Allen Ginsberg

2 posts

Allen Ginsberg’s Inner China

ginsberg

I’m not a huge fan of Allen Ginsberg or the beat poets in general, but a poem of his I came across yesterday spoke to me, proving once again that it’s bad politics to bless or condemn poets until you’ve read the body of their work (and, in Ginsberg’s case, I have far to go).

Ginsberg, it seemed to past me, was too effusive, wordy, full of his avante garde stream-of-consciousness. Like Thomas Wolfe’s novels, his poems begged for an editor in large, sandwich-board-ad letters. An editor with scissors, thank you. Sharp and well-oiled ones.

In all honesty, it’s only eight lines of the poem that I love. But that’s OK. I’m of the school that deems poetry a “success” and a wonder if only part of it wows me. Sustaining a beautiful poem, start to finish, is no small feat, after all.

Here it is in full. Can you guess the lines that sing to me? I wonder if they’ll sing to you, too?

 

“Returning to the Country for a Brief Visit” by Allen Ginsberg

Annotations to Amitendranath Tagore’s Sung Poetry

“In later days, remembering this I shall certainly go mad.”

Reading Sung poems, I think of my poems to Neal
dead a few years now, Jack underground
invisible – their faces rise in my mind.
Did I write truthfully of them? In later times
I saw them little, not much difference they’re dead.
They live in books and memory, strong as on earth.

“I do not know who is hoarding all this rare work.”

Old One the dog stretches stiff legged,
soon he’ll be underground. Spring’s first fat bee
buzzes yellow over the new grass and dead leaves.

What’s this little brown insect walking zigzag
across the sunny white page of Su Tung-p’o’s poem?
Fly away, tiny mite, even your life is tender –
I lift the book and blow you into the dazzling void.

“You live apart on rivers and seas…”

You live in apartments by rivers and seas
Spring comes, waters flow murky, the salt wave’s covered with oily dung.
Sun rises, smokestacks cover the roofs with black mist,
winds blow, city skies are clear blue all afternoon
but at night the full moon hesitates behind brick.
How will all these millions of people worship the Great Mother?
When all these millions of people die, will they recognize the Great Father?

 

If you guessed stanzas 2 and 3 (from “Old One the dog stretches stiff legged…” to “I lift the book and blow you into the dazzling void”), you are correct.

For me, those lines stand out, a poem within a poem, a lovely nod to ahimsa, the Buddhist/Hindu/Jain belief in not harming even the tiniest of life forms. Those lines capture and bottle the gentle lightning of Chinese poetry quite nicely, no? The fact that thinking of his dead friends Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac incites Ginsberg’s muse is fine, if not essential, at least to me.

I thank Allen for the marrow of the poem alone. Its sweet, soft essence. Its gentle truths about life and how much of it is brief, tender, and vulnerable.

“Murder Your Darlings”

terry-mcdonell

Murder your darlings. Famous words in writing, where the judge (that’s writers like me) tends to grant words clemency a bit more often than advisable.

In reading famous editor Terry McDonell’s The Accidental Life, I came across a small section that serves as wisdom not only for prose writers but for the non-prose sorts in his audience as well, the poets and the dreamers.

Let’s listen in:

“Avoid clichés like the plague, and no matter how amazing or incredible or unbelievable anything is, know how challenging it can be to raise the bar–even when you are writing about icons living in La La Land or Tinseltown or on the Left Coast.

“Likewise it is prudent to take Kurt Vonnegut’s advice: ‘Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.’

“Think like Mark Twain: ‘When you catch an adjective, kill it.’

“‘Kill your darlings’ means cut anything precious, overly clever, or self-indulgent. It is a stark, brilliant prohibition attributed most often to William Faulkner but also to Allen Ginsberg, Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty, G. K. Chesterton, Anton Chekhov and Stephen King, who used the phrase in his effusive On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: ‘Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.’

“When the 2013 biopic of Allen Ginsberg, Kill Your Darlings, came out, Forrest Wickman on Slate tracked what is probably the best attribution to Arthur Quiller-Couch in his 1914 Cambridge lecture ‘On Style.’ The prolific poet, novelist and critic railed against ‘extraneous Ornament’ and emphasized, ‘If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it–wholeheartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

“Wickman’s research also brought him to an even more important rule for journalists: ‘Check your sources.'”

— p. 70 “Editcraft”