Jonah Raskin's Tribute to Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg Revisited: An Appraisal on the 25th Anniversary of the Poet's Death
published in Re-Markings Vol. 22 No.1 March 2023
reprinted in
Rock and the Beat Generation
https://simonwarner.substack.com/p/raskins-25th-anniversary-tribute
Raskin's 25th anniversary tribute to Ginsberg
It might be almost a year since the
quarter-century of the passing of a major poet but Rock & the Beat
Generation is still delighted to run a memorial from a significant counterculture
scholar
, 2023
AN AMERICAN literary academic of note and the author of the much
valorised American Scream: Allen
Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation recently released an essay
reflecting on the poet’s death in 1997.
Jonah Raskin’s tribute appears in the March 2023 issue of the
journal Re-Markings, published in Agra, India. The
San Francisco-based writer tells us: ‘Agra is home of the Taj Mahal, where Beat
literature is widely read and appreciated especially Ginsberg's poetry.’
We are pleased, indeed honoured, to
share this slightly belated account with the readership of this website…
‘Allen Ginsberg revisited: An appraisal on the 25th anniversary
of the poet’s death’
By Jonah Raskin
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Allen Ginsberg published his own confessional and
autobiographical poetry for half-a century, beginning in the 1940s and
continuing until his death in 1997. An extraordinary performer, and a
peripatetic poet he also helped create the Beat Generation literary movement
with his publicity savvy. This essay, written on the 25th anniversary of his
death, looks back at his life, his work and the times that shaped him and that
he also had a hand in shaping. The author offers insights into ‘Howl’ and
‘Kaddish’, which he argues are his two best poems. He also points to Ginsberg's
flaws and suggests how readers today might appreciate his body of work, which
has been translated into dozens of languages and read around the world.
----------------------------------
When I’m in the company of poets, poetry lovers and fans of the
literature of the Beat Generation, and the conversation turns to Allen
Ginsberg, I’m asked, invariably, ‘Did you know him?’ I suppose that question
reflects the power of celebrities and the celebrity culture to which Ginsberg
belonged. For decades, he rubbed shoulders with Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Mick
Jagger, Patti Smith and the members of the Clash, the 1980s rock ‘n’ roll band
and its star Joe Strummer. Maybe also, those who want to know if I knew
Ginsberg hope I might share gossip. I do have gossip, but this isn’t a gossip
column so I’ll refrain from broadcasting it. Sam Kushner has juicy gossip in
his book, When I Was Cool.
I did know Allen Ginsberg and I do have
stories to tell. I met him at a party at Patty Oldenburg's apartment in 1972
when we learned that Nixon had defeated George McGovern and yet another nail
was driven into the coffin of the Sixties. Years later, I heard ‘Ginzy’, as
friends called him, perform at College of Marin, north of San Francisco and
invited him to read at Sonoma State University, where I taught literature and
law, including the laws of obscenity. I used his poetry to illustrate how the
law worked and didn’t work. Actually, he asked me to invite him to read. I did.
The University paid him $2,000 for a day's work.
Ever since I was teenager growing up on Long Island, about 45
miles from New York City, I had been a Ginsberg fan. I bought Howl and Other Poems at a bookstore in
Manhattan in 1956, read it from cover to cover and especially liked the poem
‘America’ which includes the line – one of the best known in 20th century
poetry – ‘Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.’ Ginsberg was rarely shy about
using obscenities. They show up repeatedly in ‘Howl’ and landed his publisher
in trouble with the law. The last line in ‘America’ is also a classic: ‘America
I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.’ That was his way of coming out of
the closet and announcing, too, that he meant to be a good citizen in the
democracy he loved and lamented its passing.
Thirty-five or so years after I first
read ‘Howl’ as a teenager, I visited Ginsberg at his apartment in New York and
enjoyed a meal with him in a vegetarian restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East
Side, the neighborhood where he lived for decades. When he said something I
thought was brilliant, but didn’t hear every single word, I asked him to repeat
what he said. He refused. ‘It will come back around again,’ he said. It didn’t.
I regret not pressuring him.
Spending time with Ginsberg and getting to know him helped when
I wrote American Scream: Allen
Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation, which is a biography of the
poet’s most famous work. Like Ginsberg himself, his poem has parents, origins,
an evolution, a birth and crucial events during its post-partum existence.
Because I interviewed him, observed him and watched him on stage, I came to
know the sound of Ginsberg’s spoken words, his body language and his ways of
interacting with audiences. He's a living presence in my bank of memories.
American Scream is all about ‘Howl’, which means that it’s also all about
Allen Ginsberg. It’s about the sources of the poem, the time and place in which
it was written – in San Francisco, away from New York and New Yorkers – its
publication history, its reception and why I think it’s a classic, using T. S.
