The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (88 page)

To focus on one aspect of the drama, consider the progression of style, from early poems adapted out of Tibetan formal-classic modes, to the free-wheeling Personism improvisations of the poems of 1975, which reflect Guru mind’s wily means of adapting techniques of Imagism, postsurrealist humor, modernist slang, subjective frankness & egoism, hip “fingerpainting,” & tenderhearted spontaneities as adornments of tantric statement. We see respect & appreciation given to the “projective field” of modern Western poetry; this is a teaching in itself, which few past “Gurus” have been able to manifest in their mistier mystic musings. Something has jerked forward here, into focus, visible, in our own language: rare perceptions dealt with in our own terms.

By hindsight the classical style poems become precious exhibitions of cultural starting place & intention for the poet, Chögyam, “the stray dog.”

For those familiar with advanced Buddhist practice & doctrine, the solidified symbolisms of early poems are significant teachings, or statements of method, attitude, & experience, as in “The Zen Teacher,” where horse, boat and stick may represent Hinayana Mahayana & Vajrayana attitudes of wakefulness. Quite thrilling, unusual, to find a contemporary poet who’s master of an ancient “system.” Within my memory, it was Academically fashionable to say that the XX Century lacked the culture for great Poetry, not possessing, as Dante’s time did, a “system” of cultural assumptions on which to hang an epic. But it seemed too late to go back and clothe the skeleton of God, tho Eliot, Claudel & others yearned nostalgic for such divine certainty.

Chögyam Trungpa, however, does have a Classical system working for him to make “the snakeknot of conceptual mind uncoil in air.” Vajrayana Buddhist symbolism is at his disposal, including the notion of “Absolute Truth”—a property hitherto unclaimable since Plato kicked the poets out of his republic. Tho’ Keats did propose redeeming Truth as Beauty. Blake created a symbolic sacred world in many ways parallel to Vajrayana. How do other poet friends look in this light, faced with contest from within their ranks by poet who’s also lineage holder of the most esoteric teachings of the East? Will Auden seem amateur, pursuing testy quasi-christian personal conclusions? Does Eliot quote Buddha, Krishna & Christ like a country vicar? How do I sit, charlatan pedant full of resentful Ginsberghood, posed by contemporary media as cultural Guru? Does Yeats gasp like a beached fish in the thin air of Theosophy’s “Secret Doctrines” version of the Great East? Whereas “Chögyam writing a poem is like a king inspecting his Soldiers.” Well, Well!

What will poetry readers think of that bardic boast? Diamond Macho the
Kalevala
song men wouldn’t match, tho’ they might threaten to sing each other into a swamp.
²
What image of Poet! What would angelic Shelly’ve said? What would Blake warn? “I must make a system of my own, or be enslaved by another man’s”? On Mt. Ida the Muses look up astonished by this bolt of lightning thru blue cloudless sky.

This book is evidence of a Buddha-natured child taking first verbal steps age 35, in totally other language direction than he spoke age 10, talking side of mouth slang: redneck, hippie, chamber of commerce, good citizen, Oxfordian aesthete slang, like a dream Bodhisattva with thousand eyes & mouths talking turkey.

Thus poems of June 1972 approach the theme of personal love using open Western forms and “first thought best thought” improvisatory technique—statements which mediate between the formality of Dharma Master and a man immersed in Relative Truth. Phrases return and reecho in mind: “Take a thistle to bed,/And make love to it.” The following “Letter to Marpa,” classical theme, is done in smooth mixture of old and new styles: “Ordering Damema to serve beer for a break.” If you know the wife of Marpa (translator and early founder of Kagyü Lineage) & Trungpa Rinpoche, this poem’s a historic prophecy of transplantation of lineage to America in American terms: awesome knowledge & self-aware humor are explicit in the poem.

“Nameless Child”: “hearing the pearl dust crunch between his teeth” is startling statement of egolessness, “unborn nature” of consciousness, done in traditional style. The next experiment is with gnomic haiku-like riddles, developing 7 November 1972 into precise American style “red wheelbarrow” snapshots. “Skiing in a red & blue outfit, drinking cold beer,” etc. Thru these we see ordinary mind of the poet, whose specialty as Eastern Teacher is Ordinary Mind.

