Coincidance - Principia Discordia

82 COINCIDANCE
blacks and browns this side of downtown Passaic; this is the typical "feel" of a
Ginsberg poem. Actually, of course, neither Rouault nor Ginsberg work in a
frothing frenzy. Ginsberg in particular probably spends as much effort
sounding "uncivilized" as Henry James ever spent in sounding "civilized."
There has been little technical analysis of Ginsberg's verse thus far; the
job requires an ear delicate as Pound's and the patience of an elephant. It
generally takes me three or four readings aloud to feel my way toward
Ginsberg's music; his great bass, as Pound would call it, is strong as a Watusi
drum, but, like a Watusi drum, full of surprising polyrhythms and
unexpected variations. I have heard that the poetry reviews in the Saturday
Review, New York Times, etc. are actually written by machines; and, from the
reviews Ginsberg has gotten in those and similar publications, I would
gather that the machines in question, like most university poetry teachers,
are not yet capable of following a meter more challenging than the
traditional umpty-umpty-umpty (followed occasionally by umpty-umpty-UMty)
Let's take a closer look at one of Ginsberg's oral constructions. A poem is a
statue in sound, or "frozen architecture," or anyway you slice it it's basically a
structure, a form manufactured by a man. The chief thing about Allen Ginsberg
as a poet is that he always shows you his form emerging, the way it builds
up, a thing created out of ordinary speech but suddenly, by the height of its
emotion, transcending ordinary speech. Kaddish begins with words you or 1
might speak:
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village
Like most modern poetry, this cannot be broken down into a traditional
meter, but has to be considered in terms of Pound's Second Law of Imagism:
"to write in the sequence of the musical phrase." There are three phrases
above, the second syncopating slightly with the first, and the third a
prolonged complication on both of the first two. It's rather like Charlie
Parker taking off and searching for his theme. In a few lines Ginsberg finds
his basic beat:
. . . and I've been up all night, talking, talking,
reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to
Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm
We are still in the area of normal American speech, but Ginsberg is
beginning to pick out of it his own building blocks. "And I've been up all
night, talking, talking" ... "Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph