po, as an Immortal;
and it was time to travel. Not, this year,
north to the Damask City, or the Gorge,
but, by the phoenix borne, swift as the wind,
to the Jade Palace Portal. There
look through the clouded to the clear
and there watch evil like a brush-stroke disappear
in the last perfect rhyme
of the begin-all-end-all poem, time.

XII
Northwest by north. The grasshopper weathervane
bares to the moon his golden breastplate, swings
in his predicted circle, gilded legs and wings
bright with frost, predicting frost. The tide
scales with moon-silver, floods the marsh, fulfils
Payne Creek and Quivett Creek, rises to lift
the fishing-boats against a jetty wall;
and past them floods the plankton and the weed
and limp sea-lettuce for the horseshoe crab
who sleeps till daybreak in his nest of reed.
The hour is open as the mind is open.
Closed as the mind is closed. Opens as the hand opens
to receive the ghostly snowflakes of the moon, closes
to feel the sunbeams of the bloodstream warm
our human inheritance of touch. The air tonight
brings back, to the all-remembering world, its ghosts,
borne from the Great Year on the Wind Wheel Circle.
On that invisible wave we lift, we too,
and drag at secret moorings,
stirred by the ancient currents that gave us birth.
And they are here, Li Po and all the others,
our fathers and our mothers: the dead leaf's footstep
touches the grass: those who were lost at sea
and those the innocents the too-soon dead:
all mankind
and all it ever knew is here in-gathered,
held in our hands, and in the wind
breathed by the pines on Sheepfold Hill.
How still the Quaker Graveyard, the Meeting House
how still, where Cousin Abiel, on a night like this,
now long since dead, but then how young,
how young, scuffing among the dead leaves after frost
looked up and saw the Wine Star, listened and heard
borne from all quarters the Wind Wheel Circle word:
the father within him, the mother within him, the self
coming to self through love of each for each.
In this small mute democracy of stones
is it Abiel or Li Po who lies
and lends us against death our speech?
They are the same, and it is both who teach.
The poets and the prophecies are ours:
and these are with us as we turn, in turn,
the leaves of love that fill the Book of Change.

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…

Allen Ginsberg and China : general
Allen Ginsberg turned to the Eastern world under the influence of Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder. He found his spiritual home in Buddhism, in Chinese Ch'an and Chinese poetics. He is not only familiar with the translated Chinese poems by them, but also experienced the Chinese culture in person. He has read the classics of Chinese Buddhism and the works of Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi. In addition to the poems of Li Bo, Du Fu, Su Shi, Wang Wei and Bai Juyi, he has read the works of modern Chinese poets such as Guo Moruo, Ai Qing, Shu Ting and Bei Dao. Ginsberg had also learned some Chinese verse skills such as image juxtaposition and employed them in his own poems. He said he 'tried to keep the language sufficiently dense in one way or another – use of primitive naïve grammar, elimination of prosey articles & syntactical sawdust, juxtaposition of cubist style images, or hot rhythm'. Of various means, perhaps the most imposrtant, aside from rhythm, is 'the image juxtaposition'.
When he visited China in 1984, he enjoyed reading the poems of Bai Juyi because he found they had common sentiment in Ch'an Buddhism. Many of Ginsberg's poems in the late period take as their subject Buddhist Meditation and ideas.
Allen Ginsberg, as well as other poets and writers of the Beat Generation, have found their last home for their anchorless heart in the classical Chinese poems and the Chinese thoughts and philosophy. And through their poems the essence of Chinese culture is also accepted and anderstood by many other Western people and influences their thoughts and life as well.

Letter from Jack Kerouac to his literary agent :
"From now on all my writing is going to have a basis of Buddhist teaching, free of all worldly and literary motives."

Harold Z. Schiffrin erhält den M.A. in Chinese Studies an der University of California, Berkeley.

Ausstellung Ten years of socialist construction in Czechoslovakia in Beijing. Zdenek Sklenar reist an die Ausstellung und trifft Ai Qing, Li Keran und Guo Moruo.
The journey gave him a taste of Chinese art and lifestyle. His "Chinese" paintings represent over one-third of all his oil paintings : Chinese landscape, theatre, ornaments etc. He kept a diary with notes and sketched visual impressions.