Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

  The theory of poetics that I got out of it was the effect of poetry that makes your hair stand on end on the back of your neck, or gives you [a] shiver on your spine. This is not only in poetry but in other kinds of aesthetic experience. It’s akin to déjà vu or religious experience or “new shiver” as invented by Rimbaud and Baudelaire. It’s a new shudder, a new wrinkle, a new tingle in art, but the tingle or shock or impact of a work of art is the mind filling in the space between two images.

  Rexroth wrote back and said, “Listen Ginsberg, you went to Columbia University too long. You’re too old to be going on with all this formal stuff like that, all these bullshit theories. And the poem itself is very stiff and formalistic and academic, what’s the matter with you at your age?” So I thought, “Ah, fuck, I’ve failed again. I can’t write poetry.” I really worked on “Dream Record” and had revised it over and over again to get just the precise words. All Rexroth could say was that it was an academic exercise. He was right in a way, but I felt like a complete failure as a poet at this point. I decided that I was a failure, quite literally, and gave up. I changed my life quite a bit. I decided I’d go live with Peter Orlovsky and quit my job in market research and began to pick up my unemployment compensation.

  CHAPTER 42

  Ginsberg and “Howl”

  I was about three weeks into my unemployment compensation, after five years working as an executive in market research, when I sat down at the typewriter and thought I would just write whatever I felt like writing, instead of writing a regular poem. Something looser, like prose or something. The first lines of “Howl” are written in somewhat more extended but the same triadic verse as Williams. That’s where all that started, the first line of “Howl.” “I saw the best minds of my generation,” but that seemed a little too long, so “generations destroyed by madness,” “generation madness.” Those two will balance out in the middle, one side is the generation and the other side is madness like a pack saddle on a mule. “Generation” is one pack and “madness” is another. I did not make any corrections till I was done typing. Later on I began x-ing things out and getting all tangled up and messed the thing up a bit.

  One of the first lines I thought of was by William Butler Yeats, “Out of the murderous innocence of the sea” in his poem “Prayer for My Daughter.” They both fit, the murderous sea and the innocent sea, but usually not together. When you can put words like “murderous” and “innocence” together the mind has to figure out how such a total contradiction makes sense. Naturally there’s going to be a little brain pop. There are a number of such mental jump cuts in Blake, like “a robin red breast in a cage, puts all heaven in a rage.”

  You have to figure those out because they’re sort of opposite things. How could a wounded murdered worm forgive the plow? It’s an opposite. So poetry in a way is composed of opposites. You take two opposite things and put them together, set them next to each other without any explanation, and the mind has to have a little explosion to make the connection. The mind has to connect them and create an understanding of what the relationship is. The operation of the mind creating that understanding is the aesthetic charge, filling in the gap.

  Another example of that gap is a line in Hamlet, when the ghost of his father appears on the wall and says, “In the dread vast and middle of the night.” I always thought that was such a funny contradictory combination of words. The dread vast and middle. Amazing Shakespeare, tremendously conjurative in the sense it does conjure up the big infinity of the night, but also right in the middle of it. That one concept of poetry is, as Aristotle says of metaphor, the apt relationship of dissimilars. Take two dissimilar things and put them side by side and the mind puts them together and relates them. That’s what metaphor is like. You’re sweeter than a flower.

  I began figuring that the more opposite the words, the more amazing the flash in the mind. The mind will create a flash just like a lightning flash between two poles. If you set up a positive and negative pole in the mind, the wider apart they are the bigger the flash will be. The more contradictory the two poles, the more explosive and inclusive the mental flash to bind them together. That was the basic principle I was operating under when I sat down to write “Howl.”

