Happy Birthday |

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born June 3rd, 1926, and died April 5th, 1997.

Today is his 88th birthday.

Ginsberg, along with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, is a preeminent figure in the 1950’s Beat Generation counterculture — i.e. the Beatniks — and if you’ve ever wondered what, precisely, these women and men stood for, it is really just the garden-variety, hippy-dippy, neo-Marxist’s dogma. Indeed, the following and more famous 1960’s hippy movement was a direct outgrowth of the Beats:

They opposed capitalism — or what they called “economic materialism” — sexual repression, military force, and all the other usual suspects.

In 1956, Ginsberg, already semi-famous, was catapulted into the international limelight, when his wildly popular poem “Howl” first appeared.

“Howl” is a long, sprawling, loose, baggy monster, only partly intelligible, in which Ginsberg bemoans, among other things, “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …”

“Howl” is essentially a protracted denunciation of what Allen Ginsberg saw as the “destructive forces of capitalism” in the good old United States of America.

There is also the undeniable theme of non-conformity running throughout his most famous poem, and, for that matter, his entire oeuvre.

But the Ginsberg line I’ve always enjoyed most — and have quoted it here before — isn’t from “Howl” or any of his other poems. It’s from a 1986 interview he gave to the Newark Review. I trust you will find it as edifying as I do:

“We talk about our assholes, and we talk about our cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re going to fuck tomorrow, or when we got drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in Prague — anybody tell one’s friends about that?”

(Listen to him read this excerpt)

Happy Birthday, Irwin Allen Ginsberg, R.I.P.

Richard Purdy Wilbur — American poet and literary translator, second Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1987), two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1957 and again in 1989), New York City native who published his first poem when he was only eight-years-old — was born March 1st, 1921.

He is 93 years young today.

A good argument can be made that he is America’s greatest living poet.

I, for one, have been influenced by several of his poems.

He’s a formal (sometimes neo-formal) poet whose language is modern and almost always intelligible — a relative rarity in that bucal-fecal carnival called modern poetry.

Here’s a poem of his I first read many years ago, one that’s remained among my all-time favorites — a lesser-known poem, to be sure, every line of which rhymes — about a toad upon whom a freak accident falls. What’s always moved me most about this poem is the dignity that Richard Wilbur gives to his little guy:

Death of a Toad

A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
Low, and a final glade.

The rare original heartsblood goes,
Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
As still as if he would return to stone,
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward some deep monotone,

Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia’s emperies.
Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone
In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
To watch, across the castrate lawn,
The haggard daylight steer.

Happy Birthday, Richard Wilbur.

Tag: Happy Birthday

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