Songs of ourselves

PUT your ear to the ground, America. Those yelps and yawps you hear come from some of the best minds of this generation, sparring, historical and occasionally half-baked, heaving up bold thoughts about a dead, bearded gay poet from New Jersey.

Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the 3,600-word verbal torrent that stands as founding document of the Beat movement, turns 50 this year. No piece of verse since 1956 has sent such ripples through American culture, and no poet since has parlayed his words into such fame. By the time Ginsberg died in 1997, he’d toured with Dylan and recorded with the Clash, ingested vast amounts of drugs, posed for Rolling Stone, embraced Buddhism and pitched khakis for the Gap. As 20th century poets go, he was a rock star.

But now he’s a dead rock star, America, and frankly, we have plenty of those. With Ginsberg, the pressing questions are whether his words have begun to outlive their time -- all signs points to yes -- and how he’s stacking up against that other rock star among poets.

That other dead, bearded, gay, great mid-Atlantic American poet. The one from the 19th century. Whitman, America.

For decades, the parallels and contrasts between Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems” -- the great unrhymed, long-lined, self-celebratory sensation of the 1850s and the great unrhymed, long-lined, self-celebratory sensation of the 1950s -- have made for great coffeehouse and campus-quad debates. Now there’s an extra edge on the conversation, and it crosses generations in intriguing ways.

“The bloom is off the rose with old Allen, baby,” says Richard MacBriar, confessed poetry junkie and longtime buyer for UCLA’s Book Zone.

“ ‘Leaves of Grass’ is important. ‘Howl’ is better,” maintains Sophia Grady, a 17-year-old shelver at Skylight Books in Los Feliz.

“Whitman is the greater poet. He wrote prolifically across a long career with no diminution of excellence,” says Dana Gioia, a veteran poet, essayist and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Yet Ginsberg was “the last guy to really catch the public’s imagination with a poem,” Gioia concedes, and his humor comes through more clearly -- even though Ginsberg’s signature poem is mostly about horror and defeat and Whitman’s is mostly about sensuality and community.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,/ starving hysterical naked,” wrote Ginsberg, beginning “Howl.”

“I celebrate myself,/ And what I assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you,” wrote Whitman in “Song of Myself,” the long centerpiece poem that anchors “Leaves of Grass.”

Each poem is a sort of political manifesto, addressed specifically to all Americans, intended to challenge the nation’s sense of itself. Oh, yes, and each poem hints at oral sex.

We take you now to the White House, America, and the year 1997. President Clinton wishes to ply a young mistress with poetry. “Leaves of Grass” is his choice.

“Whitman is so rich,” writes Monica Lewinsky in an unsent thank-you note, “that one must read him like one tastes a fine wine or good cigar -- take it in, roll it in your mouth, and savor it!”

Yes, America, it’s true. It’s in the Starr Report. “Whitman’s contribution has lasted, but it’s plowed into the soil of American poetry and thought,” says Malcolm Margolin, founder-publisher at Berkeley-based Heyday Books. “What Ginsberg has that Whitman didn’t have is rage. You read him for the cleansing purity of the rage he had. And I think there’s greatness in that. I mean, he just roared.”

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Not so very different

GINSBERG, born in Newark to a teacher-poet father and an activist mother with chronic mental illness, attended Columbia University in the 1940s, met Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs and set off on a long bout of travel and dead-end jobs, from the merchant marines to a Madison Avenue ad agency to handling baggage at the Greyhound bus terminal in San Francisco.

With publication of “Howl,” he burst into four decades of public life as a beatnik, hippie and eventually a tenured professor at Brooklyn College. A few years before his death, he sold his archives to Stanford University for $1 million. And since his death? At strait-laced Vroman’s in Pasadena and at bohemian Skylight Books in Los Feliz, “Howl” sells six copies for every five of “Leaves of Grass.” At City Lights in San Francisco’s North Beach -- the bookstore that first published “Howl,” a million copies ago -- the ratio is more like 50 to 1.

None of this, however, impresses the readers and critics who see Ginsberg as the sideshow in the carnival tent of American poetry and Whitman as the main event. To write like Ginsberg, James Dickey once spat in the New York Times Book Review, one needs only memories, frustrations, secret wishes and “an ability to write elementary prose and to supply it with rather more exclamation points than might normally be called for. It takes more than this to make poetry. It just does.”

Whitman, dead 113 years, gets more Google hits than Ginsberg. He gets more space in the stacks of the Los Angeles Public Library. He gets his own chapter on the Cliffs Notes website, and his name is found on public schools across the land. This term at UCLA, UC Berkeley, USC and Stanford, a collective five professors have ordered their students to buy “Leaves of Grass,” while three have assigned “Howl.” (Many literature classes use anthologies that include both poets.)

But here’s a question, America: Are these poets really so different?

Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” was published in 1855, then again in 1856 with a big endorsement from literary lion Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ginsberg’s “Howl” was first read in public in 1955, then published in October 1956 with a big endorsement from literary lion William Carlos Williams.

“Leaves of Grass” was banned in Boston, which aided sales all over. “Howl” provoked a San Francisco obscenity prosecution, which failed in state court, aiding sales all over.

Starting out, Whitman apprenticed as a printer for the Long Island Patriot and later edited the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Ginsberg worked as a copy boy for the New York World Telegram and later reviewed books for Newsweek.

Whitman wrote three anonymous rave reviews of his own work, once proclaiming “an American bard at last!” Ginsberg stepped up to celebrated poet Stanley Kunitz, handed over “Howl,” and said: “I want you to read the greatest poem of the century.”

Whitman, who suffered from depression, had his brother Jesse committed to a lunatic asylum. Ginsberg, who in his 20s spent eight months in a psychiatric institute, approved a lobotomy for his mother.

Whitman wrote: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,/ And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the eggs of the wren .... “

Ginsberg wrote: “Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!”

Ginsberg, who published his big poem at 29, endured his mother’s death the same year. Whitman, who published his big poem at 35, suffered his father’s death the same year.

Whitman engaged deeply in politics and mourned in verse the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865. Ginsberg engaged deeply in politics and mourned in verse the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

Horrified by the toll of the Civil War, Whitman visited veterans’ hospitals in Washington. Horrified by the toll of the Vietnam War, Ginsberg sat on a stage amid the tumult outside the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 and chanted “Om.”

Whitman liked to say his song resounded “over the roofs of the world.” Ginsberg sounded his howl “across the tops of/ cities.”

Whitman wrote “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Ginsberg coined the phrase “flower power.”

Also, Ginsberg’s secretary of State ....

Sorry, America. Lost the thread there for a second.

For poet and professor Timothy Steele of Cal State L.A., who has spent years crusading to bring back rhyme and meter, Ginsberg and Whitman both stand for “anti-intellectualism and unguarded celebration of the sensation,” which Steele finds “deeply and troublingly American.”

Both were “poseurs and promoters,” yet also somehow “authentic and original,” writes Jonah Raskin in his 2004 book “American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation.”

“I don’t see them competing with each other. I see them on my bookshelf, gleaming with genius, insight and sex,” says Lewis MacAdams, a Los Angeles author and poet who was friendly with Ginsberg. “I think Allen consciously thought of himself in the tradition of Whitman, but I don’t think he was ever trying to beat Whitman, or be Whitman, for that matter.”

The parallels go only so far. Whitman made his reputation in an era of slow-moving media and did some of his best work near the end of his life. Ginsberg hit it big fast and clung to fame through force of personality while early boosters scorned many of his later poems.

Whitman was nervous enough about being seen as gay that he once claimed (with no evidence) to have fathered six children out of wedlock.

Ginsberg, on the other hand, wrote an ode to his sphincter. He also claimed that one of his lovers, Neal Cassady, had slept with the aged Gavin Arthur (grandson of President Chester Arthur), who had slept with an English author named Edward Carpenter, who had slept with Whitman. Four degrees.

Both poets sneered at academics (though Whitman started as a teacher and Ginsberg became one). And both, as Heyday’s Margolin points out, inspired “reams of rotten poetry” from self-indulgent imitators, along with the occasional treasure. Cultural critic Greil Marcus has suggested that Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” was more influenced by “Howl” than any piece of music.

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Other voices raise a howl

AMERICA, here’s the thing. If you disqualify T.S. Eliot for spending most of his life in London, and you disqualify as insufficiently serious the guy who wrote “Casey at the Bat,” and the guy who wrote “I think that I shall never shall see/ A poem lovely as a tree,” and you exclude Maya Angelou for endorsing her own line of Hallmark greeting cards -- well in that case, America, your Whitman-Ginsberg debate might really be something larger. You may be arguing over which literary outlaw wrote the most influential poem in American history.

In the just-published essay collection “The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ 50 Years Later,” poet Marge Piercy remembers how a Ginsberg reading “reopened the world to me” and inspired her to reach beyond her secretarial job and rededicate herself to writing personal poetry.

In the same book, poet, essayist, professor and radio commentator Andrei Codrescu remembers reading a crudely translated “Howl” in 1963 as a teen in Romania and immediately falling into a Whitman-Ginsberg debate.

What he dared not say aloud in that debate, Codrescu writes, is that “I had become instantly infected by an irresistible appetite for freedom, that I wanted to be epically, infamously bad, that I wanted to test the limits of my mind and the far reaches of liberty, that

Ginsberg died in New York nine years ago this month -- on April 5, 1997, 70 years old. Some of his ashes went to a Buddhist center in Colorado, some to another Buddhist center in Michigan, and some to a family cemetery plot in Newark.

Whitman died at 72 and was buried in Camden, N.J., near his longtime home.

Which means, America, that to some degree it’s pointless to look for distinctions between Ginsberg and Whitman anymore.

They’re together forever, fertilizing New Jersey.

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Contact Christopher Reynolds at calendar.letters@latimes.com.