Ginsberg's Dirtiest Collection

WHEN ALLEN GINSBERG published "Howl" in 1956, the poem was dirty enough, and its author brash enough, to establish new standards of literary freedom.

Ginsberg, it seems, has reached the logical--and just plain gross--culmination of that legacy with the publication of his latest collection of poems, White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985. The book has attracted attention as Ginsberg's "dirtiest" collection, and it is a well-deserved reputation.

Several poems in White Shroud are devoted to lengthy, graphic, and clinical descriptions of homosexual intercourse. Some of these poems were first published in the NAMBLA [North American Man-Boy Love Association] Journal. In poems like "Love Comes," the absolute explicitness robs sex of its mystery, thereby lessening the shock value and eliminating most of the eroticism.

While the gay imagery in White Shroud may account for the book's notoriety, it does not account for the book's significance. Ginsberg presents an accessible and fascinating collection of new verse that is worth reading, at the very least because it is a historical document of what Ginsberg terms the "post-beat modernist" generation.

Ginsberg is becoming very "post"; he is 60 years old, and his poems reflect a morbid fear of old age. He also fears his own obselescence. Ginsberg previously penned two different poems entitled "Don't Grow Old," and that is the overriding theme in White Shroud. "I can't get it up/...Growing old in my heaven," he writes in "Airplane Blues." He is clearly self-conscious in his poems, for he is both old enough and important enough to refer to himself several times. Increasingly, Ginsberg's poetry is rooted in his past, as he alludes to "Howl," "Aunt Rose," and several other early works.

But the bard of the Beat Generation can still grind startling, creative, and provocative images from the grist mill of his modern America. A four-line poem entitled "Suprise Mind" reads:

How lucky we are to have windows!

Glass is transparent!

I saw that boy in the red bathingsuit

walk down the street.

A DREAM-LIKE QUALITY permeates Ginsberg's work; and he gives us a poem about daydreaming while he exercises, another poem that William Carlos Williams dictated to Ginsberg during his sleep and finally the nightmarish "Black Shroud."

The spirit of Williams and Walt Whitman are evident in Ginsberg's rhythmically rich verse. The speech patterns of these poets are ultimately translated by Ginsberg into his beloved blues lyrics (complete with music). Poems/songs like "Do the Meditation Rock" demonstrate not only his complex creativity, but a well-developed sense of fun.

Ginsberg has always been at his best when he juxtaposes humor and pathos, triviality and profundity. "Fighting Phantoms Fighting Phantoms" is vintage Ginsberg:

Fighting phantoms thousands of poets became rather good at acid satire

Fighting phantoms Jimmy Dean stepped on the gas, Orson

Welles ordered another cheesecake

Fighting phantoms Ernest Hemingway shotgunned his brain

Fighting phantoms Ezra Pound hated some Jews some hated Pound

Fighting phantoms Truman dropped two Atom Bombs

Fighting phantoms Einstein invented the theory of relativity

Unfortunately, Ginsberg is at his weakest when he gets bogged down with repetitive political diatribe. He ends two different poems with the image of Einstein and the atomic bomb, and he criticizes President Reagan's policies ad nauseum.

Nonetheless, Ginsberg presents in White Shroud some gems within the political rough. Those gems were formed by the sheer force of Whitman, Williams, and a younger Allen Ginsberg, and they reflect an illuminating vision and a lasting value.