An odyssey and an omnibus, these journals are a work meant to live on a nearby shelf, to be opened if in need of inspiration or assurance. It serves as a road atlas in a universe with multiple dimensions and numerous points of entry.
This massive collection is another extremely valuable insight into the life and work of Allen Ginsberg and will soon become required reading for Ginsberg scholars.
In the News. University of Minnesota Press Coming soon. Home Current Catalogs Blog. View Cart Checkout. Search Site only in current section. He was right to cut them and not to republish the version of the poem that appeared in BMR in Ginsberg meant the whole human race.
Part II shows him at his most humanistic, and his most sentimental, along with a sweet spirituality that seems to come from the universe itself and not from an organized religion. Nor is it Ginsberg at his worst. America go fuck yourself with your drones and your white house and your borders and your fucking hypocrisy.
Ginsberg relates the poem to music, saying that the key to understanding the structure of the poem is "in the jazz choruses As in jazz, the point that Ginsberg hoped to get across was not narrative or beauty but spontaneity, human expression, and reaction. A persons emotion was to rise and build just as the long lines themselves built upon the emotion contained within. The stanzas of the poem are also irregular and spontaneous. The first stanza is sixteen lines, the second and third both twelve, the fourth and fifth both ten.
The final stanza is an amalgamation of rhythms and stream of consciousness writing. Ginsberg shifts in the poem from talking to America like a jilted friend or lover, to discovering that much of himself is America, and finally moving towards ridiculing and taunting this personified America for its militaristic culture, its vapid media, and its paranoid politics.
Like other Ginsberg poems, the structure is really meant to be heard rather than read. In reading the poem aloud one better understands the conversational nature of the poem. The poem's first stanza is somewhat of an introduction that sets the time and context for the poem. The first line sets an exhausted and depressed mood for the poem. Ginsberg expresses his own hopelessness that his life or work, or anyone's life, would mean anything within a culture of censorship and oppression.
He laments the cultural poverty of the time, equating it to only a few dollars and cents, and finds that he is not even able to be himself in such a culture. The following lines of the poem start Ginsberg's conversation with this personified America.
He is partly dissatisfied with the militarism of the country and he tells America to "go fuck yourself with your atom bomb" 5. He wants to stop the conversation before it even starts, making excuses that he doesn't want to be bothered with such a conversation ignoring that he was the one who started it and declaring that he won't write until "I'm in my right mind" 7. But as he noted before, he will never be in his right mind.
He cannot stand his mind. The stanza then turns into a kind of angry lament. These lines make America seem like a lost lover, someone that Ginsberg once loved and saw great promise and potential in; it was a potential for salvation. Ginsberg is perhaps remembering the great promise that America offered his own family as immigrant to the land.
He asks when America will once again become the land that it once promised to be. When will it become "angelic" 8 , when will it see the death and destruction that it has caused, when will it understand that its own political oppression is greater than the political oppression of the "Trotskyites" communists that it denounces and goes to war with 11? Ginsberg laments that the libraries of America, representing the potential of free information and free expression, are "full of tears" 12 , and he denounces the corporatism of American life symbolized by "the supermarket" and how those with "good looks" are given easy entry into American wealth The second stanza continues the back and forth argument that Ginsberg is having with the personified country.
He begins with a tone of reconciliation, trying to find commonality amongst himself and his country. He writes that it is "you and I who are perfect" and insinuates that the longing for the "next world" is pointless. One of the most poignant lines of the poem is line 19, when Ginsberg, speaking to his country like a lost lover, says that "You made me want to be a saint. As a young man, influenced by his mother's Communist affiliations, Ginsberg felt that his first calling was to help workers and laborers as a labor lawyer.
Even though his ambitions took him in a different direction - that of a poet instead of a lawyer - Ginsberg admits that he cannot "give up my obsession. This is patriotic optimism that Ginsberg writes about here, though as the rest of the poem attests, there has been a definite break in the relationship.
Line 20 continues the theme of reconciliation. Ginsberg hopes that "There must be some other way to settle this argument. As he noted in lines from the first stanza, he feels that, in a way, this conversation is pointless, though through the act of writing it he knows there must be some validity in it. This stanza also sees Ginsberg offer themes of warning to his country.
He asks if America is being "sinister" or if the country, through is artistic suppression and police-like state, is simply playing some kind of twisted practical joke on him and those like him. Burroughs ' time spent in Tangiers, Morrocco where he was in a kind of exile from the United States because of legal problems related to the transport of illegal drugs from Mexico.
Ginsberg, for his whole career, was strongly in support of legalizing drugs and his warning to America in this line is that if the country continues to prosecute for such petty crimes, the country will loose their "best minds.
Ginsberg accuses the country of "pushing" him and he asserts that he knows "what I'm doing" Line 26 uses imagery from Eastern influences, a region of the world whose religion and culture would fascinate Ginsberg throughout his life.
He writes that "the plum blossoms are falling. By using this imagery from another country and culture, Ginsberg is attempting to tell America that its essence as a benevolent leader of the world is in decline. It is the East - both in its culture and its politics - that show the way to a better world. Ginsberg finishes the stanza by telling America that he has not "read the newspapers for months" and that the reason is because "everyday somebody goes on trial for murder" This is both a lament at the violence, or threat of violence, that was increasingly a part of American culture.
But this line also has personal resonance for Ginsberg. Throughout his time in New York and San Francisco, Ginsberg saw several of his friends and acquaintances in the Beat movement arrested for murder. Most of the arrests were not unwarranted. Literally he has, from all the evidence, been through hell. The wonder of the thing is not that he has survived but that he, from the very depths, has found a fellow whom he can love, a love he celebrates without looking aside in these poems.
Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith—and the art! To God: to illuminate all men. Beginning with Skid Road. Let Occidental and Washington be transformed into a higher place, the plaza of eternity.
Illuminate the welders in shipyards with the brilliance of their torches. Let the crane operator lift up his arm for joy.
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