Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

46
Allen Ginsberg
Following the chants, Ginsberg reads his ode to his sphincter muscle,
and Doty steals a glance around the room, to discover the audience
loves it. How is this? He wonders. Shouldn’t they be offended? Doty
concludes that Ginsberg managed somehow to sidestep the question
of what is polite or obscene or gay or straight. He created “some
zone of permission and distinction for himself that seemed to make
all things possible” (13). But perhaps with that particular setting and
audience, teachers in the presence of a now legendary cultural figure,
those who were disgruntled kept quiet and respectful. One can think
of many contexts—not merely the U.S. Senate or the PTA—where
these poems would be far from welcome, 50 years after the attempted
banning of Howl.
The division between the sacred and the profane—the structure of
which, though the contents vary, is found in every culture—is destabilized
in the long poems of both Whitman and Ginsberg. We saw this
in “Footnote to Howl.” Consider Whitman:
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch
or am touch’d from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. (57)
This passage in Song of Myself is followed by a body-centered incantation,
in which the parts of the speaker’s body are catalogued and
celebrated—“I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so
luscious”—and in which at several points the last opposition, that of
inside and outside, of me and not-me, is collapsed, as we have seen
earlier in Whitman’s eroticized landscape and atmosphere.
What Ginsberg did is to go far beyond the armpits:
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks
of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse!
Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace
& junk & drums! (27)
The sacred and profane come together: clothes and God and decorum
on one side; nakedness and excrement and howls on the other. Ginsberg,
however transcendent and spiritual, will always be seen as the