The Bohemian Poetry of Ernest Hemingway

 

 All 88 of Hemingway’s poems, including juvenilia, are contained in a modern edition edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis and readily available for borrowing online at https://archive.org/details/88poems0000hemi.

 

     Ernest Hemingway’s poetry is likely to be read primarily by those, diminishing in number these last few decades, who sufficiently favor his fiction to seek even relatively insubstantial new light that might illuminate his novels and stories.  The lyric oeuvre is slender, all right.  His editor has eked out eighty-eight short bits by including high school compositions, while he published maybe twenty-five poems during his life, including others in letters.  Apart from the small quantity of work, even a Hemingway enthusiast would be unlikely to make any great claims for these pieces, many of which seem to have been taken lightly by their own author.  Yet they are revealing in a way that tells less about Hemingway as an individual than about the nature of the modern avant-garde, the values and uses of an artistic bohemia, and the development of the concept of “hip.” 

     Reading these poems with a bit of distance from their composition, one conceives not so much a specific persona behind them, but rather a type, the young and rebellious artist.  While, of course, a good many details have dated, the flavor, the tone has much in common with the readings I have attended my entire life from hearing the Beats at Chicago’s Big Table Readings sixty years ago through my Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series lasting twenty-one years in the Hudson Valley.  Poetry on the page tends to differ from that which is meant to be performed, but, even apart from these generic differences, Hemingway’s poems exemplify the attitudes that have come to be associated not with art as a whole, but with an artistic “underground.”

     Though the literary historian more commonly views the expatriate writers of the ‘twenties as individuals, they contributed as well to a collective scene that celebrated the values associated with artistic bohemias: experimentalism in art and radicalism in politics and morals.  Such milieux, while in part traceable far back in time, have been well-defined since the Romantic Age.  While each artist produced individual works with unique characteristics, many also contributed or assented to the formation of a counter-cultural paradigm. 

     Readings by writers who consider themselves adversaries of the established culture take place not at universities but in cafes, bars, and living room salons.  A goal at such gatherings, apart from the delectation of art, is the creation of a community sub-culture.  For the last two hundred years such milieux have been called bohemias. [1]  Radicalism in these settings not only suggests challenges to social, political, religious, and aesthetic orthodoxies both as proposals and as pure style.  The writers’ posture of revolt appeals to the expected readership all though it may be detached from any possibility of actual adoption. 

     An embattled contrarian protest in fact derives its energy and drama from its not being accepted by the majority.  The desire to “épater les bourgeois” [2] can be a motive in itself, with the potential to inspire both Baudelaire’s in-your-face dandyism, Whitman’s casual open-collared workman’s dress, or  punk safety-pin in the ear.  I recall observing at the first live poetry readings I attended that the greatest audience response was regularly generated by transgressive lines, either sexually explicit, politically revolutionary, or aesthetically outré.  Fifty years later, at one of my own Poetry on the Loose events, an artist displayed his naked rear as part of his performance.  The gesture was meant to offend, a direct descendant of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, though in Jarry’s time the opening word was sufficient to cause the play to be banned.

     An ambience similar to such live venues may be constructed from the content of journals as well.  Hemingway published many of his poems in “little magazines” which cultivated the creation of a community of those critical of the majority culture such as Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review and Der Querschnitt, founded by Alfred Flechtheim and later edited by Hans von Wedderkop.

     The very name of The Little Review highlights its dissent from social norms.  The first issue proclaims the journal’s intention to pursue “that untrammeled liberty which is the life of Art.”  In case any reader should mistake the editor’s intentions, she later included the slogan “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste” beneath the title. [3]  She serialized Joyce’s Ulysses, losing a censorship trial over the excerpts. [4]  The poet whose work appeared in The Little Review most often was the outrageous Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven whose work was often highly sexual as well as seeming to some incoherent.  In its pages frequent contributor Emma Goldman advocated not only anarchism but sexual freedom as well.

