Howl for Malcolm Forsmark
The incipit of Allen Ginsberg (1926-97), Howl, City Lights Books: San Francisco, 1959, as presented by Christopher Skinner on his Lestaret blog. This rendering © 2010 Lestaret.
For Malcom Forsmark
(Because Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl for Carl Solomon.)
“It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha, from that charnel house, similar in every way, to that of the Jews in the past war. But this is in our own country, our own fondest purlieus. We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.”
William Carlos Williams, from Allen Ginsberg, Howl, City Lights, San Francisco, 1959.
I realize now that the multiverse nudged me to contemplate Moloch, as I watched several YouTube documentaries about the Bohemian Grove.
I finally ended reading Shakespeare‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, scene 2, “Weaving spiders, come not here!”
For the crux of Ginsberg’s Howl is this excerpt from the midpoint of part II, the literal halfway point of the poem:
“Moloch whose name is the Mind!”
You can argue that Howl is a paean to Moloch, but like most long poems Howl is many things. One thing that it is not, with no apologies to William Carlos Williams, is angelic.
It took me a couple of tries to reread it today, I last read it years ago, and at first I loathed it. I hated the description of “negro streets,” and worst of all, the word “Mohammedan” made me stop reading and write this commentary.
It felt like Ginsberg used those words because he thought that they were edgy in 1954, and all those words did for me was confirm that Ginsberg was talking about things that he did not know. The terms “negro streets” and “Mohammedan” feel prosaic and inauthentic as I write this in 2016.
What did Allen Ginsberg know about Islam? Nothing in 1954 when he began Howl, nothing compared to what we know now, courtesy of YouTube, in anno 2016.
I carried a gun in Baghdad myself in 2003 and 2004, aware that I was stalking in the land of the four rivers, the Pison, the Gihon, the Euphrates and the Tigris, where Sumerian cuneiform blossomed out of oral traditions some four thousand years before.
A young lady who ran my office, born Sunni, explained that Islam made her feel loved, not oppressed, even as she wore sunglasses in the office to avoid tormenting men with the vision of her eyes.
Then I remembered Patti Smith proclaiming that she was a Moslem, in her immortal babelogue, circa 1978. This was Ginsberg’s Islam of 1954, but 24 years later:
” … I wake up. I am lying peacefully I am lying peacefully and my knees are open to the sun.
I desire him, and he is absolutely ready to seize me.
In heart I am a Moslem; in heart I am an American; in heart I am Moslem, in heart I’m an American artist, and I have no guilt.”
I always loved babelogue for Patti Smith‘s unrepentant sluttiness and the irony that certain Muslim sects chant: “the sun is not God!”
Then Ginsberg wrote this:
” … who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night … “
Allen Ginsberg, Howl, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1959.
Yes, “boxcars” is a poetic gimmick, but it works. The more that you read the sentence, the more that you admire it. “Grandfather night” is so good that I intend to steal it.
I am also stealing Ginsberg’s description of poets whose “heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,” as we are all of us destined for oblivion. Indeed, “Writing for oblivion” is the tagline on all of my websites.
I also admire the irony of Ginsberg writing,
” … who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish…”
As this happens to every poet. I also remember Oscar Wilde, with Lord Darlington’s caveat in Act III of Lady Windermere’s Fan, writing that “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars.”
Indeed.
I also liked this part:
” … the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.”
Which brings us back to Moloch, reminding me that legalized, systemic infanticide is indistinguishable from state-sponsored Satanic child sacrifice.
One profane theme eulogized by Ginsberg is the hyper-sexuality of homosexuals. As Paris Hilton famously observed, “gay guys are the horniest people in the world.” Anyone who knows many homosexuals knows that Ms. Hilton had a point, and Ginsberg’s Howl parodies sacred sexuality.
I am less repelled by Howl’s eroticism, however, than I am by its junkies, as Ginsberg’s glorification of heroin addiction unmasks him as an effete poseur reveling in his own appetites.
I respect Ginsberg’s occidental Buddhism and his later popularization of Hindu mantra, for it needed to be done, but the final straw for me was Ginsberg’s defense of NAMBLA, and his apologia for pederasty.
Pedophiles may be programmed by nature with proscribed urges, but I have no patience for an advocacy organization that rationalizes statutory rape with, “age is just a number.” I tolerate the sexual exploitation of children by nobody, the child bride of the Prophet included (may peace be upon him).
At first reading I felt nothing beautiful from the first page of Howl, so I said the hell with it, why waste time reading it. I celebrate beauty, not vomitus, and prospecting for pearls in shit is irredeemable.
Then I remembered the pilgrimage that Malcolm Forsmark and I made to the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in 1979, just before I joined the Army. We arrived late. It was closed.
We were disappointed, because we lived in Boulder, and a journey to San Francisco was an expedition. We got drunk and we shouted Howl to the gleaming jewel lights of the city. I did not know then that I would live in San Francisco in 1986, and come to make that metropolis my own.
Sometime that night, Malcolm told me that he met Allen Ginsberg at a party in Boulder. The Naropa crowd thought that they were so countercultural. I did not understand this at the time, I was too young, but it is very clear to me now, with the hindsight of a lifetime focusing my memory. Ginsberg exclaimed, “ah, another up and coming young faggot!”
Actually, no. Malcolm Forsberg was a classicist and an autodidact, a scholar of Latin and Greek whose erudition was staggering. Malcolm eclipsed any academic on the Naropa faculty. I have not spoken to Malcolm in decades, but I knew him so well that I know that I know him still.
I know that wherever he is, he is writing poetry: the poetry of Malcolm Forsmark.
” … exhausted cigarette butts
nodding in opiate daze
burning down to grimy fingers.”
Estéban Trujillo de Gutiérrez
Bangkok, updated 5 May 2018.
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