Lesson 3

Ginsberg

This lesson focuses on Allen Ginsberg; perhaps the most influential of the Beats, from his literary influences through his major poems.

A Lifetime of Howling

It should suffice to say that Allen Ginsberg was there from the start, and for more than the next half a century, he was everywhere that significant Beat events occurred. And that could be an understatement. It’s almost as if a Beat event couldn’t take place without him.

You already know that he was a student at Columbia when he met Kerouac and Burroughs, and that he sounded the opening notes of the Beat Generation of poetry when he read “Howl” in October 1955. Subsequent readings attracted packed houses, and he became increasingly famous. In his lifetime he published dozens of books and recordings of his works. He was influenced by jazz and by Kerouac’s method of “spontaneous prose.” He was the force behind many of the first Beat publications — he was a virtual literary agent for a number of his friends. If he couldn’t get your book published, then nobody could.

During the Sixties he participated in anti-war and anti-nuclear protests; he showed the hippies how to live. He was as ubiquitous in his political activities as he was in his literary ones, and the two became as one for him. Few American poets concern themselves with politics as much as Ginsberg does in his works. “Howl” is a work of social criticism, but later he intensified the political themes of his writing.

For the Greeks, poet meant maker — the poet actually makes something through the power of his words. The word becomes a generative force. The word commands the elements. Ginsberg believed that. He believed it so much that he wrote a poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” in which a prophetic voice commands the Vietnam War to end. In “Plutonium Ode,” he attempts to put an end to nuclear proliferation by the breath of the poet. He was arrested for protesting the war. Of course he was at the famous 1968 Democratic Convention riots in Chicago — where else would he be? And like many of those rioters, he got a face full of tear gas for his trouble. He protested against Richard Nixon and toured with Bob Dylan. In early 1978 he was arrested for trying to stop a shipment of radioactive waste bound for Rocky Flats, a nuclear waste repository in Colorado, which remains one of the most polluted places in North America. In the Eighties he protested Ronald Reagan’s South America policies.

Buddhism supplanted Ginsberg’s early Jewish identity. He studied Zen, and he got into meditation and the reading and writing of the sutra, the holy writs. His religious proclivities and his political leanings continued to blend in interesting ways — political rallies featured mantras (sacred chants). In 1967 he orchestrated a “Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In,” the pattern for which was a Hindu mela, a religious celebration. In 1969, Ginsberg sanctified the word as generative force in a new way: he wrote the mantra that anti-war demonstrators used to “exorcise the Pentagon,” the five-sided building near Washington, D.C., that houses the Department of Defense.

Ginsberg took his message to the world, not limiting himself to the United States. In 1965, not long after the Cuban missile crisis, Ginsberg went to Cuba as a correspondent for the Evergreen Review. He was asked to leave the country after making public comments decrying the government’s treatment of gays. Later that year Ginsberg went to Czechoslovakia, where the populace had elected him to be the “King of May.” Again he was asked to leave within a day, when representatives of the Czech government claimed he was “sloppy and degenerate,” but Ginsberg believed that the Czech government was shocked that its people adored “a bearded American fairy dope poet.” During his lifetime he also gave readings in England, Russia, India, Peru, Chile, and Poland.

Ginsberg may have shunned most institutions, but he definitely maintained a belief in educational institutions. Sort of. He graduated from Columbia, and he had close ties to Berkeley. In 1974 he became co-founder and co-director (with Anne Waldman) of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, a liberal arts college structured in the Tibetan tradition.

Through all his travels he maintained close ties with his Beat friends, and he enjoyed great prosperity in his last years, selling his papers to Stanford for $1,000,000. The archive is a treasure trove that is just beginning to open. The Beats were prolific letter writers, and Ginsberg not only kept meticulous journals and all of the letters (assuming from the beginning that they were publishable), he also photographed significant players and events. In 1995 he published his Journals Mid-Fifties, 1954-1958, and more are expected to be published in the near future.

Finally, few American poets have enjoyed the status Ginsberg cultivated as both a literary figure and as a pop-culture icon. His longevity, his ubiquity, his ability to fuse elements of Eastern and Western thought, his eclectic mind, and his ability to adapt to changing modes of existence while maintaining his original principles for 50 years makes him a singular figure in our culture. He died in 1997 in New York at age 70, but he seemed to know how to make a day last a lifetime.

Literary Origins: William Blake and Walt Whitman

Ginsberg’s first literary influence was William Carlos Williams, who was calling for a voice that sounded like the speech of people. Well, that’s something that Romantic poets of all ages do. By Romantic I don’t mean sexual or erotic poets, but poets who put nature above civilization and exult in the common man rather than the aristocrat. Romantics find poetry in the commonplace, and thereby show the beauty of the everyday; they relate to people of all kinds, and they use the speech patterns of the people (as opposed to fancy rhyming couplets with phrasings too eloquent for common speech). As you read his poetry, look for that Romantic slant.

