Diane di Prima on the Poetics of Enlightenment

Here are two videos of Diane diPrima in Steve Goodman’s Poetics of Enlightenment class. Really extraordinary. In Part 1, she speaks of Loba which synchronistically this morning I added to our third meditation and poetics class list of resources. She also speaks of her creative process. Not only is Diane a great poet of RECEIVED poems but a great scholar of so many poets--she’s taught on John Keats, Ezra Pound, Sappho, to name a few. 

Part I on you tube reprinted from Steve’s Facebook page:




Part II on You Tube reprinted from Steve’s Facebook Page:

What is Poetrymind?

[Photo by Rosemary Rawcliffe of Frame of Mind films]

Officially Poetrymind’s a Decade Old

In the Spring of 2005 while co-directing the New England College MFA Program in Poetry, I considered starting my own blog. I still remember sitting bolt upright one night when the word poetrymind manifested as the title. I believe I first heard this word from Russell Edson--at NEC when he read. At one point he responded to a challenge from a faculty saying something like there is only one thing that matters and that is poetrymind. Edson was a magical and deeply ironic prose poet whose work I admire. His work epitomizes for me the simple notion that things are not what they seem. Thus, the phenomenal world is infused with magic and the mystery of discovery with ever fresh eyes.

 For me poetrymind is synonymous with “First Thought, Best Thought,” which is to say, thought that represents a state of mind free from conceptual overlays of judgment and second guessing. Rather it is elegant thought borne from pure perception, the original thought before attaching judgement. The slogan, "First Thought, Best Thought", coined by the late Chogyam Trungpa and Allen Ginsberg at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is not about writing without revision, as some believe. It is about experience first hand--direct and pure without a lot of egotistic filters or projections.

I am reminded of what the great Zen master, Susuki Roshi called “Beginner’s Mind” --- every moment offers a “fresh” experience. The ground is open vast mind or as Pema Chodron aptly puts it—The sky is open mind and everything else is the weather. Words are the display of poetrymind –alive with potentiality.  Words in this context can become a vehicle for discovery of who we are. 


See No Blood for Hubris on Russell Edson                                                  

News from Mary Gilliand

[Mary Gilliand reading at Mocha Mayas in Shelburne Falls]

Recently I received an email from poet friend and vajra sister, Mary Gilliand, in response to our second meditation and writing group posts. She writes:

Inspiring to read about your writing in motion workshop on tsetso blog. Good poem written during that you posted!

In the late 90's I made several labyrinths
https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/mg24/Labyrinth/labyrinth.htmland use the design both walking outdoors and finger-tracing indoors with auditoriums/cafes full of people
https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/mg24/essays.htmIt always liberates the censor-mind, whether the person is new to writing or extensively published or anywhere in between.
I'm glad we share this overlap among our many.

Spent several weeks in California around happy family event, so sorry to miss Rinpoche's summer retreat there this year. Peter and I drove up to San Juan Ridge for a few days, stayed at Kitkidizze with Gary Snyder for the first time since we left there in '76. Ah! precious teacher, 85 years old now. Those over-sunned hills, though - not the place for a northeast woodlands rainy day woman.

Attached 2 poems from new issue 'Hotel Amerika.' Do you know it? I like what they print.

Love,
Mary

***In that same issue of Hotel Amerika are poems by Chard deNiord....who will join us for our third meeting at the Emily Dickinson homestead on August 1. 

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche Visits Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry Class at Naropa

Recently the Ginsberg Project posted a transcript of one of  Allen’s early classes at Naropa Institute (now University) when Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche visited his class. In this particular class, Trungpa introduces a three part logic to working with language. The Ginsberg Project is a treasure trove of Teachings direct from the horses mouth, as they say!

The notion of what’s called threefold logic - which applies to a general state of mind, how we experience our phenomenal world (and obviously poetry comes from an expression of one’s phenomenal world - in the written form - it could either be prose or poetry form). It’s not so much, from (the) Buddhist point of view, (is that) (if) you write good poetry, particularly, but how your thought-patterns become elegant, that you see (the) phenomenal world as a process, stages, as a review, from a state of mind - That, first, we have what’s known as the ground (which we perceive is the general sense or idea of how things work – like a bright, and heavy, sense of brightness, and then you begin to have some idea that it is sunshine, and then, because there is a sense of brightness, then you experience the sense of sunshine, and having experienced the second stage that way, then we have a conclusion, which is "(it) dispels (the) darkness”. So those (three stages) are what is known as the threefold logic, which actually does apply very much to thehaiku approach – that there is an idea, and then there is a complimentary remark with (the) idea, and then a final ending, (sometimes which is punctuated by humor, or sometimes punctuated by opinion, or (it) could be just an open ending). So that seems to be an interesting kind of training and it seems that's how one thinks when you look at the real world and then just write that down. And then by doing so, a person's approach begins to become very methodical and nothing is jumpy, and everything is somewhat organized in your mind, and therefore it creates a sort of chain-reaction, probably, to the reader of (the) poetry as well, those who read your work, their thought-patterns begin to have some sort of systematic situation rather than just things jumbled together. And , in turn, the theory is that having such (an) approach, you develop a…you’re helping the world to destroy chaos and you create order in the universe.

There is also an historic 1976 reading of Chogyam Trungpa's own poems and discussion of Tibetan Poetry on archive.org site where many of the Naropa class recordings are archived. Visit here:

Chogyam Trungpa—historic 1976 reading in Tibetan and English at Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado 

    The Ginsberg Project under the direction of Peter Hale has initiated the publication of many of Ginsberg’s teaching transcripts from his years at Naropa and Brooklyn College.  There are  commentaries on the works of numerous poets including, Blake, Whitman, Haiku and other forms.                                       

Recap of our July 3 Meeting on Walking Meditation and Poems

Eight of us met on July 3 in Shelburne Falls for a relaxing yet stimulating day of literary and dharma gab mostly focused on walking meditation and the tradition of walking poems. [See previous post for details].

Here are a few more pictures of the day followed by Paula Swenson’s fine poem generated after her walking meditation on the Labrynth. Next month on August 1, we will meet at the Dickinson Homestead to visit both Emily’s house and the Evergreens next door in Amherst with old friend and colleague, Chard deNiord for some robust discussion followed by lunch. Chard is a marvelous scholar of Dickinson’s life and work. Our September 5 meeting (first Saturday of every month)  will return to our Guilford, VT location. A second cohort will begin to meet in Shelburne Falls the third Saturday of every month beginning on August 15.

The Labyrinth at St. Joseph’s Church

The names of the living and the dead

Etched on stones under the watchful eye of the steeple:

The mother of a colleague

The families of students, long forgotten

Clam Shell Alliance friends from Seabrook, where they built

the reactor anyway

The name of an almost forgotten friend,

 a Vietnam Veteran,

                                     who laid down on the railroad tracks

to protest

the movement of weapons in California

And lost his legs

Ferlingetti mentioned him in a poem

“Veterans with PTSD” etched on a nearby stone

and “Om Mani Padme Hum”

Om mani padme hum

Paula Swenson 

7/3/15

Later in the day, a few of us visited Khandroling in Buckland, MA to experience a demonstration of sacred dance in the tradition of Tibetan Dzogchen master, Choegyal Namkhai Norbu at the newly built “Vajra Mandala Hall” which houses a universal mandala.

[Photo by Sean Quinn, July 3, 2015]