     Though European and focused centrally on visual art with oblique and satiric references to politics, Der Querschnitt also insisted on its radical loyalties, publicizing innovative artists such as Klee, Chagall, and Max Ernst whose “Dada est mort, vive dada!” appeared in January of 1921.  The editors included coverage of boxing tournaments as well as of the most significant developments in art.  Its tone is suggested by the claim in its subscription promotion in 1923 that the journal had correspondents in “the great centers of Europe and America and among Negroes and Eskimos.”  It published as poetry Salvation Army songs and the “the war cry of the famous All Blacks', the Maori hakka, of New Zealand’s Rugby team” in the same issue with a song about Jesse James from Harry Archer’s musical revue. [5]

     Hemingway’s poetic contributions to these journals were in many ways discontinuous from his fiction, but most exhibit the characteristics of bohemian art: transgressive material: sexual, political, religious, and aesthetic, suggesting a general bent toward the Dionysiac in preference to the Apollonian in spite of a certain cynicism, and an insider hipness implying a coterie with privileged insight.  While the poem’s editor Nicholas Gerogiannis says that “the poems reveal Hemingway himself rather than a fictional counterpart” [6], their persona is in fact less the author as an individual than a projection of the generic bohemian artist.  The significance of the poetry’s outlaw pose is evident in the title of the earliest collection of his poetry, The Suppressed Poems of Ernest Hemingway. [7]

     The same emphasis is sounded when Hemingway refers to his poems in Querschnitt as “dirty,” writing to John Dos Passos “the ‘Schnitt also publishing a book of my dirty poems . . . Have you got any dirty poems you want me to sign? Jeeze I wish you were here to write a few good prurient poems for me because that is now my only source of income.” [8]  His off-hand attitude distinguishes these poems from the center of his serious literary work.  After this claim that the poems are merely a source of income and asking Dos Passos to contribute, he jocularly implies that his wife Hadley was the author of some of them. 

     In spite of this off-handed attitude, Hemingway thought enough of many of his poems to retain them, revise them, and to publish a good many during his life.  Still, they have found few admirers (though Wallace Stevens was one), particularly in contrast to his enormous popular success and substantial critical reputation toward the end of his life.  Many are occasional and seem very casual, tossed off while doing his more significant work.  Others are written for those in his personal circle, including allusions meaningless to the general public.  A good share are satirical or otherwise humorous, even whimsical.  Perhaps the most pervasive attitude they project is a devil-may-care, insouciant bohemianism, reflecting transgressive attitudes in a cheeky rebellion more willing to sound flippant than grave. 

     The simplest device to indicate transgressive counter-cultural attitudes is the use of vulgar language.  Taboos which have since diminished were through Hemingway’s life strict enough that his use of obscene, scatological, and racist language was still shocking.  Now that politicians and celebrities routinely use formerly tabooed expressions, it is difficult to realize the offense originally caused by words such as “cunts,” (“Sequel”).  He managed to include “shit,” “fuck,” and cocksuckers,” all in a single poem, “The Defense of Luxembourg.”  Whereas other writers pushing the boundaries of censorship were quite serious about their themes – D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and even, I would include, Henry Miller, Hemingway seems to indulge in what looks like juvenile play.  In “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers” everything is “the shit” and his style is half Gertrude Stein and half restroom graffiti: “Home is where the art is, home is where the fart is,/ let us fart and artless fart in  the home.”  In “The Road to Avallon” he makes, perhaps, a bit more sense.

 

Dogs must shit as well as men
            I like dogs better
           Say: Amen

 

     He likewise engages in ethnic jibes, referring, for instance, to “wops” in “d’Annunzio,”  “nigger” in “The Road to Avallon,” and making thoughtless remarks about Jews in “[The rail ends do not meet . . .].”  Worse, he ridicules Dorothy Parker’s suicide attempts in “To a Tragic Poetess” and Scott Fitzgerald’s chronic depression in “Lines to be Read at the Casting of Scott Fitzgerald’s Balls into the Sea from Eden Roc (Antibes, Alpes Maritime).”  (He spoke of his own depression in “Black-Ass Poem After Talking to Pamela Churchill” with greater gravitas, a somber tone, and old-fashioned prosody.)   

     He repeatedly implies a free attitude toward sexual relations, joking about gonorrhea in “Oklahoma,” and declaring “FOR THE HARLOT HAS A HARDLOT.”  When he announces an intention to aim at monogamy since he is “in love,” he sounds still ecstatic.

 

I’m off’n wild wimmen

An Cognac

An Sinnin’

For I’m in loOOOOOOOve.