Eliot’s essay, ‘What is a Classic?’ (1944), to guide me. ‘Every great work of
poetry tends to make impossible the production of equally great works of the
same kind,’ Eliot wrote. ‘Every supreme poet, classic or not, tends to exhaust
the ground he cultivates.’ That’s as true of Ginsberg as it is of Eliot. Both
had imitators. Both were parodied and both of them put the competition to shame.
Most of what I know about Ginsberg and
‘Howl’ does not come directly from the author, though I interviewed him and
taped him on several occasions in New York and in California. Perhaps this
sounds humdrum, but I obtained the most valuable information for my book by
conducting research in the Green Library on the campus of Stanford University,
which purchased a big chunk of his archives for $1 million while he was alive.
Who said poetry doesn’t pay? If you’re
famous enough and you’re truly scribacious, as Ginsberg was, you can make a
fortune selling your manuscripts, letters and notebooks to the highest bidder.
I did not find a long lost letter or a secret diary in the Green Library. There
was no ‘smoking gun’, so to speak, but there were revealing comments by
Ginsberg all along the way.
Rather, it was the accumulation of dozens and dozens of details,
some of them obscure, that helped me understand what made Ginsberg tick, how
and why he came to write ‘Howl’, the ways it changed him and altered the course
of American poetry in the mid-twentieth century, just three decades after T. S.
Eliot wrote and published The Waste Land (1922), which might aptly
be described as a forerunner of ‘Howl’.
They are, after all, both poems about
madness and about the crack up of a society, in Eliot’s case during a critical
stage in the decline and fall of the British Empire after WWI, and in
Ginsberg’s case the aftermath of WWII, the rise of the US as a superpower and
the birth of the nuclear age.
In 2003, when I recognized the obvious –
that the 50th anniversary of Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl, in 1955, was
fast approaching – I knew that I’d have to focus on ‘Howl’, and put aside much
of the material I had gathered which took me into the 1960s.
Now, more than a decade after the publication of American Scream, I think I would begin a talk
or an essay about Ginsberg by saying that ‘the inevitable’ followed him around
with much the same force that fame pursued him. Coincidentally or perhaps not,
the word ‘inevitability’ shows up near the start of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (2008). An occasionally
snarky work, albeit carefully researched and beautifully written by Deborah
Baker, it uncovers and describes a largely unknown chapter of Ginsberg’s life,
when he lived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) among Indian poets and intellectuals.
It meant a lot to them that he came to their world and recognized its beauty as
well as its poverty.
‘What held Allen Ginsberg together and would hold him for the
rest of his life,’ Baker writes, ‘was the sweetness and sympathy he found in
the company of India’s sadhus, charlatans, poets, and saints.’ A longtime
resident of Calcutta, a writer for the Calcutta Statesman, and married to the Indian
writer, Amitav Ghosh, Baker knows whereof she speaks. Along with Jane Kramer’s Ginsberg in America (1968), one of the
earliest books about the poet, Baker’s A Blue Hand is one of the most moving
books about the man who waged cultural warfare against the American academic
world and its favorite poets and poems and acted surprised when that same world
treated him as a bad boy who ought to be put him in his place.
Born into a secular Jewish family and
aware of the genocidal war launched by the Nazis against European Jews, he
aimed to remain true to his Jewish roots even as he reached out to Buddhism and
the Hindu religion.
The son of Louis, a poet and a teacher,
and Naomi, a Russian émigré, a painter and a member of the American Communist
Party, who spent much of her life in mental institutions, Allen assumed from an
early age that he would grow up and become a renowned poet. Precious, arrogant
and supremely self- confident, he was also deeply insecure about his own
identity in part because he knew as a boy that he was attracted to other boys
and that homosexuality was regarded as a disease which could be cured by
medical doctors. Also, he thought he had inherited his mother’s ‘madness’.
His psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks,
talked him out of that idea in San Francisco in the mid-1950 at Langley Porter,
a hospital where he was an outpatient. Dr. Hicks helped him accept his
homosexuality, overcome his writer’s block and begin work on ‘Howl’. According
to Dr. Hicks, Ginsberg arrived at therapy sessions with a handwritten draft of
‘Howl’. Ginsberg always insisted that he typed the earliest version. I tend to
believe Hicks.
By the time he was 30, Ginsberg was notorious as the author of
‘Howl’, his long, epic poem about himself and his own generation of
‘angelheaded hipsters’, as he called them. When City Lights first published Howl and Other Poems in 1956 in the Pocket
Poets Series there was no Beat Generation literary movement and there were no
Beat writers, though there were bohemians, bohemian enclaves, and hipsters, who
enjoyed jazz, smoked marijuana and tangled with the police in San Francisco and
elsewhere.
