In a poem to Allen Ginsberg, Czeslaw Milosz wrote:
Allen Ginsberg, at the beginning of his “Selected Poems 1947-1995” (HarperCollins; $28), gives his own definition of his “absolute defiance”: “I imagined a force field of language counter to the hypnotic force-field control apparatus of media Government secret police & military with their Dollar billions of inertia, disinformation, brainwash, mass hallucination.”
Ginsberg’s “force field” came to public notice with the publication of “Howl and Other Poems,” in 1956, when Ginsberg was thirty years old. The title poem of the volume cried out against an America that devoured its young as the pagan god Moloch had devoured the children sacrificed to him. Ginsberg had seen his mother, Naomi—an immigrant from Russia—decline into persecution mania and eventual institutionalization; and he himself, after an apparently successful transition from Paterson, New Jersey, to Columbia University, fell in with the petty criminality of friends, was briefly hospitalized in lieu of serving a prison sentence, and eventually left New York for San Francisco. Like his father, Louis, who was a high-school English teacher, Ginsberg wrote verse; but, while Louis’s poetry was conventional and high-minded, his son’s was tormented and ecstatic. In San Francisco, Ginsberg and others (Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan) emerged as the Beat movement, which in its frankness and its commitment to social and erotic reform provoked a storm in the world of writing. United States customs impounded as obscene copies of “Howl” printed in England, and the San Francisco police sent two officers to the City Lights bookshop, where the first edition was for sale, and arrested the publisher, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. At the subsequent trial, the judge pronounced “Howl” not obscene, and declared Ferlinghetti not guilty; the attendant publicity made both “Howl” and Ginsberg famous.
“Howl” was followed by other remarkable books, of which the most notable was “Kaddish and Other Poems,” in which the title poem, a long elegy for Ginsberg’s mother, widened the sympathies of the American lyric by incorporating into it the vernacular anguish of the Jewish immigrant experience. Ginsberg later, with some grandeur, called two of his volumes “Planet News” and “The Fall of America.” William Carlos Williams had written, “It is difficult to get the news from poems,” but Ginsberg put the news of the day into poetry in a bold and irreverent way. The F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Vietnam War, gay life, urban decay—all appeared regularly in Ginsberg’s bulletins. Yet Ginsberg’s remarkable poetic powers have been less extensively commented on than his many charities, his indefatigable political investigations, his support of other writers, his thronged readings (accompanied by finger cymbals, harmonium, chants), his world travel, his theatrical protests, his moral injunctions (against the hydrogen bomb, against political lies, against eco-destruction). These actions make him a significant cultural figure, but it is the poetry that makes him a significant literary figure.
Against the high odds of fame, over-occupation, and aging, Ginsberg has continued to write poetry; and every one of his books has had its memorable pieces. But that success has also been perennially threatened, and at times undone, by his two opposing neurotic temptations, which are paranoia and emotional withdrawal, and by his two poetic temptations, which are populism and “spontaneity.” In his best poems, the ever-flickering paranoia is tempered by self-irony, humor, wisdom, or sheer curiosity about being; and the Buddhist quietism that would turn every phenomenon into illusion is revoked, just in time, by an eddy of feeling. If Ginsberg’s populism craves a platinum record, it is checked by a scruple of art; and the spontaneity that records bus voice-overs on his travels is corralled by a sense of shapeliness. (When the balance of powers fails, the poems become either rant or sermon, rock lyric or journal notes.) Taken all together, Ginsberg’s poems are X-rays of a considerable part of American society during the last four decades.
