Wholly Communion, Literary Nationalism, and the Sorrows of the Counterculture

Figure 1.

Allen Ginsberg in Wholly Communion, 1965

Figure 2.

Adrian Mitchell in Wholly Communion, 1965

Figure 3.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Wholly Communion, 1965

Figure 4.

Bud get for Wholly Communion film

all those americans here writing about america it's time to give somethingback, after allour heroes were always the gangster the outlaw whysurprised you act like itnow, a placethe simplest man was always the most complex you gave methe usual things, comics,music, royal blue drape suits &what they ever give me but unreadable books?

Tom Raworth, "I Mean"

These opening lines from "I Mean" by British poet Tom Raworth, published in 1967 in Raworth's first full-length collection, The Relation Ship (Goliard Press),¹ stand as a kind of metaphor for a larger problem facing British avant-garde poetry in the 1960s. Put simply, "I Mean" addresses an "American" influence on British letters that was to weigh heavily on poets challenging the restrained formalism and hostility to the modernist project characteristic of the British "Movement" poets.² How were the many Beat and Black Mountain-enamored versifiers of Albion to be innovative on their own terms?

The avant-garde, as Raworth seems to have it, is predicated on the aura of the "outlaw," the "gangster." Such figures are suggestively American, particularly when read within the context of the poem's opening lines. American signs pointing the way forward for a developing British poetics include an idealized simplicity, comics, and music.³ Raworth's poem works in part to ask whether the English will be able to "give something back." What would that "something" sound like? What would it look like? Would it be somehow distinctly English? Would it be as good as the Americans? Is Raworth ventriloquizing and mocking the anxiety felt by British fellow poets enamored of experimental American verse, or is he being sincere?

If Raworth is ventriloquizing, why might that be the case? To write "all those americans here writing about america" is to address the highly problematic way American avant-garde poetry and poetics were unselfconsciously nationalized in the 1950s and 1960s through a variety of strategies. Many British poets, for example, got their first taste of American alternative poetry from Donald Allen's popular 1960 anthology The New American Poetry. Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and related figures were all ensconced in a book whose title gladly relied on identification with the United States as an attractive selling point, and whose cover featured red and white stripes allusive of the American flag.

The Beat poets in particular saw no contradiction in positioning themselves as antiestablishment figures while maintaining a marked patriotism that distinguished them from their more internationalist peers. Ginsberg, for example, appeared any number of times throughout the 1960s in an Uncle Sam hat. This challenged mainstream American values by virtue of the hat's placement on the head of a polysexual bearded Jewish poet, as it simultaneously marked a sincere love of country that Ginsberg, following Whitman, expressed throughout his work. We can refer to his 1956 poem "A Supermarket in California," which invoked and implicitly called for a recuperation of an idealized "lost America,"⁴ and move right through his poetry of the 1980s and 1990s to get a sense of the poet's lifelong commitment to the United States as a promised land that had to be redeemed.

Kerouac certainly never shied away from expressing his loyalty to the States even as he, like Ginsberg, railed against the limitations it placed on his desires. His On the Road refers repeatedly to an America that symbolized—like no other place—the freedom he so craved. Despite all its problems, America was "the mighty land."⁵ As Manuel Louis Martinez suggests,

it may be that [Kerouac] is neither the voice of dissension as his most ardent readers claim, nor the...