Commemorating Ginsberg at 100, Karlostheunhappy heads back into the Eric Gill-haunted Black Mountains of ‘Wales Visitation’ where Ginsberg assumed spirit of Wordsworth… with a little suggested listening…
Look out over Devil’s Pulpit and in the very Vast[i] vastness mourn Allen no more[ii]…compose new lines above Tintern Abbey[iii], Wye-side Spring not Blakean summer in the bee-loud glade[iv], not at all but no loss, let us drink, drink Spring & red wine for I too have felt the presence which disturbs, ripe w/joy of elevated thoughts[v], soul-singing. Here then – take these new prose-lines our Wales Revisitation in soft March’s rainmud’d timesteps of King of May & his original ‘Visitation & them sister stanzas After Wales Visitacione July 29 1967[vi] and moreover this place w/ ah, mindsunflower the sky above, which despite slippery time, same Allen sky: ‘Sky is covered with words[vii]’… lie mountainside grass & read, wine-soaked at least.
We come unto sickness & death as readily as journeying passed garden Narcissi reach stretching for Welsh clouds their klaxon song. Fern wet morning air, paths Allen walked w/beard glasses bardic lips grinning Albion all around – I see his beard in my mind dear reader, beard laden w/light w/primrose wood anemones, lips still tasting of Who Be Kind To of Wichita Vortex Sutra but here, in wet rainy Wales, almost Snyder-like zen observances, the greening gold particulars.
Fresh from London Roundhouse Marcuse / Laing / Cooper & Stokely Carmichael Dialectics of Liberation, as snapped by Sinclair in keen journal film The Kodak Mantra Diaries. Iain observes when from Wales Allen return’d: serene – he ‘has drunk of the Black Mountains and is easier for it, is calm and reflective.[viii]’
We set out. Drive same verdant valley where my dear friend grew up & I in the teenage war stayed over, in the sleeping-bag weekends. Lesser Celandine stars became butterflies & we waded into silky green river to feel her aquamarine fingers, worn smooth riverbed pebbles beneath our feet & the nite climb’d over us as teenagers of the moon, years advancing in found books and Allen stanzas Whitmanesque, in love w/Neal, in love w/Peter, in love w/America crying as she – princess of plutonium – was falling, falling failing as withering fire under cold winter rain. Romance then of Albion. Mike Horovitz Blakean disciple #1 here[ix], but Allen’s sutra of Wales & his Albert Hall prayers implore he becometh our brother, King of Wales for a day. From myriad lanes, hedgerows run to him then hide on the mist hills of Wales, my wet rainy Wales.
Mike’s son, poet Adam Horovitz wrote of A Thousand Laurie Lees – why not a hundred Allen Ginsbergs for a hundred years of Allen, reciting a hundred naked poems! The Heaven of our eyes descend upon his Visitation for our catching. Lamb of Wales, holy lambs & sweet Kerouacian doubters, those wavering wandering Catholic Buddhists, lovers of lamentations, tygers burning bright, drunk drink thee all words of wonder, for Allen has spoken without moving lips. Wet windy Wales. I’d have it no other way. Particulars for all!
Let whizzing trees dance poesy as the car slips thru thine fresh flourishing flowering of Wye Valley in search satori of that immense illuminated poem in the Magnolia Spring w/our corporeal selves listening to Allen reading, then the Cosmic Tones[x]. From ‘Awakenings’, ‘The Sacred Garden’, ‘Ba Hi Yah’ chanted like ‘Trane ‘A Love Supreme’, chanting beauty, ‘Photosynthesis’ – we’re heads to the ground now, down w/Allen eye now the same eyes of Horovitz’s own sublime Midsummer Morning Jog Log (1986), ‘Invocation’ and back to Blake w/‘Eternal Love’, ‘Sankofa’ unto we find, finally, ‘Spirit of Truth’. Drop the needle.
Allen you recall by invocation or by accident of Wales’ deep sky the Dylan Thomas nite the ‘moody black heaven / starless[xi]’… Dylan watching from forever sleep in same ‘bible-black[xii]’ nite in quiet lonely Laugharne, as lonely as Jack’s lonesome disenchanted thoughts of same 1967 bent into Vanity of Duluoz whilst Allen, mountainside stoned bliss illuminated harking back to his own original Blaken visitation, ejaculated mind. Never seen a sunflower[xiii] but Blake. Once NY, now Blakean essence in wet, rainy Wales.
Horovitz too had his own Blake visitation, dropped Oxford doctorate & headed out from jazz fest to Scotland composing long road improvisation w/Pete Brown Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead – Britain’s own & first greatest Beat bebop jazzpoem, 1962. Blake made his illuminated books, Horovitz illuminated poetry w/jazz and Allen came to Wales and illuminated self w/a sensory daffodil self of universal wholesomeness om. Ah, FREE! for at least an eternity moment from those dark satanic mills of NY smokestacks, Moloch towers, as if Albionic coin of all nature-humanity-universe self – ‘no imperfection[xiv]’ – had turned/flipped on the mountainside mind, flipped true, landing face up to the sun, moon, all possibility of man.
