America
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes
on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after
he came over from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and
twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live
in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your
old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro Boys.
America when I was seven momma took to me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the part was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in
precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Berkeley, January 17, 1956
*****************
Ginsberg and the Beat Generation. That was the perspective (a perspective) from America in the early days of 1956. Now here’s a perspective from Europe (Cambridge University) on that revolt and on the achievements of that revolt, looking back on it (and focusing on some of the crucial texts, considering how they speak to us now), over half a century later
Ato is joined by four pre-eminent Beat scholars, Steven Belletto, Ann Charters, Erik Mortenson, and Oliver Harris.
Erik Mortensen, editor of the forthcoming essay collection – Allen Ginsberg in Context:
“Allen Ginsberg in Context” – the name sort of gives you a hint, the (Cambridge University Press) “In Context” series is a little different to the “Companion” series, as I see it, it’s a little bit longer, there’s more chapters but they’re shorter and the aim is to kind of give the reader a good sense of the background, the context obviously needed to really appreciate an author, in this case Allen Ginsberg. You know, what kind of… how did his interests and preoccupations work into his life in his work, and how did his work enter into the larger poetic discourse of the twentieth-century.
Ginsberg’s an interesting figure because he was also very political, very active, had an activist career as well, so the book also takes a look at how his work and his life.. so it was meant to intervene in.. some of the highly tumultuous moments in the post-War period in America, (and actually, international conflict as well – he was an international figure, very much so, so the book looks at that as well) and looks also at his after-life, or after-lives, how he’s being reproduced, represented, how the books of his are still circulating, I mean, the stuff on him is still coming out. University of Minnesota Press, a couple of years ago, released some more of his journals, Fall of America Journals and Iron Curtain Journals, so, the book is.. for scholars (scholars will hopefully get something out of it, there’s a lot of interesting new takes in the book – as an editor, that’s always interesting, you have an idea or concept of what you’re going to do and what you want to see, but you’re always surprised, and that’s the greatest thing about editing, you’re always surprised, by what you get and you get a kind of a better view as well). So there’ s good. solid material for readers who are new to Ginsberg and maybe don’t know as much, but there’s also a lot of interesting material for people that do, and want to, you know, fill in the gaps and get new takes on what makes Ginsberg so important and what led to his various successes and his work and how it’s been received and how it might.. be received going forward – and that’s the idea
AQ: Allen Ginsberg was clearly one of the most dynamic social critics of his age. Now Eric, you say in your introduction to Allen Ginsberg In Context (and I’m quoting you here) – “The twentieth-century runs through Ginsberg and Ginsberg runs through it” (this is from your intro). Do you care to elaborate on this? This is an interesting and huge statement. What do you mean by that?
EM: Yeah, well, thanks for noticing that. I thought it was catchy line that I liked, but I think it’s true. He’s… Ginsberg’s a product of the twentieth-century, right? I think it’s easy to see the Beats as.. I think they wanted to see themselves as degenerates and here we are now, fully formed, but obviously they’re bein formed by the background, the time period that they’re in (and Ginsberg was certainly formed by that).. (I’m) interested in.. his interests and preoccupations – but, as time goes on, he comes to.. I won’t say define the twentieth-century, but he’s a key player in events in the twentieth-century, right? – especially in the counter-culture. I mean, you could say he is sort of the.. the figure in the counter-culture, certainly in the ‘Sixties and ‘Seventies. And that’s self-conscious – he’s putting himself in that place, right? – He’s there, he’s present, he’s theorizing rebellion, he’s talking.. he’s protesting, and he’s trying to change things, and legitimately wanted to change the world.. He was an active component of, you know, regime shift and getting people’s opinions changed, everything from personal consciousness, consciousness expansion, right? (by drugs, Buddhism, prayer, various things), but also sort of on a social level as well. He wants to change American drug policy, he wants to change the involvement, or cease the involvement, American involvement, in Vietnam. He wants to change the way that people consider or think about the environment, right? – So I think what’s interesting is that he.. a lot of these things that he picks up on, he’s part of, and they continue on.
One of the arguments that I make in the introduction, (and I think the book makes also) is that if you look at what’s going on now, I mean, Ginsberg is still very much (present).. I mean, he’s someone to read about, someone to think about. I mean, all of these issues going on today, (I’m not saying Ginsberg was the sole reason for them, that would be too much, but), you know, you take your yoga mats, your yoga class, and, you know, we don’t really think much about it but Ginsberg was part of a movement to sort of broaden understanding of spirituality that really brought in Eastern religions in the post-war, right? You’ve go(t)..
I think the legalization of marijuana is a big deal in many states, Ginsberg was out there with signs, protesting, trying to decriminalize drug use forty, fifty years ago, right? So..
And obviously the anti-war stuff that’s going on, protest culture, organic environmentalism, all the stuff that Ginsberg’s involved in, right?, from the ‘Fifties on.
So, I guess, to get back to your point, he’s a product of the twentieth-century, but he’s also somebody who’s like a ship in the twentieth-century, and I think that’s interesting (and I think that’s something the book picks up on), because it’s important to see him, in my opinion, not as a (merely as a .. he’s a poet, he’s an important poet and you can look to him as a big shaper and player in the transition from closed verse to open verse in American poetry, certainly, but he’s also just a major player in American cultural landscape of the post-War period.”
AQ: The thing is that the word “context”.. Of course, we normally.. the Beat “background”.
This was the background and he.. But, actually, from what you just said, he was not that. The “context” of Ginsberg is also partly what he produces. So the fact that he takes on all these cases highlights them. So he tends to amplify features of the context that would have remained inert. So in that way he…The thing essentially passes through him and he… through the center. So there is…a mutual enhancement. So the context enhances him but he actually tends to enhance the impact of the context.
And that there’s one of the features of dynamism that I noticed, you know, not just from Ginsberg but (in) the Beats in general..”
Jack Kerouac shared (albeit reluctantly, and indeed fatally, as the participants point out), that cultural centrality – (“King of the Beats“, a label he vehemently eschewed) – and, like Allen, his words and his presence resonated, continue to resonate, onwards, posthumously, right up to the present day,
Producer, John Battsek – ““I was struck by the fact that even though the book was written over half a century ago, its themes of freedom, self-discovery, and rebellion still resonate in today’s world. In many ways the book is timeless because it captures the raw, restless energy of youth”
Great literature, genuine expression, the desire for freedom, the articulation of truth, will always have a receptive ear, will never grow old.
It is also, if it’s truthful (as the Beat writers were), inevitably prophetic – often eerily so. Oliver Harris points this out in the unclassifiable William Burroughs.
We’d like to point it out too. The truth in Burroughs’ coruscating satire