openning that endless chasm: on Ginsberg via Coolidge
This week I had the most response to our Clark Coolidge article, A First Reading of On the Road and Later. I felt like this when I first read the beats, mostly when I first read Howl just before coming to Berkeley, coming out of a conservative Christian suburban background into a world of poetry where obscene could be done well, with a point, with intellectualism. Perhaps I was nearly coming out of the 50's into the 90's. It was quite liberating.
It's funny to recall that there was this absent-minded intellectual vacuum, immediately before the Beat onslaught. This was for me too, a conservativism, an anti-intellectualism that required being openned up into a large chasm, that required something on a huge-scale, an openning of a vast door I couldn't even imagine the edges of. Poetry. As an urge, a need. I was already an English major, but this poem made me a poet. And it is nearly pathetic how much my early writings sound like Ginsberg. Writing came free of the books I had read and became an actual work I could do. In class we discussed if Howl was used-up, too familiar now, not shocking now. It no longer shocks me. It is very familiar. Yet, it will never be used-up.
This is perhaps a sentimental connection for me, but this is why the Beats have the popularity that they do. They're accessible without dumbing down or being simple (that I would argue other "accessible" writing is in danger of doing). They are likeable (and perhaps as easily hatable) and so people, young people, grab on and don't let go.
Endless lines of words that you followed if only because you couldn't see their ends. This brings, no matter how many times I've read Howl, an anticipation, in breathlessness as I read, in knowing how he read the poem, which such energy and fury that one can't help but keep going. Someone mentioned in class that they felt the poem was too long. I'd argue that they didn't read it fast enough, with enough fury, that they lost the energy of it. Once you have captured the energy, it is precisely the length of it, the endlessness of it, that makes you keep going and wanting more.
You wrote from what you didn't know toward whatever could be picked up in the act... I don't think my current writing sounds anything like Ginsberg, and the subject matter is absolutely different, but I still use poetics in this way, as an exploration. Last semester in workshop Laura Moriarty said it was evident in my work that I sat down to write not knowing what would come out, without a preset conclusion in mind, that I let things go where they will and it is the journey and the figuring out of things that makes the poem. Perhaps the best compliment, the best assessment of my process I've heard yet ...Poetry starts here.
As an undergrad at Berkeley I shot a photographic response to Howl, a collection of photographs that relived the places, the energy, the confusion, the rage, that Ginsberg catches. It was an invigorating project to undertake. (And I only regret that it has now been lost...).
It's funny to recall that there was this absent-minded intellectual vacuum, immediately before the Beat onslaught. This was for me too, a conservativism, an anti-intellectualism that required being openned up into a large chasm, that required something on a huge-scale, an openning of a vast door I couldn't even imagine the edges of. Poetry. As an urge, a need. I was already an English major, but this poem made me a poet. And it is nearly pathetic how much my early writings sound like Ginsberg. Writing came free of the books I had read and became an actual work I could do. In class we discussed if Howl was used-up, too familiar now, not shocking now. It no longer shocks me. It is very familiar. Yet, it will never be used-up.
This is perhaps a sentimental connection for me, but this is why the Beats have the popularity that they do. They're accessible without dumbing down or being simple (that I would argue other "accessible" writing is in danger of doing). They are likeable (and perhaps as easily hatable) and so people, young people, grab on and don't let go.
Endless lines of words that you followed if only because you couldn't see their ends. This brings, no matter how many times I've read Howl, an anticipation, in breathlessness as I read, in knowing how he read the poem, which such energy and fury that one can't help but keep going. Someone mentioned in class that they felt the poem was too long. I'd argue that they didn't read it fast enough, with enough fury, that they lost the energy of it. Once you have captured the energy, it is precisely the length of it, the endlessness of it, that makes you keep going and wanting more.
You wrote from what you didn't know toward whatever could be picked up in the act... I don't think my current writing sounds anything like Ginsberg, and the subject matter is absolutely different, but I still use poetics in this way, as an exploration. Last semester in workshop Laura Moriarty said it was evident in my work that I sat down to write not knowing what would come out, without a preset conclusion in mind, that I let things go where they will and it is the journey and the figuring out of things that makes the poem. Perhaps the best compliment, the best assessment of my process I've heard yet ...Poetry starts here.
As an undergrad at Berkeley I shot a photographic response to Howl, a collection of photographs that relived the places, the energy, the confusion, the rage, that Ginsberg catches. It was an invigorating project to undertake. (And I only regret that it has now been lost...).
posted by Sean & Jennifer at 13:28
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