 

     The ethnocentrism implied by his use of racial epithets does not extend to conventional patriotism.  In the poems concerning war, a deep cynicism prevails.  In “To Good Guys Dead” he says, “they sucked us in.”  His “Riparto d’Assalto” is almost reminiscent of Wilfred Owen, apart from its more casual structure and image of “a “warm and soft and sleepy whore.”

 

Grey, cold, bitter, sullen ride --

To splintered pines on the Grappa side

At Asalone, where the truck-load died.

 

A similar attitude is evident in “Champs d’Honneur” which notes “Soldiers never do die well” and proceeds then to specifics.

 

Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch

     All the world roars red and black,

Soldiers smother in a ditch;

     Choking through the whole attack. 

 

Never nationalistic, his poems about war insist on drunkenness and death as in “To Chink Whose Trade is Soldiering,” and “[Some day when you are picked up . . .]”. 

     The seriousness of what might seem political poems in part do not survive the general tone.  One poem, “[In a Magazine . . .]”, which describes police brutality, mingles that theme with belligerence toward the “Hun,” though the persona notes that he prefers his adversaries “unarmed.”   A poem dedicated “To Will Davies” (poet and “Super-tramp” William Henry Davies) seems to address an unequal justice system, capital punishment, and racism, but concludes with a distracting throwaway jocular reference to performer Bert Williams.  His observations on America often go no deeper than playful fancy, as when he says “They read the Saturday Evening Post./ And believe in Santa Claus.” and “they wear B. V. D.’s all the year round” in “I Like Americans by a foreigner.”

     Hemingway also defines his counter-cultural pose with irreligious remarks.  In “Chapter Heading” he says he “has danced to devils’ tunes” before “shivering home to pray,” thus serving “one master in the night,/ Another in the day.”  The church is for him an occasion for a joke.  In “[God is away for the summer . . .]” he whimsically comments that the minister’s summer vacation has caused to absence of the divine, and his “Neothomist Poem” includes a line-break pause worthy of a stand-up comedian: “The Lord is my shelter, I shall not/ want him for long.”  He later glossed the bit by saying it described “the temporary embracing of the church by literary gents.” [10]

     While making a show of spurning conventional proprieties in language, religion, patriotism, sexuality, and even, on occasion, human sympathy, he adopted avant-garde rhetoric, closely imitating Gertrude Stein whose work was ridiculed by many, though the criticism only increased her celebrity.  In a comment on his description of the Lausanne Peace Conference published as “They All Made Peace – What is Peace?” in The Little Review, he called Stein’s style “invaluable for analysing anything” yet referred to his own poem as “a joke.” [11]  In spite of this claim to levity, how own mature prose style uses repetitions and simple language doubtless linked to her influence.  In “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers” he imitates Stein, though sounding careless and flippant while she often seemed measured and quite serious.

 

Home is where the art is,

home is where the fart is,

let us fart and artless fart in the home.

 

Stein’s importance is all the more impressive since Hemingway’s sexism led him to discount other “poetesses” in “The Lady Poets With Footnotes” which dismisses the leading female poets of the day. 

    It may be that Stein’s position as doyenne of the avant-garde attracted Hemingway at least as much as her specific model.  His poems include a number of friendly references to Ezra Pound though his fiction owes nothing whatever to the older poet.  In “The Soul of Spain . . .” published in Querschnitt he claims that “We have done a monument to Ezra,” in “The Age Demanded” he tropes on “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and in “Kipling” and “[I think that I have never trod . . .]” he includes Provençal envois as a gesture toward Pound. 

     As the role of Pound suggests, what Hemingway valued was in part the coterie character of the literary set with its “hip” insider references.  He considered the smallness of the small magazines that published his work as evidence of their integrity, and he defended those in which he appeared against their rivals.  When Pound was trying to convince Robert McAlmon of the Dial to publish Eliot’s “The Wasteland” he also submitted Hemingway’s “Killed Piave – July 8 – 1918,” the rejection of which generated made Hemingway an enemy of the journal.

     The bohemian attitude led him in any event to discount critics in general, particularly what he perceived as establishment critics whom he attacked not with an aesthetic defense, but by impugning their virility.  Thus, Edmund Wilson’s 1930 introduction to In Our Time elicited his observation in “[Little Mr. Wilson . . .]” that in Wilson’s “pedantic” novel I Thought of Daisy “no one liked to screw,” and a general complaint about “All the ball-less critics/ all their cuntless wives.”  Contrasting the vigorous creative type with the effete intellectual, he insists in “Poem” that his life experience has given him something “that cannot be taken from us by an article/ or abolished by a critical agreement of professors.”  

