Howl and Other Poems

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In the following essay, Merrill offers an examination of Ginsberg's “Howl” and other works.
SOURCE: Merrill, Thomas F. “Howl and Other Poems.” In Allen Ginsberg, revised edition, pp. 50-69. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

HISTORY OF HOWL

Despite the fact that it has been fashionable to say that Howl exploded on the American literary scene like a bombshell, that San Francisco finally “turned Ginsberg on,” and that this poem heralded in the Beat Generation, it is difficult to find in this admittedly extraordinary poem much that has not been anticipated in inchoate and sometimes even mature form in Empty Mirror. Howl is a crystallization of incipient attitudes and techniques that Ginsberg had held for years, but it is hardly the beginning of a new poetic direction or even a sudden eruption of outrage. It cannot even be said that Howl is uniquely modern in form or intention. Most would have to agree with Kenneth Rexroth that this type of poetry is “in one of the oldest traditions, that of Hosea or the other angry Minor prophets of the Bible.”1Howl, therefore, is not a genesis; it is an amplification.

Part of the reason for considering Howl an amplification has nothing to do with literature at all. The furor surrounding its initial publication was like a shot heard round the world. The poem was enshrouded by such sensationalism during the months of litigation that immediately followed its release that there was little opportunity for sober, reflective digestion of it. The press, with its appetite whetted for sensationalism rather than for impartial assessment, had a field day. Responsible commentary appeared mostly in Judge Horn's courtroom where the atmosphere was at least as much political as literary. As an example of the complete critical inadequacy with which the poem was first received, Lawrence Ferlinghetti—commenting on testimony made by a prosecution witness (an instructor from the Catholic University of San Francisco) who had remarked: “You feel like you are going through the gutter when you have to read that stuff”—observed that “the critically devastating things the prosecution's witnesses could have said but didn't, remain one of the great Catholic silences of the day.”2 If nothing else, the legal proceedings brought against Howl for obscenity served to make it easily one of the bestselling volumes of poetry of the twentieth century.

Howl was published by Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books in San Francisco as a part of the Pocket Poets Series. The first edition was printed in England by Villiers, passed through United States Customs, and was subsequently delivered to San Francisco for publication in the fall of 1956. A series of almost comical legal interventions then led to the “obscenity” trial, which eventually pronounced Howl and Other Poems as not being without “the slightest redeeming social importance.” In other words, in the eyes of the court, it was found not to be obscene.

The first event leading to the trial occurred on 24 March 1957, when a portion of a second printing of the volume was stopped by custom officials on the basis of section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930. The San Francisco Chronicle quoted Chester MacPhee, the collector of customs, as saying that “the words and the sense of the writing is obscene. You wouldn't want your children to come across it.”3 Shortly afterward, the American Civil Liberties Union objected to the action after having read the manuscript supplied to it by the publisher Ferlinghetti. While this litigation was going on, a new edition of Howl was being printed in the United States, which took it out of the jurisdiction of customs.

A little over a month later, Ferlinghetti published an article in the San Francisco Chronicle in which, as he himself paraphrases, “I recommend a medal be made for Collector MacPhee, since his action was already rendering the book famous. But the police were soon to take over this advertising account and do a much better job—10,000 copies of Howl were in print by the time they finished with it.” In a more serious vein, Ferlinghetti went on to say, “It is not the poet but what he observes which is revealed as obscene. The great obscene wastes of Howl are the sad wastes of the mechanized world, lost among atom bombs and insane nationalisms.”4

The stand of the customs officials crumbled shortly afterward when the United States attorney in San Francisco refused to act against Howl; the books were released. But this was only an interlude. Within a week, Ferlinghetti was arrested by a representative of the juvenile department (“Well named, in this case,” Ferlinghetti wryly remarked) of the San Francisco Police Department.5 The American Civil Liberties Union posted bail, but the fight had started.

Ferlinghetti documented a representative selection of critical support for Howl in his article “Horn on Howl,” published in the Evergreen Review. A few random excerpts provide some appreciation of a rare situation in which a literary production received unqualified praise. “I only wish to say that the book is a thoroughly serious work of literary art” (Henry Rago, editor of Poetry); “Howl and Other Poems … is a dignified, sincere and admirable work of art” (William Hogan, San Francisco Chronicle); “The poet gives us the most painful details; he moves toward a statement of experience that is challenging and finally noble” (Robert Duncan and Ruth Witt-Diamant, San Francisco poets); “Howl is one of the most important books of poetry published in the last ten years” (Thomas Parkinson, University of California); “the book has considerable distinction as literature, being a powerful and artistic expression of a meaningful philosophical attitude” (James Laughlin, New Directions publisher).6

In the course of the trial, numerous witnesses for the defense offered more detailed explication of the poet's intent—but with no less lavish praise. Most informative are the testimonies of professor Mark Schorer of the University of California and Kenneth Rexroth. The following portion of Schorer's testimony from the trial transcript was reprinted in Ferlinghetti's Evergreen Review article:

The theme of the poem is announced very clearly in the opening line. … Then the following lines that make up the first part attempt to create the impression of a kind of nightmare world in which people representing “the best minds of my generation,” in the author's view, are wandering like damned souls in hell. That is done through a kind of series of what one might call surrealistic images, a kind of state of hallucinations. Then in the second section the mood of the poem changes and it becomes an indictment of those elements in modern society that, in the author's view, are destructive of the best qualities in human nature and of the best minds. Those elements are, I would say, predominantly materialism, conformity and mechanization leading toward war. And then the third part is a personal address to a friend, real or fictional, of the poet or of the person who is speaking in the poet's voice—those are not always the same thing—who is mad and in a madhouse, and is the specific representative of what the author regards as a general condition.

(151-52)

Schorer provides as good a statement of the structure, theme, and general strategy of the poem as is possible under the circumstances. In his testimony Kenneth Rexroth associates Howl with biblical tradition, evincing sophisticated forensic tactics as well as an acute literary perspicuity:

The simplest term for such writing is prophetic, it is easier to call it that than anything else because we have a large body of prophetic writing to refer to. There are the prophets of the Bible, which [Howl] greatly resembles in purpose and in language and in subject matter. … The theme is the denunciation of evil and a pointing out of the way out, so to speak. That is prophetic literature. “Woe! Woe! Woe! The City of Jerusalem! The Syrian is about to come down or has already and you are to do such and such a thing and you must repent and do thus and so.” And Howl, the four parts of the poem—that is including the “Footnote to Howl,” of course, again, is Biblical in reference. The reference is to the Benedicite, which says over and over again, “Blessed is the fire, Blessed is the light, Blessed are the trees, and Blessed is this and Blessed is that,” and [Ginsberg] is saying “Everything that is human is Holy to me,” and that the possibility of salvation in his terrible situation which he reveals is through love and through the love of everything Holy in man. So that, I would say, that this just about covers the field of typically prophetic poetry.

(154)

This early criticism points out the two decisive and negative poles in most of Ginsberg's subsequent poetry: existential despair and the implicit optimism of scriptural prophecy. Since the issue of the trial was quickly pared down to the question of Howl's social relevance, aesthetic considerations were held in abeyance.

THE POEM

In Howl, Ginsberg explains in 1969, “what I was digging … was the humor of exhibitionism. You're free to say any damn thing you want; but people are so scared of hearing you say what's unconsciously universal that it's comical. So I wrote with an element of comedy—partly intended to soften the blow.”7Howl was from the first taken so seriously as a political, social, and literary cause célèbre that its comic quality has been generally ignored by critics and social historians. Not by the poet himself, however. William A. Henry III describing Ginsberg's reading of Howl at the McMillin Theater at Columbia in 1981 is stunned that “this puckish little figure, this professorial imp with the loony grin, does not sound angry. He is not wailing about the wickedness of his time. … The audience is laughing with him. They are howling, but in pleasure rather than anger, as he thrusts an arm up for each of the jokes. They hear satire, not nobly expended pain.”8 Henry senses that “something has changed” since Ginsberg's first reading of Howl at Six Gallery in San Francisco a quarter century earlier—that the older poet “is mocking the past—mocking the angry radicals, mocking the dreamers, mocking the quest for visions.” Maybe so. Ginsberg and American society have both changed. But we should not let this deceive us to think that the comic mockery in Howl is simply a recent, accidental accretion; it was inherent in Howl from the beginning.

Howl was “typed out madly in one afternoon,” Ginsberg tells us, “a tragic custard-pie comedy of wild phrasing, meaningless images for the beauty of abstract poetry of mind running along making awkward combinations like Charley Chaplin's walk, long saxophone-like chorus lines I knew Kerouac would hear sound of—Taking off from his own inspired prose line really a new poetry.”9 The words Ginsberg uses to describe his state—madly, custard-pie comedy, wild, meaningless, Charley Chaplin—all speak to a sense of creative freedom, the aggressive irresponsibility of unrestrained whimsy and the deliberate indifference to personal and literary inhibitions of any sort. It was, as Ginsberg says, an act of comic exhibitionism effected through a deliberate exorcism of fear. “I thought I wouldn't write a poem,” he explains, “but just write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real mind—sum up my life—something I wouldn't be able to show anybody, write for my own soul's ear and a few other golden ears.” Ginsberg sought a liberation from the inhibitions of shame; “Shame,” he once said, “is just one aspect of fear.”10

But Howl was also a declaration of metrical freedom. While in retrospect Ginsberg often accommodates the literati by attempting to classify his metrical form (“like [in] certain passages of Howl and certain passages of Kaddish—there are definite rhythms which could be analyzed as corresponding to classical rhythms, though not necessarily English classical rhythms, or Sanskrit prosody,” at the moment of creation he insists that he is “working with my own neural impulses and writing impulses.”11 He then explains the technique in a way that suggests the full extent of the sort of metrical freedom Howl demonstrates:

