Poetry in America
Hymmnn and Hum Bom! by Allen Ginsberg
4/5/2018 | 25m 27sVideo has Closed Captions
Explore Ginsberg's poetry with Bono, US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and others.
Read two of Ginsberg’s most emotionally transporting poems, the “Hymmnn” from Kaddish, and the anti-war chant “Hum Bom!” with rock star Bono, former United States Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and a chorus of clergy and religious practitioners. Hosted by Elisa New.
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Major support provided by the Dalio Foundation. Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, Nancy Zimmerman, Deborah Hayes-Stone, and Max Stone. Distributed nationally by American Public Television.
Poetry in America
Hymmnn and Hum Bom! by Allen Ginsberg
4/5/2018 | 25m 27sVideo has Closed Captions
Read two of Ginsberg’s most emotionally transporting poems, the “Hymmnn” from Kaddish, and the anti-war chant “Hum Bom!” with rock star Bono, former United States Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and a chorus of clergy and religious practitioners. Hosted by Elisa New.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Hymmnn.
In the world which He has created according to His will, blessed, praised, magnified, lauded, exalted, the name of the holy one, blessed is He.
In the house in Newark blessed is He!
In the madhouse blessed is He!
In the house of Death blessed is He!
(overlapping chanting in various languages) BONO: In the house in Newark blessed is He!
In the madhouse blessed is He!
In the house of Death blessed is He!
Blessed be He in homosexuality!
Blessed be He in paranoia!
♪ Blessed be He in the city ♪ ♪ Blessed be He in the book ♪ ♪ Blessed be He who dwells in the shadow ♪ Blessed be He!
Blessed be He!
Blessed be you Naomi in tears!
Blessed be you Naomi in fears!
Blessed blessed blessed in sickness!
Blessed be you Naomi in hospitals!
MAN: ♪ ...v'yit'aleh v'yit'halal sh'mei d'kud'sha ♪ ♪ B'rikh hu.
♪ (chanting): ♪ The people united ♪ ♪ Will never be defeated ♪ ♪ The people united ♪ ♪ Will never be defeated ♪ ♪ The people united will never be defeated!
♪ Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
You bomb!
(crowd continues chanting) (crowd cheering and applauding) ♪ ♪ NEW: What is a poem?
We may think that poems are primarily made of words we read on a page.
A poem, we imagine, is a statement of meaning we decode with our intellects.
(Ginsberg reciting) NEW: But Allen Ginsberg embraced a different vision of the poem.
Inspired by the visionary and mystic William Blake, and by ancient religious traditions, Ginsberg chanted poems that howled and hummed, and sometimes bounced off the walls.
- And beds of lead O density!
BONO: Actually, to get a feel for Ginsberg, for people who are just reading, it's worth listening to him.
Here is this giant of American poetry.
Oratory was considered by Milton... BONO: Who could be so professorial... - ...vehicles of poetry or major modes of poetry.
And so childish.
♪ If you are an old fraud like me ♪ ♪ Or a llama who lives in eternity ♪ BONO: And whose grief is as black as grief can be, but then as yellow and as Day-Glo, and all the other colors.
GINSBERG: ♪ When the stars threw down their spears ♪ BONO: I love the joy of Allen Ginsberg.
And I am attracted to his prayerfulness.
He talked to me as a person who, who believes in the metaphysical side of performance and words and writing.
He was, like, "Oh, you know, the caesura.
You know, it's very important."
He said-- you know, he knew I was embarrassed in my earlier life to have had some religious experiences, and I rarely would talk about it.
He said, "But all poets have this."
♪ Dare frame thy fearful symmetry ♪ (organ stops) NEW: To better understand the spiritual qualities that so moved the young Bono, I gathered some practitioners from the faith traditions Ginsberg drew on: Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
And I also spoke to former poet laureate of the United States Juan Felipe Herrera, who experienced Ginsberg's charisma in the 1970s.
