Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg: The Bard Who Beat the Censors

In 1957 a San Francisco judge named Clayton W. Horn was asked to decide whether a long, filthy, ecstatic poem about madness and sex could legally be sold in the United States. He ruled that it could, asking: "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?" The poem was *Howl*. Its author was a thirty-one-year-old former market researcher who had spent the previous decade convinced he had once heard the voice of God in an East Harlem apartment.

Newark, Naomi, and the Sick Rose

Ginsberg was the son of Louis Ginsberg, a Newark schoolteacher and published poet who wrote in traditional verse, and Naomi Levy, a Russian-born Marxist and Communist Party member whose paranoid schizophrenia brought institutionalisation and suicide attempts through her son's childhood. That wound organised his work. As a teenager he wrote letters to *The New York Times* about the war and workers' rights and published poems in the *Paterson Morning Call*.

At Columbia, which he entered in 1943 on a Young Men's Hebrew Association scholarship after graduating from Eastside High School, he abandoned law for literature, won the Woodberry Poetry Prize, and presided over the Philolexian Society. He also met Lucien Carr, who introduced him to William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. The three of them talked about a "New Vision," borrowed from Yeats, that would remake American writing. He shipped out with the Merchant Marine in 1945 to pay for school and took his B.A. in 1948.

That same year, in an East Harlem apartment, masturbating while reading William Blake, he heard a voice recite "Ah! Sunflower," "The Sick Rose" and "The Little Girl Lost." He identified it as God, or the Ancient of Days, or Blake. The hallucination lasted days and supplied the visionary themes he would work for half a century.

Six Poets at the Six Gallery

He moved to San Francisco in the 1950s and worked in market research until a psychiatrist told him, in 1955, to quit and write poetry full time. William Carlos Williams — a fellow Paterson man he had been writing to — gave him a letter of introduction to Kenneth Rexroth, which opened the San Francisco Renaissance to him. Williams's advice was blunt: don't emulate old masters, speak in your own voice, use strong visual imagery, move from formal verse to free. Ginsberg took all four instructions into *Howl*.

On 7 October 1955 the painter Wally Hedrick asked him to organise a reading. Ginsberg was reluctant until he reread his draft. "Six Poets at the Six Gallery" delivered the first public performance of *Howl* and is now counted among the founding events of the Beat Generation.

The Poem and the Prosecution

City Lights published *Howl* in 1956. Police and U.S. Customs seized copies; the 1957 obscenity trial made Ginsberg internationally famous and City Lights manager Shig Murao, jailed for selling it, a lifelong friend. The poem was explicit about homosexual acts at a moment when every American state criminalised them. It was dedicated to Carl Solomon, who had undergone shock therapy, and it made Solomon the emblem of everyone ground down by the machine Ginsberg called Moloch. Its opening line — "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" — became the most quoted first line in postwar American poetry.

His technique was borrowed and welded. From Cézanne he took what he called the "Eyeball Kick": the spasm the eye makes between clashing colours, transposed into clashing words, as in "hydrogen jukebox." From Whitman and Christopher Smart came the long breath-line; from bebop, phrasing; from Kerouac, the doctrine of first thought, best thought. *Kaddish* (1961) turned back on his mother directly, letters and all.

Harmonium, India, Moloch

From 1957 he lived at the Beat Hotel in Paris, where *Kaddish*, Corso's *Bomb* and Burroughs's *Naked Lunch* were all assembled. He and his lifelong partner Peter Orlovsky — whom he met in San Francisco in 1954 and later listed as his spouse in *Who's Who* — travelled India in 1962–63, living in Calcutta and Benares. He sought out the Dalai Lama and, in Kalimpong, Dudjom Rinpoche, who told him: "If you see something horrible, don't cling to it, and if you see something beautiful, don't cling to it." A collision over a taxi in New York made Chögyam Trungpa his teacher; at Trungpa's urging he and Anne Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa in 1974.

He befriended A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, funded the first Hare Krishna temple, and chanted the mantra everywhere: at the 1967 Human Be-In, at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, at a Black Panther rally at Yale in 1970. On William F. Buckley Jr.'s *Firing Line* in 1968 he sang it on harmonium; Buckley called it "the most unharried Krishna I've ever heard."

He protested the Vietnam War and the drug war for decades, refused war taxes, was thrown out of Cuba in 1965 for objecting to the persecution of homosexuals, and was crowned King of May in Prague and deported a week later.

The Indefensible Part

Ginsberg was a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, which seeks the abolition of age-of-consent laws. He framed it as free-speech solidarity — "I'm a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too" — and in 1994 read what he called a "pederast rhapsody" in the documentary *Chicken Hawk*. Andrea Dworkin wrote in *Heartbreak* that he was "exceptionally aggressive about his right to fuck children." No account of him is complete without it.

Why Allen Is Called a Genius

His gift was synthetic rather than analytical: an unusual ability to hear what several incompatible traditions had in common and fuse them into a single usable public voice. Whitman's catalogue, Blake's prophetic register, Smart's litany, bebop's phrasing, Williams's plain American speech and Cézanne's optics went in; out came a line long enough to hold an entire generation's shame and speak it aloud. The second, rarer talent was social: he turned private, criminal, humiliating material — madness, sodomy, his mother's illness — into liturgy, and by doing so made it sayable for everyone who came after. J. D. McClatchy called him "the best-known American poet of his generation, as much a social force as a literary phenomenon," and set him beside Whitman as "a bard in the old manner — outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant," whose work amounts to "a history of our era's psyche."

The honest counter-case is that the reputation rests on a handful of poems and an enormous amount of organising. Much of what got labelled Beat was defined less by shared aesthetics than by friendship with Ginsberg, who was an impresario of genius whether or not he was a poet of one. He himself dismissed the anaphora that makes *Howl* and *America* work as "a crutch because he lacked confidence," and largely abandoned it in the 1960s. Later collections drift; *Cosmopolitan Greetings* was a Pulitzer finalist in 1995 but not a winner. And for many readers the NAMBLA affiliation permanently complicates the moral authority the poems claim.

Legacy

He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974 for *The Fall of America*, the National Arts Club gold medal and admission to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1979, the Golden Wreath at Struga in 1986, and was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by France in 1993. He recorded with Philip Glass and Paul McCartney and chanted the Heart Sutra on a Clash record. He died of liver cancer in his East Village loft on 5 April 1997, aged seventy, having first telephoned nearly everyone in his address book to say goodbye.