A Beat of Our Time
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry A BEAT OF OUR TIME BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The Beat Generation—which in the words of charter member Allen Ginsberg "hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of...
...He has occasionally been too calculating about signs of the times, too manipulative, reminding one of the Wizard of Oz—a lot of bombast distracting the eye from an ail-American huckster yanking his pulleys...
...Europe...
...Jack Kerouac, author of the Beat saga, On the Road, whom he met when they were both students at Columbia...
...they've gotten hip to him...
...They were the sort who confuse T. S. Eliot's annotations to The Waste Land with the poem itself...
...Unfortunately, there is also Allen-the-Revelator...
...But Ginsberg survives, riding the crest of the Zeitgeist, eager to bring poetry to the widest audience possible...
...I the madman bum and angel beat in Time...
...Moloch needs noting...
...Which way does your beard point tonight...
...Fat books are hard to digest...
...He also is apt to pound his political soapbox, or produce a Whole Earth manual of how-to advice...
...his ridiculous antics have represented unforgettable aspects of our period...
...It seems to me, however, that Ginsberg's Beat poems—Howl, "The Green Automobile," "A Supermarket in California," "Sunflower Sutra," "America," "Death to Van Gogh's Ear...
...Many of his strongest poems use the drama of his childhood: trapped between father, Louis Ginsberg, a wellknown minor lyric poet, and mother, Naomi, subject to paranoia...
...Karma wants understanding...
...On Poetry A BEAT OF OUR TIME BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The Beat Generation—which in the words of charter member Allen Ginsberg "hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of coldwater flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz"—now seems a footnote to literary criticism...
...Not too long ago, trade publishers avoided them for fear of obscenity trials...
...Behind his Dionysian mask is a pedant eager to "transmit cultural arch types to electronic laser TV generations that don't read Dostoyevsky Buddha bibles...
...In one of his best-known works, "America" (1956), he says: "It occurs to me that I am America...
...Norman Podhoretz once accused the Beats of being know-nothings...
...Whitman's optimism is not really in tune with Ginsberg's angst...
...Yet Ginsberg cannot be dismissed...
...Today, the homosexual frankness that shocked the McCarthy era is no big deal...
...Unlike the friends in Robert Lowell's autobiographical poems, where real names disguise semifictional characters, those in Ginsberg's songs are not literary puppets...
...The many icons Ginsberg has made of himself have become the stuff of his verse...
...Poems may run on for lines of "Na-mu-sa-man-da"—a Zen dharani, the reader will discover from the book's copious notes (over 40 pages long...
...except when he is being obsessive about religion or sexual practices, he manages to delineate diversity...
...His Collected Poems 1947-1980 is obviously not the last word in that saga...
...Cross references between text and notes can serve as rough concordance to the book's mythic actualities, from Cassady to CIA to Sakyamuni...
...and sections oi Kaddish—are his most inspired efforts...
...Still, it was from "Song of Myself" that the modern poet learned all he knows about adapting the rhythms of speech to verse...
...He is a poet of the local, a historian of pop culture...
...Earlier, in "A Vow" (1966), Allen Ginsberg promised: I will haunt these States with beard bald head eyes staring out plane window, hair hanging in Greyhound bus midnight leaning over taxicab seat to admonish an angry cursing driver hand lifted to calm his outraged vehicle that I pass with the Green Light of common law...
...Those idealists are gone with the Imagists...
...His attempt to comfort her frantic and terrifying spirit, even after her death, is a constant theme of his poetry...
...In a very recent poem, "White Shroud," published in the New York Times Magazine of November 11, 1984, Ginsberg sees his mother as a bag lady, thus once again zeroing in on a haunting cultural symbol, especially in these hard times for the insulted and injured...
...Ginsberg's second-most-important role is that of American Photographer, capturing vignettes of the country's people, landscape, political and cultural stances...
...Ginsberg memorializes friendships, too: the numerous nameless characters that populate Howl-, Carl Solomon, its dedicatee, who was his fellow-inmate in a psychiatric hospital...