HERRERA: And then, when he began to read, he was a colossus, he was amazing, he was big, his voice was... just covered everyone and went beyond everyone.
GINSBERG: And the gray sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye.
(drum beating, bell tinkling) NEW: This poem titled not hymn, H-Y-M-N.
It's H-Y-M-M-N-N. HERRERA: Yes.
- Why?
It's like an om, it's like a sacred om.
Kind of in touch with all things.
The sound of the universe.
BONO: "Hymmnn" is very serious.
He makes it immediately playful, musical.
Hymmnn.... ♪ Hymmnn ♪ He's opening with not a hymn, this is not a noun to him.
He's trying to, if you will, make it dynamic.
And the way to make it dynamic is by-- ♪ Hymmnn.
♪ So you're already getting into a musical kind of feeling.
HERRERA: Hymmnn.
It is also something you're chewing on.
It's something you're-- you know, you're not, it's just not all the way out yet, also.
I mean M-M-N-N, it's almost like an ellipsis.
It doesn't end.
- And it starts to break down because we have the "M" with two waves.
It goes up, it comes down, it goes up, it comes down.
It's two waves.
And the "N" is one wave.
So we lost one wave.
So you're saying there's a kind of graphic representation of a loss.
There's a loss right there.
♪ ♪ NEW: Ginsberg's "Hymmnn" is a short section of "Kaddish," a lengthy autobiographical poem chronicling the poet's painful coming of age in a Jewish immigrant family.
In "Kaddish," Ginsberg grapples with the trauma of his mother's descent into madness, and with his own struggles to claim his sexual identity.
CLAUDIA KREIMAN: The actual prayer of the Kaddish is all about God and exalting God's presence, and there's no mention of death.
WALDOKS: Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba.
Everyone who is in mourning will say the Kaddish.
GINSBERG: I was with Kerouac and Philip Whalen and Peter Orlovsky in San Francisco in '56.
And we went to the synagogue to do a Kaddish, which I didn't know how to do, but we found that we didn't have a minyan, we didn't have enough-- what is a minyan, nine?
MAN: Ten.
GINSBERG: Ten.
We didn't have a minyan, and I didn't know anything about it, anyway.
So we never did get to do it properly at the right time, and so this was a way of making up for that.
♪ ♪ Blessed be thee Naomi in Death.
Blessed be Death!
Blessed be Death!
Blessed be He who leads all sorrow to Heaven!
WALDOKS: In the Jewish mystical tradition, "blessed" has two meanings.
The word comes from the word "knee."
(patting) So when you say, "Blessed are you," it means, "I bow before you."
"I humble myself before the vastness of the universe."
And a second underlying meaning is the word b'reikhah, which means "pool."
I immerse myself in this.
BIJOY MISRA: What you see in Allen's poem that his emotion is so strong, you are dipped in it, fully immersed.
And when you're immersed in it, then I use the word exuberance.
Where every part of your body explores.
You say, "Yes, yes, yes, do bless, do bless, do bless, do bless, do bless."
♪ ♪ Anaphoric, is that what you call it?
NEW: Anaphora, yes.
It's anaphora when there's patterning at the beginning of the line.
BONO: Does it imply in the Greek sense of the carrying up, in the way that metaphoric is the carrying across?
NEW: Yes, it is.
- I think so.
And, and-- and so that's beautiful, that... Again, this transcendental idea.
It's some kind of hypnosis, but it's music to me.
FRANK RYAN: The depth of the rhythm, the depth of almost literally some level of connection with the heartbeat.
You know, it's much more of a visceral experience.
GINSBERG: The meter, or measure, or cadence of the poem comes from the Kaddish itself.
Yit'barakh v'yish'tabach v'yit'pa'ar v'yit'romam v'yit'nasei v'yit'hadar v'yit'aleh v'yit'halal sh'mei d'kud'sha b'rikh hu.
That cadence-- da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum-- that was hypnotic and exquisite, I found.
KREIMAN: A lot of people think that prayer needs to be understood word-by-word.
Probably you have the same thing about poetry, people think that they need to understand word-by-word.
But it's not about understanding word-by-word, it's about sinking in and experiencing deeply, and it's the sound, the repetition.
It is not question of, like, are these words... are a set of words that he creates, a set of words that occurs to him at that particular time, that particular expression.
He could do a million other words.
♪ ♪ BONO: You know, the beat.
NEW: Yes.
BONO: It's Beat poetry.
What does that mean to you, Beat poetry?
I think it means rhythm, you know, it's, it's rhythm.
You can hear a ride cymbal.
(imitating tapping) (rainfall trickling) That sort of hailstorm, hailstone language that he had, where it's pelting you.
HERRERA: So all these phrases are like the sacred vibrations, and oracles, and givings, and offerings-- it's a prayer ritual.
♪ ♪ BONO: Worship.
That's a scary word.
But worship is at the heart of a lot of music.
♪ ♪ WALDOKS: What I find fascinating about this poem is the fact that he's able to encapsulate, blessing exists in everything.
That's a very interesting Jewish concept.
♪ Nam myoho renge kyo ♪ ♪ Nam myoho renge kyo ♪ ♪ Nam myoho... ♪ GINSBERG: Blessed be He who leads all sorrow to Heaven!
Blessed be He in the end!
Blessed be He who builds Heaven in darkness!
LILLIAN TSU-ERH I: "Blessed be He who builds Heaven in darkness."
That phrase actually is very Buddhist because we actually believe as Nechung Buddhists that hell and heaven actually exist within human life.
♪ ♪ ♪ Nam myoho renge kyo ♪ ♪ Nam myoho... ♪ BONO: This Buddhist idea of, all is valuable-- the heavenly, the earthly, the sacred, the profane, the expletives, the gold, and indeed the alchemy.
GINSBERG: In the madhouse blessed is He!
In the house of death blessed is He!
Blessed be He in homosexuality!
Blessed be He in paranoia!
There's nothing off-limits.
I can't think of many poets where you really feel they can write about a tear, or a drip off the end of their nose, or the most savage sexual act-- there's nothing off-limits.
GINSBERG: Blessed be you Naomi in hospitals!
Blessed be you Naomi in solitude!
Blest be your triumph!
Blest be your bars!
And the meaning is not the meaning of the fact that this is either good or bad.
But the meaning that everything has within it the capacity to do what it has to do at the right time and the right place.
So even death.
(man chanting) BONO: The Irish, there's a lot of melancholy where we came from as writers, I think.
Keening is actually the Gaelic term for grieving.
Keening is the sound, the wail.
GINSBERG: Blessed be He who dwells in the shadow!
Blessed be He!
Blessed be He!
KREIMAN: ♪ Blessed be you Naomi in tears ♪ ♪ Blessed be you Naomi in fears ♪ ♪ Blessed Blessed Blessed in sickness ♪ GINSBERG: Blessed be you Naomi in hospitals!
Blessed be you Naomi in solitude!
♪ Blest be your triumph ♪ ♪ Blest be your bars ♪ ♪ Blest be your last years' loneliness.
♪ This is so sad.
♪ ♪ GINSBERG: In a sense, what I'm doing is regaining my emotions.
Regaining my emotions, but also as artist, regaining emotions for others.
So that other people, recognizing in the mirror of art their own hidden world of emotion, can have that available to them.
I saw my mother in this poem, in Naomi.
How she suffered, how I was born, and-- through caesarean-- and how she had to be split open, and how she had these giant scars, and how she had to leave the hospital because we're farmworkers.
And you know, how she wasn't healed yet but she had to get back on the earth, and she had to get back to crouching down, and pulling stuff, and crouching down, and pulling stuff.
And I always felt that pain.
So when I read this, I felt the poem.
Through the poem, I go back to my mother, to her small body, and to her voice.
