POETS Day! Allen Ginsberg

De Amerikaanse dichter Allen Ginsberg in 1979 in de Gentse Poëziewinkel.

A friend of mine owns a restaurant and just had to let two waitresses go for absenteeism. They called the health department as petty revenge and inflicted a spot check by a blue gloved inspector. I’m pretty sure it was them.

The word “Tomorrow” matters. POETS Day stands for Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Escape from work on Friday. This should be obvious. Don’t call in ten minutes before work on a Tuesday and have your roommate who works with you call in right after. That’s mean. Someone is going to have to fill in for you. Someone with plans.

The point is to get a head start on the weekend rather than support the lie that anything gets done in the twilight workweek hours; make a statement and stand up for truth and other good stuff. Don’t disrupt the weekend funding mechanism. That’s Bad Practices.

The petty revenge failed. The score post-spot inspection is three points higher than the score pre. On a related note, if you’re in the Birmingham area and want to enjoy a pizza or some pasta in a setting recently confirmed to be clean, I have a suggestion. Sit at the bar and read a bit of verse. Come in on a Friday afternoon and you might catch a fellow patron aglow with the light of a POETS Day properly respected and enjoyed.

***

Allen Ginsberg has a lot of fans. I’m not among them. I’m also not certain if many of his proclaimed fans have read his poetry.

From Norton’s Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. II:

“In the late 1960s, Ginsberg became a vivid presence in American life: his face was familiar to those who had never read a line of poetry, and increasingly his poems were lost in a large, genial public impression.”

Ginsberg was cool. He’s still cool. There are lovers of his poetry, but there are a lot of people for whom his cachet is an accessory.

The first edition of “Howl” and other Poems was printed in England. The second edition was picked up by U.S. Customs. A well-publicized obscenity trial began and bannerman status was conferred. Again, from Norton’s,

“The publicity made “Howl” an extraordinary popular success – in 1967, there were 146,000 copies in print – and drew public attention to Ginsberg and his friends. A particularly sensational aspect of their lives was their drug use.”

That “Howl” conveys the energy of drug fueled stream of consciousness is unsurprising as Ginsberg was no stranger to the mindset, his friends were provocatively open users, and (still more Norton’s) “Assuming that “Howl” would never be published, Ginsberg wrote it for himself and his friends.”

I admire “Howl” as an attempt, or rather I admire the conception. In “On ‘Howl,’” William Carlos Williams writes that the poem “is a howl of defeat”; the man is powerless against an unfair society. I agree, but I think that rather than defeated by society, the poet is defeated by his own shortcomings. I say that he’s howling against own impotence in the face of the world as it is not because impotence is a quick shorthand but because I think he’s specifically conjuring general impotence as a contrast to the mentions of sexual bravado in the poem.

Pace William’s “the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages” there’s a lot of bravado. An attitude of living authentically through squalor pervades. It’s not an uncommon stance: people who seem happy are phonies, blind to reality, or elitist oppressors. I don’t want to get into a societal argument so staying within the poem, the examples given are of those who can’t find a place in the world he finds himself incapable of striking back against. It is the people inside the poem, of whom he counts himself, on whose behalf he speaks.

Maybe stop masturbating in public parks.

Before railing against people who are not miserable and before preening about injustice, stop burgling. Don’t draw obscene pictures on the windows to upset the cleaning lady (Picking on the help as a revolutionary act?).

Much of the “horrifying experiences” is laid at the feet of or intimated to be caused by mental illness. Ginsberg’s mother was committed to Pilgrim State Hospital and he gave permission for her lobotomization. He was understandably guilt-ridden. Society must be as guilty and impotent in the face of insanity as he was. There is no proportion or accommodation for intentions. It’s narcissistic.

I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’ lines from The Great Divorce:

“The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.”

The technical concept, as I mentioned, is admirable. A howl is an inarticulate expression where words can’t keep pace with emotion. A poem is the opposite. Trying to express the former as the latter is a monumental task. I don’t think much of the content. It’s stream of consciousness from a man who claimed as his motto “First thought, best thought” and disdained revisions. There are lots of nice moments of alliteration that carry the tune. When read aloud with a breathless speed it’s musical – not metrical. Part II is practically a drum solo. Aloud, it’s an energizing bit of nonsense but it’s still nonsense, and what little it articulates doesn’t land.

In seventh grade I had a Doors t-shirt before I knew any of their songs. If you bring up Virginia Woolf at a cocktail party the likely consensus is “I love her,” and the answer to “Which of her books is your favorite?” is probably “Oh, I like all her stuff.” Che Guevera is more silk screen than man at this point.

But The Doors sold a lot of albums, Vita Sackville-West was real, and Guevera didn’t kill all those people by himself. Just because I see a lot of people wearing Allen Ginsberg doesn’t mean he’s without devotees. His impact on American poetry can’t be denied. I joked with my wife that if the New Formalism movement had a Mt. Rushmore, he’d have to be on it. His intuitive ear is much mimicked. He was, with Kerouac and Burroughs, a pivot point in American cultural development and as such an inspiration across arts and genres. I don’t care for his work, but many have and do.

There are almost three thousand words following “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” – what a great opening line – so I’m not going to reprint “Howl.” The link is here if you like.

Below is a poem I think represents Ginsberg’s style well that was written in either 1955 or 1956 depending on which reference I decide is more authoritative. In any case, it was published along with “Howl” in the collection “Howl” and Other Poems.

A Supermarket in California
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

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, Garcia 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 an 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 automobiles 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?