NIGHT AT COLUMBIA
229
already reported how Ginsberg dealt with the philosophy question.
There remains, of the question period, only to report his views on
verse forms.
•
I don't remember how the question was put to Ginsberg
but I'm sure it was put neutrally: no one was inclined to embarrass
the guests - which led him into a discussion of prosody; perhaps it
was the question about what Ginsberg as a poet had learned at Col–
umbia; but anyway, here, at last, Ginsberg had a real classroom sub–
ject: he could be a teacher who wed outrageousness to authority in
the time-honored way of the young and lively, no-pedant-he per–
former of the classroom, and suddenly Ginsberg heard himself an-
nouncing that no one at Columbia knew anything about prosody; the
English department was stuck in the nineteenth century, sensible of
no meter other than the old iambic pentameter, whereas the thing
about him and
his
friends was their concern with a poetic line which
moved in the rhythm of ordinary speech; they were poetic innovators,
carrying things forward the logical next step from William Carlos
Williams. And now all at once the thing about Ginsberg and his
friends was not their social protest and existentialism, their whackiness
and beat-upness: suddenly it had become their energy of poetic im–
pulse that earned them their right to be heard in the university, their
studious devotion to their art: Ginsberg was seeing to that. Orlovsky
had made his contribution to the evening; he had read his two whacky
uproarious poems, the entire canon of his work, and had won his ac–
claim. Corso had similarly given his best, and been approved. The
question period, the period of instruction, belonged to Ginsberg alone,
and his friends might be slightly puzzled by the turn the evening had
taken, the decorousness of which they suddenly found themselves a
part - Corso, for instance, began to look like a chastened small boy
who was still determined, though his heart was no longer in it, to bully
his way through against all these damned grown-ups - but they had
no choice except to permit their companion his deviation into high-
mindedness. (Rightist opportunism?) Thus did one measure, finally,
the full tug of something close to respectability in Ginsberg's life, by
this division in the ranks; and thus, too, was the soundness of Dupee's
reminder, that there is always something to learn from hea,ring a poet
read his poems aloud, borne in on one. For the fact was that Gins–
berg, reading
his
verse, had naturally given it the iambic beat: after
