H
e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s
b e r g
N
a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i
v e s E d i t i o n
ELIOT KATZ
Unpublished
Letter to New York Times Book Review re: Allen Ginsberg
Dear Friends (who were also
friends of Allen’s):
In the October 10th [2010] New York Times Book Review, there was
an article by Lee Siegel comparing the views of Beat Generation writers,
including Allen’s, to the right-wing Tea Party movement. I wrote a letter
to the Book Review editor in response because I thought it was important to
challenge Siegel’s misrepresentations, particularly with the elections coming
up and with so many crazy Tea Party candidates running. Of course, it’s
difficult to get letters to the editor published in the NY Times (although I
have managed to get in a few in the past) because they receive so many more
letters than they can publish. Since I just found out that this one isn’t going
to get in there, I thought I would at least send it around to friends who were
also friends of Allen’s, in the hope that some of you might appreciate it. With all best wishes, Eliot Katz.
[Unpublished
letter to the NY Times Book Review Editor by Eliot Katz:]
To
the Editor:
As a
poet, activist, and longtime friend of the late Allen Ginsberg, I wanted to
challenge the characterization of Ginsberg’s political views and work in Lee
Siegel’s provocative article, “The Beat Generation and the Tea Party” (Oct.
10). Introducing his piece with the claim that the Beat Generation
writers were driven mainly by a desire for individual freedom, Siegel writes
that they were “essentially apolitical” and that “insofar as they had
sociopolitical ambitions, their goals…were the stuff of poetry, not organized
politics.” After portraying Ginsberg as uninterested in working practically to
improve government policies, Siegel then proceeds to link the ideas of Ginsberg
and other Beat Generation writers to the right-wing Tea Party’s project of
downsizing government’s role in ensuring people’s social and economic needs and
rights.
Siegel’s
portrayal of Ginsberg as uninterested in organized politics could hardly be
more misleading. In both his poetry and his life, Ginsberg was one of the most
politically engaged writers of his era. Influenced by such literary
predecessors as William Blake and Walt Whitman, and raised by his communist
mother Naomi, and his Debsian-socialist father Louis,
Allen Ginsberg learned how to turn his political ideas and observations into
some of the most memorable and widely read poetry of the second half of the 20th century. And in his
personal life, he actively supported and participated in a wide range of
organized political movements, beginning with the movement to end the Vietnam
War and, in ensuing years, movements for such progressive causes as gay rights,
civil rights, environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, and avoidance of
the first Gulf War in 1990-91. He served on the advisory board of numerous
organizations, including the progressive media watch group, Fairness &
Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and a national student activist group that I
worked with during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Student Action Union. In the
years that I knew Ginsberg, from 1980 until his death in 1997, he was
constantly writing or calling government offices to advocate for improved
social policies and urging younger writers like myself to do the same. Most of
the policies for which Ginsberg advocated—such as stronger social safety nets
for homeless persons; deep cuts in military spending; and a more active
government role in protecting civil rights, human rights, and the
environment—do not at all resemble the right-wing policy calls that we have
been hearing from Tea Party circles and candidates.
As
Siegel notes, Ginsberg certainly believed strongly in individual freedoms,
including freedom of expression; and he was a hard-working member of PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee, protesting literary
censorship and working for the release of imprisoned writers in both the East
and West. But contrary to Siegel’s narrow portrayal, Ginsberg also believed
deeply in the importance of solidarity and well understood the reality of human
interdependence. In his most well-known poem, note for example the key third
section of “Howl” with its repeated assertion to fellow writer, Carl Solomon,
who was at the time in a psychiatric hospital, that “I’m with you in
Rockland”--an expression of interpersonal solidarity that works in the poem as
a tonic to the sense of alienation decried in the poem’s previous and
politically charged “Moloch” section, and that, beyond the poem itself,
prefigures the kind of collective effort and movement building that is
necessary to create meaningful social change. Throughout his life, Ginsberg was
a Great Introducer, consistently trying to bring writers and activists together
for the benefit of social-justice causes. For just one interesting
example, it was Ginsberg who introduced Abbie Hoffman
and Dave Dellinger to each other, an introduction that would help lead to the
historic Chicago 1968 protests outside the Democratic Party convention and the
subsequent Chicago 8 trial, in which Hoffman and Dellinger were defendants.
Ginsberg kept a comprehensive rolodex of writers, political organizers, and
journalists working for both the mainstream and the alternative press, a
rolodex which was incredibly helpful in the pre-Internet days to those of us
who needed difficult-to-find phone numbers or addresses in order to help
organize or publicize upcoming meetings, events, and rallies. In recent years,
many of Ginsberg’s old friends and colleagues have been working with coalitions
like United for Peace & Justice to call—first from the Bush administration
and now from the Obama administration—for an end to the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and for a renewed respect for civil liberties and human rights.
Again, we have not yet heard such calls coming from the Tea Party.
In
looking at Ginsberg’s body of poems over five-plus decades, I have written
elsewhere that his political philosophy was flexible and pragmatic, not rigidly
ideological, but that his political views were always within a broad spectrum
of democratic-left traditions—including a consistent belief in values like
civic participation, economic fairness, peace and international cooperation,
accountable institutions, ecological protection, and civil liberties and other
human rights. Right up until the end of his life, Allen Ginsberg never wavered
from his dedication to progressive causes, which is why I think it is so
important to challenge this article by Lee Siegel, whose work I have previously
read and enjoyed. While it is true that not all of the Beat Generation writers
shared the same politics, in the case of Ginsberg (and many of the other
writers associated with the Beat Generation), Siegel would have been fairer and
more accurate if he had shown how Ginsberg’s legacy continues to be seen in the
contemporary and international anti-war movement; in recently increased efforts
to urge the government to play a stronger role in halting the
questionable bank-driven housing foreclosures that have led to
vastly increasing homelessness in America; and in the global justice movement
(as seen most visibly in the Seattle 1999 WTO protests and most recently at the
September 2010 G-20 protests in Pittsburgh), with this movement’s effective and
theatrical demonstrations and its poetically phrased insistence that “another
world is possible.”
Eliot Katz
Astoria, NY
[Originally
published in NHS 2011, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs11/.]