[In the following excerpt, Spiegelman finds parallels between the work of Ginsberg, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Pinsky.]

Twenty years ago, Susan Sontag suggested “Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony” as the primary forces in the modern sensibility.¹ Gay poets have no monopoly on irony, as the cases of Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, to cite a few, prove. Nemerov and James Merrill both inherited the mantle of W. H. Auden, although only Merrill shares Auden's sexual preference. Nor do American Jews have, ipso facto, a greater share of moral seriousness (consider Robert Bly, Amy Clampitt, Robert Hass, and Robert Lowell). And yet Sontag's theory has a curious validity for contemporary poetry. She has identified two strands, sometimes separate, sometimes intertwined, that stand out prominently in the contemporary fabric. In fact, at least as far as poetry goes, the three major forces in a collective “sensibility” might be the Jewish-moral, the gay-aesthetic, and the Southern-agrarian, the last represented in these pages by A. R. Ammons, but reaching backward to Robert Penn Warren and forward to Dave Smith and Charles Wright.

The view of and from the natural world (especially one a Southerner might propose) encourages descriptive more often than discursive strategies: this is why Ammons seems to stand a little to one side in this book. But all three temperaments—the Jewish, the homosexual, the Southern—share a peripheral status, which affords their representatives an eccentric or adversary relationship to the dominant culture. For this reason, didacticism becomes an understandable, if not always an inevitable, impulse. Any poet, especially one aware of a secondary position in his or her environment, would agree with Allen Ginsberg's observation, recalling both Shelley and Orwell, that “whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race.”² Poets one generation away from immigrant status are most aware of the political power of language as an instrument of enfranchisement and assimilation.

This [essay] concerns three poets who share a Jewish heritage and a New York background. Rather than thinking of a New York “school” of Jewish poets, I suggest something of the richness of American poetry by looking at the work of poets who are Jewish, if only in a secular sense. To Ginsberg, Hecht, and Pinsky, one might easily add Ben Belitt, Marvin Bell, Irving Feldman, Donald Finkel, Paul Goodman, Marilyn Hacker, Daniel Hoffman, Kenneth Koch, Howard Moss, Delmore Schwartz, Louis Simpson, and Theodore Weiss, all poets who either grew up close to New York or spent much of their lives there.³ My band of three stands both for the larger group and for different poetic strategies that any “didactic” poet might employ: exhortation, exemplification, explanation, and parable. I overlook the obvious, considerable differences among the three in favor of the rapprochement and matchmaking available within the pages of criticism rather than in life. In his autobiography, Albert Einstein identified three “features of the Jewish tradition that make me thank my stars I belong to it”: “The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and the desire for personal independence.”⁴ Without necessarily limiting to Jews these three characteristics, I examine in these poets the Arnoldian “moral seriousness” that Sontag, echoing Einstein's terms, associates with their tradition. What exactly does it mean to talk about ethical intensity in poetry?

All three poets are interested in moral problems, and all attempt different, equally exemplary ways of bringing to poetry issues from the ethical sphere. All have had academic careers, Ginsberg's perhaps a little less conventional than the others', and Pinsky and Hecht have written distinguished prose. Hecht may seem the least obvious candidate for my “didactic” badge, but his four scrupulously written volumes show how a naturally “lyric” poet opens his work to satire, narrative, and autobiography in order to encompass ethical concerns and to provoke moral responses. Whereas Ginsberg, or in a different way Robert Lowell, turns his attention to public events, and whereas Adrienne Rich defines and defends a body-centered politics, Hecht seems at first a throwback to older, sterner paradigms: a colder moralist than any other writer discussed in this book, he is today's preeminent poet of evil. And yet because he resolutely stands by conventional forms in a distrustful age that associates them with other kinds of conventionality, his poetry has a shock value at once chilling and reassuring. One might do well to modify the famous response of Dr. Johnson to Milton: “we read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master and seek for companions.” Masterful and companionable at once, Hecht speaks of pain, evil, the horrors of history, as both observer and participant, imperious prophet and fellow sufferer. …

Allen Ginsberg has been a thorny presence in American culture for thirty years. Reading the Collected Poems,⁵ which is freighted with a good deal of annotation to its topical and personal references, one feels one is witnessing the history of an age as much as of an individual. No one since Whitman has taken upon himself such a close identification of self with society, detailing its history, landscape, and politics as well as his own place within or without. Journalism and poetry have never been joined so closely as in these pages. What one reads is not just the notes of an observer, alternately anguished, desperate, satiric, fantastic, hectoring, tender, elegiac, and funny, but the mirror of American life in the atomic age. Ginsberg has had as little trouble getting headlines into his poetry, indeed sometimes making his poetry out of headlines, newsflashes, captions, even cartoon figures, as he has had in getting his name into the headlines.

But this most visible, most “public” of poets is also the most marginal. As a Jew and a homosexual, he shares a double distinction according to Susan Sontag's formulaic appraisal of our collective sensibility. Helen Vendler has already called him quadruply an outsider, given his political sympathies and his psychiatric experiences in addition to his sexual and religious eccentricities.⁶ And yet, reading Ginsberg's work, the quantity of which exceeds its quality (rather like that of Byron, another figure of exuberant excess), one gets a picture of what America was like during a crucial period of its history. Reading Ginsberg is like sitting at a microfilm machine quickly going through forty years' worth of the news, only it is more moving, comic, and instructive. Allen Ginsberg, the dharma clown on the soapbox, a borscht belt comedian masquerading as Uncle Sam, turns out to be both the observant, paranoid outsider and the mythic voice of America itself:

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your 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.