 

We’ll write books.

They will not read them

but their children may

if they have children

 

In “[Little drops of grain alcohol . . .]’’ he wrote, “Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses/ better to see to kiss the critics’ asses.”

     Hemingway’s attitude in these poems is not only anti-academic, it is flippant.  The irreverence and willful immaturity of many of his lines justify the use of the term “smart-alecky.”  Consider, for instance, this excerpt from “[Little drops of grain alcohol . . .]”: “Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses/ better to see to kiss the critics’ asses.”  Or this from “[And everything the author knows . . . ].”

 

And everything the author knows

He shows and shows and shows and shows

his underclothes

are more important than the sum.

 

Or, in “Part Two of The Soul of Spain . . .”, “The wind blows and it does not snows look at the bull with his bloody nose.”  

     His “Valentine” with the line “stick them up your asses, lads” was published in the final number of The Little Review for which Margaret Anderson, in a gambit to overtop avant-gardism itself, had specifically asked for manuscripts which were not literature.  Yet some of his poems are far less bohemian.  Those addressed to his wife Mary, for instance, sound almost sincere: “First Poem to Mary in London,“ “Poem to Mary (Second Poem),” “Poem to Miss Mary, and “Travel Poem.”  Several if the war poems such as Captives” are similarly straightforward as is his lighter bit “To Crazy Christian” about his cat.  Some poems -- “Flat Roofs” and “Bird of Night” -- come to mind) are unironic Imagism.  “On Weddynge Gyftes” is a piece of journalistic entertainment.

     Nonetheless, the bent of his 88 Poems is predominately bohemian.  The poems are significant in establishing an adversarial relation to the received ideas of his day by mocking patriotism, religion, sexual morality, and the traditional standards for art.  He practiced rigorous rewriting for his fiction; he said he had rewritten the ending to Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times [12] and pronounced that “the only writing is rewriting” [13] most often approached his poetry in a casual fashion, because that off-handedness was a central part of his poems’ significance.  He found in bohemia a subculture that would support his artistic ambitions and he established his credibility within it by rebelling against social norms of every sort.  The themes that dominated his major fiction are largely suppressed, though both combat and bullfighting are themes of the poetry.  The primary meaning, though, was to present his bona fides for membership in the artistic bohemia of his age, reinforcing the gap between writers and the general public and fostering an attitude of hipness, implying the superiority of their subcultural view.     

      

 

    

1.  Popularized by Henri Murger's stories Scènes de la vie de bohème (1845), the term is first used in English in chapter 65 of Thackery’s Vanity Fair which appeared in Punch in July 1848. 

 

2.  Often attributed to Baudelaire, the term and very similar expressions were used by a number of writers including in 1854 by Aristippe Felix Bernier de Maligny in Nouveau Manuel Théatral: Théorique et Pratique (p. 85), in 1855 by Privat d’Anglemont (in the form “Je les ai épatés, les bourgeois”) in Paris Anecdote (1855) p. 282), and in 1860 by Alexandre Dumas (père) in Le père la ruine, p. 186.

3.  The line first appears in October of 1917. 

 

4.  Ten years later, Random House invited another prosecution by importing the book.  Though the case had to be pursued to the Supreme Court, it was decided in the most significant censorship litigation for a generation to be publishable, Judge Woolsey drily commenting “nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”

 

5.  Volume V, no. 4.

 

6.  Introduction, 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, xi.

 

7.  Published in 1929 Paris by The Library of Living Poetry.  It is undoubtedly the implication of naughtiness in the title that caused this collection to be pirated in the fifties and again in the seventies.

 

8.  Letter of 22 April, 1925 in Selected Letters ed. Carlos Baker (p. 158).

 

9.  In Nicholas Gerogiannis’ edition of Hemingway’s complete poems, 88 Poems, those which are untitled are identified by the opening words followed by an ellipsis and enclosed in brackets.

 

10.  Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming, note 50, p. 234.

 

11.  See 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, 141.  This poem was nonetheless admired by Louis Zukovsky who included it in his “Program: Objectivist 1931” manifesto as a model worthy of imitation. 

 

12.  George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway” quoted William A. Glasser, “A Farewell to Arms,” The Sewanee Review Vol. 74, No. 2 (Spring, 1966).

