A Prisoner of Allen Ginsberg

...Ginsberg relates how, after the first draft, he realized his poem could not contain itself within the brief blank verse lines he had copied from his Modernist mentor, William Carlos Williams...

...Equally evocative of a vanished era are the antics of "the best minds" of the Beat generation, "who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fuggazi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,/who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,/a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists...

...First off, it must be said that skimming this book is good fun, like watching a cult movie of the '50s—bebop rebels against society...

...When he first composed the poem, he only wanted to "leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue to explode in the U.S...

...Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti soon found himself taking part in a comic-opera trial...

...Still, it is interesting to observe for oneself the transformation of the first draft's inchoate stream-of-consciousness lament and diatribe into the crazy, prophetic grandeur that Smart's characteristic contours lent the poem...

...he composed Howl as "a gesture of wild solidarity, a message into the asylum, asortofheart'strumpet call," and accorded his friend the ultimate Beat accolade: "You're madder than I am...

...When he climbs on his soapbox these days, his tone is no less patronizing than that of the stuffy academics who outraged his wilder, younger self at Columbia...

...Eliot (who didn't comment) and Lionel Trilling (who found it dull...

...The real man's "lifelong virtues of endurance, familial fidelity and ultimate balance make my [poem] seem hysterical, myself overwrought...

...he even belatedly apologizes for his former male chauvinism, albeit somewhat weakly: my poems have done some men good and a few women ill, perhaps the good outweighs the bad, I'll never know...

...One can almost picture the boisterous author of Howl screaming obscenities or throwing vegetables at the author of White Shroud...

...To commemorate the 30th anniversary of his best known work, Ginsberg, with the assistance of Barry Miles, has issued Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by the Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography (Harper & Row, 194 pp., $22.50...

...In 1955 Ginsberg learned that Solomon had been recommitted...

...Howlis dedicated to Carl Solomon, one of Ginsberg's fellow-inmates in a mental hospital circa 1950...

...Writers & Writing A PRISONER OF ALLEN GINSBERG BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In 1956, a young college drop-out was catapulted into notoriety when a lengthy poem of his, printed in England for the San Francisco paperback company City Lights, was seized by U.S...

...I've ventured my intelligence, neither modest nor immodest," the author explains, with no apparent irony, "for the general public, poetry lovers, scholars, breakthrough artists and future generations of inspired youths...

...Thus was Allen Ginsberg launched as the bard of our culture...

...Rather shamefacedly, Ginsberg now explains it never occurred to him that his verses would be widely enough read to turn Solomon into a well-known fictional character...

...the new book suggests that this instinct has finally failed him...

...Today's philistine probably deals a little cocaine to support his own habit and claims that his swingers' club is immune to AIDS...

...One also learns that, to date, Howl has been translated no fewer than 58 times into 22 languages, including Albanian, Chinese, Hebrew, Macedonian, and Turkish...

...This clue to the poem's form is somewhat less newsworthy than the poet would have us believe—Harold Bloom gave it away in a review of Kaddish and Other Poems way back in 1961...

...Ginsberg's latest work, White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985 (Harper & Row, 88 pp., $14.95), makes the failure of his pop vision more glaring than ever before...

...Ginsberg has reached this stage...

...The new collection's title poem, however, shows he can still write as strongly as ever if properly moved...

...This one, touching poem proves that the vulnerable rebel—"starving, hysterical, naked," and self-mocking—remains alive somewhere inside Ginsberg-the-complacent-guru...

...The blatant wish-fulfillment tacitly acknowledges all the guilt and self-contradiction that Ginsberg's didactic voice and sentimental love lyrics exclude...

...Three decades later, schoolmarm Ginsberg hopes this variorum edition will serve as a "how-to book" for his disciples...

...With joy, he resolves to stay with her and protect her, to be a dutiful son...

...But he has seen himself as Myshkin, Dostoyevsky's holy fool, for so long that he is incapable of taking responsibility for the "ill"—he meant well, after all, and "praised the dharma from nation to nation...

...The weighty measures and repetitions of Smart's mystical Jubilate Agno imitate the sonorous prose of the King James Bible...

...As some measure of redress, Ginsberg prints Solomon's rebuttals to his "poeticized" description of madness, and a harrowing account of how Solomon learned to value the actual as a result of insulin-coma "therapy...

...He ruled that the poem on trial was not pornographic in intent, but rather a socially significant "indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature...

...So much for browsing...

...In the past he at least showed an uncanny ability to tune in to the pulse of the Zeitgeist...

...Successful poets who wish to survive must eventually come to terms with their status as "smiling public men," to borrow Yeats' term, by counting the cost their art has extracted from themselves and others, and by summarizing their aims...

...The poet's rhetoric hasn't changed much since, but the current youthful generation is busy getting MB As...

...The trial, in particular, makes one nostalgic for the days when pornography hearings meant semi-literate bureaucrats suspiciously trying to decipher experimental literature, rather than crackdowns on child exploitation or snuff films...

...The customs official who had brought the case, when asked by the defense counsel whether parts of the Bible might not be considered "dirty" by some people, declared that "what King Solomon did with all those women wouldn't be tolerated in San Francisco...

...The intended purpose of this volume is to allow the Ginsberg enthusiast to study Howl's 28 extant drafts, with line-by-line commentary...

...In a burst of inspiration, he resurrected a mode devised by the mad 18th-century poet Christopher Smart...

...Ginsberg's penchant for preaching has, in fact, developed into full blown pedantry...

...The prosecution's star witness was an elocution instructor from a business college who explained that she had once written a pageant "for one of those big affairs in Florida...

...The poem's theme—that all creation is holy—together with its long, authoritative lines, helped Ginsberg to achieve the breakthrough that ultimately resulted in Howl as we know it...

...The Beats, social outcasts in the '50s, saw themselves as innocents, victims of materialism...

...They will doubtless profit from paragraphs on why he changed this word to that, from essays and diagrams on structure, and from a reading list of "precursor texts," including Shelley's "Adonais," some Mayakovsky, and Apollinaire (but no Blake or Whitman—perhaps Ginsberg feels he has already publicized his debt to them sufficiently...

...The crucial step in Howl's evolution was a formal one...

...They became friends when, at their first encounter, Solomon murmured, "I'm Kirilov," and Ginsberg shot back, "I'm Myshkin...

...In a poem entitled "I am a Prisoner of Allen Ginsberg" he admits to having "always been lazy" (though I suspect this is supposed to be disarming rather than remorseful...

...Now, in "White Shroud," he encounters her in a dream, living as a bag-lady in an alley, self-reliant but growing old...

...Before Howl appeared in print, for instance, Ginsberg sent mimeographed copies to dozens of notables, among them T.S...

...They liked to portray their rebellious behavior —drug dealing and addiction, promiscuous loving and leaving, even larceny—as a protest against philistine culture...

...Customs as obscene material...

...If Ginsberg were simply over the hill, it would be cruel and unnecessary to say these things...

...In the text accompanying the variorium Howl Ginsberg confesses that he "used Mr...

...One picks up a number of intriguing bits of information...

...A few years after taking this action he mourned her madness and his inability to help in "Kaddish...

...a masque on my feelings toward my mother in an ambiguous situation since I had signed the papers for her lobotomy...

...In contrast to these shenanigans, the Judge turned out to be literate and understanding...

...He has become imaginatively fixated in the '60s, a time when he enjoy ed guru status in the eyes of the young and taught them to flout the pigs by taking off their clothes...

...What children of the Cold War found shocking or liberating in the poem—the four-letter words and homosexuality, the heroic accounts of defying authority with drugs or petty theft—now seems naively goofy: a hip Peggy Sue Got Married...

...Solomon's return to the asylum as...

...Replying to a negative reply by Columbia classmate John Hollander, Ginsberg vented his hurt and frustration against all the critics who had called Beat writing formless and "know-nothing," and defended both his craftsmanship and pedagogical aims...

...In this climate, Ginsberg's somewhat enervated rhapsodies to pederasty and his hippie politics sound quite out of touch...

...consciousness in case our military-mdustrialist-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy...