Still Howling After All These Years

Lenni Brenner had this at Counter Punch over the weekend about Allen Ginsberg.

Here's an excerpt:

I clerked in Eli Wilentz's Eighth Street Bookshop in 1972. It had America's biggest selection of contemporary poetry. Allen frequently came by. One day he told me that he was for George McGovern for President. As I knew of murders committed by Democratic administrations in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Indochina, I challenged him. "McGovern stopped coming to antiwar rallies in 1969 so that he wouldn't scare the public into thinking he was a red." Allen was glum for a couple of minutes, until a youth interrupted us to ask him a question about poetry. He excused himself, saying he'd be right back. In nothing flat he was happy, chatting with a fellow poet. Then and there I decided not to pull him away from what he was good at, to attend to politics, where he was as useless as the tits on a bull. After all, it is hard to envision Buddha voting, much less voting for a party that killed over one million people in Indochina, most of them Buddhists.

If you believe that the goal of life is to escape from it, that victories and defeats are equally meaningless in the end, you tend not to bother to learn from either. But, as a sensitive person, he wanted the Indochina horror to end. Voting Democrat was what such touchy-feelies did when they came to the blank in the questionnaire where it asks, "what are you doing about it?", and they hadn't a clue as to what to really do to build the antiwar movement.

Life was a photo-album. Snapshots on the road to death. "What's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else? Built-in dumb show." If the antiwar movement invited him to speak, good, that would be a photo in his album. If not, good, there would be another in its place. With such it is as with the apostle John: "In the beginning was the Word." But in life it is Goethe who got it right: "The deed is all."

Not sure I agree entirely about Brenner's characterization of how Buddhism affected Ginsberg's thinking, but it was a corrupt version of Buddhism, as Gabe Gubbing as discussed at his blog. Nevertheless, I was never a fan of the Big A so will refrain from commenting on the poetry, except to say there was an awful lot of mediocre stuff just cranked out for what seemded like no reason. One could say the influence of the movement was democratic: hey, anyone could write that stuff. But given that it dumbed down the politics and the poetry...

What interests me here is the way activism is positioned against Spectacle and poetry. Fair? In particular I wonder if what Ginsberg failed at was using his fame to produce better counter-spectacles at those rallies. Did the message get obscured, iterating little more than a very simple "Peace" message.

But you have to hand it to those beats. The only poetry movement to get their own museum. So far...

It's now currently moving to an even larger building in North Beach.