I lie back and think of Allen, dreaming dead bottle of red Raven’s Hill beside me. Friend beside me. Wales beneath me. History beneath my eyes. I lie back in Wales and think of Allen his Wales Visitation. Saddened, no sign no tribute to Jeff Nuttall in Abergavenny’s Hen & Chicks nor no mention of Oswald Jones in Aber’s museum, not one photograph credited his, despite his year after year snapping the pilgrimage to Capel-y-ffin’s ‘New’ Llanthony Abbey and its visions of Holy Mary – despite his gift to them of his work, he who snapped likes of Ann Quin, Che Guevara, Colin Wilson, Brendan Behan & this place this Wales in Winterreise (1982) w/haiku by Frances Horovitz & Roger Garfitt; here we were in the driving rain remembering them, remembering Allen.
Coming down, touched. Yet still, as Sal Paradise said: ‘I was only myself[xv]’… but I was I, the I who exists, and if I looked & saw I was in this forever moment in the seeing, that this was it – that that was what was seen by Allen, by Wordsworth Capel y ffin mountainside all watched over by Twmpa[xvi] in that bursting acid flower dandelion as if Blakean Sunflower on the simple throne this ecstatic turf. Practice Vipassana. Start anapana, move to insight, flora fauna, rain, new grass new cloud ecology, moment & mind all today’s welcome Reality Sandwiches seen then writ down spontaneous in Ginsberg Beat breath scripture. Come to Wales, in these few Ginsberg pages. Come. Friend, dear reader, find yr own visitation mind, wild grass & read Allen words as long mantra, for one day, and soon, we’ll all be sleepers in the valley[xvii]. The vision henceforce spake from the womb of morning, from whence we set out, into the past, to find Allen in Wales. Thank you, Allen, ‘My Soul, an Apparition in the place[xviii]’; thank you, Allen ‘Crosslegged on a rock in dusk rain…mind moveless[xix]’; thank you Allen ‘All Abion one[xx]’! For a while, ‘Death’s black angel lifted.[xxi]’ So prose-pome[xxii] homage 100 years naked. Hold the soil of letters to form words, lines, stanzas. Hold behold the soil. East Hill Farm w/Gregory & others no electricity except everywhere. Hand pump. ‘Got lotsa books on flowers.[xxiii]’ Wales ‘breath of the earth…the result of it all was that I got the farm[xxiv]’. East Hill Farm.
[i] From Ginsberg’s ‘After Wales Visitacione July 29 1967’ as featured in Wait Till I’m Dead: Poems Uncollected (Penguin, 2016)
[ii] Recalls Allen mourning Neal, Denver, ‘Over Laramie’ 12 April 1971, The Fall of America (City Lights, 1972)
[iii] Think here of the ‘skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey’ from Allen’s original ‘Wales Visitation’ composed on LSD 29 July 1967, completed London August 3 1967 Planet News (City Lights, 1968)
[iv] Riffing on Yeats
[v] And now, on Wordsworth
[vi] See Wait Till I’m Dead: Poems Uncollected by Allen Ginsberg (Penguin, 2016)
[vii] ‘Sky Words’ by Allen Ginsberg from Death & Fame: last poems (Penguin, 1999)
[viii] Iain Sinclair from his The Kodak Mantra Diaries (1971, Beat Scene Press special edition, 2006)
[ix] Witness Children of Albion edited by Michael Horovitz w/mad Blakean essay to conclude, whole anthology dedicated to Allen (Penguin, 1969)
[x] Recommended listening for journey, by the Cosmic Tones Research Trio, self-titled 2nd album, 2025
[xi] ‘Wales Visitation’ by Allen Ginsberg from Planet News (City Lights, 1968)
[xii] Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas (1954)
[xiii] See ch.7 pg/69 of The Beat Face of God: the Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides by S. D. Edington (2005)
[xiv] ‘After Wales Visitacione July 29 1967’ as featured in Wait Till I’m Dead: Poems Uncollected by Allen Ginsberg (Penguin, 2016)
[xv] From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (you know when and where)
[xvi] Local Welsh name for Lord Hereford’s Knob
[xvii] Rimbaud, of course ‘Le Dormeur du val’
[xviii] Again Wordsworth ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798)
[xix] ‘Wales Visitation’ by Allen Ginsberg from Planet News (City Lights, 1968)
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] ‘After Wales Visitacione July 29 1967’ as featured in Wait Till I’m Dead: Poems Uncollected by Allen Ginsberg (Penguin, 2016)
[xxii] Kerouac spelling
[xxiii] Letter to Gary Snyder by Allen Ginsberg, July 8, 1968 (The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder ed. by Bill Morgan, 2009)
[xxiv] East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg by Gordon Ball (2011)
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