Coincidance - Principia Discordia

84 COINCIDANCE
with your Death full of flowers
From "Strange now to think" through "the rhythm the rhythm" the
poem has gradually created, just through the integrity of its own emotion,
the justification from the drum-beat and thunder of "only to have, only to
have" and "with her eyes, with her eyes." If anybody else repeated the
"formula," it would only be a trick, because the emotion is in the words and
the discovery of the words is the discovery of the emotions. It is Ginsberg's
personal Golgotha that we meet here, and if you or I were to tell our own
stories we would have to find our own words and emotions. That is why a
great work of poetry is always so original as to seem "formless" at first
glance. It appears to have no form because it is a new form, manufactured in
heart's agony, a shape cut in the air as a sculptor cuts.
The last movement opens with a bird call:
Caw caw caw crows shriek in the white sun over grave stones in
Long Island
The crows seem to burst onto the page with the vividness of real life; we
actually hear them before we see them. But Ginsberg, with the audacity of
genius, has another trick for us in the next line:
Lord Lord Lord Naomi underneath this grass my halflife and my own
as hers
The tom-tom is back again, this time in a half-rhymed fugue with "Caw
caw caw" chasing "Lord Lord Lord" down the page. It is "only to have" and
"with your eyes" picked up into greater urgency than before:
Lord Lord great Eye that stares on ALL and moves in a black cloud
caw caw strange cry of Beings sung up into sky over waving trees
The ending is pure fugue, pure as Bach:
Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord
The harsh monosyllables of American speech have dominated the poem
from "Strange now to think" right through to "caw caw caw Lord." Pound
showed us how to do this forty years ago, with his "Blue jade cups well set
etc., but he has had no student to apply him half so well as Allen Ginsberg
And the economy and magnificence of using "Lord Lord Lord" against "caw
caw caw"—an implied identification picked up in the montage-like shift
from God as "black cloud" to the black cloud of crows—this is balancing a
poem as skillfully as Roebling balanced the Brooklyn Bridge.
Among the shorter poems in this volume, particularly good are "Poem