(Very, Very) Rough Draft 2

Much of the art from the Beat Generation is about spontaneity, about individuality, about ‘first thought best thought’ – being true to yourself. “Let it be raw, there is beauty,” Allen Ginsberg said in ‘Notes for Howl and Other Poems’. This statement seems to apply not only to Ginsberg’s own poetry, but the Beat movement in general. When you find a book like Howl: original draft facsimile, transcript, and variant versions, fully annotated by author, with contemporaneous correspondence, account of first public reading, legal skirmishes, precursor texts, and bibliography, however, you’re forced to wonder how true the Beat artists were to this belief in practice. There’s a common misconception that Allen Ginsberg did not edit. The original and additional drafts of ‘Howl’ show us otherwise.

Ginsberg sent the original draft the Kerouac in August of 1955, and in his reply, “Kerouac wrote that” “Howl For Carl Solomon was a very powerful poem, but he didn’t want it arbitrarily negated by secondary emendations made in time’s reconsidering backstep – He wanted [Ginsberg’s] lingual spontaneity or nothing.” He said Ginsberg “should send some spontaneous pure poetry, original Ms. of “Howl”.” (Ginsberg, Howl, pg 149) Ginsberg returned with, “The pages I sent you of Howl (right title) and the first pages put down, as is.” (Ginsberg, Howl, pg 149) In another letter, though, Kerouac made it seem he was “aware that it was the original draft he had; his objection was to the fact that A.G. x-ed out words and phrases, revising during the process of composition.” (Ginsberg, Howl, pg 149) From even a glance at this original draft, (Ginsberg, Howl, pgs 13-25) we can see that Ginsberg did not adhere to the ‘first thought best thought’ ideal – x-ing out quite a lot as he typed. Also, this hardly accounts for the edits made in pencil all over the pages, revising and rearranging.

Throughout all Ginsberg’s edits, through all the rearranging of lines and changes to wording in attempt to better capture, ironically, the spontaneity and associative aspects of thought process, and to completely embody the poetic tone, The opening line stayed essentially the same. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” opened every one of Ginsberg’s drafts, and this certainly sets us up with a distinct tone from the offset. Originally, though, the iconic “starving hysterical naked” that follows “destroyed by madness” was “starving, mystical, naked.” In the BBC2 interview, Face To Face with Allen Ginsberg, he said that he “thought that [the use of “mystical”] was too sentimental.” In the annotated Howl, Ginsberg comments that the change is a “Crucial revision: “Mystical” is replaced by “hysterical,” a key to the tone of the poem.” There is no doubt that this revision does develop the tone. He doesn’t, however, comment on the loss of commas from the drafts to the final. It seems that this, also, plays a large part in creating the desired tone. Because they are not separated by commas, “starving,” “hysterical,” and “naked” come with one another, are one thing. The three words create imagery of humans living in a madhouse or animals on the street, mentally disturbed and suffering. Ginsberg shows us the “best minds of [his] generation” in their struggle, a literal depiction as well as a statement that covers and conveys the whole range of connotations that come with these three words.

“Starving” could have any number of implications other than the obvious, ‘starving for food.’ An individual could be starving for a fix of his or her chosen drugs, starving for inspiration for their art, starving for love. The group as a whole (the “best minds”, the Beat artists) could be starving for acceptance into society. “Hysterical” seems to most obviously pertain to madness, but hysteria is also the inability to be controlled, or an unreasonable reaction to a situation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a, “Morbidly excited condition; unhealthy emotion or excitement.” You can laugh or cry hysterically – and, when in hysterics, you often do both – so the word suggests not only the mental condition, but with both wild joy and overwhelming depression. “Hysterical” therefore takes on the tone of the Beat Generation as a whole. “Naked” obviously has the association of unclothed bodies, which then leads not only to the inability to clothe oneself for lack of money, for example, but also to sex. “Naked”, however, also connotes vulnerable, unshielded. This could be physically or emotionally, and an individual could be baring themselves to another (in Ginsberg’s case, baring himself to himself?), or the group could be baring themselves to society. Then there is, however, the idea of being ‘stripped naked’, which leads to the idea of violence, perhaps a vulnerability that this group of “best minds” had forced upon them by society?

A revision like this is, therefore, obviously “crucial”, as Ginsberg says. It defines the “who” that Ginsberg opens most lines of the poem with, that he “return[s] to and take[s] off from again” (Ginsberg, ‘Notes for Howl and Other Poems’), that he “depend[s] on” “to keep the beat.” It is a revision that became essential to how we readers perceive the poem. Other revisions throughout the series of drafts were equally as important, so why is it that Ginsberg claimed and implied that he hardly edited at all?

“The origins of the word “beat” are obscure,” (Charters, 223) wrote John Clellon Holmes in his 1952 article, This is the Beat Generation. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Ann Charters she spends the entire introduction of Beat Down On Your Soul discussing the meaning of the word ‘beat’, and who embodied it, who was a part of this so-called generation. She doesn’t pin down a sufficient definition of ‘beat’, since, it seems, even the core members of the Beat Generation didn’t know how to explain it completely. Kerouac tried several times, coming up with: a““swinging group of new Amercan men” in the late 1940s who were “intent on joy” because they had survived World War II and possessed “wild selfbelieving individuality.” (Charters, xv) Or “a revolution of manners in America” (Charters, xxi) And “a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, curious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful way.” (Charters, xxix) The Beat Generation, Kerouac said, was “a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word “beat” spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America – beat meaning down and out but full of intense conviction.…” (Charters, xxix) Kerouac came up with the name “Beat Generation” with John Clellon Holmes one night in 1948. Holmes himself defined the generation in This is the Beat Generation “as a particularly American brand of Existentialism, involving “a sort of nakedness, of mind, and, ultimately, of soul… a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness.” (Charters, xxvii)

Holmes’ and Kerouac’s attempts at definition are perhaps some of the best examples we have of what the Beats believed. In ‘Origins of the Beat Generation,’ Kerouac said, “I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood . . . and suddenly with tears in my eyes had a vision of what I must have really meant with ‘Beat’ . . . the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific.” (Merrill) According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘beatific’ is “Making blessed; imparting supreme happiness or blessedness” and a ‘beatific vision’ is “a sight of the glories of heaven; esp. that first granted to a disembodied spirit.” In this definition of ‘beat’, we can certainly see the Beat philosophy evolve, and how their poetry could be seen as their own beatific visions. The Beats followed their impulses, living as many of them believed Zen Buddhism taught them. “According to Zen, evil is not considered the natural enemy of good but its inevitable companion.” (Merrill) Merrill says that the Beats viewed the “basic corruption” of the Western culture as “its compulsion to be right”, “natural humanity” versus an “artificial ideal” – good and evil, right and wrong are equal parts of “natural humanity”, and to strive to remove one from the other is to create an “artificial ideal.” Therefore, “To be right was to follow one's natural bent; to be wrong was to resist instinct and to allow an artificial standard from outside the personality to govern one's life.” (Merrill) With this view in mind, it can be seen why spontaneity was such a highly valued ideal to the Beats.

To be completely spontaneous is to completely follow your “natural bent”. Merrill quotes Ginsberg: “The whole point of spontaneous improvisation in song is that you have to accept whatever thought presents itself to your rhyme – on the wing, so to speak. . . . You let your tongue go loose! . . . You can't change your mind – your mind is its own. And there's nothing heroic about that acceptance. . . . That's the whole point – it's ordinary mind!” This adheres to the ideas of Zen Buddhism, following T'ang master Lin-chi’s statement that “In Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.” (Merrill)

However, “Beat Zen exaggerates two aspects of “pure” Zen: the holiness of the personal impulses and the idea of the Zen-lunatic or holy maniac.” (Merrill) This comes back to Kerouac’s ‘beatific’ view, that as the Beats, in their “wild selfbelieving individuality”, were made blessed at the following of their impulses. Merrill also argues this saying, “the idea of the holy lunatic, is closely allied with the holiness of personal impulse. Such persons are revered because they deliberately confound the rational (artificial) tendencies of their disposition and therefore come closer to pure natural existence. Lunacy, in other words, is cultivated as a part of a long discipline of disaffiliation from rational and material thought patterns. One deliberately deranges the senses that organize those patterns.” It then follows that “The sanctity of the spontaneous impulse justifies the principle of “spontaneous writing” as well as the characteristic confessional quality of beat literature. Art does not discriminate; every thought and feeling is sacred and thus appropriate for aesthetic registration.” (Merrill)

