Around & about Matt Hall's FALSE FRUITS (Cordite Books, Castlemaine, '17)
[salvaged from Facebook]
I hope this aint talking out of school, but a month ago in 'chat' with Kent MacCarter i said how i was reading Matthew Hall's book, False Fruits. "I need to get my teeth into it but at first blush the language sings, in my sense, but i dont think that's how it's supposed to rest... i need to get with the argument or dialectic..." Well, thanks to John Hawke's words at last night's launch, April 7th, '17, we got it! Look forward to reading the speech, what amounted to a short history of the po-mo everywhichway of the lyric, the pastoral, Romanticism, etc --that is, as per Matt's project, lyric that aint lyric, pastoral that aint that kind of pastoral nor that, missus, and aint all parody since, as per Schuyler on NY poetry ca 50s (i'm throwing that in, begging yr pardon) gallons of [paint] true feeling courses it, suffuses it. And so on. Hmm. I confess the radical battle cry that poetry is violence upon language, and that all poetry shares the perspective, except of course that of the unmentionables, poetry's deplorables? --a claim i lived with myself through the 70s & 80s-- doesnt work for me in the way John announced it last night... Eeek! It's Saturday morning i think! Stuck in the middle of another dense & ingenious proposition for the Eco-poetic! Lots to think about, and the book itself to read! Congratulations everyone! It was a stimulating night!
---------------------------
Nice memory you recalled in yr remarks last night, Matt, regarding that conference you attended several years ago and the afterparty reading at Collected Works Bookshop, at wch i particularly recall your good self and David Herd's distinctive readings...
RE- violence, and of course your book, On Violence in the Work of J. H. Prynne (Cambridge Scholars, 2015) (--just reminded myself via the abstract up on the Web, and nice to see longtime-nosee Michael Tencer's name there), --the violence John Hawke indicated as a general condition of the practice is NOT, i think, the point of your submission on Prynne (or, indeed, the British poetry in the vicinity of that influence or out of similar Traditional & Modernist extrapolation as the man's), wch is a very particular project... or was --i'm sure by now it's widened to the air that's breathed there, almost commonplace assumptions & similar formal expressions.
(At the beginning of your V., am reminded of Olson, ye olde Projective Verse (how sprightly they read, all these assayes of the Big O even now) --our poet, "How he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. (.....) For a man's problem (...) to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature..." --reminded by your quotation from JHP that, like O, his poetry is another kind of human manifestation, and an imp is tickling me to suggest meta-literary, metaphysical, even of Platonism! --like for ex., Korean poet Ko Un adamant that his poetry's not to do with literature but "the universe!" --away with thee, imp!) --
I wish right here i could jump into statement of what i'm feeling (and to include something on feeling, on wch last night i thought John Hawke very good)... something about the relation to this being here, this relation to nature (and the nature of things), which is rather more interesting than literary cleaving (i mean grading) right & left & all about one! (--that vivacious intellectuality, --importunate mind, promiscuously vital --and dont i recognize that myself)...
My sentence runs away! I shall return after another helping of Fresh Fruits...!
[April 8/9, 17]
Showing posts with label Ko Un. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ko Un. Show all posts
Sunday, April 9, 2017
Saturday, April 7, 2007
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) , continued (2)
May 31st, 2006
Melbourne, Oz
Dear Bernard, Two things for starters : Firstly, your pile of Buddhist literature beside TDB -- and "diverted" would be a censure were it not that our book is also a Buddhist novel or, shall we say, a novel in which 1950s Californian Buddhism is evoked; and secondly, the experience of literally sitting down to read the book...
I wrote in my notebook, "Never forget that the extraordinary amount of biography [i.e., Beat generally and Kerouac in particular] stands upon the actual words of the biography's subject. Here is that subject [Kerouac] as author. These are the words, the sentences, the pages; THIS IS THE BOOK! (May13/06)" Incidentally, I think that a famous book has the same aura as a famous poem. Lines of prose generally arent memorable as those in a poem, although there are great passages in TDB , but the aura of author & book bestows upon the words the expectation of the memorable. From another angle,one returns from the biography (which has come to parallel a particular social & cultural history) to the book & the story & the words. The whole edifice is stripped back. The opening sentence, quite formal in comparison to the confidential chat (epistolary) he largely disports, is poignantly transparent. There's more than a touch of Hemingway about it. "Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffle bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara." I did this, I did that, I did the other; that is, in order to arrive at the graceful pass this was done in that circumstance. The reader also hears the sound of his story. He's talkin' to ya!
Regarding the Buddhism : Preceeding or outside of this novel resides the story of how & where Ray Smith (Kerouac) came upon Buddhism, of a kind distinguished from but compatible with Japhy Ryder (Snyder)'s. In the novel one realizes that Beat's physical expedition , the journeys & kicks as it were, is saved by & savoured through the mystical lens. It's easy to forget this or for it to be displaced in the Proust/Joyce absorption of daily life whether reminisced, observed or cogitated. The characters strive to overcome the contradiction. Life is the practice -- Ray & Japhy are dharma bums after all -- and the point of it is self-realization & good old pilgrimage as its own justification. Concepts like salvation & revelation occur to me too but in the sense of redeeming or restoring wonder to a ransacked & mindless contemporary life.
I do agree that it's our "true calling" as you suggest! We'd be among the lost without it. Mind you, Kerouac lost it too and a book like Big Sur is as eloquent a document of self-destruction as Malcolm Lowry's Dark As the Grave... My thought in 1965 or so was that my life should be devoted to the search for truth and that one had to go out into the world, away from hometown, to discover it. Travel related to encountering & experiencing the unfamiliar. I was learning about hitch-hiking before I'd heard of Kerouac's (Japhy's words actually) "ruck- sack revolution". And as children we both knew about India (the Budhha, brahmans, the Hindu stories, yoga etc) & about China & Japan from Dad, inheriting his references (the Upanishads, Paul Brunton for example) ahead of anything from or about the Beats.
I do think of you as the "Abbot of Goldy Abbey" in all seriousness! "Poet" is also a matter of self-appointment. The fancy, "abbot", more truly describes your life than anything else and that's surely the point? You are willing to bear the real burden which the fantasy imposes. Ditto, poet -- after & because of which the mystery gradually opens up to one. Your extensive reading in Buddhism and many years of various meditation practice in your sangha of one confirm your title! "Goldy Abbey" -- amongst all that Weymouth bucket & spade who could guess what was going on in Goldcroft Road? Rather like Dad's secret life in Shelley Road, Thornhill when we were growing up -- who would have guessed the yoga, the trances, the vegetarianism, the interest in UFOs & astral travel? A great pity he didnt relate to our expeditions when we got to adolescence...
A NOTE ON & ABOUT KO UN
31/5/06 When you mentioned Ko Un to me one time, I confused him with the Korean poet published by Forest Books,London -- I thought we had two of his titles in the Shop. I checked & saw we had two other Korean poets, Kwang-ku Kim & Ku Sang, both translated by Brother Anthony of Taize. Then, synchronistically, I found Ko Un in the new University of California catalogue, his Selected Poems with, as you say, Snyder's introduction. When David Prater, who edits Cordite magazine, on-line nowadays, came by the Shop one day he told me he'd recently returned from tremendously enjoyable stay in -- surprise -- Korea! I said how Korea was beginning to feature in my life, for example Kris Coad's selection for the international ceramic award in Seoul, and then your interest in Ko Un. His eyes lit up! On this & subsequent occasion he's described Ko Un's unique standing in Korea, and Brother Anthony's work there.
5/6/06 Visited Ko un's & Brother Anthony's web-sites this morning before hurrying through winter fog & cold to the train -- both of them appear to be remarkable men. Brother Anthony, for instance, is now a naturalised Korean, still with the Taize community & teaching at Sogang University. Ko Un's statement on his life & poetics is unusual & attractive. He doesnt believe in the poem as a text but as belonging to the universe. (An echo of Olson there, "a thing of nature" & etc.) His poetry, he says, relates to the present & not to any literary history. (And yet very early in his Selected he's referring to Han Shan...)
Love, Kris
18th June, 2006
Weymouth
Dear Kris, I was sitting-up in bed early this morning with "our book", reading, at about 5.30 a.m. I suppose, by rights, as Abbot of Goldy, I should have stirred even earlier to "do" zazen, set a good example, but early morning zazen never suited me. And, of late, zazen doesn't suit me full stop. It's something about that upright posture. It is posture and not the concentration. It's a pity. A pity, also, I don't have a sangha about me. I don't want to be too secret. Don't want to be as isolated as Dad was. The trance visions he saw were too much to bear by himself. So he stopped. I think he stopped as soon as he saw the emenations of devils appearing out of his skull. And also maybe his chakras were too open due to vibration of Om chanting. I don't know. It's not really my area. I did mention the UFO stuff to him the other day. "What about George Adamski?" I asked him. (He had the book, Inside the Space-ships .) But he agreed it had been a false trail. In fact all his "interests" disappeared and he was not to lead us anywhere in life. Though probably my ongoing interest in yoga & vegan diet stem from him. And of his children I probably take the most from him...
I must tell you about a great synchronicity that occurred the other day. Mum & I caught the early Jurassic Coast bus to Bridport and I took The Dharma Bums along with me in case I needed to have a little read during the day. It proved to be talismanic. I called into the second-hand bookshop I always look in on and what do I find among all the usual books (no one buys from the poetry section) but Mexico City Blues, Grove Press, only L3.50p. I don't have it in my collection. I was ecstatic. Then, on way home, back in Weymouth again, staring me in the face in W.H.Smith's are a pile of copies of Big Sur -- this time only 99pence! Brand new paperback. What a successful day. A great trip. Mind you, I'd rather be with Japhy & Ray, where I am in our book, hiking up Matterhorn, composing haiku as I go...
Love, Bernard
--------------------------------------------------------------------
(to be continued)
Melbourne, Oz
Dear Bernard, Two things for starters : Firstly, your pile of Buddhist literature beside TDB -- and "diverted" would be a censure were it not that our book is also a Buddhist novel or, shall we say, a novel in which 1950s Californian Buddhism is evoked; and secondly, the experience of literally sitting down to read the book...
I wrote in my notebook, "Never forget that the extraordinary amount of biography [i.e., Beat generally and Kerouac in particular] stands upon the actual words of the biography's subject. Here is that subject [Kerouac] as author. These are the words, the sentences, the pages; THIS IS THE BOOK! (May13/06)" Incidentally, I think that a famous book has the same aura as a famous poem. Lines of prose generally arent memorable as those in a poem, although there are great passages in TDB , but the aura of author & book bestows upon the words the expectation of the memorable. From another angle,one returns from the biography (which has come to parallel a particular social & cultural history) to the book & the story & the words. The whole edifice is stripped back. The opening sentence, quite formal in comparison to the confidential chat (epistolary) he largely disports, is poignantly transparent. There's more than a touch of Hemingway about it. "Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffle bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara." I did this, I did that, I did the other; that is, in order to arrive at the graceful pass this was done in that circumstance. The reader also hears the sound of his story. He's talkin' to ya!
Regarding the Buddhism : Preceeding or outside of this novel resides the story of how & where Ray Smith (Kerouac) came upon Buddhism, of a kind distinguished from but compatible with Japhy Ryder (Snyder)'s. In the novel one realizes that Beat's physical expedition , the journeys & kicks as it were, is saved by & savoured through the mystical lens. It's easy to forget this or for it to be displaced in the Proust/Joyce absorption of daily life whether reminisced, observed or cogitated. The characters strive to overcome the contradiction. Life is the practice -- Ray & Japhy are dharma bums after all -- and the point of it is self-realization & good old pilgrimage as its own justification. Concepts like salvation & revelation occur to me too but in the sense of redeeming or restoring wonder to a ransacked & mindless contemporary life.
I do agree that it's our "true calling" as you suggest! We'd be among the lost without it. Mind you, Kerouac lost it too and a book like Big Sur is as eloquent a document of self-destruction as Malcolm Lowry's Dark As the Grave... My thought in 1965 or so was that my life should be devoted to the search for truth and that one had to go out into the world, away from hometown, to discover it. Travel related to encountering & experiencing the unfamiliar. I was learning about hitch-hiking before I'd heard of Kerouac's (Japhy's words actually) "ruck- sack revolution". And as children we both knew about India (the Budhha, brahmans, the Hindu stories, yoga etc) & about China & Japan from Dad, inheriting his references (the Upanishads, Paul Brunton for example) ahead of anything from or about the Beats.
I do think of you as the "Abbot of Goldy Abbey" in all seriousness! "Poet" is also a matter of self-appointment. The fancy, "abbot", more truly describes your life than anything else and that's surely the point? You are willing to bear the real burden which the fantasy imposes. Ditto, poet -- after & because of which the mystery gradually opens up to one. Your extensive reading in Buddhism and many years of various meditation practice in your sangha of one confirm your title! "Goldy Abbey" -- amongst all that Weymouth bucket & spade who could guess what was going on in Goldcroft Road? Rather like Dad's secret life in Shelley Road, Thornhill when we were growing up -- who would have guessed the yoga, the trances, the vegetarianism, the interest in UFOs & astral travel? A great pity he didnt relate to our expeditions when we got to adolescence...
A NOTE ON & ABOUT KO UN
31/5/06 When you mentioned Ko Un to me one time, I confused him with the Korean poet published by Forest Books,London -- I thought we had two of his titles in the Shop. I checked & saw we had two other Korean poets, Kwang-ku Kim & Ku Sang, both translated by Brother Anthony of Taize. Then, synchronistically, I found Ko Un in the new University of California catalogue, his Selected Poems with, as you say, Snyder's introduction. When David Prater, who edits Cordite magazine, on-line nowadays, came by the Shop one day he told me he'd recently returned from tremendously enjoyable stay in -- surprise -- Korea! I said how Korea was beginning to feature in my life, for example Kris Coad's selection for the international ceramic award in Seoul, and then your interest in Ko Un. His eyes lit up! On this & subsequent occasion he's described Ko Un's unique standing in Korea, and Brother Anthony's work there.
5/6/06 Visited Ko un's & Brother Anthony's web-sites this morning before hurrying through winter fog & cold to the train -- both of them appear to be remarkable men. Brother Anthony, for instance, is now a naturalised Korean, still with the Taize community & teaching at Sogang University. Ko Un's statement on his life & poetics is unusual & attractive. He doesnt believe in the poem as a text but as belonging to the universe. (An echo of Olson there, "a thing of nature" & etc.) His poetry, he says, relates to the present & not to any literary history. (And yet very early in his Selected he's referring to Han Shan...)
Love, Kris
18th June, 2006
Weymouth
Dear Kris, I was sitting-up in bed early this morning with "our book", reading, at about 5.30 a.m. I suppose, by rights, as Abbot of Goldy, I should have stirred even earlier to "do" zazen, set a good example, but early morning zazen never suited me. And, of late, zazen doesn't suit me full stop. It's something about that upright posture. It is posture and not the concentration. It's a pity. A pity, also, I don't have a sangha about me. I don't want to be too secret. Don't want to be as isolated as Dad was. The trance visions he saw were too much to bear by himself. So he stopped. I think he stopped as soon as he saw the emenations of devils appearing out of his skull. And also maybe his chakras were too open due to vibration of Om chanting. I don't know. It's not really my area. I did mention the UFO stuff to him the other day. "What about George Adamski?" I asked him. (He had the book, Inside the Space-ships .) But he agreed it had been a false trail. In fact all his "interests" disappeared and he was not to lead us anywhere in life. Though probably my ongoing interest in yoga & vegan diet stem from him. And of his children I probably take the most from him...
I must tell you about a great synchronicity that occurred the other day. Mum & I caught the early Jurassic Coast bus to Bridport and I took The Dharma Bums along with me in case I needed to have a little read during the day. It proved to be talismanic. I called into the second-hand bookshop I always look in on and what do I find among all the usual books (no one buys from the poetry section) but Mexico City Blues, Grove Press, only L3.50p. I don't have it in my collection. I was ecstatic. Then, on way home, back in Weymouth again, staring me in the face in W.H.Smith's are a pile of copies of Big Sur -- this time only 99pence! Brand new paperback. What a successful day. A great trip. Mind you, I'd rather be with Japhy & Ray, where I am in our book, hiking up Matterhorn, composing haiku as I go...
Love, Bernard
--------------------------------------------------------------------
(to be continued)
Friday, April 6, 2007
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS
10 May 2006
Land of Oz
Dear Bernard, I realized tonight what a "gonzo" reporter Kerouac actually is. After all, what is The Dharma Bums but a travel book in which narrator & place are continually transposed, with either aspect absolutely crucial in evoking & defining the other? The genre didnt exist when he was writing, in fact he'd naturally call it a novel, as all his writing, though one should say that after Joyce & Proust the novel-of-life imparts a legacy of seriousness for the writer of fiction. The novels of life-as-lived, after Joyce & Proust, and Miller might be a prime example, allow their authors to seriously represent themselves, indeed to be fully present in their own analyses -- but as history, confession, topography, and not the pseudo science in that name. I'm half the book ahead of you in this re-reading (it's around 40 years?) so I've already escaped from the city with Ray (Kerouac), Japhy (Snyder), & Morley (John Montgomery) and climbed the Matterhorn in the High Sierras. And descended -- it's exhilerating!
When I say "travel", I include the journey or quest book that the genre has come to enthusiastically embrace. Inner journey parallels the outer. The "gonzo" slant subverts the public or conventional story -- it delivers the "secret" history. In The Dharma Bums the reader is given a key to the Beat Generation writers, mostly & importantly to Gary Snyder as the Zen Buddhist mountain climber Japhy Ryder. When I read Kerouac I'm also deciphering my beloved Beats, trusting the fiction as much as the ever-growing biography. In the 60s it was simultaneously biography. And we didnt appreciate how close we were to those characters & events. We were first generation readers, reading & emulating as we set out upon our lives.
The power of this book is seen in its basic situation; for instance, "I sat crosslegged in the sand and contemplated my life." Doesnt that grab you? Didnt it always? Isnt that what all art's about? Isnt that always where we were found?
Love, Kris
16th May, 2006
Weymouth / England
Dear Kris, Of course the whole dharma bums biz "grabs me". And I think it always did. Only wish I'd been more of a Zen lunatic/hermit -- my persona of Abbot of Goldy Abbey reflects this. Anyway, I'm diverted from my currentreading of The Dharma Bums continually. I've a whole load of books I'm reading concurrently. I'm rereading Bones of the Master (an account of an old Ch'an Master's return to Inner Mongolia), and today George Crane's sequel to this just arrived -- Beyond the House of the False Lama (Travels with Monks, Nomads and Outlaws)-- falls into the groove of TDB nicely, as do the other two books that came -- The Three Way Tavern : Selected Poems of Ko Un , and Vegetable Roots Discourse from Robert Aitken. Hope these don't divert me too much, plus all the diet and macro books. I'll have to just sit and get on and read it. I'm only a few pages in. And you're already half-way through! The last time we read a book together was John Cowper Powys' Maiden Castle. I don't think either of us finished in the end. But this feels different. Is this our true calling?!
Love, Bernard
P.S. Japhy (Gary Snyder) has written the forward for Ko Un's book. Good that he's still out there doing it.
_________________________________________
(to be continued)
Land of Oz
Dear Bernard, I realized tonight what a "gonzo" reporter Kerouac actually is. After all, what is The Dharma Bums but a travel book in which narrator & place are continually transposed, with either aspect absolutely crucial in evoking & defining the other? The genre didnt exist when he was writing, in fact he'd naturally call it a novel, as all his writing, though one should say that after Joyce & Proust the novel-of-life imparts a legacy of seriousness for the writer of fiction. The novels of life-as-lived, after Joyce & Proust, and Miller might be a prime example, allow their authors to seriously represent themselves, indeed to be fully present in their own analyses -- but as history, confession, topography, and not the pseudo science in that name. I'm half the book ahead of you in this re-reading (it's around 40 years?) so I've already escaped from the city with Ray (Kerouac), Japhy (Snyder), & Morley (John Montgomery) and climbed the Matterhorn in the High Sierras. And descended -- it's exhilerating!
When I say "travel", I include the journey or quest book that the genre has come to enthusiastically embrace. Inner journey parallels the outer. The "gonzo" slant subverts the public or conventional story -- it delivers the "secret" history. In The Dharma Bums the reader is given a key to the Beat Generation writers, mostly & importantly to Gary Snyder as the Zen Buddhist mountain climber Japhy Ryder. When I read Kerouac I'm also deciphering my beloved Beats, trusting the fiction as much as the ever-growing biography. In the 60s it was simultaneously biography. And we didnt appreciate how close we were to those characters & events. We were first generation readers, reading & emulating as we set out upon our lives.
The power of this book is seen in its basic situation; for instance, "I sat crosslegged in the sand and contemplated my life." Doesnt that grab you? Didnt it always? Isnt that what all art's about? Isnt that always where we were found?
Love, Kris
16th May, 2006
Weymouth / England
Dear Kris, Of course the whole dharma bums biz "grabs me". And I think it always did. Only wish I'd been more of a Zen lunatic/hermit -- my persona of Abbot of Goldy Abbey reflects this. Anyway, I'm diverted from my currentreading of The Dharma Bums continually. I've a whole load of books I'm reading concurrently. I'm rereading Bones of the Master (an account of an old Ch'an Master's return to Inner Mongolia), and today George Crane's sequel to this just arrived -- Beyond the House of the False Lama (Travels with Monks, Nomads and Outlaws)-- falls into the groove of TDB nicely, as do the other two books that came -- The Three Way Tavern : Selected Poems of Ko Un , and Vegetable Roots Discourse from Robert Aitken. Hope these don't divert me too much, plus all the diet and macro books. I'll have to just sit and get on and read it. I'm only a few pages in. And you're already half-way through! The last time we read a book together was John Cowper Powys' Maiden Castle. I don't think either of us finished in the end. But this feels different. Is this our true calling?!
Love, Bernard
P.S. Japhy (Gary Snyder) has written the forward for Ko Un's book. Good that he's still out there doing it.
_________________________________________
(to be continued)
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