By Charlotte Wright

Read T.V. Wasteland here.

It is a long literary tradition that writers build upon the work of each other. In “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot and “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, the authors explore the world in which they live with an apocalyptic eye: a world that had seen world wars, a world of sterility, a world that is dying, a world they wish to break free of. Though the poems seem very different, they both have a music and a theme of the breakdown of society that they both try to make sense of: Eliot with his evocation of the classics mixed with common vernacular of London which he combines in a jarring and disjointed way; Ginsberg with his juxtaposition of odd adjectives and nouns, and verses that last as long as the jazz man’s breath. Each have a unique voice that can be viewed as a form of madness, the poem each man is writing is his salvation . It has always seemed as though “Howl” was a continuation of “The Wasteland.” I see “T.V. Wasteland” as my next chapter in this continuing narrative.

When I began to write “T.V. Wasteland,” I had recently read “The Wasteland” for the first time and although I did not understand it completely, it had a profound impact. I read it numerous times and pored over Eliot’s notes trying to grasp why it spoke to me so. I was struck by the beauty and quiet of the language on top of the macabre of dead bodies, rape, and women who are no longer virtuous. In the first stanza “The Burial of the Dead,” beginning at line 19, Eliot writes:

          What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
          Out of this stoney rubbish? Son of man
          You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
          A heap of broken image, where the sun beats
          And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

When I read the lines, “Out of this stoney rubbish?” and “A heap of broken image,” I first made a connection with “Howl,” another poem that I loved so much I had it tacked on my wall. Ginsberg, in a manic heap of broken images, continued the apocalyptic vision of Eliot. “Howl,” represents “…the dead tree that gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,…” In the long, rambling, updated lines of Ginsberg the silence and properness of Eliot is gone, replaced by, “…poverty and tatters and hollowed-eyed and high…” (line 4) in a rapid fire landscape that is alternately rapturous and a nightmare.

These two poems became fused as one. Like the reference to Tiresias by Eliot, there is nothing new in the idea that humanity has always been inhumane and vulgar. Yet unlike Eliot and Ginsberg, for me, the realities of consumerism and war were up close and personal through the medium of my generation: Television. When I began “T.V. Wasteland” the beginning of the poem came to me, “…with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war.” (Howl, line 6) The first stanza came to me all at once and and it never changed, in fact, as in “The Wasteland,” the poem begins quietly:

          What was that dim hum
          Come
          Over the lines
          Morse Edison Marconi
          Tap_.Tap._Tap
          Marvels of mechanics
          Planned obsolescence in Philo’s picture tube
          Buzz*Buzz*Buzz
          Encasings rusted
          Necessitating past casts
          For the latest solid state slogan

Here, as with all new marvels, there is an awe and wonder that I imagine Eliot must have felt at the wireless, and shortly thereafter, Philo Farnsworth’s version of the television that was the prototype for mass production. With “Encasings rusted / Necessitating past casts” I was referring to the past formal forms of poetry that Eliot and Ginsberg were rebelling against and the “past casts,” were Eliot’s use of quoting classics. The “planned obsolesce,” and latest “solid state slogan,” were marks of the consumerism that Ginsberg rails against in “Howl.”

“Howl” has many references to the Beats’ constant movement cross country from east to west coast, to Denver, Mexico and Tangiers, although most of the action is centered in New York City. Eliot, likewise, discusses much movement, most notably in his “Unreal City,” passages and the movement of the entire work jumping from one classical reference to the next across centuries of time. I echo this constant movement by entitling each section with where I lived at the time of the action and a travel motif throughout “T.V. Wasteland” which begins:

          Hmmmm—Burma Shave, campgrounds and motels with
          kidney shaped pools that really did cost 48 bits
          Diners outrageous on Route 66
          On the box in the corner of the front room

These are images from before my time, images that Ginsberg would have seen on the road, images that capture the beginning of the post war boom of consumerism. It is also a segue into the land of television with the show “Route 66,” which was cancelled the year I was born (1964).

My story does not begin until the click of the television. Eliot and the “Lost Generation,” had the Great War to recover from. Ginsberg had to live through World War Two and the threat of annihilation that came with the Cold War. The television brought every ensuing war into my living room starting with the Vietnam War.

          Rat-a*tat-tat in distant jungles
          Johnny Quest my favorite black and whites
          Just brush your with Ultra Brite
          Colgate will do with Captain Kangaroo
          As James West knocks the girl out
          Bewitched!
          I dream of Jeannie, believe in Sgt. Friday the Monkees and the Banana Splits
          I watch the man land on the moon
          And I know I can boldly go where no man has gone before
          So sock it to me baby, Smothers that Tate lady
          While I, as rifleman trick or treat for cyanide lace pixie sticks
          And razor blades in the apple of my violation
          Peacocks Eyes And my ABCs

I try to evoke a child’s vision of what the adults and my older sister would watch and just how influenced I was by television before the age of six. When Eliot begins “The Wasteland” with, “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land,” and later in lines 71-72 writes, “That corpse you planted last year in your garden / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” I was reminded of the confusion and terror I felt when I was in the spring of my life, just beginning to bloom. There was the violence of the war, James West punching a woman and The Tate/La Bianca murders. I thought since Sergeant Friday said, “Just the facts, M’am,” that Tony Nelson had landed on the moon and surely the Monkees and The Banana Splits were real bands. I went trick or treating in my cowboy vest and toy gun when I was five. My mother threw away all the pixie sticks and apples. After my bedtime I heard my mother say, “The T.V. said crazy people are trying to poison children.” I was “…Listening to the Terror through the wall,” as Ginsberg wrote in line 8. This was my spring time, a cruel time indeed.

In both “Howl” and “The Wasteland,” Ginsberg and Eliot try for a musicality in their verse. For Ginsberg it was the be-bop of jazz musicians. His long lines simulate the words that could be uttered in a single breath, the words clatter along like notes in a frantic solo of Charlie Parker. Eliot listened to classical music, particularly Beethoven, and his words and imagery have a softer musicality to them, as in the description of the Thames at the beginning of “The Fire Sermon.” The music of my generation is rock and roll and as I was writing “T.V. Wasteland” I thought of The Who and their song “Baba O’Reilly.” They were a muscular band full of bravado that dared to sing, “I hope I die before I get old,” as their statement against the establishment in 1965. By 1971, when “Baba O’Reilly” came out, they were all approaching 30, had written a rock opera, and had become part of that establishment. So in the chorus when they sing, “Teenaged wasteland / It’s only teenaged wasteland / We’re all wasted,” the words made a nice refrain in my head for the land of television that I was now choosing to inhabit, through my adolescence and into my teenaged years. The only member of The Who to die before he got old was drummer Keith Moon, who overdosed on of all things, antabuse. I decided to make Keith a character in my poem much like Eliot had Tiresias and Ginsberg had Carl Solomon. Moon was known for throwing T.V. sets out of upper story hotel windows, so as I am pulled more and more into the drug of my “T.V. Wasteland,” I implore Keith to throw them out the window. He makes his first appearance in my second verse, which covers the Early 70s.

          Datsuns, camper vans, slug bugs and station wagons
          Eisenhower interstates
          Travel rates go up
          Shortages to pump your own
          And MPG are letters mean something to me
          A car? Maybe a guitar on the Osmunds, Partridges, Jacksons?
          Oh hong kong phooey eating pink panther flakes and
          Wondering about scoobey snacks, Chevy vans and the big red machine
          I watch Mark Spitz win all the medals
          As hooded men and Jews are in the news
          After the latest gas war, Asian war, clandestine white house war
          fought by symbonisian and Korean armies watched
          On Mash kept all in the family Flip
          To the Bradys where one day at a time Rockford fixes Quincy’s files
          While Kung Fu walks, Mc Cloud rides, and Emergency saves the day
          But if these are happy days and dynomite how come Chico?
          AW Keith, throw it out the window
          POP#%$*POW@*^%CRASH#$%*ZOWIE
          Love American Style

In this and the ensuing verses I am telling the history of my life through television images like the power chords of The Who. Each verse is structured with the travel motif followed by television lines that provide images of the prevailing events of the time. In this second verse there are sitcoms, dramas, cartoons and sports and my confusion with current events I did not quite understand: the violence of terrorism, watergate, and why MASH was funny if it was a war. I was terrified by the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and as I began Junior High School I learned what suicide was via Freddie Prinze.

After these two verses were written I felt like I had found my own voice. Like Eliot using lines from classical literature, I was using catch phrases and titles from television shows to tell my history. Like Ginsberg, I used rapid fire images that evoked the idea of channel surfing. I also use quite a bit of chaotic rhyme and there is no set pattern. This is my attempt at my own music, my own flow throughout the poem that reflects the rock and roll of my generation. I was also trying to hone my own eye on the progression of a de-volving society. This picks up pace with the third verse, as cable comes to the forefront. Of all the travel motifs, this is the one that I really worked at being an extension of Eliot and Ginsberg:

          The heavens are no longer held up by arrowed antennas
          Eastern to Southwest United at the Delta
          Telstar bounces near and far
          Destination Atlanta and TBS are letters mean something to me

This is my reference to “…the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” (Howl, line 3) and “Falling Towers/ Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal…” (Wasteland, lines 374-8) Satellite and cable brought a whole new era to television, and I use the names of Airlines and Telstar to create the image of the sacredness that society was beginning to place upon technology. Now the whole world really could come to me by watching T.V. Cable was indeed exciting at first but it was also the beginning of the end of any innocence in programing, which coincided with my becoming a teenager. Gone is my confusion but there is still a sense of wonder in the box:

          Uncut movies on HBO and baseball every day!
          Charlie’s Angels, Bruce Jenner, and peanut farmer and Family
          Take taxis to Dallas where cute guys in cars copters and Sweathogs
          Silver spoon the facts of life to different stroked white shadows
          And I finally get that wascally wabbit. Puny
          Like the 24 hour news hurray hurrah highjacks and high jinx
          Little Rascals and yellow ribbons
          What we need is an actor to ride in and save the day
          ‘Cause now there are more than one box in multiple rooms
          Get it in stereo! MTV now there’s some letters mean something to me

