If it accomplishes nothing else, the appearance of Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems,1 an enormous volume published under the terms of a six-figure contract, should once and for all puncture the widespread notion of Ginsberg as the pariah of the American literary establishment. Even visually the Collected Poems is a far cry from Ginsberg’s earlier books, brought out by the defiantly anti-establishment press, City Lights Books of San Francisco, a shadowy, shoestring operation that seemed permanently on the verge not only of bankruptcy but of arrest.
To be sure, this image of City Lights, far from being a liability, was at the time exactly what Ginsberg wanted for himself. When City Lights published “Howl” in 1956 he wished it known that the book contained not just poems but contraband goods—dangerous to buy and dangerous to consume. The visual design of City Lights Books contributed to the desired effect: small, square pamphlets, cheaply bound and printed, looking less like “literature” than the hastily run-off sheets of some band of revolutionary infidels. This “quick” look was supposed to be emblematic of what was inside, poetry written so harrowingly close to life that it was not expected or destined to survive.
Well, Ginsberg has been around for a very long while now, as witness his Collected Poems, a book of such weight and durability that even sluttish Time will have trouble besmearing it. Bound in heavy black cloth with gold lettering, wrapped in an expensive red jacket, this two-inch-thick extravaganza contains 330 poems, a preface, 51 pages of notes and documentary material (including photos and the introductions, forewords, afterwords, epigraphs, jacket copy, and dedications of all his earlier books), an index of proper names (nine pages), and an index of first lines and titles. Never has an aesthetic of obsolescence been so fastidiously preserved. And on top of this, Harper & Row has agreed to publish, in the coming years, separate volumes of Ginsberg’s letters, essays and interviews, journals, a new volume of poetry entitled White Shroud, and an annotated edition of “Howl.” No living American poet and very few dead ones have been treated so respectfully by a publisher as has Allen Ginsberg.
This tale of literary success had its inauspicious beginning in Paterson, New Jersey, where Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926. Ginsberg is thus, chronologically at least, a part of the immensely talented generation that burst on the poetry scene in the years following World War II. But while most of that generation’s better poets—among them Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and Howard Nemerov—were of a decidedly formalist persuasion, Ginsberg was the freewheeling, experimental rebel.
If it is always difficult to hazard psychological reasons for nonconformity, in Ginsberg’s case it is equally hard to ignore the evidence of his early life. Ginsberg’s father Louis was a sober and conservative man, a high-school teacher and part-time poet who published his verse in magazines like Saturday Review and the Atlantic. His mother, Naomi, was Louis’s opposite. An active Communist in the 30’s, she was later afflicted with paranoid delusions about her political involvement and was institutionalized for long stretches of time. Contributing to these difficulties at home was Allen’s homosexuality.
Ginsberg took this volatile psychological brew with him to Columbia University where he enrolled as a student of literature in 1943. There he encountered the eminently sane Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, neither of whom proved to be the mentor he was seeking. Although he initially tried to win the approval of Trilling, his growing taste for irrationality led him, in the years between 1944 and 1946, to form attachments to such apostles of the nascent “Beat” movement as William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke—drug addicts and criminals all.
Under the influence of the ideas of this group, Ginsberg while still an undergraduate abetted his then-apartment mate, Herbert Huncke, in a burglary and for his pains wound up spending a few months at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute. But it was Neal Cassady, later immortalized as Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957), who was the true “Nietzschean hero” (in Kerouac’s phrase) of the Beats. He earned this title on the basis of his reputed sexual prowess with males and females alike. Ginsberg himself immediately fell in love with Cassady, and the two had a very brief affair.
Cassady’s (predictable) rejection of Ginsberg—the “great mortal blow to all my tenderest hopes”—set the stage for the crucial events of his early poetic career. As documented by Ginsberg, he had been “in a very lonely solitary state, dark night of the soul sort of,” when, while reading Blake’s poem “Ah! Sunflower” in his Harlem apartment in 1948, he heard a “very deep earthen grave voice” which he “immediately assumed . . . was Blake’s.” Then:
. . . my body suddenly felt light, and a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise [came over me]. And it was a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe than I’d been existing in.
Ginsberg claims that he was able to reach this “totally deeper real universe” while gazing at the cornice of his building, thinking about the labor that went into its construction, the lives involved, even the molecules it was composed of. He focused his vision until everything else around him was blotted out, at which moment he perceived the true state of the cornice, the “divine significance” of which put him into a state of “bliss.” When this happened, people on the street seemed to be wearing “grotesque masks.” (Similarly unenlightened souls inhabit Blake’s poem “London,” their faces betraying “marks of weakness, marks of woe.”) Indeed, the entire “fallen” world seemed distorted, out of touch with the “cosmic consciousness” Ginsberg now possessed.
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The first poem Ginsberg wrote after these “Blake visions”—it appears third in the Collected Poems—is the decorative, Elizabethan-inspired sonnet, “I dwelled in Hell on earth to write this rhyme.”
I dwelled in Hell on earth to write this rhyme,
I live in stillness now, in living flame;
I witness Heaven in unholy time,
I room in the renownèd city, am
Unknown. The fame I dwell in is not mine,
I would not have it. Angels in the air
Serenade my senses in delight.
Intelligence of poets, saints and fair
Characters converse with me all night.
But all the streets are burning everywhere.
The city is burning these multitudes that climb
Her buildings. Their inferno is the same
I scaled as a stupendous blazing stair.
They vanish as I look into the light.
This weakly imitative poem succeeds in relating the fact that the speaker has had an otherworldly experience; but that is all. Unlike Blake, Ginsberg does not succeed in altering our normal ways of thinking and seeing in order to penetrate to the truer essence of reality; nor does he link what he sees with a vision for the future of humanity at large. And he is still in thrall here to what Blake dismissed as “the modern bondage of Rhyming,” or “Poetry Fedder’d.” Later, Ginsberg would follow Blake’s advice in the matter of versification, but in this early work, in the words of Paul Portugés, author of a study entitled The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg, his habits of prosody “paralleled his misdirection in the search for supernatural realities.”
Ginsberg continued to write in this fashion for three more years. (These early poems are included in his first book, The Gates of Wrath, completed in 1951 but not published until twenty-one years later.) But while he was trying to make his visionary poems more visionary, another poetic influence drifted into his orbit. Sometime during 1951, William Carlos Williams replied to a parcel of “Elizabethan” poems Ginsberg had sent, and castigated the young poet for relying too much on archaic forms and diction. “In this mode perfection is basic,” declared the godfather of imperfection. Ginsberg, heeding Williams’s warning, immediately produced a batch of poems of a distinctly mundane and imperfect bent. This one, dated April 1952, is entitled “A Crazy Spiritual”:
A faithful youth
with artificial legs
drove his jalopy
through the towns of Texas.He got sent out
of the Free Hospital
of Galveston, madtown
on the Gulf of Mexicoafter he recovered.
They gave him a car
and a black mongrel;
name was Weakness. . . .
Here Ginsberg is fully as derivative—this time, of Williams—as he had been of Wyatt and Surrey in The Gates of Wrath. He also displays less care in his writing, although this too may be credited to the Williams aesthetic. More importantly, the mundane impulse appropriated from Williams opens the way to what will soon become Ginsberg’s patented note of despair:
How sick I am!
that thought
always comes to me
with horror.
Is it this strange
for everybody?
But such fugitive feelings
have always been my
métier.(“Marijuana Notation”)
What is wrong with these poems, collected in Ginsberg’s second volume, Empty Mirror (again published later—in 1961), was well expressed by Marianne Moore in a sharp and characteristically honest letter to their author:
Patient or impatient repudiating of life, just repudiates itself. There is no point to it. What can be exciting to others is one’s struggle with what is too hard. Unless one is improved by what hurts one, it can’t be of interest to others. . . . If we share in the conspiracy against ourselves and call existence an insult, who cares what we write?2
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Marianne moore’s words fell on deaf ears. During his incarceration in the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, Ginsberg had befriended an insane inmate named Carl Solomon, and Solomon returned the favor by introducing Ginsberg to the work of the French surrealists. This became one of the primary sources of the new style Ginsberg unveiled in “Howl” (1956), dedicated to Solomon. Another was Jack Kerouac’s theory of spontaneous, or automatic, writing, which forced Ginsberg to elongate his lines so that they could accommodate whatever came into his head. (“First thought, best thought,” was his dictum at the time.) And a final catalyzing event during this period was Ginsberg’s move to San Francisco in 1954, where he obtained work as a market researcher.
