Allen Ginsberg is dangerous! So, come and get some!
When I first read Allen Ginsberg’s poems as a teenager, they worked on me like a gateway drug. Leading me deeper and deeper into a life of poetry, Ginsberg’s poems woke me up and whet a poetic appetite I’ve spent years trying to satisfy. I saw the world differently after reading “Howl,” “Kaddish,” “Sunflower Sutra,” and “America.” Language became clamorous and mystical in my brain, words delicious and unwieldy on my tongue.
Reading Ginsberg gave me the chutzpah to complain to the chair of my high school English department that there wasn’t enough poetry on the syllabus. The chair shrewdly offered to give me poetry on the side—as much poetry as I could manage. The poets he proffered—Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens—sounded tame or impregnable to my adolescent ears. The chair gave me Sylvia Plath, but even Plath failed to turn me on (then), failed to bother me the way Ginsberg did, the way I wanted poetry to bother me. No, no, no! I wanted POETRY!: disruption, danger, mind-blowing, dirty-talking, proselytizing prophecy! I wanted the kind of Talmudic Beat-babble queer broken-guitar-Bob-Dylan American song that only ALLEN GINSBERG had the nerve to sing!
This is not to say that my adoration for Ginsberg was monogamous. Far from it! Loving Ginsberg led me into all sorts of wondrous affairs. Having read Ginsberg, I fell easily in love with Walt Whitman who made perfect anachronistic sense to me after Ginsberg. I fell hard for Adrienne Rich whose diction, cadence, and density of language were unlike Ginsberg’s but whose passion and social activism were inherent to what I expected from poetry (from reading Ginsberg).
Throughout high school, college, graduate school, and beyond, Ginsberg led me astray and into fertile adventures. I never would have read William Blake if not intrigued by the stories of Ginsberg’s visions of him. Ginsberg led me to Anne Waldman and back, eventually, to Plath and Anne Sexton. I spent years following a wild, imagined map of Ginsberg’s affiliations and associations. The Ginsberg–Frank O’Hara relationship led me to poets who would sustain me for decades—David Trinidad, Wayne Koestenbaum, James Schuyler, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer. Even when months went by without reading one of Ginsberg’s poems, I always felt he was there with me and in the poems I was reading, a gorgeous contamination. Returning to Ginsberg’s poems was never disappointing. Years later, after countless rereadings, his poems still feel hot to me, infectious, infected, propelling. His poems invite me to keep writing, to write longer, to write messier, to write more authentically, with more ego and more humility, with everything I have and about everything I am.
My conception of poetry is inspired and ineluctably bound up in my (mis)understandings of Ginsberg’s work and life. I embrace a libidinous, expansive, socially aware poetics of opposition and love. It took years for the word “poet” to engender a mental image of someone who looked like me—a mother-writer, her young children in the next room or in the same room or climbing all over her. But I think that because my earliest “poet” chimera was not a consumptive poet alone in a dank room with a bit of candle but was, rather, a delirious, bearded, smiling, ranting man, a shy but outspoken Jewish bard, always in the midst and among—this made me feel that I, too, could be a poet!
For years I felt afraid of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, distant from Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, and even if I liked some of their poems, I felt ignored (or reviled) by writers like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Lowell. But Allen was a good mother to me. He invited me into the kitchen of poetry and made me a sandwich. He offered a messy, imperfect, inclusive, exuberant, erotic (we both like men) kind of poetry that I could share. I didn’t end up dropping acid or dropping out or living on an ashram. I never left New York for San Francisco or Boulder. In a way, Ginsberg was a good mother because I didn’t feel that I had to (or could) be him (or like him) in order to be worthy, in order to be worth something as a poet or a person. Loving Ginsberg didn’t mean I had to be Beat or be Buddhist. Loving Ginsberg meant that I had to be very big and very small, mindful and connected.
What a delight it is to read these old-new poems! It’s a bit like watching a memorial slide show of someone I loved dearly. How beautiful he was in younger years! How innocent-looking! How wise! One marvels at what has come back into fashion or never went out of fashion, at the images that feel familiar but are, actually, seen for the first time. “Of course!” one thinks. Or, “I never knew!” I’m so grateful for these unearthed poems, for the moreness of them, which is not just memory but new connection, new discovery. I love Ginsberg’s fearsome prolificity, but the massiveness of his published oeuvre makes it difficult to get a sense of Ginsberg’s development across time. What a pleasure it is to journey through this substantial (but manageable) temporal road trip of a collection and watch Ginsberg break (through) lines like “Ready are we to meet the challenge hurled: / ‘To battle, conquer, and rebuild the world.’” Ginsberg knows, early on, that his throat “was tight, as if to choke / My tongue from talk; though in my ear / The bawdy brawl was ringing clear.” We get to hear Ginsberg start singing. We see him “wake to see the world go wild” as he writes his “own physical eternity.”
I love the tonal range of this collection, which includes euphoric lines like “I am Bard to my own nature nameless as the very Vast I look at” (from the marvelous poem “After Wales Visitacione July 29 1967”) and doleful lines like “Melancholy to sit here middle-aged / with worn sleeve & hairy hand / exposed, alone” (from the sad, cinematic, Hopperesque poem “Cleveland Airport”). I love these poems’ inclusion of so many of Ginsberg’s friends (as direct collaborators or dedicatees), of Whitman (so present he feels nearly word-made-flesh), of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Bob Creeley, Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Dylan, Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Susan Sontag, Carl Solomon, and others. I love the way Ginsberg always cares deeply about everything, but never takes himself too seriously: “And I— / ‘Om Om Om’ etc— / repeat my prayers / after devouring the NY Post / in tears—.”
I love the short, haiku-like poems: “Awakened at dawn trying to run away— / Got caught dream / shop-lifting” or the poem “Trungpa Lectures” which reads, in its entirety:
Now that bow arrow brush & fan are balanced in the hand
—What about a glass of water?—
Holding my cock to pee, the Atlantic gushes out.
Sitting down to eat, Sun and Moon fill the plate.
And then there are the mini-epics and the awesome “New York to San Fran,” a bird’s-eye coast-to-coast view, an ode not only to America but to “vastitude” itself. I’m so glad Bill Morgan included the unabashedly sexual “[Poem]” that begins “Bebbe put me on your lap …” alongside the sweet birthday poem to seventy-seven-year-old Marianne Moore. The personal, the political, the physical, and the spiritual—it is the tangle of these life forces, an awareness that these are not even, ever separable, that is quintessential Ginsberg.
I am struck (but not, happily, struck dumb) by the alarming timeliness of this collection, which decries police violence, racism, class oppression, and the prison industrial system: “Crazy cars roam the landscape lonesome scared of your police”; “freedom of speech / I’m an average citizen / scared of the cops”; “What divine congressional investigation will ever undo / all these decades of calumny, injustice, / brainwash, jail?”; “Remember pain suffering you caused others Power Head! / Stop & Frisk laws on your deathbed conscience!” This collection reminds us that we are still, too often, “unsuspecting mortals poisoning their air”; that our news isn’t new.
I laughed out loud at the very first poem in this collection. Written the same year my mother was born, I had no idea who Gordon Canfield was (until I read the notes) but was startled by how current the poem feels as we approach the 2016 election. Later the same day my son asked me what I’d do if Donald Trump was elected (I fervently hope that seventy-three years from now no one will know who Trump was). “What would I do?” I asked. “Yeah,” said my son. What was he expecting me to say, that we’d move to Canada? That I’d stop everything and—”Mom,” my son said, “Trump said a woman nursing her baby is disgusting!” I thought of Ginsberg. “I guess I’ll eviscerate Trump in a poem?”
Ginsberg reminds me to write with my friends (even the dead ones), even poets I never met (like Ginsberg). He reminds me to have fun, to be serious, to be angry. He reminds me to meditate under the clouds, to give our crooked politicians a what-for, to wonder why the “White / bankers, politicians, police & armies” still control almost everything. Ginsberg reminds me to “come back to my body,” to fight the “misery … created / to drown the joyful chant / of all our souls.” Ginsberg’s prescient poems didn’t “work” in the sense that they didn’t end the inequities he railed against. We need these poems now more than ever. This collection reminds me that our war on terror is a war of terror, and, as Ginsberg says, “War is black magic.”
In an age so full of fear, so obsessed with quarantine, isolation, and self-protection, an age in which educators are instructed to provide trigger warnings to students about potentially disturbing material in the classroom and our government issues color-coded advisories about our current threat-level, Ginsberg’s poems remind us that art must infect, contaminate, upset, disturb, question, invade, threaten, and excite. Ginsberg’s poems have always done that and continue to do so. They are dangerous. They are fearless. We need them.
—Rachel Zucker