Print
Email
Share
“The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952” by Allen Ginsberg, edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan; Da Capo ($27.50)
“Collected Poems, 1947-1997” by Allen Ginsberg; HarperCollins ($39.95)
“Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions” by Allen Ginsberg; HarperPerennial ($18.95)
“I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg” by Bill Morgan; Viking ($29.95)
___
Sooner or later, anyone interested in American poetry must embrace Allen Ginsberg.
He would have liked that.
For the last year, the poetry world has been observing the 50th anniversary of the first public reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on Oct. 7, 1955. It was published the next year by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore.
“Howl” is huge today as it was in 1956. Some have argued that it ended modernism and began, well, a lot of things. At one blow, it certainly did begin the Beat Generation of poets; the countercultural era in American art and politics; a new era of unprecedentedly open expression regarding sexuality (especially gay sexualities); the era of performance poetry, still going very strong in the hip-hop, rap and international slam scenes ... and, not least of all, Ginsberg’s own career as a world-leading poet, social activist, intellect and celebrity.
A self-appointed pioneer for his generation, Ginsberg emerged with Elvis and just before Dylan (whom he came to befriend and revere); without him, you wouldn’t have John Lennon. He did many things, traveled the world, knew almost everyone worth meeting, championed hundreds of poets and dozens of causes, and personally tried every new sexual and drug-related practice that became available.
He shouldered the task of personally living through the traumas facing his whole society. He suffered through discovering and accepting that he was gay; he tried to (and just about did) survive on the returns from his poetry; he demonstrated as hard as he could against American foreign policy for 30 years. Long-haired before almost anyone else, he was chanting Buddhist mantras before most Americans had ever heard of Buddhism; he was demonstrating against the Vietnam War well before most Americans knew there was a Vietnam. There is a lot of his poetry, and a lot of Allen Ginsberg.
“The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice” offers us his youthful journals, most written while he was a candescent, naive, tortured undergraduate at Columbia University. In those years, he met Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, the two living writers who influenced him most; Neal Cassady, love god for so many artists and artistes in the 1950s and early 1960s; and such major minds as Lionel and Diana Trilling and Mark Van Doren. The main theme of his life was the all-combusting desire to be highly regarded: “I’ll be a genius of some kind or other, probably in literature.”
A poignant contradiction: The artist wishes to be original and a leader—while killing himself to conform to a preexisting sociocultural type (i.e., “genius”). He rejects the cliched and readymade ... and all the while, he runs into its arms. Ginsberg never stopped trying to be a genius, and once people told him he was, never stopped playing that readymade role.
His early poetry is sometimes all right. Occasionally a line flares out at us that foretells the poet to come (“I feel as if I am at a dead/ end and so I am finished”), and the marvelous 1949 poem “Paterson” has something like the full-voiced bardic roll we associate with high Ginsberg. We follow him as he contends with a range of different influences: Rimbaud; Auden; Eliot; Stevens; Ginsberg’s own father, Louis; and his two permanent muses, Walt Whitman and William Blake. His prose journals embody his agon (never finished) with his sexuality; his visionary take on belief and religion, and his incredible ability to bring people together.
Indeed, even if he never wrote a line, Ginsberg could be considered the most important cultural networker of the American 20th century. As Bill Morgan writes: “What was the Beat Generation anyway if not Ginsberg’s friends?” He met everyone and introduced him or her to everyone else. He helped found foundations and schools—notably, Naropa University, the Buddhist poetic institute in Boulder, Colo., that he helped squire through its growing years. When Warhol, Dylan, the Beatles, the San Francisco Summer of Love, Timothy Leary, and much else took off, Ginsberg was somewhere nearby.
Morgan evidently is the man with the Allen Ginsberg franchise these days. “I Celebrate Myself” is an absorbing, maddening book, telling Ginsberg’s life pretty much directly from his journals, with some (but not extremely overmuch) outside consultation. And it shows. There is next to no discussion of the poetry. And the life is presented very much from Ginsberg’s viewpoint, with very little context. We get on the Ginsberg train and ride, with plenty of great stories, but not much attempt to say what they mean. You can tell Morgan is working his way through Ginsberg’s notes one note at a time. Almost everything is given the exact same importance: He had a headache, and then the Vietnam War happened, and they got a new cat ...
