Poetic Musings: Found Haiku by Allen Ginsberg

Ginsberg’s gaps between the nouns (which he terms “ellipses”) are analogous to the white spaces and juxtapositions between colors in Cézanne’s paintings.
-- Brian Jackson, "Modernist Looking: Surreal Impressions in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg"


winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain

(found haiku in Part I, "Howl:"
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter
midnight streetlight smalltown rain,)

Allen Ginsberg

Commentary:

Interviewer: You once mentioned something you had found in Cézanne—a remark about the reconstitution of the petites sensations of experience, in his own painting—and you compared this with the method of your poetry.

Ginsberg: ...The last part of “Howl” was really an homage to art but also in specific terms an homage to Cézanne’s method, in a sense I adapted what I could to writing; but that’s a very complicated matter to explain. Except, putting it very simply, that just as Cézanne doesn’t use perspective lines to create space, but it’s a juxtaposition of one color against another color (that’s one element of his space), so, I had the idea, perhaps overrefined, that by the unexplainable, unexplained nonperspective line, that is, juxtaposition of one word against another, a gap between the two words—like the space gap in the canvas—there’d be a gap between the two words that the mind would fill in with the sensation of existence...

So, I was trying to do similar things with juxtapositions like “hydrogen jukebox.” Or ... [winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain]. Instead of cubes and squares and triangles. Cézanne is reconstituting by means of triangles, cubes, and colors—I have to reconstitute by means of words, rhythms of course, and all that—but say it’s words, phrasings...

... the idea that I had was that gaps in space and time through images juxtaposed, just as in the haiku you get two images that the mind connects in a flash, and so that flash is the petite sensation; or the satori, perhaps, that the Zen haikuists would speak of—if they speak of it like that...

-- excerpted from the Allen Ginsberg interview by Thomas Clark ("Allen Ginsberg, The Art of Poetry, No. 8," Paris Review, 37, Spring 1966)

Ginsberg recognized that Cézanne’s technique revealed the moment when the eye engaged spatial relationships between objects, discerning form (or finding their “true value,” as Williams would term it), which Cézanne would render as a juxtaposition between colors. Cézanne’s color juxtapositions, as well as the gaps of white canvas between the colors, capture a moment of heightened perception. In other words, the interstices between the forms created by color represent the petites sensations (Ginsberg’s “sensation of existence”) that the eye perceives as a result of looking consecutively and simultaneously. Ginsberg sought to incorporate into his poetry Cézanne’s juxtapositional approach: “So, I was trying to do similar things with juxtapositions  like ‘hydrogen jukebox.’ Or . . . [winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain]. Instead of cubes and squares and triangles. [. . .] I have to reconstitute by means of words [. . . and] phrasings” (Spontaneous Mind, 30–31). Thus, Ginsberg’s gaps between the nouns (which he terms “ellipses”) are analogous to the white spaces and juxtapositions between colors in Cézanne’s paintings.

For Cézanne as well as Ginsberg, the gaps and juxtapositions represent the moment of perceiving an underlying order and structure of quasi-religious significance. Such a moment originates from closely attending to the process by which the eye and mind make sense of perceptual data.

-- excerpted from Brian Jackson's essay, titled "Modernist Looking: Surreal Impressions in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 52:3, Fall 2010, p. 304


Note: For more information about  Allen Ginsberg's view of haiku, see Dark Wings of Night: Allen Ginsberg's View of Juxtaposition and His Haiku


Selected Haiku by Allen Ginsberg

Against red bark trunk
A fly's shadow
lights on the shadow of a pine bough.

Selected Poems 1947-1995

In the half-light of dawn a few birds warble under the Pleiades.

Selected Poems 1947-1995

A frog floating
in the drugstore jar:
summer rain on grey pavements.
(after Shiki)

Journals, Mid Fifties 1954-1958

The moon over the roof,
worms in the garden.
I rent this house.

Journals, Mid Fifties 1954-1958