I wasn't really working with a classical unit, I
was working with my own neural impulses and writing
impulses. See, the difference is between someone
sitting down to write a poem in a definite preconceived
metrical pattern and filling in that pattern, and
someone working with physiological movements and
arriving at a pattern, and perhaps even arriving at a
pattern which might even have a name, or might even
have a classical usage, but arriving at it organically
rather than synthetically. Nobody's got any objection
to even iambic pentameter if it comes from a source
deeper than the mind, that is to say if it comes from
the breathing and the belly and the lungs.(12)

The first part of Howl is a list of the atrocities that have allegedly been endured by Ginsberg and his friends. More generally, these atrocities accumulate to form a desperate critique of a civilization that has set up a power structure that determines people's “mode of consciousness … sexual enjoyments … different labors and … loves.”13 The theme is clearly the same as Ginsberg's essay “Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs” in which he pleads: “When will we discover an America that will not deny its own God Who takes up arms, money, police, and a million hands to murder the consciousness of God Who spits in the beautiful face of Poetry which sings the Glory of God and weeps in the dust of the world?”14

This is prose, but it could easily be inserted into the text of Howl without change. Even the structural device of the recurring word who is exploited, which demonstrates how blurred, even nonexistent, is the line between poetry and prose in Ginsberg's work. The word who, Ginsberg has explained, was used in Howl “to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from again onto another streak of invention.”15 One might even say that who was Ginsberg's point of contact between vision and reality—an anchor that regularly brought his free flights back to earth and kept the poem from disappearing into the mists of a subjective wasteland.

Who, it can be said, also served as an organizational excuse; by its sanction, otherwise unrelated chunks of inspiration could be thrown spontaneously into the poem. In other words, the device was a structural shield that kept “thinking” at bay, thereby allowing imaginative illumination and association unlimited freedom. Ginsberg's reiterative device suggests, of course, the influence of Whitman. As Gay Wilson Allen points out, “Whitman's parallelism, or thought rhythm, is so often accompanied and reinforced by parallel wording and sounds that the two techniques are often almost identical. An easy way to collect examples of Whitman's ‘thought rhythm’ is to glance down the left-hand margin and notice the lines beginning with the same word, and usually the same grammatical construction: ‘I will … I will … I will …’ or ‘Where … Where … Where …’ or ‘When … When … When …’ etc.”16

Such a technique is indicative of a poetic movement that is cumulative rather than logical or progressive, as Allen also observes; and it is uniquely suited to what he calls an “expanding ego psychology.” Such a psychology, to follow Allen's argument further, “results in an enumerative style, the cataloging of a representative and symbolical succession of images, conveying the sensation of pantheistic unity and endless becoming.” Ginsberg's supreme celebration of “pantheistic unity” is nowhere better sought than in “Footnote to Howl.” The cumulative technique also goes back to the Hebraic roots that Ginsberg acknowledges as influences upon his work; and Allen notes that “the Hebraic poet developed a rhythm of thought, repeating and balancing ideas and sentences (or independent clauses) instead of syllables or accents.”17

This criticism of Whitman is relative to Howl not only because Ginsberg's poetry exploits the devices of accumulation and parallelism but also because the unit of the poem is so decisively the line, even when the particular line is attenuated to meet the demands of an inspirational flight. E. C. Ross's point about the line in Whitman's poetry could also be applied to Ginsberg's Howl. “Whitman's verse,” says Ross, “with the exception that it is not metered—is farther removed from prose than is traditional verse itself, for the reason that the traditional verse is, like prose, composed in sentences, whereas Whitman's verse is composed in lines. … A run-on line is rare in Whitman. … The law of his structure is that the unit of sense is the measure of the line.18 Precisely the same law of structure holds true for Ginsberg's Howl showing the extent of his debt to Whitman, as well as providing a rationale for regarding Howl as poetry.

To read Howl properly, then, is to avoid the impulse to search for a logic or a rational connection of ideas, as Ginsberg would be the first to acknowledge. Howl must be read the same way as Whitman's poetry, but with a twentieth-century consciousness. Ginsberg himself has lamented that “everybody assumes … that [Whitman's] line is a big freakish uncontrollable necessary prosaic goof. No attempt's been made to use it in the light of early XX Century organization of new speech-rhythm prosody to build up large organic structures.”19Howl seems to be an experiment along these lines.

The yardsticks to measure the worth of the first part of Howl are basically two: the “tightness” of the catalogue and the maintenance of spontaneity. The first measurement has to do with what Ginsberg calls “density”—the richness of imagery packed into a given line. By and large, the poem does achieve density. Some might object that such richness is achieved at the cost of grammatical coherence. The same objection could be leveled at Whitman's verse, and further, since the movement of the poem is not logical but cumulative, grammar not only ceases to become a serious concern, but may very well be an impediment to one's contact with reality. “Nature herself has no grammar,” says Ernest Fenollosa, and so the classical grammarians' definition of the sentence as “a complete thought” or as a construction “uniting subject and predicate” is simply at odds with reality. There is no completeness in nature and therefore there should be no completeness in the sentence. “The sentence … is not an attribute of Nature but an accident of man as a conversational animal.”20 It is no accident that the entire seventy-eight-line first section counts grammatically as a single sentence.

