Amiri Baraka versus Allen Ginsberg Politics and Poetry

The Politics of Twentieth Century Poetry:
Amiri Baraka versus Allen Ginsberg
The poetry of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Allen Ginsberg are example of how serious literary works can be used as a vehicle of social change. Both poets wrote during tumultuous times in American history. Ginsberg is primarily associated with the Beat movement of American poetry, in which poets used sprawling, freeform verse to criticize American capitalism and American values. Baraka is associated with the American Civil Rights movement, particularly with its most radical branches, which emphasized an eviscerating critique of racial relations in a society which claimed to support equality. Both poets made frequent use of literary allusions and derived new and innovative structures for their poems, rather than relied upon past conventions. But Ginsberg was more apt to favor more ironic and satiric tones in his poetry, versus Baraka’s frequently foul-mouthed, angry takedowns of white privilege from a heterosexual, male perspective.
In his 1969 poem entitled “Babylon Revisited,” Baraka deliberately invokes the image of the Whore of Babylon, a Biblical allusion, and fuses that image with an image of the United States. The title is also derived from the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited.” Baraka envisions a bestial creature slinking from Europe to America, a “gaunt thing/with no organs” (Baraka 1-2). America is envisioned as bankrupt of all morals, a place which creates an environment where African-American men will inevitably sink into poverty and drug addiction. Babylon, called the “great witch of euro-american legend” is said to have “sucked the life/from some unknown nigger/whose name will be known/ but whose substance will not ever” (Baraka 14-17) In other words, the intelligence and self-possession of black men are taken away from them by the American Babylon monster, leaving the dead man, “in a pile of dopeskin” (Baraka 19). The social mobility of America is mocked, rather all America does, Baraka suggests, is destroy America’s black youth.
Baraka’s poetry is also explicitly sexualized in his condemnation of the treatment of black men in America. American Babylon, after all, is explicitly envisioned as a woman, not as a man, and Baraka’s concerns are primarily about the emasculation and dispossession of men. “This bitch killed a friend of mine named Bob Thompson /a black painter, a giant, once, she reduced/to a pitiful imitation faggot,” writes Baraka (Baraka 20-23). Baraka’s harsh use of slurs for both gays and African-Americans are used to drive his point home. His stress upon naming also seems particularly pointed, given that Baraka renamed himself with an African rather than a slave name, like many black Muslims, and the poem itself is a renaming of America as Babylon, rather than a place that is the home of the free.
Baraka’s male sexuality is also referred to in his violent image of America, who is said to be so diseased (presumably with venereal disease) that she has sores on her insides but cannot give birth, and numerous plays upon the word “pus” and “pussy.” These refer to disease and to the female organ that is said to have destroyed black manhood and taken away their vital essence, like Baraka’s friend Thompson, who must, “…feel this shit, bitches, feel it, now laugh your/hysterectic laughs” (Baraka 30-31). Baraka does not discuss black women and how they stand in relationship to the so-called whore that is America.
The openly gay Ginsberg, in contrast, celebrates his connection with previous poets like Walt Whitman who were openly gay and defied conventional constructs of masculinity. In one of his most famous poems, “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg uses the banal location of a commercialized, sterile supermarket to imagine the poet who had such an earthy and promising view of America a hundred years ago. “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman,” writes Ginsberg, suggesting that Whitman could hardly believe what he was seeing as he wandered the aisles (Ginsberg 1). Whitman strolls among the sea of bounty in the supermarket, gazing at its different wares, rhapsodizing about America in the same way he did in his own poetry during the nineteenth century, but, in Ginsberg’s fashion, in a far more ironic way that ultimately emerges as more of a critique of American society than a celebration.
Ginsberg paints a vivid picture of the supermarket using poetry, much as Whitman might have done, establishing his continuity as a poet of America in the tradition of Whitman and much as Baraka sought to affirm his status as a kind of a Biblical prophet in the midst of Babylon. “What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! (Whitman 6-9). The references to husbands suggests Whitman’s desire for men and his wandering eye, even while creating a surreal image of human beings almost literally melding with the gaudy vegetables.
As well as an invocation of Whitman, there is clearly a critique of American excess in regards to the food Ginsberg sees in his hunger. Ginsberg the poet suggests that he and Whitman are hungering for something more, something that is simultaneously sexual and spiritual, while the other, conventional suburban shoppers are confused that such hungers are merely connected to physical hungers. Rather than using direct, confrontational language like Baraka, the images have greater beauty and humor in Whitman’s poem and are more subtle and open to multiple interpretations. Although his words may be ironic, Ginsberg still acknowledges the beauty of the bounteous vegetables.
Ginsberg, in contrast to Baraka’s aggressive affirmation of masculinity, also constantly references Whitman’s sexuality and other gay poets. “..and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” (Ginsberg 9). For Ginsberg, questioning American values is not expressed in racial terms in the poem, but rather in questioning conventional masculinity, which is something that Baraka, for all of his anger against America, does not really do throughout his work. “I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, / poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. / I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork/chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?” (12-14). Whitman’s attitude shows that he does not subscribe to the conventional behaviors of how a man should behave in a grocery store. Baraka, despite being critical of America, does not fundamentally criticize American masculinity.
Whitman’s questions are ordinary ones, but his eye upon the grocery boys suggests that he is proud of his sexuality and himself. His words also send up American obsession with putting a price on things, as Whitman asks the grocery boys if they are his angels, even while he is also asking about the price of bananas. The violence in his language when he asks who killed the pork chops suggests that the poet is underlining the violence which does exist in the everyday, but in a much more subtle and humorous way than Baraka.
However, it is important to remember that not all of Baraka’s poems were profane and Baraka, like Ginsberg was also capable of using more subtle images, including the common poetic image of the wanderer, to communicate the loss and alienation he felt as a black man in American society. In his 1959 poem, “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” the poet Baraka is seen wandering the streets. “Lately, I've become accustomed to the way/ The ground opens up and envelopes me/Each time I go out to walk the dog” (Baraka 1-3). The title of the poem itself is ironic, of course, suggesting the multiplicity of reasons that an individual might kill himself, lasting twenty volumes. The poem begins cautiously, even casually, with the conventional image of someone walking a dog, but who is so depressed he feels the ground is about to swallow him up. He has, the speaker says, the same feeling when, “...broad edged silly music the wind/ Makes when I run for a bus...” (Baraka 4-5). This poem suggests that once someone is in a state of despair, it is very difficult to find comfort anywhere else, although in this instance, unlike “Babylon Revisited,” Baraka lends a quiet beauty to the ways in which the individual perceives life through a depressed gaze.
The poet in Baraka’s suicidal note even despairs how he counts the same number of stars each and every single night, metaphorically suggesting that he is striving to find some hope in a hopeless world but the world remains unchanging. Race is not specifically referenced in the poem, although the reader’s knowledge of the material which preoccupied much of Baraka’s other work helps offer an additional context for why the author feels that moving forward is so difficult, although he lists numerous reasons to be depressed. The poem ends with a hopeful note, however, as the poet looks into the future generation and sees the sight of his daughter at prayer. “Talking to someone, and when I opened/The door, there was no one there...” (Baraka 14-15). Although rather than a prayer to God, the poet can only see this as speech while the girl is “Only she on her knees, peeking into/Her own clasped hands” (Baraka 16-17). The final image suggests that the poet has lost his faith in God to work miracles, even though he is moved by the image of his daughter, a child who symbolizes hope for the future. While she is praying all he can see is a figure of a young girl on her knees, looking and speaking to clasped hands, a material rather than a spiritual image of prayer. Yet she has hope, although the poet does not.
Allen Ginsberg’s 1980 poem, “Homework,” also highlights the poet’s spiritual crisis, although in the context of this particular poem, in a very political fashion. But unlike Baraka’s rage, it once again is characterized by Ginsberg’s signature satiric irony. The despair, instead of the visceral depression of Baraka’s suicidal note, is cloaked in funny metaphors. “If I were doing my Laundry I’d wash my dirty Iran/I’d throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle,” the poet Ginsberg writes (Ginsberg 1-2). The poet suggests that America’s crimes can easily be washed clean in the laundry, with soap. Once again, similar to how he critiques American commercialism in his supermarket poem, Ginsberg uses banal images (like the laundry soap so frequently sold on American television) to suggest he’d like to wash American crimes against other countries away.
“Homework,” like Baraka’s “Babylon Revisited” does have a more explicitly racial subtext, given that Ginsberg is referring to crimes largely against nonwhite nations. But unlike Baraka who invokes the crimes of whites against blacks, Ginsberg frames his critique of America in a more nationalistic context, versus an internal struggle of blacks versus whites. He also does not personalize his critique (just like he did not explicitly refer to himself as a gay man, as he says he will, “Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state, / & put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean,” not as an American but as a human being (Ginsberg 10-11).
It is perhaps this contrast in the ways in which the poet narrator is depicted that is the most distinctive contrast between Baraka and Ginsberg. While Baraka is always a presence in his poems, regardless of whether they are highly politicized in their language or only subtly so, Ginsberg rarely refers to himself as an actual participant, only an observer. Baraka as a poet, a black man living in a racist America, sees himself as unable to detach himself from the events, emotions, and lives he describes. Ginsberg is always detached and never refers to himself or his friends, only to other poets, other people (the nameless American shoppers to which he has no connection), and to America itself. And this helps to explain the greater emotional intensity in Baraka’s poems, versus Ginsberg the satirist.




Works Cited
Baraka, Amiri. “Babylon Revisited.” Poetry Foundation. 1959. Web. 24 Mar 2018.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42559/babylon-revisited
Baraka, Amiri. “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.” Online Poems. 1969. Web. 24 Mar
2018. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/baraka/onlinepoems.htm
Ginsberg, Allen. “Homework.” Poets.org. 1980. Web. 24 Mar 2018.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49311/homework-56d22b44cb0bd
Ginsberg, Allen. “A Supermarket in California.” Poets.org. 1957. Web. 24 Mar 2018.
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/supermarket-california


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