Beginning With Allen Ginsberg

1977

1.  

I began writing poetry before I heard of Allen Ginsberg but Ginsberg is the first poet whose work influenced me as a poet. He was an important influence for me as he was for many other young poets. 

2.  

Beginning with Allen Ginsberg's poems. Beginning with "Howl", "Kaddish", "Siesta in Xbalba", "Who Be Kind To", and others.

3.

Beginning with a statement by Ginsberg that I read in a newspaper in November 1967 that expressed what I wanted to do in my writing; Ginsberg's advice was to "Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting." Ginsberg's advice is to write the poems of your soul, to do this be fearless, be visionary.

4.

We forget that Ginsberg is both a poet of social change and a confessional poet. He is a poet who teaches through his writing and he is a poet who always entertains. He is one of the important poets of the second half of the Twentieth Century. People listened to what he said because he was a poet; how many poets can this be said about today?  Go back and read his Playboy interview.

5.

Allen Ginsberg was influenced by Walt Whitman and by William Blake; I don't know if Ginsberg is an influence on younger poets today, but he was from the 1950s to the 1990s. Ginsberg's lineage as a poet is Whitman and Blake. I learned from Ginsberg that poets have a lineage, it is made up of the poets who influence us as poets, our poet ancestors.

6.

The poets you begin with are not necessarily the same poets you end with, but who you begin with is still important at the end. For this reason Allen Ginsberg will always be a part of my journey as a poet, he will always be important to me. The important poets speak to our soul even when it is many years since we first read them.

7.

I think of Ginsberg as a poet of my youth, but he is not someone whose work interests me much now. Another writer of my youth is Jack Kerouac and I remember talking about Kerouac with bpNichol in the late 1970s; bp felt that Kerouac was a novelist of his youth but no longer of great interest to him. Ginsberg is a poet of my youth, not of my adulthood, but his influence has lasted a lifetime.

8.

One of the amazing things about Ginsberg's body of work is how extensive it is. His Collected Poems 1947-1997 (2003) is over a thousand pages long. Ginsberg's Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 (2001) is a compilation of his essays, public addresses, and personal reflections on various subjects. I find everything that Ginsberg writes is interesting because it is Ginsberg who is writing it. His Indian Journals (1974), that I read when it was published, is also essential reading for fans of Ginsberg's writing.

9.

I met Ginsberg at a reception after his 1969 Montreal reading at Sir George Williams University. He was surrounded by his followers. There was nothing shy about Ginsberg.

10.

Ginsberg was the first important poet many of us read and came into contact with on our journey as poets; he introduced us to new ideas, new and exciting writers, and the example of a life committed to poetry. Ginsberg wrote, "widen the area of consciousness" which I always took as "be a conscious person" and not about using psychedelic drugs which was his intention; either way it remains that the message is only by being conscious can we fulfill our destiny as human beings.  

                                                            Stephen Morrissey

                                                            22 August 2018

Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978 - 1998

Preface to Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978-1998 (Muses’s Company, Winnipeg, 1998)

When I was growing up, I had two dreams that profoundly affected the shape of my life. I was six years old when my father died; the first of these dreams occurred three years after his death. I dreamed two men from an orphanage came to take me away. They were waiting for me at the back door; they were going to put me in a wooden cage. This dream made a deep and lasting impression on me, not only as a reminder of the insecurity and transience of life, but also as an encounter with the powerful depths of the unconscious. In retrospect, this dream began my awareness of the imagination, vision, and what psychologist C.G. Jung calls “the shadow.” It also informed me of my own separateness from the world in which I lived.

The second dream came when I was around thirteen years old, and it is responsible for my embarking on a lifetime of being a poet and diarist. In this dream I was imprisoned in a room where the windows were covered with mud. Once I could see outside, but now I was enclosed and cut off from the world. However one may interpret this dream, my own interpretation as an adolescent was that I had to write down the truth as I knew it--what people had done and what I had done. Only by writing could I see things clearly. I knew intuitively that writing could clarify, order, and give perspective to experience. My concern was with saving my inner being, which I was afraid would be lost if I were unable to remember events. My conviction, even then, was that there is a heroism and bravery to the average person’s life and I was responsible for recording as much of what I perceived of this as possible. I awoke from this dream knowing I had to write and ever since this dream I have written poems as well as kept a diary.

