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John Whalen-Bridge
A
ll the instruments agree that Allen Ginsberg was a fine performer, one who showed genuine respect and even love for his audience. I have been at more than one reading where listeners who came too late were denied entrance into the auditorium. Ginsberg’s response in both cases was to show up late for his own reading—because he first went outside to give a mini-performance to those who would have been excluded. He was a deeply inclusive writer. His performances made available a poetry that could soar, joke, and grieve, and they always imply a human touch that reaches towards the audience to demonstrate that no fourth wall, or any other wall, necessarily has to obstruct communication. If you saw a Ginsberg performance, you felt like you were part of a conversation, and the written texts, if you read them the way they want to be read, also cajole you into conversation.
In a voice that offered commonality and community (rather than the implicit division, say, of T.S. Eliot’s Greek and Latin footnotes or the mandarin tonalities we enjoy in Eliot’s recorded works), Ginsberg read in galleries, community centers, libraries, concerts, and university auditoriums. He used the stage to advantage, sometimes performing behind a simple table set with a glass of water and a simple-but-elegant ikebana flower arrangement, in the manner of his guru Chögyam Trungpa, an admirer of Japanese, Zen-influenced aesthetics. The influence of even subtle stage-setting is not to be ignored—one or two ikebana flowers contextualize the performance of a surrealistic rant about the destruction of the best minds of one’s generation.
Undoubtedly the most important performance in the history of Beat literature took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. Before the October reading, in January 1954, Ginsberg attended a performance of Robert Duncan’s play Faust Foutu at the end of which “Duncan stripped off all his clothes to explain the principle of nakedness to his audience” (Morgan 2007: 197)—a highly influential moment, as Ginsberg would later literalize the act of poetic self-disclosure in exactly the same way. Morgan makes this point in I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg:
Years later, when Allen copied Duncan doing by doing the same thing at a reading, people thought it was so outrageously daring and original that it became one of the most often repeated stories about Ginsberg, but Duncan’s example is virtually forgotten. (Morgan 2007:197)
This was the sort of thing that could happen in North Beach, not New York. It does not detract from Ginsberg’s own originality—something that almost always disappears when we look at contexts and influences in a finely-grained way—to see how his performance style and poetic style were each influenced by his West Coast experience. Morgan rightly notes that Ginsberg’s literary nakedness was a matter of influence and lineage, not an ab ovo birth of a previously non-existent kind of writing.
How about the exuberant rant of “Howl”? Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), who was a literary father to Beat writers and master of ceremonies at the Six Gallery reading, wrote a four-part rant against the commercialization and various other corruptions of American life entitled “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” While Tony Trigilio (2000) places Ginsberg in a prophetic lineage that includes Blake and H.D., Rexroth was perhaps the most immediate literary predecessor in the art of expressing social outrage through jazz-inflected, highly rhythmic free verse. Linda Hamalian describes this poem as an “indictment of society at large” that “stands out as undisguised and rhetorical social protest, its message so important that William Carlos Williams believed copies of the poem should be deposited on college campuses across the country” (Hamalian 1992: 231). This poem was an influence in terms of form, content, and performance style. Hamalian also notes that it was “not necessarily an example of [Rexroth’s] finest work” (1992: 231), and the differences between Rexroth and Ginsberg’s prophetic rants can be explained this way: Ginsberg’s is the funny one, Rexroth’s the more earnest and therefore more hectoring. Mid-paragraph footnote: Ginsberg and Rexroth were allied in the view that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” was not an influence on “Howl,” whatever we critics think (Hamalian 1992: 241). Dramatically speaking, “Howl,” in its explosive juxtapositions and self-mocking confession of not-yet-ready-for-mainstream sentiments animates the audience but also allows for role distance. Recall the non-existent fourth wall—Ginsberg’s comic role distance creates the space for a poetry at once hysterically funny and earnestly engaged; it opens the door for full-throated self-expression, but in a way that precludes narcissism or preciosity.
Ginsberg’s “Howl” was first read at the October Six Gallery reading, but the event was not merely the first hearing of a great poem or a great poet: it was the eruption of a movement. As the title of Michael Davidson’s 1991 study The San Francisco Renaissance Poetics and Community at Mid-Century underscores, this movement must be understood as the intersection of poetics and community. In addition to Ginsberg, the line-up included Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure (who organized the program along with Ginsberg), Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. Lew Welch, contrary to what one careless critic wrote, was away in Chicago recovering from a nervous breakdown, and so missed this event (Whalen-Bridge 2006-2007: 93). Ginsberg tried to get Jack Kerouac to agree to read, “but Jack refused adamantly, saying that he was too shy to perform like a court jester” (Morgan 2007: 207). Shy Kerouac was less shy after pulling on a jug of red wine, and so Ginsberg was urged on “by shouts of ‘Go, man’ and ‘Yeah’ from Kerouac who kept rhythm by tapping on a wine jug” as Ginsberg, in the second public reading of his life, read “Howl” (Morgan 2007: 209). Not all great performances translate so quickly into great books, but Lawrence Ferlinghetti reports that on the following day he sent Ginsberg a telegram, echoing Emerson to Whitman, that read, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career—When do I get manuscript of Howl?” (Morgan 2007: 209). (Ginsberg did not remember receiving said telegram, and Morgan doubts it was sent because telegrams were expensive, but it is nonetheless one of those stories that, even if it were not true, should have been.)
Although he continued after this ecstatic career-launch to experience some doubts about his poetic ability, his sexual orientation, and about “Howl” in particular (Morgan 2007: 209), the rest of the world believes that Ginsberg became Ginsberg on or about 7 October 1955. Morgan reports that Ginsberg’s confidence really began to soar in the months after, during which he read everything by Walt Whitman and identified the following as his primary poetic commitments: “1) a spontaneous method of composition, 2) a long imaginative line, 3) using the immediate consciousness of the transcriber (or writer) as the subject of the poem” (Morgan 2007: 210). The third item is of primary interest, here: Ginsberg hesitated, interestingly, between himself as transcriber and writer. To these two possibilities, we add a third role: performer. “Howl” can be seen as a torrent of language that seized the transcriber, and that notion adds to the shamanistic appeal of the ranting prophet. And, of course, it was a poem, written by a poet, reflecting the poet’s growth and the conditioning factors of local and national history. But the text of this particular poem also became the basis of a series of performances. Would self-doubting Ginsberg have gone on to become the key figure in the Beat Movement if he had not performed the poem publicly when he did? It is possible that he would not have. Ginsberg’s writing insistently calls to our attention the ways in which our stream of consciousness is a performance that we would seem to put on for ourselves, inwardly, and the spunkily rhythmic wordstreams also cry out to be read aloud, to others.
We think of poetic performance as a singular event, but let us consider the multiplicity of performance: a poem that is performed or a song that is sung is at once a single thing and a stream of events. The poet standing before the audience verbally enunciating poems is a performance: but afterwards, the poet speaking to audience members–naïve, hip-jaded, in love–is another performance. Performance is never purely a matter of written words or notes that already are fully meaningful, which contain and then transmit the full meaning to the audience through the medium of speech or instrument. Whatever the ratio of prior text to improvisation, performance involves an element of both, and Ginsberg excelled at creating poems that make his audience participate in the improvisation of the present moment. Philip Whalen’s “picture or graph of the mind moving” is not a representation of just the poet’s mind: when the experience represented by the poem—or the shared experience of the poem–can be said to refer equally to shifts and swerves in the minds of poet writer and audience/reader, then alienation has been defeated in some small way (Whalen 2007: 153).
The Six Gallery Poets (and later, the spokespersons gathered in the groundbreaking anthology The New American Poetry) practiced and theorized a poetics of community informed by Buddhist skepticism about language and concepts, twentieth century returns to orality as a tribal treasure, and jazz improvisation. This communion is the bridging of subject and object, of speaker and audience, of percept and awareness. The aesthetic experience for writers like Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen and Joann Kyger is the momentary escape from identity-bondage. We could say that much art or perhaps even all great art astonishes us– Latin ex- “out” + tonare “to thunder.” The whack of art has more than a little in common with the keisaku, the long paddle that is used in Zen Buddhist lengthy meditation practices to help the meditator snap out of distracted mind. Poets like Snyder, Whalen, Kyger, and Ginsberg all had long careers that searched for similarities between artistic and contemplative practices, and the theoretical explorations are performed in the poems.
In their relative way, and against the Modernist and New Critical hegemony of the Word-made-book, the Beats put more emphasis on the possibility that the reading was just a bit more important than the book. The poet talking to the audience and living in a community, queer or straight, mad or sane, in love or enraged, becomes an extension of the performance. Some performances are better than others, but the commitment to performing an awareness of awareness that is meant to heal and make joyful is a completely consistent characteristic of Ginsberg’s artistic activity, and this characteristic is sharpened and perhaps perfected as he ages. Countercultural heroes are remembered most precisely for their earlier work, for youthful exuberance and sometimes trite rebellion. Harder to commodify is the kind of performance that survives the energies and willful ignorance of youth, which may be why some surviving “Beats” scowl at the word.
Immediacy, spontaneity, honesty, and friendliness are the chief characteristics of Ginsberg’s style. A quick flip through his Collected Poems shows his work to be stylistically unified. Poems written across a half-century in dozens of countries and in response to every kind of social and historical stimulation bring the Ginsberg voice back to us, and we can reconnect with that mind when we perform the poem on the mind’s stage, so long as mind and art are both shapely. “First thought, best thought” is worst thought when it blocks revision and refinement (Ginsberg 1994: 13). Early on, Ginsberg’s academic critics accused him of being the byproduct of readers enamored with the famous poet whose random rambling was not unlike their own. Be-ins, performance art, and poetics of the breath were genuinely risky activities. Less dramatically, we can say not every experiment succeeds. Sixty years ago, there was a “Howl.” It was not until about twenty-five years ago—sometime before the mid-1980s—that a treaty was signed in heaven in which it was declared Ginsberg had won and that tribute would be paid to him for the rest of his life.
Ginsberg outperformed his critics by producing a steady stream of poems that were ways of being-in-the-world, performance on the page that the reader could practice like a musical score. We can experiment, following William Carlos Williams’ triplet lines in different ways: the red wheelbarrow is not always the same. Blake’s “Tyger” can be sung in various ways. We become musicians of the phrases ourselves as we learn to perform the pointing-out-instructions in befitting ways, meaning ways that allow us to see that the mind is the cup holding everything else, so hold it carefully. The poems point to an awareness that contains the world. As Emily Dickinson said in her transcendentalist manifesto “The Brain Is Wider than the Sky” (1924: n.p.):
The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.
Brain, here, is synecdoche for phenomenological experience: it differs from the totality of God—all that is—primarily in that it is slightly more organized. (All syllables are sound, but not all sounds are syllables.) She did not perform her transcendental declarations for a physical audience, but the music survives her, was discovered by a later audience, has been performed continuously ever since. We must consider the ways in which the performance is between the artist and the audience, transmitted through sound waves in the air, through books, or through pixels. This transmission saves lives and shatters the seven underworlds of homophobia, imperialism, greed, snobbery, competitive individualism, despair, and humorlessness. Sometimes Ginsberg could get all seven in one poem, with a wrathful smile and a sinking, deathward eye that saw and accepted consequences.
Prosaically and perhaps inaccurately, I have been separating awareness and world, but we become aware of what the art points to because, as Stephen Daedalus would have it, we bump our sconce into it. The materiality of the world is not apart from symbols, since things are symbols of themselves, but we mistake things for things that have a pure thingness, apart from any performance of the thingly world in which awareness somehow finds itself. There is a little risk involved, and it is really the same risk: we might fetishize our own awareness. Without having properly found the certificates and charts or tendons or neurons that link “I” and awareness, we might get sold a bill of goods that rewards narcissism or leaves us thinking, nihilistically, that there is no reason for kindness, love, joy, or equanimity. Ginsberg worked out sentences that avoided foundationalist arrogance on one side and coldness on the other.
Part of Ginsberg’s mission was to point out how we relate to our own stream of consciousness, but the outer dimension of this same effort involved connecting this awareness to how beings in the world treat one another, too often because of ignorance. Poems about sexuality, destructive habits, and political economy become another kind of performance: Ginsberg happily took on the role of culture warrior. The verbal performances in courtrooms and on talk shows were extensions of these poems, and Ginsberg’s performances consistently followed from his estimation about how primordial awareness works, whether or not he ever experienced this directly. How would we know? At the end of his life, he said he did not know what was going on, but he always said this with a knowing laugh that made us confident in our own knowledge. That is to say: fundamentally, “self” is a mistake we make, so it would be a mistake, for example, to hate Jesse Helms. Successfully or not, Ginsberg tried to make senators and right-wing interlocutors laugh with him.
Philosophical nondualism is a tool, the spiritual/philosophical equivalent of a pair of vice-grip pliers, for loosening or removing the conscious notion of self when it is an obstructive exaggeration in the mind. That said, it is still an attention-getting bit of weirdness to even mention such notions—which Ginsberg most frequently did. His Buddhist influences risked dismissal or disparagement from the cultural mainstream. To traffic in such ideas is to get on the wrong side of the Judeo-Christian God, at least as He was constructed by T. S. Eliot in After Strange Gods. If performance implies a separation of speaker and audience in a subject/object manner, then it would be absurd to say that Ginsberg’s poetry was in many instances a performance of nonduality, though Ginsberg would not have conceded the premise that performance depends upon a strict separation of artist and audience. The tendency, however, is to lionize the rebellious aspect of the Beat writer (just as I have, dualistically and even moralistically, set Ginsberg against Eliot). Our sense of what “Beat performance” must be risks being caught in an increasingly distant past. If we celebrate the writers’ youth, we privilege immaturity over wisdom and rebellion over affiliation and cooperation.
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Note: An earlier version of this essay was published in Beat Drama, edited by Deborah Geis and published Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama, 2016.
References Davidson, M. (1991), The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University. Dickinson, E. (1924), “The Brain Is Wider than the Sky,” in Complete Poems [1924], <http://www.bartleby.com/113/1126.html >[accessed 6 July 2022]. Ginsberg, A. (1963), Reality Sandwiches: The Pocket Poets Series, 18, City Lights, San Francisco. Ginsberg, A. (1984), Collected Poems, 1947-1980, New York: Harper and Row. Ginsberg, A. (1994), Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems, 1986-1992, New York: Harper Perennial. Ginsberg, A (1996), Selected Poems, 1947-1995, New York: Harper Perennial. Ginsberg, A. (1999), Death & Fame: Poems 1993-1997, New York: Harper Flamingo. Whalen, P. (2007), “Since You Ask Me,” The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, Michael Rothenberg (ed), Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University. Whalen-Bridge, J. (2006/2007), “‘For/From Lew’: The Ghost Visitations of Lew Welch and the Art of Zen Failure (A Dialogue for Two Voices),” Connotations: a Journal of Critical Debate, 16.1-3: 92-115. < https://www.connotations.de/article/john-whalen-bridge-forfrom-lew-the-ghost-visitations-of-lew-welch-and-the-art-of-zen-failure-a-dialogue-for-two-voices/ >[accessed 6 July 2022].
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John Whalen-Bridge has been teaching in Asia since 1993 and is currently associate professor at the National University of Singapore. He has written two monographs (Political Fiction and the American Self and Tibet on Fire: Buddhism, Protest, and the Rhetoric of Self-Immolation), and he has edited about a dozen books and special issues of journals. He is currently writing a monograph of Buddhism and American writing and he is the authorized biographer of Maxine Hong Kingston.
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