The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (74 page)

Burroughs:
It may not last, it may not last. You may have something just beautiful and you’ll never remember it later. Like Coleridge forgot the end of “Kubla Khan” because someone came in.

Rinpoche:
It doesn’t mean that we give up ever judging anything useful or useless. But for that situation we are willing to try doing that. It is difficult to sort out what is real production, and what is just part of your fantasy. Usually your mind becomes so clear, so precise that you need some more feedback. The result is that you put in a lot of neurosis and entertainment. This usually happens with people.

Waldman:
I think there are exceptions.

Burroughs:
It depends on how neurotic you are to start with.

Rinpoche:
Well, it’s possible that if I decided to send you to retreat, sir, maybe I would like to give you a typewriter.

Whalen:
The thing is that if you have one good idea the chances are that you’ll have another one later. You lose the first one, well you get another one anyway, so why sweat?

Rinpoche:
Yes, good Buddhist thinking.

Burroughs:
It’s not always true. You may get a good idea and lose it completely. This great novel is gone because you didn’t have a typewriter.

Rinpoche:
The painters would have a brush. And the seamstresses would have their needles and thread. And all kinds of things begin to happen. And maybe the master chef who’s in retreat would like to have his food and cook delicious meals.

Burroughs:
This would apply, of course, to any other profession. You’ve got someone up there on retreat. He’s a carpenter. He shouldn’t do any carpentry. You’ve got someone up there, a physicist. Suppose he’s got a new field theory, something comes into him. He should not write this down?

Rinpoche:
No.

Burroughs:
I’m glad you’re giving me definite answers.

Rinpoche:
Maybe we shouldn’t give you a typewriter when you go on retreat.

Burroughs:
I think it’d probably be very good for me not to have a typewriter, really. It’s like a film director who doesn’t have a camera, right?

Rinpoche:
Very much so.

Burroughs:
I think it’s a very good exercise. I agree 100 percent, because the guy’s going to be up there saying, “Oh my god, I’ve got the film, I’ve got the novel,” then he realizes this is not so important.

Rinpoche:
Sure. That always happens, and usually people who practice sitting are very brilliant people. They would like to do this thing. They come up with these fantastic ideas. The whole thing may be dissolved, or the remaining ideas may be continued after they get out of this, when they have some taste of the world and a flavor of the sitting practice.

Burroughs:
I think your point is very well taken here, very valid.

Rinpoche:
If you want to take a retreat you’re always welcome.

Burroughs:
I’m willing. I’ve written enough. I don’t have to write anymore. Any profession can become compulsive. I think to break it completely is very good exercise.

Rinpoche:
Yeah. I would say more of a training, not even exercise. There is a difference.

Rinpoche:
Well, why do you write poetry?

Waldman:
I don’t know. I feel driven. And I feel calm with it and comfortable, healthy, sane. Some kind of discipline which hasn’t interfered in other ways.

Rinpoche:
Do you feel any kind of feelings toward your audience when you write?

Waldman:
Sometimes when I read or when something comes spontaneously, I feel that the audience is somehow part of it, and feeding it. We’re all doing it together and that feels healthy. On the other hand I feel, as William was saying, professional in some way. I mean that’s what I do, I write.

Rinpoche:
Well, poets generally have some vision of society. They are putting some kind of energy into the society. So what is your work actually doing for the good of society? So somebody buys your booklet of poetry. What do you expect of them?

Waldman:
I don’t think about it too much.

Rinpoche:
You don’t? Really you don’t?

Waldman:
I’ve been lucky as far as a career in poetry is concerned. I think it has to do with being female at this time and other considerations. Publishers like to put photos on covers and so on.

Rinpoche:
Some of your poems are very powerful. They always enter my dreams.

Waldman:
Thank you.

Rinpoche:
Always, I keep on hearing your voice.

Burroughs:
You write poetry. Do you think of your audience when you write?

Rinpoche:
Sometimes I do when I write. Sometimes I have a separate sort of split, I should say; I’m writing for this particular person, a love poem or whatever it may be. But at the same time as the audience would hear this, they might pick up some kind of spark. And I think it’s the same when I give a talk. I’m talking with an individual person in the audience while this particular talk is being taped and going to be played on the radio, so I have an awareness of that at the same time. So what I expect out of my work is that people will pay attention and they will think twice. In fact, this is exactly what is happening right now, because we’re being taped. We have to make our tape not just a pile of shit but somewhat workable so we can use it again and people will have some idea as to who we are, what we are, and what we are trying to do.

Waldman:
I also feel part of some lineage. So that when I read certain poems I’m inspired to continue in some way, or translate again through my own instrument.

Merwin:
For me the two things are almost the same because it’s entirely a matter of recognition. I mean, the reason I love to do it is because the excitement, the feeling that one recognizes something in terms of language, is for me a great, great excitement. When it happens you don’t question it. Part of that faith is that the recognition is something that can be shared, it’s something that language is there to pass on to other people.

Rinpoche:
Well, I think that’s quite safe to say and all of us are dealing with some kind of awareness of a public. Somebody’s going to respond to this. It’s not just purely writing in your backyard and putting it in the garbage, but there is some sense of awareness which you try to communicate.

Waldman:
Basically, you’re communicating with yourself at first.

Rinpoche:
Sure, that’s why you want to write, or you have nothing to write.

Ginsberg:
There is a funny line in Shakespeare, “One touch of nature . . .

Waldman and Burroughs:
“. . . makes the whole world kin.”

Ginsberg:
So one touch of one’s own nature written down, and other people see their own nature. The primary preoccupation is the bemusement with discovering what you were actually thinking.

Rinpoche:
Well, we could draw another line on this, if I may say so. Please criticize me. Everybody’s aware of the audience somewhat, but at the same time it depends on how much you want to put out and how much you make yourself heard. There is that kind of arrogance and pride and craftsmanship that working with words is involved with. Is that possible? I mean all of us.

Waldman:
I think that seems more true recently.

Rinpoche:
Particularly when you’re well known.

Waldman:
It’s only in the last ten to fifteen years that one has been able to give poetry readings and have some sort of audience there.

Merwin:
But there’s a danger in it, too. I think being aware of readers and being aware of the public are two different things. The image of the poet which comes out of his writing is very often practically eclipsed by trying to make a sort of public relations image out of it.

Rinpoche:
If you criticize the government or if you talk about homosexuality or whatever, it would be a real statement on your part, something you take pride in.

Ginsberg:
What takes pride in mirroring what went past?

Rinpoche:
Well, that still somehow has residue of the coming out.

Ginsberg:
Well, I’m confused. Do you feel that this coming out is just pure ego with no value, or do you think it’s a useful work that we do.

Rinpoche:
Please don’t panic.

Ginsberg:
I’m not panicking, now will you stop that. I was examining very closely what you were saying. I’m an expert in this area. I know my own moves.

Rinpoche:
Well, I’m trying to study the sociological or psychological setup of poets, and how they are aware of the audience. A lot of people begin to deny this completely but it is not quite true. You would like to make a proclamation. People write me a poem sometimes. They say, “Please destroy this after you have seen it.” But they really didn’t want it to be destroyed.

Waldman:
I asked my class for the next time to bring poems that they would be willing to give away. There would be only one copy of them and they would give them to each other.

Rinpoche:
So there are two split mentalities taking place.

Waldman:
Or even more than that. Some people are concerned with language and using other people’s words, like the cut-up method, and putting them in surprising orders so that one isn’t even conscious of doing it.

Rinpoche:
But that’s the same thing somehow. You are still writing poetry.

Ginsberg:
However, I don’t understand why you’re making a difference between the self and the audience, because it is all self.

Rinpoche:
Well, that has always been the question of the past.

Ginsberg:
Yes, well, I don’t think it should be anymore.

Rinpoche:
No, we can’t just make it a very simple situation that way. You are the audience, and the audience is you, obviously. That’s a kind of cliché. Nevertheless, when you begin to write poetry you would like to proclaim your poems, say something. You have your booklets printed. You have the things that you would like to write down and say—say to yourself.

Waldman:
That’s not the motive.

Ginsberg:
It’s not so much proclaim as allow, give permission for the self to understand itself.

Rinpoche:
Whatever you use it doesn’t really matter, it’s the same thing. Like the poem on how you were mugged in New York City. That was a proclamation, as well as an experiential description, which is saying the same thing.

Ginsberg:
What is the meaning of the word
proclamation?
I’m afraid you’re going to say there’s a shade of aggression in the proclamation which is not useful.

Rinpoche:
Not necessarily as such, but it’s possible there is proclamation in the sense that you are going to say your particular line.

Ginsberg:
Right.

Rinpoche:
And your particular approach is apt, and that’s your style. You are already a poet or maybe somebody’s not a poet really, somebody is an amateur, but would like to be a poet or known as a poet. There is the faint hope that you might have your particular platform/ pedestal. Anybody who writes poetry seems to feel that addressing from the platform or pedestal is taking place always. Nobody writes poetry just simply for its own sake.

Waldman:
I don’t think that’s true.

Ginsberg:
I don’t agree with you.

Rinpoche:
I’m sure a lot of people don’t, but please criticize me.

Ginsberg:
There’s another way which I find. See, I’m public—

Rinpoche:
You see, that’s what I said, how else can you write poems?

Ginsberg:
The other way is just oddly surprising yourself with remembering something with no actual reference to public.

Whalen:
You remember it in words, that’s the important thing. You’ve started to remember before you’ve judged whether you’re doing it for an audience or for yourself. The recognition happens before you think why you’re doing it. So that the element of proclamation comes afterward, if it comes at all.

Ginsberg:
The way you read it, maybe.

Rinpoche:
Well, not quite, but you have hopes of hearing your voice in the back of your mind.

Waldman:
But that’s modern. In tribal societies there was always a place for the poet shaman, shamaness, whatever, who spoke, who had a role, just like being the head of the tribe, the warrior, the one who went out and made war, the agriculture man or woman, and there was no problem then.

Ginsberg:
Well, oddly enough, it’s very similar. I spent time with the Australian aboriginal stone men. They had to remember the migration of the tribe over twenty year periods, and all the water holes, and all the lizards, and where they find food. The poet now has to remember that psychologically for a larger culture, like water holes of the mind.

Zim:
Why sidestep the possibility that the writing is in fact at least partially aggressive?

Ginsberg:
Get on with the business. Don’t get hung up on your ego. That kind of self-consciousness inhibits you from seeing what’s outside of you. Most exhibitions of that kind of thought-form are just worry and self-consciousness. So you deal with it, like you do meditation or anything.

Waldman:
In my experience, hearing poetry read and reading poetry, especially hearing poetry read—it could be in a living room with twenty people—there is usually something very modest. It’s not somebody up there giving you a line or giving you some propaganda, or trying to sell you something. It’s a very naked kind of sharing and can be illuminating if you’re listening to it. And I think there are a lot of poets doing that. There are hundreds of poets who are not in this room, working in very modest ways, not trying to lay their trip on anybody.