One can see that Whitman considers spirituality as the link between human beings and nature. K sexuálním zmatkům přispěla nemoc Ginsbergovy matky. Use of the word “sutra” in the poem’s title yokes together Eastern and Western modes of thought, deriving from the Sanskrit word sutra meaning thread or rule. Today's meditation features a portion of a poem by the late American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The legacy of Ginsbergian moonlight Silberman: Ultimately, what is the legacy of what Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary created together? William Burroughs – 1975 – 4 (Q & A) April 19, 2016 November 18, 2019 admin. “First thought, best thought” was how central Beat poet Allen Ginsberg described their method of spontaneous writing. My overall aim is to reveal how spiritual conscience as portrayed in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg is far from stilted, flat or dogmatic, but spurns these qualities in favour of a complex, burning source of light, whose many facets prompt us to continue contemplating questions of spirituality and its place in the world around us instead of preaching doctrine to be blindly received. Such a link provides crucial background for reading “Kaddish,” as we unpack Ginsberg’s understanding of his Jewish identity as one combined with spiritual approaches from other religions. Jess is a recent graduate of Durham University with a degree in Combined Honours in Arts (English Literature and Spanish). Patti Smith with Allen Ginsberg at a poetry reading night at Local, New York City, 1975. to the people who “purgatoried their torsos…with dreams, with drugs…and cock and endless balls.” These again are all references to Ginsberg’s own history. “Kaddish” contains a dedication “For Naomi Ginsberg 1894 – 1956” (Allen Ginsberg’s mother); it is an elegy, ostensibly more personal than “Howl” as it narrates intimate family relationships. Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays. Required fields are marked *. 14 McClure, Michael, Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac (Middlesex: Penguin Books 1994), p.94. [accessed 21 December 2018]. New Jersey-born Allen Ginsberg reached far beyond the American tradition with his vibrant life in poetry, bridging literary connections with past and present, recognizing the inter-relatedness of poetry and poetics from around the world. The poem’s spirit of sincerity is augmented throughout, recurrent exclamation marks in Section II generating an urgent horror at the barren spiritual wasteland that society has become, and breaking up the syntax in reflection of the speaker being overwhelmed by impressions that are poured forth as they occur to him. While images of “burned cigarette holes in their arms,” “shoes full of blood,” “granite steps of the madhouse” and “fetid halls” continue to dwell in the sphere of the abject, the form within which these are presented and moments of spiritual victory which surround them hold such light that the poem generates more epiphany than disgust. The elevated perspective that it presents to its 1950s readers disillusioned by a climate of industrialised capitalism and post-war financial depression seems even more needed following the early twenty-first century’s economic recessions and more recent descent into global political crisis. If “Howl” queers the horizon by acting as the ecstatic “scream” that Munoz outlines, “Kaddish” does so through its exercise in re-working “moments of contemplation,” revisiting the trauma of past scenes to permit their reconciliation. Ginsberg began work on "Howl" in 1954. Allen Ginsberg / AP Micah Mattix-February 20, 2016 5:00 AM Holy! The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon . Ginsberg commented that “there’s a tendency to exaggerate the strangeness of the mind, and to over-stylize it, and over-rush it, […] rather than resting with it, or resting with what’s there.”57 He described paying close attention to one’s immediate surroundings as an antidote to the danger of overly self-involved writing. It re-ignites the eternal spark within us, fostering the seeds to make room for light and authentic connection over darkness, or apparent bleakness of inner conflicts, political gloom or other disillusioning factors in our surroundings. Yet, formally it echoes “Howl” with energetic, long lines, which layer onto each other a myriad of detailed images. “A Supermarket in California” Download Free PDF. Time magazine) to wealth inequality and its denial by the government (“I say nothing about […] the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots”). Indeed, this preoccupation remains at the forefront of modern-day Western culture, evidenced by media such as Matt D’Avella’s 2015 documentary Minimalism and the viral growth of the “van life” concept. Ginsberg, Allen, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, ed. 60 Ibid., p. 24.; Ibid., p. 25. 40 Ibid., p. 20. He played a vital role in expanding the boundaries of personal freedom in America of the 1950s–1990s, blazing new paths for spiritual, communal and McClure, Michael, Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1994). Allen Ginsberg(3 June 1926 – 5 April 1997) Irwin Allen Ginsber was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. This word “strange” is repeated in the speculative description of Naomi’s nomadic lifestyle “moved thru Paterson, and the west, and Europe and here again.” There is a kind of fatigue to this description that polysyndeton helps to generate. Holy! I will be treating the concept of transcendence in this dissertation as the quality of surpassing ordinary limits, e.g. Coleman, Graham, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: First Complete Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2006). By Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac, Jack, The Dharma Bums (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). There is thus something particularly disturbing about these lines as they seek to phonetically render the traumatizing experience of shock treatment, a relatively common process also described in Plath’s The Bell Jar, which would have been horrific to endure. This contributes greatly to its spiritual status, echoing notions of the prophetic. Estrangement in “Kaddish” For example, the 2010 critical text Beats, Outriders and Ethics posits: “six decades on, and even more than at first airing and publication, “Howl” refuses to be denied.”11 Rodosthenous attributes the poem’s persistence in public consciousness to “its honest and personal perspective on life, and its nearly journalistic, but still poetic, approach to depicting a world of madness, deprivation, insanity and jazz.”12 He compares “Howl” with “A Season in Hell,” written almost a century beforehand by Rimbaud, who strongly influenced Ginsberg. Holy! The words “here again” enhance this and convey a sense of circularity as the emotional alienation to the speaker’s meditations becomes imposed onto his imagined past life of the deceased Naomi. This bears out near the start of “Kaddish” as Ginsberg evokes “prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers — and my own imagination of a withered leaf,” suggesting that Jewish and Buddhist texts are interchangeable in value. 58 Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems, p. 30; Ibid., p.30. 1 p. 82-85, (2009) , [accessed 28 January 2019]. 37, No. 42 Beat Literature & the World, “A Comparison of Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman,” online blog posted by esprings, (7 November 2013) Ferrere, Alexandre, “Mechanics and Poetics: William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg,” Beatdom #18 (24 March 2018) [accessed 17 November 2018]. On another level, “the heart” hints at the core or crux of something, such as the human experience, reinforcing love to be something that “we” rather than “I” bear the weight of. Poetry itself is crucially integral to Ginsberg’s vision of spiritual light. 5 Ibid., p. 31. While “Kaddish” features less homoerotic imagery than “Howl,” it remains located upon this “horizon” of queer form, pushing against heteronormative functions of relationships within a nuclear family and how grief within this framework “should” appear. The power of Ginsberg’s allusion towards and ultimate achievement of transcendence in his work is heightened by his engagement with the broader tradition of US literature. Light’s sanctifying energy here carries a level of aggression, implying that spiritual purification may be a fearsome and even violent process: an idea that preoccupied the Metaphysical poets, exhibited in John Donne’s 1633 sonnet “Batter My Heart,” in which the speaker pleads with a bestial incarnation of God to cleanse him through an implied act of sexual violence, which has the power “to break, blow, burn and make me new.” While Ginsberg’s conjoining of “waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls”24 with a quest for spiritual liberation may seem counter-traditional, the connection between religious experience and violent sexual energy is in fact an established conceit whose existence within literature predates even the birth of the USA. That the supermarket which opposes spirituality through embodying the corrupt values of superficiality, commodification, and materialism is here home to a pilgrimage of poetic “odyssey,”46 fights against preconceived ideas about spiritual revelation, even contesting other voices within the Beat movement. There are a number of poems set in places like Varanasi (Benares) and Siem Reap (Angkor) that reflect Ginsberg’s traveling exploration of these systems. Due to the expansive potential of this theme and wealth of pre-existing literature on the subject, I have found it necessary to hone my analysis to a targeted crop of Ginsberg’s poetry, and direct analytical energy with care amongst these richly textured works, as exhausting them in 12,000 words would be an impossible task. The fusion of a Jewish upbringing, whose religious and cultural aspects remained fiercely rooted within Ginsberg’s adult identity, with his cultivated interest in Buddhism and Eastern religious practice, crafts a vividly original and multifaceted spirit of reverence in his work. Another of his poems, “America,” explicitly develops a relationship between its speaker and an anthropomorphized figure depicting US society and culture, intermingling humour and wordplay with serious comments on the different facets of the America that Ginsberg was living in, from nuclear warfare and the arms race to celebrity-venerating media outlets (i.e. Using psychedelics and reading poetry are comparable experiences in that they both permit the ability to perceive ordinary reality through an alternative lens. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, on this day in 1926. PDF. Allen Ginsberg is an innovator and an influence of many of today's writers and artists. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Ginsberg's spiritual journey began early on with his spontaneous visions, and continued with an early trip to India and a chance encounter on a New York City street with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (they both tried to catch the same cab), a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master of the Vajrayana school, who became his friend and lifelong teacher. a spiritual thinker. Hippie Seraphim: Spirituality, Sexuality and Nonconformity in Allen Ginsberg's Footnote to Howl. Its brevity of lines conveys a humility of tone which contributes towards its opening a space of peace. Even as a sense of rapture is brought to fruition in Ginsberg’s poems, the shades of confusion they encounter while reaching for this dynamic elevation remain present to some extent beyond their closing lines. Arguably the reason that “Kaddish” succeeds in being so disturbing is not just that it broaches grotesque themes, some of the most shocking scenes in all of Ginsberg’s poems occurring in the descriptions here braved of “red vomit coming out of her mouth,” “diarrhea water exploding from her behind,” genitalia cast as “ragged long lips between her legs.” More haunting and crucial is the sustained portrait that the poem conjures of the fragility of the human mind; in forcing the reader to confront this theme, Ginsberg tacitly destabilizes our relationship with a sense of the certainty of mental balance and an associated selfhood. Holy! 33 Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems, p. 57. An analysis of the most important parts of the poem America by Allen Ginsberg, written in an easy-to-understand format. He visited, A focus on spirituality and religion has been a unique aspect of the work of Allen Ginsberg, from the, As a singer, songwriter and performing artist, Allen Ginsberg collaborated with, performed with, or was inspired by, a wide range of musicians, in a number of genres, among them. Stilted by both internal pangs of trauma, and the mind-numbing stings of recalled electric shocks, this line packs the sense of its meaning being just beyond what is expressible through the speaker’s words. The impact of psychedelic experimentation on one’s perception can be seen as a metaphor for how poetry too affects understanding of reality. 37 Full PDFs related to this … And both groups of poets wrote in times when danger loomed: Whitman before and during the Civil War, and the Beats following World War II, when the threat of nuclear war became very real.45. 34 Abram, Dario, “Walt Whitman: Homoeroticism in Leaves of Grass,” American Literature 2012, Academia.edu One example of this is how the theme of light is exhibited in diverse forms ranging from the natural source of the “full moon” — a galactic entity that was also linked by Ginsberg with conceptions of individual identity, as he urged his supporters to “follow their inner moonlight” — to the artificially glimmering promise of the supermarket’s “neon” colouring, and gleam of its “brilliant stacks of cans.” These latter descriptions carry with them a falsity, indicating the dangerous myth perpetuated within 1950s US culture that the “hungry fatigue”52 of man’s spiritual needs could be satiated through consumer purchase, a “game of consuming items that can only cover physical needs (like hunger) in order to satisfy emotional needs.”53. Photograph: Richard E Aaron/Redferns . Much of its continual relevance emerges in more recent critical discussions. it hummeth in the electric typewriter. By Allen Ginsberg. While much of his poetry presents spirituality in fascinating ways, these two longer poems most clearly invite discussion due to their breadth of content. 1 Note: this is based on definitions from Dictionary.com . 13 Ibid., p. 53 1 p. 82-85, (2009) , [accessed 28 January 2019] p. 83. 61 Williams, Carlos Williams, “To Elsie,” , [accessed 11 March 2019]. Subsequently seized by the U.S. Customs and the San Francisco police, it was the subject of a long court trial at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the courts that the book was not obscene. Miles, Barry, Allen Ginsberg: A Biography (London: Virgin Books, 2000). Holy! Ginsberg, Allen, Collected Poems 1947 – 1997 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). DOCX. Most known for his interweaving of spirituality and poetry to create nuanced imagery, Allen Ginsberg’s literary career was far more than that of an average writer. One cannot deny that “Howl” seems at times earthly, base and lewd, cluttered in format, and comprised of half-finished ideas rather than cogent argument. The Poetry Foundation, , [accessed Oct 2018 – March 2019]. Now there's an adjective. Light is not only conveyed through metaphorical spiritual allusions; it is a visual presence across “Howl,” appearing imbued with varying degrees of sanctity. Ginsberg foregrounds the fusion of this Buddhist ideal of asceticism, and uncovering more truth through possessing less, with mainstream popular culture. She enjoys reading, writing poetry, learning the guitar, and gets excited by all things adventurous. All rights reserved. Such factors point towards any claims for enlightenment within the poem being wildly misplaced; hence “detractors go on insisting upon dishevelment, the upshot of a mind fatally shrill or divided.”8 The response to “Howl” amongst the poetic community of the time was ridden with ambivalence. He continues to write powerful poetry that sparks the imagination and carries it's readers to a higher level. London-based, she takes comfort in her beautiful cat Cleo when things like climate change get a bit much to think about. Thus here even moonlight, an ostensibly passive element of background scenery for the enacting of “great suicidal dramas,” holds a combative energy which mirrors that channelled through “Howl”; as the poetic voice seeds light throughout the poem, exemplified in this line, it does so not meekly but with a fierce note of uprising. Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home (Columbia Records, 1965). 16 Percy Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry” (1840), cited on , [accessed 25 January 2019] To understand Ginsberg, we must engage with profound considerations about what it means to be human and to feel truly alive – or truly oneself – in a corporate universe which deadens this capacity. It is fitting that the poem is set in a supermarket — a symbol of consumerism and capitalism, of a society in which the commodification of goods results in an amplified choice of consumer products, but a widespread sense of spiritual confusion as worship of the material replaces religious faith and community bonds. Certain themes arise recurrently in Ginsberg’s work in conjunction with his quest to unearth and linguistically generate the light of higher consciousness, such as homosexuality, mental illness, and the fragmentation of society due to industrialization, mass consumerism and widespread disillusionment at humanity which came in the aftermath of two devastating world wars. it is hidden in all its elephants and selves . Allen Ginsberg attended and participated in the Six Gallery reading, and a year later, Howl and Other Poems was published. PDF. 17 Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems, p. 3. While confessionalism generally centres its attention within the private world of the speaker’s concerns, the sense of overflow in “Howl” pertains to a humanity-scale narrative of ecstatic spiritual revelation, situating the reader’s focus beyond personal anecdote. Chabad.org, “Kaddish: About Kaddish” https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/514160/jewish/Kaddish.htm> [accessed 20 February 2019]. Note: Chapter three was previously published in Beatdom. Previous Next ... (based on a book written by Ginsberg's friend Ken Kesey): lobotomies , shock therapy, angry nurses, and more. My breath is long – that’s the measure, one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath. The text Cruising Utopia connects the disruption of linear chronology with the liberation of queer identity: To see queerness as horizon is to perceive it as a modality of ecstatic time in which the temporal stranglehold that I describe as straight time is interrupted or stepped out of. Allen Ginsberg spent the first half of 1965 out of the United States, visiting Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Poland, and England. Religious conceit is explicitly employed as Yiddish is interspersed with viscerally personal, anecdotal modern imagery. Stevens, Jay, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (London: Flamingo, 1993). The depiction of trauma Ginsberg, Allen, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice [First Journals and Poems, 1937-52], eds. [accessed 21 December 2018]. The minor themes of drugs and sexuality work together to illuminate the major theme of spirituality. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Hence, the act of reading “Kaddish” engenders social as well as spiritual illumination, in its ability to place the exchange of spirit and ideas above monetary contract. Religious texts are often envisaged in terms of having been “revealed” to a prophet, as their energy derives from beyond the realm of human activity and creative potential. 30 Nelson, Paul, “Projective Verse: The Spiritual Legacy of the Beat Generation,” Humanities, 7, 102 (2018) p.1. Spirituality in Howl by Allen Ginsberg Allen Ginsberg's composition "Howl" is usually a complicated and interesting composition about the divine in the common globe. The breakthrough of a sense of man’s innate sanctity, no matter how threatening or harsh his outward conditions, seems even more vital when procured in an ambit of darkness. A short summary of this paper. Though on the one hand markedly of its era, Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” generates a timeless rhetorical appeal to the discourse between past and present in the voices of the speaker and the imagined Whitman. But he was beyond that as well in imagination and spirituality. The labelling of the moon’s illuminating property as “wartime” is unusual in that it equates conflict with light, which would more often represent peace. Through understanding the transcendental message of “Howl,” we can reconnect with the core voices of America’s poetic tradition who inspired Ginsberg and uncover an emotional and intellectual bedrock of support for the current era and global situation. 39 Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems, p. 19. Spirituality in Howl by Allen Ginsberg. As sutra describes a rule or aphorism within Sanskrit literature, its inclusion in the titling of Ginsberg’s poetry implicitly overturns the authoritative precedence of ordinary codes of rule which govern Western discourse. In a climate of the democratically-elected presidency of Donald Trump, a figure who enshrines the USA’s cultural valuing of financial success and capitalist expansionism above humane ethics, the need to detach from these tenets of US life and rediscover authentic human connection in a “dreaming stroll”55 as outlined by Ginsberg is more pressing than ever before. 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