 

13. “Art of Fiction No. 21,” the Paris Review, issue 18, 1958.

 

Notes on Buddhism and Poetry

 

Can poetry be Buddhist?

     The existence of any Buddhist aesthetics may be questioned.  The tension between the enjoyment of art and the ideal of the Great Renunciation is evident in many East Asian poems.  For one scholar of religion [1], Buddhism is wholly aesthetic in its apprehension of the world.  “The goal of life for Buddhists is aesthetic.  It is the enjoyment of life itself as intrinsic value.”   Contemplative withdrawal is in fact that focus on intrinsic enjoyment.  “Nirvana is the complete willingness to accept this world as it is as the best of all actual worlds.”  “Nirvana is the aesthetic enjoyment of what is as it is.”  However, this apparent total embrace of beauty is accompanied by a lack of interest in privileging any specific object as better, more meaningful, or more pleasing than another.  Since Buddhist meditation consists of the pure “enjoyment of self” (presumably recognizing at the same time the non-existence of ego), any experience of a work of art will introduce a “distinction between subject and object” which is “not only irrelevant but even a hindrance to its enjoyment.”

     As the end of Buddhism is enlightenment, one might conclude that the twentieth-century American philosopher is correct that any distraction is an obstacle, yet traditions of Buddhist practice contradict his conclusion.  The fact is that Buddhist art has flourished from the earliest periods, from the reliquaries in which the Buddha’s remains, we are told, were distributed to groups of devotees to be placed in stupas. [2]  Since that time Buddhist arts has proliferated in all the countries where the religion was practiced, in architecture, painting, carving, literature, and dance. [3]

     These works were by no means made as part of a secular milieu, but rather as a form of spiritual practice.  The makers of Buddhist devotional objects clearly intended for their works to serve as meditative aids in individuals’ progress toward enlightenment.  Just as chanting the poetry of the sutras was a form of worship, so might shaping original poetic images or graphic forms direct the consciousness toward its liberation.  Representation of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas is meant to awaken the sufferer to the possibility of nirvana.  The koans of Zen are obstinately concrete and specific as are the lyrics of Wang Wei and Han Shan.  The destruction of the sand mandalas in Tibet, while intended to underline the evanescence of phenomena, is as well an aesthetic signifier as modern artists such as Banksy have realized [4].  all are meant as upaya, “skillful means,” with the ultimate goal of guiding spiritual development.

     Finally, of course, the Buddha recommended a Middle Way in the very opening words of the discourse regarded as his first after enlightenment, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, avoiding both sensual indulgence and asceticism.  Anyone possessing a body will tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain and to feel lust, hunger, and anger.  Even the bhikkhu remains human and must taste and welcome food, however frugal the meal.  Therefore, a blanket condemnation of aesthetic experience seems out of character compared to a measured use of art which may even embrace the accomplishment of religious ends. [5] 

     I can scarcely deny the often expressed ambivalence, though, of Buddhist practitioners, of which this passage from Bai Juyi is representative.

 

Since earnestly studying the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness,

I’ve learned to still all the common states of mind.

Only the devil of poetry I have yet to conquer—

let me come on a bit of scenery and I start my idle droning. [6]

                                                                             

 

The appearance of the dharma in American literature

     Though it competed with Hinduism, particularly Vedanta, for American devotees, Buddhism has been an influence in American literature for as long as the Asian texts have been available.  At certain periods Buddhism shaped the broad mainstream of American poetry, while isolated points of contact from individual writers occurred at all periods.

     The Transcendentalists introduced Buddhism to American readers.  In 1844 the Buddha was ushered into the drawing room of American thought when the Dial, at the time edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and George Ripley, printed a translation of The Lotus Sutra which had only that year appeared in a French version, the first access Europeans had to this seminal text.  [7]  The old East-West mythologies persisted in part (as they do yet today), and this new knowledge of authentic Buddhist thought was fragmentary, leading Emerson to refer to the “Bhagvat Geeta” as “the much renowned book of Buddhism,” [7] and to note vaguely that “all tends to the mysterious East.” [8]

     Still, respectful mentions of Buddhism became widespread.  Thoreau referred to “their Christ” in contrast to “my Buddha” in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [9] and Melville wrote a poem addressed to Buddha asking for nirvana. [10]  Far from the Transcendentalist Northeast, Lafcadio Hearn converted to Buddhism and translated Japanese poems and stories.  Buddhism is thereafter never absent from the stream of American literature.  During the second half of the nineteenth century its most prominent contribution to American literature was to create an enlarged space for mysticism during a time when the Theosophical Society (whose Col. Alcott was a Buddhist), Spiritualism, and eventually the appearance of Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago were among the popular manifestations of a similar interest.

