Poetry and Madness – a topic we’ve been pondering lately, in the light of Stevan Weine’s groundbreaking Best Minds book
Simon Warner interviews Stevan M. Weine – here
Weine: “Yes, madness can have a place in creativity. However, let’s avoid romantic notions which either equate madness with creativity or don’t adequately acknowledge the real suffering and loss which can come with some forms of madness. When Ginsberg wrote ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’, he was writing from the position of a witness to both breakthroughs and hardships.”
Weine notes the Surrealists as visionary precursors:
“The Surrealists found inspiration in the schizophreniform experience of the ‘stimmung‘ or ‘truth taking stare’. This stare became a core strategy for breaking through the limitations of rational consciousness which shackled modern society. In the truth taking stare, the person sees reality in a heightened sense and mysterious unreality, as never before. They experience a powerful new way of seeing the world.”
Ginsberg learned from the Surrealists, William Blake, and (from) William James, and from his own difficult life experiences with his seriously mentally ill mother, and then devised his own innovative ways of engaging madness in his writing, especially his great poems ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’”
Writing in Warner’s Rock and The Beat Generation forum, Weine also finds time to locate a rock context:
“Regarding Ginsberg and (Bob) Dylan, I recently presented a paper in Tulsa at ‘The World of Bob Dylan’ conference, entitled ‘My Generation Destroyed – Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in Witness’. I sought to understand how Dylan drew from Ginsberg’s poems of madness, especially ‘Howl’ but also ‘America’ and ‘Kaddish’, and creatively reworked them in different directions so as to confront racism and violence in his protest songs. You can see how Dylan uses Ginsbergian language and adapts the position of the witness, which he got from ‘Howl’. This paper is being published in a special issue of The Dylan Review.”
(Check out Robert Reginio‘s review, “Dylan and The Beats” in the current issue of The Dylan Review)
Speaking of Surrealism – a major new publication from City Lights – Emerald Wounds, Joyce Mansour‘s Selected Poems (translated by Emilie Moorhouse)
“You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me – and very objectively too – the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that’s you.” (Andrei Breton)
“Transgressive delight and terror of the supreme surreal feminist in this remarkable and most original book of dreams. Mansour, ‘an animal of the night, has been waiting to be reclaimed and counted..”, writes Anne Waldman
Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno writes: “This is a very welcome translation, one English readers can trust. Mansour should be far more read (in both French and English) than she is. Emilie Moorhouse has performed an invaluable service to her and to French literature in English”
Read a selection from this “compact yet career-spanning, bilingual anthology” – here and here
Editor, Garrett Caples and translator Moorhouse will be celebrating the book at City Lights, Thursday August 10th – see here
Walt Whitman Allen Ginsberg and Charles Reznikoff – Doug Holder interviews the author of a new book of Whitman studies Dara Barnat‘s Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry
Barnat : The poetic adoption of Whitman displayed in Reznikoff’s poetry is a lot subtler than in Ginsberg’s, and there are sources where Reznikoff says he doesn’t even like Whitman that much. Yet Reznikoff’s poetry is found to be pretty steeped in Whitman’s poetics, not only thematically, but formalistically. And Ginsberg later expresses appreciation not just for Whitman, but for Reznikoff, which challenges an assumption that Ginsberg was the primary Jewish American poet to turn to Whitman. Reflecting for a moment on my research process, back when I was working on this project in dissertation form, I intentionally chose to leave Ginsberg out and look at Whitman in lesser-recognized Jewish American poets. When I was developing the manuscript for this book, I realized that I had to do new research and re-situate Ginsberg vis-à-vis this wider genealogy.
Poet John Ashbery was born on this day. He would’ve been 96 –
John Ashbery on The Allen Ginsberg Project – here, here, here, here and here