City Lights made Ginsberg and he in turn
made City Lights. Theirs was a marriage made in poetry heaven. Lawrence
Ferlinghetti had co-founded City Lights Books in 1953 with Peter Martin, a New
Yorker who soon left San Francisco and returned to the East. City Lights
publishing followed hard on the heels of the opening of the store, a proverbial
hole-in-the wall that soon became a destination for the bookish, and for lovers
of literature, including the avant-garde.
Ferlinghetti’s first book, Pictures of the Gone World (1955), was the first
volume to be published in the Pocket Poets Series by City Lights. Howl and Other Poems, with an Introduction by the
modernist poet, William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor and early Ginsberg
mentor, was number four in the series which has grown over the decades.
Curiously, Ferlinghetti never considered himself a Beat writer – he belonged to
a literary tradition far older than the Beats, he insisted – though he would go
on to publish the major writers of the Beat Generation – Jack Kerouac, Gregory
Corso, William Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip
Lamantia and others, as well as book after book by Ginsberg, including Planet News (1968), one of my
favorites. His long antiwar poem, Wichita Vortex Sutra, appears in Planet News. When
he died in 2021 at the age of 101, Ferlinghetti left behind a vast body of
work, including A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), one of the
hippest and the most popular poetry books published in the 20th century.
Ginsberg didn’t age as well as his longtime publisher, though
when he died in 1997 at the age of 70, his work had been translated into dozens
of languages and read around the world. HarperCollins had published his Collected Poems, 1947-1980, an 837-page volume with
photographs and footnotes. Since his death, more of his poetry has appeared in
print, including Death and Fame.
Indeed, both death and fame haunted him his whole life. In 2006, Collected Poems was republished with new
material and with the dates in the title changed to 1947-1997 to reflect the
expanded body of work.
Twenty-five years after Ginsberg’s
death, his poetry is still read, studied and enjoyed, though probably not as
widely or as enthusiastically as it was when he was alive and when he performed
hundreds of times a year, promoting himself and his books and making converts
of the misfits to the Beat religion. In 1970, he testified for the defense on
the witness stand during the ‘conspiracy’ trial in a federal courtroom of the
Chicago 8, which included long time fans such as Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman.
The American counterculture of sex,
drugs, communes, rock ‘n’ roll and protests against conventionality was near
its peak in 1970 and in many ways Ginsberg was its embodiment and a flesh and
blood link between the Beats of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
In recent years, work by younger poets and by women and people
of color, has in part supplanted Ginsberg’s poetry, though it’s not out of
print or difficult to find. City Lights continues to publish Howl and Other Poems, which has sold nearly one
million copies in the Pocket Poet Series. Kaddish and Other Poems was republished on its
50th anniversary with an afterword by Ginsberg’s long time archivist and
biographer, Bill Morgan, the author of I Celebrate Myself: The
Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (2006) and The Typewriter is Holy: the
Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (2010).
Morgan’s work has helped to make
Ginsberg’s life widely known, though it’s probably safe to say that not
everything about that life has come to light, much as it’s probably safe to say
that the complete and uncensored history of the Best Generation has not yet
been written and published, either.
Myths and legends do diehard. Indeed,
the myths and legends, many of them generated by Ginsberg himself, will
probably never be completely disentangled from the facts, or from his biography
and Beat history. Many readers assume that he did not revise his work. He
boasted that he didn’t edit, though the many different manuscript versions of
‘Howl’ offer a far different story. He revised as much as Eliot revised which
means that he cared about the craft of poetry.
Ginsberg’s final resting place in the
pantheon of American literature has not yet been determined. Is he a major
poet, a minor poet, or a ‘major minor poet’?, as one critic suggested.
Controversy will surely continue to swirl around him and his work.
My own opinion, based on decades of
study, reflection and the long process of writing about him and his work, is
that Ginsberg peaked early in life and that ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, which he
began to write soon after he finished ‘Howl’, are his two best works, and the
two works that most fully represent his mode of expression. (Kaddish is a
traditional Jewish prayer recited in synagogues that ends with a plea for
universal peace. Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ ends, ‘Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord
Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord.’ ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, both of which are deeply
spiritual poems, belong to the same phase of Ginsberg’s creativity.
In a way, ‘Kaddish’ is an extension of the style and the form of
‘Howl’, though it’s about his mother, Naomi, and her generation of European
immigrants who came to America, retained much of their ‘Old World’ identities
and never fully assimilated. Some of Ginsberg’s critics, including David
Remnick, the editor at The New Yorker, regard ‘Howl’ as ‘adolescent’
and ‘Kaddish’ as a much more mature work.