In addition to these two dreams there was a third influence to the kind of poet I became. In 1967, when I was still in high school, I read an article in a newspaper; in it the American poet, Allen Ginsberg, gave advice for poets. He said, “Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked...” This statement made a lasting impression on me. It validated what I was already trying to do in my own poetry. For the first time I realized that the kind of subject matter I was grappling with as a teenager--content that was personal and confessional--belonged to a literary tradition and had meaning to other people. Even if I hadn’t read Ginsberg’s statement I would not have been deterred from continuing the writing I was doing--writing that attempted to understand deeply felt experiences. However, to discover that there was a public context for this kind of writing was enormously empowering, and allowed me to identify myself as a poet. My first chapbook, Poems of a Period (1971), published when I was in second year university, contains poems that have a thematic continuity extending from those early poems up to the work I am writing now. This present collection, Mapping the Soul: Selected Poems 1978 - 1998, presents a selection of twenty years from my body of writing. This selection is chronological, beginning with my first published book, The Trees of Unknowing (1978) up to the present selection from new, unpublished poems.

For years I struggled in my writing to express early experiences of grief and failure. I wrote many poems on these subjects, but none articulated exactly how I felt, or dealt adequately with what I needed to say, until I wrote the long poem “Divisions.” This poem is central to my early work--in it I was finally able to deal aesthetically and personally with the experience it discusses. Everything came together in the writing of “Divisions”: content, form, and the insight necessary for its writing. This was a breakthrough poem for me, written over a three day period in April 1977. I was finally able to express in poetry what I was attempting to do since I was fifteen years old. I photocopied “Divisions” and mailed it out to other poets and critics, including Northrop Frye and Louis Dudek, both of whom responded generously: Frye with a letter, and Dudek with an offer to publish the poem. In 1983 bp Nichol published the poem in my book Divisions, with Coach House Press.

There are two more factors that I believe have contributed to my writing. The first is the fact of being born in Montreal of a large, but dwindling, family of Irish descent. This Irish background is rich in experience and family history; names such as Callaghan, Flanagan, and Sweeney are all a part of the family which has been in Montreal since before 1840. They were not wealthy people, although a few made names for themselves, but they were hardworking and improved conditions for the lives of their descendants. Their values, religious faith, and large families made them what they were. I am grateful for being a part of this ancestry.

A final factor that has helped shaped my poetry is the tradition of writing poetry in English-speaking Montreal. Growing up in Montreal in the 1950s, I always took for granted that poets lived and worked in the community in which I lived. Poets were never “someplace else”—they were right here. So the idea of becoming a poet was never unusual. Just as I appreciate my Irish heritage, I also benefited from the poetry community into which I was born. In the 1970s I was associated with Vehicule Art Gallery where I attended and organized readings while a graduate student at McGill University. I associated with other poets, and my first full-length collection of poems was published.
I have always aimed at a directness of statement and emotion in my poems, to communicate an image and a strong emotion; to merge the personal self with the archetypal self. Poetry is the voice of the psyche speaking through the poet. These poems, selected from twenty years of published work, map the convolutions, terrain, and geography of the soul.

My poetic journey, from the early dreams and writing to the publication of this Selected Poems, has been a reaching out to other people. From the initial isolation as an adolescent poet until now, I have been blessed with meeting certain individuals who have encouraged and inspired me. My association with poet and editor Carolyn Zonailo began in 1989 with the publication, by Caitlin Press, of my book Family Album. CZ has edited my poetry and helped to prepare manuscripts for publication. We have shared a collaboration in writing and in life, living most of the year in Montreal, but spending as much time as possible each year in her native Vancouver, British Columbia. I would like to thank CZ for selecting the poems in this collection, urging me to write this preface, and for editing.

I would like to thank Louis Dudek for being my teacher and friend from McGill University days to the present. George and Jeanne Johnston extended to me friendship and the joy of discussing poetry and literature. Ken Norris, a colleague since the early 1970’s, has offered on-going encouragement. Jake Morrissey has often listened with appreciation to my work. Sonja Skarstedt and Geof Isherwood began Empyreal Press in Montreal in the early 1990s; with bravado and a belief in the importance of poetry they published each volume of The Shadow Trilogy. I would like to thank Endre Farkas and Gordon Shillingford for offering their support through the Muses’ Company. Finally, I would also like to thank the Canada Council for writing time during two grants, and for project grants in support of individual books.

