Commentary
In January 1956, the iconoclastic leftist American poet Allen Ginsberg wrote “America,” a prose poem that laments the state of the country and the poet’s place in it. “America” was included in the short poetry collection entitled “Howl,” published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Publishers in November of the same year. In 1957, “Howl” became a cause célèbre as the centerpiece of People of the State of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an obscenity trial that would launch Ginsberg’s career and catapult the Beat literary movement into the national consciousness.
In the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge that I was an apprentice to Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1982, at the age of twenty-one. I still find some of Ginsberg’s criticisms to be worthwhile, but I have since completely rejected his leftism, especially his equation of “capitalism” with U.S. imperialism, his disdain for “consumerism,” and his promotion of sexual profligacy and leftist countercultural values that undermine the social order, the family, and the free market. His criticism of Cold War military policy was right, despite his sloppy association of all these issues under his largely drug-induced poetic license….