“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” Allen Ginsberg
7 October 1955 – Allen Ginsberg gives his first public reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. The effect upon the audience was electric, and the poem was interpreted as a sharp rebuke to both unbridled American imperialism and pervasive socio-economic inequities in the United States. Its opening lines set the general tone of the work, which is a combination of outrage and awe, savagery and beauty:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .”
When “Howl” was published shortly after this reading, Ginsberg was arrested and tried for obscenity, though the articulate Judge Clayton W. Horn sensibly dismissed the charges and added, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?”
Though he is generally regarded as the greatest and most innovative poet of the Beat Generation, a careful reading of “Howl” reveals that Allen Ginsberg was the spiritual and poetic heir of Walt Whitman, especially in the way that both men employed free verse forms to celebrate the self, champion individual liberty, and defend the cause of democracy in America against people and institutions that sought to undermine it. They also had in common a delight in the unabashedly erotic expressions of human life and a desire to investigate all manner of spiritual experiences. Finally, in much of their best poetry, both men admonished their fellow citizens to live up to the lofty ideals at the heart of their Great Republic.
At the close of “Part III” of “Howl,” his fury spent, Ginsberg addresses writer Carl Solomon, whom he had met in a psychiatric hospital and to whom the poem is dedicated, though the lines, which are among his loveliest lyrics, are also an implicit invitation to his readers:
“I’m with you:
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”
Lovely lines, indeed, and a gentle summons to Americans, not just to read “Howl,” but to study and love their national literature, to study and love their nation’s history, beyond political cant, religious ideology, and corporate poltroonery, and thereby learn to respect and in some authentic and critical way, love themselves. Thank you, Allen Ginsberg
Congratulations to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet who was today awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Academy said it recognized Transtromer “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” Here is Transtromer’s poem “Midwinter,” which is fairly typical of his bleak but elegant work:
“A blue light
radiates from my clothing.
Midwinter.
Clattering tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled across the border.”
Solomon Popli Linda (1909-1982), also known as Solomon Ntsele, was a South African Zulu musician, singer, and composer who wrote “Mbube,” which is better-known as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Solomon first recorded the a cappella song with his group the Evening Birds in 1939 as “Wimoweh,” and, despite some claims to the contrary, he insisted that it was an original composition based on the traditional Zulu singing style.
Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds - 1941
There are 160 versions of Solomon’s song, including one by Miriam Makeba, but the most famous is “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” recorded by the Tokens in 1961 and which became a #1 hit. Solomon was paid just 10 shillings for recording his song, and though he eventually earned just over $8,000 in royalties, it is estimated that he should have been paid at least $15 million.
If your soul thirsts for beauty, that thirst will be slaked when you listen to Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds singing the original version of “Wimoweh”:
Gheorghe Zamfir is a Romanian musician who plays an expanded version of the traditional Romanian pan flute.
If your soul thirsts for beauty, listen to Zamfir’s incredibly lovely rendition of “doina de jale” by following the link below. I promise that your thirst will be slaked.
Died on 23 September 1973 – Pablo Neruda, the pen name of Chilean poet Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. Neruda was a master of many styles, but he is best known for his love poems, perhaps especially those in his 1924 collection “Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair.” He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924. As will be evident in the brief selections from his work that follow, Neruda expressed his passionate and unabashedly erotic engagement with life through a poetic idiom that is at once evocative, obscure, powerful, enigmatic, and hauntingly beautiful.
"Love is so short, forgetting is so long."
“I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this:
where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.” Sonnet XVII
“Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.” “Perhaps not to be is to be without your being”
“But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.”
"In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?"
Let us bid farewell to torrid summer and welcome lovely autumn with a great ode written in its honor.
“TO AUTUMN,” by John Keats
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
16 September 1977 – Ringo releases “Drowning in the Sea of Love,” and Western Civilization reaches its emotional peak. Here are some of the lyrics from this timeless ballad (have tissues ready):
“I’ve been down one time,
Drowning in the sea of love
I’ve been down one time,
And I’ve been down two times,
But now I’m drowning in the sea of love.”
Ringo, when it comes to the expression of noble sentiments, you, sir, are an All-Starr.
I now offer a remedy for the silliness of the Ringo song, one that I hope will also serve as a suitable apology for my shabby pun.
In truth there is only one “Sea of Love,” and it was written in 1959 by Phil Baptiste. Several artists have performed this love song, and I will briefly describe my three favorite renditions.
Phil Phillips: This is actually songwriter Baptiste performing under his stage name with his backup group, The Twilights. Thanks to Phillips’ great voice, this version is beautifully lilting and hauntingly lovely – an American classic that manages to be more than the sum of its lyrical parts.
Cat Power (the stage name of Charlyn Marshall): Hers is a minimalist version of the song, but it nonetheless manages to be impressively focused, almost painfully personal, and somehow deeply poignant.
Tom Waits: He sounds as if he were singing to someone – who might not even be present – in a bar after a few too many bourbons and cigarettes, but if you want to hear love vocally deconstructed and then filtered through the grit of adult experience, listen to his version of the song. http:/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3W-5nwr1aY
Died on 12 September 2001 – Victor Wong, Chinese-American actor who appeared in many films, including “Dim Sum,” “The Last Emperor,” and “Tremors,” but who is best-remembered for his role as the bus-driving sorcerer Egg Shen in John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China.”
Wong was a well-educated, multi-talented man who led an uncommonly interesting life. He studied political science and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and then, after having decided that he needed to investigate spiritual matters, Wong explored theology at the University of Chicago, where his teachers included Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Buber. When he returned to San Francisco, Wong enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute under the guidance of Mark Rothko, and he eventually met and befriended both Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac, and the latter included him as the character Arthur Ma in his novel “Big Sur.”
The last words Victor Wong spoke before his death were, “The world will never be the same,” and for those of us who fondly recall his many wonderful cinematic performances, in some small but nonetheless telling way, he was right.
Below – Victor Wong as Egg Shen: “See? That was nothing. But that’s how it always begins. Very small.”
For Dougal Tukten Neralich, now a resident of Seattle. Just something to think about when you are walking on that beautiful beach, son.
“The Eye,” by Robinson Jeffers
The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific -
Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of
faiths-
Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan. Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea–look west at the hill of water: it is half the
planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never
close;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.
