Poet as Con-Artist: LIBIDO OVER CREDO

”They sat down and Corso asked K., ”Would you like to ball with me, baby?” There was no surer way to K. ‘s heart. She declined with a small secretive, pleased smile and at once exerted herself to be charming. … Ginsberg fixed me with a sad stare and demanded to know my views on God, man and poetry. When I was slow to answer, he told me his in a rapid, hypnotized voice, at great length, and then fell into a deep silence, head bent … Corso meanwhile  described his experience of communicating with God as he watched a corpse being fished out of the Seine.” ( Dom Moraes, My Son’s Father )

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg

The personality of artistic failure is usually thought to be a combination of social rebel and aesthetic revolutionary, at least in the European tradition. The extrinsic realtion of the poem to the culture that framed it is key to the beats work; the conjunction of poems and poetry books being culture specific and manifesting an actual social presence. Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso did not encapsualte the culture and history that produced it, but became part of an immense national text. Their books did not manifest wholly that immensity but evoked it metonymically.

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Maretta Greer at Opening of Timothy Leary's Mediation Center, Hudson Street, February 15, 1967

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Maretta Greer at Opening of Timothy Leary's Mediation Center, Hudson Street, February 15, 1967

” America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination by trees or a search for roots. This is evident even in the literature; in the quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy. Nevertheless, everything important that is happening or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, bands and gangs, successful lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside. …And directions in America are different; the search for adolescence and the return to the old world occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic west with its Indians without ancestry, its ever receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers… America reversed the directions; It put its orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that came full circle; its West is the edge of the East. ( Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari )

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Boulder, Colorado probably 1974.

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Boulder, Colorado probably 1974.


The Beats, followed the decisive and pioneering  work of  Walt Whitman in ”Leave of Grass”, in terms of establishing the ”poetics of presence”; where recognition is equated with assertions of presence. This robust, self assertive enterprise is a form of hucksterism in itself, from a long established tradition beginning with the early Yankee peddlers, confidence men and the America as land of reinvention and shedding of old identities.The art of exploiting the pious liberalism of the new world. Like Walt Whitman, the beats made their writing marketable objects, and created a ”buzz” a notoriety to ensure subscription to their work. Works like ”Howl” and ”On the Road” were not merely published, but rather floated and projected into the public consciousness  as part of a larger social movement, but the idea of the ruse and con still was present. In this sense they pre-figured Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller.

Corso et Ginsberg

Corso et Ginsberg

”Burroughs, a tall, angular man, rolled up his trousers and showed K. the network of needle marks that covered his legs….Larry Rivers had a young American woman with him, and they leapt at her, suggesting that we all strip and make love on the pavement. ‘Like William Blake and the angels man,’ cried Corso. The girl became upset and burst into tears, and the poets were much concerned, petting her with repentant hands and offering her poems and candy that Corso pulled from his pockets.” ( Dom Moraes )

Whitman’s tastelesss rowdiness and commercialism was counter to the European conception of ”poetic” in the T.S. Eliot sense where the individual consciousness of the poet could disappear back into the vast spaces of mystic tradition, only to reemerge like Moses with the ten commandments. It is the distinction between the metaphysical and the physical. But also, the reflection of an absence of belonging and the sense of the nomadic, migrating individual ,shifting identities on a changing frontier versus the idea of ”belonging” in respect to an attachment to the soil irrigated by blood and anchored by mythical roots and history. Being over belonging; a devotion to making work a continuing process of a self being fulfilled through expression, however only as good as the last mark left on the page which guarantees a certain self contradiction and self multiplication as byproduct of perpetual reinvention.


%3Den%26sa%3DG%26um%3D1">Michael McClure, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, 1965, photo Dale Smith

Michael McClure, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, 1965, photo Dale Smith

”This curious mixture of innocence combined with a sharp eye for the main chance was attractive. …Edith Sitwell…Allen however, was unimpressed. He told her he was editing an anthology of verse illustrated with photographs of poets in the nude and asked her if she would like to contribute. Fortunately Dame Edith took this well and declined in the most courteous way. She also rejected an offer of marijuana from Gregory…. And they were both poets; neither could have been anything else. Their methods were far from mine; they believed in verbal extravagance and visions.” ( Don Moraes )

The style is oddly structured and on many levels, much like that first done by Herman Melville in ”The Confidence Man” where series of fragments allude to structures of arrangement that can never be realized though there is a desire for ultimate shape. The Beats design is oriented towards the manifestation of unconscious or sensual pleasure, think The Naked Lunch, where the aesthetic, political or philosophical meanings are secondary and are left to assume their own destiny through interpretation. Like Whitman, the beats poetry is more a matter of libido than credo, with the poetry carrying an erotic charge out into the culture at large. The poet serves as go-between in the clandestine and illicit intercourse between poet and reader.

Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg

Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg

” I had forgotten to advise Allen and Gregory that New College was a stronghold of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. When Gregory began to read a poem about the aesthetic pleasures of a nuclear explosion, his hosts were outraged. …the New College poetry society … took off their shoes and threw them at the poets. …Allen and Gregory packed up their poems and left. They were tight lipped and silent, like children who had been chastised for the first time.” ( Don Moraes )

One can look at the work of Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg et al. as on one part, romantic keepsakes of another era, or as a form of prosthetic sexual devices. A marriage of book and reader where the latter becomes the dominant partner. Books that are polymorphously erotic to the extent that they assume a variety of submissive and dominant roles towards the reader through it. The beat poetry has an appearance of being a deterministic structure , and yet its real energy lies in the speculation, intuitions and expectancies that it provokes from the reader. The best works invoke cultures precedence over nature, thus representing a loss of innocence, or the necessary collapse of the illusion of innocence. However, given the potential for reactionary backlash, it also indicates that the precedence of culture is precarious and temporary. Book burnings and incarcerations as a condition of frozen swamps thawing unexpectedly.

Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg

Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg

Thus the artifice and the guile is a form of survival instinct in itself. In Richard Hauck’s ”A Cheerful Nihilism” , Camus’s treatment of the absurd is seen not just as a mode of deception, but as social necessity which holds the world together. The strain of ambivalent humor running through American literature with confidence men as ”absurd creators” who create themselves and their confidence negatively against a realization of the world’s meaninglessness. The Beats were no different than the appearance of other confidence men throughout American literature. As songwriter Paul Simon noted in a lyric, ”every generation throws a hero up the pop charts”.

Gary Lindberg in ”The Confidence Man in American Literature” treats American social activity as a confidence game and a necessity to create ”covert cultural heroes”. These narrators ”lack authority” so that the telling of the story dramatizes a central problem of ”developing a relation between principle and experience”. Lindberg’s theme emphasizes the creative force of the confidence man, whose identity is a series of roles which force those whom he encounters to create and recreate their own social roles.

”Con artists are familiar figures in American literature, though they are usually directed through culture’s back door. Their calling card was written by a 19th century popular comic character named Simon Suggs: “It is good to be shifty in a new country.” Gary Lindberg’s elaborate study The Confidence Man in American Literature, uses Suggs and his cronies as models to examine the national character. The task requires the assistance of that old critical handyman, ambivalence.It is not news that public condemnation of the con man is mixed with private admiration for his sting. More than 50 years ago, V.L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought noted that the sharpster appealed to the hidden desires of an otherwise hardworking, pious people. Lindberg considers the ambivalent attitude to be not hypocrisy but rather a theoretical expression of American genius. A con man may impoverish widows and orphans, but he cannot do so without first creating confidence. And confidence, says the author, who is a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, is what America is all about….But his new readings of old books demonstrate how ingeniously some of our best writers juggled the subject of high ideals and low practices. It is an act that requires more than grace under pressure. In Lindberg’s felicitous and confident phrase, it takes “poise in ambivalence.” ( R.Z. Sheppard, Time. com )

Most of the beat poets work lacks an underlying norm by which technically, the reviewer could test the integrity of what is presented to us. There is a consciousness of the absurdity and contingency of the world as the ultimate aim. Perhaps a form of uncomfortable ethical nihilism.

” Corso had immense charm, the charm of a wicked schoolboy, which he used very consciously. Ginsberg was very serious and given to long silences; though some of his statements seemed absurd, they were absurd in a consistent rather beautiful way. He told me for instance, that in his poem Howl he had invented a new kind of prosody, undreamed of before, and that he had a vision of William Blake in his apartment in Harlem. I inquired what Blake had worn to the interview. ‘Oh like a toga man,” Ginsberg said… ( Dom Moraes )

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