Too often critics conflate Allen Ginsberg's best-known poems, “Howl” and “Kaddish,” and in the process understate important differences between them. The reasons for this conflation are clear enough: both are interventions in Western prophecy, and both conjoin religion and politics in an effort to decenter Cold War sexual-political orthodoxy and to highlight the “beatitude” of downtrodden, even oppressed, protagonists. Yet exaggerating the similarities between the two poems fails to do justice to the complex role “Kaddish” plays in Ginsberg's development of a contemporary poetics of prophecy. Specifically, such exaggeration neglects four revisionary strategies in “Kaddish”: the recovery of a female principle of divinity from the male comradeship of “Howl”; “Kaddish”'s less trustful attitude toward prophetic naming, despite its continuation of the prophetic impulse of “Howl”; Ginsberg's manipulation of psychiatric and antipsychiatric historical contexts to forge a revisionary poetics of mind and matter; and the role of “Kaddish” in Ginsberg's antilogocentric prophetic career—its inauguration of a poetry that revises the very tradition that authorizes it to speak. In what follows, I separate “Howl” and “Kaddish” in order to examine how “Kaddish” initiates a shift in Ginsberg's approach to religious authority in his later career, occasionally contrasting the two poems to bring “Kaddish” into greater relief.

Except for fan appreciations and retrospectives, little has been written on Ginsberg recently. Few academic articles on his poetry have been published since his death, even though significant Beat revisionism is occurring both in print and at major conferences.¹ The work of Brenda Knight and Richard Peabody has enhanced critical understanding of Beat women writers, and the Modern Language Association Conference has begun to reconsider the Beat era from feminist and multiethnic perspectives.²

Yet the only comprehensive reconsideration of Ginsberg's influence on contemporary poetics has been Marjorie Perloff's essay “A Lion in Our Living Room: Reading Allen Ginsberg in the Eighties,” originally composed for the thirtieth anniversary of “Howl” in 1986 and revised in 1990 for Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Perloff reexamines the scope and influence of Ginsberg's career, arguing that “Howl” and “Kaddish” are central to his place in the contemporary poetic canon. To separate Ginsberg's poetics from his self-fashioned “hipster” mythmaking, Perloff disentangles “Howl” and “Kaddish” and examines tensions between convention and experimentation in the poetry. Her exploration of “Howl” and “Kaddish”, and of Ginsberg's Collected Poems, 1947-1980, refutes common critical complaints leveled against his work—most notably the “charge of formlessness” and “of poetry as mere rant.” Perloff's response to “the genteel reaction” of contemporary critics who, she claims, do not read Ginsberg's poems closely, is instructive for its reminder that these poems self-consciously continue and revise the romantic and modernist traditions from which they emerge. Perloff asserts that Collected Poems, 1947-1980 is “an homage to America at mid-century,” and she argues that critical dismissal of Ginsberg can be traced, in part, to a critical community unwilling to engage the experimental scope of Ginsberg's poems.³ Despite Perloff's close, technical study of the poems and her deft maneuvering between Ginsberg's self-made legend and the cultural work of his poems, her repositioning of Ginsberg in contemporary poetry has so far produced no further dialogue on Ginsberg's legacy. The only major study of Ginsberg since Perloff's essay is Michael Schumacher's Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (1992), which is more biographical than critical.⁴ The Modern Language Association bibliography shows that work on Ginsberg published in academic journals since 1980 has been meager.⁵

Scholars who do highlight the importance of “Howl” and “Kaddish” in Ginsberg's career tend to overemphasize their similarities. For James Breslin, the two are the “most powerful” poems of Ginsberg's early career because both succeed in “establishing an alternative to the well-made symbolist poem that was fashionable in the fifties.”⁶ Integrating biographical detail and interpretation, Ekbert Faas argues that “Howl” and “Kaddish” frame Ginsberg's early career through their “ever more frantic and self-destructive” search for a “hidden divinity.”⁷ In The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg, Paul Portugés combines the poems in his discussion of the liberating and constraining effects of Ginsberg's 1948 Blake vision. As prophetic poems with apocalyptic themes, both are, for Portugés, Ginsberg's “ultimate poems of doom.”⁸

Schumacher's biographical discussion of the period between “Howl” and “Kaddish” can begin to show the differences between the two poems. Writing of Ginsberg's trip to Tangier in 1957, roughly during the period when Howl and Other Poems was being confiscated in San Francisco, Schumacher notes that Ginsberg began to feel that “Howl” was an inadequate statement of public prophecy. The poet was “shaken” during this trip by his first-hand experience with police brutality and the inequities of colonialism. Schumacher reports that Ginsberg “admitted to Kerouac that ‘Howl’ seemed to be an inadequate statement in comparison to the worldwide plight of the masses, and he vowed to write an epic poem to address that issue.”⁹ Schumacher implies that “Kaddish” is the fruit of this vow.

Gary Snyder's comments on “Howl” in letters to Ginsberg offer insights into the contested politics of matter and spirit in “Howl” and can help clarify significant differences between “Howl” and “Kaddish”. Snyder's letters suggest a context for the issues of authority and doubt inscribed in “Howl” and revised in “Kaddish”. In a letter dated 6 April 1959, roughly the time “Kaddish” was taking shape, Snyder told Ginsberg that “[a]ll this contemporary vision, drug & hallucination bit is dualistic.”¹⁰ Snyder took Ginsberg to task for creating a language for prophecy in which the “ordinary world of mind isn't enough” and in which a seeker “has to be high to dig the universe.” At the close of this letter Snyder states (in handwriting, as if an afterthought to the typed letter), “I take it back about you being Dualist—will explain later.” Snyder's next letter, dated 12 April 1959, suggests that this afterthought did not so much “take back” the charge of dualism as qualify and extend Snyder's definition of the term. Referring to “Howl” and to the counterculture forming around the poem, Snyder wrote, “I feel the drug & high kick of many Americans is basically a rejection of matter.”

Snyder claims that despite the attempts to fuse matter and spirit in “Howl,” Ginsberg fails to bridge the distance between the two. For Snyder, the rhetoric of vision in “Howl” fails to sustain ambivalence and collapses into dualism. Despite its attempt to revivify matter as “divine,” “Howl” remains for Snyder an exercise in escapism. Noting the rhetorical strategy of “Footnote to Howl,” Snyder argues that “[c]alling matter etc. ‘Holy’ doesn't necessarily change this [rejection of matter], because it may simply mean that one cannot accept things as they are, i.e. not particularly holy.” However, as in his handwritten addition to the letter of 6 April, Snyder's criticism culminates in ambivalence: “Again, one may be saying, the unholy & ordinary condition of things as they are is holy.” “Howl” earned Ginsberg immediate fame; but, as Snyder suggests, the poem repeatedly threatens to break down into familiar dualisms.

“Howl” is indeed organized around a separation, but the split is more particular than that between matter and spirit. “Howl” represses signs of women in order to forge male prophetic comradeship within the poem's pilgrimage; in “Kaddish,” by contrast, Ginsberg constructs maternity as a source of vision, an influence that precedes and sustains prophetic language. In “Kaddish,” Ginsberg attempts to recover the voice of his mother Naomi, which is muted in “Howl.” Naomi appears in “Howl” only in controlled contexts. Although she is catalogued as one of the “best minds” of the pilgrimage,¹¹ her identity is masked by the poem's other characters. In “Howl”'s closing visionary dialogue with Carl Solomon, she appears within Solomon, who “imitate[s] the shade of [Ginsberg's] mother” (l. 96) but is no more than an ancillary voice of prophecy, a figure comparable, at best, to a Blakean emanation.

As “Kaddish” opens, the poet is wandering Manhattan, sleepless, his focus scattered by a cacophony of cultural voices ranging from 2,500-year-old Buddhist texts to recent twentieth-century incarnations of the blues. His urban path is bathed in the pastoral sunlight of a “clear winter noon,” yet he is surrounded by an urban landscape that foretells apocalypse.¹² This contrast between the natural and the urban dramatizes the rhetoric of vision in “Kaddish”: the poem combines elegiac pastoralism with an urban, apocalyptic futurism, what Bruce Comens has described in another context as a postmodern tactic that uses the presence of the Bomb as a signifier of “apocalypse and after.”¹³ Ginsberg superimposes his walk through the city onto memories of his mother's walks as a child. The Allen-Naomi walk leads the poet to question the authorizing power of naming. Ginsberg closes the “Proem” of “Kaddish” with a revision of the Aramaic Kaddish for the dead. The Kaddish professes that final, redemptive authority emanates only from the name of God. The prayer does not invite revision; it is a profession of belief, worshiping the name of God in the face of tragedy. Yet in his own “Kaddish” Ginsberg reconsiders the trust in naming that infuses “Howl” and “Footnote to Howl”; the impulse to rename becomes in the later poem both a continuation and revision of sacred language.¹⁴

Ginsberg's “Kaddish” distrusts the monovocal certainty of the traditional prayer for the dead. His revisionism prompted early reviewer Mortimer J. Cohen to denounce the poem as an “illegitimate use of Jewish tradition.” Cohen, writing in the Jewish Exponent of 10 November 1961, accuses Ginsberg of “pouring into Tradition values that are not there and that are not genuine and legitimate.” Cohen observes, correctly, that Ginsberg's revisionary response to the Kaddish is unlawful precisely because it decenters the authority of Hebrew monotheism and of the monovocal, “definite meaning” of the liturgy.¹⁵

Yet biblical authority reverberates throughout Ginsberg's response to the Kaddish. After using dashed breath-units to describe Naomi's death, Ginsberg shifts to biblical verse:

Cut down by an idiot Snowman's icy—even in the Spring—strange ghost thought—some Death—Sharp icicle in his hand—crowned with old roses—a dog for his eyes—cock of a sweatshop—heart of electric irons.

(211)

Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed—Ass and face done with murder.

(212)

Robert Alter has written that the parallelism of biblical verse produces “an emphatic, balanced, and elevated kind of discourse, perhaps ultimately rooted in a magical conception of language as a potent performance.”¹⁶ Ginsberg's switch from “dashed” verse to parallelism implies a shift away from the subjectivity of the modern poet to the authority of biblical verse, a crucial shift in his search for an “elemental” language for prophecy.¹⁷

Ginsberg trusts an incantatory, “magical” language that is more performative than referential. He places faith in his “mystic” mother, destroyed by Moloch, rather than in an orthodox God who resides outside history. Where God is “magnified,” Naomi is “magnificent.” As he imagines her burial, he asks that peace be granted to her electroshock-ravaged body (“Ass and face done with murder”) and her “mind behind” paranoid with hallucinations of murder plots and fallen to “mysterious capitalisms”:

In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under pine, almed in Earth, balmed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.

(212)

Ginsberg's poem is, as Cohen claims, an “illegitimate” use of the Kaddish, but Ginsberg nevertheless implores Jehovah to “accept” his mother, thereby affirming the power of orthodox monotheism. Naomi's communism “made no Utopia,” and so with her “shut under pine” Ginsberg's cry of “accept” echoes the call of the orthodox Kaddish, beseeching Jehovah to “Uproo[t] idol worship from the land and, / Replac[e] it with Divine worship.”¹⁸

“KADDISH”: “CORRIDORS OF HISTORY”

As a strategy of continuity with revision, Ginsberg's response to tradition resembles similar twentieth-century strategies, most notably those of T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom. Ginsberg's response is unusual, however; his authorizing source is neither a strong poet nor a tradition of individual talent. Ginsberg's revisions are perhaps more startling because they dispense with a commitment to an essentialist authority—an uncommon gesture in Western prophetic poetry. Joseph Wittreich Jr. has argued that in the tradition of poetic prophecy the poet becomes the poet-prophet precisely when touched by a metaphysical vision that positions the writer in a lineage “authenticated by scriptural prophecy.”¹⁹ Ginsberg's commitment, by contrast, is to revise a tradition whose authority derives from an essential, unrevisable, logocentric purity.

The Kaddish is a prayer honoring the deceased that may under most circumstances be articulated only by the son. As Maurice Lamm notes, the Kaddish is meant to “bind” the son “to the synagogue for the remainder of his life.”²⁰ Too much doubt persists in Ginsberg's revisionary Kaddish for the poem to be seen as “binding” the poet to an essential monotheistic tradition. Indeed, this lack of a binding force is what makes possible the construction of a language for revisionary prophecy. Ginsberg's revision does not entrust Naomi to the “magnified” and “sanctified” name of Jehovah, who in Ginsberg's revision is both detached from the mourning son and redemptive. Jehovah, for Ginsberg, is “Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death.” Although the poet professes faith in a Western conception of Heaven, God is “forever beyond [him].” Yet Ginsberg promises he “would still adore Thee, Heaven, after Death” (212). In shifting the direct address of the Orthodox prayer from God to Heaven, Ginsberg equates identity in “Kaddish” with the emptiness of shunyata, the Buddhist conception of groundless identity that empties self-presence in a manner resembling the mechanics of Derridean deconstruction in Western philosophy.²¹ Ginsberg would worship Heaven, yet his poem is a prophecy of both the “Hebrew Anthem” and the “Buddhist Book of Answers”: the Heaven of “Kaddish” is a conditional state qualified by the nibbana (nirvana) of the experience of shunyata. His Heaven is “One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity—” (212). The “endless” telos of Western prophecy—circumscribed by the Logos—is conjoined with the beginningless, nontheistic epistemology of Buddhism. “Kaddish,” then, binds East and West and unbinds desire from religious law; the son who speaks the poem locates artistic production between these poles.

Ginsberg's “illegitimate use of Jewish tradition” is a rhetorical strategy of necessity. In their biographies, Schumacher and Barry Miles demonstrate that Ginsberg was at first committed to saying a traditional Kaddish for Naomi. The poet's father Louis requested only a small service for his wife; Ginsberg was unable to travel from the West Coast to attend, and only seven Jewish men were present, three short of the required minyan for a Kaddish. No official Kaddish was said at the service.

Ginsberg's initial desire for a Kaddish was based on the authority of tradition, the “definitive meaning” of Jewish law that Cohen uses in his attack on the poem. As Lamm describes it, the Kaddish is communal and is meant to affirm faith in Hebraic law as a social rather than individual enterprise. According to Schumacher, Ginsberg was distressed that no traditional Kaddish had been said at Naomi's grave; in a letter Ginsberg asked his father to send a copy of the prayer. Schumacher believes that Ginsberg intended to revise the traditional Kaddish immediately. On the basis of Ginsberg's request to his father, Schumacher concludes that if “it was impossible to have the Kaddish read, Allen thought, he would have to write one for her himself.”²² Miles, however, maintains that Ginsberg's first intention was to request a burial Kaddish for Naomi, not to compose his own revision of the traditional prayer: “Knowing that Naomi had been denied the Kaddish at her graveside, Allen attempted to get one said for her.”²³

According to Miles, Ginsberg began to compose his own Kaddish only after attempting to organize a minyan for a traditional reading of the prayer. Soon after Naomi's death, Miles reports, Ginsberg entered a synagogue with Kerouac and Peter Orlovsky to organize a minyan. Holding his brother Eugene's letter describing the funeral as proof that no Kaddish had been recited at Naomi's grave, Ginsberg requested a Kaddish from the synagogue staff. Kerouac and Orlovsky were not Jewish; the synagogue was unable to organize a minyan. Miles claims that it was after this failure at the synagogue that Ginsberg wrote his father asking for a copy of the prayer. Louis sent the prayer and in his response to his son affirmed the visionary history that frames the language of the original and authorizes Ginsberg's use of traditional language in “Kaddish”: “Those chants therein have a rhythm and sonorousness of immemorial years marching with reverberations through the corridors of history.”²⁴

The biographical context of Ginsberg's composition of “Kaddish” points toward the dual purpose of the poem—to eulogize Naomi and to offer a prophetic corrective to the institutional practices of Orthodox Judaism—and also highlights the urgency of Ginsberg's language of prophecy.²⁵ As much as it claims the mystical, the poem is occasioned by a specific failure—to organize a minyan—and is not, as Snyder says of “Howl,” a “rejection of matter.”²⁶ As he addresses Jehovah in his revision of the burial prayer, Ginsberg affirms the authority of the individual to revise essentialist and presumably timeless language: “Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore” (212).

The revisionary religious discourse of “Kaddish” emerges in the context of the postwar, worldwide antipsychiatric movement, which investigated whether the demonized experiences of mental patients might actually model visionary states of consciousness. While the distinction between psychiatry and antipsychiatry is well known, it has not been explored as a cultural context for Ginsberg's poetry. For pioneers in the field such as R. D. Laing and the sociologist Erving Goffman, the shift away from demonization entailed a re-envisioning of disciplining institutions such as the industrial-age family and the asylum. In texts such as Sanity, Madness, and the Family, begun just a year before the composition of “Kaddish,” Laing examines the etiology of schizophrenia not only from the perspective of the patient's perceived biological maladaptation but also in terms of the patient's family and social structures.²⁷ Goffman equates the lives and developments of asylum patients with the careers of persons in the professions, a comparison of no small consequence in an era when Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit both criticized and encouraged postwar industrial conformity (an era when Ginsberg financed his original move from New York to San Francisco with his job as a market researcher). In “Howl” and “Kaddish,” Ginsberg identifies the adaptations of industrial family life as the matrix of both madness and vision. For Ginsberg, this matrix is mythologized; family relations spawn monolithic figures such as Moloch and Oedipus, both of whom police the boundaries of language and identity.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work in antipsychiatry, especially their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, provides a vocabulary for understanding Ginsberg's pilgrimage in “Kaddish” as one that incorporates desire to multiply, rather than fix, meaning.²⁸ For Deleuze and Guattari, the language of the “schizophrenic taking a walk,” their model figure for psychic and social deterritorialization, empties the values imposed by absolutist naming and shatters the conceptual spaces circumscribed by such naming. As the name Anti-Oedipus suggests, the book assaults the primacy of Freud's oedipal model of identity. In Deleuze and Guattari's work, Oedipus is a transhistorical figure of absolutist identity in the West. Whether national, familial, or individual, all identity is circumscribed as normative or pathological according to its relation to the oedipal model, a series of relations that separate—“oedipalize”—identity in the West into lawful (oedipal) and transgressive (schizophrenic, anti-oedipal) modes.

Ginsberg's relationship with his mother in “Kaddish” parodies this “oedipalization” at a time when postwar American discourses of homosexuality were framed by what Lee Edelman has termed a Cold War discourse of “momism.” Edelman argues that the equation of homosexuality with communism resulted in a discourse of containment—“momism”—in which the exposure of communists was equated with the exposure of homosexuals. As Edelman notes, the urge to identify communists was portrayed as protecting the country from a demasculinizing invasion from within; the urge to identify homosexuals was portrayed as protecting the family from a de-masculinizing invasion from within. “Momism” elevated motherhood to an institution that had to be protected, while the medical discourse of the day saw it as an institution producing the threat from which it must be protected. Edelman writes that the popular belief that an overindulgent mother could produce homosexual identification in her son constituted a discourse “that implicated mothers in narratives of subversion through the weakening of masculine resolve against Communism” (567).²⁹

Ginsberg engages “momism” in order to produce a revelatory fusion of Naomi's communism and her madness, even superimposing his pilgrimage onto her “career” as an asylum patient. Shaping the discourse of “momism” to his own ends, Ginsberg's strategy does not portray internal collapse—as nationalist equations of homosexual and communist “threats” would predict—but instead produces in “Kaddish” a “Blessed” poet who “builds Heaven in Darkness.”

“KADDISH”: “BACKROOM METAPHYSICS”

In “Kaddish,” Ginsberg depicts Naomi as punished for her inability to submit to what Deleuze and Guattari term the “territorialization” of Oedipus. Naomi claims that Roosevelt and Hitler are plotting against her, and she believes her family sprays germs on her at night from the fire escape. The Metrazol injections that accompany her torturous electroshock therapy cause her to gain weight and lose control of the flows of her body. As a result of her psychiatric treatment, her body begins its own deterritorialization:

One night, sudden attack—her noise in the bathroom—like croaking up her soul—convulsions and red vomit coming out of her mouth—diarrhea water exploding from her behind—on all fours in front of the toilet—urine running between her legs—left retching on the tile floor smeared with her black feces—unfainted—

(218)

Naomi is “unfainted,” denied the mercy of fainting, as a result of her repeated shock treatments. Her identity subsumed by her illness, “Naomi of the hospitals” is “doomed” to what Goffman would call her “career” as a mental patient, subjected to what Deleuze and Guattari would term oedipal state control. Within the narrative of “Kaddish,” Ginsberg portrays her body as caught up in deterritorializing responses to “mysterious capitalisms.” She is “unfainted,” unable to respond to territorialization in any way except to flow.

Ginsberg's search in “Kaddish” for a primal language for prophecy is coded by the Logos yet babbles “all the disjunctions” that the Logos would eliminate.³⁰ Naomi is eventually reterritorialized. Her anti-oedipal flows solidify into monotheistic vision, and she hallucinates that she hosts a dinner for God. Naomi's identification with absolutist identity culminates in a vision of a God whom she describes in singularist terms, with language that separates Him from the lived experience of His believers. Whereas God's singularity is transcendent in theology, Naomi revises this singularity as a principle of divine immanence: “he has a cheap cabin in the country. … He was a lonely old man with a white beard.” Seeing that God is absolutely alone, Naomi cooks him dinner and keeps him company: “he looked tired. He's a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.” At the same time, she makes cold, rotting, “disconsolate” meals for her son. Using the vernacular of Naomi—speaking her language—Ginsberg remarks of the food, “I can't eat it for nausea sometimes” (219). Naomi's language must be deterritorialized in the prophetic pilgrimage of the poem; nevertheless, this language is the source of vision in “Kaddish.”

Ginsberg writes within and against a fear that prophecy is only divine madness, only a discourse inspired by external, absolutist figures such as God, the “old bachelor,” or the “Nobodaddy” of Blake. This fear emerges in Naomi's attempted seduction of Ginsberg, a scene that enacts his own oedipalization, the truck with Moloch described in “Howl.” Immediately after Naomi claims to have seen God, a solitary male figure for whom she cooks dinner, the narrative shifts to an overdetermined emphasis on the significance of the odors that trail Naomi. Ginsberg describes the meals she cooks for Yahweh as a “Charity” that “stink[s] with Manhattan, madness.” The narrative displaces Naomi's smells onto the undercooked fish she offers her son. This fish, Ginsberg admits, constitutes a “desire to please me” (219); as a result, he displaces the odor of food onto representations of her body: “Her smells—and oft naked in the room, so that I stare ahead, or turn a book ignoring her.” Seeing Naomi consumed by oedipalization and revolted by the food she attempts to serve him, Ginsberg disincorporates the “stink” of the language of territorialization.

What follows is a near-incestuous union with his mother, a passage central to the rhetoric of vision in “Kaddish”:

One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—

(219)

Breslin, one of the few scholars to discuss this section of the poem in detail, proffers an explanation of the unconscious effects of this scene, but his commentary neglects the role in the poem of Naomi's institutionalization, focusing solely on how this scene conforms to a classically Freudian explanation of homosexual object choice. Breslin thus participates in the discourse of “momism” that “Kaddish” revises.

Breslin notes that Ginsberg's correlation of the female body and mutilation constitutes an “association frequent among male homosexuals who, perceiving the female's body as the castrated body of a man and frightened at the prospect of a similar fate for themselves, are more comfortable with sexual partners who also have penises.” He contends that the poet narrates a traditional oedipal conflict, in which the young Ginsberg forms an identity for himself as a sexed subject by virtue of his ability “to deny both the powerful attraction he feels toward his mother—as well as the fear he experiences as soon as he imagines the possibility of acting on it.”³¹ Ginsberg's ambivalent attitude toward the sexualized sight and smell of his mother is significant in this scene:

—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold, later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover.

(219)

As Breslin argues, Ginsberg's tone of “detached superiority” (“She needs a lover”) threatens to negate the compassion of the narrative. If the poem, as Ginsberg writes, is a “saga” commemorating one whose “Ass and face” were “done with murder” in psychiatric hospitals, then the poet's detachment seems to undermine the elegiac purpose of the poem.

However, Breslin fails to account for Ginsberg's use of the narrative of Naomi's inhumane treatment to rewrite the roles of son and mother in the oedipal drama. The Freudian oedipal conflict is a representational schema that describes the male child's entry into desire: the sign of the mother is repressed and the father is installed as a sign of authority. The prophetic impulse of “Kaddish” is to recover the mother and rewrite her madness as redemptive through a consideration of the historical causes of her inspired madness. The placement of this incest scene within the narrative is crucial to understanding Ginsberg's revision of divine madness. His idealization of incest as “know[ing] the Monster of the Beginning Womb” is part of a process whereby he rejects idealization and the territorialization of identity by a mythic, oedipal “Great Object.” Freud's oedipal drama depends on the repression of incestuous desire. In “Kaddish” the figure of Naomi nearly breaks the patterns of oedipalization through her suggestion of seduction.

The incest scene is anticipated by an earlier scene that links metaphysical divine madness with “forced oedipalization.”³² Just after Naomi has returned from one of her hospital visits, she lies on her bed in the same erotic postures that occasion the incest scene. Ginsberg frames this earlier scene with the fear of madness, not with detachment or superiority:

She went to the backroom to lay down in bed and ruminate, or nap, or hide—I went in with her, not leave her by herself—lay in bed next to her …

‘Don't be afraid of me because I'm just coming back home from the mental hospital—I'm your mother—’

Poor love, lost—a fear—I lay there—Said, ‘I love you Naomi,’—stiff, next to her arm. I would have cried, was this the comfortless lone union?—Nervous, and she got up soon.

(217)

The language of the passage is fearful and ambivalent, eliding agency and intention in its representation of the young Ginsberg's actions: “I went in with her, [in order] not [to] leave her by herself.” As in the later incest scene, Ginsberg mythologizes his mother's body. The “comfortless lone union” anticipates “the Monster of the Beginning Womb.” The poet's visionary pilgrimage is conjoined with his mother's; he is the primary caretaker in the poem, and he claims to absorb vision from his mother's “pained head.” Yet Ginsberg's attempts to take care of his mother are often troubled in “Kaddish” by her inability to recognize them as such, and by his own mythologization of “the comfortless lone union.” In this passage, she advises her “stiff” son not to fear her madness, but offers as reassurance only her familial authority—“I'm your mother”—a territorializing authority that has already been shattered by her breakdowns and hospitalizations. Instead of closing with superiority, Ginsberg affirms his fear: “Nervous, and she got up soon.”

In “Kaddish,” if the human subject would be liberated and a territorializing “Backroom Metaphysics” uncovered and brought to the fore, then all taboo must be emptied from within, just as Deleuze and Guattari's schizoid “plays the game to the hilt.”³³ As scenes from a prophetic pilgrimage, these two incest episodes demonstrate the impulse in “Kaddish” to empty the absolutist value of the oedipal myth of psychoanalysis, just as in “Howl” Oedipus is “finally” overturned in a gesture of deterritorialization. Ginsberg's idealizations in the second incest scene are circumscribed by absolutist religious gestures more explicit than Naomi's visions of Yahweh. Immediately following Ginsberg's musing that Naomi “needs a lover” are the original Aramaic of the first two lines of the Kaddish and Ginsberg's reaffirmation of his father's place in the family: “And Louis reestablishing himself in Paterson” (219). Indeed, as Breslin argues, this movement from near-incest to the “reestablishing” of the father suggests that the poem conforms to the traditional oedipal narrative, in which the identity of the son is formed from the absolutist threat of castration, represented here by the authority of original Aramaic text.³⁴ The repressed returns in the form of orthodoxy—what Deleuze and Guattari call the “horrible circle” of Oedipus.

Yet the identity of the protagonist within the prophetic narrative of the poem is not as firmly consolidated as the traditional oedipal framework would suggest. In Ginsberg's rhetoric of vision, language is a deterritorialized flow of “Backroom Metaphysics” and “mad idealism.” For Deleuze and Guattari, prophetic language is an immanent language of unconscious flow with idealism kept in the offing. To be sure, Ginsberg's pilgrimage is commingled with Naomi's from the beginning. Ginsberg suggests, however, that the second incest scene represents a failure of forced oedipalization. The “holy family” of oedipal analysis breaks down. Louis indeed “reestablishes” himself, but not, as Breslin argues, as the patriarch. Still supporting Naomi, he takes a “grimy apartment in negro district” and marries another woman. Louis establishes himself outside the territory of Oedipus, thereby violating the white patriarchal absolutism of the postwar, territorialized “holy family.” Although paternal representation seems to be “reestablish[ed]” after the second incest scene, the father reappears outside the normative boundaries of Cold War social arrangements: divorced and remarried, he relocates outside the communities of the white middle class.

But Ginsberg's escape from incest is nevertheless a move toward oedipal repression. “Kaddish” shifts continually between babble and referentiality. Ginsberg calls the “final cops of madness” (222) to rescue him from taboo. In and of themselves, the suggestions of incest in the poem do not bring redemption; Deleuze and Guattari's “secret lunar” language cannot prevail over the institutional praxis that produces the “career” of the mental patient.³⁵

Ginsberg's last visit to Naomi in fact suggests that the scenes of incest reproduce her oedipalized career. Near the end of her life, he visits his mother in an institution that has itself become “that way,” has become the “Monster of the Beginning of the Womb.” Again, the gateway to vision is incest:

Asylum spreads out giant wings above the path to a minute black hole—the door—entrance thru crotch—

(222)

Naomi's sexuality is once again marked by the odor of debasement, and Ginsberg implicates himself in the smell: “I went in—smelt funny—the halls again” (222). She is “lame now” and her body reads like a map of her career as a mental patient: “a scar on her head, the lobotomy—ruin, the hand dipping downwards to death” (223). Breslin's claim that Ginsberg's portrayal of Naomi's scars signals only an identification with homosexual object choices neglects her history of institutionalization. Indeed, such “scar[s]” and “ruin” are what prompted antipsychiatric discourse.

Ginsberg counters these images of Naomi's deterioration with attempts to escape into transcendent articulation, closing the narrative section of the poem by renaming his family as biblical. After describing the receipt of his brother's telegram informing him that Naomi has died, Ginsberg remembers her as “Naomi of Bible,” as an idealized image of “Ruth who wept in America,” and as “Rebecca aged in Newark.” He casts his brother as “David remembering his Harp, now lawyer at Yale,” and himself again as “Svul Avrum.”

Ginsberg's conversational tone here disrupts the monovocal authority of this “holy family,” otherwise absolutist in both biblical and oedipal contexts. Naomi talks back to Ginsberg in the final lines of narration in the poem, suggesting that the apocalypse of her death represents an immanent counterdiscourse capable of deterritorializing Ginsberg's own idealizations. Naomi's voice, described as prophetic, comes in a letter delivered after her death:

Strange prophecies anew! She wrote—“The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window—I have the key—Get married Allen don't take drugs—the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window …”

(224)

This “new” prophecy is not itself absolutist; neither is it strange. The key may be the immanent representation of divinity in nature—the “sunlight in the window” and the “sunny pavement” of the opening. But the “key” for Ginsberg's prophetic language is fixed as neither marriage nor sobriety.

The “key” response to the lock of monovocality is a prophetic language dependent on both ambivalence and the ironic containment of ambivalence. Endless revision is the “key … in the window,” a redemptive series of unfixed representations that prevent poetic prophecy from becoming re-reified as divine essentialism. The final “words” of “Kaddish” are the nonreferential sounds of crows flying over Naomi's grave and the ululations of the modern poet-prophet:

caw caw all years my birth a dream caw caw New York the bus the broken shoe the vast highschool caw caw all Visions of the Lord
Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord

(227)

In print Ginsberg anchors the line with a final utterance of “Lord,” an articulation made “hymnless” by the unfixed representations of revisionary prophecy; but in a 1989 reading filmed by the Lannan foundation, he ends the poem with a final “caw,” making the language of God and nature equal.³⁶ Ginsberg's oral revision suggests that the final articulation of the poem is not stable but endlessly alternates between “caw” and “Lord.”

Ginsberg's move from trust in the authorizing power of naming in “Howl” to the continual revision of “Kaddish” may be seen as inaugurating a parallel movement in his career as a poet. With “Kaddish,” Ginsberg begins to represent visionary consciousness in speech that continues and revises the authorizing, essentializing word (the Logos). Buddhism and its “non-essentializing essentialism” of shunyata become greater presences in the work after “Kaddish,” especially in “Angkor Wat” (1963), the poems collected in The Fall of America (1973), and Mind Breaths (1978). From Mind Breaths onward, Buddhism becomes a central organizing principle in the poetry, offering Ginsberg an opportunity to swerve away from a dichotomous split between matter and spirit and toward an understanding that sees the two as interdependent.³⁷ In his later career, Ginsberg's ultimate referent for prophecy is the breath-unit, what becomes the anchoring, one-syllable exhalation “Ah.” His insistence on the power of “Ah” is instructive for this discussion of prophetic language. “Ah” for Ginsberg is not simply a syllable of authorizing unity; as an exhalation it is not a syllable at all; nor is it referential speech.

Ginsberg argues in his 1984 annotations to “Mind Breaths” that “Ah” is a key to the “vocalization” of the “purification of speech.” He writes that the “Ah” vocalization represents a “one syllable summary of the Prajnaparamita Sutra.”³⁸ The Prajnaparamita Sutra, sometimes translated as the Heart Sutra, is concerned with the Buddhist doctrine of the purification of speech; moreover, it is known in nearly all versions of Buddhism as the comprehensive sutra on shunyata. As articulations of Buddhist emptiness, Ginsberg's alternating “caw” and “Lord” in “Kaddish”—and, later, his emphasis on an “elemental” breath of “Ah”—represent the fullness of a prophetic language emptied of absolutist meaning.

As a foundation for prophecy, Ginsberg's principle of one speech-breath-thought denies a transcendent referentiality; yet its emphasis on embodied divinity distrusts language that refuses to point beyond its own textuality. During his 1949 incarceration in the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, Ginsberg writes with Carl Solomon: “[B]eyond a certain point there can be no spoken communication and all speech is useless.”³⁹ “Caw” and “Lord” reverberate throughout Ginsberg's continuous revisions; thus, as “useless” as speech may be, it is not replaced by silence in his prophetic poetry. Referentiality is, for Ginsberg, suffused with shunyata, the annihilation of fixed designation. Prophetic representation emerges from an apocalyptic, “elemental” fusion of immanence (“caw”) and transcendence (“Lord”), whose continual revision prevents the re-reification of vision as a transcendence inaccessible to matter, or as an immanence neglectful of spirit.

Notes

1. A notable exception is Alicia Ostriker's “‘Howl’ Revisited: The Poet as Jew,” American Poetry Review 26 (July/August 1997): 28-31. Published shortly after Ginsberg's death, Ostriker's essay mixes personal retrospection with critical commentary on Ginsberg's complex and at times contradictory response to Hebraic tradition. See also Ostriker's “Blake, Ginsberg, Madness, and the Prophet as Shaman,” in William Blake and the Moderns, ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1982).

2. Brenda Knight, ed., Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari, 1996); Richard Peabody, ed., A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation (London: High Risk, 1997). Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace are editing an anthology of feminist reconsiderations of female Beat writers titled The Distaff Side. My forthcoming book, “Strange Prophecies Anew”: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press) situates Ginsberg's work within the revisionary context of modern poetic prophecy, arguing that Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg constitute a countertraditional prophetic line of poets who continue and revise the dominant religious and scientific discourses of their periods.

   Scholars also are reenvisioning Beat literature at the major conference level. Johnson and Grace's anthology takes its title from a panel they organized at the 1998 Modern Language Association conference, where presenters examined a range of perspectives on the productive, often neglected role of women in the Beat era. At this same conference. “The Beats and Ethnicity” explored the multiethnic borrowings of major male Beat writers.

3. Marjorie Perloff, “A Lion in Our Living Room: Reading Allen Ginsberg in the Eighties,” in Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1990), 201, 222.

4. Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martin's, 1992).

5. Discussions of Ginsberg in major academic journals since 1980 include Paul Portugés, “Allen Ginsberg's Paul Cézanne and the Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus,” Contemporary Literature 21 (summer 1980): 435-49; Jay Dougherty, “From Society to Self: Ginsberg's Inward Turn in ‘Mind Breaths,’” Sagetrieb 6 (spring 1987): 81-92; Steve Harney, “Ethnos and the Beat Poets,” Journal of American Studies 25 (December 1991): 363-80; and David R. Jarraway, “‘Standing by His Word’: The Politics of Allen Ginsberg's Vietnam ‘Vortex,’” Journal of American Culture 16 (fall 1993): 81-88.

6. James Breslin, “The Origins of Howl and Kaddish,” in On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Lewis Hyde (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1984), 402.

7. Ekbert Faas, “Confronting the Horrific,” in On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Hyde, 443.

8. Paul Portugés, The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg (Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, 1978), 45.

9. Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 253.

10. Gary Snyder, unpublished letters of 6 and 12 April 1959; in the Allen Ginsberg Papers (M0733), Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries; quoted with permission from the Stanford University Libraries and Gary Snyder. Copyright © 1999, Gary Snyder.

11. Allen Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, ed. Barry Miles (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), line 1. All subsequent quotations from Howl are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

12. Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish, in Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 209. All subsequent quotations from Kaddish are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically.

13. Bruce Comens, Apocalypse and After: Modern Strategy and Postmodern Tactics in Pound, Zukofsky, and Williams (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1995), 20-21. In Kaddish, the romantic underpinnings of the pastoral exist in tension with an urban landscape whose inhabitants are both cowed by and hopeful about the destructive and regenerative future signified by the Bomb. See also Ginsberg's “How Kaddish Happened,” in Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York: Grove, 1973), in which Ginsberg describes the tension between pastoralism and urbanism as a dichotomy both apocalyptic and futuristic.

14. At times important religious and political distinctions between Orthodox and Reform Judaism may seem blurred in this essay. This blurring is a result of Ginsberg's various positionings of himself along an Orthodox-Reform continuum. Strict Orthodox practices that would be unacceptable from a Reform perspective were at times important to Ginsberg, and never more so than at the time of his mother's death. In “‘Howl’ Revisited,” Ostriker argues that Ginsberg's complex relationship to Hebraic tradition is crucial to understanding him as a Jewish writer: “[A]mbivalence toward Jewishness … is a key ingredient of post-Enlightenment Jewish writing. … To believe in the host culture's own ideals about itself, and then to write as an indignant social critic when the host nation fails (of course) to embody those ideals: this is all normal for the Jewish writer” (31).

15. Mortimer J. Cohen, review of Kaddish, Jewish Exponent, 10 November 1961; quoted from On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Hyde, 101.

16. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 9.

17. For Ginsberg, prophetic language is primordial but also personal, located in the body, speech, and mind of the individual speaker. In Howl, Ginsberg's “one speech-breath-thought” poetics fuses language, body, and consciousness—for Ginsberg, the Body, Speech, and Mind of Buddhist practice—in an effort to yoke the “elemental verbs” of prophetic discourse with “the noun and dash of consciousness.” Prophetic language in Howl is an immanent principle in human consciousness “jumped” with the transcendental “sensation” of “Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus” (l. 74).

18. These lines from the traditional Kaddish prayer are translated in Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning (New York: Jonathan David, 1969), 172.

19. Joseph Wittreich Jr., preface to Milton and the Line of Vision (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1975), xviii. Wittreich argues that the Western prophet is “speechless” outside the lineage of prophecy (xv). Once the prophet enters into the intrapoetic relationships of this lineage, “he becomes articulate, even to the point of engaging … in corrective criticism” (xvi).

20. Lamm, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, 165.

21. See David Loy, “The Clôture of Deconstruction: A Mahāyāna Critique of Derrida,” International Philosophical Quarterly 27 (March 1987): 59-80. Loy compares Derridean deconstruction to Mahayana Buddhism (which Ginsberg practiced in the final twenty-five years of his life) in order to reread Derrida's work through the lens of Nagarjuna, the Indian master whose deconstructive philosophy is central to nearly all forms of Buddhism. Emphasizing that Nagarjuna's philosophy is a “form of deconstruction that antedates [Derrida's] by some nineteen centuries,” Loy implies that Nagarjuna's radical distrust of language embraces deconstructive directions at which Derrida only hesitates.

22. Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 233.

23. Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 207.

24. Ibid., 206-7.

25. On Ginsberg's language, see John Tytell, Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 4-16. Tytell emphasizes the similarities between the language of Howl and that of Kaddish in order to illustrate Beat literary revisions of Cold War disciplinary practices, but his analysis would benefit from a discussion of the complex dynamic between complicity and subversion in Kaddish. For Ginsberg, silencing and policing work in tandem to produce a language for prophecy; this language is crucial to the revisionary poetics of Kaddish. Ginsberg's revisionary strategies proceed from both a recovery and re-covery of postwar identity. What M. L. Rosenthal terms Ginsberg's “refusal to repress” in Kaddish produces Naomi's unchecked flow of language, which I argue unleashes desire as the poem moves, paradoxically, toward “the final cops of madness”; see Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 111-12.

26. As Ginsberg's revisions to the poem demonstrate, Howl makes its own attempt to fuse matter and spirit. While revising the poem's opening lines, Ginsberg recast his “mystical” protagonists as “hysterical,” a revision that stands in the final draft of the poem. The substitution of hysterical for mystical replaces a term that describes a seemingly transcendental, visionary consciousness with one that describes a condition embedded for twentieth-century readers in the practice of psychoanalysis. In his 1986 annotations to the poem, Ginsberg deems his revision of mystical to hysterical “crucial” because it infuses the “initial idealistic impulse of the line” with material representation (Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, 124).

27. See R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson, Sanity, Madness, and the Family (London: Tavistock, 1964; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1970); Erving Goffman, “The Moral Career of the Mental Patient” and “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions,” in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor, 1961), 1-124. My own discussion of identity, madness, power, and discipline is indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, especially his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977) and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon, 1965). Although the manner in which institutional practices tend to discipline subjectivity has been communicated in literary studies most frequently through Foucault's work, I prefer to focus here on material that was available to Ginsberg during his early career. Laing's work, especially, was an influence on Ginsberg at this time. In a 1984 interview with Laing, Ginsberg cites him as an influence on the development in Howl and Kaddish of a language that could represent a redemptive madness; see Allen Ginsberg with R. D. Laing (London: ICA Video, 1984; The Anthony Roland Collection of Films on Art, 1989). In this interview, Laing expresses “gratitude” to Ginsberg for the influence of Howl, explaining that the poem afforded him “consolation” during his early intellectual development by demonstrating that others shared his attitude toward what he saw as the damage done to the psyche by postwar institutional culture. Ginsberg, in turn, declares that the two share a “common-sense awareness” of an element of “sacred intelligence” in humanity.

28. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983). Although Anti-Oedipus appeared eleven years after Kaddish, the conceptual framework it shares with the poem provides a useful vocabulary in two areas. As a text that emerges from the anti-psychiatric movement, Anti-Oedipus fuses theories of a productive unconscious with a social critique of capitalist culture. Deleuze and Guattari's book is also informed by poststructuralist theories of language, a difference that sets it apart from the work of Laing and Goffman, which is roughly contemporary with the composition of Kaddish. Deleuze and Guattari share Laing's emphasis on decentering “demonological” approaches to mental illness, but the “center” that resonates through Anti-Oedipus—the walking schizoid figure—is informed by an antifoundationalist philosophy that, like Kaddish, privileges linguistic flow over linguistic fixity as a path toward decentering the demonizing subject.

29. Lee Edelman, “Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 567. Edelman's discussion draws on representations of homosexuality in Cold War popular media and specifically emphasizes the rhetorical strategies of a 1964 Life magazine photo-essay on male homosexuality in the United States (“Homosexuality in America,” Life, 26 June 1964, 66-80). The Life essay asks a question that reveals much about the space occupied by non-normative desire in Cold War domestic and international relations: “Do the homosexuals, like the Communists, intend to bury us?” (76). Edelman notes that in an era when homosexuality was considered a threat equivalent to communism, the article's language of unveiling is infused with a nationalistic urge to make its audience “better readers of homosexuality and homosexual signs” (556). The urge to unveil, then, produces greater containment.

30. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 15.

31. Breslin, “The Origins of Howl and Kaddish,” 423.

32. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 123.

33. Deleuze and Guattari write that the schizoid “takes the artifice seriously and plays the game to the hilt: if you want them, you can have them—territorialities infinitely more artificial than the ones that society offers us, totally artificial new families, secret lunar societies” (35). Of course, Deleuze and Guattari's own theoretical language also “plays the game to the hilt.” Their efforts in Anti-Oedipus to avoid traps of territorialization with what seems like their own “secret lunar society”—attempts to out-artifice the artifice of referentiality—constitute a divine madness of antifoundationalist philosophy. As “outrageous” as Deleuze and Guattari represent themselves to be, their language for prophecy, like Ginsberg's in Howl and Kaddish, is nowhere more serious than when it professes outrage at the disciplinary practices of modern psychiatry.

34. On Louis's presumed reestablishment as the oedipal father, see Breslin, “The Origins of Howl and Kaddish,” 423.

35. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 35.

36. Allen Ginsberg, dir. Lewis MacAdams and John Dorr, Lannan Literary Videos, 1989, videocassette.

37. Of course, the significant role of Buddhism in Ginsberg's prophetic poetry has been discussed elsewhere. Gordon Ball, a resident with Ginsberg in his Cherry Valley commune in the early 1970s, claims that Buddhism and Blake are critical elements in Ginsberg's creation of a language for prophecy that “reconciles” God, sexuality, and imagination (Allen Ginsberg, Journals, Mid-Fifties, 1954-1958, ed. Gordon Ball [New York: HarperCollins, 1995], 173). The earliest critics of Ginsberg and the Beats dismissed their Buddhism as Bohemian dabbling. Norman Podhoretz, a classmate of Ginsberg's at Columbia who characterized the Beats as “know-nothing Bohemians,” argues that the turn from West to East by the Beats is part of a vacuous “conviction that any form of rebellion against American culture … is admirable” (“A Howl of Protest in San Francisco,” New Republic, 16 September 1957, 20). Michael Rumaker traces the “failure” of Howl to the way in which a “hollow talk of eternity” and Buddhism “corrupts” the genuine “anger” in the poem (“Allen Ginsberg's ‘Howl,’” Black Mountain Review [fall 1957]; reprinted in On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Hyde, 36). Others, most recently Helen Vendler, see Ginsberg's Buddhism as a force of “quietism that would turn every phenomenon into illusion” and that diminishes the energy of the poems (“American X-Rays: Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry,” New Yorker, 4 November 1996, 98). Paul Portugés has written most extensively on Ginsberg's use of Buddhism in his poetry, yet for Portugés, shunyata seems to signify only Ginsberg's attempt to evade Cold War censoriousness: shunyata “is the Buddhist formula for the absence of rational, controlled mind” (“Allen Ginsberg's Paul Cézanne and the Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus,” 444-45). Asked by Lewis MacAdams in a 1989 interview if Buddhism possessed a tradition of prophecy that corresponds to Judeo-Christian prophecy, Ginsberg argued that shunyata represents a mode of prophetic consciousness, that “the shunyata aspect” of phenomena is what “gives almost everything its sacred quality” (Allen Ginsberg, dir. MacAdams and Dorr). Ginsberg explained that shunyata provided him with a matrix of “prophetical sharpness.”

38. Ginsberg, annotations to “Mind Breaths,” in Collected Poems, 1947-1980, 791.

39. Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, 143.