Ginsberg, Allen
(Newark, N.J. 1926-1997 New York, N.Y.) : Dichter
Subjects
Index of Names : Occident
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Literature : Occident : United States of America
Chronology Entries (9)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1955-1956 |
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. |
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| 2 | 1955-1984 |
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… |
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| 3 | 1955-1985 |
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. |
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| 4 | 1961-1962 | Gary Snyder travels with Allen Ginsberg six months in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. They visited the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala. | |
| 5 | 1982-1987 |
Ginsberg, Allen ; Snyder, Gary. The selected letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder [ID D29191]. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder ; Aug. 25 (1982). I'm due for Chinese UCLA Conference Sept 21-23… I'll be in N.Y. till September 15. Aren't you due to attend this Mainland Chinese Lit. Conference also ? Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder ; Sept. 10 (1982). Probably see you next week in L.A. at mainland Chinese writers' meeting. Robert Rees the UCLA organizer said you were invited. Letter from Gary Snyder to Allen Ginsberg ; Oct. 13 (1982) How was Chinese Disneyland ? [Ginsberg had gone to Disneyland with a group of visiting Chinese writers]… China writers conference : I'm very glad I went, will be corresponding with Lin Bin-yan. Do hope there's a chance to visit there next year. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder ; Nov. 8 (1982). Chinese spent all day at Disneyland – me too – Wu Qiang got lost, we found him 4:30 P.M. at exit gate where he waited. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder ; [ca. Febr. 24, 1983] When China ? I'm committed now to fall '83 but will maybe maybe have five weeks free August 15-September 23, 1983. Tho that may be too short a time. Orvill Schell says he'd like to come along on the poets' trip to China. Have you written Peking yet ? Any plans formulated ? Maybe could do it after December '83 anytime – spring '84 ? I'll be free from then on. Letter from Gary Snyder to Allen Ginsberg ; Nov. 22 (1983). Charles Leong wrote me and said you were coming but his emphysema would keep him from attending the meeting. He is old and frail now, but still writes a beautiful calligraphy, and very witty sharp letters on the evolution of Chinese communist culture and politics. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder ; Nov. 13 (1984). Airplane Wuhan to Beijing Successful trip Canton to Chungking. Poets there took me to cat at last in market shops, all different dishes, sweet and pork dumplings. Boat three days two nites comfortable two person cabin (charming basic lounge-windows at boat bow to see) (OK food too) and fourth and fifth class passengers sleeping on stairway landings, passageways, steerage and eight- and sixteen-person dorms. Yangtze Gorges vaster than Li River trip, and one magnificent hairpin bend of river around mountain – village hill-cliff – sharp mountain, a complete U-turn walled by immense peaks with grotesque mythic rock formations atop. River brown – then widened out on plains the last day. Inexpensive hotels, but was met and accompanied everywhere except for three days on river. Wuhan – fantastic hall of 500 life-size arhats intact. Your camera a blessing, thanks. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyer ; Dec. 2 (1984) [Baoding] I'm packing to leave Baoding and take trains to Shanghai (overnite sleeper). Enclosed 'Dagoba Brand' emblem for toilet paper – maybe that indicates industrial Marxist view of stupa. Baoding is 'real' China – non tourist town, no active temples open in all the 50,000,000 population of Hebei Province. Talked to some intelligent Christians and Allah followers who said they were all decimated during anti-rightist campaign beginning 1958. The later Cultural Revolution was deeper extension of that, like Ai Quing the poet was sent off in 1957-8 with a million others. Official figure for persecutions now. I heard, is 27,000,000 people plus their children's disgrace – other elder says twice that. Enclose some random papers – the 35 years gives account of present views. Apparently the Great Leap Forward was also a fiasco that ruined industry by decentralizing it into the hands of loudmouth hippie patty hacks. Production of iron went up but quality down so unusable. During Cultural Revolution 80 % of machine tool industry was crippled – and other industry and professions – so said Chinese man I met on Yangtze River Gorge boat, who'd written history of machine tool industry in Modern China - 'O' [opium] production, all imports, in 1880-1890. Students are terrifically affectionate and eager and shy. The cadre at 'Foreign Relations' branch of this university whom I paranoically thought a sour spy cop turned out tipsy at last nite's farewell banquet and revealed he was an old vaudeville trooper from Chinese opera, read a scene of old sage with beard, Li Po (Li Bai) poems about Yangtze Gorges and monkeys chattering, and ended with song of Mao. 