On "Wichita
Vortex Sutra"
Allen Ginsberg
The way this was determined was: I
dictated it on this Uher tape recorder. Now this Uher
microphone has a little on-off gadget here (click!) and then when you hear the click it
starts it again, so the way I was doing it was this (click!); when I clicked it on again
it meant I had something to say. So--if you listen to
the original tape composition of this, it would be
That the rest of earth is unseen,
(Click!)
an outer universe invisible, (Click!)
Unknown (Click!) except thru
(Click!) language
(Click!) airprint
(Click!) magic images
or prophecy of the secret (Click!)
heart the same (Click!)
in Waterville as Saigon one human form
(Click!)
So when transcribing, I pay attention to
the clicking on and off of the machine, which is literally the pauses, as words come out
of my--as I wait for phrases to formulate themselves. . . .
And then, having paid attention to the
clicks, arrange the phrasings on the page visually, as somewhat the equivalent of how they
arrive in the mind and how they're vocalized on the tape recorder. . . .
It's not the clicks that I use, it's
simply a use of pauses--exactly the same as writing on a page: where you stop, you write,
in the little notebook, you write that one line or one phrase on one line, and then you
have to wait for another phrase to come, so you go on then to another line, represented by
another click.
. . . These lines in "Wichita"
are arranged according to their organic time-spacing as per the mind's coming up with the
phrases and the mouth pronouncing them. With pauses maybe of a
minute or two minutes between each line as I'm formulating it in my mind and the
recording.
. . . Like if you're talking aloud, if
you're talking--composing aloud or talking aloud to yourself. Actually I was in the
back of a bus, talking to myself, except with a tape recorder. So everytime I said
something interesting to myself I put it on tape.
Ginsberg, Allen. Composed on the
Tongue: Literary Conversations, 1967-1977. Ed. Donald Allen. San Francisco: Grey
Fox, 1980.
Paul Carroll
With admirable sincerity and making no
bones about it, Ginsberg attempts to assume the role called for by Shelley in the
celebrated if somewhat petulant assertion that poets are "the unacknowledged
legislators of the world."
Ginsberg assumes this role when he attempts to legislate by declaring the end of
hostilities in Viet Nam. . . .
What makes this assertion so original is the means by which Ginsberg strives to
give validity and authority to his act of legislation: he declares the end of the war by
making a mantra. . . .
Does the mantra work? . . .
Even though [after the mantra] we hear
no more of present conflict, however, there seem to be several more subtle ways in which
the poem itself suggests doubts that the mantra is "working.". . . The most obvious of
these doubts occurs when we hear what does come over the radio now that there's no more
news of war. . . . False
or evil language [still] infects what at first appear to be the healthy voices of the new
dispensation made possible by the creation of the mantra.
On still another level, the poem
corrodes one's hope that the mantra is working . . . [when] it ends in a loneliness or
lack of love more exacerbating than the loneliness and hatred which pervades the opening
section and which the poet discovers in himself and in his fellows and which he cries out
against in the moving stanza beginning: "I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in
Kansas.". . .
Still a third way in which the poem
suggests that the mantra hasn't worked its "right magic / Formula" is in the
spiritual vacuum which pervades the final section. Instead of continued
communion with the gods or an awareness of divinity in Americans, however, the poet sees
statues commemorating the only god this country knows: the god of the pragmatic, concrete,
materialistic present. . . .
In short, the concluding stanzas depict a spiritually empty whirlpool, irresistible
and catastrophic in power, in which the poet suffers the desolation of existence in a
nation without gods or spiritual realities. . . .
One problem still remains: Does the
failure of the mantra contain all of the complex of experience within the poem? What prompts me to
raise the question is the heroic quality in the final image of the poet as Baptist . . .
[who] refuses to stop his attempt to dismantle the vortex of hatred and death which seems
to envelop him.
. . . What matters is that the poem
embodies and sustains throughout the statement of Ginsberg's complex desire to assume the
function of poet as priestly legislator and as Baptist announcing the dispensation of
peace, compassion and brotherhood for all Americans. In this sense, then,
"Wichita Vortex Sutra" is a major work.
Carroll, Paul. The Poem in Its
Skin. Chicago:
Follett, 1968.
James F. Mersmann
[The last twenty lines are] a
microcosmic expression of Ginsberg's philosophy. That it was the grape,
the sacred fruit of Dionysus and ecstasy, that [temperance crusader] Carry [Nation] warred
against links her war with Vietnam in Ginsberg's propensity for counterposing the ecstatic
and erotic against the Apollonian order of war. Her hatred, as
Ginsberg sees it, was hatred of anything that would lift man out of that order, free him
from the dead conformity and propriety of "righteous" living. . . . For Ginsberg, Carry's
ax struck not at rum but at celebration, spontaneity, freedom of desire; for him, her
hatred brought the burden of guilt upon everything that does not prostitute itself to the
letter of an imposed and rigid law. . . . Once a vortex of
insensitivity and "judgment" is set in motion, it feeds upon and justifies
itself; it creates the Absolute Reality in which only its own actions are rational and
possible.
. . . Language that has been made to
serve the judgmental rational faculty rather than the imagination and the deeper self will
necessarily become as superficial and dangerous as the master it serves. The proliferation and
prostitution of language through the mass media has transmogrified the natural magic power
of language, words to express the ineffable and the transcendent, into evil black-magic
language that denies the ineffable and transcendent and elevates the spiritless untruths
of modern politics and culture.
A chief virtue of "Wichita Vortex
Sutra" is that it makes the reader experience the proliferation and abuse of
language. Its
technique is to notice and reproduce the language that inundates the senses everyday, and
in doing so it makes one painfully aware that in every case language is used not to
communicate truth but to manipulate the hearer. Language bludgeons the
reader from every direction, on the sides of boxcars, from church lawns, neon
advertisements, newspapers, television, radio, grain elevators, the sides of barns. . . .
"The war is language" because
language is no longer poetic or close to its source in experience or particularity, but
has become a language of mental constructs and abstractions. . . . Always the language
goes on, removed and abstract while--"Flesh soft as a Kansas girl's / ripped open by
metal explosion.". . .
In the dynamics of the poem, language
takes its place alongside the repressive and judgmental consciousness, and replaces the
erotic ecstasies the war mentality denies. That denial and that
repression of ecstasy remain for Ginsberg the greatest sin.
Mersmann, James F. Out of the Vietnam
Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry Against the War. Lawrence: U of Kansas
P, 1974.
Cary Nelson
More than most Vietnam poems, Ginsberg’s long Witchita Vortex Sutra" is
permeated with the managerial rhetoric and political slogans of the war. The poem is an
immensely self-conscious but rather notational diary of a car ride toward the city of the
title. Ginsberg records some of what he sees, in descriptive passages often sparse and
underplayed though careful and appreciative, and includes fragments of radio and newspaper
reports. As he has so many times before, he invokes Whitman and assumes his role:
"Come lovers of Lincoln and Omaha, / hear my soft voice at last ... O Man of America,
be born." Ginsberg is fully committed to the role, but more consistently mild and
self-deprecating about its efficacy than his critics usually recognize. That reticence may
help substantially to assist the poem in surviving. Ginsberg manages, in effect, to call
on Whitman's prophetic posture, to invoke the role and its still powerful symbolism, while
exhibiting no conviction that anyone will heed his voice. The language of the war is
deplored, but with regret and fatalistic humor rather than with self-righteousness. Much
more than most poets, he recognizes that the war for the majority of Americans was only
language and photography. "Rusk says Toughness / Essential for Peace," Ginsberg
notes, and describes "Vietcong losses leveling up three five zero zero" as
"headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas." "On the
other side of the planet," Ginsberg reminds us, "flesh soft as a Kansas girl's /
ripped open by metal explosion." There is "shrapnelled / throbbing meat / While
this American nation argues war" with "conflicting language, language /
proliferating in airwaves."
