ModPo 2013 #40 Angry Beat Oracle: On Ginsberg's "Howl"

Image of Moloch from en.wikipedia.org.

The link to the entire text of "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg is here.

Here's an excerpt with famous first lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

And here's a memorable line from the video discussion:

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, -

Part II of "Howl" has a series of lines that begin with a brutal god's name.

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

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This poem was definitely in the Whitmanian tradition. After having gone over Whitman in Chapter 1, I've come to appreciate long tracts of poetry. Through the video discussion, I also got to distinguish the musicality and internal rhymes and alliterations of Ginsberg's poem. This was epic, a poem to define, or at least describe, a generation (and even beyond it).

This was an angry poem. The first lines are definitely angry: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." The last lines that refer to Moloch, a god known for "demanding" child sacrifice, depicts cruel master who demands what is most precious. It's been known that Ginsberg was referring to Moloch as a metaphor for America...or at least the America/ American establishment that he was angry with. Even if this poem was written in 1956, I can see how this kind of America continues to anger its citizens (and those outside America). In the face of the government shutdown that just occurred and the huge biological footprint that America continues to make due to the unstoppable growth that is the nature of capitalism...this poem continues to be relevant. Wars and armed interventions still demand the lives of young American men even up to today. And the protests against war continue as well. You could call Ginsberg prophetic.

In the middle of this anger, there is that confessional stanza wherein the speaker/ poet addresses "you" (the reader), vulnerable and naked, incomprehensible but conforming to "the rhythm of thought of his naked and endless head." It is the voice of a poet that is encountering a different America from Whitman's, a far more cruel one and yet one that is full of beat-ific beauty.

All in all, what I take from Ginsberg is a poetry that is sprawling, unafraid in its anger, musical in its interruption of everyday discourse, a textual hemorrhage heralding the sixties of hippies, free love, drugs, protests and spiritual reawakenings. I'm glad to have read this (once-banned) poem. It gives voice to my own dissatisfactions with my country (now embroiled in corruption controversies---which we've all known about but could never pinpoint until now---and rocked by natural calamities like earthquakes in the South---and man-made ones like our city floods) and the kind of future my children will have.

ModPo 2013 #8 What Price America? On Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California"

Image from dspace.mit.edu.

Note: I am currently taking a course on Coursera.org called Modern and Contemporary American Poetry taught by Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania. I will be posting my thoughts on the course discussions here.

A Supermarket in California

          What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
          In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
          What peaches and what penumbras!  Whole families
shopping at night!  Aisles full of husbands!  Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

          I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
          I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops?  What price bananas?  Are you my Angel?
          I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
          We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

          Where are we going, Walt Whitman?  The doors close in
an hour.  Which way does your beard point tonight?
          (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
          Will we walk all night through solitary streets?  The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

          Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
          Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Berkeley, 1955  
From Collected Poems 1947-1980 by Allen Ginsberg, published by Harper & Row. 
Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Online source

I see the passage of time from 1855 (Whitman's "Song of Myself") to 1955  in Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California." Whereas the "blab of the pave" describes very physical, very outdoor scenarios, Ginsberg's poem deals with an "inside" and an "outside" that describes the America of 1955.

"Inside" is inside the neon-lit supermarket. Inside the supermarket, we encounter the goods from the outdoors: tomatoes, peaches, avocados, watermelons. And these are not merely from the farms of America, these are from the farms of the world. I see this in the questions, "what price bananas?" He asks this not in the sense of "how much are these bananas?" he asks "what price?" which has heavier implications. Where did the bananas come from? Was the distribution of the bananas under the conditions of fair trade?

When Ginsberg says "never passing the cashier," I see here a rejection of the supermarket of America, a non-participation in the commerce. Instead, he chooses to follow this grubber that he has christened Walt Whitman outside, outside to where it is dark and after store-hours, outside where blue automobiles are within the driveways of suburbia. And...like WCW in "Danse Russe"...he talks about the loneliness (perhaps the loneliness of being an artist?) of being on the outside, late at night.

The last stanza talks about a lost America and about death. I think, here, he mourns the passing of an America in Whitman's time.

While America is real and thriving, America is also an idea. For many Filipinos, America is the American Dream. America comes at a price.

I look at this from 2013 eyes as well. The America that produced the supermarket in Ginsberg's poem continues to come at a price. There are rich countries and there are poor countries. There are rich countries that produce the biggest biological footprints and there are poor countries that live below the poverty line. And all of this, of course, comes from an idea, an idea about the pursuit of happiness, an idea about power and commerce and welfare and entitlement and capital. I see the loneliness of contemplating the silent cottage outside the spheres of supermarkets and automobiles in driveways.

I like his question: Dear Walt Whitman, dear courage-teacher, what America did you have when you passed?

What America was inherited by Americans? What America was inherited by this world?

I like looking at this from three levels: against the America of Walt Whitman, the America of Ginsberg, and my America (or America for me in 2013).