TOP102-DES99
This Old Poem #102:
Allen Ginsberg’s In Back Of The Real
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 10/16/04

  Allen Ginsberg was a liar, pederast, child abuser, hypocrite, & thoroughly despicable person by most accounts. BUT, he was at his best, 12-15 poems, a great poet. No, he was not a visionary poet in the Blake/Whitman/Yeats oeuvre- his greatness, instead deriving from being 1 of the best comic poets of the 20th Century. Howl, as example, is not as old Dr. Williams said, a journey through Hell- rather a black humored rant- 1 ‘howls’ with laughter, after all. Few people get that that is what the title refers to.
  Anyway, on to the online bio: 

  Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926, in Newark and grew up in Paterson, N.J., the second son of Louis Ginsberg, a schoolteacher and sometime poet, and the former Naomi Levy, a Russian emigree and fervent Marxist. His brother, Eugene, named for Eugene V. Debs, also wrote poetry, under the name Eugene Brooks.

  Allen Ginsberg's mother suffered from paranoia and was in and out of mental hospitals; Ginsberg signed an authorization for a lobotomy. She died in 1956 in Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island. Three years after her death, Ginsberg wrote ''Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956),'' an elegy that many consider his finest poem. 

  ''Kaddish'' burnished a reputation that had been forged with the publication of ''Howl!'' three years earlier. The two works established Ginsberg as a major voice in what came to be known as the Beat Generation of writers.
  Ginsberg's journey to his place as one of America's most celebrated poets began during his college days. He first attended Montclair State College. But in 1943, he received a small scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson and enrolled at Columbia University. At Columbia he fell in with a crowd that included Jack Kerouac, a former student four years his senior, Lucien Carr and William Burroughs, and later, Neal Cassady, a railway worker who had literary aspirations. Together they formed the nucleus of what would become the Beats. Ginsberg also became part of the San Francisco literary circle that included Kenneth Rexroth -- an author, critic and painter -- Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan and Philip Lamantia. He also met Peter Orlovsky, who would be his companion for the next 30 years.
  Ginsberg received many awards, including the National Book Award (1973), the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished poetic achievement (1986), and an American Book Award for contributions to literary excellence (1990). In 1985, Harper & Row published Ginsberg's ''Collected Poems,'' an anthology of his work in one volume that firmly established the poet in the mainstream of American literature.

  Reading the classic Ginsberg poems of the 50s & 60s- his last great poem Wales Visitation was penned in 1967- is sort of like taking a time trip because what was considered titillating then is almost Puritan now. That said, with age AG got more graphic in subject matter & far more lax in poetic structure. His last few books of poetry feature doggerel so bad that to use them for  the TOP series would be like me kick-boxing a midget. So let’s take a gander at the titular poem- 1 that was written before AG gave up all pretense of even caring for poetry.
  Here’s AG’s version:

In Back of the Real

railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman's shack.
A flower lay on the hay on***
the asphalt highway
--the dread hay flower
I thought--It had a***
brittle black stem and***
corolla of yellowish dirty***
spikes like Jesus' inchlong***
crown, and a soiled***
dry center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that's been lying under
the garage for a year.
Yellow, yellow flower, and***
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow***
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.

 

  The best part of this poem is the title- it sets up the possibility of a metaphysical meditation. & we get 1- except that the musing is so banal & unpoetic that we are left scratching our heads. Also, in a 24 line poem, while we only get 2 clunker clichés, we get 8 line breaks that have no grammatical, syllabic, metric, nor logical reason for being broken where they are- that’s 1/3 of the poem! Obviously a trim is needed:

 

In Back of the Real   

railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered in front

of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman's shack.
A flower lay on the hay
--the dread hay flower
I thought--  dry

center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that's been lying under
the garage for a year.
Yellow, yellow flower,

tough, spiky, ugly,
is the flower, nonetheless,
of the World.

 

  Basically I just trimmed excess & got rid of the poor enjambment. The better grammar to end the poem also adds an element of duplicity- can you see why, my reader? A much simpler way to improve the poem is to simply paragraph it. See how it says the exact same thing yet lacks the structural flaws?


In Back of the Real   

  Railroad yard in San Jose, I wandered desolate in front of a tank factory and sat on a bench near the switchman's shack. A flower lay on the hay on the asphalt highway--the dread hay flower I thought--It had a brittle black stem and corolla of yellowish dirty spikes like Jesus' inchlong crown, and a soiled dry center cotton tuft like a used shaving brush that's been lying under the garage for a year. Yellow, yellow flower, and flower of industry, tough spiky ugly flower, flower nonetheless, with the form of the great yellow Rose in your brain! This is the flower of the World.

  Of course, good poems should mean far more than just their prosaic rendering. Here’a a snippet of AG in top form- a snip from his famed America. Note how much more elevated & mnemonic the language is:


America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

  The political pap spewed is not the point- the comic edge & satire are- & this is where AG’s language is tops- not in great description but in utter absurdity. here’s an even better example of AG’s comic flair- this from A Supermarket In California:


….and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the

  refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?

  Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my

  imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes,

  possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

 

  The utter absurdity & humor of AG whacking off in a supermarket over a long dead poetic compatriot is often misread as some divine communion. I recall at a class I once went to the moronic teacher tried to assert just that point, after I had read the poem in the comic vein it was written. Another woman there asked me what the teacher had been smoking in thinking the poem some ‘deep communion’?
  Alack, for every me there are 999 of those teachers out there who could not begin to parse a poem without having to thumb through their notes from what someone else in a book once said about a poem. O, lonely flowers of the world, indeed! Here are the scores:

Final Score: (1-100):

Allen Ginsberg’s In Back Of The Real: 60
TOP’s In Back Of The Real: 75

Return to TOP

Bookmark and Share