A substantial portion of the poem's density is also supplied by the method Ginsberg derived from Cézanne's optic tricks—the petites sensations. Their verbal equivalents in Howl are such juxtapositions as “negro streets,” “angry fix,” “paint hotels,” “blind streets,” “Peyote solidities,” “hydrogen jukebox,” and so on endlessly throughout the poem. “I used a lot of [Cézanne's] material in the references in the last part of the first section of Howl: ‘sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus,’” Ginsberg has said. “The last part of Howl was really an homage to Cézanne's method, in a sense I adapted what I could to writing.”21

The second measuring stick for evaluating Howl is its spontaneity. “But how sustain a long line in poetry (lest it lapse into prosaic)?” Ginsberg asked himself.22 One potent answer is Olson's “projective” principle: “One Perception must Immediately and Directly Lead to a Further Perception.” If this dogma can be summarized in a word, it is speed. Spontaneity lives on speed, and the creating poet must avoid the lag. He does so, it seems, through association. There are many examples operative in the first part of Howl, but Ginsberg has specifically described the principle with reference to part two. He begins with a feeling, he says, that develops into something like a sigh. Then he looks around for the object that is making him sigh; then he “sigh[s] in words.” At best, he goes on, he finds a word or several words that become key to the feeling, and he builds on them to complete the statement. “It's simply by a process of association that I find what the rest of the statement is, what can be collected around that word, what that word is connected to.” He then demonstrates the process specifically:

Partly by simple association, the first thing that comes to my mind like “Moloch is” or “Moloch who,” and then whatever comes out. But that also goes along with a definite rhythmic impulse, like DA de de DA de de DA de de DA DA. “Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows.” And before I wrote “Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows,” I had the word, “Moloch, Moloch, Moloch,” and I also had the feeling DA de de DA de de DA de de DA DA. So it was just a question of looking up and seeing a lot of windows, and saying, oh, windows, of course, but what kind of windows? But not even that—“Moloch whose eyes.” “Moloch whose eyes”—which is beautiful in itself—but what about it, Moloch whose eyes are what? “Thousands blind.” And I had to finish it somehow. So I hadda say “windows.” It looked good afterward.23

Ginsberg emphasizes the word afterward because the spontaneity of his poetry depends upon the existentialist formula: existence precedes essence. While he is writing, he is living (existing) through the experience. Thought about that experience (essence) would reduce the immediacy of the experience itself—even make it secondhand—and so, as Ginsberg says, “usually during the composition, step by step, word by word and adjective by adjective, if it's at all spontaneous, I don't know whether it even makes sense sometimes.”24 Spontaneity seems to require suspension of the rational faculties for the purpose of permitting the logic of the heart to operate freely. Testimony for this assertion is Ginsberg's own: “Sometimes I do know it makes complete sense, and I start crying.”25 Clearly, Howl, like most of Ginsberg's work, follows a grammar of emotion. The “verification principle” is shifted from the logical positivists' tests—Can I see it, smell it, taste it, hear it, or feel it?—to the simplest test of the heart: “Does it make me cry?”

Any analysis or explication of Howl would seem an affront to the poem's very method, which is literally a violent howl of spontaneous, suprarational feeling. Ex post facto explanation appears an almost certain way of completely missing the point. Nevertheless, a few generalizations and observations may prove helpful guideposts through this “animal cry” of human anguish. First, the poet sets himself up as observer in the opening line. He is witness to the destruction of “the best minds of my generation” by madness (CP [Collected Poems 1947-1980] 126). “Madness presumably is the state of civilization that the poet understands as hostile to the sentient martyrs whose collective experiences under its tyranny are catalogued in a cumulative, cresting wave of relative clauses. Second, at the same time, madness occurs thematically in the first part of the poem in other forms. For example, it is suggested that these martyrs have been attracted to what is implied as a mad quest: they are “burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night,” and they have “bared their brains to Heaven” (CP, 126). Farther along in the poem it is mentioned that they “thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy [italics added]” (CP, 127), which is later followed by a reference to Ginsberg's own commitment to an asylum (CP, 130), and finally the specific application of the madness theme to a specific individual, Carl Solomon, who is undergoing treatment at Rockland State Hospital (CP, 130).

There is a degree of ambivalence in the use of this crucial term madness in the first line. Does it reflect merely the “madness” of an officially acceptable level of reality that is uncongenial to the suffering heroes of the poem, or is it not possible that this destructive “madness” also describes the predicament of nonconformists? In other words, are not these martyrs self-destroyed because they refuse to live on the acceptable plane of official reality? In these terms, the “angel-headed hipsters” are embracing “madness” as an alternative to an unbearable sanity. Their madness consists in their refusal to accept a nonspiritual view of the world, in their “burning for the ancient heavenly connection” in a civilization that has proclaimed that God is dead. For this reason, Ginsberg emphasizes their thinking “they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy” (CP, 127).26

Nevertheless, a tension is created in the poem between planes of reality that are differentiated in terms of time. The “hipsters” undergo a pilgrimage through “blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning of the mind” (CP, 126), which illuminates “all the motionless world of Time, between / Peyote solidities of halls …” (CP, 126), and so on. This time is supernatural, eternal—not the chronological time of unilluminated existence. Peyote is a chemical channel to timelessness, and the “lightening of the mind” is a petite sensation that is a gap in time itself. Among other things, the “hipster” pilgrimage is a journey out of time and the insufferable plane of reality it represents. Because of this journey, the pilgrims “threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade” (CP, 129). For pursuing “timelessness,” the “hipsters” are punished by “Time”; and the symbol of the tyrannical alarm clocks is particularly effective because of their association with the humdrum, inhuman requirements of the “square world.”

