The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – Allen Ginsberg

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2: Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

I’ve moved on from the “Modern” volume, and am now in the “Contemporary” volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.

“First thought, best thought” was Allen Ginsberg’s motto, despite the fact that he edited his pieces relentlessly. He saw himself in a line with Whitman and Blake, big prophetic transcendent poets, and even his line-lengths, long and rambling, but with a serious internal structure – LOOK like Whitman’s and Blake’s poems. He uses repetition in an incantatory way, piling the same word through long poems, so that the drum-beat becomes relentless. Ginsberg always makes me think of Mitchell, who played him in a well-known production in Chicago, and also of my father, who loved the Beats. He said to me once (and he was not a man to live in regret – this was the only time he ever said to me that he had other dreams) that if he could have lived two lives, he would also have loved to be a Beat, and live the kinds of lives they lived at that time. An interesting insight into my father. Dad recognized balderdash for what it is, but it was their seeking questioning outlook, their lack of concern for convention, their total immersion in art, that he admired. I won’t say envied, because I don’t think that’s what Dad meant. He tells a funny story of meeting William S. Burroughs once at the Arts Club here in New York, some literary gathering of book collectors, dealers, editors, publishers. Burroughs showed up, and by that point he was an old man, in his customary garb, instantly recognizable, and he had two young boys in tow, in their early 20s, who were dressed in an identical manner. Burroughs made his way through the crowd, and the two boys followed him, and Dad said the three of them reminded him of a “school of fish”. Burroughs the leader, darting this way, the two boys darting quickly to follow, then that way, the two boys in tow.

The fact that Ginsberg and Burroughs didn’t die from their excesses in the 60s is something rather extraordinary, in and of itself.

The Anthology introduction to Ginsberg states:

For some, the publication of Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Other Poems (1956) was the beginning of a mindless and mercifully short-lived poetic fad, a cult of slovenly verse that encouraged dangerously slovenly behavior. For others, it was a fortunate and revolutionary change in the direction of American poetry. Like all poetic innovators, Ginsberg seemed to claim for poetry new areas of experience and new cultural situations. “Howl” is a panoramic vision of the dark side of the complacent Eisenhower years; it discovered for literature an anticommunity of waifs and strays, drug addicts and homosexual drifters. Ginsberg’s poetry presented an alternative to the tightly organized, well-mannered poetry written under the influence of the New Criticism; it was emotionally explosive, unashamedly self-preoccupied and metrically expansive, and it helped create in the 1960s an audience for influential books of psychic rebellion and revelation, such as Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death.

Some of Ginsberg’s stuff is embarrassing to read, as it is meant to be, I believe, and not all of it works, but as a whole it is a powerful document of a long journey: he was born in 1926 and died in 1997. And unlike many of “the best minds of [his] generation” who were “destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix”, Ginsberg made it through alive, and became more famous as an old man than he was a young man. He was a Poet Emeritus for America in his final years, a familiar face, involved in the causes he believed in, but also teaching and lecturing and holding workshops, and answering voluminous correspondence with young poets looking for a way to break through. Despite the fact that he was highly educated, he was not an academic. Part of his poetry was about shuffling off the dryness of academia and looking for direct experience. Of whatever it was: poetry, the sky, love, sex. He experimented with drugs, as most of his crowd did, but he wasn’t as out of control with it as were his contemporaries. He used it as a path to enlightenment, and many of his poems were written under that influence. Later on, however, he came to see that much of that behavior was a way to remain separate from his fellow man – it isolates people – and he came to see, through his travels, his meetings with wise men in monasteries and all that Eastern stuff – that the only reason we are here, on this planet, is to try to connect to one another. Taking hallucinogens helped him connect with the nonhuman: the spiritual subtext of things, the ancient sky, nature … Once he made that connection, after traveling through India (what is it about India?), he gave up the drugs and became a dedicated advocate of meditation. It helped him to “inhabit the human form” (his words).

Peter Balakian, in his harrowing memoir (also an investigation of the Armenian genocide) Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir, tells of a reading he helped sponsor at Bucknell University, where he was a student. He brought Allen Ginsberg to the school. Balakian wrote:

I’ve come to see poetry as the chain of language linking lands and events, people and places that make up our family story. Poetry has been a deep well of thought and feeling and language lushness that the Balakians have lived by.

So it’s 1970, Balakian is a senior, writing poetry, and trying to deal with his family (it’s an absolutely amazing book if you haven’t read it – the Armenian family wanting to forget the past, never mentioning the genocide, and Peter growing up in an atmosphere where he knows that something bad happened back there, but nobody speaks of it – they are American now, no more of this Armenian nonsense), and he gets Ginsberg to come to the school. It’s a huge event. And Balakian’s mother shows up at the reading unannounced. By this point in the book, we know enough to be a bit nervous about this. His mother is strict, ladylike, and the boss of the family. She has high standards for behavior. So … how on earth will she deal with listening to Ginsberg reading “Howl” and “Kaddish”, with his lover Peter Orlovsky in tow, and everyone sitting around on the floor smoking dope? Balakian then provides an incredibly moving account of that day. It brings tears to my eyes:

With his beard and hair brushing at the sides of his balding head and his horn-rimmed glasses, Ginsberg looked serious and vulnerable as he hobbled onto the porch of 208 South Seventh Street with a broken leg in a walking cast under his blue-jean overalls, accompanied by his friend Peter Orlovsky, whose biceps bulged from a tee shirt with a huge American flag on the front. They arrived at 4:30 and I wasn’t surprised when my mother drove up a few minutes later in our Vista Cruiser station wagon. She told me on the phone the night before that she was thinking about making a visit to her alma mater and that this seemed like the perfect excuse, and she said she would bring dinner. I must have been expecting her, because all I had on hand was an aluminum bowl of Lipton’s instant soup onion dip, some potato chips, and a couple of gallons of cheap wine. She walked into my college apartment bright and cheery as some friends were passing joints and Ginsberg and Orlovsky were holding forth with teachers and students. My mother: in a blue suit and suede pumps, carrying two trays of lasagna covered with aluminum foil, some French bread in white bags, plastic bags of lettuce, and a jar of her own salad dressing.

Before I could introduce her, she broke into the circle around Ginsberg and Orlovsky: “Allen, I’m Arax Balakian, Peter’s mother; your father taught my sister at Paterson High in ’33; he was her favorite teacher.” My mother and Allen Ginsberg began exchanging Paterson High gossip, town gossip, northern Jersey gossip, and my mother, who had dug up the titles of a few of Louis Ginsberg’s poems my aunt liked, began praising them. Ginsberg seemed so delightedly caught off-guard that he now turned his sole attention to my mother, leaving the professors and students to themselves.

Still chatting with Ginsberg, my mother began dishing up lasagna, imploring everyone to eat because the reading was in less than an hour. As she darted around the kitchen, trying to consolidate our motley collection of silverware, plates, and half-cleaned glasses, she turned to Ginsberg and said, as if she were asking him if he wanted some croutons with his salad: “Allen, would you like to see the review Helen Vendler wrote of The Fall of America? The Times Book Review is giving it the front page next Sunday.” Before I could protectively nudge my mother back to the lasagna, convinced that she was making a fool of herself, she pulled out of her purse the galley proofs my aunt Nona had given her with the review of Ginsberg’s new book.

I realized my mother had come with this document uncannily timed to establish her relationship to the poet and his work, to words and texts, in a way that quite frankly blew my mind. Did she wish to show me that literature was a territory she too could navigate? Faculty and students stared at her in disbelief, and Allen stared for a second and then said, “Arax, may I see that?” The bond between them now was unbreakable, and I watched as students and teachers closed in around them.

“Allen, it’s not a bad review,” my mother went on, as if she were a literary critic. “I hope you’re not disappointed,” she said, sounding motherly. Now in the inner circle with Ginsberg, she was enjoying herself immensely, and I stood there sipping some cheap wine, astonished and wondering, had my mother really read The Fall of America?”