(“America,” CP, 146-47)

In this 1956 poem one hears the blending of outsider and insider, paranoia and fist shaking, pathos and high comedy, social commentary and personal confession, that leads at last to a populist fervor:

America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

(148)

Looking at himself and his country, Allen Ginsberg finds that they are sometimes antagonists, sometimes mirror images.

From “Howl” onward Ginsberg's poetry has developed techniques for teaching that include a full measure of jokes and harangues. Like any good teacher, he has been willing to make a fool of himself in order to get his audience's attention and then to encourage them to learn and profit from his example. For all the bulk of Ginsberg's poetry, it is hardly ponderous. As a didactic performer, he has preferred confrontation to explanation, hammering to subtlety, repetition to variation. Where Hecht exemplifies, and Pinsky expatiates, Ginsberg exclaims: unlike his sometime rival and Columbia chum John Hollander, he uses more exclamation points than question marks. His punctuation, like his grammar, gives one clues to the effectiveness and effects of the poetry: staccato in rhythm, often verbless, it blurts, stabs, or chants, depending on the speaker's variable moods. Forceful, not subtle, immediate rather than meditative, the poetry itself suggests one reason for its author's popularity: it is a performance, even in its appearance on the page.

Vendler identifies Ginsberg's three characteristic flaws as a too-topical journalism, sexual bathos, and a simpleminded populism. I propose as the positive counters to these flaws the very things that constitute his uniqueness as a poet-teacher: an attention to the mundane reality of the public sphere (i.e., his poetry conceived in its totality as Planet News); a willingness to display the self, in its pathetic or lurid vulnerability, in order to awaken in his audience a sensitivity to the attractions and deceptions of the flesh; and a Whitmanesque identification of the singer with the subjects, scenes, and audience of his song. In Ginsberg one sees the man who suffered and was there; one joins him in that suffering, in those places. To change the frame of reference slightly: no one since Louis XIV has dared to say, as Ginsberg virtually does above, “l'état, c'est moi.” The imperial self wears motley here; self-glorification comes through the Chaplinesque art of self-exposure. From his own worst fears (solitude, failure in love, political persecution) the performer on his tightrope makes of his vulnerability an offensive strategy to challenge his readers' complacencies.

In many ways, those aspects of Ginsberg that have put him so much in the public eye go against his poetic, or temperamental, grain. The ecological poet, the political poet, the public, performing, clowning poet came late and afterwards vied in Ginsberg's less flamboyant moments with an inner, elegiac voice. In 746 pages of Ginsberg's Collected Poems, the first authentic political questions appear on pages 64 and 65 (“A Poem on America,” “After Dead Souls”), after an apprenticeship devoted to songs, both Blakean and loony, and to imitations of Dante and Marlowe (printed on pages 749-56 of the appendix). “Howl,” the seminal work, but not that of a young poet, begins on page 123; it has been prepared for a little in tone and subject, but its method, a sympathetic teacher's guide to the underworld, is something new. Even “Siesta in Xbalba” (97-110), the first long poem and a break-through in form and subject, is still largely personal until the end, which adumbrates the cultural differences between Mexico and the United States.

Ginsberg constantly depends on twin sources of power, public and private (as in “At Apollinaire's Grave,” 180), and his strictly personal meditations make up the bulk, but also the best part, of his oeuvre. Looking back on the subject of his famous visionary moment—reading Blake in East Harlem in 1948 (“Psalm IV,” 238)—he provides not only a reminiscence of his ever-receding source of primal energy but also a tacit explanation of all subsequent attempts to regain a power that suffers the Wordsworthian fate of fading into the common day. So much of the poetry from The Fall of America (1973) onward laments loss—of sexual potency, of friends, of prophetic zeal—that one might easily think of Ginsberg as primarily a poet in the elegiac tradition of all the English Romantics except Blake. In his fifties, throughout most of Plutonium Ode (1982), he finds his poetic subjects largely in deprivation: “Don't Grow Old” (CP, 710), a recollection of his father; “Maybe Love” (723), the pathos of gay old age; “Reflections on Lake Louise” (733), as he worries about the afternoon of sudden death (“If I had a heart attack on the path around the lake would I be ready to face my mother?”).

As an elegist and as a purely descriptive poet, in parts of The Fall of America, Ginsberg merits comparison with Lowell, Warren, and Ammons. What earns him a place in a study of didacticism is his constant development and manipulation of the tricks of the teacher's trade, which he uses more shamelessly than any of his contemporaries. Sometimes he's a Jewish mother, giving unsought for advice (“Who to Be Kind to,” CP, 359); sometimes a stand-up comic, trying a shtick (“This Form of Life Needs Sex,” CP, 284), in his case the perpetually pathetic comedy of a vow to enjoy heterosexuality even when his heart's not in it (“You can fuck a statue but you can't have children”); sometimes a mock-preacher:

                              O brothers of the Laurel
Is the world real?
                                        Is the Laurel
a joke or a crown of thorns?—
                                        Fast, pass
                                        up the ass
                                        Down I go
                                        Cometh Woe

(“I Beg You Come Back & Be Cheerful,” CP, 236)

The main source of his teacherly power is a simultaneous identification with America—his subject and his audience—and a sense of alienation from it. Thus, on the one hand, the Whitmanesque exuberance of “America,” quoted above, and his strong claim, “I will haunt these States” (CP, 460), and, on the other, the familiarity with the abyss, sometimes comic—“What do I have to lose if America fails? / My body? My neck? My personality?”—and sometimes rueful—“too late for laments / too late for warning— / I'm a stranger alone in my my country again” (445).

In the Phaedrus Plato first proposed the erotic energy of pedagogy. A good teacher loves his students and is willing to punish or criticize them, as a parent would, for their own good. At the same time that he is becoming a Yeatsian smiling public man, an embodiment of wisdom, the teacher is gradually cut off from the age and sexual potency of his students. This discrepancy explains the double attitude of Ginsberg to his audience. It also begins to explain the particular combination of educational methods, some of which he shares with other poets discussed in this book, that he uses in his combined harangue, assault, and admonition of that audience. For Ginsberg, prophecy takes the place of statement, and the voice of one crying in the wilderness is, above all, a voice. One can place Ginsberg at one end of a linguistic spectrum, the other end of which John Ashbery occupies: Ginsberg's poetry is all voice—that is, it is capable of being heard, even when read from the page, as the words of a real, fully emotional speaker. Ashbery's, on the other hand (this partly explains his absence from these pages: even though so much of his poetry seems mock-didactic, discursive in the sense of wandering, one can never readily identify a speaker) is visible, but never audible. The teacher has disappeared behind the screen of the page, from which he never truly emerges. Ginsberg's is a poetry of presence: one is instructed by a human teacher rather than, as in Ashbery's work, the equivalent of a teaching machine in a laboratory.

Ginsberg possesses two gifts undeniably useful to poets and teachers: a large vocabulary, which extends through technical matters in many areas, and an attention to a wide range of subjects (history, politics, chemistry, physics, psychology, religion). His is more often a poetry of specificity than of generalization. He neither makes aphorisms, quotable nuggets of wisdom of the sort that Auden or Nemerov might leave one with, nor speculates on larger abstractions, like Ammons or Merrill in his trilogy. “The Ignu” (CP, 203), an uncharacteristic poem, stands out in his work as a strange attempt to define something. The specificity of his poetry explains its learnedness, its annotatability, and its reliance on lists as a formal, and didactic, principle.

Sometimes the list dramatizes the seemingly aleatory nature of our world. The poem strings together random objects trouvés in which one sees evidence of the richness or banality of civilization. “Junk Mail” (CP, 657) proceeds formulaically from “I received in mail,” and builds to a catalogue of political, social, charitable requests for money from all over (Monthly Review, American Friends Service Committee, the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, United Farm Workers of America, the NYU Gay Peoples Union, Energy and Evolution Quarterly), all, according to the precise dating of his collected poems, “opened midnight, New York, September 4, 1976.” The printed garbage of our civilization collectively reflects the manifold richness and dilemmas of our society. Amid the chaotic specificity, a personal note seems to intrude toward the center: “Give Poets & Writers' CODA to a friend subscribe United Nations Childrens' Fund severe malnutrition Starvation faces 400 to 500 million children poorer countries. Dwarfism / disease blindness mental retardation stunted growth crop failures drought flood exhausted wheat rice reserves skyrocketing fuel costs fertilizer shortages Desperately need your help.” Something whackily comic arises from the pathos here: the famous single-breath lines, sped up for articulation, inundate us, just as we are overwhelmed by the junk mail we daily receive, ignore, and discard. Ginsberg's poetic method calls attention with cool factuality to the greatest international disasters, combined with those normal human appeals made out of self-interest or venality: the buildup, as in the lines above, leads to a sigh or a giggle of relief. A second climax comes, appropriately, at the end, signalling the not-so-random development of this list: “Dear Citizen of the World: First days explosion bomb radioactivity starve Ozone layer? Isn't it time we did some thing? / 1) Send cooperators ten addresses w/ zip codes 2) Mail friends endorsement 3) Write your Congressman President Newspaper editor & Presidential Candidate. / As a final move, the World Authority would destroy all Nuclear Weapons.” From an innocent, apparently random accumulation of requests, Ginsberg builds to a premonition, or admonition, of nuclear holocaust and its possible aversion.

So, too, what appears to be an improvised set of variations, a rap poem, so to speak, “Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox” (CP, 635), begins with a neutral formula and expands to a denunciation of organized crime and its connections to national politics, then to an incantation about American involvement in foreign affairs (“Hadda be Capitalism the Vortex of this rage”) to a final vision of international mayhem:

Hadda be rich, hadda be powerful, hadda hire technology from Harvard
Hadda murder in Indonesia 500,000
Hadda murder in Indochina 2,000,000
Hadda murder in Czechoslovakia
Hadda murder in Chile
Hadda murder in Russia
Hadda murder in America

There is method in Ginsberg's seemingly mad technique, whether he wishes to build a performance outward in ever larger circles of denunciation and political protest, as here, or to force one to experience the plenty of the universe through its iteration, as in “Graffiti 12th Cubicle Men's Room Syracuse Airport” (CP, 535), which includes want ads for sex, political pronunciamentos, opinions addressed to no one in particular (and therefore to everyone), the formula for LSD, and so forth. Not even Whitman catalogued America's richness by examining the sites of its elimination.

The principal stylistic effect of Ginsberg's populism is the inclusion of large quantities of detail in his poetry. His language is the most specific of any contemporary poet's in topicality, numbers of proper names, and references to current affairs. Yet his nonfactual diction is often so unfocused that one has the discomforting experience of reading names of people one recognizes in verbal situations that are totally banal. This is the only Collected Poems with a guide to the characters at the back, but even in a book that constantly proclaims its own topicality it is disheartening to come upon such journalese as in this passage:

toward dusk ate marshmallows at the News Stand and drank huge cold grape soda eyeing:
this afternoon's Journal headline FBI in Harlem, what kind of Nasty old Epic
Afternoons I imagine!

(347)

Ginsberg has always chosen what John Ashbery, in Three Poems, solemnly considers one alternative—“put[ting] it all down”—rather than leaving it all out. Such is the time-honored way in the American melting pot for all the ingredients the cook comes by. A neutral term for this tendency is all-inclusiveness. A positive one is generosity, and a negative one would be indiscriminateness. (Ginsberg shares the dilemma with Frank O'Hara and A. R. Ammons.) Just reading the list of magazines acknowledged at the end of the Collected Poems is an experience in Americanism. Going quite literally from A to Z (Adventures in Poetry to Zero), the places where Ginsberg's poems first appeared run the gamut from the established (the New York Times, the New Yorker, Paris Review, Partisan Review) to the ephemeral (Bugger, Kuksu, Yugen). He has never, it seems, deprived any magazine of his bounty. One can tell whether such largesse constitutes a genuinely democratic poetics or results instead from laziness only with reference to individual texts, but in two adjacent poems, “Man's glory” and “Fragment: The Names II” (CP, 260-61), one experiences a clear visual and auditory testimony to the power of the list as both a catalogue of place names invoked religiously and an exercise in Ginsberg's ongoing collective elegy, which began with the first line of “Howl,” for friends dead or ruined.

There are two significant stylistic patterns in this cataloguing. Given the natural materialism of any list, it is no wonder that Ginsberg's poetry seems primarily an exercise in objects, nouns rather than verbs. The only subject that seems to inspire him to more than newsflashes or headlines is sex, and the very rhythm of buildup to orgasm is caught by the intensity and variation of repeated formulas slowly transformed (“Please master can I touch your cheek …,” 494). But for the most part the march of history is documented, frame by frame, item by item, and reduced by a technique of headline-writing to the status of newsflashes:

N B C B S U P A P I N S L I F E
          Time Mutual presents
                    World's Largest Camp Comedy:
                              Magic In Vietnam—
          reality turned inside out
                    changing its sex in the Mass Media
                    for 30 days, TV den and bedroom farce
Flashing pictures Senate Foreign Relations Committee room
                    Generals faces flashing on and off screen
                              mouthing language
          State Secretary speaking nothing but language
          McNamara declining to speak public language
                    The President talking language,
                              Senators reinterpreting language
                    General Taylor Limited Objectives
                                                            Owls from Pennsylvania
                    Clark's Face Open Ended
                                                            Dove's Apocalypse
                                                            Morse's hairy ears

(“Wichita Vortex Sutra,” CP, 401-2)

The ongoing, swirling syntax of passages like this works by accumulation and extension. It points to the second important aspect of Ginsberg's style: the way it tends, as Charles Molesworth has suggested, to the paratactic rather than the hypotactic.⁷ His “non-subjugating syntax” has political analogies, of course, as Molesworth's phrase implies: to register everything equally is to do justice to both the random barrage of daily news that we all receive and the sense that our minds make of it. One law for the lion and the ox, said Blake, is oppression: Ginsberg wants to acknowledge the separate laws of individual creatures but also to control them by his own iteration.

In addition to reading Ginsberg's political radicalism into his poetic technique one can see his method as a rhetorical and didactic one. Sameness of iteration gives consistency and therefore potency to articulation. Teachers traditionally give examples of hypotheses as they assert ideas deductively. The nonordering of events in Ginsberg's vast diaries is only an apparent chaos: in reality his discrete items bombard singly and cumulatively with the subliminal force of headlines or the formulas of a soapbox orator who circles back to main points, always attacking from a slightly different point on a circumference. Thus the importance of the poem as an agglomerated performance, as he remarked in his Paris Review interview: “the poem discovered in the mind and in the process of writing it out on the page as notes, transcriptions.”⁸ The phrasing attests to a double allegiance, one to the mind as the repository of poetic truth, the other to the action of composing as the process of creation. The first suggests a quasi-Platonic notion of anamnesis, discovering something one wasn't formerly aware of knowing, in this case through the discipline of receptivity; the second values the process of writing, even if hallucinated, automatic, or random, as the means of preparing for a final truth that always lies beyond the poem's end. In authentically Jewish fashion, Ginsberg believes that poetic finality, like the messiah, is always yet to come. The forward-looking nature of his politics and his poetics is recorded by an apposite syntax of seemingly infinite sameness, but one that eschews both subordination and temporality in favor of a similar form for individual perceptions, and remarks that suggest simultaneity even as they move relentlessly onward.

“I propose that things in common are much more important than distinctions,” Ginsberg responded to a student's question at a Berkeley seminar.⁹ His haunting repetitions in lists, clauses without verbs, and chanted observations certainly support this belief. At the same time, his concern for the rich multiplicity of American life forces him to attend to its particularities, not its unity:

I propounded a final question, and
                    heard a series of final answers.
What is God? for instance, asks the answer?
                    And whatever else can the replier reply but reply?
Whatever the nature of mind, that
                    the nature of both question and answer.
                                                  & yet one wants to live
                              in a single universe
                                                                                                                        Does one?
Must it be one?
                    Why, as with the Jews
                    must the God be One?
                              O what does
                    the concept one mean?
                              it's mad!
                              god is one!
                              is x
                              is meaningless—
                                                  adonoi—
                              is a joke—
                                        the hebrews are
                              wrong—(crist & budda
                              attest, also wrongly!)
—What is One but Formation
                                                  of mind?
                    arbitrary madness! 6000 years
Spreading out in all directions simultaneously—

(“Aether,” CP, 249-50)

Whether he gives his primary allegiance to oneness or multeity (especially in his more desperate moods, e.g., “thinking America is a chaos,” CP, 235), Ginsberg relies on his catalogues as the sole suitable mode for poetic instruction.

The daily news and the loony listings (“I prophesy … I prophesy … I prophesy,” he exclaims in “Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber,” CP, 272) that Ginsberg has hurled at his audience for more than thirty years have turned out to be wonderfully accurate in their reflecting, reporting, and predicting of political reality. The unspecific, blanket condemnation in “War Profit Litany” reminds us that the military-industrial complex has always protected its own self-interests. Part of the charm of Ginsberg's egregious teaching technique is an unabashed hubris, which, as I've suggested, uses hyperbole to call attention to the deep truths of his social and political visions. Hear the voice of this Blakean bard, who present, past, and future sees:

I want to be known as the most brilliant man in America
Introduced to Gyalwa Karmapa heir of the Whispered Transmission Crazy Wisdom Practice Lineage
as the secret young wise man who visited him and winked anonymously decade ago in Gangtok
Prepared the way for Dharma in America without mentioning Dharma—scribbled laughter
Who saw Blake and abandoned God
To whom the Messianic Fink sent messages darkest hour sleeping on steel sheets “somewhere in the Federal Prison system” Weathermen got no Moscow Gold
who went backstage to Cecil Taylor serious chat chord structure & Time in a nightclub
who fucked a rose-lipped rock star in a tiny bedroom slum watched by a statue of Vajrasattva—
and overthrew the CIA with a silent thought—

(“Ego Confession,” CP, 623)

This “extraordinary ego … unafraid of its own self's spectre” wants “to be the spectacle of Poesy triumphant over trickery of the world. / … whose common sense astonished gaga Gurus and rich Artistes—/ who called the Justice department and threaten'd to Blow the Whistle.” Ginsberg's whimsy leads to the other source of his didactic power. For all his mystical leanings, experiments in consciousness, and otherworldly visions, Ginsberg is a thoroughly secular poet, one for whom the world is real. The greatest poverty, said Stevens, is not to live in the physical world. Ginsberg's materialism gives readers his voluminous lists, his headlines, his paratactic, sometimes verbless, incantations, and it also gives them his various voices, always distinctly his own.

Like James Merrill, whose experiments with tone have led him to otherworldly visitors (or them to him), Ginsberg ranges through different voices in a joint effort to create his own multiple self and to serve his performer's instinct to keep an audience awake. Fluctuations in tone are possible only in poets consciously in control of the principle of voice: the dramatic performances for which Ginsberg has become celebrated come naturally out of the drama invested within the multiple personae of the poems. His homage to Kenneth Koch, “Homework,” shows his mastery of the language of television commercials, his global ecology, and his political energy:

If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran
I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle,
I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,
Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,
Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal
Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,
Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow,
Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie
Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange,
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,
& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean.

(CP, 731)

The poem displays a playful insouciance in its central conceit (one of the few poems in which Ginsberg maintains such a consistency), a canny reinvigoration of childish cliché (“so snow return white as snow”), some seemingly accidental rhetorical devices (the zeugma in “blood & Agent Orange” and “let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon,” the asyndeton that gathers rivers into a single corporate entity [“Hudson Thames & Neckar”]), and the naive hopefulness of its political faith. Few poets (Blake, of course; Whitman sometimes) can create a successful song of innocence, but the political naiveté of “Homework” is produced by a cagey fox who knows how to trick his prey. Although a full catalogue of Ginsberg's masks or tones would require almost as many pages as his own work, I'd like to make a brief survey of the field, pointing out the pedagogic vigor behind the poetic voices.

In poems with titles like “Ego Confession” (CP, 623), “Manifesto” (“Let me say beginning I don't believe in Soul,” CP, 617), “This Is About Death” (35), “I Beg You Come Back & Be Cheerful” (235), “Understand That This Is a Dream” (303), “A Vow” (460), “After Thoughts” (536), “What I'd Like to Do” (602), Ginsberg announces personal credos with straightforward immediacy. The poetry seems to hold nothing back. In his best poems, like “My Sad Self” (201), the visionary catalogue becomes a lesson, the private becomes public, owing to the deft handling of both topicality and tonal inflection (not for nothing does this poem pay homage to Frank O'Hara). For all his historical goofiness, Ginsberg is often, movingly, a melancholic. The poem begins with a formulaic statement as old as Shakespeare's sonnets (“When … then”), but the vertical movement of the first stanza promises the poet's mortality rather than his salvation:

Sometimes when my eyes are red
I go up on top of the RCA Building
                              and gaze at my world, Manhattan—
                                        my buildings, streets I've done feats in,
                                                  lofts, beds, coldwater flats
—on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind,
                                        its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men
                                                  walking the size of specks of wool—
Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,
                              sun go down over New Jersey where I was born
                                                  & Paterson where I played with ants—
my later loves on 15th Street,
                                        my greater loves of Lower East Side,
                                                  my once fabulous amours in the Bronx
                                                                                                              faraway—
paths crossing in these hidden streets,
                                        my history summed up, my absences
                                                  and ecstasies in Harlem—
                                        —sun shining down on all I own
                                        in one eyeblink to the horizon
                                                  in my last eternity—
                                                                                                                        matter is water.

(201)

This is a poetry of statement, which registers emotions through the nuance of a heroic vocabulary (“streets I've done feats in,” “my later loves … my greater loves,” “absences and ecstasies”) that leads to a thought reminiscent of Keats's embittered self-epitaph (“Here lies one whose name was writ in water”).

Thence begin the solitary musings of the walker in the city, “staring into all man's / plateglass, faces,” looking for reflection and original response, tamely going home to dinner, experiencing tears but no desire, “confused by the spectacle around me.” The liquid movement of meaningless activity (“Man, woman, streaming over the pavements”) conduces to a vision of a personal and final end:

And all these streets leading
                              so crosswise, honking, lengthily,
                                                                      by avenues
                              stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums
                                                                      thru such halting traffic
                                                                                          screaming cars and engines
so painfully to this
                              countryside, this graveyard
                                                            this stillness
                                                                                on deathbed or mountain
                              once seen
                                                            never regained or desired
                                                                                in the mind to come
where all Manhattan that I've seen must disappear.

(202)

This is the elegiac, quiet Ginsberg, still imitating the rhythms of Williams and sounding the depths of a personal sorrow that he makes universal by releasing it from individuality (the RCA building, “all the details of my world”) to the generality of unspecified sadness: “this countryside, this graveyard, this stillness” becomes “deathbed or mountain” without articles, and a metonymy for any person's past experiences in time or space.

Even when sedate, Ginsberg usually sounds more volatile than he does in “My Sad Self,” but this melancholy contemplation dramatizes his mastery of minute calibrations in tone, allowing him to refer to ordinary events as heroic, romantic, banal, and expansive, by turn. One can find similar fluctuations—louder, more public ones—in those poems to be delivered from the symbolic podium upon which Ginsberg as teacher-preacher so often mounts. “What I'd Like to Do” (CP, 602), for example, takes the simple form of a series of wishes and resolutions, randomly arranged and including the topoi of retirement from the world, poetic composition, logical paradoxes (“step in same river twice”), and sexual activity interspersed with sexual abnegation, but it ends with a lyrical softness unpredicted by any previous tone or the poem's containing form:

Chant into electric microphones, pacify Rock, enrich
skull emptiness with vocal salami taxicabs, magnetize nervous systems,
destroy Empire State's dead Life Time smog,
Masturbate in peace, haunt ancient cities for boys, practice years of chastity, save Jewels for God my own ruddy body, hairy delicate antennae
Vegetable, eat carrots, fork cabbage, spoon peas, fry potatoes, boil beets, ox forgiven, pig forgotten, hot dogs banished from celestial realms cloud-roofed over Kitkitdizze's green spring weeds—milk, angel-Milk
Read Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov I laid down half-finished a dozen times decades ago
Compose last choirs of Innocence & Experience, set music to tongues of Rossetti Mss. orchestrate Jerusalem's quatrains—
War's over, soft mat wood floor, flower vase on inkstand, blue oaks gazing in the window.

From the mundane (finishing a great book one has always resolved to get through) to the heroic, from the surreal (“vocal salami taxicabs”) to the self-improving, the resolutions end in the calm finality of stasis: objects arranged as for a still-life, and no verbs, no selfhood. “Effort and expectation and desire,” Wordsworth's phrase for our being's heart and home, is relinquished in favor of the passivity of mere being, as the scene and the dreaming speaker settle squarely into this world but pass for the moment beyond it as well. Out of Ginsberg's whackiness there emerge moments of such transcendence, announced as here by the absence of tone, of volition, and of passion.

In heightening his tone by paradoxically eliminating it, Ginsberg here reminds us of his debt to Williams, to American imagism, and to the orientalism he shares with Gary Snyder. These lines provide an unusual quiet moment in Ginsberg's otherwise noisy poetry. Reading him is like riding a roller coaster—always moving, and moving rapidly at that. The man crowned May King in Prague has also written some of the major elegies of the past thirty years; public performance and private regret are the two sides of Ginsberg's poetic ritual. Likewise, paranoia and aggressive silliness go hand in hand; as in a drugged haze he first imagines “police clog the streets with their anxiety” and then his own explosive response:

                              Tear gas! Dynamite! Mustaches!
I'll grow a beard and carry lovely
                              bombs,
I will destroy the world, slip in between
                                                            the cracks of death
                              And change the Universe—Ha!
I have the secret, I carry
                                                                      Subversive salami in
                                                                                my ragged briefcase
“Garlic, Poverty, a will to Heaven,”
                    a strange dream in my meat:

(“I Beg You Come Back & Be Cheerful,” CP, 235-36)

The radical as burlesque comic, the lunatic who speaks truth: Ginsberg assumes whatever momentary mask will keep his audience's attention, and his own antic disposition hammers home mad claims that contain nuggets of wisdom:

Here I am—Old Betty Boop whoopsing behind the skull-microphone wondering what Idiot soap opera horror show we broadcast by Mistake—full of communists and frankenstein cops and
mature capitalists running the State Department and the Daily News Editorial hypnotizing millions of legional-eyed detectives to commit mass murder on the Invisible
which is only a bunch of women weeping hidden behind newspapers in the Andes, conspired against by Standard Oil,
which is a big fat fairy monopolizing all Being that has form'd it self to Oil,
and nothing gets in its way so it grabs different oils in all poor mystic aboriginal Principalities too weak to
Screech out over the radio that Standard Oil is a bunch of spying Businessmen intent on building one Standard Oil in the whole universe like an egotistical cancer
and yell on Television to England to watch out for United Fruits they got Central America by the balls
nobody but them can talk San Salvador, they run big Guatemala puppet armies, gas Dictators, they're the Crown of Thorns
upon the Consciousness of poor Christ-indian Central America, and the Pharisees are US Congress & Publicans is the American People
who have driven righteous bearded faithful pink new Castro 1961 is he mad? who knows—Hope for him, he stay true
& his wormy 45-year dying peasants teach Death's beauty sugar beyond politics, build iron children schools
for alphabet molecule stars, that mystic history & giggling revolution henceforth no toothless martyrs be memorized by some pubescent Juan who'll smoke my marihuana—
Turn the Teacher on!

(“Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber,” CP, 274-75)

The repetitiveness within and among his poems proves Ginsberg's willingness to forego originality in favor of the reiteration of important lessons. It may well be that a native American naiveté, a hopefulness inherited from Thoreau and at least one aspect of Emerson, has inspired a greater degree of what I have labeled didacticism among American poets than among those of other nations. The Shelleyan mantle of legislation sits more comfortably on American than on British shoulders; combined with a sense of daily renewal and rebirth, this prophesying instinct keeps Ginsberg confident and public throughout a career and in spite of a disposition that might otherwise tend in the direction of the elegiac and the introspective. At the end of “The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express,” a litany of hellish visions and Boschian political vignettes, Ginsberg commits himself to return and rebirth. In such imaging resides endless potential:

                                                  From this single
                              birth reborn that I am
                              to be so—
My own Identity now nameless
                              neither man nor dragon or
                              God
but the dreaming Me full
                              of physical rays' tender
                              red moons in my belly &
                              Stars in my eyes circling
And the Sun the Sun the
                              Sun my visible father
                              making my body visible
                              thru my eyes!

(330)

This ending of Planet News (1963) prepares Ginsberg for a return to America (after King of May in 1965, the subsequent volumes that begin with The Fall of America [1973] are primarily local). Despite his travels and his experiments with foreign philosophies, religions, and medicines, Ginsberg remains a distinctly homegrown product. For all the explicit topicality of his poetry, its references to public issues and personalities, it remains an unorganized work, never building to a philosophical system or to anything more than momentary statements of faith. Ginsberg does not tell stories or use parables, like Hecht or John Hollander, because he has little sense of what they might stand for. Richly imagistic, the poetry is almost bereft of metaphor: “Things are symbols of themselves” he boldly announces on the title page. As a teacher, Ginsberg does not explain, and turns aside from the ardors of expatiation because he lacks the linear, discursive tendency that explanation demands. Nor does the Aristotelian frame of narrative suit a speaker who finds beginnings and endings equally problematic.

Instead, in Ginsberg are acts of circling and of repetition—statement, harangue, kvetching, comic self-exposure, proclamation—that assault, implore, berate, excite, surprise, confuse, tease, amuse, and charm in a dizzying kaleidoscope of tones. As a teacher Ginsberg is a prophet of a post-McLuhan age who knows how to barrage readers with multiple images, whole armies of them. No other poet has so richly, if bizarrely, inherited Whitman's seigneurial copiousness.

The voice of moral outrage with which Ginsberg has been long associated, and which comes one might say by right to a twentieth-century Jeremiah, is heard nowhere more stridently and authentically than in “Howl,” the seminal poem, the controversy over which virtually assured its notorious success. It is more clearly structured than anything else in Ginsberg: the brilliant, and longest, first part that derives from the opening proposition (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”), then a series of relative clauses meant to picture, through aggregation, those “angelheaded hipsters … who” fill its pages; the second and third parts, shorter and apostrophic, addressed to Moloch as the symbolic representation of nightmare, machinery, and deadly mechanization, and then to Carl Solomon, the human prisoner incarcerated, as the speaker's double, in the Rockland asylum; the appended “Footnote to Howl,” a series of exclaimed “Holy! Holy! Holy!”s as benediction and antidote to all that has gone before.

“Howl” (126-33) diagnoses a condition first by defining it. What did the best minds of his generation do? They … “bared their brains to Heaven under the El … passed through universities with radiant cool eyes … studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah … threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity …” and so on. Next “Howl” explains its cause: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? / Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!” For all its obvious debt to Blake, Williams, and Whitman (one may construe the whole first section as Ginsberg's catalogue equivalent to “I hear American singing”), “Howl” is an Ovidian fable both in its overall scheme of providing an etiology of a current state of affairs and in its incidental, smaller details that often look like surrealistic metamorphoses (“who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements”).

A walker in the city, Ginsberg everywhere marks, as Blake does in London, the conditions of madness, poverty and deprivation, and their mental causes as well as effects: “Moloch whose name is the Mind!” Looking like a diagnosis of a problem by a witness, the poem turns out to be a sympathetic insider's view as well. Ginsberg, as perennial “beat” outsider, is very much of the landscape he surveys, and his acts of sympathetic identification with Carl Solomon fill the entire third section (“I'm with you in Rockland where …”); they also begin with the title and dedication, which ask to be read as a verbal command: “Howl for Carl Solomon,” administered and then obeyed by the single speaker who proceeds with his observations in response to his own imperative. From observation to sympathy is one kind of didactic movement. Adrienne Rich remarks that unless the teacher is in love with the mind of the student he is practicing rape.¹⁰ Ginsberg allows eroticism to blossom in “Howl” through such empathy (“ah Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time”), especially in the endings to the three sections, which break through the stylistic and emotional boundaries that the opening incantations have defined.

The first section interrupts its chronicling by addressing Carl Solomon in the impassioned, sympathetic remark quoted above, and winds to an end by equating the daring of artistic innovation with the sacrifice of Christ: breaking through a syntax that has remained fairly consistent (“who …,” etc.), the speaker now sacrifices himself, his subject, and his poem, on the rood of American civilization. Ginsberg has called the end of the section “an homage to art but also in specific terms an homage to Cezanne's method.”¹¹ His effort “to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame” at last deifies him, “the madman bum and angel beat in Time,” and he

rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

(131)

From such desperate annihilation, of self and of society, comes the hope of redemption, proffered here through the Christian allusion and the half-zany radio jingle quality (“good to eat”) of the final image. The change in tone and syntax at the conclusion also dramatically corresponds to the multiplicity of identity (Ginsberg as Carl Solomon, the victim as the savior, the Jew as Christ, the prisoner as saint) that Ginsberg has made a distinctive theme.

As the first section transgresses its own syntax at the end, reaching a momentary climax, so do the second and third parts. The exclamations to a Moloch who embodies the poverty, oppressiveness, and industrial wastes of modern life give way to a release from the oppression of the very apostrophes as Ginsberg envisions an apocalyptic escape from Moloch's juggernaut. What seems like the destruction of the American dream turns out to be the cause of its realization:

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

(132)

The verse enacts the movement from confinement to release by replacing the apostrophic responses to the horrifying opening question (“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls? … Moloch!”) with new exclamations of mad visionary fulfillment. The pattern of syntactic transformation becomes, in other words, a didactic model for the psychological and social changes the revolutionary speaker urges upon his readers.

Excluding the “Footnote to Howl,” written (or at least dated) before the completion of the entire poem and containing a litany of praise that incorporates the heterogeneous and heterodox reality of Ginsberg's world, one may hear in the end of the poem's third section its true climax, one that confirms the pattern of repetition followed by the sudden undermining of syntax and tone in the earlier parts. Having identified with Carl Solomon (“I'm with you in Rockland”) seventeen times, Ginsberg begins his release from confinement in the antepenultimate line with an antic response to his country:

I'm with you in Rockland
          where we hug and kiss the United States under our
          bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

(133)

Overwhelming the enemy, subduing him in a comic assault, the two prisoners can now release themselves from their mental, almost Blakean, imprisonment:

I'm with you in Rockland
          where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our
          own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come
          to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates
          itself           imaginary walls collapse           O skinny legions
          run outside           O starry-spangled shock of mercy the
          eternal war is here           O victory forget your underwear
          we're free

The climax submits itself to a final revision, however, and is succeeded by a sad statement of separation, as Ginsberg's elegiac temperament overwhelms his hopeful, revolutionary zeal and restores him (and readers) to a painful awakening:

I'm with you in Rockland
          in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on
          the highway across America in tears to the door of my
          cottage in the Western night

(133)

In this anticlimactic dream one sees Ginsberg's true acknowledgement of a plight that is both separate and shared. One also sees the twin halves of his poetic personality—the ecstatic and the elegiac—that together have served him from his first utterances to his latest. Our funniest poetic teacher may also be our saddest.

Notes

1. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Elizabeth Hardwick, ed., A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982), 118.

2. Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York: Random House, 1968), 86.

3. John Hollander deserves a volume of his own, since his poetry has become a major text in the last part of our century in the same way that his commentary on others' work has proved indispensable. His recent essay, “The Question of American Jewish Poetry,” Tikkun 3, no. 3 (1988): 33-37, 112-16, discusses, among other things, the problems confronting Jewish poets writing in English.

4. Albert Einstein, The World as I See It (New York: Covici Friede, 1934), 143.

5. All references are to The Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), hereafter CP.

6. Helen Vendler, “A Lifelong Poem Including History,” The New Yorker, 62 (13 Jan. 1986): 77-84.

7. Charles Molesworth, The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1979), 38-39.

8. Quoted in Richard Howard, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 149.

9. Kramer, Ginsberg in America, 115.

10. “If the mind of the teacher is not in love with the mind of the student, / he is simply practicing rape, and deserves at best our pity” (“Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib,” in Poems Selected and New: 1950-1974 [New York: W. W. Norton, 1974], 123). Rich has thought twice about this poem and has omitted it from her most recent selection; whether it was the sentiment or the pronouns that disturbed her is a question to consider.

11. Writers at Work, 3d ser. (New York: Viking, 1967), 295-96.