National Poetry Month, in a Plague Year #2 – Allen Ginsberg

National Poetry Month, in a Plague Year

#2 – Allen Ginsberg

Seems appropriate, during national poetry month, and on the 23^rd anniversary of his death, to mention Allen Ginsberg.

I’ve often wondered if Allen Ginsberg and I would have gotten along. There are odd little coincidences and catches surrounding my experience of Ginsberg … He died the year before I went to the writing school that he founded with Anne Waldman in 1974 (the year before my birth).

My first summer at the “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics” (yes, that is really its name) his presence and his absence were palpable. Everyone was still very much grappling with his death.

I mostly felt shut off from a lot of the discussions and sadness and celebration about him. While I had read a few things, I’d only gotten a book of his work about the year before. I hadn’t even realized, when I applied to Naropa (the school where the JKSDP lives), that Ginsberg was a founding father.

I got to know Ginsberg after his death, in my two years at the school, feeling his influence all around. I checked books out of the library with his handwritten notes in them. I had teachers who were his former students, friends, lovers. I heard gossip, worship, and derision. Becoming so steeped in this world of his absence, my “personal” experiences with him are rather ghostly than concrete.

Here are two. First, one morning just before a weekend workshop that was going to deal with Ginsberg, I woke to find a hand written notation in the front of my copy of his 1996 “Selected Poems”. I had no idea how the note had gotten there, although it seemed to be my hand writing. I couldn’t remember having written it at all. It felt like a message direct from Ginsberg himself. It reads: “If you say it / absolute, perfect honesty / they will get it. / Trust yourself”.

And once I had tea with him, in a dream. (Dreams were definitely something to pay attention to at Naropa … for instance, the gossip around school was that everyone always eventually had a dream about a particular teacher of poetic theory … And I did eventually have mine, it was wild.) In my Ginsberg dream I was in the mountains, high up among tall narrow pines. I struggled along a frightening, narrow dirt track on the edge of the mountain – up and up, until I found a little cabin. Inside the cabin, Ginsberg sat waiting for me. He invited me in, offered me tea. We sat and drank the tea together. Mostly in silence. And in the end, I left the way I’d come, feeling as if I’d just had a visit with a Buddhist master, feeling as if I might be able to see straight through the veil if I could just let go enough.

I’m not a Ginsberg scholar in any sense … but I think that his poetry tells you a lot about him. For one thing, he cared deeply about the suffering of others, was deeply affected by the intrenched inequalities and injustices in our social and economic systems, and was brilliantly, joyfully, and exuberantly defiant of those who cared more about the bottom line than their fellow humans.

I think he probably would have had a lot to say about the way COVID-19 has brought into such stark relief the disparities between rich and poor, the ominous greed of the power elite, and the fragility of our very un-ecological economic system.

For now, I thought I’d share one of his most haunting and heartening pieces – the Footnote to Howl, written in 1955. It’s a very Ginsbergian celebration of the world and all things in it (except, possibly, Los Angeles).

FOOTNOTE TO HOWL by Allen Ginsberg

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!

Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!

Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!

Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums!

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

Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!

Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul!

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!

Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!

Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

                                                                                                            Berkeley 1955

National Poetry Month, in a Plague Year

National Poetry Month, in a Plague Year

What does poetry matter during a time of plague? Has poetry ever stopped a plague? Probably not. Has it ever stopped a war? I don’t have the data but I’m going to say it’s probably doubtful.

So then what does it matter? What can poetry, or any art for that matter, do for us, right now?

At its best: poetry tells the truth. It tells the truth in a way that gets at what is beyond words. That knowing just beyond sight, beyond hearing. It gets to truths that aren’t able to be codified or ordered. It gets to the kind of truths that don’t just happen in the brain, but in the whole body, in the soul, in the heart. And even if the truth that the poem is expressing is something that could, by the right person, be distilled down into a digestible sentence in a text book – what poetry does is give the reader, or hearer, an experience of that truth.

And an experience requires participation. It requires a meeting between the object of art, the poem, and the person reading it. In between is a third thing (as D.H. Lawrence would have called it), a meeting, a negotiation between the poem and the reader. The meaning is there – but it’s also, in that moment, in us.

Poetry, as well as other art forms: music, painting, sculpture – opens the possibility within human beings of being able to hold multiple truths at one time. What John Keats called “Negative Capability”. Here’s the bit from a letter where he first mentions it: “I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In the midst of uncertainty, anxiety, and doubt – in the midst of fear and threat – what better skill than to be able to hold it all in balance within ourselves: the fear, the hope, the conflicting sources of pain and joy.

And of course, poetry invokes Beauty. A whole treatise unto itself … Whether you think that beauty is the driving force of life that sparks evolution, cell mutation, the co-arising of bee and flower, the language created by a pine tree as it spins out the patterning of its DNA, ring by ring. Or if you believe that beauty sings from inside a balanced mathematical equation, that it is the force of gravity and the movement of planets. Or the painting of a twisted, violent, yellow tree against a deep blue sky.

For me poetry helps because it reminds me of what humans can be. It reminds me of why we might be here. It reminds me of what we might do, how we might see. And how we might change the world to make it more true, more beautiful.

And so … a poem. By the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, from her 1990 book In Mad Love and War.

Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear;

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we

Were born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.