Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish": a Definitive Mid-Twentieth Century Poem
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University of Central Florida STARS Digital Repository: Showcase of Undergraduate Showcase of Undergraduate Research Research Excellence Excellence 2020 Jan 1st, 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish": A Definitive Mid-Twentieth Century Poem. Teddy Duncan [email protected] Part of the American Literature Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/sure University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Event is brought to you for free and open access by the Office of Undergraduate Research at STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Digital Repository: Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Duncan, Teddy, "Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish": A Definitive Mid-Twentieth Century Poem." (2020). Digital Repository: Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence. 9. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/sure/2020/posters/9 Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish": A Definitive American Mid-Twentieth-Century Poem. Teddy Duncan Jr. Faculty Mentor: Dr. William Fogarty University of Central Florida Introduction: Allen Ginsberg is one of the most well-known poets of the twentieth century. The poem he is famous for is “Howl.” However, it is Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” published five years after “Howl,” that represents his highest literary achievement. “Kaddish” is the culmination of a poetics that defines the FACET #1: American aesthetic sensibility after modernism: its candor regarding familial events rejects modernism’s impersonality; its social commentary refuses to FACET #4 divide the personal and the political; its adaption of the rhythm of the Jewish Ginsberg’s poem appropriates the rhythm and line-length of the traditional formal burial prayer underlays modern experience with religious tones, and Judea mourning prayer ‘Kaddish Yatom’. He substitutes and alters the In “Kaddish” Ginsberg utilizes his own experiences, and his mothers, to insert political its conceptions of death and afterlife derive from Eastern rather than Western language to depict the particularities of both his mother's life and his commentary in the text. For himself, he discusses homosexuality in a candid and honest spiritual ideas. I intend to illustrate, with accompanying textual references own. Yaavok Ariel notes this in her article where she succinctly manner, and he employs this discussion of his own homosexuality in order to resist and and pertinent images, these four components and to show visually how they states: “Ginsberg’s Kaddish follows the rhythm, but does not repeat the disrupt hetero-normativity. Ginsberg explicitly does this when he states “first love—a operate in the poem. Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” is the definitive American mid- words of the traditional prayer” (Yaakov Ariel 6). This occurs most crush--/Later a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of century poem: brutally confessional, unabashedly political, and profoundly explicitly in the “Hymmnn” section of the poem, where the line-length is cock, Grand canyons of asshole” (16). He even discloses the pressure of hetero- spiritual. almost identical and the word “blessed” is repeated, rendering his normativity when he says “weight on my melancholy head” (16). (“Weight” being the mother’s life, and his own, sacred and holy. mortal avalanche of homosexuality). In the case of his mother, Noami Ginsberg, the incessant apparition of Hitler in her neurotic visions is another example of the transcendence of the personal, subjective position to a political or wider social position. As Scott Herring states: “’Kaddish’ becomes not just an elegy for a single woman but for all the dead of the Holocaust” (536). Noami sees Hitler “in her sink” (25) and claims that he “want[s] to shut [her] up” (26). Noami’s haunting of Hitler and Nazism is representative of the haunting that plagued all Jews post-world war two. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries FACET #2 FACET #3 “Kaddish” is candid when discussing familial events, with the narrative cataloguing his mother’s neurotic tendencies and the impact that those tendencies have on his family. This can be seen throughout the poem-narrative, such as when he describes her nervous breakdowns that induces Throughout the poem, Ginsberg relies on eastern spiritual ideas rather than western ones. He asserts “customers [to] vomit their cokes” (18). Or when he describes her in an unpleasant manner: “ragged in various parts of the poem that reality is an illusory experience, such as the line: “nothing to weep long lips between her legs—what even, smell of asshole?” (24). Ginsberg even installs his own for but the Beings in the Dream, trapped in its disappearance, sighing, screaming with it, buying and emotional state and subjectivity into the mourning-text. The poetry critic Helen Vendler states that selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other” (7). This conception of the worldly, corporeal "'Kaddish' will always remain a son's poem, a poem which we uneciate in the position of a reality as an illusory “dream” aligns with the Hindu notion of “maya” (illusion-reality). Ginsberg also mourning child" (9).This starts on the first page: “Dreaming back through life. Your time— undermines the western theological notion of mono-theism in the poem, for instance he says that and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse” (7) or throughout when he describes his own emotional “death let Noami out” and now she is “done with her century, done with God” (9). Rendering God a anguish: “lay my head back in the last seat, depressed—the worst to come?—abandoning her, rode worldly notion, something that is left in the illusion-life-reality after death. in torpor—I was only 12” (15). This makes this a comprehensive narrative of his mother’s life, and WORKS CITED: the effect that her life had on others, rather than just praising and eulogizing his mother. This Ariel, Yaakov. “From a Jewish Communist to a Jewish Buddhist: Allen Ginsberg as a Forerunner of a New effectively makes his poem deviate from the traditional elegy conventions. American Jew.” Religions, vol. 10, no. 2, Feb. 2019, pp. 1– 17. EBSCOhost Ginsberg, Allen. Kaddish and other poems: 1958-1960. San Francisco. CA: City lights books, 1961. Herring, Scott. “‘Her Brothers Dead in Riverside or Russia’: ‘Kaddish’ and the Holocaust.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 42, no. 3, Fall 2001, pp. 535–556. EBSCOhost Vendler, Helen Hennessy. Soul Says: Recent Poetry. Belknap Press, 1995. EBSCOhost.