Confronting Conformity

The Pocket Poet Series Number Fourteen

Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg

For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894—1956

I

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer—

And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers—and my own imagination of a withered leaf—at dawn—

Dreaming back thru life, Your time—and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,

the final moment—the flower burning in the Day—and what comes after, 

looking back on the mind itself…

Where to break into this long poem? It is a poem in chapters and the chapters aren’t short. At first glance one might think that this second epic poem by Ginsburg is a shift from the focus on the brotherhood of mad and maddened brother poets that animates Howl, Ginsberg's first epic poem. However, Kaddish, focusing on Ginsberg’s mother Naomi, is a more forward address to her, Howl having been a sublimation of his feelings towards her.

The Beat writers (for want of a less compromised way of speaking of them in their diversity) wanted to break with the conformist way of living that they encountered post-WWII America, but that meant more in the way one felt and spoke about the things that everyone actually cares about. Some, like Jack Kerouac, sought an escape from the social bonds of family and settled life in search of transcendence, but others, like Gary Snyder and also Robert Duncan and David Meltzer (in fellowship with Wallace Berman) believed that all of these elements could be combined – a confrontation and confounding of forces that might have repelled each other.

In the immediate post-WWII period there was an effort to reverse social progress that certainly felt like a harsh attack. Women were forced out of the work-force and back into home based lives. Once again, black soldiers found their horizons cramped and crabbed back in the US. Disabled veterans struggled to find ways to be allowed to be useful. Leftists were hounded, deprived of the ability to make a decent living and sometimes forced out of the country or even jailed for their beliefs. By the 1950s the efforts to force conformity were fully developed and regularized. The resistance to this in the world of poetry and the arts had to renew itself. Elements of the pre-War avant garde and counter-culture had to adapt themselves to a younger generation’s way of rebellion. It was not always an easy transformation.

The Beats and the other non-conformists expressed a greater interest in joy in living, frankness of speech, and the search for ecstatic transcendence than the surrealists and the communists of the 1930s.

We are clearly in a moment now that bears more resemblance to the immediate Post-WWII era (and the era of US involvement in WWI and its immediate aftermath). Whether socially repressive and conformist forces here in the US are able to triumph is still an unsettled conflict. However, it seems clear to me that there is no coherent sense of what the ends of resistance amount to. We are suffering from the overwhelming co-optation of the means of production and propagation of culture. This is certainly a handicap, along with a much more punishing cost of living, that the post-WWII generation faced.

It is hard to clearly inhabit the mindset of that previous generation, that is, how they felt in their skin in their time, however in the elegiac mode of Ginsberg’s poetry from that period I see something that feels familiar. There are so many people and so many parts of lived experience that make me want to say Kaddish. My memory seems to be serving as a third-rate rear-guard action in defense of those whose values are needed today even in their absence, even as I seek to raise up voices still speaking from this world, particularly in the generations who are younger than myself.

Twenty-Five years ago I lived in Jerusalem for a summer with my family in an apartment complex populated almost entirely by Mizrahi and North African Jews. There was a very old man who sat on a bench in the courtyard in the shade everyday. As you passed he would often gesture for your attention. He would bring you close and bless you in his raspy Judeo-Arabic. When people have asked me over the years about what I might do in my retirement I usually tell them that this old man was my model for life in retirement. Perhaps I have gotten an early start on that project as a way of putting aside my mourning. The frustration in this moment is that I feel less alone in that mournfulness than ever.

In, Pocket Poet Series Number Sixty

When I Was a Poet, by David Meltzer

...Meltzer includes a selection of poems as amulets. Amulets are texts of protection and, although I am not usually the kind of person to truck in this sort of thing, I think we all can benefit from some protection from our times.

Typewriter Amulet

Reinforced against poetry’s fists.

    Cement its four poles to a firm base set beneath

the great fig tree. Under heaven song shall be

pulled from its rollers.

    Scroll sheets hot off the branches cut into

tabloid by sun spokes

    Protect each key.

    Praises.


Amulet for Song

About your place go swallowing stars.

    Grab them off branches. Wear asbestos gloves.

    Husk stars correctly, with care. Place themselves

upon well-tilled soil. They sink into earth and

become white stones you weigh and wear in a

band above your elbow.

    Whenever darkness returns, you need not

worry.

    Now you may stay there and write and sing and

read mystery books to yourself or anyone else who

can break through the vision surrounding your

place.