The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (73 page)

Rinpoche:
Why do you write poetry?

Ginsberg:
I took a vow when I was fourteen years old that if I were admitted to Columbia University I would work hard on the salvation of mankind.

Rinpoche:
Did you think you were going to be famous?

Ginsberg:
That was not the original intention.

Rinpoche:
But the second one?

Ginsberg:
You know, I don’t think I’m going to be famous. I’m already famous, so the future isn’t necessarily fame.

Rinpoche:
So how did you think poetry would help people?

Ginsberg:
If you can make an accurate description of the differences in behavior and changes in your own life and in your own mind, people looking at it see a sample of how somebody else behaves and how somebody else reacts and get some sense of their own changes, the variety of them, the strangeness of them. It’s you who learn for other people to understand. You make a graph of the agreements and contradictions.

Rinpoche:
Do you think that’s going to help society?

Ginsberg:
Yes, because you lay down “what oft’ was thought but ne’er so well expressed,” or never expressed at all.

Burroughs:
But Allen, let me say something about your poetry. I mean, the fact that forty years ago if someone had gotten up and sung a song “Everybody’s a Little Homosexual” they would have been torn to pieces, particularly in front of college kids who were especially afraid of that. You have created this terrific cultural revolution whereby you can get up and say that, and people will applaud you. I would say that Allen’s poetry has been a great force in transforming American society.

Rinpoche:
Are you talking, Bill, purely in terms of homosexuality or something else?

Burroughs:
Not just homosexuality, but the whole matter of freedom of the word—so that you can say words like “fuck.”

Ginsberg:
Responsible frankness, or at least an accounting of what’s going on, like a core sample.

Rinpoche:
So that will just be to help people free themselves from holding back, and culture from holding back?

Ginsberg:
No. To help them free themselves for spiritual search, free themselves for dharma also, or even to awakening curiosity and insight.

Rinpoche:
Well, you have a lot of faith and hope.

Ginsberg:
Well, yes I have. “Devotion is the head of meditation, as is said.”

Rinpoche:
Oh, my goodness!

Ginsberg:
No, it begins with some sense of devotion. I recognize your beauty the same as I recognize my own or anyone else’s, and I write about that in my poetry. However you want to define the word
beauty.

Rinpoche:
Are you sure? Are you perfectly certain?

Ginsberg:
No, but I do my best.

Rinpoche:
That’s better.

Ginsberg:
Well, that’s all I say. I may try to make a record of what goes on as far as I can see it, but there doesn’t have to be a record of truths. There only has to be a record of what I thought was true or what I thought about, so it serves as a model for other people who might not be thinking, or might not think you’re supposed to think about that, or might not think that there’s any reality to such investigations.

Burroughs:
If anyone asks me why I write novels, I am but a simple craftsman.

Waldman: A
writer writes.

Burroughs: A
writer writes, that’s the way he makes his living just like a doctor. Any craftsman wants to make money. It’s his trade and he has to make money in order to continue to do it.

Rinpoche:
Do you regard yourself as a craftsman?

Ginsberg:
Sometimes. Other times I regard myself as a bodhisattva or with bodhisattva intentions.

Rinpoche:
When was the first time you heard the word
bodhisattva?

Ginsberg:
Oh, 1951 or something. Reading Suzuki.

Rinpoche:
What did you think a bodhisattva was like then?

Ginsberg:
It reminded me of the fact that I got there on the ferryboat across the Hudson from Hoboken to New York and kneeled down on my knees and prayed that if I got admitted to Columbia University I would save the working class in America.

Rinpoche:
Just the working class? Why not the others?

Ginsberg:
Well, that was just the beginning. I didn’t realize at the time that anybody was suffering, that the trees were suffering, that I was suffering.

Waldman:
It’s like being a reed, just a simple reed and letting the wind or whatever play on you.

Merwin:
The first reason I do any of those things is because I want to.

Whalen:
I usually get carried away. I hear some line in my head or see something that attracts my attention or carts me off with it temporarily and I get it all on paper somehow, maybe not all at once, maybe several days later. But it’s an obsessive kind of business. I can’t really say that I create these things, that I sit down with the intention of saying, “Now, today is Friday and it’s poem writing time,” and I get out this paper and pencil and say, “Now I’m going to think of a sublime thought,” and presently the sublime thought appears and I say, “The moon is rising over the purple hills.” This is a sublime statement of my sublime thought and you got poetry. With me it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes I get turned on by a single word or by a phrase or by something somebody says on the bus or maybe I’ll be reading something that suggests something else to me, and I take off and start writing my own thing at that point. It isn’t so much a business of my being a professional poet or something or of my seeing myself that way, but just being interested in words and language and having a great deal of fun with it.

Rinpoche:
Do you memorize your poems of the past?

Whalen:
No. I can’t remember. I have to write them down. And then after I write them down I can’t remember them.

Waldman:
You’re freed once you write them down.

Whalen:
In a way. Sometimes on rare occasions I can remember fragments but if someone tells me, “Please recite one of your poems for us,” I can’t do it. I have to go find a book and look in the book and read. Allen used to be able to remember lots of his poetry and Gregory could remember his and Kerouac could remember long passages of his own writing and recite them for you. And I always envied Allen’s capacity to remember classical poetry, to remember large sections of Shakespeare and Milton, Blake and so on, which I can’t do. My memory is too shaky or something.

Rinpoche:
How do you feel your practice connects with the poetry?