They see ‘Howl’ as a poem in which he is
a show-off. Perhaps he is, though many of the surrealistic phrases and images
are truly memorable. They include: ‘hydrogen jukebox’, ‘the scholars of war’,
‘the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality’, as well as the opening lines ‘I saw
the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving/ hysterical
naked.’ When Ginsberg gave a poetry-writing workshop at Sonoma State University
he talked about these phrases and invited students to create some of their own
vivid and explosive images.
In the 1970s, Ginsberg got into a poetic
rut from which he could not easily extricate himself. Talismanic words like
‘madness’, ‘naked’ and ‘nakedness’, which play a crucial part in ‘Howl’, appear
again and again in later work. Eager to write poems as popular and as powerful
as ‘Howl', he sometimes became a cliché of himself, though near the end of his
life he wrote short descriptive, and sometimes confessional poems, that reveal
his life as an aging poet.
In ‘Autumn Leaves’, he writes, ‘At 66,
just learning to take care of my body/ Wake cheerful 8 AM & write in a
notebook/ rising from bedside naked leaving a naked boy asleep by the wall/ mix
miso mushroom leeks & winter squash breakfast/...happy not yet to be a
corpse.’
Near the end of his life, he held on to
his notion of himself as a sexual charged human being attracted to boys. A
Member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), he wrote in his
own defense, ‘I'm a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too – everybody does,
who has a little humanity.’ He aimed to be candid, even if it damaged his
reputation.
One can find elements of misogyny in
Ginsberg’s poetry, especially in ‘Howl’. ‘Who lost their loveboys to the three
old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar,’ he wrote.
Sexism infuses the long section on Neal Cassady, referred to as
“N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the
memory of his innumerable lays of girls.’ He’s the playboy and the Casanova of
‘Howl’, which was published soon after Playboy magazine was born in 1953
and honored men like Cassady. Also, Ginsberg’s images of Blacks tend to be
stereotypes, sometimes associated with drugs and addiction. ‘Dragging them-
selves through the negro [sic] streets at dawn looking to an angry/ fix,’ he
wrote of his beloved ‘angelheaded hipsters’.
In his Introduction to ‘Howl’, William
Carlos Williams wrote, ‘When he was younger, and I was younger, I used to know
Allen Ginsberg.’ He added, ‘He disturbed me.’ He disturbed a great many people,
including his teachers at Columbia who came to his aid when he was arrested and
faced time in prison. Williams went on: 'I never thought he’d live to grow up
and write a book of poems.’
His ability to survive, travel and go on
writing astonishes me. Twenty-five years after Ginsberg’s death at the age of
70, it’s still astonishing to me that he survived the trauma of his early
years, his mother’s mental illness, which impacted him profoundly, and his
ability to survive anti-Semitism and the cultural climate of the Cold War,
which negatively affected the arts and creativity in the US.
While at Columbia in the 1940s, no
teacher taught Walt Whitman’s poetry. That's still shocking. In fact, poetry
was relegated to the bottom rung on the ladder of creativity. The novel reigned
supreme. In the 1940s, for an American man to want to become a poet was to go
against the American grain.
‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’ look and sound to
me like artifacts of the era in which they were born, though I know that they
are also more than artifacts. They speak to readers today who are living
through and surviving the crises of the twenty- first century. Ginsberg’s great
teacher, Walt Whitman, wrote,
I am with you, you men and women of a
generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it
is. Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a
living crowd, I was one of a crowd.
So, too, Ginsberg was one of a living
crowd. Like Whitman, he projected himself into the future and into generations
beyond his own. ‘Howl’ lives and so does ‘Kaddish’. Readers who are not willing
or ready to dive into Ginsberg's long poems might begin by reading the short
poems he wrote in the mid- and late 1950s, including ‘America’, ‘A Supermarket
in California’, ‘Sunflower Sutra’ and ‘A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley’. They
all provide insights into his state of mind and his art when he was near one of
the peaks of his creativity.
Bibliography
Baker, Deborah. A Blue Hand: The Beats in India.
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947-1980.
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947-1997.
Ginsberg, Allen. Indian Journals.
Ginsberg, Allen. Planet News.
Kramer, Jane. Allen Ginsberg in America.
Morgan, Bill. I Celebrate Myself: The
Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.
Morgan, Bill. The Typewriter is Holy: the
Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation.
Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen
Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass.
Biography
Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to Re-Markings, is the author of 15 books,
including literary criticism, reporting, memoir and biography. His new book is Dark Past, Dark Future. He has taught journalism,
media law and the theory of communication at Sonoma State University, USA. He
guest-edited the special section on Doris Lessing (the Literature Nobel
laureate) for the March 2008 issue of Re-Markings. Doris Lessing’s endorsement
on Raskin’s The Mythology of Imperialism: ‘I wish someone like Jonah
Raskin had been around to teach me when I was young’. It is a rich tribute to
Raskin’s attributes as a teacher and internationally acclaimed writer, poet and journalist.
