Ron Price
Mr RonPrice
SUPREME REALITY AND ALLEN GINSBERG
The poems in this volume(1953-1960)...mostly lack the desperately earnest cry for truth and the snug-tension accuracy of Ginsberg at his best. -A.R. Ammons, "Ginsberg’s New Poems"(published 1964) in On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Hyde, editor, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1984, p.185.
Truth and justice are achieved, not questioned and described. -Maurice Blanchot, The Siren Song: Selected Essays, Harvester Press, 1982, Brighton, p.135.
Yours just may have been the
quintessential cry for truth
as it was uttered at the very beginning
of the Kingdom of God on earth.*
For your story really begins in 1953
which was quite a big year
for this mystic and messianic poet
of impossible visions
in the liveliest spot for poetry
in the USA: San Francisco,
after your eight months in
a mental hospital in 1949.
Your howl against everything
in our materialist world
in your new poetics of vision,
as you tried to catch
the texture of our age
and as you tried to catch
the Supreme Reality+
you caught the mystical
death wish, a desire to draw
near to that sense of cosmic awe.
The ninth stage of history
was opening up and the inception
of the Kingdom of God on earth:*
a mystical air of new beginnings
was caught by your poetic consciousness
which turned to Buddhism.
The step of search in the path
leading unto the knowledge
of the Ancient of Days
took you down some road
leading, over decades, to illusions
and embodiments of satanic fancy.**
And so it was that the Beat Generation
and the New American Poetry
missed an eschatological centre
that was completed, at last,
in Chicago in 1953 with all
the trappings of millennial zeal
and the apocalyptic as it was
symbolized and enshrined
in Real manifestations of a New Age,
Whose Dust was now in Haifa.
Ron Price
4/10/95 & 8/1/05.
* Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p.351.
+ Allen Ginsberg had a profound interest in spiritual reality in the late 1940s and early 1950s
and turned, in 1954, to Buddhism.
** Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, Tablet of the True Seeker.
________
The poems in this volume(1953-1960)...mostly lack the desperately earnest cry for truth and the snug-tension accuracy of Ginsberg at his best. -A.R. Ammons, "Ginsberg’s New Poems"(published 1964) in On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Hyde, editor, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1984, p.185.
Truth and justice are achieved, not questioned and described. -Maurice Blanchot, The Siren Song: Selected Essays, Harvester Press, 1982, Brighton, p.135.
Yours just may have been the
quintessential cry for truth
as it was uttered at the very beginning
of the Kingdom of God on earth.*
For your story really begins in 1953
which was quite a big year
for this mystic and messianic poet
of impossible visions
in the liveliest spot for poetry
in the USA: San Francisco,
after your eight months in
a mental hospital in 1949.
Your howl against everything
in our materialist world
in your new poetics of vision,
as you tried to catch
the texture of our age
and as you tried to catch
the Supreme Reality+
you caught the mystical
death wish, a desire to draw
near to that sense of cosmic awe.
The ninth stage of history
was opening up and the inception
of the Kingdom of God on earth:*
a mystical air of new beginnings
was caught by your poetic consciousness
which turned to Buddhism.
The step of search in the path
leading unto the knowledge
of the Ancient of Days
took you down some road
leading, over decades, to illusions
and embodiments of satanic fancy.**
And so it was that the Beat Generation
and the New American Poetry
missed an eschatological centre
that was completed, at last,
in Chicago in 1953 with all
the trappings of millennial zeal
and the apocalyptic as it was
symbolized and enshrined
in Real manifestations of a New Age,
Whose Dust was now in Haifa.
Ron Price
4/10/95 & 8/1/05.
* Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p.351.
+ Allen Ginsberg had a profound interest in spiritual reality in the late 1940s and early 1950s
and turned, in 1954, to Buddhism.
** Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, Tablet of the True Seeker.
________