...In a piece of doggerel prompted by a 1973 request from Who's Who for a self-characterization, he wrote: From Great Consciousness vision Harlem 1948 buildings standing in Eternity I realized entire Universe was manifestation of One Mind— My teacher was William Blake—my life work, Poesy, transmitting that spontaneous awareness to mankind...
...Nonsense...
...Mini-essays hint further reading for innocent-eyed youths...
...Europe...
...The roster goes on and on...
...In subsequent years Ginsberg has split more and more between self-proclaimed prophet and ironic bystander...
...Nonetheless, if Ginsberg has a personal vision of One Mind, the perspectives his poetry provides are certainly fragmented...
...II am talking to myself again...
...And in "An Open Window on Chicago" (1967) he does wonders with Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes" strain: Elbow on windowsill, I lean and muse, taller than any building here Steam from my head wafting into the smog Elevators running up dc down my leg Couples copulating in hotel room bed in my belly & bearing children in my heart, Eyes shining like warning-tower Lights, Hair hanging down like a black cloud— Close your eyes on Chicago, and be God Long poems, such as "Iron Horse" and "Wichita Vortex Sutra," narrate the poet's continuous journeys across these United States, observing, commenting, identifying with the spirit of the country...
...Peter Orlovsky, listed as Ginsberg's spouse in Who's Who...
...Plump, balding, the once wild beard trimmed down to a natty goatee, Ginsberg holds a set of his famous City Lights Press books: Howl (1965), Kad-dish (1961), Reality Sandwiches (1963), Planet News (1968), The Fall of America (1913), Mind Breaths (1978), Plutonian Ode(1982...
...Ah, dear father, gray beard, lonely old courage teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit polling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe...
...Ginsberg hasn't sold out to the squares...
...Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage...
...designed to make this large volume 'user friendly.' [It] may be read as a lifelong poem, including history, wherein things are symbols of themselves...
...It is in this guise that he presents himself in "A Supermarket in California" (1955) as Son of Walt: Where are we going, Walt Whitman...
...The angry young poet maudit who saw "the best minds of [his] generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked," became in his next phase the hirsute bard of the hippies—preaching hallucinogens and love-not-war, stripping at stuffy academic symposia...
...It is easy to confuse this poet's engaging personality with his poems...
...Her son was sometimes responsible for committing her to asylums, as Kaddish so graphically describes...
...Narrative and observation of people and places—their peculiar flavor and variety—remain his strength...
...poet Gary Snyder...
...Above all, though, there is his great Lost Love, Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in On the Road), the muse of his initial breakthrough into verse...
...Now, in the' 80s, we find him pictured on the back of his Collected Poems 1947-1980 (Harper & Row, 837 pp., $27.50) as a genial academician, complete with rose in the lapel of what may well be a gray flannel suit...
...When he tries to relate perceptions or dreams, he falls into incoherence, didacticism, sometimes both...
...Ginsberg constantly refers to this revelation, yet like many mystical experiences it resists incarnation...
...Indeed, he has appended pictures, biographical notes and an " 'Index of Proper Names...
...In the solipsistic '70s, he chanted Buddhist mantras outside nuclear power plants, and sat at the feet of swamis at the Vajrayana Seminary in Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin, or the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado...
...Here he succeeded in his aim "to recreate the syntax and measure of pure human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame...
...Even at its best the verse is flawed by self-indulgence, often slipping into bathos or the dead language of "poesy"—basically lazy...
...First and foremost, he is the Family Chronicler...
...Drugs have probably heightened a natural prolixity and discursiveness . As Helen Vendler, an admirer, has cautiously commented, "there will always be more of him, more of his excesses than we can quite want...
...Much in the fashion of another well-known Whitman disciple, Carl Sandburg, he speaks not with authority but as the scribe...
...For decades now he has put an unerring finger on our public nightmares and private dreams...
...America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood...
Vol. 67 • December 1984 • No. 22