Interspersed with this reportage are the vignettes of silent Kansas landscapes and
Ginsberg's own comments. He mocks the rhetoric of politicians, pleads with, teases, and
challenges his American audience--"Has anyone looked in the eyes of the
dead?"--and calls on a pantheon of gods to come to his aid: "Come to my lone
presence / into this Vortex named Kansas." Yet Ginsberg's voice never dominates. We
no longer have the insistent personal lamentation that carries the listings of his earlier
poems. His presence here is intermittent, as if he realizes that while "almost all
our language" is being "taxed by war" a poet cannot shape it to his will.
The poem, then, seems only partly to belong to Ginsberg. History writes much of the text,
and Ginsberg can try to identify what history has written, but he cannot pretend to
dominate it. The rhythm of alternating vantage points carries us through to the end; the
poem is remarkably effective and even hopeful about the possibility for intimacy and joy
despite the war's toll on all of us. Yet the poem is finally only elegiac about the
vocation of poetry. There is little left for poets to do, and no convincing reason for
them to do even that. Nonetheless, Ginsberg manages a gesture whose political significance
is precisely its powerlessness. If the war for us is language, he will let it end on his
tongue. It is, he writes, an "Act done by my own voice" and "published to
my own senses": "I lift my voice aloud" and "pronounce the words
beginning my own millenium, I here declare the end of the War." It is a poignant,
extraordinary moment, utterly gratuitous though an exemplary lesson and grandly
Whitmanesque in its way. Yet it gives back to the rude history written by politicians all
but the speech of vision and witness.
Hearing Ginsberg read "Wichita Vortex Sutra" during the war was exhilarating.
In a large audience the declaration of the war's end was collectively purgative. The text
of the poem retains that fragile, deluded but dramatic effectiveness because it registers
its unresolvable ambiguities with such clarity.
From Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry.
Copyright © 1981 by The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Paul Breslin
One can see the result of psycho-political confusion in a poem such as
"Wichita Vortex Sutra," in which Ginsberg views his mother as only one
among many casualties of a vast historical violence. Wichita, where Carry Nation
started the temperance movement, "began a vortex of hatred that defoliated
the Mekong Delta" and
murdered my mother
who died of the communist
anticommunist psychosis
in the madhouse one decade long ago
complaining about wires of masscommunication in her head
and phantom political voices in the air
besmirching her girlish character.
Many another has suffered death and madness
in the Vortex.
(AG, 410)
Here we have an easy, scattershot indictment, in which the prohibition of
liquor, McCarthyite anticommunism, the use of defoliants in Vietnam, and Naomi
Ginsberg's "death and madness" are all the results of a national
"hatred." In this passage, Ginsberg treats individual madness as the
symptom of political madness, but again, he wants it both ways. By suggesting,
even if only for purposes of metonymy, that Carry Nation began "the
vortex," Ginsberg identifies a villain whose individual repressions
initiate, through social contagion, the repressiveness of a whole country.
(Carry Nation's name serves Ginsberg's turn all too conveniently.) In this
sweeping equation of any social evil with any other, individuals can be treated
either as willing agents or as passive victims, according to one's mood.
Ginsberg extends no sympathy to Carry Nation, who presumably was also shaped by
her social environment. Those one has singled out as villains are responsible
for their actions, while those who have been cast as victims are not.
Ginsberg wrote a great deal of political poetry in the late 1960s and early
1970s, all of it sentimental in its insistence that the war in Vietnam resulted
directly from bad consciousness, and that good consciousness drives out bad.
Even in Wichita Vortex Sutra, the best of these political poems, Ginsberg
portrays the war as the work of "inferior magicians with / the wrong
alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold."
from The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by the U of
Chicago P.
Michael Davidson
In The Fall of America, he traverses the United States in a Volkswagen, speaking
his observations into a tape recorder and singing the requiem of Walt Whitman's democratic
vistas. The book was written in 1966 during the first major escalation of the Vietnam War,
and Ginsberg was among the first to register the enormous impact of global
telecommunications on that conflict. One poem in the volume, "Wichita Vortex
Sutra," captures the bizarre contradictions between distant Indochina and middle
America. Ginsberg is literally in a vortex of recorded speech as he drives (or is driven)
from Macpherson, Kansas, to Wichita, where he is to give a poetry reading. He describes
himself being surrounded by high tension wires, telegraph poles, and invisible radio
waves:
News Broadcast & old clarinets
Watertower dome Lighted on the flat plain
car radio speeding
acrost railroad tracks--
Kansas! Kansas! Shuddering at last!
PERSON appearing in Kansas!
angry telephone calls to the University
Police dumbfounded leaning on
their
radiocar hoods
While Poets chant to Allah in the roadhouse Showboat!
Blue eyed children dance and hold thy Hand O aged Walt
who came from Lawrence to Topeka to envision
Iron interlaced upon
the city plain—
Telegraph wires strung from city to city O Melville!
Television brightening
thy rills of Kansas lone
I come
Ginsberg views himself as a "lone man from the void" like Whitman, who has
been sent to identify himself as a "PERSON" in Kansas. His isolation is
contrasted with a world of electronic sound--news broadcasts, crank telephone calls
protesting his appearance on college campuses, police in their "radiocars," and
television signals. Ginsberg is driving through Bible-belt America, where religious
broadcasts merge with news from Vietnam and then-current patriotic songs such as Sergeant
Barry Sadler's "The Ballad of the Green Berets." It is against this electrical
interference that the salutary voices of Whitman and Melville are remembered, voices
forged in a different America and a different auditory sensorium.
As Ginsberg rolls through middle America, he records the voices of radio announcers
broadcasting the daily body count of the dead in Southeast Asia. Newspaper headlines,
billboards, and other forms of highway signage add to the general information blitzkrieg
as Ginsberg strives to retain a voice capable of prophecy:
"We will negotiate anywhere anytime"
said
the giant President
Kansas City Times 2/14/66: "Word reached
U.S. authorities
that Thailand's leaders feared that in Honolulu Johnson might have tried to
persuade South Vietnam's rulers to ease their stand against negotiating
with the Viet Cong.
American officials said these fears were
groundless and Humphrey
was telling the Thais so."
AP
dispatch
The
last week's paper is Amnesia.
Quoted material from newspapers, far from clarifying the ambiguities of the historical
moment, creates further confusion. The speech of Johnson or Humphrey, filtered through AP
journalese, convinces neither the Thai leaders who want further assurance of American
support of South Vietnam nor the poet who wants the opposite. Against the doubletalk of
Washington or the newspaper, Ginsberg poses the prophetic voice of Whitman's
"Democratic Vistas." In a world so riven by undirected sound, Ginsberg yearns
for a sign or an icon that participates directly in the physical character of its source.
He finds it, partially, in the Chinese character for truth as defined by Ezra Pound,
"man standing by his word":
Word picture:
forked creature
Man
standing by a box, birds flying out
representing
mouth speech
Ham Steak please waitress, in the warm café.
Ginsberg wants a voice that has not already been heard, one equivalent to Pound's
ideogram that captures in an instant what the canned voice of the media cannot provide.
The voice as "word picture" would be as immediate as birds flying out of a box
or a request from a lunch menu. For Ginsberg the orality of the tapevoice stands in direct
opposition to the reproduced heteroglossia of incorporated sound. Newsmedia, press
reports, advertising, and police radio transmissions are all implicated in an information
blockage against which the low-tech, Volkswagen-driven cassette recorder stands as
alternative. Prophecy no longer emanates from some inner visionary moment but from a voice
that has recognized its inscription within an electronic environment, a voice that has
seized the means of reproduction and adapted it to oppositional ends. "I sing the
body electric," Whitman chants, but the literal possibility for such a song had to
wait for Ginsberg and his generation.
From Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word. Copyright ©
1997 by the Regents of the University of California.
Return to Allen Ginsberg