| Allen Ginsberg 1926 - 1997 |
| Copyright 2007 Red Pulp Underground |
Allen Ginsberg 1926 - 1997 American poet and diarist, highly visible with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in the beat generation literary movement, that burst into prominence in the 1950s. Ginsberg's poem HOWL (1956) is considered to be one of the most significant products of that movement. However, before the radical work he underwent a long apprenticeship in traditional rhymed and metered lyrics. Before devoting himself entirely to poetry, Ginsberg worked for a short time for Newsweek and as a market research consultant in New York and San Francisco (1951-53). In San Francisco Ginsberg took a room near Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookstore and started to compose Howl!. William Carlos Williams, his mentor, claimed that Ginsberg had finally found his voice. Howl! gained immediate fame in 1955 at a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. The poem was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Light Press, with a foreword by Williams: "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell." The police seized the entirely printing on the grounds of obscenity: Ginsberg's loudly declared homosexuality was explicitly expressed in the book. The matter went to trial and Ginsberg used his fame in the publication of Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959). Howl! is a long, free-verse poem, reminiscent of Walt Whitman and influenced by the American Trancendentalists. It exemplifies Ginsberg's poetics of spontaneous composition with attention paid to the natural wanderings of the mind and the rhythms of breathing. "All you have to do," Ginsberg once said, "is think of anything that comes into your head, then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each." From the beginning, the work was designated to be read aloud. Howl! became one of the symbols of the liberation of American culture in the 1950s from an academic formalism and political conservatism. Influenced by the mysticism and poetics of Blake, Howl! celebrated and lamented with Old Testament rhythms the casualties of capitalism and consumer society, and in particular the lives of bohemians, his friends. The final part, 'Footnote to Howl' is a hymn of praise: because of human love, the world is holy, despite the nightmare. Howl! is much too long to post here but you may find it on the internet. |
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Red Pulp Underground
| A Supermarket in California What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the streets 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? |
Homework Homage to Kenneth Koch If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle, I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico, Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska, Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again, Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow, Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange, Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state, & put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean |