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From Walter Kirn's essay on Allen Ginsberg in Sunday's NY Times Book Review this passage stands out:
He could say anything by then, and did, and the fact that he said it made it poetry.
Or made it something. It hardly matters what now. Oracular spontaneity is rare these days, and heartfelt, inspired sloppiness underrated. The poets are pros now, like the software coders, and they function smoothly as nodes in the great network.
IOW in contrast to Ginsberg's sloppiest work the polished often predictable verse of many contemporary poets has descended to the pedestrian level and finite utility of computer code. Our job as poets is not to create work that will perform an immediate temporary task but to articulate insights, thoughts and feelings that can touch not only our peers but generations to come.
To his credit Ginsberg lent his celebrity to urgent political causes, but in spreading himself too thin his poetry became, to put it kindly, uneven. But as Kirn puts it more generously continuing the section I quoted above:
Ginsberg was always a bug in the machine, though, and the chaos he caused rang alarms that brought repairmen. He made a racket, and, for stretches, a grand one, with subtler modulations than some appreciate and wittier undertones than they remember. I and many others can hear it still, even above the noise of the explosions.
He could say anything by then, and did, and the fact that he said it made it poetry.
Or made it something. It hardly matters what now. Oracular spontaneity is rare these days, and heartfelt, inspired sloppiness underrated. The poets are pros now, like the software coders, and they function smoothly as nodes in the great network.
IOW in contrast to Ginsberg's sloppiest work the polished often predictable verse of many contemporary poets has descended to the pedestrian level and finite utility of computer code. Our job as poets is not to create work that will perform an immediate temporary task but to articulate insights, thoughts and feelings that can touch not only our peers but generations to come.
To his credit Ginsberg lent his celebrity to urgent political causes, but in spreading himself too thin his poetry became, to put it kindly, uneven. But as Kirn puts it more generously continuing the section I quoted above:
Ginsberg was always a bug in the machine, though, and the chaos he caused rang alarms that brought repairmen. He made a racket, and, for stretches, a grand one, with subtler modulations than some appreciate and wittier undertones than they remember. I and many others can hear it still, even above the noise of the explosions.