Christian parallels are unavoidable. The persecution of the early followers of Christ in Roman catacombs finds its counterpart in the despair of those “who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in the grandfather night” (CP, 127), and those “who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits in Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse … or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality” (CP, 129). Finally, there is Carl Solomon, the supreme martyr—the archetype who is “really in the total animal soup of time” (CP, 130)—to whom the poem is addressed.

Part two of Howl, written under the influence of peyote, is an accusation: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?” (CP, 131). The protagonist “who” is now replaced, in an attempt to coordinate the structures of the two sections, by the antagonist “Moloch.” The spontaneity of this part is vitiated not so much because Ginsberg violates the principles of rapid associations and the like, but because the element of surprise is gone. The unraveling of the j'accuse is painfully inevitable, and Ginsberg is thrown back upon the single resource of imagery. The effect of the petites sensation has by this time been blunted almost to the point of tedium, and the voice of the propagandist begins to usurp that of the poet. The case is almost identical with the much criticized Usury canto of Ezra Pound. Without the sauce of the unexpected, Ginsberg's Hebraic lamentations on Moloch become increasingly difficult to digest as they drag on to the conclusion where the “Mad generation” is hurled “down on the rocks of Time” (CP, 132).

Part three begins suspiciously like a “peptalk” or a get-well card: “Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am” (CP, 132). Whether this assertion is diagnosis or flattery hinges on the connotation one chooses for madness. Solomon, however, has been raised, through the bulk of accumulation, to the status of a symbol. The final section of the poem unfolds as a dark version of Donne's “Seventeenth Meditation.” Certainly, “no man is an island,” but Donne never could have anticipated such lines as “I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets,” or “I'm with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha” (CP, 133).

Whether the following explanation Ginsberg gave for the total pattern of Howl was premeditation or afterthought, even he would probably decline to say; but it does supply a workable rationale for the project: “Part I, a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamblike youths; Part II names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb; Part III a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in its glory: ‘O starry-spangled shock of Mercy!’ The structure of Part II, pyramidal, with a graduated longer response to the fixed base.”27

Ginsberg considers “Footnote to Howl” as the last of a series of experiments with a fixed base. “I set it as Footnote to Howl because it was an extra variation of the form of Part II,”28 he explains. “Moloch,” the symbols of social illness, was the metrical anchor in part two for a series of graphic but predictable images. Since “Footnote” presumes to offer a cure for the social illness (Moloch), it is appropriate that the structure of both sections be roughly parallel and that the word Holy should operate in the same manner as its counterpart, Moloch. In this way a symmetrical balance is achieved both structurally and thematically. A simple comparison of a line from each section picked at random immediately shows Ginsberg's conscious exploitation of structural balance for thematic purposes:

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

(CP, 131)

Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!

(CP, 134)

Clearly, the distinction between “Moloch” and “Holy” is point of view. One is confronted with identical raw material in both cases (skyscrapers, pavements, and urban commonplaces), but the subjective perspective yields two separate appraisals. On the one hand, there is ugliness; on the other, an understanding of the holiness of everything. The response depends upon how one looks at the world.

If Moloch is a state of mind that is the dark side of a holy state of mind, how does one differentiate between the two attitudes with any precision? Ginsberg once again appears to resort to time as his touchstone. Part two ends in a rhetorical fury that describes, among a plethora of other things, a “Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!” (CP, 132). Similarly, “Footnote” contains near its conclusion the somewhat enigmatic line:

Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!

Two distinct understandings of time are exhibited in these lines: on the one hand, there is a destructive time, which belongs to the realm of Moloch and which scuttles the “mad generation” upon its craggy surface; on the other hand, there is the paradoxical time of holiness, where time and eternity (logical opposites) are reconciled presumably in the “fourth dimension.” To simplify an excessively complicated idea, it appears that Ginsberg is merely attempting to differentiate between an objective, chronological timekeeping, with its attendant implications of responsibility, duty, and competition, and a subjective, Bergsonian temporal measurement that understands time only as it is relative to human existence. Time, therefore, becomes a symbol of two separate realms of existence: “squares” read time on their wristwatches; “hipsters” read the holy “clocks in space,” which inform that time does not matter—that the truth is timeless.

