"Strange Prophecies Anew: Rethinking the Politics of Matter and Spirit in Ginsberg's 'Kaddish'"
by Tony Trigilio

Review copyright March 2000, Mary Sands

Strange prophecies anew! She wrote--"The key is in the window,
the key is in the sunlight at the window--I have the key--Get mar-
ried Allen don't take drugs--the key is in the bars, in the sunlight
in the window..." (Kaddish, 224)

"Strange Prophecies Anew" is an academic read that might be boffed at by those who don't care for in-depth study. Yet, if there's any poet whose writing deserves such a careful, thoughtful analysis, that would be Allen Ginsberg. April 5th is the third anniversary of his death. During his 70 years of life he traversed a large slice of American culture: from a beat generation poet, whose Howl was confiscated after City Lights first published it, to Ken Kesey's acid tests, to political protests, to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets at the Naropa Institute, to the London underground, to punk rock, to guru-ing around; he did it all--but most of all, he really did poetry and is considered by many America's best.

Kaddish was published in 1960 and is a clear memoir of Ginsberg's youthful observations and adult recollections of his mother Naomi's psychotic episodes and death. A Kaddish is also a Jewish prayer that sometimes is offered by the only son, honoring the deceased. So, it's no surprise that Trigilio's article studies the prophetical nature of Kaddish. It's also a prayer poem that marks a paradigm shift in the poet's Blake-ish doom and apocalyptic writing to an enlightened style with more visionary language.

Trigilio's article contrasts Howl and Kaddish in order to get to the heart of the matter. One difference, the author notes, is that in Howl, "[the duality] is indeed organized around a separation, but the split is more particular than that between matter and spirit. Howl represses signs of women in order to forge male prophetic comradeship within the poem's pilgrimage; in Kaddish, by contrast, Ginsberg constructs maternity as a source of vision, an influence that precedes and sustains the prophetic language. In Kaddish, Ginsberg attempts to recover the voice of his mother Naomi, which is muted in Howl." This duality also is superimposed over traditional prayer and conventional poetry that Ginsberg revises into a more mystical language and tone, "incantatory," even.

The beginning of "Strange Prophecies Anew" discusses studies of Howl, Kaddish, and other Ginsberg poetry, noting Marjorie Perloff's essay "A Lion in Our Living Room: Reading Allen Ginsberg in the Eighties" and Michael Schumacher's Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg. Trigilio also cites James Breslin, Ekbert Faas, Paul Portugés, and Gary Snyder's thoughts in order to put his study into context. After this, the reader is led into the symbolic nature of Naomi (as noted above), pointing out her muted, ancillary-voice figure in Howl and her pure resurrectional keyness in Kaddish. And then, there's a summary of Kaddish itself, beginning with the somewhat beautiful pastoral, sunlit walk through Manhattan, which is an urban prophecy of apocalypse, to the end of the "proem" section with its revision of the Aramaic Kaddish for the dead. Mortimer J. Cohen denounced Kaddish for being an "illegitimate use of Jewish tradition," and thus follows a discussion of the monovocal liturgy and yet otherwise biblical verse within Kaddish.

In the next section, "Kaddish: Corridors of History," Trigilio hashes out Ginsberg's methodology and approach to Western prophetic poetry, which turns out to be a unique and nontraditional strategy that revises, not parallels, the lineage of Western prophecy. In Kaddish, for example, are lines that address God (traditional Orthodox prayer) and twists of Buddhist nirvana and reference, which produce a sort of artistic representative or interpretative--or at least visionary--waylay. Also in this part of the article is a bit of history about the origins of the poem itself; Ginsberg desired to have the Kaddish at his mother's graveside, and since that was denied, he wanted to write his own--all the while, deeming himself authoritive enough, yet not in any conventional manner. Too, the article points out the socio-economic context, including the "worldwide antipsychriatic movement" of the time, and how Ginsberg dealt with this with regards also to his vs. their thoughts about Moloch and Oedipus, communism, and homosexuality.

The final section, "Kaddish: Backroom Metaphysics" continues on the analysis of Naomi's condition and how it relates to the "territorialization of Oedipus," as termed by Deleuze and Guattari. Naomi's lack of self and purpose is finally reconciled with her vision of God's singularity, with which she can find absolute company. "This fear emerges in Naomi's attempted seduction of Ginsberg, a scene that enacts his own oedipalization, the truck with Moloch described in Howl," states the article, and then retells the symbolic cooking dinner and revulsion--too, the "stink of the language of territorialism." Also are a few pages of Breslin's take (muchly Freudian) and Trigilio's discussion of such views, relating to the two incestual passages of Kaddish. These are followed by a conversational, sunnier verse play within Kaddish, which has Naomi talking about the key--which Trigilio explains: "The 'key' response to the lock of monovocality is a prophetic language dependent on both ambivalence and the ironic containment of ambivalence. Endless revision is the 'key. . . in the window.'" This section concludes with a reflective look at Kaddish, noting "from trust in the authorizing power of naming in Howl to the continual revision of Kaddish may be seen as inaugurating a parallel movement in his career as a poet." Also discussed are later works such as "Angkor Wat," The Fall of America, and Mind Breaths, and what came later. With regards to Kaddish's unique revisionary tactic, the phrases "Caw" and "Lord" appear often in Kaddish admendments, the suffusion of which, Trigilio states, is with "shunyata, the annihilation of fixed designation." ("Shunyata" is a concept from Ginsberg's Buddhist study/practice.)

This article is related to an upcoming book by Trigilio, titled Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg, whose publication in scheduled for fall, 2000, by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. The book looks at Blake's Milton, H.D.'s Trilogy, and Ginsberg's Kaddish as it revives questions of religious and political authority in poetic prophecy. Traditional approaches to poetic prophecy do not explain fully those poet-prophets, such as Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg, who doubt or deny that the prophetic texts of the Bible represent unified, semantically coherent, authoritative visions. Close readings of these poems and their contexts in Strange Prophecies Anew enliven critical understanding of the scope of Blake's influence on the twentieth century, the depth of H.D.'s feminist synthesis of religion and history, and the deftness of Ginsberg's engagement with his cultural moment. Rather than accept easy boundaries separating literature, literary theory, and cultural studies, this book operates from the premise that the most productive questions for poets and readers emerge from an interdependent dynamic among these three.