'Show Covers all North China'… I spent another afternoon leisurely at the temple - here's more info on it – Sixth Patriarch's place you photo'd. Tho Buddhism seems stamped out, in talking with students and old Chinamen, the breath activity practice which seems officially OK is 'Ch'i Kung (Qigong) involving something parallel to 'Tso Chan' or belly-sitting- also involving the chakras. Do you know anything about the relationship between the 'Chan' and 'Ch'i Kung' styles of practice ? Maybe they got some kind of Zen here without anyone knowing it. Students do practice wushu and varieties of exquisite tai chi chuan so there is some awareness practice, very sophisticated, without the dharma except as theoretic Marxism provides bodhisattva turnabout of energy. Approaching Yangtze Gorges Two hours down river from Yichang / The rooster in the gallery / Crows dawn. Yangtze stopover at 7 P.M., boat waits till 3 A.M. and starts down the gorges to pass them in daylight. We ate the chicken that day I guess. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyer ; Shanghai Dec. 10 (1984). Our Writer's Association tour translator, Xu Ben, who met us in Süchow, came to listen to my lectures and brought me two copies of newspaper with your 'Maple Bridge' poem he'd translated, and a verse of mine I'd written for him but not kept copy. Enclosed the Süchow News. I'm slowly recovering from bronchitis by now, and getting active – visit Nanking this weekend, next weekend, Kunming I hope. Lecturing on Whitman is fun. Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyer ; Nov. 8 (1987). Our Chinese project has been set for fall 1988 and I've been in touch with Wang Meng and the Writer's Union in Beijing, they've ok'd it – now for the final selection of poets. Any last months' suggestions ? Letter from Gary Snyder to Allen Ginsberg ; Nov. 24 (1987). Am going from Lhasa to Kashgar across Tibet next fall, as co-leader on a trip. David Padwa coming too. Letter from Allen Gisberg to Gary Snyder ; Dec. 21 (1987). Lhasa-Kashgar trip ! I don't know if I've physical stamina! My left knee healing tho weak, lost some thigh muscle, taking physiotherapy. |
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| 6 | 1984.10.16-12.9 |
Gary Snyder travels in the Peoples' Republic of China as part of an American Academy of Arts & Letters delegation for a 4-day writers conference, as guest of the Writers' Union with Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Harrison Salisbury, William Gass, Francine du Plessix Gray. The American writers were taken to the most famous tourist destinations : Beijing, the Chinese Acrobat Theatre, the Imperial Palace, a section of the Great Wall. After a week in Beijing, the group went to Xian, to Shanghai, to see the Buddhist temples, the Tang gardens in Suzhou and Han Shan's Cold Mountain. After the other members of the mission went back to America, Allen Ginsberg stayed in China by himself for some time to have more communication with contemporary Chinese writers and a spiritual dialogue with great ancient Chinese poets. He wen to the universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Baoding and Guiling to read and instruct his own poems and other western poets. In this period he wrote more than ten poems : One morning I took a walk in China, Reading Bai Juyi, Improvisation in Beijing, I love old Whitman so, Black shroud. In these poems Ginsberg depicts his endearment of China and its profound culture. And the poems have been praised as opening a window for western readers to understand China. |
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| 7 | 1985 |
Ginsberg, Allen. China trip [ID D32503]. I went through China asking everybody I met what they really thought—- and found the general atmosphere is one of an opening up, of reform and new breath. In individual conversations, the Chinese are completely clear and Mozartean-minded, very friendly, and tell you everything they can about themselves. But you can only have a subtle, real, frank conversation on a one-to-one level. If you talk with three people, they'll be somewhat inhibited because it is considered anti-state activity to criticize Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader, or the socialist basis of the state, or to say anything funny about China's occupation of Tibet. When people talk about the Gang of Four, for example, they lift up their hand with five fingers as they say 'Gang of Four', meaning Mao Tse-tung was actually behind the four leaders blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, although that is still not officially said. In class, students ask very few questions except technical ones. They told me that anybody who asked too much, or too curious a question, would stand out as too individualistic and it might be noted in his dossier. They are also inhibited by a cultural timidity and traditional Confucian respect for authority. Sometimes they surprised me. One student near Shanghai borrowed a book and translated a large number of my erotic poems. When I asked him who he would show it to, he said, 'My