[1675] The Lion For Real
Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul, <mithwarg@>:
'Soyez muette pour moi, Idole contemplative...'
I came home and found a lion in my living room
Rushed out on the fire escape screaming Lion! Lion!
Two stenographers pulled their brunnette hair and banged the window shut
I hurried home to Paterson and stayed two days
Called up old Reichian analyst
who'd kicked me out of therapy for smoking marijuana
'It's happened' I panted 'There's a Lion in my living room'
'I'm afraid any discussion would have no value' he hung up
I went to my old boyfriend we got drunk with his girlfriend
I kissed him and announced I had a lion with a mad gleam in my eye
We wound up fighting on the floor I bit his eyebrow & he kicked me out
I ended up masturbating in his jeep parked in the street moaning 'Lion.'
Found Joey my novelist friend and roared at him 'Lion!'
He looked at me interested and read me his spontaneous ignu high poetries
I listened for lions all I heard was Elephant Tiglon Hippogriff Unicorn
Ants
But figured he really understood me when we made it in Ignaz Wisdom's
bathroom.
But next day he sent me a leaf from his Smoky Mountain retreat
'I love you little Bo-Bo with your delicate golden lions
But there being no Self and No Bars therefore the Zoo of your dear Father
hath no lion
You said your mother was mad don't expect me to produce the Monster for
your Bridegroom.'
Confused dazed and exalted bethought me of real lion starved in his stink
in Harlem
Opened the door the room was filled with the bomb blast of his anger
He roaring hungrily at the plaster walls but nobody could hear outside thru
the window
My eye caught the edge of the red neighbor apartment building standing in
deafening stillness
We gazed at each other his implacable yellow eye in the red halo of fur
Waxed rhuemy on my own but he stopped roaring and bared a fang greeting.
I turned my back and cooked broccoli for supper on an iron gas stove
Boilt water and took a hot bath in the old tub under the sink board.
He didn't eat me, tho I regretted him starving in my presence.
Next week he wasted away a sick rug full of bones wheaten hair falling out
enraged and reddening eye as he lay aching huge hairy head on his paws
by the egg-crate bookcase filled up with thin volumes of Plato, & Buddha.
Sat by his side every night averting my eyes from his hungry motheaten face
stopped eating myself he got weaker and roared at night while I had
nightmares
Eaten by lion in bookstore on Cosmic Campus, a lion myself starved by
Professor Kandisky, dying in a lion's flophouse circus,
I woke up mornings the lion still added dying on the floor -- 'Terrible
Presence!' I cried 'Eat me or die!'
It got up that afternoon -- walked to the door with its paw on the wall to
steady its trembling body
Let out a soul-rending creak from the bottomless roof of his mouth
thundering from my floor to heaven heavier than a volcano at night in Mexico
Pushed the door open and said in a gravelly voice "Not this time Baby --
but I will be back again."
Lion that eats my mind now for a decade knowing only your hunger
Not the bliss of your satisfaction O roar of the universe how am I chosen
In this life I have heard your promise I am ready to die I have served
Your starved and ancient Presence O Lord I wait in my room at your
Mercy.
-- Allen Ginsberg
|
Paris, March 1958.
As long as we are doing poems about Poets and Lions....
This is easily one of my favourite Ginsberg poems - largely because I think
it captures so well the entire spirit of Ginsberg's poetic enterprise. It
has everything - a visionary idea worthy of Blake; sly touches of humour;
references to sex and drugs; references to Plato and the Buddha; a finely
crafted image of the raw power of a lion trapped in a small apartment; a
marvellously accurate description that brings out so clearly the sights and
smells of the beast's presence (sick rug full of bones wheaten hair falling
out); a metaphysical, almost mystic engagement with the world and to end it
all, a stanza of breathtaking, almost biblical proportion. A large part of
the brilliance of this poem is in the development - what starts off as a
clever gag turns into an intensely physical experience before finally
becoming a spiritual epiphany.