BONO: Not having a real relationship with my own mother-- she died when I was 14-- I...
I think I've understood how the absence of that relationship has helped form me as a writer.
The painful separation of the child from the mother and the longing of the child for the mother, this is an epic subject, it's a great subject, and it's a great subject for poets.
♪ ♪ GINSBERG: The art seemed to be kind of the saving grace in terms of trying to relieve my own and others' suffering by raising the dead.
The dead here being not my mother, but the emotions involved, which are not dead, but are only buried under the defense against being torn apart by feeling.
KREIMAN: You cannot say the Kaddish if you don't have a minyan.
You have to be with others.
It's not an individual experience.
This is a communal experience where you stand, only the mourners stand and say this out loud, and the others witness that.
WALDOKS: Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba.
B'rikh hu, the crowd responds, blessed be He.
B'al'ma di v'ra khir'utei v'yam'likh mal'khutei.
When he was saying this, he was saying this to us.
And he was saying, "I've just experienced this."
GINSBERG: Yit'barakh v'yish'tabach v'yit'pa'ar... WALDOKS: It's horrible, and yet it's blessed.
It's the way life is.
It's what the totality of humanity is about.
Come comfort me.
And share your pain and suffering, which you've had, and perhaps by sharing it, we can dissipate it a little bit for all of us.
TSU-ERH I: One Buddhist concept that we talk about is changing poison into medicine when we approach a very difficult or sad situation as an opportunity to become more courageous or more compassionate.
HERRERA: He's finding the point of the wounds, the points that need to be called on, and in calling those points-- the thigh, the cheek, Naomi-- he's pulling out the thorns.
- Oh... HERRERA: He's pulling out the thorns.
- And soothing.
And soothing.
Yes.
NEW: You're going to try a tiny bit?
- Give it a shot.
NEW: Oh, good, please.
- It's just funny.
Because it'll be like a tongue twister.
Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
(laughing) (laughing) Okay, here we go.
(laughing) Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
NEW: Ginsberg wrote "Hum Bom" in 1971, during America's war in Vietnam and as a protest against the looming danger of nuclear annihilation.
GINSBERG: I think America has been addicted to power, and I think the problem has been wanting to be number one.
And wanting to be number one means they gotta push everybody off the top of the mountain.
Wanting to be king of the hill means you always gotta be fighting, all the time.
(cheers and applause) MAN: He is the king of the... RYAN: The very first time I met Allen Ginsberg was in 1968, during the Democratic convention.
And I was quite struck by both his warmth and his fearlessness at the time, because we were just about to be under the gun of the Chicago police force.
- (chanting, playing cymbals) Shortly after that, there was complete chaos.
(shouting, horns honking, screaming) ♪ ♪ GINSBERG: Daniel Ellsberg and myself, and the poet Peter Orlovsky and the poetess Anne Waldman, and a group called the Rocky Flats Truth Force had been for several years doing sitting meditation on the railroad tracks of Rocky Flats plutonium bomb trigger nuclear facility.
Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
BONO: His performance of "Hum Bom" is very rock-and-roll.
He's like a full band there.
He's bass, drums, and guitar.
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
HERRERA: "Hum Bom."
NEW: "Hum Bom."
Here we go again with the title, it's like the one in "Kaddish."
NEW: It's just like "Hymmnn," "Hum Bom."
- "Hum Bom."
And the title is "Hum Bom," but the first word is "whom."
- "Whom bomb."
And there's "om" in there.
NEW: Yes!
- "Om" sneaks in there.
Yeah.
There's om, whom, oom, hum, bomb, om.
- Who wanted a bomb?
Somebody musta wanted a bomb!
Who wanted a bomb?
Somebody musta wanted a bomb!
Who wanted a bomb?
Somebody musta wanted a bomb!
NEW: All the first musical stanzas of this are buck-passing-- "I didn't do it.
"Who did it?
He did it.
We didn't want to do it.
They did it."
- That's right, that's right, uh-huh.
Who wants a bomb?
We don't wanna bomb!
Who wants a bomb?
We don't wanna bomb!
Who wants a bomb?
We don't wanna bomb!
It's pantomime in so many ways.
You know, it's like carny barker.
Who wants a bomb?
We don't wanna We don't wanna We don't wanna bomb!
And then it's Jeremiah.
Armageddon did the job.
Gog and Magog.
Gog and Magog.
Armageddon did the job.
Gog and Magog.
Gog and Magog.
Gog and Magog... NEW: As in "Hymmnn," Ginsberg finds inspiration by reaching back to ancient texts.
BONO: He's Gog and Magog, bogeyman.
- It's the biblical bogeyman, right?
- Yeah, biblical bogeyman.
Gog Magog Gog Magog Gog Magog Gog Magog Gog Magog Gog Magog Gog Magog Gog Magog Gog Magog Gog Magog These are dangerous words, Gog and Magog.
These are the armies of Armageddon.
This is Revelation stalking us.
But the way you read it, it detonated, right?
The Gs.
- Whew!
The stanzas, they're little troops.
He's got them all lined up.
NEW: They are!
HERRERA: They're not those long lines of "Howl," or those long lines of "Kaddish."
NEW: That is the greatest.
There's little troops, little bomblets.
And magoglets.
The "Gs" and the "Ms" and the "Os."
These monsters in the shape of bombs.
These bomb-shaped monsters.
- That's right, that's what Gog and Magog are.
And they're an army of bomb-shaped monsters.
It's an amazing accomplishment, that we can go this big, this poem goes this big and this far and this deep into the Bible, and forward into our time.
Ginsberg says Gog and Magog.
HERRERA: And then Ginsberg comes into being and says... Ginsberg says Gog and Magog.
Armageddon did the job.
HERRERA: He's kind of stating this: this is what it is.
Armageddon did the job!
(applause) You know, this is it, this is how bad this is.
Because you just don't say, "Gog and Magog," and walk away.
- Lightly.
And because Ginsberg says it, we are saying it.
And because he has called on Gog and Magog, we are calling on Gog and Magog.
And now what are we going to do?
MAN: Missile away!
NEW: In 1991, during the first Gulf War against Iraq, Ginsberg added new stanzas to the poem.
GINSBERG: Saddam said he hadda bomb!
Bush said he better bomb!
Saddam said he hadda bomb!
Bush said he better bomb!
Saddam said he hadda bomb!
Bush said he better bomb!
Saddam said he hadda bomb!
Bush said he better bomb!
NEW: This version of it is different from the first one that he wrote and performed during the Vietnam War.
All that stuff, it's just, it's amazing that it seems still prescient, does it not?
But it also raises the question of the words of a poem.
We kind of often think that a poem is a stable thing.
And this... BONO: Oh, that's a wonderful idea.
That it's ever-changing.
Adaptable.
- Yes.
- To circumstance and situation.
That's lovely.
To say, "I didn't write a poem, I wrote a, a, a mechanism for something."
- A little machine, a little spiritual... - A little working, a little machine that works.
- A little widget, yes.
- Widget, good.
- Well, and that's what... - That's great!
NEW: That's what a performance is.
- He'd love the word widget.
♪ ♪ NEW: I think of Ginsberg's poems as touching down in books, finding a resting place, a sojourning place, but not necessarily belonging to or confined by books.
HERRERA: That's right, this is a midpoint.
Once you look at them, it's already in motion.
BONO: Ginsberg was developing this sort of unified field theory of poetry, where literally everything in the cosmos was going to be drawn into the poem.
Nothing was to be laughed at because it was already laughing.
Nothing was too serious because it was already grieving.
The ache and the flirtation, all this range, this massive spectrum.
What a, what a thrill.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
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Major support provided by the Dalio Foundation. Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, Nancy Zimmerman, Deborah Hayes-Stone, and Max Stone. Distributed nationally by American Public Television.