Another perspective to be mindful of is that many of the American Romantic writers are also Transcendentalists. They believe in and seek a higher, clearer moral perspective, not necessarily one tied to institutional religion. For some it is God, but for others it is the Oversoul (Emerson), or Nature (Thoreau). They believe in some transcendent reality. Recall that Holmes in his definitive article, “This is the Beat Generation,” announced that the Beats were essentially on a spiritual quest. Ginsberg’s life and his travels reflect that sort of a spiritual or visionary quest.

William Blake

Ginsberg’s spiritual and poetic quest began when he was reading the work of the great British Romantic poet William Blake. Ginsberg claimed to have received his calling (or spiritual vocation) as a poet in a series of visions of William Blake. He heard “a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice . . . the peculiar quality of the voice was something unforgettable because it was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.”

This may be an incredible claim to you, but there is a precedent for it. Blake was both a poet and a visual artist working on a painting of an Archangel one day, when he mused aloud, “Who can paint the face of an angel?” Immediately the Archangel himself entered the room and said, “Michelangelo can,” and proceeded to tell Blake how he had posed for the great Renaissance painter. Ginsberg often paid homage to Blake, even performing Blake poems at his readings.

The lesson here might be that if you’re going to get a poetic calling or a visionary one from anybody, it might as well come through William Blake.

Walt Whitman

The first time I read Howl, I thought instantly of Walt Whitman. If you’ve read Whitman and Ginsberg, it’s hard not to make an instant connection. Then you realize that the subject matter is a century older, and you realize that Ginsberg’s using words that Whitman did not. But the line lengths are similar, as are the catalogs or long lists of parallel structures. The boundless enthusiasm conveyed by the galloping rhythm of the poetry is there, the open embrace of all comers. The self-absorption matches. This could be Whitman’s great-grandson, keeping the family poetry pot stirred and seasoned with the relentlessly generous spirit of Walt.

Now that you have read “Howl,” compare it with a fragment of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a long poem in sections that reveals Whitman’s world. Notice the similarities as you read the opening lines of the poem:

I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes . . . . the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume . . . . it has no taste of the distillation . . . . it is
odorless,

It is for my mouth forever . . . . I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

Note the length of the lines, the cadence of the voice, the absence of rhymed endings, the sound of a voice that won’t be suppressed, a voice with a solid body describing his world. Bear in mind that Whitman’s is a tamer world, a pre-Civil War world, the era of exploration and westward movement, the world at the beginning of the industrial age. Ginsberg describes a much less optimistic world, a war-torn world, shell-shocked by Hitler’s holocaust and the atomic bomb blasts. Whitman wrote at the optimistic dawn of post-colonial America; Ginsberg writes a twilight song. He knows the outcome of the industrial revolution; he knows that machines will be honed to control and kill people.

What other similarities do you see?

Notice the way that Ginsberg starts successive long lines with the same words; Whitman employed the same device, as you can see in the following snippet.

I speak the password primeval . . . . I give the sign of democracy;
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the
same terms.

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,
Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons,
Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and
dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars — and of wombs, and of the fatherstuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
Of fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung.
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts . . . . voices veiled, and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.
I do not press my finger across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from;
The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.

Do you see similarities in subject matter? Writing more than a century before Ginsberg, Whitman also faced the ire of the censor. Given the times each was writing in, it is possible that Whitman’s poetry was “racier” than Ginsberg’s. No subject was off limits. Just one more passage. Read this one and look for the similar spiritual sensibilities between Whitman and Ginsberg.

I do not despise you priests;
My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
Enclosing all worship ancient and modern, and all between ancient and modern,
Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,
Waiting responses from oracles . . . . honoring the gods . . . . saluting the sun,
Making a fetish of the first rock or stump . . . . powowing with sticks in the circle of
obis,

Helping the lama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,
Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession . . . . rapt and austere in the
woods, a gymnosophist,

Drinking mead from the skull-cup . . . . to shasta and vedas admirant . . . . minding
the koran,

Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife — beating the
serpent-skin drum;

Accepting the gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he
is divine,

To the mass kneeling — to the puritan’s prayer rising — sitting patiently in a pew,
Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis — waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me;
Looking forth on pavement and land, and outside of pavement and land,
Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.

Do you not agree that Ginsberg’s own sensibilities are reflected in Whitman’s lines? Look for other similarities between the two poets; we’ve barely had time to scratch the surface here.

Quote

“Only if you are thinking an outmoded dualistic puritanical academic theory ridden world of values can you fail to see I am talking about realization of love. LOVE.”
– Ginsberg, in a letter to a hostile critic of “Howl.”

Elements of “Howl”

Until 1954, Ginsberg believed that the poetry of the revolution could be written in the style of modern poetry. He abandoned the idea in 1955 when he moved to Northern California and met the poets of the Bay Area. He was also inspired by Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose,” which was written in a drug-induced, overflowing stream of consciousness style. Kerouac, had, in turn, been inspired by the jazzmen who blew whatever was on their minds night after night in the clubs, never playing the same pieces quite the same way. The pure improvisation also appealed to Ginsberg, who later described “Howl” as a “jazz mass.” Note, if you will, that the phrase combines the inspirational form, jazz, with the spiritual purpose, mass, a celebration of the holy. Jazz is adjective and mass is noun. Let’s look at the poem that skyrocketed him to fame.

