Spine is the unconscious: a reading of Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra
by Janée J. Baugher
| Poem: | Sunflower Sutra | |
| Poet: | Allen Ginsberg | |
| Published in: | Howl (1955) |
This poem is highly deceptive to the novice reader. Seemingly, it's merely Ginsberg sitting with his pal, Kerouac, and musing. Such a simple assessment of this poem proves to discredit it on the level of poetics. In actuality, I would argue, Sunflower Sutra is huge, huge, huge!
This magnanimous poem is driven by the deep-image. Certainly there are poems with lines of deep-imagery here and there, but Sunflower Sutra 's spine is the unconscious. Ginsberg so deftly allows this poem to be what is wants to be – propelled by the imagination – yet he skillfully incorporates context so the reader has a place to stand. On page, the poem is perfectly framed in realism: I walked on the banks... and sat down... to look at the sunset , begins the poem. It ends, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the... riverbank sunset . What this framing does is invite the reader in – come, sit here, here – and the voice of the imagination can explode once the reader is settled on firm ground. After the reader is elevated into the unconscious' cosmic realm, the reader is gentle transported back to that riverbank... and the poem ends.
One of the reasons why this poem works so well is because it's riddled with tension. Look at its pieces, its opposing elements: machinery (as depicted in locomotive and the landscape of steel ); nature (as depicted in the sunflower , riverbed and sunset ); and Man (i.e. the speaker, Jack Kerouac , and all of civilization ). Lines of juxtapositions like the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset serve to marry these incongruent elements. And what Ginsberg does with these units is builds the rant's momentum: Man's insistence on nature and the utter crime of it.
The poet is able to make such a statement without it being off-putting because of the poem's tongue-in-cheek tone. His use of personification when describing the sunflower – leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root... a dead fly in its ear – further demonstrates the speaker's attitude.
This is a poem for the collective unconscious. The reader has many options when entering this piece – to align herself with the speaker, with his friend idly sitting by, with the locomotive in its stalwart stare, with the sunflower as its seeds fallout of its face , or with civilization . The choice is yours, insists Ginsberg, but you must live a deliberate life, you must not blind your eyes to the grime and sex of your city – the city without, the city within.
Janee Baugher earned a B.S. from Boston University and an M.F.A.
from Eastern Washington University. Dozens of her poems have appeared
in national anthologies and journals, and she was nominated for
the
Pushcart
prize.
Baugher teaches at the University of Washington Experimental College
in Seattle and at Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan.
She is also an editor of Switched-on Gutenberg, a global poetry journal.