“What came is gone forever every time”: Embedded Pentameter and Loss in Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through a reading of “embedded pentameter” in “Kaddish,” Allen Ginsberg’s profane, anguished elegy for his mother Naomi, this article asks what a scansion-forward approach to ostensibly non-metrical poetry can reveal about its emotional stakes. Ginsberg was vocal about his principled aversion to the iamb, but the article proves that, in the poem, he gains affective traction by incorporating discrete units of iambic pentameter into longer lines that intermix culturally meaningful rhythmic codes. Engaging the ghost meter metaphor in its theorization of elegy, the article explores the affordances of a modern/contemporary prosody that involves uncanny moments of recognition, compulsive revenance, and palpable presence-in-absence. It proffers a way of reading Ginsberg that connects his cultural hybridity to his metrics, not simply taking for granted that the long lines are complex and chant-like but articulating that complexity and those rhythms in order to appreciate how they feed the poem’s sense of loss.