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much so
little. Words
say everything
I
love you
again,
then what
is emptiness
for. To
fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.
1967
ALLEN GINSBERG
1926–1997
Allen ginsberg, perhaps the best-known American poet after World War II,
changed the face of poetry and culture. Bob Dylan has written that Ginsberg’s
“Howl” signaled “a new type of human existence.” Declaiming his poems in
coffeehouses and auditoriums, Ginsberg made himself a celebrity. He aligned
poetic innovation with popular culture. He brought political dissidence into
the poetic mainstream, and—along with such poets as Robert Lowell and Anne
Sexton—he refashioned poetry to make it a medium for intimate self-disclosure.
He was also the first public figure to bring an explicit self-representation as a
homosexual into the center of American culture. A pioneer, a rebel, and an
original, Ginsberg expanded the scope of poetry in both its public and its personal dimensions. He challenged and rocked American culture, and at the same
time he used his charm and humor to achieve the popular approval he craved.
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Allen Ginsberg
Ø
Born in Newark, New Jersey, to a family of Jewish-Russian immigrants, Ginsberg grew up in working-class Paterson. Already a rebel in elementary school,
he adopted the slogan “Do what you want to when you want to.” Reading Walt
Whitman in high school only strengthened his iconoclastic character. Ginsberg’s
later position as both a community member and an outsider reflected his difficult early years. His father was a dutiful high school teacher and poet, whereas
his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia, paranoia, and epilepsy, belonged
to an idealistic wing of the American Communist Party and was obsessed with
helping suffering workers. Ginsberg attended Columbia University on a scholarship, and after graduation he worked as a dishwasher, spot welder, member of
the merchant marine, and book reviewer for Newsweek magazine. But, with the
encouragement of his mentor William Carlos Williams, he devoted his life to
poetry. After experiencing a hallucination in which the English poet William
Blake spoke to him, he concentrated on establishing a new poetic movement,
which he called “New Vision.” In the 1950s, this movement transformed itself
into what Jack Kerovac called “the Beat Generation,” the era’s noisiest and most
creative opponents of Cold War conformity.
After a series of heterosexual and homosexual affairs, and time spent in a
mental hospital, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a market researcher and lived an openly gay life with his lover, the poet Peter Orlovsky. By the mid-1950s, the San Francisco Bay Area had become a vital center of
Beat culture, and Ginsberg—along with novelists Jack Kerouac and William S.
Burroughs and poet Diane DiPrima—was one of its leading lights. In 1955 he
wrote and performed his Beat epic, “Howl,” which had an immediate effect as
a shocking and mesmerizing text. The next year, “Howl” was published, seized
by authorities as obscene, and found by a court to have “redeeming social significance.” The poem, published together with some shorter poems (including
“A Supermarket in California,” “Sunflower Sutra,” and “America”) in an inexpensive City Lights edition, was hugely successful. Ginsberg became a national
celebrity, a position he was never to lose. Funny, provocative, thoughtful, personable, and fiercely independent, he transfixed the nation for the next thirty
years.
In 1956, Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, died, after years of being in and out of
mental hospitals. Ginsberg mourned the loss in his long poem, “Kaddish.” He
then continued to write and to travel, publishing his poems in inexpensive editions (and later in more conventional volumes); becoming a political spokesman
for justice, equality, and peace; exploring Buddhist and other spiritual traditions;
and, in the 1960s, making the transition from Beat to hippy culture. In the 1960s,
he befriended such popular culture icons as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones,
and especially Bob Dylan. John Lennon made a reference to Ginsberg in “Give
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Peace a Chance.” Ginsberg sang a duet with the Rolling Stones. He appeared
with Dylan in videos, films, and concert tours. He was instrumental in the crossfertilization of poetry with rock and roll in the 1960s and 1970s. Ginsberg also
became a major figure in opposition to the Vietnam War, writing poems against
the war (such as “Anti-Vietnam War Peace Mobilization”), appearing on television and in newspapers, and participating in protests and sit-ins.
The 1980s and 1990s were a quieter period for Ginsberg. In the 1980s, he traveled widely, taught at the Naropa Institute (a facility for education and spiritual
awareness located in Boulder, Colorado), and continued to write poetry. His
revolutionary zeal appeared to wane, though he never abandoned his devotion
to peace and freedom causes. He continued to explore the intersections of poetry and popular culture, performing and recording many of his poems as songs
(for example, on the album New York Blues)—featured in recordings by such
rock groups as Rage Against the Machine, the Clash, Sonic Youth, and They
Might Be Giants—and appearing in videos and films. In a Thansgiving episode
of The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson paid homage to Ginsberg in her poem “Howl of
the Unappreciated.” By the 1990s, Ginsberg was living in New York and adopting an introspective mood in such late poems as “It’s All So Brief” and “Yiddishe
Kopf.”
Ginsberg died at home of liver cancer at the age of seventy-one. The illness
was the endgame of a case of hepatitis he had picked up during a visit to the
Amazon while in his mid-twenties. Buddhist monks chanted in one corner of
his room. Friends recited a Jewish prayer in another. Asked if he wanted to sleep,
he answered, “Oh yes.” They were his last words—a fitting conclusion to a life
spent in the affirmative.
further reading
Graham Caveney. Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg. New York: Broadway Books,
1999.
Ann Charters, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Allen Ginsberg. Collected Poems, 1947–1997. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
————. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
————. Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by
Author. Ed. Barry Miles. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
————. Letters. Ed. Bill Morgan. New York: Da Capo Press, 2008.
————. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996. Ed. David Carter. New York:
HarperCollins, 2001.
Bill Morgan. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. New York:
Viking, 2006.
Paul Portugés. The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg. Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, 1978.
Jonah Raskin. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Michael Schumacher. Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1992.
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Howl
Ø
Howl
For Carl Solomon1
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,2
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection3 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,4
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El5 and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas
and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,6
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on
the windows of the skull,7
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets8 and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo9 with a belt of
marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley,10 death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
endless balls,
1. Carl Solomon (1928–1993) was a fellow writer
whom Ginsberg had met in 1949 in a mental
institution. When Ginsberg began to write
“Howl,” he had just learned that Solomon was
back in another mental hospital. Ginsberg
intended the dedication as “a gesture of wild
solidarity, a message into the asylum, a sort of
heart’s trumpet call.”
2. Ginsberg’s friend Herbert Huncke (1915–1997)
“cruised Harlem and Times Square areas at irregular hours” seeking heroin (Ginsberg’s note).
3. Ambiguously implying either a spiritual connection or a drug connection. Starry dynamo: an
image “derived from Dylan Thomas’s mixture of
Nature and Machinery” (Ginsberg’s note).
4. “The jazz was late bop Charlie Parker played
in Bowery loft jam sessions in those years”
(Ginsberg’s note).
5. “Part of Manhattan’s subway system, the
Third Avenue elevated railway, one of those
familiarly called the ‘El,’ was demolished in the
mid-’50s” (Ginsberg’s note).
6. “Refers to author’s adventures at Columbia
College” (Ginsberg’s note). Ginsberg had a
mystical vision while reading the poetry of William Blake (1757–1827) in 1948. In the 1940s,
Columbia scientists worked on constructing the
atom bomb.
7. Ginsberg was suspended twice from Columbia, once for writing obscenities in the grime on
his dorm room window and once when he was
confined to a psychiatric institution.
8. Solomon burned money “while upset about
the evils of materialism” (Solomon’s note).
9. City in Texas on the Mexican border.
10. A cold-water-flat courtyard in New York’s
Lower East Side, an area where Ginsberg and
his friends lived and socialized in the late 1940s
and early 1950s.
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incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,11 illuminating all the
motionless world of Time between,
Peyote12 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 Battery13 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’s14 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 Bellevue15 to
museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops16 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-grindings17 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,
11. New Jersey city where Ginsberg was born and
which William Carlos Williams immortalized
in his epic poem Paterson.
12. Cactus native to northern Mexico and southwestern United States that produces a stimulant
drug used in religious ceremonials by some Indian peoples. Tree vibrations: “ref. author’s first
peyote experience” (Ginsberg’s note).
13. The southern tip of Manhattan. The Battery
and the Bronx were the southern and northern
ends of a subway line. Zoo: the Bronx Zoo. This
line was “a conscious attempt to go all the way
from A to Z (Zoo)” (Ginsberg’s note)—or perhaps, more precisely, from B to Z.
14. New York cafeteria where Ginsberg mopped
floors. Fugazzi’s: a bar in New York’s bohemian
Greenwich Village. Hydrogen jukebox: the
phrase juxtaposes two very different contexts
that were both central to the 1950s: nuclear
bombs and popular music.
15. New York public hospital and psychiatric
clinic. Ginsberg’s friend Ruth “one day began
a flight of talk in Washington Square that continued through the day and night for 72 hours
until she was finally committed to Bellevue”
(Ginsberg’s note).
16. Front porches.
17. Reference to beat writer William S. Burroughs’s heroin withdrawals in Tangiers,
Morocco. Newark’s bleak furnished room:
Ginsberg’s brother, Eugene Brooks, “lived in
one such studying law, late forties” (Ginsberg’s
note).
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Howl
Ø
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus18 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 Square19 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 pederasty20 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,
18. Ginsberg studied this mystical writer, and
the others named, in college. Bop: a style of jazz
developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kabbalah: a Jewish mystical system of interpreting
the Hebrew scriptures.
19. Public square in Manhattan, site of radical
speeches and protests, especially in the 1930s.
Los Alamos: laboratory in New Mexico where
the atomic bomb was developed. Wall: Wall
Street in New York, the nation’s financial center, but at the same time the Wailing Wall (or
Western Wall) in Jerusalem, a sacred spot where
religious Jews gather in prayer.
20. Anal intercourse. Here the poem begins a frank evocation of sexuality, especially
homosexuality.
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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 fate21 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.,22
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 Tokay23 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 blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be
crowned with laurel in oblivion,
21. The three Fates, in Greek and Roman myth,
were goddesses who determined the course of
human lives by spinning threads and then cutting them.
22. Neal Cassady (1926–1968), Ginsberg’s friend
and lover, was also a friend of novelists Jack
Kerouac and Ken Kesey. Kerouac portrayed
him as Dean Moriarty in On the Road (1957)
and Kesey as Superman in “The Day after Superman Died” in Demon Box (1986). Adonis of
Denver: in Greek myth, Adonis was a beautiful
young man beloved of Aphrodite, the goddess of
love; Cassady grew up in Denver.
23. Sweet Hungarian white wine with a high alcohol content.
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Howl
Ø
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
bottom of the rivers of Bowery,24
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,25
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 borsht26 & 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 suits27 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,28 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
24. The lower part of Third Avenue in Manhattan, frequented by alcoholics and homeless
people.
25. Possible reference to the first and last sections
of Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge (1930).
26. Russian beet soup, a dish cooked by Ginsberg’s mother.
27. Sloane Wilson’s best-selling novel, The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), identified
businessmen as typically wearing flannel suits.
Madison Avenue: location of many New York
advertising agencies.
28. The Passaic River flows through Paterson,
New Jersey, where both Ginsberg and his mentor, William Carlos Williams, grew up. The
phrase “filthy Passaic” comes from Williams’s
1915 poem “The Wanderer,” in which the river
provides the poet with inspiration. German jazz:
refers to the songs “O Show Me the Way to the
Next Whiskey Bar” and “Benares Song” in Kurt
Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of
the City of Mahagonny (Ginsberg’s note).
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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 hotrodGolgotha29 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,30 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,31 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 hypnotism32 & were left with
their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY 33 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 insulin34 Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
29. In the New Testament, Golgotha, “a place of
a skull,” is the site of Christ’s crucifixion (Matthew 27:33).
30. “Lyric lines by Kerouac: ‘Down in Denver,
/ Down in Denver, / All I did was die’ ” (Ginsberg’s note).
31. The Beat writer and drug addict William S.
Burroughs lived in Mexico for a time. Rocky
Mount: a town in North Carolina where Kerouac briefly lived. Tangiers: Moroccan city
where both Burroughs and Ginsberg lived for a
time. Southern Pacific: Neal Cassady worked as
a brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad.
Narcissus: in Greek myth, a youth who fell in
love with his own reflection in a pool. Woodlawn: a large cemetery in the Bronx, which
Ginsberg’s mother could see from her window.
32. Naomi Ginsberg, the poet’s mother, suffered
from a paranoid delusion that the radio was
communicating to her personally.
33. City College of New York. Dadaism: avantgarde literary and artistic movement of the
1910s and 1920s that emphasized absurdity and
chance. Carl Solomon threw potato salad at a
lecturer at Brooklyn College, an act that he said
“was supposed to be Dadaism” but that led to
his incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
34. Used for shock therapy in the 1940s and
1950s. Metrazol: a drug used in convulsive shock
therapy in the 1950s. Electricity: another form
of shock therapy. Naomi Ginsberg was given
both insulin shock and electroshock treatments.
Allen Ginsberg himself only “received hydrotherapy, psychotherapy, occupational therapy
(oil painting) and played Ping-Pong with Carl
Solomon at N. Y. State Psychiatric Institute”
(Ginsberg’s note).
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Howl
Ø
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,35
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,36 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 ******,37 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,38 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 meter & 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 Deus39
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you
speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing
35. Carl Solomon overturned a ping-pong table
at New York State Psychiatric Institute in a “big
burst of anti-authoritarian rage on arrival” (Solomon’s note).
36. Three mental hospitals in the New York
area. Carl Solomon was incarcerated at Pilgrim State; Naomi Ginsberg, the poet’s mother,
was a patient at Pilgrim State and Greystone.
Dolmen-realms: a dolmen is a prehistoric monument found in Britain and France and thought
to be a tomb. “Dolmens mark a vanished civilization” (Ginsberg’s note). At the time “Howl”
was composed, the poet’s mother was living her
last months at Pilgrim State Hospital and Carl
Solomon had recently been admitted there.
37. Ginsberg’s initial draft reads, “mother finally fucked,” an expression of long-repressed
incestuous desire. “Author replaced letters with
asterisks in final draft of poem to introduce appropriate element of uncertainty” (Ginsberg’s
note).
38. In response to this line addressed to him,
Carl Solomon responded ironically, “It’s safer in
hospital than outside.”
39. “All-powerful Father, Eternal God” (Latin).
The phrase is from a letter written by the French
Post impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–
1906), in which he describes the overpowering
sensations he feels in observing nature. Ginsberg commented in Spontaneous Mind: “The
last part of ‘Howl’ was really an homage to art
but also in specific terms an homage to Cézanne’s method. . . . Just as Cézanne doesn’t use
perspective lines to create space, but it’s a juxtaposition of one color against another color . . . ,
so, I had the idea, perhaps over-refined, that by
the unexplainable, unexplained nonperspective
line, that is, juxtaposition of one word against
another, . . . there’d be a gap between the two
words, which the mind would fill in with the
sensation of existence.”
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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 sabacthani40 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 sphinx41 of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up
their brains and imagination?
Moloch!42 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!43
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!44 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!
40. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me” (Aramaic). These are Christ’s words on the
cross in the New Testament (Matthew 27:46).
41. Fearsome mythic creature that speaks in
riddles.
42. “ ‘Moloch’: or Molech, the Canaanite fire
god, whose worship was marked by parents’
burning their children as propitiatory sacrifice.
‘And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass
through the fire to Molech’ (Leviticus 18:21)”
(Ginsberg’s note). Boys sobbing in armies: the
Cold War draft was instituted in 1948.
43. “Ref. also world-shock 1953 N. Y. electric
chair executions Julius & Ethel Rosenberg spy
convicts” (Ginsberg’s note).
44. According to Ginsberg, the appearance of
the upper stories of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel
in San Francisco inspired this section of the
poem. Skyscrapers: “Ref. cinema images for
robot megalopolis centrum, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Berlin, 1932” (Ginsberg’s note).
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Howl
Ø
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!45 Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of
the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries!
blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses!
granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios,
tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American
river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive
bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood!
Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
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 Rockland46
where you’re madder than I am47
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 mother48
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
45. “This verse seems to objectify a recognition
uncovered in the act of composition, a crux of
the poem” (Ginsberg’s note).
46. Mental hospital near New York City. Carl
Solomon commented: “I was never in Rockland . . . Neither of us has ever been in Rock-
land.” Solomon was actually in Pilgrim State
Hospital at the time.
47. Ginsberg later recanted this assertion, saying he was thankful for Solomon’s “sanity and
generosity.”
48. Naomi Ginsberg was then in Pilgrim State
Hospital, as was Carl Solomon.
183
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184
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Allen Ginsberg
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 Utica49
I’m with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx50
I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket51 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 Golgotha52
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 Internationale53
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
49. City in upstate New York.
50. Solomon’s mother and aunts had lived in the
Bronx, as had Ginsberg’s mother and aunts.
51. Solomon commented that he was straightjacketed at Pilgrim State Hospital “rather often.”
52. Site of Christ’s crucifixion, according to the
New Testament. Solomon was not a socialist but
a liberal Democrat.
53. Composed by Eugène Pottier in 1871 to
celebrate the Paris Commune, this song has
served as the anthem of workers, socialists, and
communists.
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Howl
Ø
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
1956
“Howl” is a landmark of American poetry. By turns melancholy, shocking, and celebratory, it diagnoses American culture after World War II, and at the same time it reflects on
the poet’s personal experience. It reveals aspects of both civilization and the author that
would traditionally have remained hidden. One way to view “Howl” is as the signature
poem of the Beat movement—an act of opposition to the culture of conformity that
predominated in Cold War America. If that era could be termed by social scientists as a
time of “the lonely crowd” and “the organization man,” Ginsberg compellingly portrayed
a self that was at odds with both crowds and organizations. Ginsberg himself characterized the poem in a variety of different ways: as an effort to show readers that they could
be “angels”; as “an homage to art”; as a “coming out of the closet”; and as an “emotional
time bomb that would continue exploding in U. S. consciousness.”
A small epic based in free association, “Howl” recounts the deeds of its hero and his
companions. It is also a tissue of paradoxes, depicting the contemporary world as a hell
but also as a potential paradise. The speaker’s tone of voice is simultaneously prophetic
and injured (perhaps prophetic because injured). He dwells on social margins but with
an abiding good humor. He looks at gritty realities while engaging in quests for spiritual transcendence and aesthetic achievement. Love it or hate it, “Howl” expanded the
boundaries of what a poem could say and be.
Ginsberg wrote and revised the poem—not sure at first that it was a poem—in the
North Beach district of San Francisco. Soon after finishing Part I, he read it publicly at
the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. A little-known, virtually unpublished
poet when he began to speak, he was a sensation by the end of the evening. Scholar Jonah
Raskin describes the event: “After several hours of drinking cheap red wine, Ginsberg was
drunk, but as he read he became increasingly sober, and as he gathered momentum he
was surprised by his own ‘strange ecstatic intensity.’ He developed a deeper sense of his
own identity than he had ever had before. He thought of himself, he said, as a rabbi reading rhythmically to a congregation. Indeed, there was something of the Old Testament
prophet about him. In the process of reading the poem, he found himself forging a new
identity as a public poet sharing his private thoughts and feelings with eager, admiring
listeners. . . . ‘Everyone was yelling Go! Go! Go!’ Kerouac wrote. No one had ever been
at a poetry reading that was so emotional and so cathartic.”
Upon the poem’s publication, its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was charged with
obscenity, though he was found innocent. As a result of the trial’s notoriety, “Howl” immediately became a best-seller. It has remained hugely popular ever since, inspiring several generations of rock and roll artists, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling
Stones, and Patti Smith. The footnotes ascribed to Ginsberg and Carl Solomon in our
text derive from Ginsberg’s Howl: Original Draft Facsmile, Transcript & Variant Versions
(included in “Further Reading” above).
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Allen Ginsberg
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!1 Whole families shopping at night!
Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and
you, García Lorca,2 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 Charon3 quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking
bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
1956
While lamenting “the lost America of love,” the speaker of “A Supermarket in California”
reveals his personal struggle with loneliness and his need for others. More questioning
than prophetic, this poem uses paragraphs to acquire some of the informality of prose,
1. Partial shadows with a fringe of light.
2. Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), a Spanish
dramatist and poet. He was killed at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, perhaps because
of his liberal views or his homosexual identity.
3. In Greek myth, Charon (pronounced Keren)
is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the
newly dead across the rivers dividing the world
of the living from the world of the dead. Lethe:
the river of forgetfulness, one of five rivers in
Hades.
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Sunflower Sutra
Ø
and it employs surreal humor (“Who killed the pork chops?”) to complicate the tone of
suffering. “A Supermarket in California” pays tribute to Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who
wrote an analogous poem called “Hours continuing long, sore and heavy hearted.” The
speaker here begins to restore himself by reconnecting with Whitman and with his own
imagination.
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 Kerouac1 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,2 no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hung-over 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 Blake3—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—
corolla4 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,
1. Ginsberg’s friend and sometime lover Kerouac (1922–1969) wrote such classic Beat novels
as On the Road, The Subterraneans, and The
Dharma Bums.
2. The highest peaks in San Francisco are
Mount Davidson and Twin Peaks.
3. In 1948 Ginsberg had a mystical vision of the
English poet William Blake (1757–1827) reciting
“Ah! Sun-flower” and several other poems.
4. Petals of a flower.
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Allen Ginsberg
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—that civilization spotting
your crazy golden crown—
and those blear5 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,6
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 golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed
& 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.
1956
In Hindu tradition a sutra is an aphorism or a series of aphorisms, whereas in Buddhism
a sutra is a canonical narrative, especially the dialogues of the Buddha. The sunflower of
Ginsberg’s title alludes to William Blake’s “Ah! Sun-flower.” Paul Portugés writes: “The
best example of Ginsberg’s visionary quest, ending in a vision of Eternity, is ‘Sunflower
5. Dim, blurry.
6. Royal staff or baton.
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America
Ø
Sutra.’ The poem specifically refers to his Blake experience and also describes his perceptions of a dying sunflower, dying because the soot and grime of a thoughtless, mechanical
society have weighed so heavily upon it. . . . Ginsberg transcends the forces of our society
by coming forth with a vision of Eternity that claims we are all spirits, all angels.”
America
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven 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?1
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.
Burroughs2 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.3
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
1. Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) was a leader and
theorist of the Communist revolution in Russia.
Eventually deported by Stalin, he was assassinated in Mexico by one of Stalin’s agents.
2. William S. Burroughs (1914–1997), Ginsberg’s
friend and the author of such novels as Junky
and Naked Lunch.
3. Compare Ezra Pound’s Cantos: “The blossoms of the apricot / blow from the east to the
west, / And I have tried to keep them from falling” (Canto 13).
189
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Allen Ginsberg
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.4
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.5
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 Ford6 my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.
4. Members of the Industrial Workers of the
World, an activist American labor organization
of the 1910s and 1920s. Ginsberg thought they
had an “Anarchist-Buddhist-Populist tinge.”
5. Karl Marx (1818–1883), German social philosopher and revolutionary.
6. Industrialist (1863–1947) who founded Ford
Motor Company and established the assembly
line as a means of mass production. Strophes:
stanzas.
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America
Ø
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney7
America save the Spanish Loyalists8
America Sacco & Vanzetti9 must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.10
America when I was seven momma took 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 party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing11 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.
1956
7. Labor organizer (1882–1942) who spent
twenty-three years in jail on a probably false
charge of bomb-throwing.
8. Opponents of the Nationalists in the Spanish
Civil War of 1936–39, ultimately defeated.
9. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
Italian-American immigrants executed for
armed robbery and murder in 1927 after a controversial trial.
10. Nine African-American teenagers convicted
in 1931 in Alabama for an alleged gang rape of
two young white women that probably never oc-
curred. They spent as many as seventeen years
in jail for a crime they did not commit.
11. Radical economist, opponent of World War
I, and advocate of simple living (1883–1983).
Mensch: an adult, a good person (Yiddish).
Mother Bloor: Ella Reeve Bloor (1862–1951) was
a Communist Party organizer and writer in New
York. Ewig-Weibliche: the eternal feminine, the
power of women to inspire (German). Israel
Amter: Communist Party leader in Ohio and
New York. Compare Robert Browning’s line,
“Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?” in his
poem “Memorabilia” (1855).
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Allen Ginsberg
Michael Schumacher, one of Ginsberg’s biographers, has written of this poem: “ ‘America’ was a poem that demanded discipline and restraint on the part of the poet. If the
poem went on too long, it could lose its impact; if it overextended its use of hyperbole, it
would lose the seriousness of its intent. . . . Allen worked carefully on the poem, working
with its rhythms until he had built a poem with a series of emotional peaks and valleys.
A section would build momentum, reach a climax, and then Ginsberg would repeat
the process. The poem’s parting shot—‘America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the
wheel’—became one of Ginsberg’s most famous lines, one that managed to encompass
both the humor and sense of determination present throughout the work.”
Anti-Vietnam War Peace Mobilization
White sunshine on sweating skulls
Washington’s Monument pyramided high granite clouds
over a soul mass, children screaming in their brains on quiet grass
(black man strapped hanging in blue denims from an earth cross)—
Soul brightness under blue sky
Assembled before White House filled with mustached Germans
& police buttons, army telephones, CIA Buzzers, FBI bugs
Secret Service walkie-talkies, Intercom squawkers to Narco
Fuzz1 & Florida Mafia Real Estate Speculators.
One hundred thousand bodies naked before an Iron Robot
Nixon’s brain Presidential cranium case spying thru binoculars
from the Paranoia Smog Factory’s East Wing.
1972
“Anti-Vietnam War Peace Mobilization” evokes one of many protest rallies Ginsberg
attended during the Vietnam War. A pacifist, Ginsberg remained (in the words of biographer Michael Schumacher) “one of the war’s most visible and outspoken critics.” This
poem was written five days after the Kent State shooting of May 4, 1970, in which four
unarmed college students were killed, and a fifth was permanently paralyzed, by shots
fired by the Ohio National Guard. The event precipitated national protests.
1. Police. Florida Mafia Real Estate Speculators: probably a reference to Charles “Bebe” Rebozo
(1912–1998), a Florida banker and real estate investor and a close friend of President Richard Nixon.
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“Don’t Grow Old”
Ø
“Don’t Grow Old”
I
Twenty-eight years before on the living room couch he’d stared at me, I said
“I want to see a psychiatrist—I have sexual difficulties—homosexuality”
I’d come home from troubled years as a student. This was the weekend I would
talk with him.
A look startled his face, “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your
mouth?”
Equally startled, “No, no,” I lied, “that isn’t what it means.”
Now he lay naked in the bath, hot water draining beneath his shanks.
Strong shouldered Peter,1 once ambulance attendant, raised him up
in the tiled room. We toweled him dry, arms under his, bathrobe over his
shoulder—
he tottered thru the door to his carpeted bedroom
sat on the soft mattress edge, exhausted, and coughed up watery phlegm.
We lifted his swollen feet talcum’d white, put them thru pajama legs,
tied the cord round his waist, and held the nightshirt sleeve open for his hand,
slow.
Mouth drawn in, his false teeth in a dish, he turned his head round
looking up at Peter to smile ruefully, “Don’t ever grow old.”
II
At my urging, my eldest nephew came
to keep his grandfather company, maybe sleep overnight in the apartment.
He had no job, and was homeless anyway.
All afternoon he read the papers and looked at old movies.
Later dusk, television silent, we sat on a soft-pillowed couch,
Louis sat in his easy-chair that swiveled and could lean back—
“So what kind of job are you looking for?”
“Dishwashing but someone told me it makes your hands’ skin scaly red.”
“And what about officeboy?” His grandson finished highschool with marks too
poor for college.
“It’s unhealthy inside airconditioned buildings under fluorescent light.”
The dying man looked at him, nodding at the specimen.
He began his advice. “You might be a taxidriver, but what if a car crashed into
you? They say you can get mugged too.
Or you could get a job as a sailor, but the ship could sink, you could get
drowned.
1. Peter Orlovsky (1933–2010), American poet and longtime companion of Allen Ginsberg.
193
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Allen Ginsberg
Maybe you should try a career in the grocery business, but a box of bananas
could slip from the shelf,
you could hurt your head. Or if you were a waiter, you could slip and fall down
with a loaded tray, & have to pay for the broken glasses.
Maybe you should be a carpenter, but your thumb might get hit by a hammer.
Or a lifeguard—but the undertow at Belmar beach2 is dangerous, and you
could catch a cold.
Or a doctor, but sometimes you could cut your hand with a scalpel that had
germs, you could get sick & die”
Later, in bed after twilight, glasses off, he said to his wife
“Why doesn’t he comb his hair? It falls all over his eyes, how can he see?
Tell him to go home soon, I’m too tired.”
III.
Resigned
A year before visiting a handsome poet and my Tibetan guru,3
Guests after supper on the mountainside
we admired the lights of Boulder spread glittering below
through a giant glass window—
After coffee, my father bantered wearily
“Is life worth living? Depends on the liver—”
The Lama smiled to his secretary—
It was an old pun I’d heard in childhood.
Then he fell silent, looking at the floor
and sighed, head bent heavy
talking to no one—
“What can you do . . . ?”
1982
“ ‘Don’t Grow Old’ ” recalls the final months of Ginsberg’s father, Louis Ginsberg (1896–
1976), a high school teacher and poet. Ginsberg wrote the poem in 1978, two years after
his father’s death from cancer. Part I includes description similar to that found in a letter
Allen Ginsberg wrote to a friend in 1976: “Louis is dying in Paterson. Wasted thin arms
and wrinkled breasts, big belly, skull nose, speckled feet, thin legs, can’t stand up out of
a bathtub.”
2. In northern New Jersey.
3. Chogyam Trungpa (1939–1987), Allen Ginsberg’s spiritual advisor, a Buddhist scholar and
meditation master, and the founder of Naropa
Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where Ginsberg
sometimes taught.
Copyright Rutgers University Press • Unauthorized copying or sharing is prohibited
Yiddishe Kopf
Ø
It’s All So Brief
I’ve got to give up
Books, checks, letters
File cabinets, apartment
pillows, bodies and skin
even the ache in my teeth.
1986
Yiddishe Kopf
I’m Jewish because love my family matzoh ball soup.1
I’m Jewish because my fathers mothers uncles grandmothers said “Jewish,” all
the way back to Vitebsk2 & Kaminetz-Podolska via Lvov.
Jewish because reading Dostoyevsky at 13 I write poems at restaurant tables
Lower East Side, perfect delicatessen intellectual.
Jewish because violent Zionists make my blood boil, Progressive indignation.
Jewish because Buddhist,3 my anger’s transparent hot air, I shrug my shoulders.
Jewish because monotheist Jews Catholics Moslems’re intolerable intolerant—
Blake4 sd. “6000 years of sleep” since antique Nobodaddy Adonai’s mind trap—
Oy! such Meshuggeneh absolutes—
Senior Citizen Jewish paid my dues got half-fare card buses subways, discount
movies—
Can’t imagine how these young people make a life, make a living.
How can they stand it, going out in the world with only $10 and a hydrogen
bomb?
1994
The title, “Yiddishe Kopf,” means “Jewish head” (Yiddish). The poem critiques the absolutism of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) while employing
Jewish terms and cultural attitudes in a positive way.
1. Chicken soup and a dumpling made of matzoh meal, a traditional Eastern European Jewish
dish.
2. A town in Belarus. Kaminetz-Podolska: a town
in Ukraine. Lvov: a city in Ukraine.
3. Ginsberg was a Jewish Buddhist, a common
phenomenon in which an ethnically Jewish person follows both Buddhist and Jewish traditions.
4. English poet and mystic William Blake (1757–
1827). Nobodaddy: title character of Blake’s
poem “To Nobodaddy,” a pejorative image of
the Judeo-Christian God as a “silent & invisible / Father.” Adonai: Lord or God (Hebrew).
Oy!: oh, used to express dismay or exasperation
(Yiddish). Meshuggeneh: crazy, impractical
(Yiddish).
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