Jewish Beat Poet
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) changed
the face of American poetry.
Reprinted with permission from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published
by W.W. Norton & Company.
"Allee
samee," Allen Ginsberg was wont to reply when asked about his religious or
ethnic affiliation. And he was right, for himself at least, given the deep expanse he claimed for that
affiliation. William Blake, the biblical prophets, Buddhist meditation, all fed
the same visionary inspiration in his most characteristic poetry. Take the
closing cadence of "Sunflower Sutra,"
conceived soon after Ginsberg's spectacular 1955 presentation of
"Howl" in San Francisco:
"We're not our
skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the
mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown
vision."
The golden sunflower stems from Blake, the sutra (thread)
from Buddhist scripture, and the drawn-out breath-line from Hebraic verse.
Revelation in East Harlem
Or listen to Ginsberg relate his prime revelatory moment.
Desolate in an east Harlem sublet in 1948, he is lying in bed with Blake's
"The Sunflower"--"Seekingthat sweet golden
clime"--open on his lap: "Suddenly I realized that the poem was
talking about me…and suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it, heard a very deep earthen grave
voice in the room…. Like the voice of the Ancient of Days. But the peculiar
qualityof 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."
In the sky outside
his window and the carved cornices on the old tenement he sensed a
living spirit: "I suddenly realized
that this existence was it!. . Never deny the
voice--no, never forget it."
Where did this nice Jewish
boy come from, to be visited by the Ancient of Days in east Harlem?
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, on June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Levy Ginsberg--Russian emigree and avid
Marxist--and Louis Ginsberg, high-school teacher and lyric poet. From a 1985
interview: "They were old-fashioned delicatessen philosophers. My father
would go around the house either reciting Emily Dickinson and Longfellow under
his breath or attacking T. S. Eliot for ruining poetry with his 'obscurantism.'
My mother made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king
rose forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers, and healed them.'"
And from his own 1960
biographical note: "High School in Paterson till 17, Columbia College,
merchant marine, Texas and Denver, copyboy,
Times Square, amigos in jail,
dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, satori in Harlem,
Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast Howl 1955, Arctic Sea Trip & then
Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, London, readings Oxford Harvard Columbia
Chicago, New York Kaddish 1959."
At Columbia, Ginsberg
studied literature with Mark Van Doren and especially Lionel Trilling, whom he
felt close to "because we were both Jewish and he sort of empathized with
me." Later, studying with the art historian Meyer Schapiro, he "got
all hung up on Cezanne." He also fell in with William Burroughs, Jack
Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, and other "angelheaded
hipsters," experimenting with drugs, homosexuality, poetry.
"Howl"
In a psychiatric
institution, where he'd gone in lieu of jail when a friend storing stolen goods
with him was convicted, Ginsberg met the "intuitive Bronx dadaist"
Carl Solomon, an inspiration for "Howl."Yet
the same budding poet could go home to Paterson, New Jersey, in 1950 and write
to the town's eminent older poet William Carlos Williams, speaking of the
"misery I see (like a tide out of my own fantasy) but mainly the splendor
which I carry within me," and sending his poems, including "a mad
song (to be sung by Groucho Marx to a Bop background.)" Williams's touch
for common, earthy things and people, his colloquial bent, plus the extended
verse line he was trying at the time, helped Ginsberg toward his own voice.
Nothing, though,
could have presaged the explosion of "Howl." Having
gone to San Francisco in 1954 and taken a room around the corner from Lawrence
Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookshop, Ginsberg joined with Kenneth Rexroth, Gary
Snyder, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, and met Peter Orlovsky, who became his longtime
companion. At a gathering in a converted auto repair shop on Fillmore Street on
Oct. 13, 1955--exactly one century, as it happens, after Whitman published
"Leaves of Grass"-- Ginsberg recited the first part of "Howl":
"I saw the best
minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves
through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters
burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night…."
With this
"Hebraic-Melvillean bardic breath" (as he said), which also owed to
Kerouac's "inspired prose line" and to cantorial chant, Ginsberg
opened up for poetry a culture of
down-and-out Beatness, drugs, rebellion, sex, and ecstasy in the midst of the Eisenhower
and McCarthy years.
Propelling his
"spontaneous bop prosody," Ginsberg's sense "that each line has
to be contained within the elastic of one breath" gives "Howl" visionary reach. The rhythmsurges
with prophetic force: "Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind
windows!" The words agglomerate into daubings of urban actuality. But
while Ginsberg says he wrote "Howl"
on peyote and espouses
"first thought, best thought," the poem's typescript shows deliberate
revision.
