Improvisation in Beijing, Allen Ginsberg
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 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.
October 21, 1984
Naota: Hey…Why do you always do this?
Mamimi: Mamimi has to do this or I’ll overflow.
Naota: Overflow? What happens?
Mamimi: Probably…something amazing.
From FLCL by Studio Gainax
Every person consciously experiencing life and the world with all of everything that makes up his being must periodically reach a point of overflow. If he doesn’t, there’s something wrong. Either he is holding back, or he isn’t really living.
The creative, experiential mind is like a wet phoenix recycling itself through its own ashes and flames over and over and over again never stopping moving and never stopping to consider even for a moment any other way of existing. This is the way it must exist.
Passion is insanity to those who lack it. Passion is every drug rolled into lone laced with God to those who experience it within their own personal universe of living like fire and dying like rain.
He starts at nothing the cosmic null set with no value no potential no nothing whatsoever here there anywhere from now before since the beginning of time. From this comes something formless and explosive that combusts so rapidly with increasing heat that it doubles itself infinitely in every fraction of eternity. It builds and grows and swells with the vibrations that have shoot matter from the big bang forth and before and it grows until a critical mass is achieved and everything goes technicolor 3D welcome to omniscience say hello to Buddha and Gengis Kahn all in an instant when everything overflows and sprays out over all of creation if only just for that instant and from a single narrow point of view. In that instant it is beauty pure and clean and as soon as that instant has passed (does it not last forever?) everything comes rushing back down into the nothingness where it has forever created and destroyed itself so that creation has color and emotion has heat and everything smells like the square root of infinity less a handicap of no less than six strokes.
He who does not burn can never know it.
I went to St Louis today. Went up to the top of the St Louis arch, wandered through great rooms at the art museum. 630 feet tall and 630 feet wide. From the top the bottom hangs below you and barges on the river pushing coal up the Mississippi to industry needing its fire glide silently with so little wake you can hardly believe it for the size of it all. In the museum slackjawed children and attentive children and amazed children and adults who either want to be there or want to be dead knowing nothing of the museum ever again. I wonder what the museum does to shape the minds of the children. I wonder what an six-year-old standing in front of a Rodin bronze is thinking. I wonder what the little girl with a doll in one hand thinks of the Dutch impressionists.
Still limits on the internet here – thus I’m actually typing this in my text editor to be uploaded later along with the three emails I’m writing, updates to the Large Format User’s Directory, and a new resume that I’ll be sending along with a number of new job applications.
I talked with Kourtney earlier tonight and with Dimitri just a few minutes ago. Aside from actually currently having a job, Kourtney seems to be in the same boat as me when it comes to photography, career, etc. We have similar thoughts, though she has experience enough to give me added insights regarding what the hell I’m supposed to do next. Chatted with Dimitri about life and jobs and what is and isn’t happening, hoping that the people over ther had possibly had an ear to the ground and might have a lead or two for me to follow. No such luck, or not exactly that, aynway. Dimitri’s going to talk to someone for me. I’m going to start sending out resumes and job applications like mad while still trying to find anything at all I can manage to pick up here for cash and debt-reduction in the immediate situation of things. Joel might call in a bit, he might not. I don’t actually know if he’s coming back tonight or just going to his girlfriend’s house straight from the studio. Maybe he’s heard something.
I’ll say it again – I need to get out of here.
There’s a nubile blue-haired girl on my computer desktop who stares at me with eyes that would melt your soul in an instant if she were real. And I remember just how far I am from everyone and everything I care about.
