Raskin's 25th anniversary tribute to Ginsberg

It might be almost a year since the quarter-century of the passing of a major poet but Rock & the Beat Generation is still delighted to run a memorial from a significant counterculture scholar

AN AMERICAN literary academic of note and the author of the much valorised American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation recently released an essay reflecting on the poet’s death in 1997.

Jonah Raskin’s tribute appears in the March 2023 issue of the journal Re-Markings, published in Agra, India. The San Francisco-based writer tells us: ‘Agra is home of the Taj Mahal, where Beat literature is widely read and appreciated especially Ginsberg's poetry.’

We are pleased, indeed honoured, to share this slightly belated account with the readership of this website…

‘Allen Ginsberg revisited: An appraisal on the 25th anniversary of the poet’s death’

By Jonah Raskin

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Allen Ginsberg published his own confessional and autobiographical poetry for half-a century, beginning in the 1940s and continuing until his death in 1997. An extraordinary performer, and a peripatetic poet he also helped create the Beat Generation literary movement with his publicity savvy. This essay, written on the 25th anniversary of his death, looks back at his life, his work and the times that shaped him and that he also had a hand in shaping. The author offers insights into ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, which he argues are his two best poems. He also points to Ginsberg's flaws and suggests how readers today might appreciate his body of work, which has been translated into dozens of languages and read around the world.

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When I’m in the company of poets, poetry lovers and fans of the literature of the Beat Generation, and the conversation turns to Allen Ginsberg, I’m asked, invariably, ‘Did you know him?’ I suppose that question reflects the power of celebrities and the celebrity culture to which Ginsberg belonged. For decades, he rubbed shoulders with Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Patti Smith and the members of the Clash, the 1980s rock ‘n’ roll band and its star Joe Strummer. Maybe also, those who want to know if I knew Ginsberg hope I might share gossip. I do have gossip, but this isn’t a gossip column so I’ll refrain from broadcasting it. Sam Kushner has juicy gossip in his book, When I Was Cool.

I did know Allen Ginsberg and I do have stories to tell. I met him at a party at Patty Oldenburg's apartment in 1972 when we learned that Nixon had defeated George McGovern and yet another nail was driven into the coffin of the Sixties. Years later, I heard ‘Ginzy’, as friends called him, perform at College of Marin, north of San Francisco and invited him to read at Sonoma State University, where I taught literature and law, including the laws of obscenity. I used his poetry to illustrate how the law worked and didn’t work. Actually, he asked me to invite him to read. I did. The University paid him $2,000 for a day's work.

Ever since I was teenager growing up on Long Island, about 45 miles from New York City, I had been a Ginsberg fan. I bought Howl and Other Poems at a bookstore in Manhattan in 1956, read it from cover to cover and especially liked the poem ‘America’ which includes the line – one of the best known in 20th century poetry – ‘Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.’ Ginsberg was rarely shy about using obscenities. They show up repeatedly in ‘Howl’ and landed his publisher in trouble with the law. The last line in ‘America’ is also a classic: ‘America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.’ That was his way of coming out of the closet and announcing, too, that he meant to be a good citizen in the democracy he loved and lamented its passing.

Thirty-five or so years after I first read ‘Howl’ as a teenager, I visited Ginsberg at his apartment in New York and enjoyed a meal with him in a vegetarian restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the neighborhood where he lived for decades. When he said something I thought was brilliant, but didn’t hear every single word, I asked him to repeat what he said. He refused. ‘It will come back around again,’ he said. It didn’t. I regret not pressuring him.

Spending time with Ginsberg and getting to know him helped when I wrote American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation, which is a biography of the poet’s most famous work. Like Ginsberg himself, his poem has parents, origins, an evolution, a birth and crucial events during its post-partum existence. Because I interviewed him, observed him and watched him on stage, I came to know the sound of Ginsberg’s spoken words, his body language and his ways of interacting with audiences. He's a living presence in my bank of memories.

American Scream is all about ‘Howl’, which means that it’s also all about Allen Ginsberg. It’s about the sources of the poem, the time and place in which it was written – in San Francisco, away from New York and New Yorkers – its publication history, its reception and why I think it’s a classic, using T. S. Eliot’s essay, ‘What is a Classic?’ (1944), to guide me. ‘Every great work of poetry tends to make impossible the production of equally great works of the same kind,’ Eliot wrote. ‘Every supreme poet, classic or not, tends to exhaust the ground he cultivates.’ That’s as true of Ginsberg as it is of Eliot. Both had imitators. Both were parodied and both of them put the competition to shame.