The concern for objective time, then, is not merely a symptom of Moloch's activity in the world; it is the very activity itself. Time is the natural enemy of holiness because holiness is discovered through love. One need go no further than traditional love poetry to be convinced that time is the natural opponent of love, but Ginsberg presumes to carry this natural antagonism to its extreme by implying that the modern obsession with objective time prevents one from experiencing a true community with others. The enigmatic assertion in “Footnote”—“Who digs Los Angeles is Los Angeles” (CP, 134)—serves to sum up, in a way, Ginsberg's whole attitude towards time. Time to him is always present tense because he acknowledges only time which is “lived through.” Los Angeles, for example, is not just a place existing at a certain time; Los Angeles is a human being's concerned impression of Los Angeles. For that concerned person, Los Angeles exists only when he or she is “digging” it. In that sense, the individual is a solipsist of sorts who creates the reality of Los Angeles in the mind, timeless and placeless, holy and eternal.

OTHER POEMS

Appearing with the notorious Howl in the 1956 volume are several other poems of significance. One of the best, “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound,” is a vividly rendered, four-part meditation that effectively transforms the detailed reality of a bus station baggage room into a metaphysical allegory:

it was the racks and these on the racks I saw naked in electric light the night before I quit,
the racks were created to hang our possessions, to keep us together, a temporary shift in space,
God's only way of building the rickety structure of Time,
to hold the bags to send on the roads, to carry our luggage from place to place
looking for a bus to ride us back home to Eternity where the heart was left and farewell tears began.

(CP, 154)

It is not the allegory nor the symbolism that makes this poem work so well; it is, as so consistently is the case, Ginsberg's eye. In line with meditative tradition to which it belongs, “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound” scrutinizes the smallest physical objects in order to “find Heaven in a grain of sand.”

“Sunflower Sutra” (CP, 138) is somewhat anticipated by the earlier “In back of the real” (CP, 113). The themes of both are essentially the same, but “In back of the real” exhibits Ginsberg's early flirtation with Williams's short-line method, while “Sunflower Sutra” demonstrates his advance toward the “Melvillian bardic breath” long-line technique. Both poems present flowers seen against backdrops of a railroad yard in San Jose and a “tincan banana dock,” respectively. In “In back of the real,” the flower is a symbolic martyr (“It had a / brittle black stem and corolla of yellowish dirty / spikes like Jesus' inchlong crown …”) that suffers under the oppressive grime of industrialization. It is a “flower of industry, tough spikey ugly flower.” Both Jesus and the flower are understood as bearing the sins of humanity, the adjective “spikey” even suggesting a vague allusion to the stigmata. The point of the poem, which the title explicitly proclaims, is that, despite the ugliness of the exterior of the flower, it is a “flower nonetheless, with the form of the great yellow Rose of your brain / This is the flower of the World.”

The word real in the title is meant to represent only the external appearance of the inherent, natural reality of “flowerness,” which remains constant underneath the filth of civilization. In back of the real (the ugliness) the poet finds an almost platonic formal reality, and the situation of the flower is seen to be an emblem of the present human situation. In short, the theme is hardly different from the theme of “Footnote to Howl” where it is proclaimed that “Everything is holy” in its root nature and is discoverable through love.

The similar themes of the earlier and the later poems permit one to appreciate some of the radical effects that are achieved with the introduction of the long line. The later poem, “Sunflower Sutra,” is a complete metamorphosis and a far more genuine article. Why? The first poem is spare, economical, and contains the striking comparison of the flower with Christ. Although it is written in the first person, the general tone is rather formal. The focus of attention is upon the flower, not upon the perceiver of the flower. In short, the poem has the rudiments of a classical quality to it—classical at least as Williams would use the term. The short line has produced a control that saturates the structure of the poem, even permeating to the treatment of what is intended as a highly personal epiphany.

Contrast this feeling of control with the mood in “Sunflower Sutra,” and the tremendous difference between a relatively good early poem and a later one can be seen in an instant. The distinction totally transcends structure, but structure is its genesis. The intimacy of the first person, to begin with, is expanded through the introduction of a second persona—Jack Kerouac. The description of the scene (structurally a sine qua non in both poems) is developed much more expansively, because of the meditative possibilities of the long line. Dramatic narrative enters the poem, increasing the immediacy and personal intimacy of the moment, so that, when the flower is discovered (“Look at the Sunflower, he said … I rushed up enchanted …”), a kinetic energy is released that begins a buildup of emotion impossible in the earlier poem. Finally, there is no hint of artifice in “Sunflower Sutra.” It is completely natural and completely in the present. There is no scavenging of the past for significant allusion; the immediate ingredients of what is under the nose accomplish everything without assistance, save for the concluding sermon, and make explicit what was implicit in “In back of the real.”

The transition from the short-line form to the long, with its attendant changes in tone, charts the course of Ginsberg's poetry from what might be termed conventional, literary verse to Kerouac's ideal of “spontaneous prose.” As Ginsberg has said, “Of course the distinctions between prose and poetry are broken down anyway. So much that I was saying like a long page of oceanic Kerouac is sometimes as sublime as epic line.”29 What Ginsberg finds so attractive in the long line is, therefore, its possibilities for honestly and without deception telling the truth (which for Ginsberg is, at this stage in his life, inward). The formal devices of traditional poetry are for him hypocritical. For these reasons Ginsberg was so astounded, as he reports it, when Kerouac told him one night “that in the future literature would consist of what people actually wrote rather than what they tried to deceive other people into thinking they wrote, when they revised it later on.”30

“America” (CP, 146)—about as spontaneous as a poem can be—is whimsical, sad, comic, tedious, honest, bitter, impatient, and yet, somehow, incisive. It refuses to settle on a consistent structure. Dialogue discovers that it is monologue and then drifts off into mutterings against a hypothetical national alter ego. The poem is an attempt to catch the mood of a particular attitude toward the United States without the interference of logic. It is a drunken poet arguing after hours with a drunken nation; and yet, through all the turmoil, the gibberish, and the illogicality, a broad-based attack, which rational discourse can only hint at, is launched against American values. The seemingly hopeless illogicality of the poem itself becomes a mirror for the hopeless illogicality it reflects.