    In the early twentieth century, during the time of High Modernism, Buddhist poetry shaped the Imagist movement through Pound and Buddhist convert Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.  [11]  Among those later influenced by these were William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists,  Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen and Rakosi.  Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali, took a course in Japanese Buddhist philosophy, and concluded that Indian philosophers make European thinkers “look like schoolboys.” [12]  Though there had been converts for decades, genuine Buddhist institutions receptive to non-Asians such as Christmas Humphrey’s Buddhist Society of America (established 1931) were appearing.  The main effect of this era’s Buddhist influence was, however, reflected in Williams’ slogan “no ideas but in things.”

     The writing of the Beat coterie in the fifties is surely the most prominent example of Buddhist influence.  With several prominent poets with Buddhist gurus (such as Allen Ginsberg), some who were actual monks (Philip Whalen), and a great many other practitioners (Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder), the appearance of Black Buddhists such as Bob Kaufman and, today, the fiction writer Charles R. Johnson, as well as a great many more who took a sympathetic interest, this group brought Buddhist ideas and texts to millions. 

 

 

Allen Ginsberg on Buddhism and poetry

     As the most influential and prominent Buddhist American poet of the last century as well as a founder of the Buddhist Naropa University with its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,  Allen Ginsberg is a case of particular significance.  Since Ginsberg is a scholarly man, familiar with a great deal of poetic and religious texts, as well as being a serious follower of Buddhist practice, his delineation of the intersections of poetry and Buddhism are uniquely revealing. 

     In the most general way, Ginsberg identifies poetry as a whole with meditation, saying “breath spirit is the vehicle for poetry and song as well as the air horse/ The mind rides during meditation practice.”  Thus, “fine art and other meditation practices are brother-and-sister-related activities.” Great poetry is “a probe into the nature of reality and the nature of the mind.”  The goal of such “probes of consciousness” is the “purification of mind and body” [13]  

     Yet he specifies certain of his own practices, in particular “spontaneous mind, on-the-spot improvisation,” poetry as the “art of spontaneity in the void” [14].  For Ginsberg, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s formula “first thought, best thought,” or, in slightly elaborated form, “the first thought you had on your mind, the first thought you thought before you thought you should have a formal thought,” defines poetry’s proper subject. [15]  For readers who fear the loss of the pleasures of meticulous craftsmanship, this method would substitute “the total delight in chance.”  [16]

     Drawing on several generations of translations of Chinese poetry including versions by Pound, Waley, and Rexroth, Ginsberg also emphasizes a focus on concrete objective imagery.  He quotes Trungpa: “Things are symbols of themselves,” and advocates “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” [17] 

     Thematically, both “first thought, best thought” and the deep focus on the object of meditation arise from the Buddhist conviction of the ephemeral and ultimately misleading experience of reality.  According to Ginsberg, the “transcendental wisdom” of the insight that life is “both real and dream, both once at the same time,” the realization of “dream as the suchness of the universe,” is the central theme of “the ‘Golden Ash’ school, as Kerouac qualified existence.”  [18]  The phantasmagoria of poetry is explicitly “daydreams,” [19]  but consciously recognized as such and thus pointing the way to an accurate assessment of all perception and leading the reader toward enlightenment.  Every poetic detail of a Buddhist poem signifies “the eternal gateless gate which if it has ‘form’ has an undescribable [sic] one – images of which are however innumerable.” [20]

     While Ginsberg’s Buddhism inspired a body of great poetry, his theoretical writing was always polemic, uninterested in the claims of other world-views and compositional techniques.  Like other partisans, he maintains the universality of his approach, saying that “’Form is no different from Emptiness, Emptiness no different from Form’.  That formulation is one that Keats and all subtle poets might appreciate.” [21]  He maintains that “beauty itself is the realization of simultaneous ‘emptiness and form’” [22] as though there were at bottom but one variety of beauty.   

 

 

final thoughts

     In that overgeneralization lies the difficulty with Buddhist poetics.  Not surprisingly, it is similar to the limitation of Christian or Marxist poetics, each of which may couch in comely terms a certain world-vision but which has difficulty accommodating any other.  The dialectic of form and emptiness in the dance of eye and object may constitute beauty indeed, though not necessarily any more than the contemplation of form alone, whether one’s beloved’s thigh or the cadences of meter. Impermanence has its own aesthetics as well, reflected in Bernadette Mayer’s stream-of-consciousness or John Cage’s verbal compositions.  With a sufficient metaphorical imagination a non-Christian reader can appreciate the value of a Christian poem, so likewise a non-Buddhist may delight in Wang Wei, or a bhikkhu might relish Milton.  Poetry is the record of moments of consciousness which, even for an advanced spiritual practitioner, does not reside always at the highest of altitudes. 

     The thematic contributions of Buddhism, the conceptual space for describing meditative revelation and the ambiguity of perceived reality, remain significant and lasting.  The study of East Asian poetry, one of the oldest and most sophisticated poetic traditions in the world, immeasurably enriched American poetry, particularly by encouraging a disciplined focus on imagery.  As for Truth, I dare say Gerard Manley Hopkins might bring a reader an illuminated moment just as surely as Han Shan might.  Furthermore, many poems are careless of theme and impress rather with ingenuity or sensuous sound beauty or powerful passion. 

     We are only just beginning to assimilate (and transform) the artistic and philosophic achievements of Asia.  Priceless though they be, they cannot govern American poetic practice in the twenty-first century while they certainly will contribute to it.  In fact Buddhist poetry from a dozen countries of the East has already both broadened and deepened American writing in both form and content.

 

 

 

1.  See Archie J. Bahm, “Buddhist Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Dec., 1957).

2.  See the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta.

3.  A suggestion of iconoclastic fundamentalism is apparent in the reluctance for several centuries to represent Buddha himself.  Now, of course, images of the seated Buddha are the most common and recognizable theme of Buddhist art. 

4.  Banksy’s self-destroying work Girl with Balloon was more notorious than original.  Gustav Metzger had been making such works since the late 1940s.  See his article "Machine, Auto-Creative and Auto-Destructive Art," Ark, summer 1962.  In 1962 Jean Tinguely presented Homage to New York in the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden, an assemblage composed primarily of objects collected in garbage dumps and wired to explode and burn immediately after its unveiling. 

5.  Even Augustine, who had been so ashamed of his fondness for the theater, came to feel that there was a place in Christianity for art which encouraged the soul toward God. 

6.  Translated by Burton Watson (who uses the form Po Chü-I) in cThe Selected Poems of Po Chü-I. 

7.  The French was by Eugène Burnouf; he had written it in 1839, but did not publish it until he had completed an introduction in 1844.  The English translation from French, once attributed to Thoreau, is anonymous in the text but by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.  The sutra appears in the Dial immediately preceding a translation of a Hermetic text.  For a full account, see Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism.   

7.  Emerson to Elizabeth Hoar, June 17 1845, Letters III, edited by Ralph L. Rusk, 290. 

8.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols, eds. William H. Gilman, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960-1982), 1: 12.

9.  “I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing.”

10.  “Buddha” includes an epigraph from one of the more Buddhist passages of the Greek Testament, James 4:14 “Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” 

11.  Pound’s preference for the social ideals of Confucianism led him to mock Daoist and Buddhist holy men, yet his poetry is not thereby affected.  Arthur Waley’s translations and critical writings were a major transmission source (including for Pound) as was the work of D. T. Suzuki.

12.  Spender said Eliot “almost became a Buddhist.  See Jeffrey M. Perl and Andrew P. Tuck, “The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic Studies,” Philosophy East and West, vol. 35, no. 2 (Apr., 1985).

13.  These passages are from two pieces, both titled “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995, 152 and 262.

14.  From Deliberate Prose, “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” 251.  Compare also Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” which recommends “No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.”

15.  Ginsberg, Allen. “First Thought, Best Thought,” Composed on the Tongue (1971), 106–117.

16.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 258 and 272.

17.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 266 and 268.

18.  “Retrospect of Beat Generation,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 246 and 247.

19.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 152.

20.  “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 250.

21.  “Meditation and Poetics” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 265.

21.  “Retrospect of Beat Generation” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 246.