The poem is for Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met in a psychiatric hospital. The story is worth telling in some detail. In 1949, Ginsberg was driving with several friends in a stolen car when they were stopped and arrested. The others went to jail, and despite the fact that Ginsberg’s apartment housed a bit of stolen property, he was able to avoid jail time by pleading that he was unaware of their criminal dealings. But Ginsberg’s journals and notebooks were found in the car, and because of their contents, Ginsberg pleaded insanity was sentenced to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute for eight months. There he met Carl Solomon, the future dedicatee of “Howl.” By a most delightful coincidence, though, Solomon does not disappear from the Beats’ story. Upon his release from the hospital, Solomon went to work for his uncle A.A. Wynn, who owned Ace Books — the press that would publish Burroughs’ Junky and consider (and reject) three of Kerouac’s works, including the first version of On the Road. Ginsberg and Solomon remained good friends.

Part I identifies the “best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” Ginsberg details his exploits and those of his fellow Beats; it catalogs every element of the Beat world. Read it aloud. Hear the jazz; note the frantic pace of the lines uninterrupted by commas. Try to read each line (that means the long line as well as any indented parts) in one breath. See how Ginsberg captures the rush of life as well as the elements of his own life in the lines? Notice the catalog, the form Whitman introduced. You should also recognize the “secret hero” of the poem, “N.C.” as Neal Cassady, and references to the affair Ginsberg had with him — as he had so many other affairs with women.

Part II begins with the question of who destroyed these best minds. Moloch is the culprit — Moloch, the vengeful, ancient Caananite fire god who demanded human sacrifice of a particularly ruthless kind: parents sacrificing the lives of their children.

Moloch becomes the highly symbolic figure through which Ginsberg indicts the destructive elements of modern society. Read the passage again, noting how the punctuation forces a frenzied reading. By the end, Moloch has become everything that crushes the human spirit.

Part III is Ginsberg’s personal response to hearing that his friend Solomon had been institutionalized again, this time at the Pilgrim State Hospital — and in all prisons and confining spaces. The repetition of “I’m with you” underscores their brotherhood, and symbolizes the unity of all people — an idea that also permeated Whitman’s poetry. Ginsberg, the poet-maker, howls them to freedom as he details the prison’s features.

The “Footnote to Howl” sanctifies the poem, crying everything holy — even “the Angel in Moloch” — so that detractors can see the poem’s deep affirmation.

Of course, Ginsberg could not predict that his mother would die in the same hospital a year later, and she would be the subject of the poem Ginsberg knew was his greatest.

Quote

“There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, it’s good.” – Ginsberg, “Kaddish”

“Kaddish” For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956

Surely she is one of the “best minds,” and Ginsberg witnessed her gradual destruction. His childhood was fractured by his mother’s insanity, and he fictionalized nothing in his “Kaddish.” (The Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the souls of the dead.) She was a teacher, a Jew, a fervent Communist, and she went mad and was hospitalized frequently until a lobotomy reduced her to a manageable husk.

Ginsberg was unable to attend his mother’s funeral, and he later learned that Kaddish had not been said at her funeral because there were not ten men in attendance, the number prescribed by Jewish law. The poem is his honest recollection of her life, in painful detail, addressing her directly in the first section. Read it aloud, listening for the gentle, soothing tones. There is no raging here, no loud noises. The vowel sounds of the words absorb his grief. Notice how frequently the m sound murmurs through the text. What effect does it have?

Section two tells the story of her madness in excruciating detail, the growth of her paranoia, the parade of hospitals in which she was subjected to insulin shock and then electric shock. Having recounted her life, he ends the section with a beautiful hymn in which he blesses her life. Note the biblical language, the lofty tones.

Section three is the Incantation, the prayer. It’s also the void — his speculations of the things that he did not witness in his mother’s life. When anyone dies, the secret parts of their lives go with them, and he pays honor to the person he did not know. And it ends with his speculation about the last moments of her life, as she died alone in the hospital.

Having told her story in detail and acknowledged the parts he does not know, he can unleash his personal mourning in a catalog of remembrances, the quick list of the forces that destroyed her by degrees. These are the small bites with which Moloch fed on her flesh and spirit.

Finally Ginsberg imagines the gravesite punctuated by the “caw” of the crows. Juxtaposed against the crows’ cries are the prayers, “Lord, Lord, Lord,” that seem unable to proceed past the invocation. And so, “Lord,” becomes the benediction he says on his mother’s life. You have to admire the mastery with which he captures his vision of his mother, attempting to create her life and death in the poem, to pronounce forgiveness and sympathy for events that must have disturbed him intensely. To make art of one’s anguish is difficult; Ginsberg fuses his mother’s life and his grief into his greatest offering.

Assignment: Ginsberg

Read Part One of On the Road.