Marvelous. He wanted real connection. She provided it. She was not like the sycophants circled around him, which must be a huge problem when you become famous. Al Pacino told a great story about how he realized he was famous when he was at a party once and everyone laughed uproariously at every joke he told. It made him uneasy. He stopped having to work hard. It was strangely isolating. It’s good to have people around you who treat you normal. Mrs. Balakian, scooping out lasagna, as the pot-smoke drifts in from her son’s living room, calling Allen Ginsberg “Allen”, and insisting that they be friends. They were.

Now, to put some context into this: Arax Balakian’s entire family was wiped out in 1915. The family tree Balakian puts at the beginning of the book is a chilling reminder of what genocide looks like. The date “1915” is the end-stop of that entire generation. Arax Balakian has never discussed the genocide, no one in the family has ever discussed it – Peter Balakian grew up not even knowing that there was a genocide. He senses something is … off … but it takes him years to put it together, and his final act of commemoration and memory is the writing of Black Dog of Fate, where he tells his family’s incredible and harrowing story. This is where Balakian’s mother is coming from, even with her judgmental stance on Peter’s girlfriends, and certain types of Armenians, and her uptight insistence that her family is AMERICAN, not Armenian. Balakian then goes on to describe the reading. Orlovsky read a poem, too, about jerking off Allen, and Balakian was mortified, glancing over at his mother to see if she were horrified or outraged. She sat there, impassive, no response. Peter, however, wanted to sink through the floor. Ginsberg read for a couple of hours, people drifted in and out, smoking pot, and the crowd thinned a bit, and then:

After three hours, only a handful of people were left and I wished the whole thing were over. I was on the verge of signaling Ginsberg to wind it up, when out of nowhere, he began to recite in a beautiful, resonant voice: “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 … listening to Ray Charles blues about blind on the phonograph.” It was “Kaddish”, his epic poem about his mother. A poem that I loved.

Into the tired, nearly emptied littered hall the rush of images began to flood. I sat staring at the old linoleum floor in the slightly blue light coming from the ’40s fluorescent fixtures above. I watched my mother sitting cross-legged in the middle of the near-empty room, intent and poised as a young student.

Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and weeks – forgetting, aggrieve watching Marie Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth, …
Or back at Normal School in Newark, studying up on America in a black skirt – winter on the street without lunch – a penny a pickle – home at night to take care of Eleanor in the bedroom –
First nervous breakdown was 1919 – she stayed home from school and lay in a dark room for three weeks – something bad – never said what – every noise hurt – dreams of the creaks of Wall Street

As Ginsberg’s words echoed in the cavernous dining hall, I buried my head in my hands and began to weep.

Ginsberg and Orlovsky slept at Peter Balakian’s that night. Here is the ending of the story:

When my mother barged into my room quite early the next morning, I don’t know what she expected to find. Charlene and me? Or me under the covers, alone in pajamas? She found neither, because I had neglected to tell her that I had given my room to Allen and Peter, and that I was staying at Charlene’s. What she witnessed exactly – that is, the precise details – I’ve never been able to find out, but my apartment mates who lived in abutting rooms said they heard her scream and run down the hallway and the stairs, and from their windows, watched her get in her car and drive away. Ginsberg and Orlovsky were in bed. Ginsberg had a walking cast on. The rest remains between Peter and Allen and my mother and it seemed clear that Peter and Allen were unruffled by the intrusion.

When my mother called the next day, she was effusive with the afterglow of the occasion. “It’s amazing,” she said, “how much Jews and Armenians have in common. I felt so at home with Allen. Please tell him and Peter that they must come to dinner the next time they’re in Jersey.”

“I will, Mom,” I said sullenly. “Thanks for everything.”

“And one other thing,” she said. “That poem ‘Kaddish’, I want to get a couple copies of it; can you find it in your bookstore?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then there was silence.

“You know,” she went on, “that poem, I can relate to it.”

“You can?” I said reluctantly.

“In some way it’s about Armenia, too.”

Still hurting from what had happened over Charlene, I did not feel like talking with my mother at this moment, when she seemed to want to say something serious about herself to me.

“That’s good,” I said. “See you at graduation.”

I hung up the phone feeling ambivalent. I did not want the poem, the evening, Ginsberg, to be a bridge between us, not just then, because I was sunk in my own spite. I did not tell my mother that I had wept listening to “Kaddish” in Larison Dining Hall, did not want her to know how much the poem affected me. But I was also sorry I could not talk to her just then.

An amazing anecdote, I think, and speaks to the strange deep power of Ginsberg’s best work. His stuff is so personal, so specific, and yet here is an example of how it crosses over into the universal. I don’t think that is true of all of his stuff, and I am not fond of his later poems, which seem coy to me. I like Ginsberg loud, messy, in a rage, on the edge, and howling his pain and fear up into the universe at the top of his lungs. “Kaddish” is a hell of a poem.

Ginsberg was notorious early on, because of the controversies surrounding “Howl” (similar to what James Joyce went through with Ulysses), and it put him (and his friends) on the map.

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, talks about the famous story of how Ginsberg came to write “Howl”, a story that Ginsberg told again and again, as the moment of inspiration:

In America in the late 1940s, Allen Ginsberg, interested in Supreme Reality, alone and suffering a “dark night of the soul sort of,” his lover Neal Cassady having sloped off, and having himself just masturbated, with a volume of [William] Blake before him – “I wasn’t even reading, my eye was idling over the page of ‘Ah, Sun-flower,’ and it suddenly appeared – the poem I’d read a lot of times before.” He began to understand the poem and “suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it,” he “heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice.” This “apparitional voice” became his guiding spirit: “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.” On Ginsberg this “anciency” fathered Howl, though the Blake simulacrum was aided by the hallucinogens popular at the time, the recipe for Part II of the poem including peyote, just as for Kaddish he was assisted by amphetamine injections. “The amphetamine gives a peculiar metaphysical tinge to things, also. Space-outs.” Blake managed his visions without substance abuse. Ginsberg’s appropriation of the poet of innocence and experience did much to promote Blake to the alternative culture of the 1950s and 1960s.

William Carlos Williams (another Paterson, New Jersey poet) wrote the introduction to Howl, an event duly noted by everyone that something new and powerful had arrived. What on earth is the connection between those two poets, except geography? But they had a long correspondence, and Williams was important to Ginsberg, in helping him find his own voice and stop blatantly imitating others. Ginsberg is still a big steal-er, he steals from everyone he meets, it seems, but Williams had pushed him gently towards his own path.

Ginsberg remains controversial to this day. What exactly IS his poetry? How can it be classified? Does it work, separated from him the man? Or was it his readings and performances of his poems that really helped them LAND? I suppose the jury is still out, but it is an interesting thing to think about.

Michael Schmidt has a lot of criticism of Ginsberg’s poetry alongside his admiration (and his memories of seeing him perform and how insane it was, how hypnotic and powerful) and really gets a line on some of the conflicts here:

Ginsberg could be the priest of holy madness, anti-authoritarian, a man of generosity, a voice of the future; but he signed the papers to have his mother lobotomized, supported authoritarian individuals and regimes as long as they were ranged against his primary foe, the United States, was ungenerous to fellow poets if they were not of his camp and promoted himself at the expense of those around him, even after he had shaved off his beard and assumed the quiet demeanor of an almost dapper professor. The big days were in the 1950s, and his last four decades fed off the fat of the huge and unexpected pop-star success of his setting out. He remained a compelling performer, even of the awful later poems. Self-projection was his incomparable skill and it proved fatal to the work in the end: the voice could imbue a shopping list with transcendent significance.

Schmidt accurately describes Ginsberg’s impact as “drop[ping] on American poetry like a bomb.”

So this was a long entry. There’s still a lot to talk about when we talk about Allen Ginsberg. Charlatan or muse, sell-out or prophet? Depends on where you are standing. We have Balakian’s view of Ginsberg, we have Schmidt’s, we have Ginsberg’s view of himself, and William Carlos Williams’s view. Everyone has an opinion.

And the beat goes on.

Here’s a poem of Ginsberg’s that I do love, a tribute to one of his two muses, Walt Whitman:

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
–and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?

A couple of clips below the jump, of Johnny Depp talking about meeting Ginsberg – really funny interesting stuff: