SUPA: Chaos Sutra (585 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 2 on 20 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by goferforhire <goferforhire.at.yahoo.com> (View user info) at 2007-04-22 01:37:59 EDT
For Allen Ginsberg, who Howled like a Coyote to a kindler, gentler moon.
I have a recurring dream
where Allen Ginsberg comes down
from heaven, dragging Kerouac behind him,
cute as a button in his Buddhist Chic.
With a chorus of heaven's holiest
jazz trumpets, they call to me;
with all the bass drums of the beat
movement, they call to me;
with surrealist cymbals,
with the drums of Tao
and Dada and one lonely
cello for the churchyard boys,
they call to me,
they call to me,
they are calling me to golden eternity.
In my dream
T.S Eliot is French-kissing Ezra,
who is weeping underneath his Noh mask.
Before and behind them
I can see Sylvia and Emily,
naked and beautiful as wedding china,
marred and made beautiful by
ink-stained hands, crawling
decadently into Frost's expectant
lap, who smiles, too old to care
to see the knives they hold
like feathers behind their backs.
In my dream there is nothing
in this world so soft as water,
and as I wade among
the thousand corpses of Virginia Woolfe
I am universal as a flood
and finite as the thunder,
and finite as the ones who came before.
They are calling to me.
They are howling with the pain
of this golden eternity,
which the world recognizes as good
and is good,
which the world sees as beautiful
and is;
and he is holding Solomon's hand
and shouting with all the painful
tremors of silence while Jack smiles,
and they calm down for a moment
as Ezra runs by in the background
with his pants rolled at the knees
like the old man of the sea
and they all smile, even Ginsberg,
as I slowly wake up screaming,
wake up howling with the pain
of dreaming the greatest minds
of my generation, which is all generations,
swirling like flecks of white plastic
in the great snowglobe which is time.
User Reviews
Submitted by CaptainThorns (user info) at 2007-04-26 08:44:31 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Mad props to all Round 3 contestants. Best round of entries yet, lots of great reading!
Submitted by goferforhire (user info) at 2007-04-25 23:39:14 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
The Churchyard Boys were a group of English poets that inspired romantic poets, except they wrote almost exclusively about death.
Golden Eternity is a reference to Jack Kerouac- scripture of the golden eternity. It's essentially a religious text rather than poetry, and Golden Eternity is his phrase for enlightenment, or the oneness of the universe. Very Taoist/Eastern. Coyote, from the dedication, came from the same book.
T.S loved Ezra.
"Noh Mask" is a reference to Pound's interest in Noh theatre, which I'm not going to explain but you can look up if you really like, which he helped re-popularize.
Sylvia=Sylvia Plath
Emily=Emily Dickenson
Frost=Robert Frost
'there is nothing/ in this world so soft as water' 'universal as a flood' 'which the world recognizes as good/ and is good,/which the world sees as beautiful/and is'
Are all fairly direct references to the Tao Teh Ching
Virginia Woolfe drowned herself.
'he is holding Solomon's hand' - 'he' is Allen Ginsberg, and Carl Solomon is the man to whom Howl, Ginsberg's masterpiece, is dedicated. All uses of the word howl or howling in the poem are an intentional draw from this as well. Solomon is also intended to reference Solomon from the bible if it strikes that chord.
Jack=Jack Kerouac
'his pants rolled at the knees' is a reference to Prufrock
'like the old man of the sea' is a Hemmingway reference, which I expanded in a later reworking of the poem I did a day or so later.
'dreaming the greatest minds/of my generation, which is all generations,'
A joint reference to Howl (I have seen the greatest minds of my generation starving hysterical naked) and Eastern philosophy.
Thanks again, O-man for giving me an excuse to write this thing.
Submitted by Sacrilicious (user info) at 2007-04-25 23:20:11 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I don't need to be familiar with every last reference to appreciate this, yet without having a literature-intensive education, some of them are familiar enough. You have a true talent for poetry and fiction, and I enjoy watching you cultivate it before our eyes.
Submitted by Orgasmatron (user info) at 2007-04-25 18:01:18 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
"T.S Eliot is French-kissing Ezra," for instance. That's a heavy line there.
You could have gone all puff pastry on this, but instead you made it dense as poundcake.
Good on you.
Submitted by Orgasmatron (user info) at 2007-04-25 18:00:09 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This was impressive.
There are things I read here that I'd like to read again with the author's comments added to it, either in footnotes or at the beginning/end just to have a wider appreciation for all the connections, asides or language used throughout. I know your intention and my interpretation will never be the same, but I'm not talking about authority here. Just perspective. Anyway, this is one of those posts.
Submitted by Coleslaw_Murphy (user info) at 2007-04-25 10:39:48 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I'd have to study this more to give it a proper rating / criticism.
But upon first and second glance, intuition tells me it's better than good.
Submitted by Zebra (user info) at 2007-04-23 20:51:51 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This poem is excellent.
I disagree completely with Scourge. The contest isn't over, it's just over for him.
That hissy fit denigrating Sacrilicious' excellent poem as inferior to his after being eliminated was laughable, as is her ridiculous offering for round three which will apparently deprive uber of another entry from ahumblefool, whose work so far has been wonderful.
There are several others capable of inspired poetry.
To praise this poem and declare the contest over in the same breath is passive-aggressive nonsense.
This would stand out in a field of two or two hundred.
Submitted by Anansie (user info) at 2007-04-23 16:24:00 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Everything scourge said.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2007-04-23 15:55:09 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
y'know what, I didn't read this, i just let the words punch me in the eyeballs
Submitted by experima (user info) at 2007-04-23 12:26:58 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
beautifully written.
Submitted by scourge (user info) at 2007-04-23 09:51:16 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
you're going to win this year.
too bad the contest is more or less over already.
for what it's worth, everything you've written for this thing was fantastic
Submitted by CaptainThorns (user info) at 2007-04-23 09:27:23 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Very nice.
Submitted by beeltea (user info) at 2007-04-22 14:55:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
very good work.
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-04-22 13:18:06 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by ghola (user info) at 2007-04-22 11:51:05 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by NotVoltron (user info) at 2007-04-22 07:28:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
this is superb.
Submitted by Merlina (user info) at 2007-04-22 04:15:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Hookhand (user info) at 2007-04-22 03:42:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Weeee!
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2007-04-22 02:57:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Really liked this.
Submitted by Zebra (user info) at 2007-04-22 02:40:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Thy sins are forgiven, Wichita!