THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Friday, March 1, 1985 Lew Silver SAVE 30-60% aosona ATM rid Ma, ON NEW AND OUT-OF-PAWN 19 work I like a lot and teach a lot," says Ginsberg. His wife was Marie Syrkin, a professor of English at Brandeis Uni- versity and the editor of Jewish Frontier. The lines quoted (above) are fromFather Death Blues, which I wrote in imitation of Reznikoffs poem Kaddish on the Death of his Mother." Was Reznikoffs Kaddish an influence on Ginsberg's Kad- dish? Ginsberg says no, he didn't know ReznikofFs work at that time. "I knew a few of his poems," he says. "I knew of him through William Carlos Williams." (Dr. Williams, himself half-Jewish, wrote the introduction to Howl.) Ginsberg points out that "there are a lot of Jewish ele- ments in my poetry, like Kad- dish itself, which is based upon the rhythms of the Kad- dish. I don't know if anybody noticed it, but the basic rhythm that runs through the whole text, the pulsation of rhythm, is very similar to the one thing I do quote in Hebrew eYisborach, v'yistabach, v'yispoar, v'yisroman, v'yisnaseh, v'yishadoi-, v'yishallel, v'yishallol, sh'meh d'kudsho, b'rich hu.' — that whole line. And if you look through the poem you realize that's the basic pulsa- tion of the whole poem, that it evolves rather like davening. "The other element is that a lot of my verse is modeled on the verse of an English poet, Christopher Smart, of the 18th Century, who was sort, of a religious fanatic and was a brilliant translator of the Psalms. He did a lot of Biblical work and because of his deeper rhythms wrote a poem called Rejoice in the Lamb in what \ was basically the rhythm of the Psalms adapted into English. You can see it in the somewhat Biblical rhythms of Walt Whitman also. But Christopher Smart was my model with Rejoice. That's the model for the line of Howl." Ginsberg takes great care to make his point: "Not Whit- man, but Smart. And via Smart, the rhythms of the Old Testament, the Hebrew poeti- cal rhythms which did not in- volve rhyme and meter like English. Thus, the major influence on my work, before Whitman, was the Old Testa- ment — for rhythms, structures and forms, via L Smart and the Bible. "Most. people don't go further back than Whitman. DIAMONDS & JEWELR Lew Sliver "V' Diamond Broker 9 Mile Road at Greenfield Across from the Advance Building Confidential Loans On Jewelry 559-5323 CALL NOW! ONE WEEK ONLY! NO DOWN filyMENT Ginsberg discusses his poetry and philosophy with Plymouth Canton High School students. I've been sort of talking about it for years, but nobody picks up on it. Scholars are not scholarly. They've got these fixed ideas about Kenneth Fearing, Kenneth Patchen, Robinson Jeffers, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman, and they don't go further back. It always ends with Whitman. "I like Whitman. He's a big influence. But I read through Whitman after I wrote Howl. I read through Smart before I wrote Howl. "Look at my Bop Lyrics written in 1949: 'Smart went crazy, Smart went crazy.' "That's Christopher Smart." But how did Ginsberg get an early exposure to Jewish influence if his parents were atheists and agnostics? "Be- cause they were also radicals," he replies. "They had books by Lion Feuchtwanger and Lud- wig Lewisohn. Books like Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch. Jewish intellectual stuff. My father's favorite poet was Heinrich Heine. "They were all somewhat interested in I3er Borochov's Marxist Zionism and the plans for resettlement by the Jews in Bessarabia. My mother came to America from Russia in 1905 to escape the pogroms. She came from Vitebsk, the same town that Chagall painted. She settled on Or- chard and Rivington streets. Her family had a small candy store on the corner and they made ice cream in the back room. I live just a block away from there. "Then my family moved to Newark. I had a great mat- riarchal grandmother, Bubba, who sort of ran the whole fam- ily. I am still close to my fam- ily today. I had a lot of aunts and uncles. One of my uncles is a well known psychologist in Beverly Hills. He knew the whole European group who came over after the 1930s: Isherwood, Huxley, Stravinsky. I stay with him now whenever I go to Santa Monica." But if anything makes Ginsberg angry, it is the thought of American Jewish conservatives. He believes "that element in American Judaism — Commentary, Podhoretz, Wattenberg, all those conservatives — have a very bad influence on rich world Jewry. In a sense they fulfill the prophecy of the anti-Semites on the Jewish cabal, the Elders of Zion and all that. "As I noted in the Birdbrain poem: Birdbrain manufactured guns in the Holy Land and sold them to white goyim in South Africa Birdbrain supplied helicopters to Central American generals .. . "— That's Israel." But Ginsberg saves his biggest salvos for Podhoretz. "Among the Jewish conserva- tives, one of the leading neo- conservatives is Norman Podhoretz. He got his first energy kicks and public re- nown attacking Kerouac in an article in Partisan Review in the late 1950s. The article was called "The Know-Nothing Bogeymans," in which he ac- cused Kerouac of being un- learned and living under no discipline. "The remarkable thing is that it (the article) shows the same authoritarian heavy judgmental militaristic ten- dencies of fighting for peace as he exhibits now that he's gone Continued on next page ZERO DOWN Free Service Loaners LEASING ALL MAKES & MODELS or Acro s s From Tel-12 Mall SECURITY DEPOSIT 355-1000 JOE BURGDORF Lease Manager With Approved Credit John Newmyer Builder Inc. 363-9663 THE PELLA SUNROOM DOORWALLS • FRENCH DOORS • SKYLIGHTS SUNROOMS • WINDOWS • • • • FREE ESTIMATES INSURED ALL WORK GUARANTEED FINANCING AVAILABLE AUTHORIZED REPLACEMENT CONTRACTOR 19