The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

ALLEN GINSBERG

Ø Allen Ginsberg 172 much so little. Words say everything I love you again, then what is emptiness for. To fill, fill. I heard words and words full of holes aching. Speech is a mouth. 1967 ALLEN GINSBERG 1926–1997 Allen ginsberg, perhaps the best-known American poet after World War II, changed the face of poetry and culture. Bob Dylan has written that Ginsberg’s “Howl” signaled “a new type of human existence.” Declaiming his poems in coffeehouses and auditoriums, Ginsberg made himself a celebrity. He aligned poetic innovation with popular culture. He brought political dissidence into the poetic mainstream, and—along with such poets as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton—he refashioned poetry to make it a medium for intimate self-disclosure. He was also the first public figure to bring an explicit self-representation as a homosexual into the center of American culture. A pioneer, a rebel, and an original, Ginsberg expanded the scope of poetry in both its public and its personal dimensions. He challenged and rocked American culture, and at the same time he used his charm and humor to achieve the popular approval he craved. 173 Allen Ginsberg Ø Born in Newark, New Jersey, to a family of Jewish-Russian immigrants, Ginsberg grew up in working-class Paterson. Already a rebel in elementary school, he adopted the slogan “Do what you want to when you want to.” Reading Walt Whitman in high school only strengthened his iconoclastic character. Ginsberg’s later position as both a community member and an outsider reflected his difficult early years. His father was a dutiful high school teacher and poet, whereas his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia, paranoia, and epilepsy, belonged to an idealistic wing of the American Communist Party and was obsessed with helping suffering workers. Ginsberg attended Columbia University on a scholarship , and after graduation he worked as a dishwasher, spot welder, member of the merchant marine, and book reviewer for Newsweek magazine. But, with the encouragement of his mentor William Carlos Williams, he devoted his life to poetry. After experiencing a hallucination in which the English poet William Blake spoke to him, he concentrated on establishing a new poetic movement, which he called “New Vision.” In the 1950s, this movement transformed itself into what Jack Kerovac called “the Beat Generation,” the era’s noisiest and most creative opponents of Cold War conformity. After a series of heterosexual and homosexual affairs, and time spent in a mental hospital, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a market researcher and lived an openly gay life with his lover, the poet Peter Orlovsky . By the mid-1950s, the San Francisco Bay Area had become a vital center of Beat culture, and Ginsberg—along with novelists Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and poet Diane DiPrima—was one of its leading lights. In 1955 he wrote and performed his Beat epic, “Howl,” which had an immediate effect as a shocking and mesmerizing text. The next year, “Howl” was published, seized by authorities as obscene, and found by a court to have “redeeming social signi ficance.” The poem, published together with some shorter poems (including “A Supermarket in California,” “Sunflower Sutra,” and “America”) in an inexpensive City Lights edition, was hugely successful. Ginsberg became a national celebrity, a position he was never to lose. Funny, provocative, thoughtful, personable , and fiercely independent, he transfixed the nation for the next thirty years. In 1956, Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, died, after years of being in and out of mental hospitals. Ginsberg mourned the loss in his long poem, “Kaddish.” He then continued to write and to travel, publishing his poems in inexpensive editions (and later in more conventional volumes); becoming a political spokesman for justice, equality, and peace; exploring Buddhist and other spiritual traditions; and, in the 1960s, making the transition from Beat to hippy culture. In the 1960s, he befriended such popular culture icons as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and especially Bob Dylan. John Lennon made a reference to Ginsberg in “Give Ø Allen Ginsberg 174 Peace a Chance.” Ginsberg sang a duet with the Rolling Stones. He appeared with Dylan in videos, films, and concert tours. He was instrumental in the crossfertilization of poetry with rock and roll in the 1960s and 1970s. Ginsberg also became a major figure in opposition to the Vietnam War, writing poems against the war (such as “Anti-Vietnam War Peace...