|
From The Literary Revelution
in America
Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso
In the Fall of 1955 a group of six unknown poets in San Francisco, in a moment of drunken enthusiasm, decided to defy the system of academic poetry, official reviews, New York publishing machinery, national sobriety and generally accepted standards of good taste, by giving a free reading of their poetry in a run down secondrate experimental art gallery in the Negro section of San Francisco. They sent out a hundred postcards, put up signs in North Beach (Latin Quarter) bars, bought a lot of wine to get the audience drunk, and invited the well known Frisco Anarchist resident poet Kenneth Rexroth to act as Master of Cerimonies. Their approach was purely amatuer and goofy, but it should be noted that they represented a remarkable lineup of experience and character- it was an assemblage of really good poets who knew what they were writing and didn't care about anything else. They got drunk, the audience got drunk, all that was missing was the orgy. This was no ordinary poetry reading. Indeed, it resembled anything but a poetry reading. The reading was such a violent and beautiful expression of their revelutionary individuality (a quality bypassed in American poetry since the formulations of Whitman), conducted with such surprising abandon and delight by the poets themselves, and presenting such a high mass of beautiful unanticipated poetry, that the audience, expecting some Bohemian stupidity, was left stunned, and the poets were left with the realization that they were fated to make a permanent change in the literary firmament of the States.
The poets participating were a curious group. First, Philip Lamantia, a surrealist blood poet, former member fo San Francisco Anarchist group, who at the age of 13 had in imitation of Rimbaud written surrealist poetry, come to New York, consulted Breton and other surrealists, renounced surrealism, lived with Indians and priests in Mexico, took drugs, underwent visions, became Catholic, became silent, and reappeared at age 28 in natve town to take part in the reading.
The
second poet, the youngest, was representative of the Black Mountain School-which
derives in influence from Pound and W.C. Williams. Michael McClure read
some of his own work and some of Robert Duncan's.
The next
poet, Philip Whalen, a strange fat young man from Oregon- in appearance
a Zen Buddist Bodhisattva- read a series of very personal relaxed, learned
mystical-anarchic poems. His obvious carelessness for his reputation as
a poet, his delicacy and strange American sanctity is evident in his poetry,
written in rare post Poundian assemblages of blocks of hard images set
in juxtapositions, like haikus.
The most brilliant shock of the evening was the declamation of the now-famous rhapsody, Howl, by Allen Ginsberg.... The poem initiates a new style in composition in the U.S., returning to the bardic strophic tradition, till now rejected in the U.S., of Apollinaire, Whitman, Artaud, Lorca, Mayakovsky- and improving on the tradition to the extent of combining the long lines and coherence of Whitman, with the cubist imagery of the French Spanish traditions, and adding to that a fantastic rhythmic crisis of Bach fugue, and ends on a high peak of ecstatic elongation of the line structure....The poem is built like a pyramid, in three parts, and ends in fantastic merciful tears- the protest against the dehumanizing mechanization of American culture, and the affirmation of individual particular compassion in the midst of a great chant.
The reading was delivered by the poet, rather surprised at his own power, drunk on the platform, becoming increasingly sober as he read, driving forward with a strange ecstatic intesity, delivering a spiritual confession to the astounded audience-ending in tears which restored to American poetry the prophetic consiousness it had lost since the conclusion of Hart Crane's The Bridge, another celebrated mystical work.
But this was not all! The last poet to appear on the platform was perhaps more remarkable than any of the others: Gary Snyder, a bearded youth of 26, also from the Northwest, formerly a lumberjack and seaman, student of literature and anthropology who had lived with American Indians and taken the religious drug Peyote with them, and who is now occupied in the study of Chinese and Japanese preparatory to the drunken silence of a Zen Monastery in Japan. He read parts of a hundred page poem he had been composing for 5 years, myths and texts- composition of fragments of all his experiences forming anarchic and mystical pattern of individuality.
Perhaps the most strange poet in the room was not on the platform- he sat on the edge of it, back to the poets, eyes closed, nodding at good lines, swigging a bottle of California red wine- at times shouting encouragement or responding with spontaneous images-jazz style- to the long zig-zag rhythms chanted in Howl. This was Jack Kerouac, then unknown also, now perhaps the most celebrated novelist in America....Mr. Kerouac is also a superb poet, his poems are automatic, pure, brilliant, awesome, gentle, and unpublished as of yet.....
Mention should also be given to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publisher of Ginsberg's Howl, and himself poet of a book of verse, Pictures of a Gone World. Ferlinghetti was the most advanced publisher in America in that he published "suspect" literature, literature usually rejected by other publishing houses because of their wild neo-bop prosody, non-commercial value, extreme expression of soul, and the pure adventure of publishing it. For his pains he was tried in American courts for publishing Ginsberg.
Also, the same year, announcements were made to recognize the completion of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, a long epic prose-poem. Burroughs is the shady character behind the more published Ginsberg and Kerouac, and the completion and editing of his work were grounds for a reunion of the three in Tangiers early that year. The booked seemed destined to be trifled with from the beginning. Its style is surrealistic and its theme; the desecration of the unity, the human image desecrated by a mad society, its images; sex, drugs, dreams, riots, hangings, etc. Soon Naked Lunch was to be censored due to its alleged American based obscenity.
In America, apart from the Little Rock stagnant sign of doom, apart form the money-wild cultureless majority of humans that inhabit it, apart from the wealth and the woe and fear and sorrow and false joy and guilt, there is, out of all of this, in America, a new forceful stir of young poets, and they have taken it upon themselves, with angelic clarions in hand, to announce their discontent, their demands, their hope, their final wondrous unimaginable dream.
A new era in poetry, creative writing, and conciousness had been planted by the hands of those above in the ear and heads of all present at Six Gallery in 1955. The first cannons rang out and their blow hit first the mind infrastructure and intro-hierarchy of conformity, commonality, repression, and materialism held by those hundred or so individuals present; those individuals taking into the San Francisco night a new head and awestruck inspiration
Howl
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 machin-
ery 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 tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant
cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas
and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars
of war,
who were expelled from the academies for
crazy &
publishing obscene
odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burn-
ing their money
in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through
the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning
through
Laredo with a belt
of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine
in
Paradise Alley,
death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after
night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
al-
cohol and cock and
endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering
cloud and
lightning in the
mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the mo-
tionless 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 Brook-
lyn, 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 after
noon 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 Brook-
lyn Bridge,
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-grind-
ings and migraines
of China under junk-with-
drawal 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 grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the
Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated
at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho
seeking vis-
ionary 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 Okla-
homa on the impulse
of winter midnight street
light 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 fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating
the
F.B.I. in beards
and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their
dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible 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 manu-
scripts,
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 rose
gardens 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 can-
dle 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 sun
rise, 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 pet-
ticoat 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 unemploy-
ment 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 steamheat
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,
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
unsuccess-
fully, 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 sinis-
ter intelligent
editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs
of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually
hap-
pened and walked
away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly
daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks,
not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair,
fell out of
the subway window,
jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, 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 steam
whistles,
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 hyp
notism & 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 in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void
of insulin
Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy 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 mad
man 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, rock-
ing and rolling
in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of
love, dream of life a night-
mare, 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 fur-
nished 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 ellipse the
catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing 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 intel-
ligent and shaking
with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing 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 imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans
and unob
tainable 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 stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch
whose
blood is running
money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies!
Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal 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 fac-
tories dream and
croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks 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!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible
suburbs!
skeleton treasuries!
blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral
nations! invincible mad
houses! granite
cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to
Heaven! Pave-
ments, 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! De-
spairs! 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 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
twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades 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 col-
lapse 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