In both the “Wasteland” and “Howl” there is an undercurrent of madness that each author was dealing with. In lines 182-84 Eliot writes, “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…/Sweet Thames , run softly until my song ends / Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.” Then later in lines 328-30 he writes “He who was living is now dead / We who are living are now dying / With a little patience.” The lament in these two passages, speaks of the profound sadness that had the capability to overwhelm Eliot, even do him in. While writing “The Wasteland” he was devastated by the war and there was trouble with his first marriage due to both he and his wife’s mental fragility. For Ginsberg, schizophrenia ran in the family as his mother Naomi was in and out of the mental ward most of Allen’s life. He wrote “Howl” while committed to a mental hospital. In part three of “Howl” he talks of his own commitment and that of Carl Solomon, whom he declares, “Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland /…I’m with you in Rockland / where you imitate the shade of my mother.”(lines 94,96) The horror of watching Solomon having shock treatments like his mother would have a profound impact on Ginsberg and he often said that he wrote himself out of madness.

The fourth verse of “T.V. Wasteland” is the last of the initial verses that I wrote, all while in a mental hospital in Lubbock, Texas. My diagnosis is bi-polar disorder and these first four verses were written within two weeks in a burst of beautiful, terrified mania. The decades of the 80s and 90s are lumped together, where sitcoms give way to cop shows to the images of war and terror, now being perpetrated on U.S. soil.

          Cable boxes, VCRs, and Channels 48
          Emulate a plethora of AIDS, love, sports, and hate
          There’s no more on the move with the sitters of the mind
          We’re beings in a box where anyone can find
          Happy Huxtables, silly Simpsons and raucous Roseanne
          Are married with children that all tuned in as their
          Teacher was lost in space
          As 30 something LA lawyers in night court solve crime on
          Hill street where Matlock always gets his man
          In an oiled gulf where mad men with dark skin
          Or Ireland to Scotland til *POW*
          On our own turf as Waco then Atlanta burn
          And Oklahoma isn’t a Rogers and Hammerstein anymore
          Aw Keith, throw ‘em all out the window

Upon my initial reading of “The Wasteland” my favorite portion of the work was “A Game of Chess” that starts out with a beautiful detailed description and descends into the bar scene. Later, in “The Fire Sermon” there are two scenes where women have casual sex. In line 103 Eliot writes, “”Jug, jug” to dirty ears.” Eliot seems to rue the fact that sex is no longer sacred and he sees this as part of the breakdown in society. In “Howl,” Ginsberg rarely writes more than a few lines where sex is not mentioned in some way. In a 1950‘s society where he could be jailed for his homosexuality, Ginsberg’s poem challenged sexual monogamy, and the conservatism which he sees as the breakdown of society. “T.V. Wasteland” is devoid of sex. Instead it shows television as a vehicle of voyeurism and how living vicariously through images on a screen has produced a sterility that helped to define the last fifty years. As Ginsberg writes, “Moloch who entered my soul early, Moloch in whom I am a consciousness with no body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!…” (line 87) Moloch is a false God, and for me, my television set.

There is a great deal of religious symbolism in “The Wasteland,” the most notable being in “What the Thunder Said.” Eliot writes:

          Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
          There is the empty chapel, only the winds home.
          It has no windows, and the doors swing,
          Dry bones can harm no one.
          Only a cock stood on the rooftree
          Co co rico co co rico (lines 388-93)

These lines evoke a religious emptiness, or the old 1960’s saying, “God is dead.” Mankind has turned its back on God. Ginsberg finds no need of God in the “Footnote to Howl.” In this section of his poem, as throughout all of “Howl,” he celebrates the holiness of the moment, of all things temporal:

          …The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and hand and cock and ass hole holy!
          The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! …(line 2-3)

As I wrote the last stanzas of “T.V. Wasteland” I quote directly from Eliot and Ginsberg. With Eliot I use his quote of the nursery rhyme “London Bridges and the line from the bar scene: Hurry up please, it’s time which I read somewhere is the British version of last call for alcohol. With Ginsberg I combine the first line of Howl with the old T.V. commercial “this is your brain on drugs.” I wanted to pay homage in a subtle way. I tried to evoke how the visual medium that is available on a screen at the touch of a button has taken over society and in doing so has reduced the world to images on a screen. I was going to bring computers and cell phones in but decided to keep on the theme of television. Much of what is viewed on the internet are videos that merely mimic television. In T.V. Wasteland the main theme throughout the poem is violence. In concluding the poem I try to touch on how violence has become synonymous with sex and for some, a vehicle to God. As I wrote the last verses I try to keep in mind what I am trying to say as I howl into the wasteland.

Charlotte Wright is currently a grad student in the MLA program focusing on creative writing. She received her undergraduate degree from Texas Tech where she majored in English and History. Besides writing poetry, Charlotte also writes short stories. She is a musician and has written many songs, several of which have been covered by other artists.

Photo from the Library of Virginia.