  I had already experimented with triadic verse forms somewhat like Williams in “The Green Automobile.” The first page of “Howl” was basically an attempt at staying within Williams’s triadic line. It extended itself a little too much and the lines are heavier and longer and there was a point, “the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops,” where there was more than could be contained in the three-line triadic form. Within one single breath of thought there were more extended ideas and more extended improvisations. It reminds me of a line of Kerouac’s about that a few years later in 1959. He said [in] The New American Poetry,

  Add alluvials to end of your line when all is exhausted but something has to be said for some specified irrational reason, since reason can never win out, because poetry is NOT a science. The rhythm of how you decide to “rush” yr statement determines the rhythm of the poem, whether it is a poem in verse-separated lines, or an endless one-line poem called prose . . . (with its paragraphs). So let there be no equivocation about statement, and if you think this is not hard to do, try it. You’ll find that your lies are heavier than your intentions. And your confessions lighter than Heaven.

  Otherwise, who wants to read? 225

  So that’s what I was doing. Alluvials, he was referring to James Joyce’s “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” the mythological eternal woman, heroine of Finnegans Wake. Finnegan is masculine, Anna Livia Plurabelle [means] many rivers, the Liffey River. Anna Liffey River of many beauties is the goddess of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. When Kerouac said “alluvial” in that line he was talking about Finnegans Wake prose, which is the babble sound, the subconscious continuing babble behind the ear. Extra-alliterative assonants and Jupiter pluvians raining out of your brain. After you’ve thought you’ve said what you had to say, but you’re still thinking of something, you continue saying it. Like “the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops.” That’s what he means by an alluvial. Add extra phrasing, extra tongue mouthings, extra thoughts, just to finish the thought completely and to exhaust the thought spurt.

  Basically what I was doing was just making up stuff for my own amusement. As this went along, I had the idea that it couldn’t be published anyway, so I might as well be totally free and say anything I wanted, because it wasn’t really in poetry form. It didn’t succeed in being neatly put together like the Williams triads, it got too clunky and big and dumpy, and then I began breaking up the lines weirdly, so it didn’t have any form, I thought. It was prosaic, it wasn’t long enough to be a novel and it wasn’t short enough to be a lyric, so I figured it wasn’t a poem. In that case I might as well write what I felt like, which was a fortunate mistake, because that way I was able to escape the self-consciousness of writing a poem. That is a constant trap, it is the constant trap for me continuously, the constant awareness of setting something down which other people will read. Therefore you don’t say what you really think, you say something you want them to think you think. It’s just as simple as that.

  Saying what you actually think, instead of what you want people to think you think, is a big problem. What would you write if you were up on the moon and you knew nobody would ever see it? The writing would be sublime because there would be no reason not to say everything. So that’s the method here.

  The line was originally “the best minds of my generation starving, mystical, naked,” so that was the secret undertone of that. Then when I looked at it, I realized “mystical” was just like a crybaby complaint. Williams wouldn’t approve of that, because what the fuck does that mean anyway? But if I said hysterical, which sounded like mystical, all of sudden it brought it down to earth because obviously these people were
hysterical and people would recognize hysterical. It also gives it the point of view of Time magazine. In other words, this poem was written for the people who read Time magazine as well as for the bohemian left.

  There are specific things crossed out on the manuscript of “Howl.” Here’s an interesting one: “anarchy & Blake-light tragedy.” It sounded corny, hallucinating anarchy, how can you hallucinate anarchy? You can hallucinate Arkansas, but how can you hallucinate anarchy? Anarchy is an abstraction, so I’ve put in something that you could hallucinate. It was much better than Arkansas and Blake, but I was digging the idea of putting opposites together, what could be more opposite from Blake-light tragedy than Arkansas, I thought? If I put “Arkansas” next to “Blake-light tragedy” that would create a little flash of “How could these two things be put together?” The very goofiness makes it interesting, the unexpected. When you read it, it’s beautiful that way, better than something smooth and pretty.

  Then the phrase “among the postwar cynical scholars.” I took out “cynical among postwar scholars” because I thought that was too editorializing and then later changed that to “scholars of war.” I was thinking of someone like Norman Podhoretz. “Who burned in the hells of poetry,” what does that say? I changed that from poetry to turpentine and paint. It had the same sound, “poetry,” “turpentine,” and if I was going to describe an artist’s loft with paint and turpentine I shouldn’t say art or poetry. I should just say turpentine and paints or turpentine and pigment or something. “Who ate fire in paint hotels” or “drank turpentine in Paradise Alleys.” That’s the same thing, in other words, people who suicided themselves or suffered for art, you know. The idea was the old bohemian image of somebody who’s suffering for his art as a painter. The original was “who burned in the hells of poetry and making paintings, whose apartments flared up in the joyous fires of their heavenly brains.” That was all very corny, so that’s all left out. I replaced it with “who ate fire in paint hotels.” “Ate fire” was an opposite, a juxtaposition, how can you eat fire? I thought that was somewhat interesting. And “drank turpentine,” meaning that he committed suicide.

  Mainly I was amazed at just how many lines remained intact. I kept the really good ones. The beginning is more or less the same. “Bared their brains” and so on. “Got busted in their beards” was corny, so it became “busted in their pubic beards.”

  The precursors to this were things like Apollinaire’s poem “Zone.” The parallel texts to this, the things I drew on in addition to the “Zone” poem, were Christopher Smart’s “Rejoice in the Lamb,” which had the same construction. He used “who who who,” or “that that that,” “and and and” in that poem. Lorca’s ode to a bullfighter “Ode to Walt Whitman” has some great lines in it that have these opposites. “You looked for a naked body like a river. Bull and dream who would join wheel with seaweed,” trying to describe a boyfriend as a lover, a toreador lover. He has another line about a bullfighter, “Sleep, fly, rest: even the sea dies!” The idea is similar to the “murderous innocence of the sea.”

  I had a job mopping Bickford’s cafeteria, so “mopped all night in desolate Bickford’s” is here. “Listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox.” That was the inspired line, my favorite phrase in “Howl.” So hydrogen jukebox is murderous innocence. It’s the same thing, taking two opposite words or two words that would be theoretically unrelated and putting them together to make a connection which comes surrealistically from the unconscious but really makes sense. I was talking about that relationship between the extreme roar of sensation of the jukebox and the prophetic apocalyptic lyrics of the jukebox. In those days you had [songs like] “Open the Door, Richard.” Neal Cassady and I interpreted that as “open the door to the future, the apocalypse, the door of Christ.” Let me in, I want to get into heaven, open the door to the other universe. Anyway, hydrogen jukebox was the method.

  You get a general idea of listening to the crack of doom on the jukebox to begin with, but you want to say “the crack of doom on the jukebox” is a little boring, it isn’t enough. It needs something else to balance it out, it needs a punch line. You need something that will electrify the jukebox, so to speak. Or you need something to plug in the jukebox to some kind of supersonic metal idea, so you put an opposite word to jukebox. I could have said, “listening to the crack of doom on the classic jukebox.” That wouldn’t have been too bad, or capitalist jukebox, or communist jukebox. If you have one abstract word, then put another abstract word next to it which is its opposite and you make a concrete image.

  That’s a classic method from the surrealists. Hop up your image with some totally opposite zonk. You zonk the image with something so weird that people will ask, “How’d you get to that?” One way of doing it is to put the word “meat” in front of it: in front of the meat jukebox, in front of the meat scholar, in front of the meat lady, in front of meat walls. They’ll all sound good, “meat” is an invariable, perfect word.

  It was a bold move to say “absolute reality” because it’s a caricature of itself. That’s why it succeeds. The tricks of this particular trade are to take nonsense and elevate it to an art. It’s not really nonsense, it’s taking the promptings of your imagination, otherwise known as the unconscious, and yoking the unconscious with the conscious. Take an adjective, an unconscious intuition, and yoke it with a conscious noun or a conscious verb. Make it a surrealist or unconscious or imaginative adjective or adverb and yoke it next to a conscious noun or verb. A regular, ordinary thing like an angel. If you take “Indian” and put it next to “angel” it becomes a visionary Indian angel. Well of course nowadays that’s corny, but at this time it was a new invention. The idea of putting an Indian next to an angel, or putting “teenage” before “angel” was new in 1957. The notion of the angel was just coming into American mentality around that time, probably on account of peyote being circulated around then, so a certain angelic light ray entered the absolute brain.

  “Howl” uses the longer line, like Whitman or Smart, but stuffed with artifacts and noticings of the phenomenal world in a kind of shorthand. [That’s] William Carlos Williams’s influence, though you’ll find a lot of the detail with Whitman if you go through his catalogues, exquisite observation of detail also. The problem is that it’s a little long-winded, syntactically, and so use surrealist methods of conjunctions, or juxtapositions of words like “hydrogen jukebox” in order to keep the long line active all the way through, the long, long verse lines, or inject it with a lot of curious interesting sparkles within the line. There are always crazy poetic juxtapositions within the line, phrasings within the line, like “angry fix,” or “Mohammedan angel.” The Moloch section, trying to make a rhythmic machine, something similar to Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” or Hart Crane’s “Atlantis,” which I point to as specimens in this workbook of “Howl” precursors.

  When you get to “Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen,” that combination of “sexless hydrogen” is pretty far out, but it’s actually got a lot of thought in it. There’s the hydrogen bomb, but there’s also the displacement of sexuality, all that energy going to war, a displacement of eros, so sexless hydrogen, and also quite literally hydrogen is pretty, it’s the liberation of hydrogen, the splitting of the atoms, splitting rather than the atoms hugging and uniting. A lot of the visual imagery of Moloch is taken from surrealist movies such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, M with Peter Lorre, another German film, The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse by Fritz Lang, the pre-Hitler German films, where the psychological anarchist attacks the police state.

  CHAPTER 43

  Ginsberg, “Howl,” and Christopher Smart

  Christopher Smart provided the method of the line when my idea of William Carlos Williams’s triadic lines broke down under the pressure of too much to say and too big a breath for the triadic breakdown of the line.

  Smart’s poem Rejoice in the Lamb was a transition text. Christopher Smart was
a friend of Dr. Samuel Johnson. He was a great scholar in Greek and Latin and went to Cambridge where he won all the prizes year after year for about fifteen years steady for poetry composition. In those days it was quite an honor and also would lead to a big position in the city, in the diplomatic service, or in society, but Smart was eccentric and would stop on the streets of London and get down on his knees and pray to God. He was always being kicked around and scuffed by the constables. He was also in debt and drank, hanging around Grubb Street and working as a journalist. At that same time he wrote very tight, rhymed, complicated poems, especially A Song to David, which is in almost all anthologies. Smart was also one of the few people who could write a good Sapphic verse with his ear tuned to the length of the vowel rather than the accent. He was one of the [few] people in the whole English tradition who had a good ear, an ear like Ezra Pound wanted twentieth-century poets to develop. An ear for the weight of the syllable or the length of the syllable, the duration of the syllable.

  I wrote a poem back in 1948 that went “Smart went crazy, Smart went crazy.” He wound up in Bedlam, Bethlehem, a madhouse where he started writing a poem called Rejoice in the Lamb. The myth is that he did it three lines a day. He wrote single lines, like a line out of Whitman or the Bible. The method of composition he used was anaphoric. He returned to the margin with a word like “who,” like I did in the text of “Howl”—“who did this, who did that.”

  I got the idea of the structure from reading a lot of Christopher Smart and just imitating him. There are a lot of academic commentators who have looked at my poetry and have said that “Howl” is modeled on examples from Kenneth Fearing and Kenneth Patchen and Carl Sandburg and Whitman but, though I’d read Whitman, I wasn’t that interested in his form. I was interested in Smart’s form. And I was very familiar with Rejoice in the Lamb: Jubilate Agno. The manuscript was never published in Smart’s time because everybody thought he was crazy and that his book was off the wall. Finally in 1920 it was put together and published for the first time and everybody said it was like a great modern surrealist poem in a kind of twentieth-century style. It’s constructed in antiphonal form.