...from Phillip Whalen, who eventually became the abbot of the San Francisco Zen center and his old buddy, Gary Snyder, who was about to go to Japan to study Zen in formal fashion. Both poems from late 1955, shortly after the infamous 6 Gallery reading in SF which kick-started the emergence of the Beats, hence the hippies, and all that....
First Whalen, from a poem entitled "Unfinished":
A single waking moment
destroys us
and we cannot live without
ourselves
You come to me for an answer? I
invented it all, I
am your tormentor, there is no
escape, no redress
You are powerless against me: you
must suffer agonies until you know
you are suffering;
work on that.
And from Snyder, the same winter, 1955/56, about to embark on a momentous life change, crossing the Pacific:
All America south and east,
twenty-five years in it brought
to a trip-stop
mind-point, where I turn
caught more on this land -- rock tree and man,
awake, than ever before, yet ready to leave.
damned memories,
whole wasted theories, failures and worse success,
schools, girls, deals, try to get in
to make this poem a froth, a pity,
a dead fiddle for lost good jobs.
Granite sierras, shelves of books,
all my friends, scatter
aimlessly tumbling through
years and centuries
Aristotle's herd of formal stars
stampedes:
the diamond point mercy
of this timeless rain.
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