Well, not me.
But everyone else, presumably.
True or not, poet Sam Sax raises an interesting point in his poem "Everyone Has an Uncle Who Has Slept with Allen Ginsberg" wherein he talks about building a legacy for oneself out of the minor (sexual) intersections of someone else's celebrity.
But what this poem does in part, for me, is that it asks us to speculate at the most and suspend a polite disinterest at the least with regard to the poet's personal life. While it is not on any of us to pass judgement as to his sexual proclivities, there are troubling details about Ginsberg as a person that sometimes interfere with my reading of his works. He was an alleged rapist and pedophile, as well as a member of NAMBLA, which are facts that complicate (for me) divorcing him from his creative output. I guess the question that I am attempting to pose is whether we can or should separate the writer from his works. Is there any place for examining his writings bearing in mind his wrong-doings?
MK & Holly -
ReplyDeleteI had never come across this material before - I knew Ginsberg was somewhat of a sexual miscreant, but I didn't know of his affiliation with NAMBLA, etc. That said, and I by no means want to sweepingly put these aspects aside, I think Holly gave a quite cogent response to the question your post points to - whether or not the artist's personal life should be considered context to an artistic work. According to Spivak, an "ethical reading" requires a close, "unimaginative" reading of the work before us, and nothing else. This means abandoning our accumulated cultural capital and personal convictions and absorbing what's before us without any preconceptions - about the piece, and especially about the artist. Of course in literary studies, especially with artists like Kerouac and Ginsberg whose work is largely autobiographical, it can be hard to make clean delineations between an artist and his or her work, especially when many of the Beats, and those in their wake, believe(d) that the greatest poem of all was one's life.
- T