Supreme Reality & Allen Ginsberg

[Ron Price]

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.



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