Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm curious about other universes, and nonhuman elementals. For me it's still a very lively ethos. It's a kind of practice. It's an ethos that is very sustaining.
My last bedside conversation in the hospital just a few weeks before Allen Ginsberg died was 'please take care of so and so. And the legacy of the Kerouac school.
I call what I do 'modal structures.' Sometimes they're songs, sometimes they're longer, sometimes they're this mantra - I've never called myself a spoken word poet.
This will be a good time for poetry, you know, when things get darker and stranger and your very speech is being questioned and the sense of trusting that human thing.
You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment.
We have a motto at Naropa: 'Keep the world safe for poetry.' It's humorous but has some real bite to it. If the world is safe for poetry, it can be safe for many other things.
Trump is the worst. I mean, he is like a shape shifter. You can't nail him down. It is like the last gasp, the last bastion of old white males, of white supremacy and hegemony.
Our need to reimagine our world through the vibratory larynx, that's what matters. Re-awaken the world to itself. Through ideas, pictures, sounds. Hold the mirror up to "nature."
I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents.
Certainly the beat writers I've known who carried forward the original, you know, I'd say that came together in the 1940s and 50s. So I was inheriting in a way some of that ethos.
Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.
I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page.
I get worked up over an 'idea' or the ethos of an idea. I follow dreams, take notes on travels, and engage in research often - if I need names, details, facts that enhance the project.
I remember being caught in this earthquake in Mexico City and having a sense of people coming before me, of being part of this lineage. I felt similarly when I went to India and South America.
There's a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That's what you're doing.
I think Visions of Cody is the most radical book in terms of poetic stretch and the way Jack Kerouac is able to incorporate documentation and incorporate the live tape recording of Neal and so on.
I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.
What I propose for the "life of a poet" goes against the grain of the fossil fuel monoculture. Maybe the most revolutionary act these days is not to watch television and to read a book a day at least.
Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.
I don't demonize the downside. As we've seen in Egypt and Tahrir square and other recent event, the adhesiveness through [technology] kinds of communication is extraordinary. Interesting times we live in.
A lot of my father's generation were thinking about communism and had deep liberal and progressive connections. He never admitted whether he was a card-carrying communist party member but I think its possible.
Obviously, if I'm reading in Vienna or Venezuela or Italy, there's the issue of language, and I will make choices that are more sound oriented. Or I'll try to incorporate those languages and occasions somehow.
How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one's whole lifetime, even as one protests it - what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization.
I'm concerned about the overuse of spectacular places. And there's no real wilderness left and so there's a heartbreak there. You can go anywhere and be rescued through your cell phone and have some helicopter drop down.
How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators.
The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed.
My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.
I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.'
I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land.
My love of poetry comes from the "actualization" I experienced in the poetry of others. And I was reading it silently and there is deep pleasure in that intimacy, a mind-to-mind transfer going on. All the music is there, inherently. And mystery as well.
I don't think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There's very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There's an elegant quality to the wild mind.
[Jack] Kerouac looking at the fellaheen worlds. Looking at other cultures. Welcoming it, curious. Really stepping outside his own limited, whatever that narrow world was. It's amazing to think we can do it. We can have that same kind of trajectory of mind.
We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives - what's handed to us.
The formal stuff feels old and windy. Not to say you shouldn't know prosody. But it's a wonderful time for exploratory poetics. Contemporary poets are inventing all kinds of wild, complex shapes for poetry, as we see. It's a wonderful time, less ego-centered.
We had much more imagery from Vietnam war. The media was not controlled. The storyline, the master narrative was not controlled. I thin it was some those images really radicalized people and shifted things to some extent. And the Viet Cong also, their tenacity.
The text for me is the musical score. I'm the instrument. My voice is the instrument. My voice is articulating the sounds which are coming through the imaginings and visitations in my head, and I'm making these sounds but I've selected them from an ocean of sound.
We pride ourselves at Natrona - I mean, pride {ironically] - on developing a noncompetitive community. That's very important. The values that can come from that kind of meditative work combined with the creative work you do, combined with your activism, can come together.
Growing up in the fifties, having to wear a dog tag, having to take shelter in a bomb shelter. That turned me toward the road, I did not want to live in fear of that, I was gong to work somehow against what that vision was, and what that horror was. It was poetry, art, music.
I had parents who were attentive to what was going on politically. There was the Greek connection, a sense of a larger world. People coming in from abroad. There was a sense of community around ideas: a discourse and an adhesiveness which is my favorite word from [Walt] Whitman.
I'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you're headed, in what direction, the weather and so on.
There is a pretty interesting document called 'action writing.' Which is not all about spontaneity and first thought, best thought,' but a certain kind of attention to the smallest increments of the phonemes of language, The kind of power of connection, what he is able to do with language.
No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.
My mother actually left American in 1929 to be part of an alternative community of bohemians around her then father-in-law who was a well-known Greek poet. This group of people were living in this semi-Luddite reality and weaving their own clothes - proto-hippies in a way- -but around an artistic vision.
I had a student some years ago whose father had worked on the Manhattan Project. I had a student who had to escape this very intense, born-again fundamentalist Christian background that was very much like a cult and of course they struggle to get to Naropa. And they have cut themselves off. They don't look back.
Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry, which is a practice of the imagination.
The dichotomies, the brokenness of the culture around things like the Vietnam war, and then a lot of it has to do with war and where we put our energy and money and attention. And the military industrial complex, which dominates our whole economy. Even with the vision of democracy in other places we know the dark side.
When I attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, I was very inspired. The collaboration of many poets from these alternative traditions - though there were not enough women - who were very much more influenced by, say, Asian forms or by Mantra or by thinking politically through their work in deeper ways really stuck with me.
When I got back to NY had the opportunity to work with the beginning years of the poetry project which was founded with money from the OEO under Lyndon Johnson to work with alienated youth on the lower East side. This was extraordinary, to be able to help then to create a culture that would capture the energy that I felt at Berkley.
The color red is symbolic of passion and action, so this Vajrayogini, as she's called, comes with a mantra and she comes with these various weapons and accouterments that are all symbolic of the kind of activity that this principle, as it were, this psychological principle, does or activates in the world. And there's text and mantra as well.
Idea that all the beats are wildly liberal and progressive is ridiculous. You have people thinking for themselves and having certain affinities because of their upbringing and who their family are, their own people who were close to them who fought in these wars and so on. It's complicated. But they had that ability to continue the conversation.