1968 - Mark Kurlansky [78]
If a songwriter is a poet, stronger candidates were available in 1968 than McKuen. Bob Dylan had made his position clear by choosing the stage name Dylan. There was a distant relation between his richly worded lyricism and that of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The Doors named their group from a line of William Blake’s poetry: “the doors of perception.” In Life magazine, Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, was called “a very good actor and a very good poet,” in fact “an amplified poet in black leather pants.” It did not matter that the words at times would not have conveyed the point without the embellishment of Morrison’s shrill screams. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, whose ballads featured lyrics full of metaphor and imagery, were to many fans poets. But the songwriter of the pair, Paul Simon, dismissed the idea. “I’ve tried poetry, but it has nothing to do with my songs. . . . But the lyrics of pop songs are so banal that if you show a spark of intelligence, they call you a poet. And if you say you’re not a poet, then people think you’re putting yourself down. But the people who call you a poet are people who never read poetry. Like poetry was something defined by Bob Dylan. They never read, say, Wallace Stevens. That’s poetry.”
On the other hand, few doubted that Ginsberg was a poet and no one that Ezra Pound was one, the octogenarian artifact of the birth of twentieth-century poetry, now sitting out his days in Italy. Despite Pound’s fascism and anti-Semitism, he and his politically conservative protégé T. S. Eliot remained on the cultural list of the 1968 generation. Even without studying poetry, the lineage was clear. If there had been no Pound, there would have been no Eliot and there would have been no Dylan Thomas, no Lawrence Ferlinghetti, no Allen Ginsberg. Or they would have written very differently.
Ginsberg acknowledged his debt to Pound, so the Jewish poet or, as he liked to say, Jewish Buddhist poet wanted to visit Pound. When he did in 1967 in Venice, he did not recite his own poetry. Instead, after dinner he rolled marijuana in cigarette paper and, without comment, smoked it. Then he played records for the elderly poet—the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and “Eleanor Rigby,” Bob Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” and “Gates of Eden,” and Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.” Pound smiled as he listened, seemed particularly to enjoy certain lines, tapped his ivory-handled cane to the music, but never said a word. Ginsberg was later assured by the elderly poet’s longtime partner, Olga Rudge, that if he had not appreciated the offering, he would have walked out of the room.
Just who was and wasn’t a poet was becoming an issue.
Politics had much to do with tastes in poetry. Russian poets, especially if they were politically outspoken, were garnering huge followings among college students in the West. Yevgeny Yevtushenko was having a big year in 1968, both in political controversy at home and in artistic recognition abroad. Born in 1933, he belonged to a new school of Russian lyric poetry. Critics frequently suggested that others from the new school, such as Boris Pasternak’s protégé Andrey Voznesensky, also born in 1933, were better poets. But in the 1960s Yevtushenko was the most famous working Russian poet in the world. In 1962 he published four poems highly critical of the Soviet Union, including “Babi Yar,” about a massacre of Jews unsuccessfully covered up by the Soviets.
In 1965, when Ginsberg was in Russia, in between being thrown out of Cuba and being thrown out of Czechoslovakia, he met with his famous Russian colleague. Yevtushenko told Ginsberg that he had heard many scandalous things about him but did not believe them. Ginsberg assured