The American writer Jay McInerny was recently defending the role of the novel in the pages of the UK press, suggesting in the Guardian that it was through fiction rather than factual commentary that incidents as psychologically shattering as New York’s 9/11 or Britain’s own 7/7 could be truly reflected upon, digested, and ultimately understood. Reportage had a part to play, but the nature of literature involved processes of emotional consideration that journalism alone could not deliver.
He conceded that the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Hunter S. Thompson had, during the later ’60s and early ’70s, forged potent ways of joining the reporter’s realism with the novelist’s creativity. But those years had been especially rich as a subject for that kind of scrutiny. Today, McInerny believes, we need the creative crafts of storytellers to help us come to terms with the man-made tremors that have shaken our streets, cities, and lives.
But what of poetry in all this? Do poets and poems still have a part to play in unravelling the barbed anxieties that characterise the start of this edgy millennium? Can a well-turned stanza distil a fresh truth? Can a volley of blank verse prompt a new view of the world? Can rhyme be infused with genuine reason? Or are clipped couplets or wisecracking wordplay merely whispers in the wilderness?
In an age when the nearest most of us come to a version of poetry is that concocted by Snoop Dogg or 50 Cent, the best-selling versifier in America is a fey folkie called Jewel; perhaps the poem’s power to touch us, to make us think, has been drowned out by the neon orchestras of rampant commercialism and instant gratification. Poets needed their listeners to contemplate and meditate: the background noise of modern life is probably too intrusive for such cerebral introspection.
These thoughts have been at the forefront of my mind in recent months as I’ve worked on both a live performance and a book commemorating a significant moment in the poetic arts’ recent history. On 7 October 2005, it was 50 years since Allen Ginsberg unveiled a long poem that would have major repercussions for the culture that followed in its slipstream.
‘Howl’, an extended consideration of life at the margins, of insanity, suicide, and saintliness, of jazz and Buddhism, of drugs and death, of spirituality and hopelessness, of existential exhilaration in the shadow of Cold War paranoia, thrilled the feverish throng who packed the Six Gallery in San Francisco that night. Within months it would be issued by that most independent of publishers, City Lights, read by tens then hundreds of thousands of readers, and survive the ordeal of an obscenity trial before emerging as a mantra to a new consciousness, one that refused to comply with the forces of conservatism and repression and, instead, argued there could be a world beyond the white, male, Protestant, heterosexual nexus that had dominated for so long.
Few figures so personified this possibility, and few vocalised it so eloquently as Ginsberg, the Jewish son of a Socialist and Communist, a second-generation Russian émigré, a student with an early aspiration to train as a labor lawyer. Ginsberg was an outsider in all sorts of ways who, at an early stage, confirmed his homosexuality. Thus, he wore most badges associated with alienation and government-sponsored ostracism during the McCarthy-ite ’50s.
Yet he used these perceived disadvantages to powerful effect. Not only did they fuel his highly personal art, much of his poetry was determinedly autobiographical and fervently confessional, but he also used them to expose the penury of the dispossessed and disenfranchised and drew attention to the prejudices and hypocrisies of a society that was so evidently multi-cultural, indeed multi-sexual, yet so deeply fractured in its differences.
‘Howl’ proved to be a mould-breaking moment for Ginsberg. After more than a decade of struggle to find his voice and project it to a wider audience, the live rendition of this epic work not only confirmed his status as a uniquely skilled wordsmith but also set alight the imagination of those who heard it to be quickly followed by those who read it on the printed page. If Elvis Presley fuelled a visceral revolution, Ginsberg lit the blue touch paper on an intellectual one.
Nor was he self-obsessed in the wake of this triumph. For years, he had tirelessly promoted his friends and fellow writers like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, and the impetus that ‘Howl’ lent to Ginsberg’s upward trajectory was shared. With his assistance, key works by his Beat Generation colleagues, On the Road in 1957 and The Naked Lunch in 1959, found publishers willing to take a risk on a wave of new voices. By the 1960s, the poet had become a key figurehead in a countercultural groundswell that challenged all conventional wisdom.
On 7 October 2005, to celebrate the precise half-century of the poem’s premiere, the University of Leeds in the UK is presenting “Howl for Now”, a production combining spoken word and a series of newly commissioned musical works to record this special anniversary. The presentation proposes that if ‘Howl’ spoke to its immediate time, Ginsberg’s signature piece also retains a resonance and relevance today.
To accompany the performance, a book of essays of the same name will be published, gathering writers and academics, theoreticians, and practitioners to consider the lasting importance of ‘Howl’ as a literary, artistic, and political force five decades on. Bay Area poet David Meltzer, musician and Ginsberg collaborator Steven Taylor, and filmmaker Ronald Nameth are among those who contribute their thoughts.
We opened this account with Jay McInerny’s stout defence of the novel. I hope that “Howl for Now”, in its live and printed incarnations, can offer a defence of great poetry and confirm its enduring power. ‘Howl’ emerged from a particular moment and had, in its author, an extraordinary advocate. Yet, I would argue, the ripples still spread Ginsberg is gone, but in City Lights and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in the Bowery Poetry Café and among the remarkable Nuyorican poets, to name. Still, a few contemporary examples, the spirit of the spoken word, personal and political, lives on.
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“Howl for Now”, the live event, takes place on 7 October 2005 in the Clothworkers’ Centenary Concert Hall, School of Music, University of Leeds, at 6.30 pm. Tickets are free but must be reserved by contacting Susan Wheater ([email protected]). Howl for Now, the book, edited by Simon Warner, is published on the same day by Route. For further details please visit the publishers’ website at www.route-online.com
To our readers: Simon Warner will take a sabbatical from his popular column to concentrate on his academic commitments. Watch for the return of “Anglo Visions” in March 2006.