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Playing with Appel - Ginsberg on Karel Appel
PLAYING WITH APPEL
Karel Appel had taken the initiative, old Cobra activist, ten years earlier and written me—we should collaborate. I'd first been in Amsterdam in 1957 and met some of his contemporaries as well as younger poets—Simon Vinkenoog, among the White Bicycle breakthrough poetry revolution energizers of 1953, had known Appel in Paris. Since then I'd visited Amsterdam maybe five times under the patronage of One World Poetry's Ben Posset, and I could find my way on foot from the railroad station to the Cosmos to Leightsplein to MilkVeg to the Amstelside house that Vinkenoog and his wife, Barbara, live in. They gave us keys so that Peter Orlovsky and Steven Taylor and i could join their family when we visited for poetry singing festivals.
Now the poets we'd met and read with in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Nijmegen, Groningen, Eindhoven, and elsewhere were visiting the USA ensemble: New York, St. Mark's Poetry Project; Boulder Naropa Institute; and City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, on their hejira. Appel came, poet among poets, with Ben Posset and elder Bert Schierbeek—tweeds, pipe, old-dog kind eyes; Jules Deelder—thin, speedy, George Raft black suit, black hair pomaded skull tight; Simon V. and Barbara—fatigued, gazing through my bedroom window at the Front Range at last in Colorado; Remco Campert—sensitive-shy, middle-aged, and wise; Indian Cosmos cosmopolite Hans Plomp in silken orange Shiva scarf; J. Bernlef—inscrutable J. Friday glance; and burly majestic Appel arriving before them—huge vegetarian elephant, healthy because he drank a daily spoon of olive oil to ease off his kidney stones decades ago.
We spent time together at last. Nanao Sakaki, Japanese forest-mountain walking poet, was visiting; the two recognized the haunted genius look in each other's cold tender eyes. We talked exchanged books, sang. The day before May Day, Naropa arts faculty's philosophe-historian José Arguelles and staff set up a big room full of Masonite and art boards and acrylic in the old classroom where I'd taught International Heroic Twentieth-Century Poetics the summer before. We'd been preparing a Jack Kerouac festival twenty-fifth-anniversary of On the Road publication for midsummer and had asked Appel if he could make us a poster image. That became the motif of two paintings. I don't remember the sequence. Karel started the big one with wild colors, "bold strokes." Fauve-Cobra intuitions. But he knew what he was doing—after awhile, the classical image of J.K. appeared rough and ready, gleaming giant, unfinished. Then Karel handed me the brush, to put on words. Now that's where he opened my mind. I had no idea how to hold the brush, what color, where to lay the words. I could think of a few words, but why would he trust me not to make a mess of his enormous colored brush-wet visage? "Well, just go ahead—any color you think," he said. "I'm afraid." "It's all right, what you make is yours. It's real paint, even if you make mistakes it's okay, we can paint it up funny." So I laid my arm on, climbed a ladder after dipping the brush he gave me into raw acrylic colors laid out on, was it newspaper for a palette? "All yr graves are open"—meaning all Kerouac's buried spontaneities have come back to haunt the world and enlighten it, as in Appel's fearless gesture that made me free to make genius mistake. Then I remembered the original cross airbrushed off Kerouac's breast as it appeared in the New York Times and Mademoiselle magazine in the original 1956 picture. (It was Gregory Corso's Italian gift, that moment's crucifix; I misremembered San Francisco's Pythagorean aristocrat Philip Lamantia as the poet who handed Jack the cross.) So I asked Karel to paint that in, and labeled it, with a Buddhist AH to cap it off. The giant Kerouac head later occupied center stage during the J.K. festival.
There was still need for a poster image, we thought maybe maybe maybe, so Karel set out again: the smaller collage with Kerouac in plaidlike wool, as I described his shirt—Karel funnily dotted breast and arm to continue the motif out to the wrist holding up a mirror or placard for me to write a poem on; an explanation of Kerouac, Karel asked. So I did that on the spot, twelve long lines in biography of K.'s essential spirit-art, life, and death.
With each succeeding improvised work, Karel left space open for me to make up words and put them in all over, big, right on top of his spaces. Sometimes he'd suggest a color, sometimes a space, other times encourage me to make up my own mind, go ahead. Finally I realized he was actually free of shame and proud to let everything happen, with outside forces marrying and merging into his work, adorned by non-ego, a stranger's words, mine, attentive, mirroring his image, as best we can, I can, rise to the occasion, loose my own mind, no fear, paint the earliest phrases that came into my mind watching his own images splash their way into visibility and coherence, help them cohere even more with my interpretations—freely taking, freely giving. "First thought best thought," as C. Trungpa would write and Kerouac had spoken—permission to be myself, because Karel was manifestly himself and right there solid, a good guy, helpful, big daddy openness, in a free space he'd been living in and painting in for decades since I was a kid, always eating vegetables!
The results you see and can read—funny haikus and mind jumps after the serious concentration of mirror-length Kerouac biography. And Appel welcomed art historian vajrayana Buddhist Jose A. to be artist too and write his own loose-minded words on the acrylic boards.
May Day, after the readings at Naropa and Colorado U., we had a big party with Lama Chogyam Trungpa and all the Dutch and US poets and meditators and yoginis and Vajra guards and Shambhala warriors and Naropa professors and flower arrangers and archery and tea experts, outdoors on a hill house in a garden, beautiful day. There Trungpa Rinpoche's attendants unrolled a giant spread of white paper for calligraphy games—Rinpoche drew a big-tailed awkward small-headed bird, with elegant tailfeather trailing ragged ink. "What's that?" I asked. "Might be a peacock," murmured Rinpoche in his white silk summer suit, sipping sake, left leg clubfoot, his bulk upheld to the calligraphy table by his secretary. Karel Appel looked with a naked slow glance, accepted the brush, and inked in a big black outlined staring empty eye standing up on the left beside the guru's big conscious bird.
All these images were left as gifts for Naropa when Appel flew to New York.
Sept. 12, 1984
PLAYING WITH APPEL
Karel Appel had taken the initiative, old Cobra activist, ten years earlier and written me—we should collaborate. I'd first been in Amsterdam in 1957 and met some of his contemporaries as well as younger poets—Simon Vinkenoog, among the White Bicycle breakthrough poetry revolution energizers of 1953, had known Appel in Paris. Since then I'd visited Amsterdam maybe five times under the patronage of One World Poetry's Ben Posset, and I could find my way on foot from the railroad station to the Cosmos to Leightsplein to MilkVeg to the Amstelside house that Vinkenoog and his wife, Barbara, live in. They gave us keys so that Peter Orlovsky and Steven Taylor and i could join their family when we visited for poetry singing festivals.
Now the poets we'd met and read with in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Nijmegen, Groningen, Eindhoven, and elsewhere were visiting the USA ensemble: New York, St. Mark's Poetry Project; Boulder Naropa Institute; and City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, on their hejira. Appel came, poet among poets, with Ben Posset and elder Bert Schierbeek—tweeds, pipe, old-dog kind eyes; Jules Deelder—thin, speedy, George Raft black suit, black hair pomaded skull tight; Simon V. and Barbara—fatigued, gazing through my bedroom window at the Front Range at last in Colorado; Remco Campert—sensitive-shy, middle-aged, and wise; Indian Cosmos cosmopolite Hans Plomp in silken orange Shiva scarf; J. Bernlef—inscrutable J. Friday glance; and burly majestic Appel arriving before them—huge vegetarian elephant, healthy because he drank a daily spoon of olive oil to ease off his kidney stones decades ago.
We spent time together at last. Nanao Sakaki, Japanese forest-mountain walking poet, was visiting; the two recognized the haunted genius look in each other's cold tender eyes. We talked exchanged books, sang. The day before May Day, Naropa arts faculty's philosophe-historian José Arguelles and staff set up a big room full of Masonite and art boards and acrylic in the old classroom where I'd taught International Heroic Twentieth-Century Poetics the summer before. We'd been preparing a Jack Kerouac festival twenty-fifth-anniversary of On the Road publication for midsummer and had asked Appel if he could make us a poster image. That became the motif of two paintings. I don't remember the sequence. Karel started the big one with wild colors, "bold strokes." Fauve-Cobra intuitions. But he knew what he was doing—after awhile, the classical image of J.K. appeared rough and ready, gleaming giant, unfinished. Then Karel handed me the brush, to put on words. Now that's where he opened my mind. I had no idea how to hold the brush, what color, where to lay the words. I could think of a few words, but why would he trust me not to make a mess of his enormous colored brush-wet visage? "Well, just go ahead—any color you think," he said. "I'm afraid." "It's all right, what you make is yours. It's real paint, even if you make mistakes it's okay, we can paint it up funny." So I laid my arm on, climbed a ladder after dipping the brush he gave me into raw acrylic colors laid out on, was it newspaper for a palette? "All yr graves are open"—meaning all Kerouac's buried spontaneities have come back to haunt the world and enlighten it, as in Appel's fearless gesture that made me free to make genius mistake. Then I remembered the original cross airbrushed off Kerouac's breast as it appeared in the New York Times and Mademoiselle magazine in the original 1956 picture. (It was Gregory Corso's Italian gift, that moment's crucifix; I misremembered San Francisco's Pythagorean aristocrat Philip Lamantia as the poet who handed Jack the cross.) So I asked Karel to paint that in, and labeled it, with a Buddhist AH to cap it off. The giant Kerouac head later occupied center stage during the J.K. festival.
There was still need for a poster image, we thought maybe maybe maybe, so Karel set out again: the smaller collage with Kerouac in plaidlike wool, as I described his shirt—Karel funnily dotted breast and arm to continue the motif out to the wrist holding up a mirror or placard for me to write a poem on; an explanation of Kerouac, Karel asked. So I did that on the spot, twelve long lines in biography of K.'s essential spirit-art, life, and death.
With each succeeding improvised work, Karel left space open for me to make up words and put them in all over, big, right on top of his spaces. Sometimes he'd suggest a color, sometimes a space, other times encourage me to make up my own mind, go ahead. Finally I realized he was actually free of shame and proud to let everything happen, with outside forces marrying and merging into his work, adorned by non-ego, a stranger's words, mine, attentive, mirroring his image, as best we can, I can, rise to the occasion, loose my own mind, no fear, paint the earliest phrases that came into my mind watching his own images splash their way into visibility and coherence, help them cohere even more with my interpretations—freely taking, freely giving. "First thought best thought," as C. Trungpa would write and Kerouac had spoken—permission to be myself, because Karel was manifestly himself and right there solid, a good guy, helpful, big daddy openness, in a free space he'd been living in and painting in for decades since I was a kid, always eating vegetables!
The results you see and can read—funny haikus and mind jumps after the serious concentration of mirror-length Kerouac biography. And Appel welcomed art historian vajrayana Buddhist Jose A. to be artist too and write his own loose-minded words on the acrylic boards.
May Day, after the readings at Naropa and Colorado U., we had a big party with Lama Chogyam Trungpa and all the Dutch and US poets and meditators and yoginis and Vajra guards and Shambhala warriors and Naropa professors and flower arrangers and archery and tea experts, outdoors on a hill house in a garden, beautiful day. There Trungpa Rinpoche's attendants unrolled a giant spread of white paper for calligraphy games—Rinpoche drew a big-tailed awkward small-headed bird, with elegant tailfeather trailing ragged ink. "What's that?" I asked. "Might be a peacock," murmured Rinpoche in his white silk summer suit, sipping sake, left leg clubfoot, his bulk upheld to the calligraphy table by his secretary. Karel Appel looked with a naked slow glance, accepted the brush, and inked in a big black outlined staring empty eye standing up on the left beside the guru's big conscious bird.
All these images were left as gifts for Naropa when Appel flew to New York.
Sept. 12, 1984
“Bearded robots drink from Uranium coffee cups on Saturn's ring. May 1990”
— American Sentences