girlfriend'. I asked him, 'What's your pleasure in that? ' He said, 'I'm young and I enjoy love. I'm interested in love.' But he said he couldn't show it to very many people; maybe one or two friends. The Chinese I met were thirsty for some kind of real emotion and frankness and feeling. They denied there is any sex life until people get married at 28. One guy told me, 'Well, people go to the park and rub elbows for hours. If a student is caught just making out, it could mean a mark in his dossier. If he is an English speaker, instead of being sent to the United States or Oxford, he might be sent to teach high school in the Gobi Desert or assigned to a provincial town and stuck there for the rest of his life because he didn't measure up to the moral standards of the community. So mostly they take showers or do Boy Scout exercises. Every morning they're up at 5:30, running around the soccer field, doing tai chi exercises. It's like the Moral Majority is running China. I was in China with a literary delegation sponsored by the University of California at Los Angeles and the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and invited by the Peking Writers Association to meet leading writers in China at a four-day conference. The subject of the conference was 'The Source of Inspiration,' a tricky title designed to dodge the doctrine of art as revolutionary propaganda and give Chinese and American writers a chance to talk about individual sources of inspiration and for them to air their ideas of liberty of expression. The best conversations were in private, on the side, and we Americans, being polite, didn't probe too deeply into Chinese censorship but made speeches about freedom of expression as a basis of art, hinting by example rather than criticism. The excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) are still very much a part of their lives. Some Chinese are worried that the 'open door' and the new free market might close down again, worried about whether the recent reforms are permanent, worried about what effect they will have on Chinese culture. Some intellectuals fear that the new technology China is buying might lead to a high-tech computer control system over the population, more efficient than the paper-shuffling bureaucracy. I spent a lot of my time among the intellectuals at the foreign languages departments of universities, so everybody had a story about the Cultural Revolution, about how they were sent out to the country as a Red Guard, or how their parents were fired from their jobs as translators or physicists, or their mothers sent off to the countryside, or how they themselves were exiled to clean latrines. Elderly physicists were forced to stand bowed over wearing dunce caps, answering questions from a bowed position day and night. Intellectuals were humiliated by such job assignments as cleaning night soil out of the 'streetside water coffin'. While I was there, there was a big self-examination within the party. Each party group had to check out the validity of the rumors about members' activities during the Cultural Revolution, rumors that somebody had used undue violence or zealotry in persecution of so-called 'bourgeois stinkers' – their neighbors. I went to a meeting of freshman English faculty. It was all discussion of the latest purification of the party, of all the miscreants and how to deal with the fact that half the faculty was not at the meeting and can't teach anyway because they don't speak English, having gotten their jobs for the 'correctness' of their Maoist views during the Cultural Revolution when Red Guards reigned. New they are dead wood but still occupy positions, so the faculty is only limping along on half the number of proper instructors and having to feed and house obsolete political hysterics. Almost every city in China was involved in the Cultural Revolution, so it's like a giant family problem as well as a political problem. In conversation, the Chinese express different emotions about the decade of upheaval. They feel bewilderment that China, which was the greatest civilization in the world, went through this period of self-degradation. Many people I spoke to remarked that the people who made the Cultural Revolution – the Red Guards, the professors who were informers – are now working side by side with their 'rehabilitated' victims. A typical comment was, 'The man who led the investigation of me and interrogated me for months on end in 1967 now has a lesser post than me : he's clerk in the English faculty. I see him every day in the office'. I asked him how he accepted that, and he told me, 'What should I do ? Where is he going to go ? Where am I going to go ? I can't ask that he be sent to jail; there'd be too many. We don't want to start another reign of violence. We're trying to get on with the future'. A lot of the Chinese knew my work from a translation of 'Howl' in the foreign language magazine. And they knew about the Beats—there was an essay on the Beat Generation by Fan Yi Zhao, a former Red Guard who had been burning dictionaries in the '60s and who is now taking his Ph.D. on Edmund Wilson at Harvard. The Chinese think of the Beat Generation very differently from Americans. They see it as a literary movement in rebellion against capitalism, or American imperialism, and partly in rebellion against simple government repression and censorship. They don't understand all of it, but they got a whiff of liberation, of Bohemian openness and freedom of speech, and that fits in with their current phase of getting rid of the heavy bureaucracy that controls literature. The Chinese are heartbreakingly in love with Americans. At a literary conference in Shanghai, Chen Nai-Sun, a very good young lady poet, was asked by the elder writers to be the first speaker. Talking about her ideal, she said that as a young girl she always dreamed of Gregory Peck and his movie adventures. 'I had colorful dreams of youth about him', she said. There's an ambiguousness among the Chinese. The people are trying to sort out how much of the sexual repression, how much of the travel limitations, how much of the hyper-organization is really a support system for keeping the whole society together, and how much is a control system to keep power at the top. But they rely on some kind of basic socialism to keep the country from falling back into the dog-eat-dog time when the European nations' free market—including Western nations peddling opium—dominated Chinese politics. In Shanghai, I supped with the president of Fudan University, a specialist in molecular physics. She had been locked in her office during the Cultural Revolution, given a menial job, kicked and left slightly crippled. Now she is a member of the ruling Central Committee. I told her, 'I have heard students everywhere and they all tell me they don't believe in communism, they're disillusioned'. She said, 'Not all think that way. It is a difficult problem. It's true many of the students are disillusioned with socialism. We have all suffered a great deal. We have to work together, we have to find solutions. I think things will change for the better'. I spent three weeks teaching at Baoding University in the provinces. It's not an open city, so there is no facade created for tourists, no international hotel, no marble-floored bathrooms, no heat in any of the houses—even in the teachers' houses—and soft-coal dust everywhere. There's soft-coal smog throughout China; it is the industrial energy source and used for cooking. Chinese students laughed or tittered whenever I said something outrageous. American teachers in China are allowed to say anything they want—presumably you wouldn't go so far as to denounce Deng or the Communist Party, but you can make jokes at their expense. I read students a William Carlos Williams poem, 'Danse Russe', that goes, If I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades, who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household. I explained that, despite the notion the Chinese have of American conformity, despite their view of the American businessman, this is what people are like at heart. After I finished teaching at Baoding, they held a farewell banquet for me and another teacher. An old cadre member at the dinner—whom I'd thought was a spy bureaucrat—turned out to have managed a Chinese opera company on tour in the mid-'50s. He sang to us, and then sentimentally recited a famous heroic poem by Mao that goes in part: The mountains are dancing silver serpents, The hills on the plain are shining elephants I desire to compare our height with the skies. We were Americans, we were going away and he wanted to manifest his great feeling for China. Our farewell was warm with tipsy embraces. |
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| 8 | 1985 |
Ginsberg. Allen. Allen Ginsberg on China today : poet's impression of country, people. In : The Boston globe ; Febr. 20 (1985). = Ginsberg, Allen. Allen Ginsberg takes a poetic look at China. In : San Francisco examiner ; Feb. 26 (1985). I went through China asking everybody I met what they really thought – and found the general atmosphere is one of an opening up, of reform and new breath. In individual conversations, the Chinese are completely clear and very friendly, and tell you everything they can about themselves. Buc you can only have a sublte, real, frank conversation on a one-to-one level. If you talk with three people, they'll be somewhat inhibited because it is considered antistate activity to criticize Deng Xiaoping. China's paramount leader, or the socialist basis of the state, or to say anything funny about China's occupation of Tibet. When people talk about the Gang of Four, for example, they lift up their hand with five fingers as they say 'Gang of Four', meaning Mao Tse-tung was actually behind the four leaders blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, although that is still not officially said. In class, students ask very few questions except technical ones. They told me that anybody who asked too much, or too curious a question, would stand out as too individualistic and it might be noted in his dossier. They are also inhibited by a cultural timidity and traditional Confucian respect for authority. Sometimes they surprised me. One student near Shanghai borrowed a book and translated a large number of my erotic poems. When I asked him who he would show it to, he