Absence of the Hero by Charles Bukowski, Edited with an introduction by David Calonne Page B

coffeehouses, this flumping spread of hair that is Allen Ginsberg. He’d be holy if we’d let him, but it all falls through about halfway and everybody is confused. Yet he’s better to have around than not to have around. If I throw little mudballs at him it is because I can’t be bothered with that cat in the Jewish Delicatessen. Allen is some kind of blessed pickle down in a fat jar full of hair and yellow seeds. You’d want to buy it but you’d end up buying something else.
    â€œA Meaningless Institution,” a kind of Kafka-dream 1948 vintage is a fair piece of work. I feel it. Especially the ending where A.G. has to wander down empty corridors “in search of a toilet.” If you can’t find that toilet, man, all the poetry in the world isn’t worth a damn.
    In “Society, Dream 1947,” the poem is lighted with force and humor, genius, here is some of the stuff, the style, the bombast and flow that raised Ginsberg out of the muck. I mean this is the forerunner of things to come, Howl , the whole Howl ruckus that made Ginsberg, and the genius that allowed Ginsberg to continue making it even after he lost a part of it.
    And in “Hymn,” we have the biblical fire of poetic prayer done very well. When Ginsberg is at the top of his game you might as well put down your toys and listen. It would be only the most unkind and jealous fink who would put a man down for his later showmanship when he could write as well as this early. Why must we scratch each other to pieces? The real enemy is elsewhere.
    â€œThe Archetype Poem” which begins
    Joe Blow has decided
    he will no longer
    be a fairy.
    is a tragic-humorous drawing of the unworking and switched-off sex machinery. Sex is really funny as hell. We are all caught up with the damn thing and hardly know what to do. And I mean funny like slowly roasting to death might be funny—if you could watch yourself.
    The book ends on “The Shrouded Stranger,” which really doesn’t work. Although there are some good lines that nobody but Ginsberg could have written:
    â€œHis broken heart’s a bag of shit.”
    Ginsberg is one of the few poets trying to destroy himself with unpoetic acts yet he still has not destroyed himself. Let us say grace to his huge tank of reserve. Eliot has said it easier, Pound with more Art, Jeffers with more knowledge of forces, Auden with more precision, Blake louder, Rimbaud more subtle; William Carlos Williams had a better left jab, Dylan Thomas bigger screaming feet, this with this, that with that, but I think that Ginsberg belongs somewhere, early or late, and that without his coming through, none of us would be writing as well as we are doing now, which is not well enough, but we hang on in, watch old Allen, stare at his photos, and are still a little afraid of America, of him, of the workings of wax and sun and hangovers, we go to bed alone, finally, all of us.
    A Test of Poetry —Louis Zukofsky, $2.50, Corinth Books, c/o Eighth Street Bookshop, 17 W. 8th Street, New York 11, N.Y.
    Ah, Zukofsky, the magic name, the big name, talking about poetry! Maybe while working at the railroad yards or maybe even while fighting Sammy Zsweink behind the gym after high-school hours we heard of Zukofsky, something that might some day help us with people like Sammy or the railroad yard foreman who watched us scrub the sides of boxcars and streamliners. Damn you foreman, I’ve got Pound, I’ve got Zukofsky, I’ve got Poetry Chicago . Yeah, and thin tires on my car and flat tires. I think Sammy won the fight and Pound didn’t care. I’ve stopped reading Poetry Chicago . Now we have a test of poetry.
    The test of poetry, Zukofsky tells me, is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection. This is its purpose as art.
    Further on, L.Z. tells us, “I believe that desirable teaching assumes intelligence that is free to be attracted from any