According to the Ginsberg legend, this encounter with the “straight” world was one of the factors that lent “Howl” its authenticity as a document of social and spiritual liberation. If by liberation one means the willed celebration of depravity, dereliction, and obscenity, the poem certainly qualifies as one of the most liberated in American literature:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets
at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in
the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and
high sat up smoking in the supernatural dark-
ness of cold-water flats floating across the
tops of cities contemplating jazz. . . .
Apart from its status as a relic of 50’s radicalism, however, “Howl” raises some problems as a poem. The divergent impulses Ginsberg had been toying with—the transcendent impulse of Blake, the mundane impulse of Williams—are uncomfortably conflated here. It is easy enough to see the materialism of Williams; it is found in the naked revelations of Ginsberg’s tortured personal life. What could be more “real” than this passage about Neal Cassady?
who went out whoring through Colorado in
myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of
these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver
—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays
of girls in empty lots & diner backyards,
moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops
in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar
roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially
secret gas-station solipsisms of Johns, &
hometown alleys too, . . .
The visionary side, however, is more elusive: there are about as many theories of where this quality resides in “Howl” as there are critics who have undertaken to write on the subject. One of the most eloquent, Paul Portugés, follows Ginsberg himself in focusing on the influence of Paul Cézanne. It all started, relates Portugés, when Ginsberg, as a student at Columbia, saw a group of Cézanne’s canvases at the Museum of Modern Art. On one of his first visits to the museum the young poet was gazing at one of Cézanne’s landscapes:
“[T]here’s a strange sensation that one gets [said Ginsberg], looking at his canvases, which I began to associate with the extraordinary sensation—cosmic sensation, in fact—that I had experienced catalyzed by Blake’s ‘Sunflower’ and ‘Sick Rose’ and a few other poems.” This “cosmic sensation” he felt while peering into Cézanne’s landscapes was a “strange, shuddering impression” and a “sudden shift, a flashing” in his mind that created a momentary “gap” in consciousness caused by the “space gap” in Cézanne’s paintings. . . .
The “space gap” in Cézanne’s paintings—literally, the “gap” between dots of color—conjured up for Ginsberg what Portugés calls the “perfect Plotinian other world of timelessness and eternal transcendence.” Contemplating how he himself might “develop a poetry that would help the reader find ‘Heaven and Eternity’ . . . between the lines and images of a poem,” Ginsberg went back to the museum under the “suggestive influence” of “a lot of marijuana.” He then began, as he himself has related, “turning on to space in Cézanne.” The disoriented poet noticed how the rocks of The Rocks of Garonne were not rocks at all but amorphous “rock parts” (the same perception he had had in looking at the cornices of his building). Ginsberg: “. . . [A]ctually [Cézanne had] reconstituted the whole fucking universe in his canvases.”
As in painting, so in poetry. Where Cézanne juxtaposed “one color against another” to produce the effect of “cosmic sensation,” so too “the gap between two words” placed next to each other in a poem would force the “mind [to] fill in with the sensation of existence.” In other words, between the words in such two-word phrases in “Howl” as “hydrogen jukebox,” “heterosexual dollar,” “nitroglycerin shrieks,” “catatonic piano,” and “angelheaded hipsters” the reader is supposed to get the feeling of Eternity Ginsberg got while gazing at the dots in Cézanne’s landscapes.
From today’s vantage point, of course, these two-word phrases strike a note less of cosmic sensation than of stale Bob Dylan. Even in theory, however, it is clearly impossible to liken the juxtaposition of colors to the juxtaposition of words, for the simple reason that words have specific meanings and colors do not. Nor can black and white squiggles on a page ever create atmosphere and light the way the dots in Cézanne’s colors do. All this, incidentally, quite apart from the fact that Cézanne’s pictures rather beautifully cohere in a way that Ginsberg’s poems rarely do.
Nevertheless, Ginsberg and Kerouac were so enamored of this “gap” effect they supposedly “adapted” from Cézanne that they began studying a four-volume set of translations of Japanese haiku—a form of poetry which they thought exemplified the same principle. In Ginsberg’s words, haikus “present two distinct images, yet side by side without drawing a logical conclusion between them: the mind fills in this . . . space.” Thus, he quotes a haiku by Issa:
O ant
crawling up Mount Fujiyama
but slowly, slowly
Ginsberg’s gloss: “Now you have the small ant and you have Mount Fujiyama and you have the ‘slowly, slowly’ and what happens is that you feel almost like . . . a cock in your mouth! You feel this enormous space-universe, it’s almost a tactile thing. Well, anyway it’s a phenomenon-sensation.”
So much for Cézanne; so much for haiku.
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We come back in the end to Blake. Many critics have located the elusive visionary quality in “Howl” in the prophetic structure Ginsberg borrows from Blake, and indeed the three parts of “Howl” do reflect a transforming spiritual odyssey reminiscent of that poet. Thus, the first section reveals that the Beats, the “best minds” of Ginsberg’s generation, will revolutionize our distorted ways of thinking and seeing by identifying the true path we are to take (the path, that is, of madness and delinquency). The second part inculpates America as the enemy of this revolutionary undertaking. The third part affirms the status of the Beats, despite temporary defeats, as prophets and seers; this is done through the glorification of Carl Solomon.
This three-part scheme conforms well to Blake’s prophetic mode; what is more, “Howl” is written entirely in un-“Fedder’d” lines. But there is a problem, and it derives from the dominant note of confessionalism in “Howl.” The confessional poet, cleaving very closely to the details of real life and real emotions, is clearly at odds with the visionary who sees the actual world as a fallen place that needs to be wiped clean. Moreover, the solipsism of confessionalist poetry is deeply opposed to the notion that there are secret visions whose significance can only be revealed by a prophet armed with special powers of transcendence. The debt to Blake, then, is at best merely a formal one, if it is not factitious altogether.
It is thus no wonder that most of the critics who have praised “Howl” have had to ignore Ginsberg’s claims to be a visionary, and have focused instead on the ruthless “authenticity” of his revelations about himself and his feelings. But here too one is compelled to raise a question: is this famous authenticity authentic?
Of course, nothing is more difficult to ascertain than the emotional truth of a piece of writing. But luckily one critic, Paul Breslin, has undertaken to investigate the incidents that gave rise to Ginsberg’s recorded feelings in “Howl” and to check them against the emotional level of the poetry. In “The Origins of ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish,’” published in the Spring 1977 Iowa Review, Breslin demonstrates, on the basis of a dogged perusal of Ginsberg’s unpublished journals and other material at the confidential Allen Ginsberg Archive at Columbia University, that Ginsberg’s much-publicized account of the origins of these two poems is largely invention.
According to the established myth surrounding “Howl,” the twenty-seven-year-old Ginsberg, under instruction by his San Francisco psychiatrist to drop everything and pursue his true desires, promptly got himself fired from his job as a market researcher and moved into an apartment with his lover, Peter Orlovsky. This turn of affairs allegedly released Ginsberg’s heretofore pent-up sensibilities and led to the writing of “Howl,” an ode to sexual, social, and poetic freedom.
The truth, Breslin writes, is different:
Ginsberg’s account of these events sounds suspiciously like a fantasy or a magical cure, and a reading of the journals he kept at the time reveals that even the chronology has been transformed a bit to promote the myth of the Breakthrough. Actually, Ginsberg continued to work at his market-research job for three or four months after he moved in with Orlovsky and insofar as his journals reveal his mood at the time, they suggest he felt depressed, not liberated, when he lost the job. Moreover, while Ginsberg strongly implies that his therapy (and even the need for it) ended with his doctor’s laying on of hands, the journals indicate that he continued in treatment, perhaps as long as several months, including the time that “Howl” was written. Moreover, the lengthy and almost daily entries from late 1954, when he first met Orlovsky, show that Ginsberg entered this relationship with the same premonitions of disaster with which he then launched all of his activities.
Clearly, Ginsberg twisted events and his responses to them in order to make the “breakthrough” appear more decisive than it was. And Breslin has a similar tale to tell about “Kaddish” (1961), Ginsberg’s notoriously “candid” confessional poem about his mother’s insanity and death. Altogether, Breslin’s researches into the emotional circumstances surrounding “Howl” and “Kaddish” tend to support a dark utterance on the subject of literary authenticity by Joseph Conrad: “I have always suspected, in the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotion, the debasing touch of insincerity.”
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The poems Ginsberg wrote in the late 50’s were collected in Reality Sandwiches (1963); despite the title, they show him pursuing new routes to transcendence. Here is a section of a poem called “Laughing Gas” (1958):
Stepping outside the universe
by means of Nitrous Oxide
anesthetizing mind-consciousness.
* * * * *
O waves of probable
and improbable
Universes—I’ll finish this poem
in my next life.
The titles of other poems of this period similarly telegraph Ginsberg’s favored means of dispatch to heaven: “Mescaline,” “Lysergic Acid,” “Aether.”
But Ginsberg’s commitment to “Eternity” (as he calls it in “Psalm II,” a reaffirmation of his “Blake Visions” of twelve years earlier) did not last long. On a trip to India in 1963, he was introduced to Buddhism. Under the paternal influence of various gurus and sages, Ginsberg was persuaded to abandon the task of revealing God and his angels to a benighted mankind, and was instructed instead to accept the “human universe” of the body and the world. This about-face was recorded in a poem aptly entitled “The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express,” written in July 1963:
Open the portals to what Is,
The mattress covered with sheets,
soft pillows of skin,
* * * * *
Tears allright, and laughter
allright
I am that I am—. . . .
The two central principles of Ginsberg’s new religion were relativism (no good or bad) and selflessness (repudiating “great Whitman’s universal Self”). The shift left its mark on the poetry of these years. The poems in the volume entitled The Fall of America (published in 1973 but containing the work of 1965-71), no longer written in order to express Ginsberg’s quasi-demented self, are relatively egoless projections of the real world. The opening lines of “Beginning a Poem of These States,” written in September 1965, are typical:
Under the bluffs of Oroville, blue cloud September
skies, entering U.S. border, red red apples
bend their tree boughs propt with sticks—
At Omak a fat girl in dungarees leads her big
brown horse by asphalt highway.
Through lodgepole pine hills Coleville near
Moses’ Mountain—a white horse standing back
of a 2 ton truck moving forward between trees.
Unfortunately, the replacement of linguistic chaos determined by the self with linguistic chaos determined by selflessness does not produce poetry of a markedly improved character—only more boring than usual.
Meanwhile, Ginsberg’s earlier message of do-it-yourself transcendence was being adopted by the culture at large—and with a vengeance. Before long, thanks to the wide availability of drugs, an entire generation of mini-prophets was practicing spiritual transcendence right here on earth. Ginsberg, despite his new stance in the here-and-now, was not moved to caution against the use of drugs; on the contrary, he publicly supported it, testifying before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee in June 1966 that LSD was a “useful educational tool” which granted “a new sense of openness.”
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Nevertheless, the mass appropriation of what was essentially the Beat aesthetic must have alarmed Ginsberg, who had valued the Beats as an exclusive, elite club. What, after all, was distinctive about a bearded, hooting ex-prophet when drugs and William Blake in paperback were available to all? Perhaps that is why Ginsberg now entered the world of politics. Not only did his poetry become increasingly political in this period, but Ginsberg himself became a political figure. With cameras and reporters documenting his every move, he marched on the Pentagon, staged rallies at the various party conventions, and sat-in at scores of sites. He even visited Havana and the Soviet Union. Perhaps his greatest single moment came during a visit to Prague in 1965, when he was elected “King of May” at the traditional May Day festival; Ginsberg’s poem about the incident, “Kral Majales,” reflects the surge in his ego that had been momentarily quelled by his Buddhist mentors:
And I am the King of May, which is the power
of sexual youth,
and I am the King of May, which is industry in
eloquence and action in amour,
and I am the King of May, which is long hair of
Adam and the Beard of my own body
and I am the King of May, which is Kral Majales
in the Czechoslovakian tongue,
and I am the King of May, which is old Human
poesy, and 100,000 people chose my name,
and I am the King of May, and in a few minutes
I will land at London Airport. . . .
The notoriety that accrued to Ginsberg on account of his political activities inevitably prompted a return to his old hobby of prophecy. But the prophetic poetry of the 60’s is, if anything, even more pretentious than its 50’s counterpart. “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” for example, written in February 1966, contains a call for the end of the Vietnam war so pathetic that it made even Ginsberg’s most ardent admirers cringe:
I call all Powers of imagination
to my side in this auto to make Prophecy,
all Lords
of human kingdoms to come
Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash. . . .I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
Ancient days’ Illusion!—
and pronounce words beginning my own
millennium
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate its own delight
let the President execute his
own desire—
this Act done by my own voice,
nameless Mystery—
Ginsberg’s revived penchant for wild declaration went hand in hand with an increasingly vitriolic anti-Americanism. “Eclogue,” an eleven-page poem written in 1970, begins:
In a thousand years, if there’s History
America’ll be remembered as a nasty
little Country
full of Pricks. . . .
