Dreamed of Bolivia last night Not exactly Bolivia but we had just returned and we were about to be interviewed on a talk-show with a live audience I was going to say the cities haven’t been bombed out like European cities so the streets swirl I was trying to find some pants to wear for the interview Pawing through a pile of freshly folded jeans It was almost time for the show The legs were the right length but the waist was all the way up to my chest I would hide the waist with my shirt I started up for the studio rehearsing responses to imaginary questions when in fact I couldn’t even recall for certain if it was Bolivia So how did you find it down there? I could see myself leaping from a ledge in the Andes and grabbing a mountain goat midair Well the living is rough but I love the ambiance I make my coffee and open a book Uncollected Poems By Alan Ginsberg Wait Till I’m Dead It is organized by decades I open to the 60s To the poem To Frank O’Hara & John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch where he writes about the women in the market sitting in the mud hands over their noses selling black potatoes and blue onions But this was not the Bolivia in my dream so maybe I wasn’t in Bolivia or even close But I did wake with a headache as if I really had been up in Ginsburg’s high valley in the Altiplano
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Reflection:
I sent this to my brother. He emailed back:
Do you know the story? Last year, Evo Morales, probably one of the best national leaders in the world for the past 50 years — a powerful environmentalist and the first indigenous person to lead a modern nation in the so-called “New World,” was overthrown by a US backed military coup and replaced by a classic Latin American dictator. There were protests, in which hundreds of indigenous people were murdered by the military, there were international campaigns calling the cancellation of the fraudulent election that was used to oust Morales and cause him to have to flee the country to Mexico for his life, and the pressure led to a redo of the eleciton, which Morales’ party, led by an ally of his, won by over 52% of the vote yesterday, ruling out the need for a run-off. The conservative party got some 39% and the coup party just 14% — a crushing defeat. Hopefullly the winning party of Morales will be allowed to assume power. Morales opposed oil companies wrecking the country’s Amazon forests, has raised the poor out of poverty, and says that the earth needs to be saved.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/19/democracy-has-won-year-after-right-wing-coup-against-evo-morales-socialist-luis-arce
I responded: I did not know all of this, but that doesn’t negate the value of surrealistic poetry. My poem is making fun of my (the dreamer’s) cluelessness, self-absorption and hubris. It is making fun of our over-civilized Hunger Games-style elitist culture. Ginsburg was always wrestling with his own irrelevancy and hedonism but there were flashes of reality in his poetry and he helped a lot of poets come down from the ivory tower to write about real things like addiction, homophobia, world-destructive capitalism, existential isolation, intellectual irrelevancy. I agree my poem is kind of like a distraction from focusing on real issues, but sometimes I do feel like I am one of those vapid people in the audience at a talk-show, where the host might be interviewing a poet who thinks he might have been in Bolivia, who is wearing his pants up to his chest, quoting Ginsburg in his poem in a desperate attempt to bring it home. Sometimes it takes a dream to show how much our culture has become like the Hunger Games where people have nothing to do but watch everything fall apart. But I can hear Jung saying, if we can dream it, we stand a chance of owning it.
Gary Lindorff - Nine Waves 