San Fran Beats

This week's readings took us into one of my favorite eras of poetry: The Beats. Theorist Judith Butler is asserts that gender is performative in nature, a concept which I believe extends to the ways in which all identity is created. With their emphasis on public performance and the counter culture nature of their poetry, The Beats can certainly be seen as the place where identity was most radically experimented with up to that point in American history. The Beats used their poetry, and the way they lived their lives, to explore alternative perspectives on drug use, sexuality, religion, and ways to confront authority. One of my favorite aspects of the Beat era was the way in which they appropriated certain Buddhist concepts to form a uniquely American-Buddhist ascetic, a process which mirrors many Westerner's first encounters with Buddhist ideas. Allen Ginsberg provides a striking example of this process in that his first references to Buddhism are often superficial or show an affinity for the concept without the benefit of careful study or practice.

Ginsberg was forced to confront a shaking of his ideals, however, when he encountered the cut-up method of his friend William S. Burroughs. Burroughs would take print and cut the text into pieces and then reassemble the parts into a new whole. Ginsberg was stunned by the removal of subject matter and authorial intent practiced by his friend, and this new idea haunted him for quite some time. On Friday, July 13^th 1962 Ginsberg writes, “Everything random still, as any cut-up. Burroughs it's already a year still haunting me. I slept all afternoon & when I woke up I thought it was morning, I didn't know where I was. I had no name for India.” Ginsberg, still haunted by the cut-up method a year later, could not handle the evacuation of the author from the work. Ginsberg then decided to travel to India and study under many gurus in order to achieve a deeper spiritual understanding of his consciousness and how to continue with his poetry. He writes that “nobody can seriously go on passionately concerned with effects however seeming-real they be, when he knows inside all his visions & truths are empty, finally.”

This crisis was the impetus for a new approach to poetry and new vision of consciousness for Ginsberg. He began to play with the sound that words make rather than the meaning. In one of his later poems, “Hum Bom” the mantra HUM BOM is played with and changed to become whom bomb. Although there is referential meaning within the poem, the poem is meant to act as a manta on the vibratory level. This poem, as most of his later work, can be read as an effort to transcend the usual implications of language and produce a state of consciousness in his readers. Although much of his later work failed to garner the attention of his earlier pieces, I am impressed by Ginsberg's willingness to take poetry and the question of representation as far as he could.