I’m so lucky to be nutty.
—Allen Ginsberg, “Bop Lyrics” (1949)
The very first poem in Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947-1980[1] seems, in a way, to prophesy Ginsberg’s entire career. It is titled “In Society,” and it dates from 1947, when the poet was twenty-one years old. The poem records a dream: Ginsberg is at a high-society cocktail party, is more or less ignored, and is told by a woman, “I don’t like you.” He screams at her:
. . . “What!”
in outrage. “Why you shit-faced fool!”
This got everybody’s attention.
“Why you narcissistic bitch! How
can you decide when you don’t even
know me,” I continued in a violent
and messianic voice, inspired at last,
dominating the whole room.
Could Ginsberg have known, at that tender age, that he would spend much of his adult life dominating rooms in this manic, “messianic” manner—indeed, that his attention-getting tactics at poetry readings, political conventions, sit-ins, be-ins, protest marches, and Yippie Life Festivals would be a crucial catalyst in his rise to fame? Even Richard Howard, who in his no-nonsense survey of contemporary American poetry, Alone with America, begins forty of forty-one essays with a businesslike disquisition upon the poetic career at hand (“In 1960, Howard Moss selected an appropriate showing of poems from his first three volumes . . .”), makes an exception in the case of Allen Ginsberg. The long opening paragraph of Howard’s essay on Ginsberg is devoted not to
