The American Century: Literature since 1945 613of power and “pure machinery” in a way that recalls earlier prophets like Isaiah.
It suggests what another poet, Richard Eberhart, meant when he said the poem was
“profoundly Jewish in temper”; and it demonstrates Ginsberg’s peculiar ability to
combine the disjunctures of modernism with melancholy, an ancient sense of
apocalypse. Finally, the third part concentrates on the destiny of one man, Carl
Solomon, whom the poet identifies with as an archetype of suffering. Fired by this
identification, Ginsberg then projects an imaginary liberation for them both, where
they “wake up electrified out of coma” to their “own souls’ airplanes roaring over
the roof.” That jubilant remark illustrates the mixture of religious intensity and wry
realism which is one of Ginsberg’s most memorable gifts. Poems like “Howl,”
“In Back of the Real” (1956), or “A Supermarket in California” (1956) work precisely
because they walk a tightrope between acknowledgment of the grubby particulars
of everyday life and proclamations of the immanent presence of the ideal. Even
moments of annunciation, statements of vision and purpose, can be tempered with
a wise and sufficient irony – a measured appreciation of what, in “Sunflower Sutra”
(1956), the poet calls the “skin of grime” covering “all beautiful golden sunflowers
inside.” And this is because, as Ginsberg saw it, the two, skin and sunflower, were
inseparable. For him, that “battered old thing” known as the soul announced itself
through the “dread bleak dusty” apparitions of the body; the joy of the spirit was
incarnated in the sadness of the flesh.
“It occurs to me that I am America, / I am talking to myself again.” These lines are
another example of Ginsberg’s capacity for being intimate and prophetic, comic and
serious, at one and the same time. And they also express his very American desire to
celebrate and sing himself as representative man: to present his poems as what he
called “a complete statement of Person.” As part of this statement, Ginsberg wrote
some extraordinarily powerful accounts of personal grief, like “Kaddish” (1961), his
fugue-like elegy to his mother. He also produced poems of passionate sexual
encounter, such as “Love Poem on Theme by Whitman” (1956) that describe his
experience of drugs in terms that recall earlier, prophetic accounts of wrestling with
God. In the 1960s, in particular, Ginsberg made his wanderings over America and
the globe his subject: in poems that were, as he put it, “not exactly poems nor not
poems: journal notations put together conveniently, a mental turn-on.” Often
spoken into a tape-recorder rather than composed on the page, they carried his
commitment to “mind-flow,” “jumps of perception from one thing to another,” to a
new extreme. “All contemporary history,” Ginsberg said, “whatever floated into one’s
personal field of consciousness and contact” was drawn together here, “like weave a
basket, basket-weaving.” Some of these poems of the late 1960s and early 1970s
reveal a greater commitment to the specifics of history; nevertheless, they do so
from the standpoint of Ginsberg’s root concerns. In “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1972),
for instance, the poet denounced the Vietnam War. But “The war is language,” he
insisted; that is, the Vietnam conflict was product and symptom of something
deeper – the “Black magic language” or “formulas for reality” with which corporate
America blinded itself. Ginsberg’s answer to this problem was to construct a model
of “language known / in the back of the mind”: a true vocabulary, enabling trueGGray_c05.indd 613ray_c 05 .indd 613 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM