April 18, 2000, Review of “Deliberate Prose” by Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995
Edited by Bill Morgan
Foreward by Edward Sanders
$30.00
Harper Collins
ISBN: 0-06-019294-1
It took me almost a month to do what I knew I had to do when I first received a review copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Deliberate Prose—to go into my files and go through a stack of correspondence, cuttings, and photocopied workbooks related to him that I’d begun in 1979, when I first arrived in Boulder as his apprentice. I knew what I was looking for. In 1983, Allen had edited an issue of my magazine Friction, and we were sitting over the galleys of Allen’s handwritten introduction. This is what he’d originally written:
There are many ‘raw’ poems, ‘uncombed’ pages, containing some element of new personal thought and gaiety of language, combined with unexpected insight into self and civilization that I always look for in poetry, and miss increasingly in my own writing and that of professional peers. It may be the obscurity of circumstance and common life around the mass of sentient citizens that breeds this honesty. As W.C. Wms. used Marie Curie’s search thru masses of raw material to find those few grains of radium she labored to extract, so in these pages I sense rare elements of Person unabashed by National Observation—Sophisticated to the phenomena of mind tho not necessarily of public art in some cases, sophisticated to accidents of language and thought—outspoken in obscurity often.
When he’d finished reading, he put his head on the desk and moaned. “I’m always telling students to be specific and particular, to talk about what they actually experience, but I can’t even follow my own advice.” Then he took out his pencil and wrote:
Many pages are “uncombed,” containing strands of raw thought—sophistication and private heart language, the hairy insight that I always look for in poetry. It may be that living above barbershops & eating television, among a mass of silent sentient citizens, breeds this honesty. W. C. Wms. noted Marie Curie’s search thru tons of uranium to extract a few grains of radium as example of how we find poetry in American language.
It is easy to see what Allen was doing. He was removing the conversational language we are used to when reading and writing, and replacing it with concrete objects and sense impressions, which precede and underlie the superficiality of language. “Raw material” becomes uranium; “the obscurity of circumstance and common life” becomes “living above barbershops & eating television.” Allen wasn’t interested in discussing an issue, in his poetry or his prose—he was interested in having you feel it, the way he felt it. When Allen wrote poetry, he wrote from the place where specific witnessed images generated his thought and feeling, and usually intentionally refused to rise to the level of commentary or abstraction—of thinking about thought. As such, the most common criticism of his collected poems is that they are not actually digested or reconstructed as poems. But I believe the fundamental characteristic of his poetry is his fierce loyalty to life as it is lived and to the extremes of passion possible within it, not as it is dissected and reconstructed into something else—”poetry”—as it is every day in writing workshops all over the country.
This specificity is also the hallmark of the essays collected in Deliberate Prose, a collection from over 40 years of writing “on subject” for various small publications. Allen is, and always will be, primarily known as a poet, and this collection will not change him into the next Ezra Pound, a poet respected as much, or more, for his literary advice as for his poems. But these essays do paint a serious portrait of the artist—encapsulating his interests in politics, drug culture, spirituality, censorship and sex laws, literary criticism, and a sort of mosaic autobiography. The range of his interests and research was broad, and his dogged gumshoe pursuit of his interests, pro and con, puts the ivory tower image of the poet to shame. Like Pound, Ginsberg was disenchanted with ars gratis ars, and believed poets were still the unacknowledged legislators of the race—and as such, he considered his position in the world as active, not contemplative or isolato.
In his foreword, Ed Sanders makes the point that Ginsberg’s poems are filled with questions, and that these essays are, in a sense, their answers—and rightly calls these essays “emblems of [his] passion to teach.” Bill Morgan, in his “Editor’s Note,” tells us that the book’s title is Ginsberg’s, but that he died before he was able to turn the book into the learning tool it could have been—much like Allen’s Collected Poems, which a young poet recently told me had been his textbook for poetry, Allen’s extensive notes leading him back to Rimbaud and Artaud, to Whitman and Lorca.
And that is my main complaint with this collection. Surprisingly enough—having been edited by Ginsberg’s archivist, Bill Morgan—the organization of this book is a mess. Take the section “Writers” for example. There are 8 subsections and 39 essays. How in its 162 pages do you locate Allen’s essay “Kerouac’s Ethic”? Good luck. Referring to the table of contents, one finds that the only page numbers listed are for the sections themselves. Even the headings on each page are no help, repeating only the section titles, leaving the scholar-student to the frustration of flipping pages back and forth while continually cross-referencing to the table of contents to see if they’re getting close. And how are the individual essays organized within each section? Beats me. It’s not chronological, alphabetical, thematic, or in the order of their composition.
And there are other confusions as well—such as two pieces entitled “Meditation and Poetics” in two different sections of the book, and an egregious editing error: on page 270, the second paragraph of an excerpt from Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” is returned to the margin, making it seem as if Ginsberg has temporarily lost his mind.
But even a poorly organized book such as this is a valuable collection of the thoughts of Allen Ginsberg, a poet who was at the forefront of the cultural and social revolutions of the fifties, the political upheavals of the sixties, the introduction of meditation to the West, and the continuing influence of the seventies punk ethic. Here are his thoughts, beginning shortly after World War II and continuing almost to the millennium, all jammed together, on subjects as diverse as the Hell’s Angels, W. H. Auden, NAMBLA, Lenny Bruce, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, L.S.D., John Cage, the Cuban Revolution, Andy Warhol, China, John Lennon, William Blake, and Jack Kerouac. And when serious readers finally turn to the index in frustration, they’ll come to a powerful realization: that somehow they are all connected—politics, drugs, literature, spirituality, and sex—at least in the mind once known as Allen Ginsberg.
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