Accents of Death and Endurance:
IGNATOW, DAVID
Accents of Death and Endurance Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958-60. By Allen Ginsberg. City Lights. 100 pp. $1.50. Mountain, Fire, Thornbush. By Harvey Shapiro. Alan Swallow. 29 pp....
...From Harvey Shapiro we may look forward to verse of quintessent comfort and endurance...
...It batters history, that genesis, words that ivhelped a world up, while priest and king and all raged at the syntax they were swaddled by...
...Shapiro's poems are as significant as Ginsberg's because of their very objectivity, intellectual detachment and skepticism...
...author "The Gentle Weightlifter" "Poems' "KADDISH," the poem from which the title of Allen Ginsberg's book is taken, can only be read with compassion, tears, inward graveling sobs and terror and destruction in one's bones...
...One is helpless to end the chaos in either case, but if God's will is a civilizing one then it must be expressed as a kind of grace before evil, a grace which, while carrying every innuendo of violence and depravity, can yet retain an attachment to order by its accent, its detachment...
...The point is that from widely divergent sections of our society two very different poets converge upon the fear, mystery and worship of their one God...
...Ginsberg, if he must be critically evaluated, first must be approached as an integral being directed at a certain goal, much as Walt Whitman has been treated...
...I want to commend particularly Shapiro's realistic lyricism in "Death of a Grandmother," one of the finest deliverances of grief-and-love ambivalence it has been my joy to read...
...Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore...
...It succeeds, not by any rule of religion or poetics, but simply because it has form and mass and drives forward into the day...
...Only the holy may turn their back on "Kaddish," for they are facing God, their backs made straight...
...The vision is penetrant...
...He brings his mother to an institution and he is left to go home alone...
...Kaddish" is a confession of the criminal in one's life...
...It is idle to choose between them...
...Reviewed by David Ignatow Poet...
...All this may seem astounding to say about a poet who has been tagged as the most outrageous of the Beats, but there it is on the page to be read by anyone...
...A studied, controlled calm pervades the whole...
...It is a superb capstone to Ginsberg's horror and ecstasy...
...The differences between them, despite certain similarities in style, are fundamental and diverse: Whitman discovers God everywhere, buoyantly, expansively, reaching out with a caress, giving to life a final exultant mystery...
...To go from Allen Ginsberg to Harvey Shapiro is an exercise in poetic gymnastics, from powerful rough and tumble to the loping stride of the long distance runner...
...A family is exploded through the insanity of the mother...
...And this is the law, or so is said within the darkening synagogue by old men, honored in their beards by the unsealed, heroic sounds...
...With his blood the book is written...
...The rest of Ginsberg's slim book is anti-climactic...
...What hangs upon the tree is man...
...As a religious contemporary of Ginsberg, Harvey Shapiro is a remarkable contrast...
...This is the essence of Shapiro's intellectual and poetic creed...
...The language is precise yet flowing, the images drawn from history...
...He has built a style characteristic of his thinking which still retains highly sensitive antennae to all that goes on within and without: It is "sensitive" because it reminds both the reader and the poet that objectivity and detachment generally are but a way of steeling oneself to the chaos within and without...
...It is an act of purification, an expression of the need to be accepted, understood and loved...
...Celebration without end, the dark book whispers to the wind, wind cradles the destructive globe...
...Here is Shapiro in a poem called "The Book": Violent in its blood, the dark book hangs like a tree of night upon the sky...
...With this poem he has put himself at the center of life...
...This is a poem coarse and crying, wicked and pitiful, at the point before a man cracks...
...there is only the sound of raving and mad acts...
...Outside, the night is far away...
...There are profoundly shocking, tragic things said in "Magic Psalm" and elsewhere, but it is only in "Kaddish" that Ginsberg achieves a major breakthrough of the spirit into open life, committing himself as he is, as he must suffer himself, into the hands of others, for good or evil...
...His poems are— in his own phrase from "Spirit of Rabbi Nachman"—"Words moving a bit of air/ so that the whole morning moves...
...Space is empty...
...Years later he commemorates her death in an asylum and his birth as a poet in accents of death, destruction and despair, sweeping his entire world into the poem...
...The youngest son is a child...
...It is a very recognizable world, with houses, streets, bedrooms, kitchens, food, poverty, ideals and ambitions, all distorted in the face of a mad mother and issuing in the frightful voice of her son as poet...
...Thus the poet begins his creative life...
...From "Kaddish," Part One: "Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death...
...The poem fixes upon the reader a mask of death through which he feels his very being disintegrating...
...Slowly, in inflections blasphemous and obscene, always frightened and enraged, the poem turns, to God, and help comes...
...Shapiro apparently has had thorough academic training and is a scholar in his poetic interests...
...Both are Jews, and both draw on Hebraic sources...
...One might touch, if the necessary power were given, all with human eloquence...
...This poem, I believe, will be read many years from now as one of the great modern acts of faith, rising classically out of the extremes of human life...
...yet the differences are astounding...
...The reader must go insane, be destroyed with the mother and resurrected in the poet who saves him in a whisper of holiness and dependence on God, to the sound of "Caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord...
...Nothing is left...
...This poet has trained himself for the long stretch, he knows what there is to know and has girded himself accordingly...
...Ginsberg is hammerlike, smashing away until nothing is left but the great unsmashable dark void that yet clangs and stays intact and, under tremendous blows, forms an anthem in praise of God...
...His tone often is ruminant, putting one in mind of his acknowledged rabbinical masters...
...75...
...And this world lives, it grabs by the hair...
Vol. 44 • July 1961 • No. 29
