Posted on 09/14/2006 8:09:29 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
Some people have a favorite poem. Not me. I have a least favorite — and I remember precisely the moment when I knew that it was utter rubbish. It happened while I was reading The New Criterion, whose 25th anniversary is now upon us — about which more in a moment.
The poem is “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg — and oh, gentle reader, how it reeks to high heaven. Although it’s vulgar and verseless — or perhaps because it’s vulgar and verseless — “Howl” is routinely hailed as one of the finest accomplishments of the so-called Beat Generation. Earlier this year, it was the subject of adoring book, The Poem That Changed America. Yet I’d rather spend an entire lunar cycle listening to Triumph the Insult Comic Dog bark at the moon than read this pathetic poem again.
I first encountered “Howl” in an English class at the University of Michigan. It was a survey course on poetry and our text was one of those thick anthologies full of small print and cheap paper. We covered a lot of ground that semester — Shakespeare’s sonnets (all of them), the metaphysical poets, the British romantics, Matthew Arnold (about whose “Dover Beach” I wrote a paper), the modernists, and so on.
Then came “Howl.” It blew me away with its sheer awfulness. Consider a couple of characteristically wretched lines, which apparently describe Ginsberg’s circle of friends and acquaintances:
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu- scripts...
There’s a lot more where this came from, unfortunately — including a notorious line, which I won’t reproduce here, that led to an obscenity trial in which the poem’s publisher was acquitted. (A brief account may be found here — the rub is that the trial proved the maxim that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, because it turned Ginsberg into a free-speech hero and encouraged people who should have known better to sing his praises.)
When I read “Howl,” toward the end of the term and in the wake of so much genuinely good poetry, I was confused. My professor was a sensible guy. He had exposed us to the classics and seemed to appreciate them. So why did his syllabus carve out a place for this abomination?
My first response was to question my own judgment: Was I missing something? My second response was to go to the library and learn what I could about “Howl” and its author.
That’s how I discovered The New Criterion, the monthly journal of art and culture. Technically, what I discovered was a book: The New Criterion Reader, a compilation of the best that had been thought and said (to coin a phrase) on its pages during its first five years. And specifically, what I discovered was an article by Bruce Bawer, on page 350: “The phenomenon of Allen Ginsberg.”
It was a revelation to me. I wasn’t alone! Here was an acid-tinged review of Ginsberg and his career:
Since “Howl,” he has published (and read from a thousand platforms) over a dozen books of poetry, and the recipe has remained pretty much the same throughout: take one part anti-Establishment rhetoric, one part sexual indelicacy, one part scatology and general grubbiness, and mix rather sloppily. Voila — a book of poetry.
There was plenty more, including a dazzling, two-paragraph conclusion that explained why critics honored Ginsberg and why their love for him and his work has done real damage to our culture. The poem that changed America? Yeah, for the worse! I wished that Bruce Bawer was my poetry professor. Either he would have given a great lecture on “Howl,” or he would have had the good sense to skip the poem entirely.
From this experience, I developed a real fondness for The New Criterion, which is now embarking on its 25th year of publication. It was founded by Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman, a pair of New Yorkers who had become distressed at the state of cultural criticism. “Almost everywhere [criticism has] degenerated into one or another form of ideology or publicity or some pernicious combination of the two,” they wrote in the first issue. Since then, The New Criterion has come out ten times a year to fight the culture wars, issuing broadsides of common sense as it struggles against the likes of Ginsberg and those who take him seriously.
In its first 25 years, The New Criterion has published a ton of smart writing. And it hasn’t merely criticized the bad, as important as that chore is. It has also performed “the task of battling cultural amnesia,” as an editorial comment in the double-sized September 2006 issue says. “From our first issue nearly a quarter century ago, we have labored in the vast storehouse of cultural achievement to introduce, or reintroduce, readers to some of the salient figures whose works helped weave the great unfolding tapestry of our civilization.” In terms of people, The New Criterion has propelled the careers of Kramer (now easing into retirement) and Lipman (who died in 1994), it helped launched those of Erich Eichman (now an editor at the Wall Street Journal), Roger Kimball (who is currently The New Criterion’s co-editor, with Kramer), and Heather Mac Donald (who did some of her first professional writing on its pages). (I tell the story of The New Criterion in a little more detail in A Gift of Freedom.)
We at NR have many ties to The New Criterion — its editors and writers often appear on our pages and our people often appear there. NR’s managing editor Jay Nordlinger is The New Criterion’s music critic. (One of the best essays he’s written, anywhere, was on the state of classical music, and it ran in The New Criterion.) John Derbyshire also writes frequently for Kimball & co.—and a few years ago, Derb penned a very nice tribute to them here. The current issue features not only these two but also pieces by NR regulars Andrew C. McCarthy and David Pryce-Jones.
I’ve contributed a couple of pieces to The New Criterion as well, when my inner lit major has needed a special outlet: I’ve written on the classic Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the ancient epic of Gilgamesh. I don’t expect either of these short essays to make it into a 500-page, 25th anniversary anthology that Ivan R. Dee plans to publish in the spring. But I do hope that in the not-too-distant future, a college student, searching for signs of intelligent life on campus, will pull it off a library shelf and discover what I did nearly 20 years ago.
I don't know why but I think Warhol's Mao in Chicago is pretty cool. And I like Pollack too.
.
SquealI saw the best minds of my generation
Destroyed—Marvin
Who spat out poems; Potrzebie
Who coagulated a new bop literature in fifteen novels; Alvin
Who in his as yet unwritten autobiography
Gave Brooklyn an original lex loci.