Morgan often neglects to set things up before they hit us, so, for example, when Ginsberg’s father begins to die from cancer, we don’t find out until he’s pretty far gone. When Jack Kerouac, one of the great loves and influences in Ginsberg’s life, dies horribly from alcoholism, it’s pretty much a phone call and on to the next thing. People are referred to mainly by first names, affable enough, but it makes it hard to keep track—and renders an index more or less useless.
(Morgan does one thing I really loved: In a series of insets throughout the book, he cross-references poems with the moment of their inspiration or composition. A suggestion: Read Morgan with the “Collected Poems” at your elbow. It’s a great way to experience the poems in a privileged context.)
In another, perhaps unintentional way, maybe this slapdashery suits the life, compulsive indeed, lurching from one enthusiasm to another, staggering exhausted from one party, conference, personal catastrophe, hypochondria, true health crisis, financial crisis, sexual crisis, or social crisis to another. This was an obsessive man, so amazed by LSD and other drugs that, for almost his entire adult life, he wanted to talk about them (or about sex) to everyone—including, hilariously, luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Buber.
Now for the poetry. Ginsberg wrote enough good verse to ensure a permanent place in the American anthology. True, too many of his poems are simply journal entries, and, as poetry, about as good as that. (One exception is “The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express” of 1963, which documents an important epiphany.) Granted, he was a crucial innovator in opening up sexuality as an arena of free expression; he has been crucial for poets of all orientations. Still, for me, his treatment of sexuality is, in the end, neurotic rather than celebratory. (Here he is different from Whitman.) Although he dwells overmuch (famously so) on the details and the names, there was something in his sexuality he never faced, never got over, never knew how, at least as a poet.
One surprise, in reading these poems, is the wonder of his travelogue poems. His was an era, let us remember, when John Steinbeck, Paul Simon, and many others were crisscrossing the land, “looking for America.” None more than Ginsberg, always in someone’s van or car, always writing down images from the road. Laid next to one another, poems such as “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” “Kansas City to Saint Louis,” and the wonderful “Iron Horse” present a panorama seen through eyes like none other.
Ginsberg was the kind of poet who needed to get rolling, to feel the vatic, ecstatic surge of image and inspiration buoy him up. He is one of the few poets who is better the longer he writes. Thus we come to “Howl”, a world unto itself. The 50th anniversary draft facsimile, with notes, essays, and photos, shows he worked hard on it—much may have to Ginsberg in from one to four big bursts, but it was not “first thought, best thought.” Terrific, terrifying, mesmerizing lines, the witness to an era—and it should be experienced aloud. The “Footnote,” which proclaims all existence “Holy!”, still provokes tears of grateful, painful assent.
His single best poem, for me, is “Kaddish,” written out of love and grief over his mother. Ginsberg himself had signed the papers to allow her to be lobotomized, and his remorse was permanent. Little confessional verse ever went as far, and few moments are as lonely, as piercing, as the prayerful, bitter end of “Hymmnn,” in which crows and the divine inhabit the same ambiguous reality: “Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw Lord.”
Ginsberg, for me, is not much of a lyric poet in the traditional sense. But he did manage to write one of the best love poems of his century, “Song” of 1954: ” ... we carry the weight / wearily, / and so must rest / in the arms of love / at last,/ must rest in the arms / of love.” One other startling, gentle lyric is “Who Be Kind To” of 1965. And do read “Pastel Sentences” of 1995.
Add to these the pieces that are so familiar: “America,” “Sunflower Sutra,” “A Supermarket in California,” and so on.
Having read his life and poetry, I call them a record of the times, a record to be embraced. Indeed, sooner or later, we must come to Ginsberg and rest with him. And he would like that very much.
