A Posturing Individualist

By Joseph Kellard

"Society needs angry noisemakers like [Allen] Ginsberg," USA Today (4/97) wrote about the recently deceased poet. "They ensure that art and culture remain vital, that a lively margin surrounds the solid middle."

Ginsberg once commented in regard to composing his poetry, "All you have to do is think of anything that comes into your head,...don't bother about sentences." (4/6/97 New York Times) Through his unconventional works, with which he intended to shock and outrage others, Ginsberg postured as an individualist. A conformist adopts the standards of others as his own without validating them objectively against reality's facts. Artists of the Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock, e.e. cummings, Igor Stravinsky-ilk are non-conformists; however, they are just as social-oriented, in that their standards are based on the standards of othersÑthe opposite of whatever others uphold as poetic, beautiful, melodic, logical. Individualism is absent when other peoples' standards, not reality and reason, are ones primary guide.

By upholding pain, suffering, despair and depravity as worthy of artistic prominence in his ungrammatical, often torturous, drug-influenced poems, Ginsberg essentially intended to destroy reason and consciousness for destruction's sake; to make impotent man's ability to understand reality. "Of course I learned I'm an idiot," he once said, "a complete idiot who wasn't as prophetic as I thought I was."



Play Ground Politics

By Joel Scott _____________________________________ _____________________________________

A Posturing Individualist

By Joseph Kellard

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The Right To Be Wrong

By Joseph Kellard

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special:

An Interview With Dr. Michael Hurd

By Joseph Kellard

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