Interspersed throughout the poem are lines that suggest almost all the attitudes, postures, and convictions of Ginsberg's earlier poems. First and foremost is the souring of Whitman's exuberant optimism toward America into a disillusionment that suggests the breaking of a covenant: “America I've given you all and now I'm nothing” (CP, 146). This admission is followed later in the poem by an appeal to America to shake off its hypocrisy and be equal to Whitman's challenge: “America when will you be angelic? / When will you take off your clothes?” (CP, 146). The motif of “one time / is all Time if you look / at it out of the grave” earlier articulated in “In Death, Cannot Reach What Is Most Near” (CP, 34), comes directly afterward (“When will you look at yourself through the grave?”), shortly followed by the here-and-now position previously taken in “Metaphysics” (CP, 33): “America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world” (CP, 146).

The characteristic Zen antagonism toward striving and competition is also represented significantly in “America”:

I'm obsessed by Time Magazine …
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business men
                                                                                                                        are serious
                    Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but
                                                                                                                        me.

(CP, 147)

And so the poem continues in a jerky dialogue full of shifting issues, which only at the conclusion bothers to justify its nonsensical logic and its logical nonsense: “America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. / America is this correct?” (CP, 148).

The real impact of the protest in this poem is conveyed structurally. The scattered irritations and objections are merely instrumental caprice; it is the total bewilderment and confusion that one feels in reading the poem rather than the validity of the attacks that quicken one's appreciation of the American dilemma Ginsberg attempts to mirror.

“A Supermarket in California” (CP, 136) is another study of the contrasts between Whitman's America and Ginsberg's. True to the American idiom, the poet is pictured as “shopping for images” in the “supermarket” of American life, dreaming all the while of Whitman's “enumerations.” Here is poet as consumer filling his shopping cart for the ingredients of his art among “Aisles full of husbands!” Implicit in his meditations is the question: What would Whitman have thought of America now? A dramatic reconstruction takes place: “I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, / poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.”

The poet follows Whitman “in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans” (follows him also, in fact, in poetic technique), imaginatively feeling the presence of the “store detective” behind them. Even here, Ginsberg cannot help underscoring the illicitness of the poet's position in society—both his own and Whitman's. No doubt Ginsberg's many brushes with the authorities helped nourish his obsession that the way of the true poet inevitably arouses police suspicion. But the poet can always enjoy freedom of the mind, which is suggested in the following lines:

We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

(CP, 136)

Fortunately, images cost nothing; they have already been paid for by those who have put them up for display, and this fact leads to the final meditation of the last stanza.

“Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?” Ginsberg asks. The urgency of the quo vadis adds pathos to the appeal. There is not much time. What are the options, old “graybeard”? Will they continue their alien course? “Will we walk all night through solitary streets? … we'll both be lonely.” Or will the poet and Whitman give up on their country and “stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage”? Despair and nostalgia seem the two alternatives, and the disciple is bewildered.

The poem ends, as it inevitably must, with a question:

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher.
What America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry
and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the
boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

(CP, 136)

Whitman's America was quite different from the one Ginsberg sees around him, and the next poem in the collection, “Transcripts of Organ Music,” follows Ginsberg “home to our silent cottage” where he ponders his existential misery to a Zen beat.

The poem is quite simply the description of a moment—a timeless moment when an event occurs. The event is nothing more sensational than “a moment of clarity” when the poet “saw the feeling in the heart of things [and] walked out into the garden crying.” The moment sounds very similar to one of Wordsworth's “time spots” or mystic visions, but the reference in Ginsberg's poem is decidedly oriental. The mood is what in Zen would be called wabi, an instance, in Alan Watts's words, “when the artist is feeling depressed or sad, and in this particular emptiness of feeling catches a glimpse of something rather ordinary and unpretentious in its incredible ‘such-ness.’”31

The opening two-line stanza roughly approximates two haiku poems and serves as a kind of introduction, or perhaps frame, for the body proper of the work:

The flower in the glass peanut bottle formerly in the kitchen crooked to take a place in the light,
the closet door opened, because I used it before, it kindly stayed open waiting for me, its owner.

(CP, 140)

Then comes the articulation of the wabi: “I began to feel my misery in pallet on floor, listening to music, my misery, that's why I want to sing.”