Ginsberg’s dark sense of social evil must stem in part from his imaginative symbiosis with his paranoid mother, “from whose pained head,” he says in “Kaddish,” “I first took Vision.” On the other hand, the America in which he came of age defined homosexual acts as crimes, pursued undeclared wars in Korea and Vietnam, ran puppet governments in South America and elsewhere, was undisguisedly racist, had unsavory dealings with the drug trade, and spied shamelessly on its citizens through the F.B.I. Ginsberg differed from his apolitical contemporaries not only in that his political education had begun early (through his mother) but in that his own marginality as a homosexual made resistance to the status quo necessary for self-respect. He differed from many activist poets in eventually coming to recognize that all bureaucracies are much the same: he was as unwelcome in Communist police states (Czechoslovakia and Cuba both threw him out) as he was in the United States. And he was aware (as most reformers are not) that the underlying cause of his zeal was aggression within himself, which was projected outward as suspected aggression in others. The rage and despair in Ginsberg’s early poems were as much a product of self-loathing as of objective criticism of the world. Yet his own crises of feeling enabled his violent insights into the suffering inflicted by a repressive society on its young,
Ginsberg was saved from suicidal depression by what he called an “auditory vision,” in which he heard a voice—he took it to be that of William Blake—reciting poetry. Since Ginsberg’s own poetry has always been scored for the audible voice—endorsing orality over the inhibitions of literacy—it is no surprise that the vision was an auditory one. And, since Blake is the greatest English poet of disinhibition—as Whitman is its greatest American poet—it was Blake who would be the instigator and Whitman the guru of Ginsberg’s early verse. Whitman’s “Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” was the epigraph for “Howl”; and—to complete the revolutionary triad of precursors—Shelley’s “Die, / If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!” was the epigraph for “Kaddish.”
Blake and Shelley and Whitman were, on the whole, better poetic models for Ginsberg’s verse than Buddhist sutras. Ginsberg’s path resembles that of T. S. Eliot: both possessed exceptionally high-strung sensibilities, which when exacerbated plunged them into states alarmingly close to madness; both had breakdowns; both sought some form of wisdom that could ameliorate, guide, or correct the excesses of their reactions; and what Eliot found in Dr. Vittoz’s Lausanne sanatorium (“Give . . . Sympathize . . . Control,” words from an Upanishad quoted in “The Waste Land”) Ginsberg found in Buddhist mantras and meditative practice.
Ginsberg’s Buddhism seems to me to have had roughly the same effect on his lyrics that Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism had on his: a tension goes out of the poetry, and didacticism replaces it. In taming the uncontrollable, in regulating the nerves, the flinching person is made able to live; one cannot dispute the wisdom, in life, of staying out of the asylum. Yet the analysis of unregulated and baffling pain is a deep source of powerful lyric expression. The discipline that is taken up to regulate such pain is, of course, in itself a source of a different kind of deep pain—the pain of self-mutilation. Though the Eliot of “Four Quartets” recognizes this, Ginsberg is not very much interested in it. He finds consolation, rather than pain, in the atheist emptiness of his Buddhism.
The new “Selected” is not entirely satisfactory. Many wonderful poems—from “American Change” to “Chances R,” from “Ecologue” to “Black Shroud”—have been omitted so that some sixty pages of Ginsberg’s songs (none of which appeared in the 1984 “Collected Poems”) could be included. The songs may be convincing in performance, but they don’t survive cold print, and Ginsberg’s association with Bob Dylan is recalled rather too buoyantly: “I’m pleased with this intergenerational exchange of influence which confirms old traditions of artistic & spiritual transmission.” Hardly an accurate interpretation: what of Ginsberg will enter the matrix of tradition is least likely to be the song lyrics imitating Dylan. But a truer statement follows: “The original task was to ‘widen the area of consciousness,’ make pragmatic examination of the texture of consciousness, even somewhat transform consciousness.” That seems a fair summary of what Ginsberg’s work has, in fact, done. Of course, his public appearances and his political activities have in their own way helped to “widen the area of consciousness,” just as have Czeslaw Milosz’s and Adrienne Rich’s essays. But poetry has its own means, and they are not the same as marching in parades or writing persuasive prose.
