June 13th, 2009 / 3:05 pm
Excerpts
Excerpt from “Footnote to Howl” by Allen Ginsberg
The frequent commenter and all around nice man Ryan W. Bradley once told me that his mother gave him Howl to read when he was ten. This made me go buy Howl from the great City Light Books. James Blake will play Andy Murray in the final of Queens, the lead up event to Wimbledon. I just finished reading an old One Story story ( I subscribed at one time, I no longer do, but those little stories are scattered around my house) called “Selling the Apartment” by Danit Brown. It was written in the second person. Wells Tower wrote in the second person once and I liked that story, but it was really short.
Right now I am listening to Bon Iver, which I rarely do. My husband took all the children to a Trout Parade. It’s beautiful outside. Last night, I played hangman and then the Minister’s Cat with children for two hours and drank vodka (later switching to bourbon). A few nights ago, a friend of my son’s asked for MORE BROCCOLI at dinner and it made me very proud of my broccoli. It’s three o’clock and I haven’t showered yet and I haven’t gone running in almost a month. Last night, I bought the boys two whoopie cushions and water balloons that look like grenades and I bought myself two lip glosses (even though I had 9 in my purse). I also bought nicotine patches and an hour later, a pack of cigarettes. I feel very blessed. And so here’s what Ginsberg says:
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Tags: allen ginsberg
whoa! a shoutout on the giant.
ginsberg and wells tower in the same post. this is a good saturday. other than the three hours at Midas.
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These holies are great. Why? How did he make “Footnote to Howl” so … so I don’t know? I don’t care, I just want to like it.
This makes me think of this one post, http://htmlgiant.com/?p=9137#more-9137, where Jimmy Chen quoted Allison Glock saying poetry is good and blogs are bad because “blogs inevitably activate our baser human instincts—narcissism, vanity, schadenfreude. They offer the petty, cheap thrill of perceived superiority or released vitriol,” and I thought how really right she was but then Ginsberg tells America in “America”
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
But he’s not activating baser human instincts . . .
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy!
I still don’t think print and glossy media are elite, they just have editors and reporters, and they select things and research and investigate things and edit things. And, once upon a time, until one company said they’d buy out my company, gave me a job. They are different. They do useful, different things. I like both of them, blogs and those other people. What he said. I just need a job now.
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Yes, we are all holy. Ginsberg taps into that in his poem and the afterpoem. He seemed anti-elitist. But I am still discovering him. I like those who celebrate the holiness of human existence.
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June 14th, 2009 / 11:14 pmRoss Brighton—
I have lots of Holes. They’re pretty awesome.
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I also liked this post, by the way. In case it sounded like not.
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June 13th, 2009 / 10:15 pmpr—
Thanks Heath. It’s not one of my serious long thought out and somewhat hard worked posts, but i put some heart into it.
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i love the way ginsberg was like walt whitman reincarnated. how come ginsberg hasn’t been reborn yet?
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June 13th, 2009 / 10:31 pmpr—
I think he has been. But I don’t know. Thanks, Ryan, for making me read it. I read it 20 years ago but not thoroughly- it’s been great to read it.
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June 13th, 2009 / 10:33 pmryan—
i’m glad i was of some use!
also, maybe his reborn form just isn’t old enough to start writing the poems yet. when i was in high school i wrote a lot beat-knockoff shit.
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June 14th, 2009 / 8:08 pmMichael J—
Whitman was kind of an asshole. I mean, I guess, we’re all asshole-ish at times.
What I mean is, he was all anti-mexican during the Mexican American war. Never once did he go, hey America, you’re kinding pitting Natives against other Natives while going back on your contracts and doing all this supershady stuff.
I guess you can separate poetry/poetic influence with a writer’s personality, but then again you really can’t. But then you can. Because what if you were looking at a painting and liked it. But then found out Hitler made it. And then maybe you like it less. Or like it more. And then you might feel bad that you link a monster’s work.
