In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, in a review of The Poem That Changed America, James Bowman further dismantles the fraud that was Allen Ginsberg. The book is a collection of essays commemorating the 50th anniversary of “Howl, ” which Bowman deftly exposes as dishonest, hysterical and disastrously influential:
“For not only has poetry since Ginsberg tended to concentrate on emotional truth to the exclusion of other kinds, so has the popular culture. `Howl’ is the direct ancestor of every self-pitying rock ballad ever written. Indeed, practically every line turns up a potential rock-group name: The Angry Fix (which actually exists), The Angelheaded Hipsters, the Starry Dynamos, the Machinery of Night. What do all these locutions have in common? Evocative meaninglessness. Their meaninglessness is their meaning.”
In poetry, as in most discourse, we expect concision and precision of expression. Ginsberg gives us neither quality. His pastiche of Blake, Whitman, hipster argot and Buddhist nonsense is intended as a refutation of intelligible discourse. Clarity, of course, is another manifestation of bourgeois repression.
“People used to speak of Victorian poetry as `sustaining,’” Bowman writes. “They read it and memorized it because it offered them a combination of moral truth, spiritual comfort and beautiful language. It got them through the daily struggle with Moloch. Ginsberg’s adolescent pretense – that Moloch can simply be repudiated – robs poetry of that sustenance. All that’s left is guilt that we haven’t, like him and his fellow `best minds,’ transcended reality with some spectacularly imagined act of self-destruction. That’s a big change, all right, but not one that anyone out of his teens should welcome.”
On a more encouraging note, Adam Zagajewski talks with Cynthia Haven at poetryfoundation.org. If you don’t know the work of this Polish poet, the immediate heir of Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, do seek out his work, both in poetry and prose (he is a masterful essayist, most recently in A Defense of Ardor). Zagajewski splits his year between Krakow and her in Houston, where he teaches at the University of Houston.
Citing “many contradictory explanations’’ to account for the great legacy of Polish poetry in recent decades, Zagajewski says, “One of the main ones is that the attention given to the meaning of human life in radical circumstances, as opposed to the hermetic direction or to a purely formal quest.” Polish poetry “after the World War II catastrophe . . .gave the dying Modernism a new energy. It `rehumanized a highly sophisticated but a bit empty palace of modern poetry.”
Zagajewski continued: “I don’t want to be a New Age vague religious crank, but I also need to distance myself from `professional’ Catholic writers. I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old metaphysical objects and longings. I’m a Christian, a sometimes doubting one (but this is almost a definition of a Christian: to doubt also). In my writing I have to be radically different from a priest. My language must have the sheen of a certain discovery.”
After Ginsberg’s puerilities, Zagajewski sounds like a grownup, in addition to being a great world poet.
1 comment:
You don't have to be an admirer of Ginsburg to be disturbed by Bowman's attitude toward the subjective and the emotional -- particularly for someone venturing to write about art. His favorite term of abuse here, "hysterical," is so obviously a boomerang. But perhaps, like the laughing hysteric in Chekhov's story, we don't realize Bowman is hysterical as long as we are laughing with him.
The nicest touch was the helpful aside about Ginsburg's mother's madness. I'll have to remember to add a "strictly accountable truth" like that in the next negative review I write.
With you on Zagajewski, though.
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