In ‘Howl’, Ginsberg references Kerouac’s belief in ““First though, best thought” clarity and sincerity” (Howl, 136). In the original version, the line (80) read, “who recreated syntax & structure of prose to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head” (Howl, 25) and which in the final version (line 75) reads, “to recreate syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected et confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head” (Howl, 6). The annotation of this line includes “Kerouac’s slogans for composition” as “outlined in “Belief and Technique of Modern Prose.” (Howl, 136) This list, “tacked on the wall above [Ginsberg’s] bed” before he wrote ‘Howl’, includes many ideas that conform to the Beat Zen spontaneity:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

29. You’re a Genius all the time

(Howl, 137)

When Kerouac read Ginsberg’s edited-while-typed first draft of ‘Howl’ and told Ginsberg he wanted “spontaneous pure poetry,” Ginsberg replied with:

…that was the first time I sat down to blow, it came out in your method, sounding like you, an imitation practically. How advanced you are on this. I don’t know what I’m doing with poetry. I need years of isolation and constant everyday writing to attain your volume of freedom and knowledge of the form.
(Howl, 149)

This sentiment shows quite clearly how influenced Ginsberg was by he, Kerouac and the Beat’s shared belief in spontaneity. “No time,” as Kerouac wrote, “for poetry but exactly what is.” It has been said that the Beat Generation really only consisted of three or four people. In Beat Down On Your Soul, Ann Charters quotes Hettie Jones, who said in 1959, “the Beat Generation was “really a misnomer because at one point everyone identified with it could fit into my living room, and I didn’t think a whole generation could fit into my livingroom.”” (Charters, xvi) Charters says, however, that “by the end of the 1950s, many thousands of us throughout the United States felt that we belonged to the Beat Generation, even if we all didn’t go on the road with Kerouac or take off our clothes with Ginsberg or get stoned with Huncke.” (Charters, xvi) She says she “first became aware in May 1956 that [she] was part of a community of disaffected Americans who would later be identified as members of the Beat Generation.” (Charters, xvi) This realisation occurred at Ginsberg’s first legendary reading of ‘Howl for Carl Solomon’.

Holmes said that to be ‘beat’ was “More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw.” (Charters, 223) The disillusioned youth of the United States at the time of the Beat Generation latched on to this, identified with it. The Beat writers saw the pain in reality, the necessity of bad to come with good and the beauty in the “ordinary mind.” (Merrill) Spontaneity, it seems, was seen as the best way to capture this, and it was therefore held in extremely high esteem. Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ pretends spontaneity, when it was actually revised quite thoroughly in hopes of further capturing the ideas that spawned the desire for spontaneity in the first place. And it does so successfully. One Beat writer, George Barker, said in one of his ‘IX Beatitudes to Denver’ that “To Ginsberg reality has, for a longwinded moment,/Broken down, howled, and shown her disconsolate heart./It is much to his honor that he has not attempted/To edit her real hysteria. Or his own.” (Charters, 3) Ginsberg edited the words, but only in attempt to further the reality they conveyed.

Notes:
This is highly disoraganised, but it includes most of the information I wanted to discuss in this essay. I plan to rearrange it to make it a lot more coherent and improve on the flow and how things tie together, and also elaborate on some of the lesser discussed points and quotes. This is about 7seven and a half pages right now, but I think it will reach ten once I’ve fixed it up properly. I also want to go into some of the other important lines of the poem and how they changed over Ginsberg’s edits to help achieve the poem’s purpose of portraying reality as Ginsberg saw it. I also would like to include the following quotation if a place opens up for it in the editing process:

In Gary Snyder’s ‘Note on Religious Tendencies,’ he comments that on the religious inclination of the Beat Generation: “[I find- three things going on: 1. Vision and illumination-seeking. This is most easily done by systematic experimentation with narcotics. . . . 2. Love, respect for life, abandon, Whitman, pacifism, anarchism, etc. . . . partly responsible for the mystique of 'angels,' the glorification of skid-row and hitchhiking, and a kind of mindless enthusiasm. . . . 3. Discipline, aesthetics, and tradition . . . its practitioners settle on one traditional religion, try to absorb the feel of its art and history, and carry out whatever ascesis is required.” (Merrill)

Also, how do you cite a video interview from the internet? Right now I have it as the following, but I doubt it's correct:

BBC2 interview, Face to Face with Allen Ginsberg, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1011318964326139723#/videoplay?docid=1011318964326139723#/videoplay?docid=1011318964326139723#

Russell Edson

by Nathan Gale

(as far as i got)

Poetry often is condensed and confined by its structure, which makes the subject matter whether it be psychology or fantasy seem foreshortened and stark. Russell Edson over the last half-century developed a structure which frees poetry from certain restraints of style or scheme, using prose poems. Russell Edson lets the content of the poem, in his case often political phycology and sociology, create the structure itself. Psychology and sociology have a roll in his poetry as they help define characterize the way his poetry is constructed, often he uses absurd and surrealistic turns of event to bring forth meaning. Using anthropomorphic and fabulist situation in which nothing is based in reality, but like in a dream it is based on our understanding of how reality could become. Prose poetry lets Edson navigate through different sections of the subconscious using poetry to describe that subconscious travel of events which is often non-linear and based off of abstractions. The prose poem like a film is able to represent the abstract because it has no true linear value or boundaries, it can tell a story and still grant us a truly poetic experience. Russell Edson demonstrates that prose poetry frees the content of the poem from having to be limited by any structure or scheme, and lets the subject matter create its own structure.

Russell Edson like Thomas Pynchon and J.D Salinger hides away from fame and lets his work speak for his own notoriety. Indeed his poems seem to have the same effect, as instead of explaining themselves they leave interpretations up to the audience. His poems are dream-like sequences in which nothing is for certain, and the point at which you enter the story or the world of that story is always from some mid point, like a dream, never from any solid beginning. In his poem “Conjugal” a women is flexible enough to be physically bent into a myriad of positions by her husband, in this way Edson is hinting that women in the late mid 20th century were often dominated by their husbands and the only roles they could play were domestic, by pleasing the husbands every need, “bending” to every whim. The poem may be highly fictional and sensational yet it helps accent the obtuse issues in marriage because of its non-sensical meter. Edson who admitted in an interview to being “neo-surrealist” was quoted saying: "Dreams create their own art works at night in a language of signs, images, gestures, and metaphor, all in a dumb show. The subconscious does not know how to speak in the conscious language. Trying to put a dream into words is like trying to translate a painting into words." His use of dreams accompanies his abandonment for structure, just dreams abandon reality and only reference towards it through the subconscious mind. Then again using surrealism frees him from association, he can now “bend” the woman and use the image freely without consequence, that liberates his images to explore a meshing of solid object or fact with fantasy to enhance his message (Miltner). Metaphors like in dreams are easier to translate if they embossed by unrealistic nature of the poem, and the structure must be able to hold and encompass the way the surrealism changes the narration.

Edson's poems repeat a subconscious narrative that lacks any moral constitution or code where anything imagined is possible without social consequence. As Lee Upton states in his essay “Structural Politics: The Prose Poetry of Russell Edson” : “ In Edson’s prose poetry, structures - whether of hierarchical social arrangement, gender, or language itself as mastering and persuasive form - tragically constrict. Repeatedly, Edson’s prose poems reflect the oder of culturally sustained ideologies of violence.” Edson subsequently uses the way the content speaks to us as the way in which the poem is structured using an unconscious logic. Russell Edson poems look deeper into the unconscious logic that surrounds the way in which we arrange and placate issues in our modern world such as classism, race, family matters and gender roles, and as he states: “The unconscious world can only be located from the conscious world” (“Soul” 88’) That his foray into the unconscious realm using poetry helps people see beyond a sort of conscious world and bring forth the political and philological issues so that readers will understand them because of their exaggerated nature. (Upton 102) By using no real structure it hard for the reader to expect a change in reality, as their is no way of predicting it without the structure, Edson then can let his poems twist and turn with the introduction of each image. In some cases Edsons poems become Baktinian in a juxtaposition between a Carnivalesque style in which where status quo divisions and caste, class, race, age and profession become equal and are interchangeable with each other (Mclane). This allows the state of the poem to become altered, as it requires no societal context, so like the structure itself, the content frees itself from any long lasting social form. For example in the poem “Amyloo” a man “erases” his daughter Amyloo and then proceeds to purge the memory of Amyloo from his wife's memory:

A father with a huge eraser erases his daughter. When he finishes there's only a red smudge on the wall.
His wife says, where is Amyloo?
She's a mistake, I erased her.
What about all her lovely things? asks his wife.
I'll erase them too.
All her pretty clothes? . . .
I'll erase her closet, her dresser--shut up about Amyloo! Bring your head over here and I'll erase Amyloo out of it.
The husband rubs his eraser on his wife's forehead, and as she begins to forget she says, hummm, I wonder whatever happened to Amyloo? . . .
Never heard of her, says her husband.
And you, she says, who are you? You're not Amyloo, are you? I don't remember your being Amyloo. Are you my Amyloo, whom I don't remember anymore? . . .
Of course not, Amyloo was a girl. Do I look like a girl?
. . . I don't know, I don't know what anything looks like anymore. . .

Like before this scheme mimics a Jungian or Freudian outtake on the human subconscious where all objects collide, separate, and meet again in different ways that symbolize the conscious realm of the mind, where inanimate and animate things become subjective as part of our conscious and subconscious pathos. In Amyloo the father without any real conscious morality is able to just erase his daughter, Edsons plain speech seems to accompany this lack of moral acquisition. Many of his characters lack any sort of moral conscious or even seemed affected by their odd often violent situations, which goes to show that their mental state and development is purely psychology and subconscious changes (Upton 102). As Mclane states: “Edson goes immeasurably further to create a world where the living and the mechanical, the two-legged and the four-legged, are equal and undifferentiated in any conventional sense.” The way the structure of the prose poem lends to this is that it can be written in manner that requires no pacific line breaks and no rhyme scheme, it follows a Jack Kerouc or Miller like stream of consciousness where what comes out is what appears on the page, but it is condensed into brief poem that gives us enough time to digest the poem itself.

Russell Edson’s father Gus Edson was a cartoonist who replaced Sidney Smith, creator of the “Andy Gump” newspaper character (Milner). Because of his cartoonist upbringing Edson’s poems have been compared to literary examples of cartoons in which his topics while social relevant and up to date like most comics and distort and contort the reality of those topics in order to find meaning, truth and humor in those situations. The format of his poems are done in a frame like formula where there are ten to twelve different frames that slowly divulge the end punch-line or truth behind the storyboard, the prose poem extends in the same way until it reaches its conclusion. In his essay The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (1998) he states: “almost all of Edson's prose poems . . . consist of a series of short paragraphs, most of which are only one sentence. . . . The different phases of the narrative, which testify to the author's fascination with the eccentric and the bizarre, reflect his predilection for short 'scenes' with a strictly limited narrative scope and with plotlines built upon a particular detail or a succession of details." In this way Deville is comparing the narrative of a cartoon storyboard to that of Edsons prose poem, in way that the poems build momentum with each detail and image until a conclusion surfaces just as randomly as the beginning of the poem starts. For example in the poem “Accident” :

he barber has accidentally taken off an ear. It lies like

something newborn on the floor in a nest of hair.

Oops, says the barber, but it musn't've been a very good

ear, it came off with very little complaint.

It wasn't, says the customer, it was always overly waxed.

I tried putting a wick in it to burn out the wax, thus to find my

way to music. But lighting it I put my whole head on fire. It

even spread to my groin and underarms and to a nearby

forest. I felt like a saint. Someone thought I was a genius.

That's comforting, says the barber, still, I can't send you

home with only one ear. I'll have to remove the other one. But

don't worry, it'll be an accident.

Symmetry demands it. But make sure it's an accident, I

don't want you cutting me up on purpose.

Maybe I'll just slit your throat.

But it has to be an accident . . .

The poem starts off like any comic strip with an accurance this being the barber “accidentally” removing the ear. Then the next segment the customer is alright the fatality of his ear, and the conversation is short and cropped almost like speech bubbles where a small sentences help describe the imagery and lend to it rather then actually distort it. Soon after the barber decides to cut of the other ear because “symmetry demands it”, this turn of events throws a curveball at us as we are not expecting it. Yet the repetition of syntax in the poem sets up a story board logic because of the elementary vocabulary in the dialog, that mimics the way speech-bubbles work in cartoons (Upton). His poems act as a dark commentary or satire of cultural issues and politics that helps bring to light and characterize these issues. Which like in cartoons subtle political motives are incorporated into often c