Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion

2015

I

Early Takes

Manifesto on Writing

Going through notebooks from the 1970s, I found a mimeographed one-page form letter from Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, postmarked November 9, 1977, inviting me to submit to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, which was about to start the following February. It included a handwritten note from Bruce with some suggestions about what I might send. I also found two typed pages, undated and unsigned, that I now assume I must have written in response to Bruce’s request, but apparently never sent. I am not sure if this is so; I am not even sure this is my writing, though it more or less sounds like me, and more or less sounds like what I would have thought at the time. Retyping this manifesto on a computer, I am impressed most of all by the unconscious assumption that there is an intense and crucial relationship between writing and action, living, and, toward the end of the piece, the breath. And that the characteristic of it should be warmth. This seems very true to me, and very interesting, though I had no idea that I had such notions in 1977. Also, it seems this manifesto contains ideas about writing that are quite different from those typically associated with the Language School; I am not sure if I would have known that in 1977, when I was intensely interested in Language writing, aspiring to it, close friends with its main proponents, and probably misinformed as to its tenets.

The basic point is: to be in a position to write.

Next: what is writing made of.

Writing is not scientific—narrowly defined, objectified, founded on method, of limited scope, of limited end. Nor is writing an art—full of the sense of its own importance and overflowing with the feelings and sense of the one who is doing the writing. Stories are no longer told—all stories are now known, everyone does anything. Mental states interpenetrate physical space, the physical object—hence words’ meanings gain immeasurably, their exactitudes become momentary—what they refer to is certain only in the moment of writing and reading.

Writing must be clear, it must be vivid. If it is not, the resultant confusion is wholly mental and blocks action. One goes around and around in the same place. Not good. For the writing. Which must always be new. We know now there is nobody there: anywhere. It is in our body, this fact at this time. No need then to break apart what we know is broken. With clarity and vividness we evoke the life. So experience is vivid if language is vivid. Otherwise we are approaching life from behind a screen of words. This assumes there are words, there is life.

And writing must be sincere. It must connect to warm accuracy of perception, of simultaneous action. After all, no one’s writing is a particular thing—if so, what is it and what makes it more than what it seems to say? It is, as they’ve said, that poetry springs up fully made out of life—in the spaces between, perhaps, the moments—that is, the moments themselves supercharged with meaning. To focus in on time that way—lovingly, warmly—is sincerity—it must be in action, perception, and such must be the mental state in the act of writing—otherwise, despite what skill one may possess, the writing falls flat—oh it is good enough but so what. Mouth to mouth, hand to hand. Otherwise writing is specialized out of existence. Otherwise language stands aside, in its own slot, and thought is destroyed forever. And with thought, action.

And writing is not an object. If we say writing is to convey meaning—my insights about life/the troubles I have known—how foolish we are! The words slip beyond us. Form is gone, or is so simple it is not nice, no longer gives an open feeling—as cruising an empty stretch of road in a car—to where? Too much meaning holds it back. Form, the shape of it, is it, if writing is architecture, and it is. So we are tempted to say writing is an object—we place it over there, in its form, an object now, made of glass? This contains an exact inaccuracy. For in this meaning is affixed more solidly than ever and consciousness is blotted out. Writing is not an object. Far from it—it is the final subjectivity. So much so it doesn’t appear as such. May appear as an object. Is, in fact, an action, a gesture. This way meanings are exact and momentary, form moves. It is a dance—or a strong arm slinging paint with spirit—the result of a momentary impulse fixed for all time. Or as long as it lasts. And it cannot.

What makes the form in writing. Breath makes the form. The breath in, the breath out. These two make it in its dance—as speech does, in and out, as anything goes in and out, pain, relief of it; sun and dark; love and hate. Any shape in words is shaped by breath. If we know the breath, we know what we say and how to say it.

AND THESE ARE THE CHARACTERISTICS OF WRITING WHICH ARE INTERESTING.

The Poetics of Emptiness

In April 1987, with Gary Snyder and others, I organized a public event at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center called The Poetics of Emptiness: A Collaborative Gathering of Poets Who Meditate. The final issue of the magazine Jimmy and Lucy’s House of K (January 1989), edited by Andrew Schelling and Benjamin Friedlander, was devoted to transcripts and other writing from the event. Below I reproduce two of my own pieces for the magazine: my introduction to the issue and my poetics statement (which was later reproduced in the anthology Beneath a Single Moon, Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Kent Johnson and Craig Paulenich, Shambhala, 1990). Also below is the text of my The Birth of the Buddha poem, which has been performed annually at Green Gulch Zen Center since I wrote it in 1988 as a response to conversations about traditional Buddhist pageantry at our Poetics of Emptiness event. Words in brackets are notes added in 2012.

I’ve been doing zazen for almost twenty years and have been writing for longer than that, but until I began doing zazen, I couldn’t get the feel of writing. When I finally did get the feel of it, inevitably that feel had everything to do with zazen. I had to have a way of writing that put me into the world rather than out of it looking at it and describing it.

In 1985, while I was living and practicing Zen in New York City, I decided to start talking about all of this, so I organized an event called Beyond Words and Phrases? A Symposium on Language and Meditation. It was held at Greyston Seminary, Zen Community of New York, in Riverdale, the Bronx, and included ten poets/practitioners of meditation, among them the poets Jackson MacLow; Alan Davies; Charles Bernstein [who is proud to be a nonmeditator, but somehow was included]; Nick Piombino, who is a poet and theoretician coming from a background in psychotherapy; Lou Nordstrom, a Zen priest and philosophy PhD; myself; and some others [including, I now remember, Armand Schwerner and Charles Stein]. The event was organized as a presentation/discussion, very serious, not much of an audience or publicity, a working situation. We had a pretty lively day of it, and as I recall, the main point of controversy, and it was a hot one, was whether the poem is on the page or in the mind.

Returning to California, I wanted to see what it would be like to do this again, on another coast, where I anticipated we’d have a very different sort of discussion. I began talking with Gary Snyder about my idea, and soon the thing took quite a different shape: we’d have a large, public event, the centerpiece of which would be not discussion but demonstration of how poetry and meditation work together.

So in April 1987, we held The Poetics of Emptiness: A Collaborative Gathering of Poets Who Meditate, a full weekend at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, where I live and work as a Zen priest. About thirty people joined Gary and me, including Phil Whalen, Anne Waldman, Jane Hirshfield, Gail Sher, Steve Benson, Andrew Schelling, and Will Staple. They stayed for the whole weekend, which included, as the New York event had not, zazen, meals, Zen talks, and hanging around time, and was capped by what we called a Buddhist Poetical Performance and Meditation Event in the Meditation Hall, which was attended by probably three hundred people. This performance was truly memorable. It involved many events, word- as well as music-based, including one that I produced: a droning reading of the phantasmagorical Avatamsaka Sutra from a corner of the room while the audience, given strips of paper with my one-line poems on them, spontaneously performed the poems as the sutra was being read. The most powerful part of the program, in my memory now, was the chanting of En Mei Jikku Kannon Gyo—the brief Kannon Sutra—that went on for a very, very long time, repeating and repeating. Memorable for me because I was playing the big Fish Drum during the chanting, which sped up as it went, and I lost all sense of time and physicality as the drum went on playing itself long past my ability to play it, and then it stopped abruptly, and there was the sort of intensely present silence that you can only experience out in the country, far from traffic. This silence lasted for what seemed quite a long time—no stirring whatsoever from the audience—until suddenly a frog from the pond behind the zendo began to croak. Immediately a second frog responded, and within five seconds there were what sounded to be ten thousand more frogs croaking—and then roars of laughter from the audience. With this, and nothing more, the performers left the stage and the evening ended.

It was, I think, an extraordinary event, and I am very grateful that Jimmy and Lucy’s is devoting this issue to publication of the proceedings. I believe that there is a great deal to be said and understood about this subject of meditation and poetry and that we are only now beginning to think about it after many years, collectively, of practicing these disciplines here on this continent. It has been a notion of mine for many years that began, I think, early on with my appreciation of Williams and Olson, that what we are about here is a writing that is not the same as European writing but rather comes out of this wide landscape and experience of mixing of peoples in a democratic way. And I am convinced still as I have been for many years that the transmission of the meditative traditions of Buddhism are central to the making of this writing. [From the standpoint of the present this seems impossibly Whitmanesque.]

Since 1987, I have been continuing. In the spring of 1988, I led a workshop at Green Gulch that combined again time on the sitting cushion with time behind a pen; in April 1988, for Buddha’s Birthday, we held a passion play here, based on a poem by me, with masks and theatrical direction by Annie Hallat, a direct outgrowth of some of our discussions during the weekend of the 1987 event.

Unquestionably, the work will continue. I do not think we will have spectacular results or even terribly noticeable results. But very steadily and gradually and clearly I think it becomes more and more impossible not to think of our minds our bodies our hearts and our words as of a piece.

POETICS STATEMENT: ON MEDITATION AND POETRY

At their best, both of them, meditation and poetry, are ways of being honest with ourselves. Only by honesty can we see anything because honesty opens the eyes or cleans them. Without it we’d see what we’d like to see, or what we think we’d like to see, or what someone else would like us to see.

Meditation is when you sit down, let’s say that, and don’t do anything.

Poetry is when you get up and do something.

I don’t think there is any escape from these activities: all of us have to do both of them. And both of them are involved with the imagination, that human faculty that creates, envisions, or transforms a world.

Somewhere we’ve developed the misconception that poetry is self-expression, and that meditation is going inward. Actually, poetry has nothing to do with self-expression; it is a way to be free, finally, of self-expression, to go much deeper than that. And meditation is not a form of thought or reflection; it is a looking at or an awareness of what is there, equally inside and outside, and then it doesn’t make sense anymore to mention inside or outside.

Experience, I think, is a never-ending adjustment.

Practically speaking, I would say that meditation gets you used to failure and gives you great familiarity with the mind’s excitement, to the point of boredom, and so much so that there is a great acceptance of all experience, and there is no wish to favor one kind of experience over another. It is all pretty remarkable. This attitude is an aid to poetry.

So you are not interested in poetic experience or in poetic language. These seem unnecessary exaggerations. Only that you know, as a human, that you live intimately, intensely, with language, honestly with it, in it, as it, and it is necessary to keep that up, to clarify and deepen it.

That is why some aspects of poetic form are not helpful. And that is why, with your eye on the main purpose of the poem, you feel compelled at first to challenge poetic form, and then later to simply do away with it (by which I mean to stop being concerned with it terribly).

How do you do this? Practically speaking, I think meditation offers a feeling for or sense of experience, very broadly, that allows us to find a way to do this. The grip on self can very naturally loosen, the grip on meaning loosens, and there is the possibility of entering wholeheartedly into a dark or unknown territory. That, and talent, a little, familiarity with poetic form, a little more, courage, and luck. An interesting footnote is that it is not a struggle; it is the release from struggle.

I imagine that no really amusing (a word Ted Berrigan [a mentor, teacher, supporter, and friend of my early years] insisted on, and I understand, as from the muse) literary work was ever conceived without meditation. Without an insistent, intent, single-minded holding in mind of a single object until it dissolves. I am convinced every poem involves this process, at least narrowly conceived. And the broader we make our meditation, the more implications it has for our poetry.

Do not imagine that I am advocating a particular approach or that, even worse, I am suggesting a meditative verse modeled on the Oriental or Occidental [sic] poetry written in previous centuries by meditators or contemplatives. I read and learn from this poetry but much of it I do not like very much.

No, I am talking about a life in which we can be radically simple. And out of this great simplicity or honesty, one does what one can.

I think if meditation can show you that there is really no such thing as, nor would one want, a poetic voice, then it is already worthwhile.

If I am recommending one thing that can be clearly understood, I suppose it must be an unerring sense of humor.

Text of my poem performed annually at Green Gulch for the Buddha’s Birthday celebration:

THE BIRTH OF THE BUDDHA

1.

Listen to the story of the birth of the Buddha, a story that is always told

Whenever beings gather together to work or to play

And even when they fight or shout

The story of the birth of the Buddha is told on every breath in and out

2.

There was a king of the mighty Shakya tribe, Suddodhana by name

Whose purity of conduct and grace of manner

Caused him to be loved by his people

As pens love paper, flowers love the spring

3.

His queen was Mahamaya whose splendor bounced from the clouds to the earth

And she was like the earth in her abundant solidity

In her beauty like a great blue heron or like a mass of willow trees at dawn

Seen from a distance from a truck

4.

This great king and splendid queen in dallying

Spread open happiness like a picnic basket in May

And without any ants or spilled wine extruded the vine-like fruit of a gestating babe

As concentration and mindfulness together gently produced the winds of the wisdom gone beyond

5.

Queen Maya before conceiving saw in her sleep a great white lord of an elephant

Emerge from a cave and come close to her envelop her incorporate her

Into his all-embracing comprehension

Like a nation state a political movement a trance or a soothing bath

6.

This lord of elephants with the Queen dissolved into a pure melody

And so she sought in all purity, piety, and joy, without illusion, a place in the sin-free forest

A valley among trees by the sea

A place suitably arrayed for the practice of meditation and birth, called Lumbini

7.

Here the queen aware of the stirrings of beginnings and endings

Amid the welcome of thousands of waiting women

On her couch covered over with awnings and leaves gave birth without pain from out of her side

To a son born for the weal of the world from out of her vows

8.

Forth he came yet not from earth or cloud or spirit but as if from out of the empty sky

Pure of being as the breath itself long or short without beginning or end fully aware

And like a brilliant sun in the summer sky

His beautiful gaze held all eyes like a full moon in Autumn

9.

For like the sun he awakened all life on earth the trees and children deer and little fish

He woke up stars in the night that whispered to one another

He woke up seas and breezes, the tall mountains that nail the universe shut

And the streams in the mountains that flow to the rivers like tongues

10.

And standing up straight like a mountain attending above and below

He took seven silver steps his feet lifted up unwavering and straight

The strides spanning earth and heaven

ONE. . .TWO. . .THREE. . .FOUR. . .FIVE. . .SIX. . .SEVEN

11.

And like a lion in charge of the jungle

Like an elephant ruling the grounds

Proclaimed the truth and sang,

I am born for enlightenment, for the weal of all beings!

12.

Hot and cold running water like jewels from the sky poured forth for his refreshment

The softest couch appeared bedecked with pears and apples flowers potatoes lettuce and pets

The invisible dwellers in the heavens

Shielded him with their giant umbrellas

13.

And the dragons of the earth and air flew and blew the air for him

And the dragons of the seas tipped the purple waves with points of silver

And the dragons of the houses flapped the houses

Like nightgowns bedsheets or banners

14.

And animals stopped eating one another to take a