Monday, December 12, 2011

Work Cited

 Baym, Nina. "Allen Ginsberg." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Print.

Waldman, Anne. The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2007. Print.

(See Blog For Websites)

Other Poems Written by Allen Ginsberg

"A Desolation"
"Kaddish"
"Song"
"First Party At Ken Kesey's With Hell Angels"
"Hum Bom!"
"Mugging"
"On the Conduct of the World Seeking Beauty Against Government"

Links to Interviews with Allen Ginsberg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-H5SmLieII&feature=fvwrel
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/face_to_face_with_allen_ginsberg/ (scroll to bottom)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znLItt_WzwE

Links to Timelines

http://www.allenginsberg.org/index.php?page=chronological-addenda
http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/allen-ginsberg-136.php (scroll to bottom)
http://www.xtimeline.com/timeline/The-Life-of-Allen-Ginsberg

Links to Biographical Information about Allen Ginsberg

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/allen-ginsberg
http://www.lib.unc.edu/rbc/beats/ginsberg.html
http://www.beatmuseum.org/ginsberg/AllenGinsberg.html
http://www.biography.com/people/allen-ginsberg-9311994
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0320091/bio

Links to Biographical Websites

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/8
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Allen-Ginsberg
http://www.allenginsberg.org/

Analysis of "Sunflower Sutra"

           “Sunflower Sutra” was written in the 1950’s during a time of industry and consumerism in America. It is about the destruction of nature, beauty, and loss of one’s soul. “[Jack Kerouac and I] thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery”. Ginsberg believes that the new technology is to blame for the loss of souls. A “sutra” is something that holds something else together. The sunflower is Ginsberg’s sutra of hope and creativity. “Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then”. An example of the destruction of his sutra is the locomotive. “That veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial—modern”. Ginsberg believes that the locomotive destroys everything pure and natural. The sunflower is also a symbol of Americans. He believes Americans choose technology over beauty and life. “Poor dead flower? When did you forget you were a flower? When did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? The ghost of a locomotive? The specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive? You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower”. Ginsberg hopes that we will all reject technology and bring back the creativity in our souls. “We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment”. By resisting culture and conformity, we can bring our inner sunflower back to life. It is interesting to see how an idea Ginsberg had about technology is still an idea which is relevant today.

Audio Recording of "Sunflower Sutra"

Audio Recording of "Sunflower Sutra"

"Sunflower Sutra"

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and

sat down under the huge shade of a Southern

Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the

box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron

pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts

of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,

surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of

machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun

sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that

stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves

rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums

on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray

shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting

dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,

memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes

Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black

treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the

poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel

knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck

and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the

past--

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--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like

a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,

soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays

obliterated on its hairy head like a dried

wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures

from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster

fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O

my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human

locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad

skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black

mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance

of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--

modern--all that civilization spotting your

crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless

eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the

home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar

bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards

of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely

tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what

more could I name, the smoked ashes of some

cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the

milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs

& sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you there

standing before me in the sunset, all your glory

in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent

lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye

to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited

grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden

monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your

grime, while you cursed the heavens of the

railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a

flower? when did you look at your skin and

decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?

the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and

shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me

not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck

it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul

too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread

bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all

beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed

by our own seed & golden hairy naked

accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black

formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our

eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive

riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening

sitdown vision.

"A Supermarket in California" Critical Essay

"A Supermarket in California" Critical Essay

"A Supermarket in California" Analysis

Allen Ginsberg “A Supermarket in California” is both an ode to Ginsberg’s poetic hero and major influence, Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman was an early influence in Ginsberg poetry. He recounts one night that he had envisioned. He sets the scene by stating he is walking down a street, under trees and a full moon, having “thoughts” of Walt Whitman. The natural world is symbolized by the trees and the moons referred to in this poem. These symbols remind him of Walt Whitman who sought out to find a truer world and identity in nature. This poem has a lot of cultural references if it didn’t it would have just been a simple poem about going to the supermarket. As Allen Ginsberg refers to Walt Whitman a lot in this poem he wanted to show the longing for the true American life that Whitman represented. In this poem Ginsburg refers to him having a “headache” and a “hungry fatigue” and from my understanding it is believed Allen Ginsburg is going through a crisis and him wandering through the “supermarket” gives him solace. Ginsburg hopes the supermarket will be a glimpse of the world Whitman spoke of in his poetry. Ginsberg is looking to history from Walt Whitman to help him answer the economic and social questions that his modern world has become. Ginsberg walks into the supermarket hoping for beauty in the natural products. Ginsberg is surprised on what he finds there when he states “What peaches and what penumbras!” which designates the secret hidden behind nature. In the second stanza Ginsberg begins his imaginative encounter with Whitman. When Ginsberg states “I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys” and this was Ginsberg term for male intercourse and the eyeing the boys was him referring to Whitman alleged liking for boys. In the final stanza of this poem it’s obvious that Ginsberg is following Whitman around. Ginsberg seems not so optimistic when he states “Where are we going the doors close in an hour” this lets Ginsberg know that this vision he is having won’t last. Ginsberg knows there is no place for him and Whitman to go to find Whitman’s vision of natural society and the natural man. Their quests through the “solitary streets” make them realize they will be lonely and Ginsberg refers to it by saying “Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely”. Symbols of a “lost America” such as cars and dark houses will lead them only to loneliness “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?”

