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Photo Ann Wood
Poet Jason Shinder talks about how Ginsberg’s “Howl” shaped poetry for generations to come.
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Photo Ann Wood
Allen Ginsberg, beat poet and teacher who penned the iconoclastic poem “Howl.” |
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Ginsberg’s poem Howls for a half century
Poet Jason Shinder pays tribute to ‘The Poem That Changed America’
By Ann Wood
Banner Staff
It was on Oct. 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, Calif., that poetry was liberated, taken away from academics, given to the people. It happened when 29-year-old Allen Ginsberg gave his first-ever reading of the poem “Howl.” With it, he changed the frequently elitist genre by giving it permission to be real. This drunken reading of the poem titled by good friend and fellow beat writer Jack Kerouac loosened the breath of American poetry in ways that hadn’t happened before.
Twelve days later, clear across the country in Brooklyn, N.Y., the poet Jason Shinder was born, probably with a howl.
“I fell in love with poetry fairly early. The rhythms just cradled me,” Shinder says, sitting in his Provincetown home, staring out to sea. “If you’re lucky, you find something that talks to you a little bit.”
Shinder was so influenced by the poem penned shortly before his birth, along with Ginsberg’s other work, that when he was 21 he sent a note to the poet asking if he could study with him at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Shinder probably never really expected to receive a response. He had written to poets he admired before. But Ginsberg isn’t other poets — and one day a postcard arrived in the mail. On the front was a picture of Ginsberg and Bob Dylan sitting cross-legged on Kerouac’s grave. Scribbled on the other side were the words: “Come when you can.”
He did. Shinder became Ginsberg’s assistant, helping him edit some books and letters. He became a lifelong friend.
“He includes you into his community very quickly,” Shinder says. “And you find him to be generous and attentive.”
Shinder honors his friend’s most celebrated poem, which appeared in 1956 in the book “Howl and Other Poems,” with a collection of essays by writers who were affected by it. “The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ 50 Years Later” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006, $30 hardback, $14 paperback) includes a CD of the first known recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl,” on March 18, 1956, at the Town Hall Theater in Berkeley, Calif.
Shinder, who edited the book, will play part of the CD, talk about the poem and his experiences with Ginsberg at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Wellfleet Public Library, 55 West Main St., Wellfleet. Admission to this Castle Hill Tuesday Night Lecture Series event is $7, or free for members.
Shinder remembers that first meeting with Ginsberg, who was wearing his typical white shirt and skinny, colorful tie. (Ginsberg had many of those ties, and when he died in 1997, two months before what would have been his 71st birthday, he left them to his friends. Shinder has one, but never wears it.) Ginsberg always carried a leather shoulder bag and was running off to meet a poet or a student or someone.
“He was sort of on roller skates,” Shinder says. “At that time, ‘Howl’ was like 25 or 30 years old.”
For its 30th anniversary, Ginsberg himself wrote an essay commenting on the poem, which appears in Shinder’s collection.
“I had a secondhand typewriter, some cheap scratch paper. I began typing, not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth,” Ginsberg writes. “As my loves were impractical and my thoughts relatively unworldly, I had nothing to gain, only the pleasure of enjoying on paper those sympathies most intimate to myself and most awkward to the great world of family, formal education, business and current literature.”
“Howl” is a strong, brave poem. Something Ginsberg could only write after going through psychotherapy. Something Ginsberg had to be drunk to read that first time. Something Ginsberg wrote to impress the already established Kerouac. Ginsberg told things about Ginsberg in “Howl” that he was afraid to reveal.
“For Allen, what was at stake was his whole identity [as a gay Jewish man]. Ginsberg created a character to live out of,” Shinder says. “But I think he was constantly working back and forth out of this character. … The consequences of his actions instilled the sense of revolution, the sense that there was another way to live.”
Of course, in Shinder’s collection, Ginsberg isn’t the only one speaking out on “Howl.” The book contains comments from likely fans (Marge Piercy) to less obvious ones (Robert Pinsky). Shinder says that when he set out to collect essays about the poem for its 50th anniversary, he had some goals in mind.
“Of course the choices are informed by the limits of space in the book and the limits of my own instincts, information, contacts,” he says. “I wanted good (great if possible) prose writers who had experience writing personal or public essays — who could fashion a clear, lively, meaningful and accessible review of the poem and its impact on their lives as writers, as people.”
Shinder says he wanted to include some people who knew Ginsberg and the beats, some who didn’t, and writers from a variety of lifestyles.
“I didn’t achieve all of what I wanted in this manner — but something of an engaged, various, lively, meaningful reflection on the poem took some shape,” he says, adding that the poem changed so many things for so many people. “I’m not sure what happened exactly, but there was a break politically and socially and the poem captured this rupture and helped trigger engagement and action on its behalf, and still does. And, in the end, it held up the schism, all breaches of faith, with the irreversible notion of hope through candor."
This isn’t the first collection Shinder’s edited. Provincetown’s second poet laureate (following in the footsteps of good friend Stanley Kunitz), Shinder is the editor of six poetry anthologies, as well as “Best American Movie Writing 1998” and “Tales from the Couch: Writers on Therapy.” He also authored two books of poetry and one chapbook, and his second chapbook, “Arrow Breaking Apart,” is due out this fall from Arrowsmith Press. Also forthcoming are “Poets on Poets of the Past,” “True Minds: The Letters Between Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, 1944-1969” and “Hollywood Poets: Favorite Poems of Actors & Directors.” As if that’s not enough, the poet founded the YMCA National Writer’s Voice, is a graduate writing professor at Bennington College and New School University and is the director of the arts writing program at the Sundance Institute.
Shinder, who received a 2006 Poetry Fellowship from the Mass. Cultural Council, among many other awards, first came to Provincetown as a Fine Arts Work Center fellow in the 1980s.
“I just fell in love with the place. Fell in love [with a woman]. Fell out of love. Still fell in love with the place,” he says, adding that he continues to split his time between his Provincetown and New York homes. “The evening here has a lot of promise. … Provincetown gives you something back always. New York sort of takes a lot.”
Reading through the Ginsberg-Kerouac letters, Shinder says he learned Ginsberg lost his virginity to a woman on his first — and only — visit to Provincetown. He agrees that Ginsberg was probably confused about his sexuality at the time.
But it’s not Provincetown Shinder wants to talk about. He talks about what a generous, gentle man Ginsberg was. He talks about how, even when the famous poet received unsolicited phone calls, he listened intently, always looking to learn from anyone, from everyone.
“He had the ability to know that at any moment something could change the direction of his life,” Shinder says. “He was defined by what he had, not what he didn’t have. … I felt that way about myself.”
awood@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Aug 3rd, 2006