A poem dated July 1972 and entitled “These States: to Miami Presidential Convention,” runs:
Woe to the States, whoever’s the empty President
Nixon McGovern X or Caesar
Must decree end to matter habit,
America swallowing aluminum sleeping pills
Cries of millions of trees travel thru TV
loudspeakers to the Athletic Club’s basement
steamroom—
(Of the book in which this poem appears, Mind Breaths [1978], the critic Hayden Carruth wrote, incredibly, that Ginsberg “has returned to poems of the imagination, poems arising from within, complexes of feeling. . . .” But the compiling of incredible critical statements about Ginsberg is a task all in itself, and a much too easy one.)
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By the middle of the 1970’s, however, Ginsberg seems to have tired of political activism, and under the guidance of a monk named Trungpa, he began returning to Buddhism. Trungpa, born in 1938 in Tibet, educated at Oxford (where he acquired a taste for poetry), had become by the mid-60’s the guru of choice among American literati. In 1970 he founded a Tibetan monastery in Vermont and before long had established numerous “schools” that attracted an ever-growing number of disciples. Allen Ginsberg was one of these disciples, and soon a favorite. When Trungpa opened his Naropa Institute in 1974, he designated Ginsberg leader of the department called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Ginsberg in turn brought many of his poet-friends to Naropa, including John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, and W.S. Merwin.
Then, in 1975, at a wild Halloween party which has now become a legend, a drunken Trungpa, unable to convince Merwin and his lady companion, the Hawaiian poet Dana Naone, to join in the revelry, ordered his “guards” to break down the door and fetch the recalcitrant couple from Merwin’s room. But no sooner was the door smashed in than the poet started wildly swinging a broken beer bottle at Trungpa’s guards. There were injuries, and a considerable amount of blood. When Merwin finally surrendered, he and Miss Naone were brought to the center of the room. One hundred of Trungpa’s disciples watched in silence as their leader threw saké in Merwin’s face and ordered the couple to strip. In a moment of pathetic desperation, Miss Naone yelled, “Call the police!”
News of the incident spread quickly, and cast a certain discredit on the saintly Trungpa. As for Allen Ginsberg, Trungpa’s biggest and most famous supporter, he had this comment:
In the middle of that scene, to yell “Call the police”—do you realize how vulgar that was? The Wisdom of the East was being unveiled, and she’s going, “Call the police!” I mean, shit! Fuck that shit! Strip ’em naked, break down the door!
Yet when in a 1976 interview Ginsberg was asked, “How, if at all, has your work with Trungpa—your extensive meditation practice—changed your outlook on North American or world politics?,” he replied:
It has changed it somewhat from a negative fix on the “fall of America” as a dead-end issue—the creation of my resentment—into an appreciation of the fatal karmic flaws in myself and the nation. Also with an attempt to make use of those flaws or work with them—be aware of them—without animosity or guilt; and find some basis for reconstruction of a humanely useful society, based mainly on a less attached, less apocalyptic view.
Whether Ginsberg’s attack on Merwin and Naone was owing to “karmic flaws” or to “a less attached, less apocalyptic view” must remain an open question.
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There, at any rate, we have the passage of Allen Ginsberg, radical scourge, hero of the counterculture, mystic, now the proud holder of a six-figure book deal and seemingly irrevocable status as a major American poet. It should come as no surprise at the end to learn that the latest role of this free spirit has been to act as censor to a new generation of academics and critics whose assigned job is to preserve the Ginsberg myth. The aging poet now regularly haunts Modern Language Association conventions and academic meetings, “not to throw potato salad,” as Paul Breslin remarks (in From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965), but to ensure that nothing contradictory to the myth be taught, written, or in any way perpetuated. “No one,” says Breslin, “can quote from the [Columbia Archive] without Ginsberg’s permission, and in my own experience in using this collection, he demanded to see and to approve the entire essay in which the quotations appeared—a strange stance for a man whose first book was involved in a censorship trial.”
In the final poem of the Collected Poems, “Capitol Air,” Ginsberg writes:
Truth may be hard to find but Falsehood’s easy Read between the lines our Imperialism is sleazy
One need not read between the lines of Allen Ginsberg’s life and work to find sleaziness abounding.
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1 Harper & Row, 837 pp., $27.50.
2 Moore's previously unpublished letter to Ginsberg is included in a new volume called On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Lewis Hyde, University of Michigan Press, 461 pp., $22.00.