Two concepts are of paramount importance to understanding the movement of this poem. One is the expectation of “the presence of the Creator” (satori), and the other is the attempt to dissolve all conflict between man and nature. The medium in which both phenomena occur is timelessness—the absence of hurry, rush, urgency, when “the human senses are fully open to receive the world” (Watts, 171). The beginning of the “moment of clarity” occurs when the poet, listening to the music, realizes that his “gray painted walls and ceiling” contained him “as the sky contained … [his] garden.” An equation is grasped between himself and nature; it is understood particularly in flowers.

In attempting to transcribe the affinity, even the oneness, between himself and flowers,32 he runs into the Zen problem of creation; for, according to the principles of Zen, to expend effort in creation is to lose precisely the ability to create. As the poem puts it, “Can I bring back the words? Will thought of transcription haze my mental open eye?” (CP, 140). Thinking is not the answer to transcription here, for “the Taoist mentally makes, or forces, nothing but ‘grows’ everything” (Watts, 171). Hence, Ginsberg's next line becomes clear: “the kindly search for growth, the gracious desire to exist of / the flowers, my near ecstasy at existing among them. …” The problem, then, is not to write about a flower or an experience of a flower, but to become a flower. Zen masters, supervising the art training of their pupils, watch them as “a gardener watches the growth of a tree, and wants to have his student to have the attitude of the tree” (Watts, 171).

Time and the responsibilities that time imply are foreign to this moment, and so books on the table are described as “waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remains and qualities for me to use” (CP, 140). This is a moment, in other words, expanded, but not endless. Time has literally stopped in order that an “openness” to things can occur. As Watts observes, “It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world” (171), and this is precisely what happens during the “glimpse of clarity” in the poem. It is a celebration of “openness” to the world, which is structurally held together by the initial and subsequent references to the open closet door. “I looked up,” the poet says, “those red bush blossoms … their leaves … upturned top flat to the sky to receive—all creation open to receive …” (CP, 140-41).

There are other “openings” as well—a catalogue of them. There is a light socket open “to receive a plug which … serves my phonograph now …”; the doorless entry to the kitchen; “the door to the womb was open to admit me if I wished to enter”; the “unused electricity plugs all over my house if I ever need them”; the open kitchen window. Significantly, only the potential openness of the telephone is nonfunctional at this moment; the telephone is an openness to time that is for the present suspended. This enumeration of “connections” Ginsberg provides for his own consideration—connections that bind together humans and nature, nature and the cosmos. It is Ginsberg's way of expressing the Zen insight that “if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality” (Watts, 192). The poet Hung Tzu-ch'eng puts it thus: “If the mind is not overlaid with wind and waves, you will always be living among blue mountains and green trees. If your true nature has the creative force of Nature itself, wherever you may go, you will see fishes leaping and geese flying.”33

Notes

  1. Kenneth Rexroth, Assays (New York: New Directions, 1961), 194.

  2. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Horn on Howl,Evergreen Review 4, (1957): 155.

  3. Quoted from the San Francisco Chronicle in ibid., 145.

  4. Ibid., 146.

  5. Ibid. 147.

  6. Ferlinghetti, “Horn on Howl,” 145-58. Included also are statements given by: Kenneth Patchen; Northern California Booksellers Association; Barney Rosset and Donald Allen, editors of the Evergreen Review, as well as the actual statements during the trial of Mark Schorer, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Blau, Vincent McHugh, Mark Linenthal, and Kenneth Rexroth. Excerpts follow in the text.

  7. Paul Carroll, “Playboy Interview,” April 1969, 90.

  8. William A. Henry III, “In New York Howl Becomes a Hoot,” Time, 7 December 1981; reprinted in On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Lewis Hyde (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 368.

  9. “Notes on Howl,” 28.

  10. Carroll, “Playboy Interview,” 88.

  11. Thomas Clark, “Art of Poetry VIII,” Paris Review 37 (Spring 1966): 15.

  12. Ibid., 15-16.

  13. “Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs,” Village Voice, 25 August 1959, 8.

  14. Ibid.

  15. “Notes on Howl,” 28.

  16. Gay Wilson Allen, “Walt Whitman: The Search for a ‘Democratic’ Structure,” Walt Whitman Handbook (Chicago: Packard and Co., 1946); reprinted in Discussions of Poetry: Form and Structure (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co.: 1964), 71.

  17. Ibid. 63.

  18. E. C. Ross, “Whitman's Verse,” Modern Language Notes 45 (June 1930):363-64.

  19. “Notes on Howl,” 28-29.

  20. See Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1936), 12.

  21. Clark, “Art of Poetry VIII,” 28.

  22. “Notes on Howl,” 28.

  23. Clark, “Art of Poetry VIII,” 23-24.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Ibid. 24.

  26. This point is explained by Ginsberg in Clark, “Art of Poetry VIII,” 40.

  27. “Notes on Howl,” 29.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Clark, “Art of Poetry VIII,” 53.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Alan W. Watts, Way of Zen, (New York: Mentor, 1959), 176. Further references in this chapter follow in the text.

  32. The similarity of the theme in this poem and “Wales Visitation” (CP [Collected Poems 1947-1980] 480), written twelve years later, is striking.

  33. Quoted in Watts, Way of Zen, 187.

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