Most of what I know about Ginsberg and ‘Howl’ does not come directly from the author, though I interviewed him and taped him on several occasions in New York and in California. Perhaps this sounds humdrum, but I obtained the most valuable information for my book by conducting research in the Green Library on the campus of Stanford University, which purchased a big chunk of his archives for $1 million while he was alive.

Who said poetry doesn’t pay? If you’re famous enough and you’re truly scribacious, as Ginsberg was, you can make a fortune selling your manuscripts, letters and notebooks to the highest bidder. I did not find a long lost letter or a secret diary in the Green Library. There was no ‘smoking gun’, so to speak, but there were revealing comments by Ginsberg all along the way.

Rather, it was the accumulation of dozens and dozens of details, some of them obscure, that helped me understand what made Ginsberg tick, how and why he came to write ‘Howl’, the ways it changed him and altered the course of American poetry in the mid-twentieth century, just three decades after T. S. Eliot wrote and published The Waste Land (1922), which might aptly be described as a forerunner of ‘Howl’.

They are, after all, both poems about madness and about the crack up of a society, in Eliot’s case during a critical stage in the decline and fall of the British Empire after WWI, and in Ginsberg’s case the aftermath of WWII, the rise of the US as a superpower and the birth of the nuclear age.

In 2003, when I recognized the obvious – that the 50th anniversary of Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl, in 1955, was fast approaching – I knew that I’d have to focus on ‘Howl’, and put aside much of the material I had gathered which took me into the 1960s.

Now, more than a decade after the publication of American Scream, I think I would begin a talk or an essay about Ginsberg by saying that ‘the inevitable’ followed him around with much the same force that fame pursued him. Coincidentally or perhaps not, the word ‘inevitability’ shows up near the start of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (2008). An occasionally snarky work, albeit carefully researched and beautifully written by Deborah Baker, it uncovers and describes a largely unknown chapter of Ginsberg’s life, when he lived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) among Indian poets and intellectuals. It meant a lot to them that he came to their world and recognized its beauty as well as its poverty.

‘What held Allen Ginsberg together and would hold him for the rest of his life,’ Baker writes, ‘was the sweetness and sympathy he found in the company of India’s sadhus, charlatans, poets, and saints.’ A longtime resident of Calcutta, a writer for the Calcutta Statesman, and married to the Indian writer, Amitav Ghosh, Baker knows whereof she speaks. Along with Jane Kramer’s Ginsberg in America (1968), one of the earliest books about the poet, Baker’s A Blue Hand is one of the most moving books about the man who waged cultural warfare against the American academic world and its favorite poets and poems and acted surprised when that same world treated him as a bad boy who ought to be put him in his place.

Born into a secular Jewish family and aware of the genocidal war launched by the Nazis against European Jews, he aimed to remain true to his Jewish roots even as he reached out to Buddhism and the Hindu religion.

The son of Louis, a poet and a teacher, and Naomi, a Russian émigré, a painter and a member of the American Communist Party, who spent much of her life in mental institutions, Allen assumed from an early age that he would grow up and become a renowned poet. Precious, arrogant and supremely self- confident, he was also deeply insecure about his own identity in part because he knew as a boy that he was attracted to other boys and that homosexuality was regarded as a disease which could be cured by medical doctors. Also, he thought he had inherited his mother’s ‘madness’.

His psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, talked him out of that idea in San Francisco in the mid-1950 at Langley Porter, a hospital where he was an outpatient. Dr. Hicks helped him accept his homosexuality, overcome his writer’s block and begin work on ‘Howl’. According to Dr. Hicks, Ginsberg arrived at therapy sessions with a handwritten draft of ‘Howl’. Ginsberg always insisted that he typed the earliest version. I tend to believe Hicks.

By the time he was 30, Ginsberg was notorious as the author of ‘Howl’, his long, epic poem about himself and his own generation of ‘angelheaded hipsters’, as he called them. When City Lights first published Howl and Other Poems in 1956 in the Pocket Poets Series there was no Beat Generation literary movement and there were no Beat writers, though there were bohemians, bohemian enclaves, and hipsters, who enjoyed jazz, smoked marijuana and tangled with the police in San Francisco and elsewhere.

City Lights made Ginsberg and he in turn made City Lights. Theirs was a marriage made in poetry heaven. Lawrence Ferlinghetti had co-founded City Lights Books in 1953 with Peter Martin, a New Yorker who soon left San Francisco and returned to the East. City Lights publishing followed hard on the heels of the opening of the store, a proverbial hole-in-the wall that soon became a destination for the bookish, and for lovers of literature, including the avant-garde.

Ferlinghetti’s first book, Pictures of the Gone World (1955), was the first volume to be published in the Pocket Poets Series by City Lights. Howl and Other Poems, with an Introduction by the modernist poet, William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor and early Ginsberg mentor, was number four in the series which has grown over the decades. Curiously, Ferlinghetti never considered himself a Beat writer – he belonged to a literary tradition far older than the Beats, he insisted – though he would go on to publish the major writers of the Beat Generation – Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia and others, as well as book after book by Ginsberg, including Planet News (1968), one of my favorites. His long antiwar poem, Wichita Vortex Sutra, appears in Planet News. When he died in 2021 at the age of 101, Ferlinghetti left behind a vast body of work, including A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), one of the hippest and the most popular poetry books published in the 20th century.

Ginsberg didn’t age as well as his longtime publisher, though when he died in 1997 at the age of 70, his work had been translated into dozens of languages and read around the world. HarperCollins had published his Collected Poems, 1947-1980, an 837-page volume with photographs and footnotes. Since his death, more of his poetry has appeared in print, including Death and Fame.

Indeed, both death and fame haunted him his whole life. In 2006, Collected Poems was republished with new material and with the dates in the title changed to 1947-1997 to reflect the expanded body of work.

Twenty-five years after Ginsberg’s death, his poetry is still read, studied and enjoyed, though probably not as widely or as enthusiastically as it was when he was alive and when he performed hundreds of times a year, promoting himself and his books and making converts of the misfits to the Beat religion. In 1970, he testified for the defense on the witness stand during the ‘conspiracy’ trial in a federal courtroom of the Chicago 8, which included long time fans such as Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman.

The American counterculture of sex, drugs, communes, rock ‘n’ roll and protests against conventionality was near its peak in 1970 and in many ways Ginsberg was its embodiment and a flesh and blood link between the Beats of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

In recent years, work by younger poets and by women and people of color, has in part supplanted Ginsberg’s poetry, though it’s not out of print or difficult to find. City Lights continues to publish Howl and Other Poems, which has sold nearly one million copies in the Pocket Poet Series. Kaddish and Other Poems was republished on its 50th anniversary with an afterword by Ginsberg’s long time archivist and biographer, Bill Morgan, the author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (2006) and The Typewriter is Holy: the Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (2010).

Morgan’s work has helped to make Ginsberg’s life widely known, though it’s probably safe to say that not everything about that life has come to light, much as it’s probably safe to say that the complete and uncensored history of the Best Generation has not yet been written and published, either.

Myths and legends do diehard. Indeed, the myths and legends, many of them generated by Ginsberg himself, will probably never be completely disentangled from the facts, or from his biography and Beat history. Many readers assume that he did not revise his work. He boasted that he didn’t edit, though the many different manuscript versions of ‘Howl’ offer a far different story. He revised as much as Eliot revised which means that he cared about the craft of poetry.

Ginsberg’s final resting place in the pantheon of American literature has not yet been determined. Is he a major poet, a minor poet, or a ‘major minor poet’?, as one critic suggested. Controversy will surely continue to swirl around him and his work.

My own opinion, based on decades of study, reflection and the long process of writing about him and his work, is that Ginsberg peaked early in life and that ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, which he began to write soon after he finished ‘Howl’, are his two best works, and the two works that most fully represent his mode of expression. (Kaddish is a traditional Jewish prayer recited in synagogues that ends with a plea for universal peace. Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ ends, ‘Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord.’ ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, both of which are deeply spiritual poems, belong to the same phase of Ginsberg’s creativity.

In a way, ‘Kaddish’ is an extension of the style and the form of ‘Howl’, though it’s about his mother, Naomi, and her generation of European immigrants who came to America, retained much of their ‘Old World’ identities and never fully assimilated. Some of Ginsberg’s critics, including David Remnick, the editor at The New Yorker, regard ‘Howl’ as ‘adolescent’ and ‘Kaddish’ as a much more mature work.

