The Tibetan Bon View of Sound, Open Form Poetics and Whitman’s Poetry of Parturition

 

 

On the Summer Solstice 2002 I met a man described in his press materials as a Lha Khu, or Thunderbeing[1] in the Tibetan Bon tradition, a person who reincarnates every 700 years to be the embodiment of medicine. The occasion was an interview for a radio program I was doing on the book The Tibetan Art of Living.  In July of 2004 I was able to get some time with him, between workshops, to discuss some of the topics brought up in his second book The Tibetan Art of Positive Thinking and the subject of sound and Open Form or Field poetry also came up:

 

CH - All sound is sacred. It depends on how you recognize it and then what you do with it. So therefore how you apply that sound or understand what is within that sound, you then begin to use, because sound is the body of light. Sound is actually a vibration of light. As your physical body is an expression of the energy generated by your brain, so is sound an expression of light.

 

PN – You mention, in the book, an exercise to amplify the power of your brain.

 

CH – The brain itself is full of light, according to the Bon tradition and impulses of energy that rush through your body and it’s from your brain that you get great energy that generates life force. There are many Tibetan Bon methods of actually training the brain to generate a higher resonance, a higher frequency, a bigger field of energy. Your brain resonates in the Western musical (system) as a G Major, but you can actually change it and get it to resonate at a different level, here it emanates a different kind of sound. Your brain is actually a generator. And it receives and gives out. You can actually get your brain to store more light and as you store more light, you store more sound.

PN – Is there a tool by which you can measure levels of consciousness?

CH – Yes, it’s called your heart.

PN - How is that quantified for someone else to recognize?

CH - By how good you feel about yourself.

PN – That’s a difficult one isn’t it?

CH – No. If you feel truly good, you feel good, and there’s no other feeling.

PN – Someone can’t read that from a paper, do you think?

CH – Yes they can.

PN – Can you give an example?

CH – Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

PN – As opposed to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land?

CH – Absolutely.

PN – Why?

CH – Because T.S. Eliot wrote out of unconstrained fear. He always sought an outcome. And Walt Whitman discovered that words, although seemingly the adventure, were in fact the instruments by which he discovered himself.

PN – “I sing myself and therefore what I assume you shall assume.”

CH – Absolutely.

PN – Right, right right, so some of the Field poetry of post-World War Two American poetics talk about the opening of the field (which) was Robert Duncan’s book.

CH –Absolutely.

PN – So this energy is greater than, can be quantified as having more energy than something by Tate or Ransom or these kinds of folks?

CH –Yes, absolutely.

PN – How would you… [define that]?

CH – Because all people in their deepest beings are like that type of poetry. [Duncan, Whitman, Open Form poets.]

PN – Meaning…?

CH – That when you look at Walt Whitman for example, all people wish to be in that way.

PN – That way being in touch with the universal oneness of all things?

CH – Yes.

PN – Yeah. And that stream of poetry that is taught in the academy by and large, the New Criticism, the Donald Hall…

CH – I think you can relate that to the kinds of developments in psychology and psychotherapy and misinformation that Freud created. In the same way, it’s a poetry of doubt and fear. It’s a poetry of empirical doubt, and it’s the kind of poetry that likes to put things in a box because you can.

PN – Is it a poetry of pathologizing rather than mythologizing?

CH – No, it’s a poetry of forensics. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re in a court case, but the fact is that you are actually a human being living a life that is too big and too small to be defined clearly.

PN – Can you talk to us about body wisdom and breath is the key to accessing it…in the written word?

CH – Yes.

PN – And how does one get that somatic…

CH – By speaking it.

PN – You fucker. (Loud laughs.) Alright, I quit.

 

At this point the interview ended and we sat on the deck of the house on this rock island in British Columbia’s Clayoquot Sound, watching the Pacific waves, eating potato chips and drinking beer. It was an afternoon after a workshop on “The Art of Listening” had just ended and another workshop was to begin the next day. I had laughed because part of Christopher’s approach to working with me was to ask that I stand in front of the gathered and improvise poetry aloud to them. Is there anything more frightening? Perhaps, but it must involve heights, wild animals, nudity and sharp objects. Spontaneous poetry performance was enough of a challenge for me, hence the laughter and resignation in my reaction to Christopher’s response to my question about accessing the power of the body, which Walt Whitman said is the soul. Michael McClure echoes that sentiment in his brilliant poem “Dolphin Skull”.

     The body is the soul.    The intelligent body (11).

 

So what do Walt Whitman, the Tibetan Bon tradition and Michael McClure have in common? They are all integral components of my process of making sense out of why I chose to incarnate in this body at this time on this planet. All three are part of what McClure has called a systemless system. In my case, it’s an effort to make meaning out of experience as Whitman and McClure have done, with words. I have had the most profound experiences of my life with McClure’s poetry and with Tibetan Bon healing modalities.

 

My experience with McClure began in 1995, when the book Three Poems crossed my desk, as many review copies do. Something about it made me want to interview him. I had met and interviewed Allen Ginsberg the year before and at that time vaguely knew McClure had a connection to Allen. My intuition was working that day. I read the book, some of it during a backpacking trip in the Olympic National Park and some of that in an intense grief ritual conducted at 5,000 feet. After backpacking, I conducted the interview and went out to lunch with Michael at a Vietnamese restaurant, “courtesy of Penguin Poets,” Michael said. Since then I have been on a quest to understand why McClure’s poetry has such resonance for me. He tipped me off to “Projective Verse” on that October day and suggested I read it aloud. Yet, who else claims to write in “Projective Verse” as McClure does? In my nine year investigation I have found few that claim to do so, yet many who are organically using parts of that suggestion. Michael has told me it was a suggestion by Olson, though written in a manner that pays homage to Ezra Pound’s bombastic style.

 

In “Projective Verse,” Olson suggests the opposite of what Hansard called “the poetry of doubt and fear,” the need to seek an outcome. Olson says:

 

From the moment he (the poet) ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION – puts himself in the open – he can go by no track other than the one the poem, under hand, declares for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined (240).

 

One of the forces to which Olson was referring was Field theory. This comes out of 20^th century physics, and earlier from Faraday’s work with magnets. It has been expanded, most notably by Rupert Sheldrake’s theories of Morphic Fields and Morphic Resonance. The unique properties of Open Form poetics, for me, do give off a deeper energy than something of the Eliot/New Criticism school and my charge over the next few years is to try and ascertain why that is and how some are able to sense this. How are some able to recognize the field which emanates from poems? How is the background chatter mitigated and the focus so finely-tuned? The work of McClure in “Dolphin Skull” and also his book inspired by his Zen Buddhist meditation practice: “Touching The Edge: Dharma Devotions from the Hummingbird Sangha,” are two of the highest manifestations of this conscious radiance.

 

I have sensed this for years, but got a powerful confirmation when reading these poems around the fire during the evenings on that island in Clayoquot Sound after the workshops were done for the day. Mr. Hansard wanted to know the name of the poet whose work I was reading. When he saw me later with the copy of Touching The Edge, he said he could actually see the radiance emanating from that 118 page book.

Of course, not everyone will have the same reaction. Many will be attracted to the unconstrained fear and desire for outcome that T.S. Eliot represented. What do you think is the source of power of the administration of President George W. Bush? Yet for those sharing what McClure calls a “hunger for freedom” (xv), there is little work like his that helps to manifest an American poetics that the good gray poet himself had envisioned, at a level of consciousness that does Whitman’s opening salvo justice.

 

 

The Poetry of Parturition, Whitman’s Opening Salvo.

 

D.H. Lawrence called him the “first white aboriginal” (19). William Carlos Williams said on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of the original publication of Leaves of Grass that: “I had not known how much the spirit of Whitman animated us until it was withdrawn from us.” Michael McClure tells us: “Song of Myself is one of the most detailed records we have of a religious experience” (McClure interview).

There are two main themes I think are critical to an understanding of Whitman and his role in American poetry, especially that of Open Form. First is the transcendent experience to which McClure alluded. The second is the need to break wholly from European precedents (forms, meters) in the creation of a poetry indigenous to America. It is this combination of the experience of the miraculous and form being an extension of content (or revelation as Denise Levertov appended Robert Creeley) that created the remarkable foundation upon which Open Form in North American poetry exists (and one could add Latin and South American poetry as well, but that is a subject for another inquiry). That foundation was a transcendent experience and an open process by which Whitman could better understand that experience. Come to terms with it. Get some kind of handle on it, but not too tight a grip as to suffocate it, or put it into that box Dr. Hansard described. To have the faith to go into the literary wilderness and somehow trust that process that Olson in “Projective Verse” described as speech at its “least careless and least logical” (241). So, into the literary wilderness went Walt Whitman. He had a better idea of what wilderness actually was as he was born in a time and a place where that wilderness was still readily accessible. As Robert Bly has pointed out, the sonnet was a form more applicable to the prim English countryside rather than the fierce and scary wilderness that was lurking on the continent on which Whitman found himself and somehow understood his role as spokesman for that new experiment that had, by the time of the first edition of Leaves of Grass already assumed transcontinental proportions.

 

The form, then, had to be new. With Whitman, though, the process of creating and recreating that form was the modality by which he developed his consciousness. It was, as R.W.B. Lewis writing 50 years ago noted, the identification of self:

 

European readers were not slow to recognize in Whitman an authentic rendering of their own fondest hopes: for if much of his vision had been originally imported from Germany and France, it had plainly lost its portion of nostalgia en route. While European romanticism continued to resent the effect of time, Whitman was announcing that time had only just begun. He was able to think so because of the facts of immediate history in America during the years when he was maturing: when a world was, in some literal way, being created before his eyes. It was this that Whitman was able to dramatize; and it was this that gave Leaves of Grass its special quality of a Yankee Genesis: a new account of the creation of the world; an account this time with a happy ending for Adam its hero; or better yet, no ending at all; and this important emendation, that now the creature has taken on the role of the creator (111).

 

While Lewis’ notions of Whitman remain among the most valid for our age, and for future ones if consciousness is important, I must clarify this notion of Whitman as creator. What he is creating is not creation per se, but himself through his work. The preceding quote may not reflect Lewis’ understanding of that, but elsewhere in the same essay Lewis suggests Whitman had begun by making himself and perhaps the most striking example “of the self-made man, with an undeniable grandeur which is the product of his manifest sense of having been responsible for his own being” (114). He is engaged in that effort Keats would call soul-making. He was using words to do it. He did go back to edit and reedit and shape and reshape the poems and order of poems in Leaves of Grass. Asselineau suggests that each new edition marked a victory and was the resolution to a spiritual crisis (16). The Open Form of today, as practiced by its most accomplished practitioners, is more of a fine-tuning, as Gary Snyder puts it, or a clearly spontaneous gesture in McClure’s hand, than the constant reworking as in Whitman’s practice. “Words…were in fact the instruments by which he discovered himself,” says Mr. Hansard (Hansard interview). The writer, charged with ineffable experience, a sudden shift in perspective, a realization of how small one is, (or as he “gets huger” to quote “Dolphin Skull” again), a feeling of not existing as a separate entity, but more like a wave in a giant ocean of being, can only have poetry to describe that experience of living as “big and too small to be defined clearly.”
Language is perhaps humanity’s most impressive accomplishment, but still inadequate for the task of relating an experience as enormous as Whitman’s must have been. The energy which charges Leaves of Grass is remarkable. It is sexual energy, or that procreant urge turned and used for verse. Albert Gelpi understands that: “Organic poems, like bodies, are incarnations of spirit, are marriage poems, moving not to the measure of the metronome but to body rhythms of breath, pulse, heartbeat, sex-throb” (205). Yet that sexual energy in Whitman was not tied up in lust. He was “innocence personified” Lewis says and that combination of sexual energy and innocence is a manifestation of the degree of consciousness from which Whitman was operating. In fact, Mr. Hansard suggests lust is usually a misplaced search for that lost innocence.

What builds Whitmanic consciousness? Certainly overcoming the cognitive dissonance that precedes greater knowing is one marker. This dissonance may be seen as contradiction and Whitman is clear on his relationship to paradox:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

I am large, I contain multitudes (132).

 

Keats (again) had this notion of negative capability, or that ability to be at ease with seemingly opposing views “without any irritable reaching after fact or reason”. If one can hold the mystery of seeming opposites, a deeper understanding of the interconnection emerges. This may be the principle of how new systems organize if there is anything similar in this to Chaos Theory’s notion of Strange Attractors. It is also central to the alchemical experience called the “conuinctio” for which we have Jung’s work to remind us.

 

Whitman may never be more contradicting of himself than in the poem “By Blue Ontario’s Shore.” In stanza ten he suggests “the poet is the equable man,” yet a few lines later he states:

 

In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as

good as the engineer’s, he can make every word he speaks

draw blood, (369)

 

but later in that same stanza:

The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies

foreign despots (369).

 

In the next stanza he seems to be glorifying war again:

Warlike flag of the great Idea.

 

(Angry cloth I saw there leaping!

I stand again in leaden rain your flapping folds saluting,

I sing over you all. flying beckoning through the fight – O

     the hard-contested fight!

The cannons ope their rosy-flashing muzzles-the hurtled balls

     scream,

 

The battle-front forms amid the smoke-the volleys pour incessant

     from the line,

Hark, the ringing word Charge!-now the tussle and the furious

     maddening yells, (360,70)

 

Again a moment of pure prophecy, which given his own mystical experience, he could easily foresee:

 

There will shortly be no more priests, I say their work is done, (373)

 

And finally in stanza seventeen of a twenty stanza poem, he is back to abhorring war, not celebrating it:

 

          The war, (that war so bloody and grim, the war I will henceforth

                  forget), was you and me, (375).

 

You can imagine the self-described Poet of Democracy having mixed emotions about the war to preserve the union which he so dearly loved. He was able to see the beauty of the firing cannons on a purely aesthetic level as when McClure cites the creativity of the flaming tire round the neck of a murder victim in apartheid-era South Africa, though he certainly would not approve of such an act, or the smell of lizard excrement on the fingers. Or how bullets fire into a world made of stacks of dirty feet, eyes of starving families…Yet Whitman’s actions from when he was against using corporal punishment as a schoolmaster in Long Island to his days as a volunteer hospital worker during the war speak as highly of the depth of his consciousness if the contradictions of his verse leave one any doubt. And with the strange quality of any practitioners of Open Form, there is ample room for doubt for many readers. It is a rare person who can turn off enough of that background noise, cultural chatter and literary expectations developed by work that does not seek to accomplish as much. Even in Olympic Games there are degrees of difficulty.

 

Whitman’s friend, the Canadian psychologist Dr. R.M. Bucke refers to Whitman’s Cosmic Consciousness. This quality manifests throughout Leaves of Grass. One could almost open the book at random and find examples, but let me share a couple of my favorites. Of course “I Sing The Body Electric” and the sensuality of Whitman describing the female form is a highlight. It is exquisite and erotic and I can only imagine how people might have reacted when it was first released. John Greenleaf Whittier was said to have thrown his copy in the fire and Emily Dickinson did not read any of Leaves of Grass after a tip that it was “vulgar”.

 

5

This is the female form,

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,

It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,

I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless

         vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,

Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what

         was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed

Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response

         likewise ungovernable,

Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all

         diffused, mine too diffused,

Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh

         swelling and deliciously aching,

Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly

         of love, white-blow and delirious juice,

Bridegroom night of love working surely and swiftly into the

         prostrate dawn,

Undulating into the willing and yielding day,

Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

 

This the nucleus – after the child is born of woman, man is born

         of woman,

This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and

the outlet again.

 

Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is

         the exit of the rest,

You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul (130,1)…

 

There are also many amazing passages in “Song of Myself” that clearly communicate this consciousness, both the words themselves and the field of resonance they emit. From stanza 25:

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,

If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me (89).

 

“Eidolons,” “Poets to Come,” “Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?,” “Full of Life Now,” “Salut au Monde!,” “Song of the Open Road,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Song of the Answerer,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” his elegy for Lincoln  - “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and many others, but let me add one that has special resonance for a life-long radio man. Part of the “Autumn Rivulets” section, a poem entitled “Vocalism”

1

Vocalism, measure, concentration, determination, and the divine

       power to speak words;

Are you full-lung’d and limber lipp’d from the long trial? from

       vigorous practice? from physique?

Do you move in these broad lands as broad as they?

Come duly to the divine power to speak words?

For only at last after many years, after chastity, friendship,

       procreation, prudence, nakedness,

After treading ground and breasting river and lake,

After a loosen’d throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races

       after knowledge, freedom, crimes

After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations and removing

       obstructions,

After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man,

       a woman, the divine power to speak words;

The toward that man or that woman swiftly hasten all – none

       refuse, all attend,

Armies, ships, antiquities, libraries, paintings, machines, cities,

       hate, despair, amity, pain, theft, murder, aspiration, form

       in close ranks,

They debouch as they are wanted to march obediently through

       the mouth of that man or that woman.

 

2

 

O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?

Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I

       shall follow,

As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps,

       anywhere around the globe.

 

All waits for the right voices;

Where is the practis’d and perfect organ? where is the develop’d

       soul?

For I see every word utter’d thence has deeper, sweeter, new

       sounds, impossible on less terms.

 

I see brains and lips closed, tympans and temples unstuck,

Until that comes which has the quality to strike and to unclose,

Until that comes which has the quality to bring forth what lies

        slumbering forever ready in all words (404,05).

 

He understands the pull of a charismatic voice. Look at the success of Hitler. Had he existed in the television age, is it likely he would have had the same pull and cooperation of the German people? Look at Rush Limbaugh. What is it about the power of his voice that attracts legions of followers who ignore the blatant paradoxes in his rantings, such as anger and impatience with drug abusers and the desire for their punishment rather than treatment, standing in opposition of his own shadow, that addiction to a prescription drug and his cover-ups and lies regarding it? Or on the positive side, look at the legacy of Martin Luther King and the riveting “I Have a Dream” speech. The power of the human voice cannot be understated.

 

Whitman’s legacy is the level of that degree of “develop’d soul” he achieved, as revealed in his eternal verse, but also, and perhaps more important for those trying to achieve some level of soul development, his creation of a process by which we can either access that dimension, or like him, experience and document it. It is our duty, as poets in America, to use our craft, to move through the doors that such a sacred quest opens, to expand our level of soul development to that which Whitman achieved, while using the refinements in the Open Form process(es) (or other similar methods) that have been created in his wake. Anything less than the quest for individuation through one’s artistic process seems to me ultimately negligible.

Port Townsend, WA

November 2, 2004 11:07 PM

 

Works Cited:

 

Asselineau, Roger. “The Evolution of Walt Whitman.” Iowa City: Iowa Press, 1999.

 

Gelpi, Albert. “The Poetics of Open Form: The Mixed Message of Whitman and Williams.”  “The Cast of Consciousness.”  Westport, CT:   Greenwood,   1987

 

Hansard, Christopher. “The Tibetan Art of Positive Thinking.” London: Hodder Mobius,  2003.

Hansard Interview – Hansard, Christopher in an unpublished interview with Paul Nelson.

Lawrence, D.H.  “Whitman from Whitman: A Collection of Critical Essays.” Pearce, R.H. Ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,  1962.

Lewis, R.W.B. “The New Adam: Whitman, from Whitman: A Collection of Critical Essays.” Englewood-Cliffs:  Prentice Hall,  R.H. Pierce Ed. 1962.

McClure, Michael.  “Three Poems.”  New York: Penguin Poets, 1995.

McClure interview - Unpublished interview provided by McClure. (See Sergio interview: Poetry Play Business)

 

Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse from Collected Prose.” Allen, D. and Friedman, B. Eds.  Berkeley: California, 1997.

 

Olson, Charles.  “Projective Verse from Poetics of the New American Poetry.”  Allen, D. and Tallman, W. Eds  New York:  Grove Press, 1973.

Whitman, Walt. “I Sing The Body Electric.” “Leaves of Grass.” New York: Bantam,  1892 ed, 1983.

 

[1] ibid, pg 22