The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven Read Online Free PDF Page B

collections edited by David I. Rome: First Thought Best Thought: 108 Poems , arranged chronologically and published in 1983; and Timely Rain: Selected Poetry of Chögyam Trungpa, organized thematically and published posthumously in 1998. 15 Other poems included in The Collected Works first appeared in small-press editions. 16 A number of poems from the Loka magazines are also appended, including a long poem recited spontaneously by Rinpoche and Allen Ginsberg. The Collected Works also includes poems published in the Vajradhatu Sun, the Shambhala Sun, the Garuda magazines, and in other periodicals and newsletters.
    Allen Ginsberg and Chögyam Trungpa shared many years of personal, poetic, and spiritual collaboration. Both Ginsberg and Waldman took part with Rinpoche in several panel discussions and poetry readings at Naropa. Ginsberg contributed the Introduction to First Thought Best Thought. He encouraged Rinpoche to speak out about his ideas on poetics, inviting him to talk to Ginsberg’s classes at Naropa. “Poetics,” which appeared in the Shambhala Sun in 1993, was based on a discussion among Trungpa, Ginsberg, and Rome that took place in Ginsberg’s Meditation and Poetics course at Naropa in 1978. Here Rinpoche talks about using a threefold logic of ground, path, and fruition in writing poetry and says that “obviously poetry comes from an expression of one’s phenomenal world, in the written form.” “Dharma Poetics” from The Heart of the Buddha (see Volume Three) presents another discussion from one of Allen Ginsberg’s classes in 1982.
    The creative interactions between Allen Ginsberg and Chögyam Trungpa gave rise to the famous concept of “first thought best thought.” In an interview with Paul Portuges in 1976, Ginsberg commented that he thought he had come up with the phrase first and that Trungpa Rinpoche had appropriated it from him. 17 In any case, this remark concretely reinforces a point Rinpoche made in his discussion of the American poets in his preface to First Thought Best Thought: that buddhadharma could not be proclaimed in America without the contribution of the American poets. In Ginsberg’s interview with Portuges, he also commented that Trungpa Rinpoche asked him to take part in the poetry school at Naropa (Ginsberg is too humble here to say that he was one of its founders) because Rinpoche “wanted his meditators to be inspired to poetry, because they can’t teach unless they’re poets—they can’t communicate.” 18 As mentioned earlier, Chögyam Trungpa was not just interested in art for artists, or poetry for poets. As Ginsberg notes, Rinpoche was trying to affect the perception and communication “skills” of all of his students through the medium of art.
    For further insight into Chögyam Trungpa’s poetry itself, the reader is directed to the poems themselves, to the comments made by Allen Ginsberg in his Introduction to First Thought Best Thought (also reprinted as the Introduction to Timely Rain), and to David I. Rome’s Editor’s Preface to First Thought Best Thought and his Afterword to Timely Rain. In the Afterword, David attempts to look at Chögyam Trungpa’s life and psychology through the lens of his poetry. David Rome, Rinpoche’s private secretary and close student-friend for many years, has read, studied, and appreciated poetry for much of his life, with a particular fondness for the works of W. B. Yeats. He and Rinpoche shared an appreciation for poetry that was a creative spark for Rinpoche and an encouragement to persevere with his own poetic efforts. In his Preface to First Thought Best Thought, David talks about Rinpoche’s spontaneous method of composing poetry, which took place on many late nights at the end of a full day of activities. For many years, David Rome was frequently the scribe who took down Rinpoche’s poetry as he spoke it aloud. In his preface, perhaps out of modesty, David does not tell us that he was also the person who was called