"Ginsberg set up shop as our emergency room doctor and eventual mortician. He exhausted himself railing against our corruption and madness, yet the system remained unfazed. It even absorbed him, turned him into a sort of weirdo mascot. To attend a Ginsberg reading in the 80’s and 90’s was to witness a celebrity poet on tour, performing his greatest hits, their social and political contents sapped of urgency, merely ornaments from another era. Outside the windows, Molloch was alive and well, calmly prosperous and impervious to any poetic exposé or condemnation. Like L.S.D., Howl was something you sample in early youth before committing to the more serious, adult business of prospecting for mollahs (I almost wrote mullahs—wassup, Home Land Security!)."

Ginsberg doesn't hold a candle to Adrienne Rich's moral seriousness, and her disciples never went to work for mullah/molochs. Yet, somehow her name never seems to come up among you "political" fellows.

I wouldn’t normally comment on something so overtly opinionated and under-analyzed, but I couldn’t leave this one alone. Allen Ginsberg only serves as a soap box in this post.

It doesn’t matter whether or not I agree with the points raised here. I only hope that no one forms their opinion based on this type of propaganda (which is rampant in today’s media). As a poet who earns his living as an analyst, I see all too many “analyses� put forth in a manner which would lose any true analyst their job.

Here are the items that deserve a lot more discussion (hopefully not on this web site since I’d much rather read about poetry):

“yet the system remained unfazed� – Is this suggesting that nothing has changed for the better since the 50’s and 60’s?...and none as the result of Ginsberg?

“Howl was something you sample in early youth before committing to the more serious, adult business of prospecting for moolahs� – Anyone who views Howl this way should read it again.

is America finally ready to kick the bucket? All of our vital signs are fucked, the Dow is on a nose dive, oil is at $110 and climbing – Our country’s short history has seen far worse, and we have survived: Gas crisis in the 70’s, savings and loan scandal in the ‘80’s, early 90’s recession.

our brave men and women defending our freedom at 702 bases in roughly 130 foreign countries around the world on every continent including Antarctica are exhausted – Is this based on a factual survey of troops, anecdotal information, opinion?

our national debt is unfathomable... – This is a question of economics. When interest rates are low, many would argue that taking on additional debt is a wise financial decision.

It’s weird that not so long ago, phrases such as “full spectrum dominance� and “the end of history� were being bandied about, but even that old standby, “the American dream,� now sounds embarrassing. - DRAMA!

For the millions of our citizens losing their homes – Where were you when millions were choosing to take out high interest mortgages beyond their means?

Who cares who wins American Idol, let’s discuss poetry.

Touchy, touchy! Damn, y'all, someone mentions politics in context with a poet and folks go bananas.

I'm pretty positive Mr. Dinh isn't for excluding Adrienne Rich from any conversations...but this particular post is about Allen Ginsberg. I've heard tell about some of Ginsberg's more abusive antics toward younger poets in his later days, and I would agree, it squares up with the assertion that he was absorbed into a sort of weirdo mascot for the America he saw as falling.

None of that takes away from his prowess as a poet...but hey, isn't that fodder for some of that vaunted "disussion" about poetry that Marty Elwell so loudly argues for? Also gotta say, Marty, methinks you doth protest just a bit much when you devote that many typewriter clicks to smacking around someone's politics.

This isn't propaganda. Propaganda is when opinions or lies are presented as facts by some official, authoritative source so that they won't be questioned. This is a blog. Blogs are supposed to be opinionated. Relax. People who read this blog particularly are smart enough to make up their own minds about what they read here.

Mr Oilwell,

Wasn't it analysts themselves who convinced banks that, in the absence of any other opportunties for profits, they could swindle people out of their savings and repackage their debt as a fancy derivative w/o it causing the kinds of problems it has? You guys hardly seem to fare better than the soapbox preachers, prediction wise. You're sort of neck and neck with Nostradamus, in my book.

As for the U.S. struggling through previous crises, yes, but at what cost? Real wages have fallen in the U.S. for the past 35 years; the ability of U.S. capitalism to hold on here has been predicated on a process of globalization that has, by the World Bank's own admission, increased poverty in the developing world.

I'm glad for your optimism about U.S. survival. Too bad it can't extend this survival to the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Here's a source for U.S. basing data:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12181

Considering that the original post was direct and polemic, even including an F-Bomb, I'm not sure why folks are so upset with my response. I've been called "touchy", but all of I've done is raise questions around the ideas brought up in the original post and point out potential holes in the argument. It seems that the assumption is that the opinions in the post are truth, and no debate is warranted. I don't share all of Mr. Dihn's opinions, and I don't disagree with all of them either. There is a lot of solid factual information in both directions, none of which has been presented here (myself included). The crafty insult attempts would indicate that I'm not the only touchy one.

In the long run, we're all out for the same thing:

I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the
United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I don't think it's terminal, but treatment is required.

Jasper - The way you mispelled my name was very creative. I hope it made you feel clever.

To your point about the mortgage crisis, I don't agree that everyone impacted has been victimized by some big corporate monster. Corporations are made up of individuals, just like any other organization on the planet. Some of these individuals are hard working moral individuals, while others are not. I suspect you know many of them...perhaps you are one of them?... Were there people victimized in the mortgage crisis...sure...but there are many people who need to take responsibility for their own poor financial decisions.

Clearly, America now is in disarray, but I don't think we should blame Ginsberg for somehow not doing his job or his poetry for not weathering our post-9/11 climate. Allen Ginsberg was a poet and prophet of his generation. He and Kerouac and Dylan all stood against Moloch, regardless of what they eventually became, and they did make substantial changes. Even today, we view that generation as the one that wouldn't stand for government injustice.
If now, Moloch is wearing out our soldiers and our citizens are more concerned about Idol (I want Brooke to win), can we really blame Ginsberg's poetry, or Whitman's - especially when so many poets of our own generation refuse to take on political issues (for fear of being considered 'propagandists')? It seems like a real passing of the buck to say "Ginsberg, what happened to you? I though you were going to fight for us?"

Politics fight! I guess I share Linh's fears (Marty, I suggest you read Chalmers Johnson's "blowback" works if you're interested in the state of the American empire -- which does indeed involve a massive overseas network of permanent bases.)

It's possible -- even plausible -- that Howl was the last political poem that "analysts" have read. I'm sure a large -- let's say 20% -- fraction of people in finance would be able to identify the opening lines of the poem. After all, they all did come out of the elite University system that considered acquaintance with Ginsberg and other icons of rebellion to be part of the maturation process. (These days, my guess is that iconoclasm-as-method is even better business than usual.)

"Moral seriousness" is a tricky one. Adrienne Rich has it in spades, but while her work is great in many ways (on decline, I fear, since the 1990s), she's never been able to hit the Ginsberg note. It's interesting that another "morally serious" poet, Carolyn Forché (who I think had greatest impact with her anthology) wrote a prose poem (about severed ears) that is probably the most often encountered of her work -- but that the "morally serious" folk consider it the suspect one, because of its aestheticization.

Indeed, Adrienne Rich's work does teeter a little; I think (for partly ideological reasons) she does not reach Ginsberg's fever pitch -- Rich is concerned to witness and record and not get shrieky -- but it does mean that at times she does rather get a bit brahmin about things. She herself admits as much in a footnote to an early poem about diamond miners, where she flagellates a little about using them as metaphors in a way that elides their horrific working lives.