Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

  God! seeing the two gangsters from this angle was really strang!

  They certainly didn’t look like they looked in the papers.

  Here they were young and clean shaven and well-shaped.176

  That was Gregory’s private insight into the world of gangsters, the difference between Daily News and reality, strange musings on death, curious imagination about what it would be like to be dead, amazing appreciation of the pale bodies of gangsters naked on a morgue table, a little bit sexy even. I saw through that and said [it was] really universal mind. It has a funny kind of compassion, a funny kind of detachment. Pretty straightforward about it, actually. For a young kid it’s amazingly smart. That was the end of it. “I remember seeing their pictures in the papers.” You know, the diction, the cadence is absolutely Greenwich Village born. The pronunciation, as Gregory would pronounce it, indistinguishable from ordinary speech, and yet completely clear ideas, and a little discordant too, although the discord gives birth to a little vibration of beauty. Here they were young and clean shaven and well shaped. I appreciated his Whitmanic appreciation of their well-shaped bodies. There is a masturbatory, strange, and juvenile element in his early work.

  Then there’s a picture of himself, “In the Tunnel Bone of Cambridge,” a little fragment. He’s displaying his rough trade, gangster, or jailboy background to the Cambridge aesthetes.

  In the Tunnel Bone of Cambridge

  1

  In spite of voices —

  Cambridge and all its regions

  Its horned churches with fawns’ feet

  Its white-haired young

  and ashfoot legions —

  I decided to spend the night

  But that hipster-tone of my vision agent

  Decided to reconcile his sound with the sea

  leaving me flat

  North of the Charles

  So now I’m stuck here —

  a subterranean

  lashed to a pinnacle

  2

  I don’t know the better things that people know

  All I know is the deserter condemned me to black —

  He said: Gregory, here’s two boxes of night

  one tube of moon

  And twenty capsules of starlight, go an’ have a ball —

  He left and the creep took

  all my Gerry Mulligan records with him

  And it ends:

  Far into the tunnel-bone I put my ear to the ear

  of the minister—and I could hear

  the steel say to the steam

  and the steam to the roar: a black ahead

  A black ahead a black and nothing more.177

  That was his prophecy for himself. He had a lot of funny imaginings, like little archetypal cartoony, fantasy, daydream short movies that made use of images that were culturally common in anybody’s head. He dealt with them in a very lively, complete, intelligent way, making use of them for poems. There’s one here, “In the Early Morning,” in the City Lights Gasoline and The Vestal Lady on Brattle.

  In the Early Morning

  In the early morning

  beside the runaway hand-in-pocket

  whistling youth

  I see the hopping drooling Desirer

  His black legs . . . the corncob pipe and cane

  The long greasy coat, and the bloodstained

  fingernails

  He is waiting

  flat against the trees178

  It’s some kind of old bogeyman, out of Fritz Lang maybe, out of the movie M or Metropolis, or some early Carl Dreyer, Danish cinema dealing with vampires, Dreyer’s Vampyr perhaps, if you know that film from the 1932, “corncob pipe and cane, who owned greasy coat with bloodstained fingernails.” It’s just a little sketch, but pretty.

  Another major poem that he wrote at that time was a “Requiem for Charlie Parker,” a curious, early appreciation for Parker. A lot of poems to Charlie Parker or to Jimmy Dean or even to Kerouac these days have a kind of overblown, romantic rhetoric. They exaggerate everything and make it gushy or creepy or overaggressively angry. Here’s something that’s very straight and flat, like a masque play for several voices. I’m also pointing out that it’s a really young poem, hence the twisty, upside-down toylike imagery that a kid plays with.

  Requiem for “Bird” Parker, Musician

  this prophecy came by mail:

  in the last murder of birds

  a nowhere bird shall remain

  and it shall not wail

  and the nowhere bird shall be a slow bird

  a long long bird

  somewhere there is a room

  in a room

  in which an old horn

  lies in a corner

  like a handful of rice

  wondering about BIRD

  “An old horn lies in the corner like a handful of rice.” I couldn’t imagine anybody else thinking something like that.

  first voice

  hey, man, BIRD is dead

  they got his horn locked up somewhere

  put his horn in a corner somewhere

  like where’s the horn, man, where?

  second voice

  screw the horn

  like where’s BIRD?

  third voice

  gone

  BIRD was goner than sound

  broke the barrier with a horn’s coo

  BIRD was higher than moon

  BIRD hovered on a roof top, too

  like a weirdy monk he dropped

  horn in hand, high above all

  lookin’ down on them people

  with half-shut weirdy eyes

  saying to himself: “yeah, yeah”

  like nothin’ meant nothin’ at all

  fourth voice

  in early nightdrunk

  solo in his pent house stand

  BIRD held a black flower in his black hand

  he blew his horn to the sky

  made the sky fantastic! and midway

  the man-tired use of things

  BIRD piped a varied ephemera

  a strained rhythmical rat

  That’s Gregory’s own, his disharmonics, “a strained rhythmical rat.”

  like the stars didn’t know what to do

  then came a nowhere bird

  third voice

  yeah, a nowhere bird —

  while BIRD was blowin’

  another bird came

  an unreal bird

  a nowhere bird with big draggy wings

  BIRD paid it no mind; just kept on blowin’

  and the cornball bird came on comin’

  first voice

  right, like that’s what I heard

  the draggy bird landed in front of BIRD

  looked BIRD straight in the eye

  BIRD said: “cool it”

  and kept on blowin’

  second voice

  seems like BIRD put the square bird down

  first voice

  only for a while, man

  the nowhere bird began to foam from the mouth

  making all kinds of discords

  “man, like make it elsewhere,” BIRD implored

  but the nowhere bird paced back and forth

  like an old cornball with a nowhere scheme

  I like that, “an old cornball with a nowhere scheme.” You can see that this is all written in some kind of early fifties hip talk, maybe one of the first poems written making use of that newborn language. This is the first introduction of Beat or hippie vernacular into poetry that I know of. [Along with] Kerouac’s roughly contemporaneous Mexico City Blues, this may be some of the earliest use of that language, which later became very widespread in poetry and imit
ated badly.

  third voice

  yeah, by that time BIRD realized the fake

  had come to goof

  BIRD was about to split, when all of a sudden

  the nowhere bird sunk its beady head

  into the barrel of BIRD’s horn

  bugged, BIRD blew a long crazy note

  first voice

  it was his last, man, his last

  the draggy bird ran death into BIRD’s throat

  and the whole building rumbled

  when BIRD let go his horn

  and the sky got blacker . . . blacker

  and the nowhere bird wrapped its muddy wings round BIRD

  brought BIRD down

  all the way down

  fourth voice

  BIRD is dead

  BIRD is dead

  first and second and third voices

  yeah, yeah

  fourth voice

  wail for BIRD

  for BIRD is dead

  first and second and third voices

  yeah, yeah179

  That’s where it ends, a pretty strange masque for four voices. Really pretty because it’s not overstated at all. The imagination is very pretty, big bird sinking its beady head into bird’s horn. Bird opposed by the bird of death. Using that kind of fugitive language for playfulness with funny modern concepts, it’s nicely done. Imaginative with real poetic images in it and at the same time flat culturally, not overambitious, poetically just right. It’s down home in a way, “yeah, yeah” being the chorus for many voices. Just the idea of people saying “yeah, yeah” as choruses in itself is odd and original and imaginative for a young kid.

  He developed that language through the fifties. In 1955, Corso went out to San Francisco and met everybody. He brought some new poems and wrote a lot of poems while developing a style more and more extravagantly. At the beginning of his book Gasoline, there’s a fantastic long line style, “Ode to Coit Tower,” which ends on the most fantastical Shakespearean line in hippie poetry.

  I saw your blackjacketed saints your Zen potsmokers

  Athenians and cocksmen

  Though the West Wind seemed to harbor there not one

  pure Shelleyean dream of let’s say hay-

  like universe

  golden heap on a wall of fire

  sprinting toward the gauzy eradication of

  Swindleresque Ink180

  I read that and it blew my mind. I thought, that doesn’t make any sense at all, except actually it makes a great deal of sense, if you figure it out. What he’s saying is “I came to San Francisco, but I’m a Shelleyan and I don’t believe all this Zen, pot smoking bullshit, because I didn’t see any pure Shelleyan dream in it.” So what’s swindleresque ink? Disappearing ink. The universe disappearing into itself, a golden universe, the concept of conceptualization erasing itself. Kerouac’s golden ash anyway. “Swindleresque ink” is a perfect characterization of Gregory’s own poetry, where he presents an idea which disappears on itself when you look at it carefully.

  Or disharmony contradiction, where one image will contradict another image. It doesn’t seem to make sense, but it does make sense, because he’s playing with words and suggesting something curious. Corso was thinking of some great Shelleyan outburst of pure swind­leresque ink language, that is poetics, pure poesie. I thought that was a big touch of genius.

  Gregory’s interest was in disharmony. Discord was his method. That is, taking things, turning them inside out, making words contradict each other, or making the image or metaphor clash in a logical way. There is a poem called “This Was My Meal,” or this was my matter, or this was my poetics, or this was my method, this is my way, this is my actuality, this is my beauty.

  This Was My Meal

  In the peas I saw upside down letters of MONK

  Thelonious Monk. Now, how does he do that? Well, he’d look at the peas and say “I saw upside down,” looking at peas he sees something upside down, which is ridiculous to begin with. What? Letters. Of what? Monk?

  And beside it, in the Eyestares of Wine

  I saw Olive & Blackhair

  I decided sunset to dine

  I cut through the cowbrain and saw Christmas

  & my birthday run hand in hand in the snow

  I cut deeper

  and Christmas bled to the edge of the plate

  I turned to my father

  and he ate my birthday

  I drank my milk and saw trees outrun themselves

  valleys outdo themselves

  and no mountain stood a chance of not walking

  Dessert came in the spindly hands of stepmother

  I wanted to drop fire-engines from my mouth!

