Ginsberg, Kerouac, and all that Jazz.

While looking through the Scriptorium links the other day, I came across an interesting article on the links page- a review of Fred Kaplan’s history of 1959 in City Journal. The review is interesting enough, but the following paragraph jumped out at me:

“Nor is it clear that the cultural revolutionaries always succeeded, even on their own terms, never mind the bad theory and bad social consequences. Beat writers like Ginsberg saw themselves applying to literature the techniques of the bebop jazzmen. But it’s unlikely that “Howl” is as worthy of our admiration as are the compositions of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. Is the difference merely a matter of mass appeal? Or does it reflect something in the nature of the forms themselves? An arrangement of notes can convey a feeling or a mood; an arrangement of words must convey a meaning as well. How can dissonance, while often exciting in the former, fail to be merely jarring and unpleasant in the latter?”

The connection between the beat writers and Jazz has always interested me- inasmuch as I enjoy Kerouac and Ginsberg, I cannot bring myself to believe that the beat poets quite understood Jazz. I’m sure they listened to the music and were far more familiar with it than I could ever hope to be, but I feel they missed something essential about Jazz- the beauty and goodness of it, to be blunt. The reckless improvisation that is freedom to Miles Davis is despair to Ginsberg. All throughout Howl, the images of Jazz and of Harlem read like some popular reimagining of the Inferno- suffering, torment, emptiness, the absence of God.

 

The madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,

yet putting down here what might be left to say

in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in

the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the

suffering of America's naked mind for love into

an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone

cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

 

You can see it in this passage- people say that Coltrane’s saxophone cry would speak to God- but according to Ginsberg, all it says is “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Still, I think it is fair to say that Kerouac got his attempt a little better- I think his improvisation works much better than Ginsberg’s precisely because it is prose, not poetry: Kerouac is always forced to keep his wandering in check and come back to the narrative. However disjointed he is, and however frustrating and wearisome this eventually becomes, he comes a little closer to success than Ginsberg. In all my wrestling with free verse, I have come to believe that most free verse poets are often better suited to narrative prose than to poetry. The best free verse poets are focused enough to keep their poetry unified, and of course, should keep on writing poetry. But I think a good many mediocre free-verse poets could make good novelists, if they could make the switch.

 

What were we talking about? Oh, yeah: Jazz!

 

In the end, the beat poets fail to capture the style of Jazz in writing. Read Howl (which is an amazing poem, just amazingly evil) and then listen to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis for an hour.  The beat poets cannot compare. They wear Jazz’s “ghostly clothes”, while Coltrane and the rest are clothed in its robes of splendor.