They came from all over, from the pool room,
The bargain basement, the rod,
From Whitman, from Parkersburg, from Rimbaud
New Mexico, but mostly
They came from colleges, ejected
For drawing obscene diagrams of the Future.They came here to L.A.,
Flexing their members, growing hair,
Planning immense unlimited poems,
More novels, more poems, more autobiographies.It’s love I’m talking about, you dirty bastards!
Love in the bushes, love in the freight car!
I saw them fornicating and being fornicated,
Saying to Hell with you!America.
America is full of Babbitts.
America is run by money.What is it Walt said? Go West!
But the important thing is the return ticket.
The road to publicity runs by Monterey.
I saw the best minds of my generation
Reading their poems to Vassar girls,
Being interviewed by Mademoiselle.
Having their publicity handled by professionals.
When can I go into an editorial office
And have my stuff published because I’m weird?
I could go on writing like this forever . . ..
— Louis Simpson.
I don't dislike Pollack. Warhol strikes me as a pretentious buffoon, although I agree that some of his stuff is amusing. I just don't think either of them represents great art.
'Money isn't everything,' they say.
Okay, so what is? Sex?
Did you ever make love to a pauper?
Pee-yoo!
Revolution?
It takes money to overthrow the government, you know.
Art?
The more it costs, the better it is.
And that's the bottom line!
Yes, there's a lot of energy in the Pollacks. And I can see why people like them in their strange fashion. But I find myself increasingly impatient with the whole modernist gang, especially in music and art. In literature, I like Joyce and Eliot, though they both have problems, and I love Yeats and Stevens.
But Schoenberg? Music went to the dogs with the modernists.
Picasso was one of the most talented modernists. He was a great artist in some ways. But his work is cruel, brutal, and artistically immoral. Great talent put to destructive use.
Cicero --
I agree with your tastes pretty much down the line. Classical music seems stuck in a dead end and can't find its way out. Contemporary operas -- Corigliano, Bolcom -- are just high-toned pastiche or else minimalism best appreciated after a hit of acid. I like Darius Milhaud and Dave Brubeck, though.
Howl had the same problem. Like it or hate it, it was a dead end.
So much of modernism and post modernism is about telling us that there is no God and the universe has has no meaning. Once that message is delivered and accepted, where do you go? Not to concert halls, museums and libraries.
Everyone knows (or should) that his father was the real poet in the family, right up there with that other guy from NJ, William Carlos Williams. The kid, was bright, but a beatnik. Which, at any rate, is better than being a hippy.
BTW, Alan really was very dirty, in a bus station men's room sort of way. Don't let that stop you from reading Dad, though.
"City Lights in North Beach?
"
Next door for me, at Vesuvio. I ran into him and Ferlinghetti there once. Very odd people for an 18-year-old kid to meet. It made a big impression on me.
Yea, I remember the Vesuvio. We used to get Irish coffee there for some reason. City Lights was a pretty cool place in the early 70's. I remember meeting a writer named Richard Brautigan there. He had a big hit with "Trout Fishing in America", which was about anything but. I gave North Beach a miss the last time I was in SF. I know it has run down, so I'll just remember it the way it was.
Atonality was inevitable. Don't blame Schonberg blame Wagner if not Chopin.
There's atonality in Bach. But he knew how to do it.
Yipes you got me.
Sounds like you lived up in 6A at 400 RSD
I ran into Dolores Capece at a Starbucks in Northern VA last fall. She has two sons in high school. One is getting ready for college. He's interested in going to columbia. I told him the same thing dolores did. If you go to columbia you have to be prepared to lose ten years -- at least-- in some bizarre time warp. In fact, that boy tapped into anger I didn't know I had. Not at him mind you -- though the way he talked reminded me of the way I talked when I was his age.
Dolores said she and alison knopf had been up to NYC recently to see bob campbell. She said he hadn't changed a bit. I expect he's still living at 400 RSD.
I've become a lot more conservative.
If you're posting here--you've followed a similiar trajectory. In fact, there's a CU ping list on FR somewhere. A lot of guys are still pissed at the hopelessly stupid stuff they picked up at CU.
I don't recall what happened to Jordan. He could be still living at 400 RSD for all I know. From time to time in my dreams I'm still there.
I'm glad/relieved to wake up in Virginia.
No, Old Friend, I never lived in that apartment with you guys. I do remember some really good parties there, though.
I know what you mean about the time warp. But I look back more in sadness than anger.
Does sound like you've changed a bit. I think I was basically conservative even then, listening to Rush Limbaugh, starting the first morning he was broadcasting on WABC, and regularly after that. Just didn't advertise my political views back then--didn't need the hassle and probable ostracism. Had a different agenda in those days, and "White Harlem"/CU were so full of rabid left-wingers in those days that I kept a low profile. Nor into earning a living and young man's games than activism.
Got out of the neighborhood a few years after you did, I guess. Now I rarely go back to NYC...and most of my dreams of that place have been triggered by 9-11.
will continue in a Freep-mail....
New Criterion bump.
I saw the best minds of my generation
Destroyed - pot and alcohol and body lice
Scouring their health, emptying their eyes, turning their brains to pickle-flavored Jello,
Their radiant, youthful bodies carved by age into wrinkled escresences,
Stripped back to their bare essences of orifices and genitalia,
Their politics frozen in the icy grip of arrested adolescence,
Their minds - what were we talking about? Pass the Cheetos
I always vote Democratic. How 'bout you?
See? It's easy! Now if you damn bourgeoisie would send me a paycheck I could get back to partying and boinking coeds...
Quick joey small went over the wall
with a ball and a chain behind him.
Quick joey small went over the wall
and the hounds set out to find him.
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