Herald of the be-bop apocalypse
Campus Times
April 11, 1997
"America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes
on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry."
-Allen Ginsberg, "America" (1956)
Allen Ginsberg, one of the last surviving fathers of the Beat Generation,
died at age 70 Saturday morning of terminal cancer spurned on from the liver
disease that had been eating away at his body for years.
Ginsberg, perhaps one of the greatest poets this country has ever produced,
was a boisterous voice in the 1950s and '60s, illustrating the changing
generation and ranting against the throng of contradictions within a supposedly
polly-pure society. His words are still influential today, but somewhat
more silently so. Today, America as a whole is in a more pressing economic
state than it was 40 years ago before the women's movement revamped the
work force.
Living in America today, it is not common for the individual to remove
oneself from society in order to look at the world in a different light
for fear of starvation or failure. Unlike the Beat writers who explored
all facets of life to the fullest, including experimenting with drugs and
sexuality and theorizing about the aesthetic world compared to reality,
it seems we have no choice but to conform to doing what we can to get by.
I always wanted to live in the time of the Beats, drink in fascination
with everything around me and somehow turn it into an experience worthy
of recording on paper. I want to know first-hand what it is like to delve,
worry-free, into the sound, feel and emotion that highlights the world we
live in, but usually goes ignored.
Before America transformed into a place where most people are pretty
much forced to work, the Beatniks wandered the countryside, scribbling written
verse that was, until that time, unheard of and unpublished, and dabbled
in lifestyles that went grossly against the Norman Rockwell pictures of
the American dream in the '50s. Because of poetry written by men like Ginsberg,
the embodiment of what was known as the "American Dream" was exposed
as being what it really was-a bunch of psuedo-perfect, television bologna.
But it was exposed beautifully, so beautifully that the energy of its narratives
and powerfully charged verses changed the face of poetry forever.
Ginsberg was unique because, unlike Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs,
who wrote novels, Ginsberg solely wrote poetry throughout his lifetime.
Upon knowing he was going to die, he hammered out about a dozen poems the
week before he passed away. Not only are there are few poets who attain
such an extreme level of success while still alive, but there are few who
get to see their poetry flourish and enrich society as his did.
He is perhaps most famous for his poem "Howl," an intonation
that, according to Ginsberg in an interview conducted when "Howl"
was published in 1956, was "the first discovery as far as communication
of feeling and truth, that I made."
"Howl" is an immersion of urban life and in the poem we see
a tortured soul responding to society's state by finding ways to get beyond
society and experience escape from social conditions.
It is a shame that even with all of the evolution within modern American
society, which many consider to be improvements, the economy is really the
entity of capitalistic America that holds all the cards in its greedy little
hands. Today, money controls practically all levels of thinking. Giving
oneself completely to an underlying theme or beat is not something widely
idealized. But we still have Ginsberg's writing as a reminder of what we
can feel if only we let ourselves-and the world has one less prophetic writer.
"It's true I don't want to join the army or turn lathes in precision
parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."
-"America"
Raechel Fittante, a junior journalism major, is editor
in chief of the Campus Times. She can be reached by e-mail at fittante@ulvacs.ulaverne.edu.