Allen Ginsburg's Father and His Surprising Reaction to "Howl"

Christopher Bram's new book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America is packed with great stories of the gay literary powerhouses who rose to prominence after World War 2 - Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and more.

But I'll remember the book for the amazing quote from Allen Ginsberg's father - Louis Ginsberg - who was himself a poet and college teacher. After that fateful first reading of "Howl" on October 7, 1955 Ginsberg sent a mimeographed copy of the completed poem to his father. The poem was shocking, sexual explicit, ground-breaking in its substance and style. As author Christopher Bram writes: "Louis Ginsberg's response was both perceptive and prescient."

My expression, at first blush, is that it is a weird, volcanic, troubled, extravagant, turbulent, boisterous, unbridled outpouring, intermingling genius and flashes of picturesque insight with slag and debris of scoriac matter. It has violence; it has life; it has vitality....The poem should attract attention and perhaps be a sensation; one will hear defenders and detractors. But it should give you a name. (page 33)

And indeed Louis was right on all counts. The book is full of just such amazing quotes, startling anecdotes and fresh insights into the work of these authors, who so shaped our country's literary landscape.

Outbreaks, Attacks, Sackings, and Fires

This past weekend I finished Luciano Canfora’s The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World.

Canfora, an Italian scholar of ancient literature, examines the history of Egypt’s famous Library of Alexandria and the contradictory accounts of what happened to its books.

So many writers with differing agendas--both in antiquity and modern times--have had their say in this matter that it is difficult to unravel truth from fiction. With an impressive grasp of history and source material, Canfora tries mightily.

Much is disputed: the location of the collection, its composition, its size by volume count, which potentates helped build and care for it, and which despots destroyed it in whole or part.

Warfare, religious zealotry, political intrigue, hubris, and flames all took their toll at various times, and in nefarious ways, on the Ptolemic dynasty’s center of scholarship.

In one narrative of an event dating to the year 641, the Muslim Caliph Omar sends a message by envoy to the Emir Amrou Ibn el-Ass that if "[the library's books] contain matter not in accordance with the book of Allah, there can be no need to preserve them. Proceed, then, and destroy them."

Amrou, an educated man sympathetic to his Christian contemporaries and the collection they wished to preserve, reluctantly complied.

The books were distributed to the public baths of Alexandria, where they were used to feed the stoves which kept the baths so comfortably warm. Ibn al-Kifti writes that 'the number of baths was well known, but I have forgotten it' (we have Eutychius's word that there were in fact four thousand). 'They say,' continues Ibn al-Kifti, 'that it took six months to burn all that mass of material.' Aristotle's books were the only ones spared.

Today, libraries and many other institutions are under siege in the United States, though by accountants and public officials rather than foreign armies.

In response to lean economic times, nearly all states have cut social services, and library budgets are likewise on the chopping block.

The venerable Boston Public Library, founded in 1848, is considering the closure of eight of its ten branch libraries.

Recurring reductions in the Hawaii State Public Library System budget have forced librarians to rely solely on fees and fines to pay for new materials.

Here in Illinois, things are no less bleak. The state has been slow to forward funds to the nine cooperating library systems, including Lincoln Trail Libraries System, of which TUFL is a part.

Essential per capita grants to libraries were reduced by 16%. And the City of Urbana is predicting a budget shortfall of nearly $1.5 million.

All of this is happening at a time when greater numbers of people are seeking the resources of libraries [pdf].

In the grip of one of the most severe recessions since the Great Depression, more Americans are turning to their libraries not only for free access to books, magazines, CDs and DVDs, but also for a lifeline to technology training and online resources for employment, continuing education and government resources. In January 2009, over 25 million Americans reported using their public library more than 20 times in the last year, up from 20.3 million Americans in 2006. It is likely this trend continued or increased through the remainder of 2009.

That library funding is diminishing while library usage is increasing perplexes those of us sitting this side of the reference desk.

We may not be forced from our positions at the point of a spear or watch the governor (like archbishop Theophilus) reduce each library "to a heap of rubbish" or see them all "closed forever, like tombs" as in fourth-century Rome.

But the fate of our public libraries in tumultuous times speaks volumes about the men and women occupying seats of power, their wisdom, and their values.

Speaking of remarkable....

To call Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, a remarkable book, would be trite, but accurate. This 2002 nominee for the Booker Prize was an accidental find for me and now I think you should move with all deliberate haste to read it. It is an unusual book, inviting readers into the lives of residents of a quiet, urban street in England over the course of a single day. After the prose-poem prologue, the reader is aware, from the first page, of a tragic event that occurs on the street, but is never quite sure what it is. All is revealed in the end, but to skip from the beginning to the end of this book would be to miss the point.

The Times reviewer says “A dream of a novel … McGregor has the gift of reminding his readers of that heaven in a wild flower, that infinity in a grain of sand.” This book is observation; witness; a chronicling of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, and actions that speak volumes about the characters: the boy at number eighteen with the sore eyes, the woman at number nineteen waking in the night, the girl in twenty-two with the short blonde hair and the little square glasses. The reader enters the story as another observer. The author juxtaposes all this detail, watching and knowing against themes of not seeing, not knowing, not naming.

There are mysteries, there are surprises, there are other themes, there is plot – and I can’t tell you any of this, as to reveal too soon, would be to diminish the power and fascination of this unique book. So, you just have to take my word for it, “read it and find out”, and then come talk to me. Soon!

The Lives of the Optimists

Nearly ten years ago at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, I had the good fortune to take courses with poet Lucia Perillo and once (as a fellow grad student) with poet Paul Guest.

Both individuals possess sharp intellects, good humor, and a serious dedication to writing. I respect and envy them tremendously.

Katha Pollitt calls Perillo's poems "tragicomedies of everyday life." John Ashbery considers each of Guest's poems "an act of defiance."

These titanic blurbsters are referring to the fact that both poets live with physical limitations: Perillo with multiple sclerosis; Guest with paralysis due to a childhood accident.

If you want to plunge into Perillo's personal life, read her absorbing essay collection, I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature.

Even though the disappearance of one's young body is a tired lament, it is especially galling to me not only because of how I once worshipped at the temple of of physical fitness, but also because of the extremity of my body's being sacked. When I asked [my husband] the other day how he could stand making love to such a freak, he said: "That's what eyelids are for" ... So we keep our eyes shut, though actually the dropped lid was always my preference--I never wanted to see the face that makes the cry that poet Louise Glück calls "the low, humiliating / premise of union."

Guest opens his book My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge on a similar note, with the poem "User's Guide to Physical Debilitation."

Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis
last longer than forever or at least until
your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart
or the culture of death, which really has it out
for whoever has seen better days ...

When not an outright impossibility
or form of neurological science fiction,
sexual congress will either be with
tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy,
performing an act of sadistic charity;
with the curious, for whom you will be beguilingly blank canvas;
or with someone blindly feeling their way
through an extended power outage
caused by summer storms you once thought romantic ...

In her collection Luck Is Luck, Perillo dedicates the poem "Fubar" to Guest, a connection I only just noticed and which speaks to shared experiences.

... But in last night's hypnagogic dreamscape where I went
to collect some data. Where I was just getting into the swing of things
tranquility-wise. Then this kid came rolling through the moonlight
in a bed with lots of Rube Goldberg traction rigging.
And it was a kid like you, some kid with a broken neck ...

But come on, the sun is rising, I'll put a bandage on my head,
and we'll be like those guys at the end of the movie--
you take this crutch made from a stick.
For you the South is a mess, what with its cinders and its smoldering.
And looky, looky here at me: I'm playing the piccolo.

"Day 354" photo by SuperFantastic