They see ‘Howl’ as a poem in which he is a show-off. Perhaps he is, though many of the surrealistic phrases and images are truly memorable. They include: ‘hydrogen jukebox’, ‘the scholars of war’, ‘the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality’, as well as the opening lines ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving/ hysterical naked.’ When Ginsberg gave a poetry-writing workshop at Sonoma State University he talked about these phrases and invited students to create some of their own vivid and explosive images.

In the 1970s, Ginsberg got into a poetic rut from which he could not easily extricate himself. Talismanic words like ‘madness’, ‘naked’ and ‘nakedness’, which play a crucial part in ‘Howl’, appear again and again in later work. Eager to write poems as popular and as powerful as ‘Howl', he sometimes became a cliché of himself, though near the end of his life he wrote short descriptive, and sometimes confessional poems, that reveal his life as an aging poet.

In ‘Autumn Leaves’, he writes, ‘At 66, just learning to take care of my body/ Wake cheerful 8 AM & write in a notebook/ rising from bedside naked leaving a naked boy asleep by the wall/ mix miso mushroom leeks & winter squash breakfast/...happy not yet to be a corpse.’

Near the end of his life, he held on to his notion of himself as a sexual charged human being attracted to boys. A Member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), he wrote in his own defense, ‘I'm a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too – everybody does, who has a little humanity.’ He aimed to be candid, even if it damaged his reputation.

One can find elements of misogyny in Ginsberg’s poetry, especially in ‘Howl’. ‘Who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar,’ he wrote.

Sexism infuses the long section on Neal Cassady, referred to as “N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls.’ He’s the playboy and the Casanova of ‘Howl’, which was published soon after Playboy magazine was born in 1953 and honored men like Cassady. Also, Ginsberg’s images of Blacks tend to be stereotypes, sometimes associated with drugs and addiction. ‘Dragging them- selves through the negro [sic] streets at dawn looking to an angry/ fix,’ he wrote of his beloved ‘angelheaded hipsters’.

In his Introduction to ‘Howl’, William Carlos Williams wrote, ‘When he was younger, and I was younger, I used to know Allen Ginsberg.’ He added, ‘He disturbed me.’ He disturbed a great many people, including his teachers at Columbia who came to his aid when he was arrested and faced time in prison. Williams went on: 'I never thought he’d live to grow up and write a book of poems.’

His ability to survive, travel and go on writing astonishes me. Twenty-five years after Ginsberg’s death at the age of 70, it’s still astonishing to me that he survived the trauma of his early years, his mother’s mental illness, which impacted him profoundly, and his ability to survive anti-Semitism and the cultural climate of the Cold War, which negatively affected the arts and creativity in the US.

While at Columbia in the 1940s, no teacher taught Walt Whitman’s poetry. That's still shocking. In fact, poetry was relegated to the bottom rung on the ladder of creativity. The novel reigned supreme. In the 1940s, for an American man to want to become a poet was to go against the American grain.

‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’ look and sound to me like artifacts of the era in which they were born, though I know that they are also more than artifacts. They speak to readers today who are living through and surviving the crises of the twenty- first century. Ginsberg’s great teacher, Walt Whitman, wrote,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;

I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is. Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.

So, too, Ginsberg was one of a living crowd. Like Whitman, he projected himself into the future and into generations beyond his own. ‘Howl’ lives and so does ‘Kaddish’. Readers who are not willing or ready to dive into Ginsberg's long poems might begin by reading the short poems he wrote in the mid- and late 1950s, including ‘America’, ‘A Supermarket in California’, ‘Sunflower Sutra’ and ‘A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley’. They all provide insights into his state of mind and his art when he was near one of the peaks of his creativity.

Bibliography

Baker, Deborah. A Blue Hand: The Beats in India.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947-1980.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947-1997.

Ginsberg, Allen. Indian Journals.

Ginsberg, Allen. Planet News.

Kramer, Jane. Allen Ginsberg in America.

Morgan, Bill. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.

Morgan, Bill. The Typewriter is Holy: the Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation.

Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass.

Biography

Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to Re-Markings, is the author of 15 books, including literary criticism, reporting, memoir and biography. His new book is Dark Past, Dark Future. He has taught journalism, media law and the theory of communication at Sonoma State University, USA. He guest-edited the special section on Doris Lessing (the Literature Nobel laureate) for the March 2008 issue of Re-Markings. Doris Lessing’s endorsement on Raskin’s The Mythology of Imperialism: ‘I wish someone like Jonah Raskin had been around to teach me when I was young’. It is a rich tribute to Raskin’s attributes as a teacher and internationally acclaimed writer, poet and journalist.