Ginsberg’s poetry gains much of its power from a cinematically detailed immersion in present-tense immediacy. You are there (as in any Ginsberg poem) when, in “Manhattan May Day Midnight,” Ginsberg goes out at night to buy the newspapers and sees workmen tracking down a gas leak. He notices the bullet-shaped skull of the man in the manhole, he remarks the conjunction of asphalt and granite, he registers the presence of an idling truck:
What is agreeable here is that there’s no agenda. We are not asked to sympathize with the proletariat or to feel ecologically alarmed by the gas leak. Ginsberg’s invincible interest in the real liberates us into a participatory disinterestedness. And his mind roams widely, in unpredictable ways. In another poem, the gas scene might have led to Ginsberg’s own gas stove, or to comparable workers he had seen in India, or to the lure of night walking. In this case, his mind turns unexpectedly to Ancient Rome and Ur:
One can’t widen consciousness in poetry by having it follow a programmed path (as most ideologically committed poetry does). However noble its intentions, a programmed path narrows consciousness. Ginsberg, at his best, is alert, unprogrammed, free.
To examine “the texture of consciousness” means to find the million places existing in the interstices between our coarse terms for the activities of consciousness: “planning,” “remembering,” “memorizing,” “grieving,” “hoping.” The texture of consciousness has had such marvellous explorers in our century (Joyce and Woolf in the novel, Eliot and Stevens in poetry) that it might seem that the task has already been accomplished. But Ginsberg has added something new. This has generally been thought to be the unspeakable (his mother’s vomiting and defecating in the bathroom in “Kaddish,” his own sexual grovelling in “Please Master,” his embarrassment at the effects of Bell’s palsy in “What You Up To?”). But, though Ginsberg has tracked shame and humiliation with great thoroughness, he has equally been the “Curator of funny emotions to the mob”—to borrow the title he bestowed on Frank O’Hara.
The comedy of consciousness was not the stock-in-trade of Eliot or Stevens, but it occurs with brio in Ginsberg, whose satiric eye is always ready to pick up a new contemporary genre—the “Personals” ad, for instance—and use it for a cat scan of his own psyche:
Which of us, Ginsberg’s poem suggests, has not read the “Personals” ads and mentally composed one? Which of us has not recognized the intrinsic absurdity of self-description? The very levels of consciousness that exist to be explored are mocked by their jockeying for place in Ginsberg’s ad: the tabloid self-epithet, “poet professor”; the helpless stock of cliché, “autumn years”; the archaic reversion, “seeks”; the casting about for names for homosexual partnership, “helpmate companion protector friend.” (The writer’s mental state alters slightly with each of these: from the Biblical “helpmate” to the euphemistic “companion” and on to the feudal “protector” and the longed-for “friend.”) The impossibility of enumerating all the levels of consciousness shows up in the forced coexistence on a single line of Rimbaud and Ma Rainey; and Ginsberg’s self-silhouetting—the last line echoes Lionel Johnson, who wrote, grandly, “Lonely, unto the Lone I go; / Divine, to the Divinity”—shows his determination not to forsake the (parodic) sublime.
In lyric poetry one transforms the consciousness of others solely by transforming one’s own. Ginsberg’s self-transformations (rather like Whitman’s) license his readers to go and do likewise. “Sunflower Sutra” is one of the famous rhapsodic self-transformations (“You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!”), but there are also satiric ones, of which the most outrageously cheerful is the famous “Pull My Daisy”:
It’s hardly possible to say this without losing a lot of pompousness (if one happens to be harboring any). To become Ginsberg as one reads his poems is to undergo a powerful, if transient, alteration of consciousness. Under his spell, one is both more excited and more noticing, more tender and more mocking. As humor bests aggression, and curiosity bests xenophobia, the world improves.
Finally, Ginsberg’s ever-reliable means of consciousness-raising is his rhythmic momentum, expressed by his long lines rolling in like breakers. Its urgency—at times strained, when Ginsberg is forcing the issue, but often genuine—means that some portion of life is demanding its place in the museum of history. If Ginsberg had not been mugged in New York, we would not have had the unstable rhythms of “Mugging”:
Ginsberg’s nonresistant chanting drives the muggers crazy—“Shut up or we’ll murder you”—and the poet concludes that it’s easier to transform your own consciousness than that of the man in the street. Yet, though the poem descends from its idealist hopes, and closes ruefully in the realm of the real, it does not dismiss the premise that nonviolence as a response to violence is the only alternative to an endless chain of aggression. The new generation reading Ginsberg’s “Selected” will find in such poems that Ginsberg’s “force field of language” still exerts a powerful imaginative pressure. ♦