Howl and Other
Poems (City Lights, 1956)
carried an introduction by Williams, noting the "horrifying…depths"
the poet had traversed. "It is the belief in the art of poetry that has
gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha, from that charnel house,
similar in every way, to that of the Jews in the past war." Apart from this rather excessive estimate, Williams welcomed "a well-made
poem." But the poem's rude language provoked San Francisco authorities
into charging City Lights with obscenity. After a two-month trial, the judge
ruled that "Howl" was not without "redeeming social
importance." (Over the next decade it
went through 15 printings.)
Ginsberg added the "Footnote to Howl." Its exclamatory liturgic
impetus--"Holy! Holy!"--not only recalls Blake and Whitman, but
resonates against Isaiah's calling (6.3): Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh. .
. ("Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full
of his glory"). Ginsberg's lines also recapitulate his besetting concerns,
people, and places. "Footnote to Howl is too lovely and serious a joke to
explain," he told John Hollander [another Jewish-American poet] in 1958.
"It's dedicated to my mother who died in the madhouse and it says I loved her anyway & that
even in worst conditions life is holy."
"Kaddish"
Ginsberg had mailed his mother a dittoed copy of "Howl." The night before her death
on Long Island in June 1956, she wrote him in San Francisco: "I wish you
get married. Do you like farming? It's as good a job as any. . . . I wish I were out of here and
home at the time you were young; then I would be young.. . . I hope you are not taking drugs as
suggested by your poetry. That would hurt me. Don't go in for ridiculous
things."
At her funeral, there were not 10 men for a minyan
[prayer quorum] to say the mourners' Kaddish, so that was left to her son.
Months later in a Paris cafe, Ginsberg began his "Kaddish," then
finished it on New York's Lower
East Side in 1959: two days on "amphetamine plus a little bit of morphine,
plus some dexedrine later on to keep me going."
The elegy's strongly cadenced opening calls up Ray Charles,
"the rhythm the rhythm," but an older measure can be heard, the
habitual dactyls of Walt Whitman's first lines: "Starting from
Paumanok" or "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking."
"Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets
& eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all
night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles
blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three
years after--And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing
how we suffer--
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing,
remember, prophesy asin the
Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers…"
And yet older repetitive cadence is present in Ginsberg's
opening: tushbehata v'nehemata…the incantatory Aramaic of the Kaddish
itself.
Kaddish (meaning "holy"), the traditional
mourners' prayer, contains no lament of death, but only sanctification, praise
of God, and peace. It may seem hard to find praise in a harrowing, humiliating
account of Naomi Ginsberg's paranoia and degeneration: "scars of
operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions
pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers--ragged long lips between
her legs." But her son meant "Only to have not forgotten," he
says in Part III. The unsparing honesty of Ginsberg's language, exposing his
own pain opposite hers, may possibly earn a sort of peace, as in his summons:
"Communist beauty, sit here married in the summer among
daisies…
blesseddaughter come to America, I long to
hear your voice again…."
And in her own vision:
"'Yesterday I
saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a
ladder--he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken
farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard.
'I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper--lentil
soup, vegetables, bread & butter—miltz—he sat down at the table and ate,
he was sad.
'I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down
there, What's the matter? Why
don't you put a stop to it?
'I try, he said--That's all he could do, he looked
tired. He's a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.'"
This "once
long-tressed Naomi of Bible-- / or Ruth who wept in America" wrote one
last letter: "Get married Allen don't take drugs--the key is in the bars,
in the sunlight in the window. Love, your mother."
Turning Toward the Human
After Kaddish and
Other Poems (1961), Ginsberg intensified the traveling--Europe, Asia,
America--and public demonstration that shaped his notoriety. In Jerusalem in
1961, he visited Martin Buber, who urged him toward human-to-human relationships
rather than human-nonhuman. Prague students crowned him King of the May in
1963, and he declared himself a "Buddhist Jew." Indian gurus told him
to live in his body, in his
heart. In Japan, he felt a need to renounce drugs and even his Blakean vision.
In Venice, Ezra Pound admitted to him: "The worst mistake I made was the
stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."
Ginsberg's turn
toward the human meant political protest for sexual and drug liberation, for
underdogs and misfits and outcasts, against the Vietnam War, nuclear arms,
ecological desecration. "America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the
wheel," he announced in 1956, and that he did--with finger cymbals and
harmonium, at peace rallies and Be-ins, universities and courtrooms, in Wichita
and throughout "these states."
Allen Ginsberg died
on April 5, 1997. Was he a charlatan or a salutary spirit? For Harold Bloom
[the literary and cultural critic], "Kaddish"is "not an imaginative
suffering for the reader," but like being "compelled to watch the
hysteria of strangers." Yet for Saul Bellow, "Under all this self-revealing candor is purity of
heart." With comic brio (and a lot of help from his friends), Ginsberg did
change the face of American poetry. The word for him is chutzpah.