Whalen:
Oh, it stops it. At first, in the earlier part of doing formal zazen—the first year and a half, two years—I wrote very little and I resented—very deeply resented—the fact that I wasn’t writing anything, and it made a great difficulty for me. It was only about six months or so ago that I started to feel free enough to write or not write.

Rinpoche:
Do you find any conflict between writing poetry and sitting?

Whalen:
You know, in some subliminal way that I can’t really describe. It’s gradually working itself out to where I can write if I have something to write and if not, not. It all works itself out without my having to worry about it, mess with it.

Rinpoche:
Do you write about sitting practice in poetry?

Whalen:
Oh, no. I couldn’t. It’s too large. It’s too complicated. After I’d been through a sesshin I thought, my goodness, that to explain what had happened to me in those seven days would take thirty-five or forty volumes of closely printed pages, and then you’d still just have books, you still wouldn’t have anything like what it was that I pushed myself through. So it doesn’t work, or at least I haven’t found a way of telling that or telling what it’s like to be in the training period at Tassajara where your life is totally changed, where in addition to doing lots of zazen you do all three meals a day in the zendo with the bowls, plus working, plus changing out of working clothes into robes and back again and things like that, and it’s very funny. I still have found no way of saying it except to tell people that they ought to try it.

Ginsberg:
I’m not as deeply into practice as you are but what will I do? Some things stand out, like anything you can remember stands out. So what little you can remember is material in a sense.

Rinpoche:
You wrote a lot of poems when you were at the seminary?

Ginsberg:
Yes, I wrote a lot of good poems, I thought.

Rinpoche:
Maybe that was your only thought, a time to write poetry.

Ginsberg:
No, it wasn’t my primary thought. Thoughts came. Occasionally they were tempting enough to write down. They were solid enough, pretty enough to write down.

Rinpoche:
Yes, I think a lot of Tibetan poets like Milarepa are spiritually moved out of the sitting practice. All kinds of things come up which they jot down, just write, just sing happily or sadly or whatever it may be and poems get written down. It’s worth trying.

Ginsberg:
Yes, it would seem natural. The only conflict I would find was whether or not to break up the sitting to write. I did it once, but anything strong enough to write down remained after sitting.

Rinpoche:
Well, you could do it while you were sitting on the toilet or something.

Burroughs:
I don’t see any reason why you can’t sit at the typewriter.

Waldman:
Gertrude Stein used to meditate at the typewriter.

Fields:
Rinpoche, during retreat you instruct your students not to write, why is this?

Rinpoche:
Well, when you sit meditation a lot of things churn up your mind—resentment of the past and your mother, your father, your teacher, your brothers, sisters, and dharma or blood brothers or whatever.

Burroughs:
Doesn’t all that come up when you’re writing?

Rinpoche:
Not necessarily. There could be a moment of very clear thought when you can actually write something without thinking.

Burroughs:
I’d like very much to go on one of these month retreats to cut off all input.

Rinpoche:
Let’s do that.

Burroughs:
But I would like to have a typewriter.

Rinpoche:
Well, a typewriter becomes an out for us. It becomes your occupation; that’s the only source of entertainment.

Ginsberg:
Yes, but he’s also saying the typewriter, the use of typewriters, is his zafu, that’s his yoga. Is that possible?

Rinpoche:
It’s possible, of course, but it’s very deceptive.

Whalen:
Or you could take the ribbon out.

Ginsberg:
Well, it’s a practical proposition. I wonder would there be room for Bill at Karmê Chöling?

Rinpoche:
There’s no room for him to type in a retreat hut. There’s only room when he comes down. He can do that, which is an entirely different situation. I think that if you’re able to preserve your creative mind even when you’re in a transitional period, then you are already there. You can write. But there was a woman who did her whole book in retreat, which was jammed with all kinds of resentment, all kinds of sexual fantasies, and all kinds of political ideas.

Burroughs:
Well, sexual fantasies are bound to arise in retreat.

Rinpoche:
Sure, that’s not regarded as bad, but if you have writing materials available on the spot of your sitting practice, then it’s just more garbage. There’s so much happening you don’t have a chance while you’re sitting to review anything that’s happened to you before.

Rome:
Why does it make sense to you to limit your input but not your output?

Burroughs:
I didn’t say that at all. I simply said that if I was on retreat I would rather like to have a typewriter in case anything useful came up.

Rome:
But I think that’s the point, that we give up judging anything useful in the process of doing retreat, being in meditation.

Burroughs:
That seems quite reasonable.

Rinpoche:
Sitting practice is regarded as an unproductive period. You don’t produce any commercialized industry of any kind at all. Just sit and do it, slow the world. The world doesn’t have any further ideas or input in it at all. This is very hard in some sense, but I think in the long run it provides more input.

Burroughs:
In other words you’re simply cutting out your input. No mail, no radio, no nothing.

Rinpoche:
No telephone.

Burroughs:
I could do that in New York City, rip out my telephones and say, “I’m in retreat, boys. Nobody contacts me.”

Waldman:
I’ve got some problems with some of the students here at the Poetics Academy coming to classes and saying that they can’t write because they’re so involved with their meditation, which is fine.

Burroughs:
Why do you say that when someone is in retreat, they can’t also write?

Waldman:
It’s just a temporary cutoff.

Burroughs:
But suppose in retreat they get an idea for a great novel?

Waldman:
It’ll come back later if it’s that great.

Burroughs:
But it may not though.

Rinpoche:
The point is that we may have good ideas but we are uncertain as to which part is the real inspiration and which part is just entertainment. You would like to prove to yourself that you have something happening. If you have real inspiration it’s going to last.