So maybe we all need to be monsters to make people question themselves more.
But I can’t stand Walt Whitman. Love Ginsberg though. Got the anniversery edition of “Howl” where it has corrections, fascimiles, drafts, all that stuff. Dope.
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June 14th, 2009 / 11:15 pmRoss Brighton—
cf. Ezra Pound. Always feel just a little guilty reading him.
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June 15th, 2009 / 12:13 amHeath—
Yeah, I was just thinking about Pound. It’s hard to find much to worry about in his criticism or early work, but when he starts going on about “usury” in the Cantos, anti-Semitism surfaces in the actual work. I think it’s fair to say a lot of his Cantos aren’t beautiful anyway, but Pound is a peculiar case; supported Fascism, went nuts, ranted, then expressed remorse—though far too little and too late . . . and there’s hateful stuff in the work itself. It doesn’t help that the poems are dense with meaning, like he’s aspiring to measure up to his line, “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” So I get a bad feeling I’m reading hate but I don’t quite understand what all the poem contains. I like this idea of resting transparently, though, so we can free “In a Station of the Metro” at least
THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
June 14th, 2009 / 11:26 pmKen Baumann—
Yeah, it’s an interesting subject, that of separating an artist and his work.
I think David Milch has the right idea when he says that when a writer writes, or a painter paints, or a lover loves, that you ‘rest transparently in the spirit which gives you rise’, the Spirit being God, love, the universal matter that we are, our idea of separateness dissolved.
A bigot can write beautiful stories. Hitler can paint beautiful art. In the practice of art, they’re resting transparently.
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“Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
. . . 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 the Lethe?”
Heart is Ginsberg.
And the next one, yeah, takes a little time to be reborn . . . thirty-something years? In Whitman’s case . . .
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June 14th, 2009 / 12:09 pmpr—
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/supermarket.html
Nice.
You guys are right about the not yet reborn I think. I don’t know enough about contemporary poetry though. I guess I was suggesting that I’m sure he has influenced others…but that’s not the same, is it?
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This guy Alexandr Skidan has got to have read Ginsberg. He doesn’t have the beat, exactly, but maybe in the original Russian . . .
http://jacketmagazine.com/36/rus-skidan-trb-turovskaya-randall.shtml
And Catherine Bowman probably heard a little
http://www.opencity.org/bowman.html
http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com/2007/07/spice-night-by-catherine-bowman.html
http://www.albany.edu/offcourse/winter00/abbywen_example.html
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June 14th, 2009 / 1:54 pmpr—
I enjoyed those. Thanks. ( I didn’t finish reading the Skidan one…I need to get my printer working and print that out…too long for me to read on screen.)
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When Ginsberg was 19 he slept with a young boy. While he was in Africa he paid some guy to find a man he could have sex with, and the man presented him with a kid, who’d been instructed to do whatever Ginsberg said. It’s in G.’s journals. My wife was reading them and (among other things) that anecdote was what made her stop.
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
It’s just interesting. No one ever talks about it.
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June 14th, 2009 / 5:47 pmHeath—
and he checked himself into the New York State Psychiatric Institute for most of the year shortly thereafter. It also sounded interesting:
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
That doesn’t, of course, make it better for the kid. I guess I want to think he did his time, there, and on Earth . . .
I don’t know. A prof I had said he loves writer biographies—they’re a great instruction guide for how not to live your life.
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June 14th, 2009 / 7:37 pmpr—
Jean Rhys beat her husband, contributing to his early death. I still love her novels. I read In A Doll’s House, by Philip Roth’s ex wife…man that guy was nuts and awful. But his novels are great.
Yeah, writer bios are instruction guides on how not to live a life.
What was Paul Bowles doing in Tangiers? Hanging out with older men? I think not.
And on and on and on…
de Sade? I loved reading him. But yeah.
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I wont write my poem ’til I’m in my right mind.
Ginsberg.
He had a great beard.
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