  But in ran the moonlight and grabbed the prunes.181

  It’s total contradiction but okay. “I wanted to drop fire-engines from my mouth!” In other words, he wanted to make the big sound, wanted to make big metaphor, big fire engines out of his mouth. Incredible idea of how to say poetical power. Really direct, totally direct, in the sense of what’s the most powerful screamy red majestical noise maker you can imagine? A fire engine! Okay, now “I wanted to drop fire-engines out of my mouth.” You may not understand that he means he wants to achieve great rhetoric, which is what that line means, but it is so strange in itself that even if you don’t understand what it means it penetrates the mind immediately with some kind of unconscious excitement in the language, excitement of having jumped over a chasm of nonassociation into a real clear logical association, so that it does mean something.

  But what contradicted him? “In ran the moonlight,” beauty, “and grabbed the prunes.” In ran beauty and grabbed reality. How can moonlight grab the prunes? What was the moonlight doing running in there anyway? It’s obviously playful, obviously an imaginary world of contradictions.

  He was interested in taking the actuals of his own thoughts, like moonlight, prunes, fire engines, Christmas, father, mother, peas, and then turning it upside down so that it contradicts itself. And by these discords, or self-contradictions, making a funny kind of harmony or beauty.

  CHAPTER 34

  Corso and Gasoline and Other Poems

  Peter, I, and Gregory were living in Amsterdam in October 1957. He was preparing this book [Gasoline] for City Lights and so he asked me to write an introduction. I asked him to write something about his method, because he had once given me a long lecture on his method, which completely knocked me out. It was a description of his mind process while writing and I’d never heard anybody talk so precise in such a funny direction as he did. Gregory’s method was that if he wanted to write a romantic poem about a young girl, then he would follow her in his mind’s eye to the courtyard and climb up her balcony to the fire escape like Romeo and Juliet, but once he got on the fire escape he would extend the image somewhere else. Not into some corny regular idea, he would find something that would contradict it. If there was laundry hanging from the fire escape, then there would have to be corpses, laundered human skins, and that would lead to [asking] how’d that get there? Well, maybe there was a fight on the moon or whatever occurred to him. And if there was a fight on the moon there had to be a spaceship. In other words, following mind associations and making a metaphor, but rather than completing it logically, completing the metaphor by making it contradict itself constantly, twisting it around and turning it upside down. He called that automaticism. Taking those automatic associations and making them contradict.

  I asked him to write a little essay that I could enclose within his preface, explaining his precise method of association. And he said, “With me automaticism is an intract moment in which the mind accelerates a constant hour of mind-foolery, mind genius, mind madness, when Bird Parker or Miles Davis blow a standard piece of music, they break off into other ownself little understood sounds, well that’s my
way with poetry. X, Y, and Z, call it automatic, I call it a standard flow because the offset words are standard, that is intentionally distractive, or diversed into my own sound. Of course many will say that a poem written on that order is unpolished. That’s just what I want them to be. Because I have made them truly my own which is inevitably something new, like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected by hip people who listen.”

  One excellent example is an odd poem, very Shelleyan, which he has down here as characterization, “Don’t Shoot the Warthog,” the warthog as being the muse. He chose the most ugly beast imaginable for his muse. He identifies with that strange ugly muse. “My goodness” is his comment on that one. Which is another way of putting his aesthetic out front.

  Don’t Shoot the Warthog

  A child came to me

  swinging an ocean on a stick.

  Well, see, he’s doing that again, a child swinging an ocean on a stick. Kind of a weird idea. Why not?

  He told me his sister was dead,

  I pulled down his pants

  and gave him a kick.

  What he’s trying to do is contradict each line. Each line contradicted a little bit.

  I drove him down the streets

  down the night of my generation

  I screamed his name, his cursed name,

  down the streets of my generation

  and children lept in joy to the name

  and running came.

  Mothers and fathers bent their heads to hear;

  I screamed the name.

  The child trembled, fell,

  and staggered up again,

  I screamed his name!

  And a fury of mothers and fathers

  sank their teeth into his brain.

  I called to the angels of my generation

  on the rooftops, in the alleyways,

  beneath the garbage and the stones,

  I screamed the name! and they came

  and gnawed the child’s bones.

  I screamed the name: Beauty

  Beauty Beauty Beauty182

  A funny combination. So his conception of beauty is as a warthog, discord. His method of writing was to go to the opposite, to be contrary, as with all of his life, to create beautiful objects out of the unexpected contradictory imagery. Beauty as the unexpected, like a fire engine dropped out of your mouth. Beauty as ugly, beauty as discord, beauty as contradiction, beauty as surprise, beauty as unreality, beauty as anything except the expected. So beauty as the ugly old self. Beauty as a dumb kid in the Lower East Side.