Stephen Morrissey
Vancouver, British Columbia
August 7, 1998

"Scribble down your nakedness." -- Allen Ginsberg

Article from 11 November 1967

Back in 1967, two years after I began writing poems, I read the following article in the Montreal Star (published on 11 November 1967). This was around the time when I first heard of Allen Ginsberg and the other poets and artists who are also mentioned in this article. It was Allen Ginsberg's advice that was enormously important to me: "Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting." It was terrific advice--and certainly epiphanal--it gave a direction for my writing that was probably already present but not consciously thought out. The article also directed my reading to a generation of writers and artists who were an intellectual and creative community for many of us at the time. They inspired many of us in our life-work. Here, then, is the complete text of that article:

Scribble Down your nakedness, said Ginsberg -- and he did

By Peggy Polk

New York

Conrad Rooks, the rich boy who went from beatnik to alcoholic to drug addict to moviemaker, is going even further soon -- to the Indian province of Dharmasala, home of the exiled Dalai Lama.

His first film "Chappaqua," winner of the Silver Lion at the 1966 Venice film festival, opened at a New york theatre Sunday and is scheduled to make the rounds of art movie houses throughout the country, but Rooks is preparing to retire to the study and filming of Tibetan metaphysics.

"Chappaqua" -- named for the Indian burial place -- is a full color, baroque nightmare based on the cure which its 32-year-old author -- director-producer-principal player took in Zurich six years ago to rid himself of his addictions.

The Kansas-born Rooks traces his taste for narcotics to a series of operations he underwent at the age of 9. He says he began drinking when at 13 he started to frequent bars on New York's West 52nd Street to listen to jazz and at 14 he was an alcoholic.

Expelled from four prep schools, given a medical discharge from the Marines and arrested at 21 on a marijuana charge, he tried to learn the craft of writing from his beatnik friends. But it was not until his father died in 1961 that Rooks decided to take the 30-day "sleep cure" he was to tranbscribe to the screen in a rich melange of sound, color and stunning technique.

To make the film, Rooks assembled the patron saints of the beat and hippie world -- poet Allen Ginsberg, writer William Burroughs of "Naked Lunch" fame, French actor Jean-Louis Barrault, Moondog and Swami Satchidananda. Ornette Coleman played the saxophone and Ravi Shakar the sitar. Robert Frank, the avant garde photographer, was camerman.

The movie, from its inception as a poem, took four years and $750,000 of Rook's Avon Cosmetics fortune to film. It was one of the few such personal ventures to emerge from the underground to commercial distribution.

Rooks, who sports a Buster Brown haircut and a didactic manner, says he is delighted with the venture but has no intention of joining the filmmmaking establishment.

Business, he says, is corrupting and "businessmen have pretty much managed to run commercial moviemaking into a baloney factory.

"Of course I want to reach mass media. But I want to change mass media."

Hoping to avoid the baloney business entirely and to continue the process of self-education he began in the 1950s at the "baby end of the beat generation," Rooks, who has been married and divorced, says he will leave for northern India before Christmas with his young son, his girl friend and his crew.

There, he says, he will experiment with "pure film" under the aegis of the Dalai Lama. "He's interested in me," the movie maker said. "I've already spent some time with him in India. My guru took me. He wants me to come back; he is interested in my ideas of film."

One of those ideas is that filming should proceed like writing. A writer may experiment by constructing a paragraph a dozen ways. A film maker should do the same, Rooks says, by taking a variety of shots and putting them together in a variety of ways.

"Film isn't expensive," he says. The most you can spend if you shoot all day is $100,000.

Rooks is also convinced that the movie maker has no business trying to reproduce a novel on film. He must originate his own material.

"Chappaqua," he says, is a result of advice Ginsberg once gave him:

"Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting."

"Chappaqua" is autobiographical in the same way that Burroughs' "Naked Lunch," Ginsberg's "Howl" and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" are autobiographical, Rooks says.

But in his next film, Rooks wants to go outside of himself and "through some sort of simplicity, reveal some of the teaching which Asia is about to let us learn.

"We are basically uncultured races that are now coming into contact with the vastly more subtle races of the east and their cutlural knowledge is beginning to conquer us," he says. "Look at the Beatles running after their guru. Look at Mia Farrow going to India for spiritual teaching.

Working with the Tibetan exiles also has its practical advantages.

"There are 90,000 refugees all willing to do this kind of labor," Rooks said. "There are 20,000 artists doing nothing but sitting in front of tents now waiting for the Indian government to feed them. We'll put them to work."