Allen Ginsberg

 

I hadn't read Allen Ginsberg since high school, but for whatever reason I picked up a copy of his collected works last week, and have enjoyed revisiting his poetry over the past few days.

I will say up front that some of Ginsberg's work feels dated: there's definitely an appeal to "cosmic reverberations," and to the sort of language made famous by the Beat generation. Ginsberg, of course, was part of that generation, and contributed a considerable amount to their emergent lexicon. The point, though, is that years later, some of Ginsberg's poems collapse under their own ambition, their own quest, as he might write, through "hallucination."

All of that said, there are certain poems in the Penguin collection which have a staying power, and there are lines which I'd not remembered, or which I'd not fully understood. Ginsberg seems to have a better sense of humor than I'd thought: his sense of irony anticipated what came next. In 'America,' he writes: "It occurs to me that I am America / I am talking to myself again." This is powerfully executed: that paranoia of the American condition comes through in Ginsberg's poetry. 

Many of the poems included here were written in the middle of the 1950s: this caught my attention. It's a transitional moment in American history, and Ginsberg's poetry wrestles with that uncertainty. The Beats and the revolutionaries had not yet emerged -- or at least not fully. Instead, there's an abyss, an impasse, and it's over it that Ginsberg peers, introducing in the process a novel set of themes: homosexuality, neuroses, and, for perhaps the first time since the war, an awareness of beauty. It was this combination of tropes which affected me most.