Allen (baby, why so jaded?) Ginsberg has been in the news lately. Well played for a man dead these past eight years. But poets, like playwrights and good authors, only really die when their work is forgotten. We can all thank our stars, lucky or not, that Ginsberg The Poet lives with us still. Because this past Friday was the 50th anniversary of Ginsberg’s feverish first public reading of Howl in San Francisco. With Jack Kerouac sitting in the front row — reported urging Ginsberg on with baseball-esque chants of “Go! Go! Go!” — Ginsberg held court, pouring his written soul onto a rapt coffee shop audience in a heady stream of words drenched in politics, religion, sex, drugs and nonsense. That night, the Beat Generation was born.
Of course, Kerouac had been saying “Beat Generation” — It’s the beat generation, it be-at, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart — since 1948. But maybe it took the brave soul-bearing sound of bespectacled Allen Ginsberg to push the Beat out into the shallows of the mainstream.
Here we are, 50 years on. The newspapers are all over the anniversary, of course. Anniversaries make pretty features. Harder to find are articles citing relevance and pointing to obvious lines stretching from now to then. Richard Morrison of the Times (UK, not NY) gives decent ink to mark the calendar, even tracing all too easily a lineage from the punks back to the beats, but then he leaves the scene to ponder the price of municipal travel in London. In order to find someone willing to pull Ginsberg into the present, we have to look beyond our daily city papers. The best of this weekend might just be an editorial from Indiana State that not only appreciates the poem’s place in literary history, but sees Howl — specifically, the last section (“I’m with you in Rockland!”) — as written proof of a love that ignores gender, a love that is worthy of marriage. Even for a college newspaper, that’s current. That’s perspective. It’s almost beat.
Of course, when I think of Howl, I think of another Ginsberg poem. One of the “other poems” in Howl And Other Poems (published a year after the reading by City Lights Press) is a alternately accusatory and defensive piece entitled America. Like the work of another poet I admire greatly, America offers a changing sense of place through its stanzas. We’re in the supermarket, we’re in the library, we might be in The White House. The rhythms are obvious and particular, making America impossible to enjoy entirely without reading it aloud and not at a whisper. Had I followed through with my original second third attempted course of college work, I might be teaching this poem to a sleepy class of high school juniors — assuming, of course, that the school system of my employ would allow the study of obscenity-laced poetry written by unrepentant homosexuals.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Read on, class. I’ll expect a two-page report on my desk by tomorrow morning. Single-spaced, please.
Or an apple. Your call.
