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Reissue! Repackage! Repackage!
Reevaluate the songs,
Double-pack with a photograph,
Extra track, and a tacky badge.
—Morrissey
One benefit of a "collected poems" is that it allows us to read a poet's work in context of his or her larger vision. A collected can reveal strengths, poems that haven't received much attention, and it can reveal weaknesses. A collected, like a box set with B-sides, can prompt a sudden, sad realization: I don't like everything this poet has done; in fact, it seems that what I do like is something of an anomaly. A collected might well lead to the disposal of individual works, either because they have been made redundant, or because they are no longer cherished. A collected has a way of shaking the tree.
The physical presence of a collected can be intimidating or even discouraging. The Collected Poems of Charles Olsen, a handsome volume published a few years ago by the University of California Press, defies even the average attaché case—and that volume doesn't include Olsen's massive Maximus Poems. Tempted to slip a collected into your backpack, you need to remember that the unusual weight of the thing often leads to ripping of the dust cover. Indeed, some collecteds are like cinder blocks wrapped carefully in Kleenex. This changes the reading experience from one of possible momentary pleasure to one of carefully planned engagement.
For publishers, a collected represents a new way to market an author, an opportunity to schedule readings and lectures, and possibly to cultivate a new readership. A collected can be a good way to cash in on a legacy. It's easy to become a bit jaded about this whole "collected" business—for a business it is. Of course, Bibles are big business too.
Of the four new collecteds and two selecteds under review in this essay, Allen Ginsberg's is the heftiest and at $39.95 the most expensive, despite the fact that he often denounced consumerism. In "America" he asks, "When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?" Not yet, rings the answer fifty years later. "America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe," he announces, and it's hard not to wince at the irony, especially in light of Ginsberg's sale of his papers to Stanford for around a million dollars just a few years before his death. Columbia, his alma mater, had been outbid.
But it's unfair to hold Ginsberg to the impossible standard of pure communism he himself espoused. He was, as he says, "a famous sissy … and the American public's sissy too." We've all made concessions to capitalism. Perhaps Ginsberg earned the right to late-life mercenary indulgence by writing so eloquently about America's besetting materialism during the Fifties and Sixties. One virtue of this book is that it includes the classics "Howl," "Supermarket in California," and "Kaddish."
It may also be unfair to hold Ginsberg to his own reputation as a Great American Poet, heir to Whitman, cultural revolutionary—standards Ginsberg himself would have likely resisted. Ginsberg's primary concern, or so it would seem perusing this volume, is sex. And he often wanders unnervingly close to NAMBLA territory. "I needed a young musician take off his pants sit down on the bed sing me the blues," begins one poem; another, in its entirety, reads, "How lucky we are to have windows! / Glass is transparent! / I saw that boy in red bathingsuit / walk down the street." More often the poems are "graphic," as the euphemism has it. Check out "The Guest" on your own.
Ginsberg's poetics are toned and muscular. The lines of these poems sparkle with verbal juxtaposition, wild shifts in tone, and rapid movement through a montage of visual images. Sometimes Ginsberg's language is as slippery as Gerard Manley Hopkins': "Green horned little / British chickweed, / waxlight-leafed black / seed stalk's / lilac sweet budcluster / Ah fluted morning / glory bud / oped / & tickled to yellow / tubed stamen root / by a six legged / armed mite / deeping his head / into sweet pollen / crotches." More sexually charged than Hopkins, granted, but just as verbally remarkable.
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