Audio Recording of "A Supermarket in California"

Audio Recording of " A Supermarket in California"

"A Supermarket In California"

          What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
          In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
          What peaches and what penumbras!  Whole families
shopping at night!  Aisles full of husbands!  Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

          I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
          I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops?  What price bananas?  Are you my Angel?
          I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
          We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

          Where are we going, Walt Whitman?  The doors close in
an hour.  Which way does your beard point tonight?
          (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
          Will we walk all night through solitary streets?  The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

          Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
          Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

"Howl" Critical Essay

Critical Essay of "Howl"

"Howl" Analysis

First off, this poem is insane! It’s nothing like the usual poem you read in school and I’m not ashamed to say I like it and feel its creativity more so any poem I’ve read. At the beginning Ginsberg shows the toll drugs have taken on his once creative friends and how they seem to be falling away from the lives they once lived. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,” “Howl” Allen Ginsberg. It’s the first line and it speaks so clear. His once proud, genius friends are losing it. Their minds, souls, everything is falling apart. ”angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,” “Howl” Allen Ginsberg. This reads like a wakeup call. All that they had worked for was falling apart in a drug fueled self-absorbed mess. Losing sight of what they had worked for to begin with and getting lost in a false reality. It sounds so real because it is. Through the despair Ginsberg pulled himself back up and tries to put in words the loss he feels for the “family” he once had. The Beatniks had turned into junkies and drunks, luckily Ginsberg saw this and put his mind right on paper writing honestly about what he saw going on around him. ”who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,” “Howl” Allen Ginsberg. It is said that Ginsberg was under the influence of the Psycodelic drug Peyote when he wrote “Howl” and in this last passage he seems to call out everyone, not just his friends but his peers. Ginsberg was looking at all the people around him and realizing that he was disgusted by the whole thing. Everything was not perfect as it had seemed. His generation was blowing it. No one had nor would fix the everyday growing problems that are our lives. Every generation has problems, Ginsberg just choose to call out the problem in hope that they would be fixed to no avail.

                “Howl” then goes into its second part, there are three altogether. It starts back up where it had left off only calling out normal society even more then he had to begin with. “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!” “Howl” Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg sees our government, industries, the whole lot for what it is. Our society is built on the backs of the poor while the rich get richer and everyone stands aside watching as if its normal and fine. America at the time was still segregated and overtly racist. Ginsberg was an open homosexual. To speak out like this definitely brought a lot of negative attention to Ginsberg and he knew it and wasn’t afraid to speak up. It is utterly amazing to think of the amount of courage that it took to simply be who he was as a person. The fact that he wasn’t beat to death by a group of “normal” white male citizens at the time is kind of weird. Ginsberg was everything that these people hated, and he wouldn’t back down without a fight.

The end of “Howl” is quite different. It’s as if Ginsberg is thinking about what the world could and should be. “ I’m with you in Rockland  where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself    imaginary walls collapse    O skinny legions run outside    O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here    O victory forget your underwear we’re free I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.” “Howl” Allen Ginsberg. What could America be? It is an unanswered question. What America is today has a lot to do with this poem. The human race has taken great advances since Ginsberg wrote “Howl”. I would argue that we would live in a much different society if Ginsberg hadn’t opened up and said what he felt. We take our Freedom for Speech for granted and don’t realize how strong it can be. Life is basic striving for equality and the betterment of mankind are very noble causes. We need to get up and see how we are all and how we affect each other. What we have as humans is a gift that we should be taking advantage of and help those who can’t help themselves. Ginsberg devoted his life mankind and will only grow stronger with time.

Audio Recordings of "Howl"

Howl Part 1
Howl Part 2
Howl Part 3

"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg

                                                                         I

 I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazzincomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,  

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,  

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blur floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.





II



What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!





III



Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland

   where you’re madder than I am

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you must feel very strange

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you laugh at this invisible humor

I’m with you in Rockland

   where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I’m with you in Rockland

   where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I’m with you in Rockland

   where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

   where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland

   where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I’m with you in Rockland

   where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I’m with you in Rockland

   where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep

I’m with you in Rockland

   where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself    imaginary walls collapse    O skinny legions run outside    O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here    O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland

   in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Introduction to Allen Ginsberg



Unlike most writers of poetry, Allen Ginsberg wasn’t just a poet; he was the founder of a whole new generation of writers. Born in 1926, Ginsberg grew up in New Jersey and lived a normal life until he went to college in New York at Columbia. While at college Ginsberg hooked up with a group of young writers who would become a whole new twist on poetry, stories and writing in general, this group became The Beatniks. Among this group were a number of the best writers of the Twentieth-Century. Henery Hunkle, William S. Bouroughs, and Jack Kerouac were just a few and goddamn were they good. They didn’t write like anyone before them, with talk of sex drugs and Jazz, bringing up many topics that we are able to talk about today that if not for this revolutionaries we might not have that right or ability. They were the people who weren’t afraid to speak their minds in a time when Leave it To Beaver was edgy! William S. Bouroughs even had his book, Naked Lunch, not just burned like the U.S. was Nazi-Germany, but put in front of the United States Supreme Court! Ginsberg stuck to poetry producing a great number of works from “Howl” to “A Supermarket in California”. Ginsberg was also an activist standing up for such causes as Free-Speech, Gay Rights, Civil Rights, and The Vietnam War, Frequently he would give speeches at giant events such as Woodstock. It can even be argued that Ginsberg helped create the first music video for The Velvet Underground’s song “Heroin” where Andy Whorhol filmed Allen dancing around a stereo, throwing flowers while the song played. Punk Band Fugazi even takes their name from a line in “Howl”. Ginsberg was an innovator and there aren’t many people in the world with his creative power. Ginsberg’s and The Beatniks legacy will live on for many years to come and it’s easy to see why.