Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (review)

Though they were an odd literary couple, separated by nearly 30 years, William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg created one of the most mutually productive friendships in 20th-century American poetry. Ginsberg found a literary father in Williams; Williams found a literary son in Ginsberg. Paterson, New Jersey, where Ginsberg was raised, and where his father Louis was the leading poet, provided the backdrop for many of their meetings that began in 1950 and continued for nearly a decade. During that time they walked, talked, and corresponded with one another. Williams included Ginsberg’s letters to him in Paterson. He also wrote a letter of introduction to the San Francisco poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth that paved Ginsberg’s way when he arrived in California. Of course, Williams also wrote the Introduction to Ginsberg’s Howl and other Poems (1956) that gave the book lineage and dignity.

Indeed, no older poet did more for a younger poet than Williams did for Ginsberg, though he also had strong reservations about him. “He is a Jew during an age which makes a god of advertising,” he wrote to Denise Levertov. “He can walk into any business office and demand recognition.” Ginsberg also had strong reservations about Williams. In 1951 he wrote to Ezra Pound to say that Williams’s poetry “just isn’t gone, wild, weird.” He added, “He has no bounce, no beat.” Louis Ginsberg thought Williams was anti-Semitic. Allen didn’t. When Williams died in 1963, the younger Ginsberg wrote a poem about him entitled “Death News,” in which he exclaims climactically, “Williams is in the Big Dipper” by which he means, of course, that he’s gone to heaven and has achieved literary immortality.

Tony Trigilio makes scattered references to Williams’s life and work in his book about the complex connections between Ginsberg, poetry, and Buddhism. He disdains nearly everything biographical, so basic facts—which would have clarified matters—about when, where and why Ginsberg first met Williams, and when he first sat and meditated in the Tibetan Buddhist manner, are excluded. In 250 pages, Williams shows up on 16, and there’s hardly a word about his poems. Much more space is devoted to Blake, Walt Whitman, and Michel Foucault in whose work Triglio finds theoretical support for his endeavor. Still, the places where Williams does show up are pivotal. For example, in the index, under “Williams, William Carlos” the first reference is to Williams’s “influence on Ginsberg’s Buddhist poetics, 38–39.”

On page 38, Triglio writes that Ginsberg’s 1963 poem Angkor Wat “is the first of a series of poems in Ginsberg’s career that attempt to merge Williams’s poetics with one inspired by Buddhist vipassana practice—a poetry grounded in concrete particularity but also in Ginsberg’s belief, inspired by vipassana meditation, that an inextricable connection between perceiving body and perceiving mind creates sacred space and therefore, sacralizes the imagination.” Of course, Ginsberg also learned about “concrete particularity” by reading T. S. Eliot on the “objective correlative,” much as he also first learned about Indian spiritual traditions from reading The Waste Land that ends “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih.”

A nuanced narrative about the many varieties of Ginsberg’s religious experiences does not fit Triglio’s thesis, and everything that does not fit—from Ginsberg’s chanting “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna,” to his fascination with Indian goddesses, for example—he expunges. Repeatedly, he neglects obvious yet powerful images, such as the image of “the Big Dipper”—the familiar constellation in the night sky—that appears in “Death News,” and that says far more about Ginsberg’s poetics than any Buddhist he Ginsberg absorbed. Trigilio is fixated on “Buddhist poetics,” and how it is “fused” with everything else. He hammers away at his thesis with words and phrases like “sacralizes,” “mantra-based,” and “spell-like illocutionary gesture” that obfuscate rather than illuminate. What he doesn’t grasp is that Ginsberg’s poetics were already formed by the time...