\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through <\/em>The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.<\/em><\/p>\n Could be the weather, could be the news, could be the state of my digestion, but right now I\u2019m in the mood for a proper American poet-buffoon. A poet-buffoon, that is, on the American scale: a figure of swashbuckling vulnerability, ridiculous and unstoppable, friend to the dispossessed, personal frequenter of the edge of things, orating and chanting and moaning in ecstasy and getting himself arrested. I\u2019m in the mood for an Allen Ginsberg.<\/p>\n So into The Atlantic\u2019s archive I moodily go, hunting for Ginsbergiana.<\/p>\n There are a couple of examples, 20 years apart: a poem from the July 1986 issue titled \u201cI Love Old Whitman So,\u201d and a pro-weed essay from 1966, \u201cThe Great Marijuana Hoax.\u201d The essay, according to the Ginsberg biographer Michael Schumacher, \u201cwas well conceived, argued, and documented, and its appearance in one of the country\u2019s most highly respected magazines gave it a further sense of credibility among the \u2018squares.\u2019\u201d (It still sounds like Ginsberg, though: \u201cI therefore do know the subjective possibilities of marijuana and therein take evidence of my own senses between my own awareness of the mysterious ghastly universe of joy, pain, discovery, birth & death.\u201d)<\/p>\n There\u2019s also some interesting Atlantic coverage of Ginsberg-related phenomena. For readers in 1966 who may have been lingeringly confused as to the precise nature of the Beat Generation (founding member: Allen Ginsberg), Dan Wakefield offers a helpful definition: \u201cThe Beat Generation is the name of a young people\u2019s social, literary, and travel club that started up in this country after World War II.\u201d And in 1967, Faye Levine, writing about \u201cThe New Calcutta,\u201d zeroes in on Ginsberg\u2019s time in that city, where his fertile, fomenting poet-buffoon presence \u201cbolstered an incipient, antiestablishment literary movement, the Hangries\u2014\u2018hungry and angry\u2019\u2014who were demanding economic, sexual, and aesthetic freedom from the old order.\u201d The Hangries meant business, Ginsberg-style: \u201cThey published works widely condemned as \u2018obscene,\u2019 and threatened to hold a nude parade.\u201d<\/p>\n The first piece of Ginsberg verse to appear in The Atlantic, however\u2014\u201cMorning in Spring,\u201d from April 1955\u2014is not by Allen. It\u2019s by Louis Ginsberg, his long-suffering minor-poet father. And it begins like this:<\/p>\n One morning when I went downtown, \u201cCapsize\u201d: that\u2019s a great verb. And aren\u2019t they rather moving, these modestly rapturous, small-town-visionary lines? Especially when one considers that at the exact moment that Ginsberg Sr. was being published in The Atlantic, Ginsberg Jr. was in North Beach, San Francisco, writhing through the early drafts of \u201cHowl.\u201d The mighty, shuddering \u201cHowl\u201d: his hymn to the mad ones, the ones who \u201cbared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan \/ angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated.\u201d It\u2019s as if the father, with care and quiet formality, has chiseled open this discreet portal to the divine, only to watch his son go rocketing through it with his buttocks on fire.<\/p>\n Poet-to-poet, the two Ginsbergs were always generous with each other. Upon the publication of \u201cHowl\u201d in 1956, Louis wrote to Allen in gentle remonstration: \u201cThere is no need for dirty, ugly words.\u201d But Louis also saluted the power of the poem, the gush of the poem, \u201ca hot geyser of emotion suddenly released in wild abandon from subterranean depths of your being.\u201d Fourteen years later, Allen was writing the introduction to Louis\u2019s third book, Morning in Spring. He took the job seriously, according to Schumacher: \u201cTo prepare himself for the task, he read and took copious notes on his father\u2019s poetry, treating the individual poems as if they were the works of a contemporary rather than the writings of a relative.\u201d And what he wrote was beautiful.<\/p>\n \u201cI weep at his meekness and his reason, at his wise entrance into his own mortality and his silent recognition of that pitiful Immensity he records of his own life\u2019s Time, his father\u2019s life time, & the same Mercy his art accords my own person his son.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Could be the weather, could be the news, could be the state of my digestion, but right now I\u2019m in the mood for a proper American poet-buffoon. A poet-buffoon, that is, on the American scale:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4023,473,14510,118,14511],"class_list":{"0":"post-23820","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-allen","9":"tag-american","10":"tag-ginsberg","11":"tag-great","12":"tag-poetbuffoon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
I felt such sunlight capsize down
That streets were glutted with more gold
Than all my heart could ever hold.
I thought a glory much like this
Must have been poured from Genesis.<\/p>\n