Absence of the Hero (8 page)

Empty Mirror
. Early poems by Allen Ginsberg/Totem Corinth Books/17 W. 8th St./New York/N.Y./10011/$1.25

It is not easy being Allen Ginsberg. Nor is it easy to review him. For in spite of his romantically-avowed homosexualism, we still subconsciously look up and expect top performance. The favorite parlor games of little magazine freaks (and big magazine freaks) is to knock Allen Ginsberg, and Mailer and Albee and Capote and and and—I know. I do it myself.
Imagine, for instance, that these early poems had been written by somebody called Harry Wedge
. I'd immediately have myself a new culture hero. But since they were written by Ginsberg and introduced by W.C. Williams, my typewriter teeth are already itching for the bite. What?

Williams works around in the short foreword and I do not quite pick it up. It is a kind of a jogging through of his poetic formula of what good poetics should be and Ginsberg is his boy, “this young Jewish boy, already not so young any more.” There is some talk of Dante, of G. Chaucer. Williams says that the poet must speak to the crowd in their own language yet he must disguise his lines so that they will not offend. “With this, if it be possible, the hidden sweetness of the poem may alone survive and one day rouse a sleeping world.” Of course, since 1952, since this foreword was written, we have realized that no “hidden sweetness” is necessary. If
Williams
meant presentation (style) or humor or inventive distractions to jack-off boredom, then I will go along with him. It is possible that this is what he did mean.

The poems themselves are simple, clear, very good poems—not yet diseased with the Whitmanesque prophet rantings of the later Ginsberg.

I feel as if I am at a dead

end and so I am finished.

All spiritual facts I realize

are true but I never escape

the feeling of being closed in

and the sordidness of self,

the futility of all that I

have seen and done and said.

Maybe if I continued things

would please me more but now

I have no hope and I am tired.

There are some borrowed and overused phrases here: “feeling of being closed in,” “sordidness of self,” but the last 3 lines are honest enough to perhaps save the whole poem.

“. . . What a terrible future. I am twenty-three,” he says further on. And he was right. He had no way of knowing how he would use himself or how America would use him or make him use himself. But here he speaks of something else. Of madness. Of the feeling that his head is severed from his body. He realized it while lying sleepless on a couch.

In “Psalm I” there is some hint of the biblical line, the Whitmanesque roar-plead and act. The lines still trickle between originality and the pose. In the end, in the last line, originality loses and the pose finishes off the poem: “This gossip is an eccentric document to be lost in a library and rediscovered when the Dove descends.”

While writing this, I can't help thinking how easy it is to be a reviewer, as if one (myself) held the candle of truth and was tossing light to the slobs. What horseshit, eh friends? Well, I'll do what I can, or can't. My head hurts tonight and I am out of beer and smokes and am too lazy to make coffee. Allen, you're probably going to catch hell.

Yes, “C
é
zanne's Ports” is a bad poem.

In the foreground we see time and life

swept in a race

I am afraid that the sweetness is not too well-hidden. It gets sweet enough for toothache later on. It doesn't help me understand C
é
zanne nor “Heaven and Eternity” either. Ginsberg is a better writer than this. And C
é
zanne was a better painter. They should have met over a bottle of wine instead of in this fashion.

When I sit before a paper

writing my mind turns

in a kind of feminine

madness of chatter;

These are what I like to call perfect lines, for lack of anything else to say. I mean perfect lines to me as to content and presentation. Ginsberg lays it in your lap and there it is, as real as a kitten. Or a lion. You know what I mean.

“Fyodor” is a good poem not so much as a force but because I guess we all felt that way about Dostoyevsky, so it's charming to hear it, good to hear it, but still being somewhat snappish we wish it were better written. But let us remember that Ginsberg was young here. I wonder how Allen looked when he was young? Have you ever wondered that? All we have now is this bearded half-monk, kind of lighted with bedroom infractions and stinking of nightmares of India and Cuba and coffeehouses, this flumping spread of
hair
that is Allen Ginsberg. He'd be holy if we'd let him, but it all falls through about halfway and everybody is confused. Yet he's better to have around than not to have around. If I throw little mudballs at him it is because I can't be bothered with that cat in the Jewish Delicatessen. Allen is some kind of blessed pickle down in a fat jar full of hair and yellow seeds. You'd want to buy it but you'd end up buying something else.

“A Meaningless Institution,” a kind of Kafka-dream 1948 vintage is
a fair piece of work. I feel it. Especially the
ending where A.G. has to wander down empty corridors “in
search of a toilet.” If you can't find that toilet,
man, all the poetry in the world isn't worth a
damn.

In “Society, Dream 1947,” the poem is lighted with force and humor, genius, here is some of the stuff, the style, the bombast and flow that raised Ginsberg out of the muck. I mean this is the forerunner of things to come,
Howl
, the whole
Howl
ruckus that made Ginsberg, and the genius that allowed Ginsberg to continue making it even after he lost a part of it.

And in “Hymn,” we have the biblical fire of poetic prayer done very well. When Ginsberg is at the top of his game you might as well put down your toys and listen. It would be only the most unkind and jealous fink who would put a man down for his later showmanship when he could write as well as this early. Why must we scratch each other to pieces? The real enemy is elsewhere.

“The Archetype Poem” which begins

Joe Blow has decided

he will no longer

be a fairy.

is a tragic-humorous drawing of the unworking and switched-off sex machinery. Sex is really funny as hell. We are all caught up with the damn thing and hardly know what to do. And I mean funny like slowly roasting to death might be funny—if you could watch yourself.

The book ends on “The Shrouded Stranger,” which really doesn't work. Although there are some good lines that nobody but Ginsberg could have written:

“His broken heart's a bag of shit.”

Ginsberg is one of the few poets trying to destroy himself with unpoetic acts yet he still has not destroyed himself. Let us say grace to his huge tank of reserve. Eliot has said it easier, Pound with more Art, Jeffers with more knowledge of forces, Auden with more precision, Blake louder, Rimbaud more subtle; William Carlos Williams had a better left jab, Dylan Thomas bigger screaming feet, this with this, that with that, but I think that Ginsberg belongs somewhere, early or late, and that without his coming through, none of us would be writing as well as we are doing now, which is not well enough, but we hang on in, watch old Allen, stare at his photos, and are still a little afraid of America, of him, of the workings of wax and sun and hangovers, we go to bed alone, finally, all of us.

A
Test of Poetry
—Louis Zukofsky, $2.50, Corinth Books, c/o Eighth Street Bookshop, 17 W. 8th Street, New York 11, N.Y.

Ah, Zukofsky, the magic name, the big name, talking about poetry! Maybe while working at the railroad yards or maybe even while fighting Sammy Zsweink behind the gym after high-school hours we heard of Zukofsky, something that might some day help us with people like Sammy or the railroad yard foreman who watched us scrub the sides of boxcars and streamliners. Damn you foreman, I've got Pound, I've got Zukofsky, I've got
Poetry Chicago
. Yeah, and thin tires on my car and flat tires. I think Sammy won the fight and Pound didn't care. I've stopped reading
Poetry
Chicago
. Now we have a test of poetry.

The test of poetry, Zukofsky tells me, is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection. This is its purpose as art.

Further on, L.Z. tells us, “I believe that desirable teaching assumes intelligence that is free to be attracted from any consideration of every day living to always another phase of existence. Poetry, as other object matter, is after all for interested people.”

I have to read these sentences several times to make sure that
Zukofsky
is not pulling my leg, my ears, or any part of me. The writing is not clear; it is stodgy but I get the message. Poetry is for us, the special ones—and it's of life (almost) and yet divorced, finally, and fixed and pleasurable. To sight, sound, intellection. Well, intellection is the catch-word, the out.

Yet once I thought poetry was to keep me alive, to keep everybody alive; other people's poems, my own, paintings, stories, novels, I had thought that these things were to help me get on through so that, when I went into the cabinet to get a razorblade, I shaved carefully with it instead of going for the throat with the big slash.
A
Test of Poetry
was first published in 1948 and reissued in 1964. We are living in strange and violent and unusual times. I am afraid that life has caught up and extinguished such as Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Louis Zukofsky. We will no longer accept dry and safe bread. Poetry is going into the streets, into the whorehouses, into the sky, into the picnic basket, into the whiskey bottle. The fraud is over—certain people will not be allowed to live while others die. At least not from this typewriter, and the action is heavy too at the universities, the alleys, the beer-halls. This type of primer is not going to fool anyone any longer. There
are
some well-chosen poems but we will not let them be put into their little cages of mechanistic and prissy explanations. Some of the explanations, let me say, are thoughtful and even make sense in the limited way of a charming circle. But I can't imagine handing this book to a man doomed to go to the chair in a month.

The true test of poetry is that it fits every man everywhere.

There are some poems like this in this book but Zukofsky talks about everything else. There goes another idol. There go another 165 well-printed pages that might have crawled with love and blood and laughter, that might have gone good with beer and salami sandwiches, that might have made the next morning better instead of that trained slippery nostalgia of horror slipping through the curtains to fall upon me like a mother-axe and make me close my eyes again and hold the mean in my belly and wonder when the living will arrive??

Notes of a Dirty Old Man
, Essex House, paperback, 255 pgs. with an introduction by the author. $1.95. Written by Charles Bukowski, reviewed by
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I drank with a friend the other night who said or maybe it was I who said, “It is terribly difficult not to like the smell of your own shit.” We spoke of staring down at our turds after an accomplishment and feeling, somehow, proud of our deed.

Now,
an opener like this will give the hackers, the poison-ivy
boys, the university-ivy boys all that they need, so I
give it to them early in order to feed them
first. Let us get the suckerfish off of our sides
and begin to speak decently. I've already had enough Creeley-University nightmares to last me 44 lives and dream-lives to go.

All right. Kirby sent me a couple of advance copies. So you get the thing out of the mailbox and you look at it.

I got into bed—I like beds, I think that the bed is Man's greatest invention—most of us are born there, die there, fuck there, jack-off there, dream there. . . .

I am somewhat of a crank and a disbeliever, so I clambered into my jack-off sheets, alone, expecting that Kirby and Essex House had taken out the best, not that I knew anything about Kirby or Essex House; I was only speaking of my experiences with the world—man, I flipped on through and they had left in everything—the rants, the literary, the unliterary, the sex, the no-sex, the whole bag of warty screams and experiences.

It was honor.

I like honor. And it was cleanly set with immaculate cover,
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
, 0115.

I got into bed and read my
own
stories
or whatever they were and I enjoyed them. Once I
have written a poem and go back to it, I
only get the sense of vomit and waste. And people
quote lines to me, verily, from back poems and I
don't know what the hell they are talking about. It's
like when they tell me when I am in hangover,
“You chased 23 people out of my house and tried to fuck my wife.”

You know, it seems like a bunch of shit.

But the stories, as I laid there in bed, I rather liked. Rotten thing to say, what? I do suppose it was the gathering of experience between covers ghostly which cuckolded me. Reading the life-days and nights of my life I wondered how I could possibly still be
alive
and walking around
now
?

How many times can a man go through the thresher and still keep his blood, the Summer sun inside of his head? How many bad jails, how many bad women, how many sundry cancers, how many flat tires, how many this or that or what or what or what? . . .

Frankly I read my
own
stories in easy wonderment, forgetting who I was, almost almost, and I thought:

Ummm, ummm, this son of a bitch can really write.

I remember other writers. Being very discouraged with Chekhov, G.B. Shaw, Ibsen, Irwin Shaw, Gogol, Tolstoy, Balzac, Shakespeare, Ezra Pound, so forth. They, all of them, seemed to put literary
form
in front of the actuality and living of life itself. In other words, or perhaps more clearly, each of these men condescended that life itself could be evil but that it was all right so long as they could get by and say it in their special literary way.

Which is all right. If you like playing games.

And I do think that the professors are finding, now, that the students themselves are tired of game-playing.

All right, let's get back to
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
.

Re-reading them, stories and fantasies, I found them wondrous and flaming. I thought, Jesus, there hasn't been a short storyteller this good since Pirandello. At least since then.

It's crappy to say, but I think that the book is worth reading. And that the unborn librarian virgins, 200 years hence, will come in their flowered panties, recognizing the power, after my damned dumb skull has become a chickenshit playground for subnormal worms, gophers, other underworld creatures.

Oh, one other thing.

In ten years your $1.95 copy will be worth $25. And if you live
long
enough and the Bomb doesn't do it, you may be able to pay a month's rent with the book.

Until then, read your nuts off and

Gobble and grow what you can.