Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation by Tomkinson Carole

Author:Tomkinson, Carole [Tomkinson, Carole]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781101663653
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1995-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Harold Norse

(1916– )

Harold Norse began his literary career at the age of twenty-two when, after attending W. H. Auden’s first U.S. reading, Norse befriended the eminent poet and took up a post as his secretary. Norse’s literary friends included such established writers as Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin and a very young Allen Ginsberg. Although Norse’s poetry had been published in journals since 1934, it was not until the early fifties that his career began to take off; William Carlos Williams singled him out for his reading at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in a discovery program presenting new poets. The following year Norse left for Europe to pursue writing and translation.

Norse began to learn about Buddhism in Florence in 1956 through a book given to him by a friend. Shortly thereafter the poet became ill with viral pneumonia and went to convalesce in Spain; he brought his newfound meditative practices with him. When Norse received a letter from William Carlos Williams, he was stunned to read that poets back home had started to pursue the same interest. On February 14, 1957, Williams had written to urge him to return to the States to take part in a new literary movement: “They are headed by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac . . . A feature of the united front that these men present is that they are all Zen Buddhists, one of their most influential members [Gary Snyder] is at the present time living in a monastery in Japan. . . .” Norse recorded his reaction in his memoirs: “I was astonished, for I too was practicing Buddhist meditation. My friend Edgar had given me a book published in Ceylon called The Way of Mindfulness by Bhikku Soma. He also sent me the name of a German Buddhist monk in his eighties to whom I wrote for advice while practicing meditation. The effect on me of learning that Allen Ginsberg was doing this in New York was electric, not to mention that he had become a leader in a literary movement.”

While Norse did not take Williams’s advice to return to the U.S., he nevertheless came into close contact with other Beat writers. In Paris in 1959, Gregory Corso introduced Norse to William Burroughs, who urged Norse to move into the two-dollar-a-day “Beat Hotel,” so-called for its clientele, which included, at various times, Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Norse lived there for three years, sharing ideas and collaborating with Burroughs on a catalogue for an exhibition of Norse’s “cosmographs,” a series of ink drawings. Norse returned to the U.S. in the seventies and became a leading proponent of gay liberation. He has authored thirteen volumes of poetry; a cut-up novel, Beat Hotel; an autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel; and The American Idiom, a ten-year correspondence with William Carlos Williams.

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