As an evocation of the Muse this is an almost unparalleled poem - combining
a sense of wonderous disbelief and whimsy with a feeling of trapped
frustration and pathos mingled with majesty (just writing this sense makes
me review the many different emotions the poem not only conjures up but
manages to balance so perfectly). In Preludes, Eliot speaks of "the notion
of some infinitely gentle / infinitely suffering thing" - Ginsberg's muse is
more savage than that, but for all that no less exquisite.
Aseem.
P.S. I'm not really sure where the epigraph for this poem comes from.
Anyone?
[this poem is archived, accessible and awaiting your comments at]
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1675.html
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From: "John K. Taber" <jktaber@>
See
http://www.navigationplus.com/poesie/tristan-corbiere/rapsodie-du-sourd.
php
The concluding quatrain is
- Soyez muette pour moi, contemplative Idole,
Tous les deux, l'un par l'autre, oubliant la parole,
Vous ne me direz mot : je ne répondrai rien...
Et rien ne pourra dédorer l'entretien.
My rough translation:
Be mute for me, contemplative Idol, both of us side by side, forgetting
talk, you won't say a word to me, and I won't reply anything... And
nothing can tarnish our conversation.
A helpful online dictionary for French is at
http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/tlfiv4/showps.exe?p"combi.htm;java
"no;
There is I guess beauty in silence together. I'll suggest it to my wife.
John
From: "John K. Taber" <jktaber@>
The poem is Rapsodie du Sourd, by Tristan Courbière.
John
From: Vivek Narayanan <vivek@>
Hi Aseem,
"The Lion for Real" is also the title of Ginsberg's album from Island records that he did (1989) with a number of avant-garde jazz musicians (Marc Ribot, Steve Swallow, etc.) It's a fantastic record; I've had it for 13 years and it just keeps getting better with every listen.
Ginsberg's own liner notes for the title poem, verbatim as follows:
"Be mute for me, Contemplative Idol": epigraph from Tristan Corbiere's last stanza, Rhapsody of a Deaf Man. Retrospective account of a "mystical experience" described elsewhere (Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work
3'd Series, Penguin, NY, 1986), the Lion representing Divine Presence. I then thought it necessary to break thru the wall of reality & confront God Eternity Death face to face. Five years later Tibetan Lama Dudjom Rinpoche advised me, "If you see something horrible, don't cling to it; if you see something beautiful, don't cling to it." Ironic Quartrain structure switching to prayer last stanza roughly follows Corbiere's poem dynamics. Gary Windo's circus sax announces the poem's burlesque symbolism. Beaver Harris's drum follows the drama."
A brief note on Corbiere, who seems to have been one of the models for Verlaine's poetes maudits: http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/reframe.cgi?app"scribe&author"corbieret
Also, if people haven't seen it, here is a transcendent recording of a real-time improvised poetry battle between Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch in 1979, from Jacket magazine, at the same time that freestyle rap was just being born uptown of them, in the Bronx:
http://www.jacketmagazine.com/15/koch-popeye.html
The theme given to them was, "Popeye and William Blake Battle to the Death"; the rules of the battle were that it should be in rhyming stanzas in
a ballad metre (4 beats, 3 beats, 4 beats, 3 beats). Koch is more calmly and wryly in control of both the metre and the rhyme: with his close friends and partners in crime John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler, he had already composed hundreds of collaborative poems in strict forms, sitting around a table in a coffee house, coming up with more and more
absurdly wonderful formal restrictions. Ginsberg wants to take bigger, less sustainable leaps at first, and Koch directs him back to the metre.
"That's an alexandrine!" complains Ginsberg, "Doesn't that count? Are there any ballad experts in the audience?" Then, wearily he gets it right,
and the contest starts in earnest. My feeling is that Ginsberg ends up playing the part of Blake and Koch the part of Popeye. What do people think?
Cheers
Vivek