When Ginsberg first published this poem and when it had
its first readings, it caused quite a stir and led to one of several "obscenity" trials
that later were used to help define the difference between art and obscenity. Many of
the beat poets and writers faced banning and even litigation over the potentially
obscene nature of their art. This poem, in particular, contains a number of examples of
imagery that could be considered obscene.
Speaking of the
"best minds" of his generation:
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine
in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after
night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and
cock and endless balls
He
goes on to refer to them as individual:
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let
themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with
joy,
But what perhaps
bothered conservatives the most was that he linked sex to
religion:
who blew and were blown by those
human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the
grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who
may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob
behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
Ginsberg's
own open homosexuality was already a source of concern - in fact, when he was finally
able to access his FBI and CIA files under the freedom of information act, he was
shocked and amused to find that his sexual orientation was considered dangerous to
America! Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the critics would take issue with
mention of homosexual sex and angels in the same passage (more so reference to
homosexual angels!)
But Ginsberg did not just refer to
homosexual sex. He brought the heterpsexuals into the picture just as
vividly:
who
sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in
the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks
under barns and naked in the
lake
A look at the poem in
depth reveals a number of passages that can be viewd as obscene, but can also be viewed
through the critical lens of a raw response to government repression, the situation that
was life in the fifties and a brilliant prelude to the ant-war generation that followed.
Ginsberg's career spanned all the way to the 1980s and included a wealth of protest
writing (including a song on the Clash's album Combat Rock and a guide for how to make a
peaceful march/spectacle, and the famous Pentagon Exorcism (No taxation without
representation).
He was raw, outspoken, and by some
accounts this could be seen as obscenity, but the end result was that the obscenity
charges against him in the 1950s were dropped, and sales of the poem excelled. So, in
the end, freedom of speech was protected, but the question of what is or is not obscene
remains and can only be defined by the subjective eye of the
reader!
References (non
electronic)
Miles, B. (1989) Ginsberg: A Biography. New
York: Simon and Schuster
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