Wrapping Up the Anti-Thesis Movement

Beyond the Machinery of Improvisation:
Demystifying Allen Ginsberg's Performance Poetics
July 2010, So-Rim Lee

Ginsberg was a pioneer who bridged the gap among literature, theatre, and music. He was also what Artaud called “an authentic madman,” who deliberately broke norms to represent the subculture of the contemporary socio-political academia. Ginsberg not only challenged the conventions of the established literati but also those of the Beats by living past the generation he is most widely known to represent; the poet became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974, followed by a bolder move of nominating himself to be crowned a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Government in 1993.[1] In many ways he was a nonconformist, as discussed in the second chapter; he lived by the ideals of madness, nakedness, incorporated drugs and hallucinogens into the scheme of writing, experimented freely with sexuality, and practiced his own religious beliefs without restrain. In 1997, the poet witnessed his controversial works included in major literary anthologies before he died at the age of seventy-one. Ten years after his death, Columbia University teaches “Howl” as a prerequisite for earning a degree in humanities. The Allen Ginsberg Trust, established by Ginsberg himself and currently represented by Bob Rosenthal, provides resources for all attempts to recollect the life and works of the poet. In short, Ginsberg and his legacy have grown into living legends.

Above all, however, Ginsberg opened a path for a novel art form consisting of literature, theatre, and music. His improvisatory aesthetics, which entail meticulous previsions and revisions, embodies a new ideal of poetics that the poets today are following as new vision. His performance poetics, in particular, suggests a new academic discipline yet to be developed. Translating, transfiguring, and thus transforming the written form of “Howl” into the visual and auditory performances embody an interdisciplinary eclecticism that serves as the fundamental premise on which this thesis is based upon; as mentioned earlier in the introduction, poetry in its spoken form is firmly rooted in two disciplines modern-day scholarship denominates as literature and theatre, on top of which Ginsberg and the Beat Generation writers also incorporate the ideals of spontaneity and improvisation of bebop jazz.

The society is a battlefield where revolutionaries and underdogs are often treated with contempt and disdain. Throughout the four decades since the publication of “Howl,” Ginsberg has been banned, imprisoned, arrested and expatriated. Ironically, as the poet was thrown off the stage for his antisocial behaviors, Howl and Other Poems continued to snowball into a multi-million bestseller translated into numerous other languages that penetrated the readers with a determined alacrity. When Ginsberg became a self-nominated Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1993, the established academia saw, for the first time, how such undaunted self-promotion has been the ultimate drive behind the poet’s every utterance. Following the wake of Ginsberg are talented poets, actors, literary critics, spoken word performers and Ginsberg scholars that deliver, in their respective unique ways, “Howl” to the audience on the stage that the poet stood on countless occasions.

Among these young generation of practitioners is Turturro, whose rendition of “Howl” was discussed in the last chapter. As his performance of “Howl” in The Source proves, the ultimate goal of Turturro’s performance poetics can be defined as to appear natural and minimally contrived when, under the surface of improvisation, the performer trains himself a machinery of memorization, variation, and adaptation that creates an invisible structure of techniques and schemes that augment such apparent naturalness. Such machinery beyond the realistic is a working dynamic in all modern poetry performers, among whom this thesis particularly has chosen to discuss Ginsberg and his literary origins; one major difference between Ginsberg and Turturro is that the former is essentially a writer whereas the latter is, more than anything else, an actor. In effect, the fundamental differences in Ginsberg’s and Turturro’s renditions of “Howl” lie under the fact that Ginsberg’s approach to performing the poem is a literary one, while Turturro’s approach to performing the same work pertains to the aesthetics of drama and theatre arts, not to mention film. 

The most predominant risk an artist has to take in creating a work of interdisciplinary studies is to expose himself under critics of different disciplines. To the academia that regards a particular discipline as higher or more authentic in its pure form, not conjugated with another discipline, the attempt to interbreed a new genre of art can be sacrilegious, if not disqualifying. The artist has to have a concrete knowledge of the disciplines he attempts to mesh, and he has to know how to respond back to criticisms from all sides. In this context, performance poetics still has a long and winding way to go, more artists to develop it as an authentic and independent art form in itself, and, most importantly, more knowledgeable interdisciplinary critics to refute each work and draw out the mistakes and loopholes the artist has yet to make amends. Ginsberg’s “Howl” is a seminal work in this sense, since it has built the foundation upon which performance poetry, a historically established discipline but is also largely a twentieth-century phenomenon, is to grow and blossom into novel forms.

Due to such double-edged nature of performance poetry, the contemporary poet-performer is constantly challenged not only by the traditional process of art creation but also by the already established academia that often cast much too critical eyes to interdisciplinary efforts as unsuitable for scholarly investment. Although the current American literary anthologies include Ginsberg next to his non-Beat contemporary writers as Gertrude Stein, one should accept the fact that the two most acknowledgeable deeds the poet accomplishes with “Howl,” i.e., revolutionizing the traditional mode of expression and using the contemporary jazz ideals of improvisation in writing the verse form, will probably never suffice to put him on the same literary niche as T. S. Eliot or Emily Dickinson. For another decade at the least, instead of having his own placing within the academia, Ginsberg will be taught in university lectures almost always within the larger context of the Beat Generation writers as a whole. And this is not only because Ginsberg cannot be regarded outside the boundaries of the Beat Movement, but also because he, as a writer, does not have a rich oeuvre as T. S. Eliot or Emily Dickinson respectively does.

This thesis not only acknowledges but also endorses the innate and inevitable hierarchy that exists among literary figures, and does not attempt to assert in any sense that Ginsberg is truly the most exceptional and underrated poet American literature has seen. The object of this thesis is, instead, to stress the ways in which Ginsberg should be appropriately merited for the idiosyncratic accomplishments he accomplishes with his unique style and accumulation of verses, especially as one of the very few Beat writers that lived to see the end of the twentieth century. By attempting to demystify the “Howl” manuscripts and performances through close reading, this thesis ultimately seeks to contribute to forming the foundation upon which many more scholars in the future will continue to build their critiques and evaluations on the poet and his literature. Whereas this thesis focused on “Howl” only, Ginsberg scholarship has countless other resources to branch further; for instance, a study on the manuscripts and the performances of “Kaddish,” a much later work as compared to “Howl,” will yield a different perspective on the poet. Only by combining the scholarly efforts to bring Ginsberg’s works into light will develop the literary scholarship on which “Howl” will be placed as suitable for its merit as an example of contemporary American poetry.

Library Catalogue Information

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[1] Barry Miles. Allen Ginsberg: A Biography. 1989. London: Viking; London: Virgin, 2002. 1