Sonora Review

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I’ve addressed and written so many poems to and about Allen Ginsberg. The appeal of poetry came to me from its implied freedom, from form, from argument, from everyday logic, from societal constraints and, inherently, this arose out of a juvenile need to feel like I was participating in some act of rebellion. Now, after teaching “Howl” and other of his works, it seems that the romantic appeal of most beat writing to adolescent readers comes out of a connived sense of escape, particularly from the contemporary world, rather than from internalizing the world through invention, which is what Ginsberg thrives upon.

His work imagines an America where a buddhist, gay, Jewish, ugly bard is a fallen angel that speaks to us from a “real” American experience. He propositioned a whole generation to participate in the debauchery of hope, the comedy of real psuedo-ethical governments, the mantra of “whoever digs California is California”. This is poetry as “being” rather than “seduction”, an evolution Barthes predicts as the eventual course that literature will take, not having realized that it was happening.

Two of the most popular and exciting new poets, Tao Lin and Chelsey Minnis, seem to me to be beating on the old trunk of absurdity, the conceptualist Kenneth Goldsmith on dada, Linh Dinh on postmodern parody, and Robert Hass on Milosz’s grave, etc… Ilya Kaminsky’s book Dancing in Odessa is to me the most exciting and enduring in recent memory, because of its ability to capture the history of his present state of being, an exile poet living in America (He’s working out of the same hat that Hass is, but Hass can’t pull it off as well because, as we all know, Hass is American)… All of these philosophies either float around daily American existence or make comment about it (excluding Ilya Kaminsky). That is why, ultimately, they are unsatisfying to the reader. They do not liberate us, rather they remind us of the world, particularly the banal, commercial, unappealing electronic forest of contemporary life. Hass, at his best, invents a waiter named Dmitri in a poem by John Ashbery in a poem by Robert Hass. That’s like imagining a cloud in a cloud, or the cloud that makes up the cloud, or a jar in Tennessee inside a jar in Tennessee etc…

We as Americans, particularly at this time, need a poet who is interested in pulling the anxiety of our condition inside and inventing a hopeful state of being, a reevaluation of American ethics, and reestablish the sense of the American self (the American poetic self). I don’t know how it will be done, or who will do it, but everyone seems a bit anxious… even Ron Silliman recently said that the old paradigm of quiet v.s post-avant is now dead…  So anyway, that’s some thoughts entering the next decade from this young and anxious poet/reader… and I believe, if its going to happen, if Americans have a history, that they will take a cue from Ginsberg, that it will come from the pages of Whitman rather than Williams, Ashbery, or Stevens (and wouldn’t it be groovy if Sonora got to be the first one to publish him/her/it/robot).

Best New Year,

Jake Levine