said "My girlfriend." I asked him, "What's your pleasure in that?" He said, "I’m young and I enjoy love. I'm interested in love." But he said he couldn't show it to very many people: maybe one or two friends. The Chinese I met were thirsty for some kind of real emotion and frankness and feeling. They denied there is any sex life until people get married at 28. One guy told me, "Well, people go to the park and rub elbows for hours." If a student is caught just making out, tt could mean a mark in his dossier. If he is an English speaker, instead of being sent to the United States or Oxford he might be sent to teach high school In the Gobi Desert or assigned to a provincial town and stuck there for the rest of his life because he didn't measure up to the moral standards of the community. So mostly they take showers or do Boy Scout exercises. Every morning they're up at 5:30, running around the, soccer field, doing tai chi exercises. It's like the Moral Majority is running China. I was in China with a literary delegation sponsored by UCLA and the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and invited by the Peking Writers Assn. to meet leading writers in China at a four- day conference. The subject of the conference was "The Source of Inspiration," a tricky title designed to dodge the doctrine of art as revolutionary propaganda and give Chinese and American writers a chance to talk about the real reasons they write. In a sense, we were an excuse to allow, the Chinese writers to talk about Individ-ual sources of Inspiration and for them to air their ideas of liberty of expression. The best conversations were in private, on the side, and we Americans, being polite, didn't probe too deeply Into Chinese censorship but made speeches about freedom of expression as a basis of art, hinting by example rather than criticism. The excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) are still very much a part of their lives. Some Chinese are worried that the "open door" and the new free market might close down again, worried about whether the recent reforms are permanent, worried about what effect they will have on Chinese culture. Some Intellectuals fear that the new technology China Is buying might lead to a hi-tech computer control system over the population, more efficient than the paper-shuffling bureaucracy. I spent a lot of my time among the in-tellectuals at the foreign languages departments of universities, so everybody had a story about the Cultural Revolution, about how they were sent out to the country as a Red Guard, or how their parents were fired from their Jobs as translators or physicists, or their mothers sent off to the countryside or how they themselves were exiled to clean latrines. Almost every city In China was ivvolved In the Cultural Revolution, so it's like a giant family problem as well as a political problem. In conversation, the Chinese express different emotions about the decade of upheaval. They feel bewilderment that China, which was the greatest civilization in the world, went through this period of self-degradation. A lot of the Chinese knew my work from a translation of 'Howl' in the Foreign Language Magazine. And they knew about the Beats - there was an essay on the Beat Generation by Fan Yl Zhao, a former Red Guard who had been burning dictionaries in the '60s and who is now taking his PhD on Edmund Wilson at Harvard. The Chinese think of the Beat Generation very differently from Americans. They see it as a literary movement In rebellion against capitalism, or American imperialism, and partly in rebellion against simple government repression and censorship. They don't understand all of it, but they got a whiff of liberation, of Bohemian openness and freedom of speech, and that fits in with their current phase of getting rid of the heavy bureaucracy that controls literature. The Chinese are heartbreakingly in love with Americans. At a literary conference in Shanghai, Chen Nal-Sun, a very good young lady poet, was asked by the elder writers to be the first speaker. Talking about her ideal, she said that as a young girl she always dreamed of Gregory Peck and his movie adventures. 'I had colorful dreams of youth about him', she said. At these conferences, the elders often call on the younger people to speak, and refer to them as being fresher and less intimidated by the painful memories of the Cultural Revolution. The older writers tell you they are more wary because of their disillusionment with the past. The Chinese writers said they admired poets Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder – who was at the conference with me – Gregory Corso, and asked about Robert Creeley and T.S. Eliot. There's an ambiguousness among the Chinese. The people are trying to sort out how much of the sexual repression, how much of the travel limitations, how much of the hyper-organization is really a support system for keeping the whole society together, and how much is a control system to keep power at the top. But they rely on some kind of basic socialism to keep the country from falling back into the dog-eat-dog time when the European nations' free market – including Western nations peddling opium – dominated Chinese politics. I spent three weeks teaching at Baoding University in the provinces. It's not an open city, so there is no façade created for tourists, no international hotel, no marble-floored bathrooms, no heat in any of the houses – even in the teachers's houses – and soft-coal dust everywhere. There's soft-coal smog throughout in China ; it is the industrial energy source and used for cooking. After I finished teaching at Baoding, they held a farewell banquet for me and another teacher. An old cadre member at the dinner – whom I'd thought was a spy bureaucrat – turned out to have managed a Chinese opera company on tour in the mid-50s. He sang to us, and then sentimentally recited a famous herois poem by Mao that goes in part : 'The mountains are dancing silver serpents, The hills on the plain are shining elephants I desire to compare our height with the skies'. We were Americans, we were geoing away and the wanted to manifest his great feeling for China. Our farewell was warm with tipsy embraces. |
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| 9 | 1996 |
Interview with Allen Ginsberg ; 8.11.1996. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/interviews.htm. Alen Ginsberg : First of all, open forum in poetry, rather than a closed forum. It's like when you split the atom, you get energy. So we were following Whitman and William Carlos Williams and the imagists and objectivists in technique, rather than the academic folks who were having a metronomic beat. That happened in painting, poetry, music and all the arts. And that involved candor and spontaneity, spontaneous composition, a classic thing from Tibet, Japan, China, not recognized here as classic because people weren't scholarly enough, so they thought it was some home-made spontaneous prosody, but it was the great tradition of Milarapa, the Tibetan poet. |
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Bibliography (10)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1980-1985 |
[Ginsberg, Allen]. Hao jiao. Jinsibao ; Zheng Min yi. Übesetzung von Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. In : Wai guo xian dai pai zuo pin xuan. Vol. 3 [ID D16726]. [Öffentlich vorgetragen 1955 in der Six Gallery in San Francisco]. 嚎叫 |
Publication / YuanK2.57 |
|
| 2 | 1984 |
Ginsberg, Allen. Improvisation in Beijing. (1984). In : Ginsberg, Allen. Cosmopolitan greetings : poems, 1986-1992. (New York, N.Y. : HarperCollins, 1994). http://lumpy-pudding.tumblr.com/post/58322922/improvisation-in-beijing-by-allen-ginsberg. |
Publication / Gin2 |
|
| 3 | 1984 |
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947-1980. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1984). http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/onlinepoems.htm. |
Publication / Gin3 |
|
| 4 | 1985 | Ginsberg, Allen. China trip. In : San Jose mercury news ; Febr. 20 (1985). | Publication / Gin10 |
|
| 5 | 1986 | Ginsberg, Allen. White shroud : poems 1980-1985. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1986). | Publication / Gin11 |
|
| 6 | 1991 |
[Ginsberg, Allen]. Kadixu : mu qin wan ge. Jinsiboge zhu ; Zhang Shaoxiong yi. (Guangzhou : Hua cheng chu ban she, 1991). (Xian dai san wen shi ming zhu yi cong). [Collected poems, 1947-1980]. 卡第绪 : 母亲挽歌 |
Publication / Gin5 | |
| 7 | 1992 |
[Ginsberg, Allen]. Wo de li ming li ge : xian dai pai zhi hou ying yu shi ge 105 shou. Jinsibao deng zhu ; Huang Liaoyuan yi. (Guangzhou : Hua cheng chu ban she, 1992). (20 shi ji wai guo wen xue jing cui cong shu ; 2). 我的黎明俪歌 : 现代派之后英语诗歌105首 |
Publication / Gin6 |
|
| 8 | 2000 |
[Ginsberg, Allen]. Jinsiboge shi xuan = Selected poems (1947-1997). Ailun Jinsiboge zhu ; Wen Chu'an yi. (Chengdu : Sichuan wen yi chu ban she, 2000). 金斯伯格诗选 |
Publication / Gin4 | |
| 9 | 2000 | Ginsberg, Allen. World trade organization wto : status of China's trade commitments to the u. (Darby, Pa. : Diane Pub Co, 2000). | Publication / Gin9 |
|
| 10 | 2009 |
Ginsberg, Allen ; Snyder, Gary. The selected letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Ed. by Bill Morgan. (Berkeley, Calif. : Counter Point, 2009). http://books.google.ch/books?id=frxgXY_BvqAC&pg=PA257&lpg=PA257 &dq=gary+snyder+in+china+1984&source=bl&ots=T_nhVzzeDq&sig= KOQRgV9SoA8mOTztMUUCJF2SjcA&h=de&sa=X&ei=gRL9UMqUIMv 44QS4zoHwCA&ved=0CGoQ6AEwBg#v=snippet&q=china&f=false. |
Publication / Sny5 |
Secondary Literature (3)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1972 |
Cheung, Dominic. Dang dai Meiguo shi feng mao. (Taibei : Huan yu chu ban she, 1972). (Chang chun teng wen xue cong kan ; 10). [Betr. Allen Ginsberg; Charles Olson; Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Gregory Corso; Gary Snyder; Robert Lowell]. 當代美國詩風貌 |
Publication / Gin7 | |
| 2 | 1996 |
Li, Si. Kua diao de yi dai : Jinsibao, Keluyake, Boluosi ren sheng yu wen xue de wan ge = The beat generation. (Haikou : Hainan chu ban she, 1996). [Betr. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs]. 垮掉的一代金斯堡克魯亚克伯罗斯人生与文学的挽歌 |
Publication / Gin8 | |
| 3 | 2012 |
Min, Yu. Allen Ginsberg and China. In : Theory and practice in language studies ; vol. 2, no 4 (2012). http://ojs.academypublisher.com/index.php/tpls/article/view/tpls0204850855. |
Publication / Gin1 |
|