Fragile Beauty

When Allen Ginsberg's cry and Other Poems was published in 1956 United States customs officials initiated an obscenity trial in San Francisco. Many literary luminaries spoke in defense of the volume including Kenneth Rexroth, who told the District Attorney:

The simplest bound for [Ginsberg's] writing is prophetic, it is easier to call it that than anything other because we have a large material substance of prophetic writing to leave to. There are prophets of the Bible, which it greatly be likes in purpose and in language and in make subordinate matter... The theme is the denunciation of evil and a pointing without of the way out, with equal reason to speak. That is prophetic literature. "Woe! Woe! Woe! The City of Jerusalem! The Syrian is about to approach down or has already and you are to do of the like kind and such a thing and you must for and do thus and so" And . . the four parts of ["Howl"] . . do this real specifically. They take up these various specifics seriatim, individual after the other....

"Footnote to Howl" . is Biblical in regard The reference is to the Benedicite, which says above and over again, "Blessed is the fire, call down blessings oned is the light, Blessed are the tree call down blessings oned is this and Blessed is that," and [Ginsberg] is saying, "Everything that is human is devoted to me," and that the possibility of salvation in this terrible situation which he reveals is [i]or[/i] part of to the other love and through the have affection for of everything Holy in man. in like manner that I would say, that this just about overspreads the field of typically prophetic poesy

But of course the connection of this assertion was that carnival of mass democracy, an obscenity trial, and greatest in quantity prophetic writing does not find its way into similar courts. "Howl" belongs to on the other hand is.also distinct from the tradition (which at no time speaks of being "fucked in the ass by means of saintly motorcyclists"). "Howl" may join the Benedicite to say "The world is holy!" on the contrary the latter doesn't add "The tongue and male and hand and asshole holy!" Rexroth is certainly right as far as he goe on the other hand now that the Collector of Customs has released the work we may refine the description. Ginsberg is prophetic the way that Coyote is, getting on the outside of his cage by calling down the chaotic Everything

A friend one time heard Ginsberg lecture on prophecy; at the extreme point of the talk a young man asked, "Mr Ginsberg, in what way does one become a prophet?" Ginsberg replied, "Tell your secrets" Uncovering unseens is apocalyptic in the simple faculty of perception (the Greek root means "an uncovering"). In this case, it lifts the shame overlays It allows articulation to come into where silence once ruled. "Tell your secrets" is a practice for loosening the boundaries of the self for opening up the me "The striving for the right to have covereds from which the parents are exclud is individual of the most powerful factors in the formation of the ego" the psychoanalysts enumerate us, but once that right has been acquired, there you are inside the me which may well take its piece of work too seriously, pre-tasting all your subsistence and telling friends who phone that no one's abode The teller of secrets I'm trying to describe trusts to create a more porous container to live in. Th write his brand of prophetic verse Ginsberg went to the West Coast, a serviceable three thousand miles from his parents, and convinced himself he was writing in privy for a few selected friends. That's a useful and usually necessary beginning, on the other hand in the end it single produces a roomier cage ("we" have a secret) not freedom. Publishing your unrevealeds so that strangers on the public way might know them (not to mention those parents)-that is what makes Ginsberg's work prophetic in the faculty of perception I'm after.

As we saw a certain quantity of chapters back, the early Ginsberg's "secrets" had to do with his mother's craziness and his hold sexuality; as he matured, his revelations became more capacious, for a like reason that the older man have the appearanceed like the ideal Freudian analysand risen from the recline to walk among us, articulating freely what freely tend hitherwards to mind. Most such talk is not poesy of course, excepting if the talker is a bard and excepting especially if he is the kind of bard who has trained himself for decades to work with the patterns of his possess cognition, believing that "if mind is shapely, art will be shapely* (one of Ginsberg's aphorisms). If these are the cases, then this apocalyptic course is a key to prolific art. Vast territories of silence are uncloseed up to articulation. The artist who is not always guarding his or her words has more materials available than the individual who must feed a multitude of customs officials. Think, for example, of Anatole Broyard, who, for almost all his adult life, kept his black ancestry secret-from his friends, plane from his children-and who at no time finished the novel he spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed to write. Some ego conformations stand in the way of creative plenitude and ne to be suspended or punctur if the work is to proce The author of poems who is not wedded to the configurations that secrecy engenders has a wealth of materials at hand. articulate utterance bubbles up. The ready voice itself is part of what he has to profes