Years later ordinary egoless mind says in response to anxiety-ridden ecology freaks, “Glory be to the rain/That brought down/Concentrated pollution/On the roof of my car/In the parking lot.” Amazing chance to see his thought process step by step, link by link, cutting through solidifications of opinion & fixations on “Badgoodgood/goodbadbad” & attachment to this and that humorless image the poems July 1974, including “Ginsberg being Pedantic.”

This method of first-thought concatenations develops in a series of tipsy essays in modern style—some dealing with serious personal matters. By September 1974, in “Supplication to the Emperor,” Ancient Wisdom Transmission heritage is wedded to powerful modern “surrealist” style.

These poems are dictated amidst an ocean of other activities including the utterance of masses of books of Dharma exposition—as the Tibetan imagery says “a mountain of jewels”—exactly true of this strange poet in our midst, noticing our “Aluminum-rim black leather executive chairs.”

What’s odd, adventurous, inventive, mind-blowing, is the combination of classical occasion (visit of head of Kagyü Order, His Holiness Gyalwa Karmapa, to North America) treated in authentic post-Apollinaire recognizably American-minded style (“Supplication to the Emperor”).

Poignant and powerful then, the re-echoes of liturgical style that reappear in 1974, the poet in midst of struggle with the flypaper of modern centerless-minded poetics: (as in an unpublished text, “Homage to Samantabhadra,” 11 November 1974).

I am a mad yogi.

Since I have no beginning, no end,

I am known as the ocean of dharma.

I am the primordial madman;

I am primordially drunk.

Since all comes from me,

I am the only son of the only guru.

By February 1975, a series of poems in entirely modern style indicate absorption of the lively fashion of versifying developed in the U.S. after models of Christopher Smart & Apollinaire, & transmitted in U.S. ’50s to ’70s by Corso, the “List Poem” spoken of by Anne Waldman and others—see the cadenzas punning and joking on the word
Palm
(25 February 1975), the “best minds” commentary of the same day, and subsequent love poems. In “Dying Laughing” there’s an ironic commentary on modern poetic mind, “scattered thoughts are the best you can do . . . That the whole universe/could be exasperated/And die laughing.”

There follows a series of portraits—“characters” as T. S. Eliot termed certain of W. C. Williams’ poems on persons—thumbnail sketches of his students, their natures exposed to X-ray humorous advice—“If you’re going to tickle me, be gentle. . . . But titillating enough to stimulate my system with your feminine healthy shining well-trimmed nail just so . . .”

Of the famous situation of Guru playing with disciples this is rare honest private occasion made public where you can see the inside story & its humanity & innocence, its true teaching & bone quick insight. Tiny details of personality, irritating seen in greater space, along with tiny details of resolution of problems of egoic self-consciousness proposed by subjects of the portraits—this one composed March 1975:

. . . jalapeño dumpling

Bitten by Alice’s white teeth,

Which are lubricated by feminine saliva

There’s an odd reminder of Kurt Schwitters’s
Anne Blume
here, or: the love poem dated 7 March 1975:

As she turns her head

From the little irritation of long flowing hair

She says, Mmmm.

But on the other hand she is somewhat perturbed;

Not knowing whether she is glamorous or ugly

A number of successful complete poems follow, the poetic ground having been prepared, the improvisational practice having been taken seriously, thus “Victory Chatter” is fruition of poetic path begun consciously much earlier. The details in the mind of the “good general” of dharma battle are recognizable. A number of poems like “Missing the Point” have extra flavor of inside gossip on attitudes & thought processes of the professional teacher, “Lingering thought/Tells me/My private secretary is really drunk” & have sort of Chinese Royal tone; might’ve been written in 14th Century Kham slang. “RMDC”: “Dead or alive, I have no regrets.” An up-to-date playfulness develops, mind-plays of obvious charm, even naivete, as in writings by Marsden Hartley or Samuel Greenberg’s not-well-known classics.

“Report from Loveland,” July 1975: The whole dharma is given in Disneyesque parody of everyday perplexity’s Bourgeois life. By that month’s end, the writings are well-formed shapes with one subject. The “1135 10th St.” lady friend poem is a series of exquisitely courteous & penetrant, yet funny, first thoughts, where mind’s mixed with dharma and every noticed detail points in a unified direction. Can you, by following first thoughts, arrive at a rounded complete one-subject poem, but crazy-poetic still, like: “fresh air/Which turns into a well-cared-for garden/Free from lawn mowers and insecticides”?

In “Aurora 7 (#11)” the poet emerges complete whole, teacher & self, talking to the world his world, face to face, completely out of the closet poetically so to speak, without losing poetic dignity as Tantrick Lama & Guru: “Here comes Chögyie/Chögyie’s for all/Take Chögyie as yours/Chögyam says: lots of love!/I’m yours!”

I must say, that there is something healthy about the American idiom as it’s been charmed into being by Williams, Kerouac, Creeley and others, a frankness of person & accuracy to thought-forms & speech that may’ve been unheard of in other cultures, a freestyle stick-your-neck-out mortal humor of the “Far West.” When the Great East enters this body speech & mind there is a ravishing combination of Total Anarchy & Total Discipline.

Well, has the transition been made, by this poet, from Absolute Truth expressed thru symbols (“riding on the white horse of Dharmata”)
³
to Relative Truth nail’d down in devotional commitment to the American Ground he’s set out to transvalue & conquer?—In the drama of this book, yes, the author Chögyam, with all his Vajra Perfections, is the drunk poet on his throne in the Rockies proclaiming “Chögyie is yours.” What will Walt Whitman’s expansive children do faced with such a Person?

A
LLEN
G
INSBERG

Land O’Lakes, 1976

Boulder, 1983

1
. That’s Kerouac’s Wish-fulfilling gem,
Mexico City Blues
, 110th Chorus (New York: Grove Press, 1959).

2
.
The Kalevala
, tr. F.P. MaGoun Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), poem 3, 21–330 . . . “up to his teeth behind a rotten tree trunk”

3
.
Rain of Wisdom
, tr. by Nālandā Translation Committee (Boulder & London: Shambhala Publications, 1980), p. 285, “The Spontaneous Song of the White Banner” by Chögyam Trungpa.

EDITOR’S PREFACE TO

First Thought Best Thought

The one hundred and eight poems published here, roughly in chronological order, are selected from among over four hundred composed by Vajracharya the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, between 1968—two years before his emigration from Great Britain to America—and the present year (1983). The majority of these poems were composed directly in English. The rest were written in Tibetan and then translated into English by the author. These translations were subsequently reviewed and, to varying degrees, revised by the Nālandā Translation Committee.

Seventeen poems and songs by Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche, composed prior to 1970, were previously published in
Mudra
(Shambhala, 1972). Several of the early selections in the present volume date from the same period as
Mudra
, but none are repetitions. Four devotional songs translated from the Tibetan appear in
The Rain of Wisdom
(Shambhala, 1980), two of which are republished here. A number of other poems have previously appeared elsewhere in a variety of anthologies and journals, especially in
Garuda
and the
Vajradhatu Sun
.

A minimum of annotation has been supplied. For clarification of Buddhist terms, concepts, and imagery, the reader is referred to Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche’s numerous published writings as well as works by others on the Buddhist teachings. To assist the reader in identifying certain topical references encountered in the poems, the following brief guide to significant persons and events is offered.

Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche’s childhood in Tibet, his rigorous training as a tulku or enlightened lineage holder in the Kagyü lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and his perilous escape from Tibet following the Chinese takeover of 1959 are graphically described in his autobiography
Born in Tibet
(Shambhala, 1977). The Epilogue to the third edition of that work describes Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche’s years in India, working with the Tibetan refugee community and encountering Western culture; in England, studying at Oxford; in Scotland, as spiritual director of the Samye Ling Tibetan Meditation Centre; and his work in North America up through the mid-seventies. The disruptive events that resulted in Ven. Trungpa Rinpoche’s departure from Great Britain to America are alluded to in several of the early poems collected here.