Bravo, Gerard
March 23, 2006 - 3:40 pm
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Pitch-perfect and fabulous!
Wow!
I have never been one for poetry, but both of those were really something. I can actually see why people enjoy poetry now.
Roger,
Once I greatly admired “Howl” (I’m younger than that now).
Rereading it today it seems tawdry, shallow and absurdly self-indulgent.
Ginsberg himself became — or perhaps always was — a rather pathetic, amoral windbag.
Were he alive toady, he would be uttering inanities on the level of the outpourings of Ward Churchill, though with superior and more original imagery.
I rather enjoyed “Growl”.
Jamie Irons
I remember when “Howl” was every English prof’s underground new-wave declaration-of-war-on-the-Man glisten-eyed avant-garde favorite, back in the late 60s around the UT/Austin campus.
I remember thinking, “Hey, ‘free-form’ means ya don’t gotta make nothin’ rhyme!”
Gerard’s parody is a stone hoot, man.
The problem with Ginsburg is that he isnít Whitmanónot by half, or perhaps even two thirds.
In Whitman we have the Dionysian; in Ginsburg we have the Priapic, vulgar coarse and slightly ridiculous. Even Priapus, however, has a sense of humor about his penile obsessions, whereas Ginsburg is deadly serious about all his excretions, like an infant. If the Greeks were right, that poets must be mad, then there must exist a sort of mediocre madness composed of sad little frenzies, tedious, morose, adolescent ecstasies; that is, if Ginsburg is a poet.
Problem is, I think he is. He is a poet circa 1960, a poet filled with all the unhappy decadence and degeneration of America post WWII, and things have only gone downhill since. Take a look at Whitman (a real Whitman) and feel the vigor and optimism of his America, compare it to the cultural black hole that Ginsburg creates. A black hole that Ginsburg in his retentive little way can only envision as an anus. Were we ever really that?
His ìbest mindsî went down a crapper of their own making.
Good analysis, GeorgeIII. Dead-on, really–esp on the contrast w/ Whitman’s optimism (optimism despite being a hospital orderly during the Civil War carnage). The beatniks were in revolt against a ‘repressive’ society, a revolt which they won, on the intellectual end of the end of the culture, in that religious mores faded into political correctness. Some victory.
Time talks. Ginsberg has become the worst possible parody of the self he was then, losing his observation and writing skills along the way. Gerard on the other hand wrote this masterpiece this week. As regards the content, Ginsburg gave himself the flaying he deserved; Gerard’s nine circles of hell were designed by those he here describes descending into them.
There will never be a better argument against the madness of the 60′s. Devotees, stuck in a lifetime loop, harry and haunt was every day.