Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

  I enclose these poems. The first shows you where I was years ago. The second, a kind of dense lyric I instinctively try to imitate—after Crane, Robinson, Tate, and old Englishmen. Then, “The Shroudy Stranger” less interesting as a poem (or less sincere) but it connects observations of things with an old dream of the void—I have real dreams about a classic hooded figure. But this dream has become identified with my own abyss—and with the abyss of old Smokies under the Erie R.R. tracks on Straight Street—so the shroudy stranger speaking from the inside of the old wracked bum of Paterson or anywhere in America. This is only a half made poem (using a few lines and a situation I had in a dream). I contemplated a long work on the shroudy stranger, his wanderings. Next an earlier poem, Radio City, a long lyric written in sickness. Then a mad song (to be sung by Groucho Marx to a Bop background). Then an old style ballad-type ghost dream poem. Then, an ode to the setting sun of abstract ideas, written before leaving the hospital, and last an Ode to Judgment, which I just wrote, but which is unfinished. What will come of all this I do not know yet.

  I know this letter finds you in good health, as I saw you speak at the museum in N.Y. this week. I ran backstage to accost you, but changed my mind, after waving at you, and ran off again.

  Respectfully yours,

  A.G.212

  Then I sent him those poems and he wrote me back, no, they wouldn’t do. Then I went to my journals and took concrete direct prose statements from my journals and sent that to him, like “Marijuana Notation.”

  Marijuana Notation

  How sick I am!

  that thought

  always comes to me

  with horror.

  Is it this strange

  for everybody?

  But such fugitive feelings

  have always been

  my métier.

  Baudelaire—yet he had

  great joyful moments

  staring into space,

  looking into the

  middle distance,

  contemplating his image

  in Eternity.

  They were his moments

  of identity.

  It is solitude that

  produces these thoughts.

  It is December

  almost, they are singing

  Christmas carols

  in front of the department

  stores down the block on

  Fourteenth Street.213

  It takes an interior rumination and then suddenly [there’s] a switch and the attention goes to the external world from the interior illumination and bullshit. As with marijuana or just plain ordinary mind, suddenly waking up out of interior rumination and putting attention into the external world. Finally I came back to myself or located myself in space and time with a specific image and it was that jump from the interior to the observation of external ground or detail or fact that really struck me. I was high on grass and so it was triply awesome or doubly awesome, the realization that the mind could be spaced out and then come back and focus. That was also an aspect of the notion of a gap or jump from one phase of consciousness to another, one unconscious daydreaming to a real place, a focus on the external phenomenal world.

  That is one of the poems I still read a great deal when I give readings, trying to expound where I came from and what I’m doing, and that’s very much under the influence of William Carlos Williams’s clamp the mind down on objects or get to actuality. At least that’s the basis of my poetry. So I put together a bunch of poems for Williams like these. The whole point is that from the subjective babble, meandering, thinking, and daydreaming you’ve got reality all of a sudden, shifting and becoming aware of the actuality outside, just like Williams was writing about actualities. That he dug immediately.

  A couple other little things that I sent him were:

  A Meaningless Institution

  I was given my bedding, and a bunk

  in an enormous ward,

  surrounded by hundreds of weeping,

  decaying men and women.

  I sat on my bunk, three tiers up

  next to the ceiling,

  looking down the gray aisles.

  Old, crippled, dumb people were

  bent over sewing. A heavy girl

  in a dirty dress

  stared at me. I waited

  for an official guide to come

  and give me instructions.

  After awhile, I wandered

  off down empty corridors

  in search of a toilet.214

  Instead of getting hung up on metaphysical visionary Rimbaud derangement of the senses, I started looking, like Williams, to ­ordinary-mind observations for visionary perception. To look at ordinary fact rather than supernatural fact. Then “The Trembling of the Veil,” the trembling of the veil of consciousness. The title is taken from an essay by William Butler Yeats in the 1890s on the trembling of the veil of civilization. So “trembling of the veil” means coming on with some big revelation.

  The Trembling of the Veil

  Today out of the window

  the trees seemed like live

  organisms on the moon.

  Each bough extended upward

  covered at the north end

  with leaves, like a green

  hairy protuberance. I saw

  the scarlet-and-pink shoot-tips

  of budding leaves wave

  delicately in the sunlight,

  blown by the breeze,

  all the arms of the trees

  bending and straining downward

  at once when the wind

  pushed them.215

  I was working under the influence of William Carlos Williams’s example, who said “direct contact with external phenomenal world is the only way you can, in describing what your perception is of objective reality outside of you, it’s the only way you can make a coordinate point where others can see, compare their perceptions with your perceptions.” If you describe accurately what you see outside of yourself, you will transmit your mind that way rather than try to do it by means of symbolic or rehash of esoteric symbols, but direct contact with the external world will give you a coordinate to work with other people’s perceptions. You present what you perceive through your senses and others will be able to compare their own sense experience with yours, and thus you present your mind. Then I began writing in a more up-to-date modern style, at the same time mixed up with writing rhymed lyrics and straightforward modern poems modeled on Williams. It was just a little animistic description of nature, but taken from fact rather than making a big trip. He immediately wrote back saying, “How many more of these do you have? I shall see that you get a book.” He was amazed that somebody understood the quick shift of perception that he was into.

  The Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour

  Two bricklayers are setting the walls

  of a cellar in a new dug out patch

  of dirt behind an old house of wood

  with brown gables grown over with ivy

  on a shady street in Denver. It is noon

  and one of them wanders off. The young

  subordinate bricklayer sits idly for

  a few minutes after eating a sandwich

  and throwing away the paper bag. He

  has on dungarees and is bare above

  the waist; he has yellow hair and wears

  a smudged but still bright red cap

  on his head. He sits idly on top

  of the wall on a ladder that is leaned

  up between his spread thighs, his head

  bent down, gazing uninterestedly at

  the paper bag on the grass. He draws

  his hand across his breast, and then

  slowly rubs his knuckles across the

  sid
e of his chin, and rocks to and fro

  on the wall. A small cat walks to him

  along the top of the wall. He picks

  it up, takes off his cap, and puts it

  over the kitten’s body for a moment.

  Meanwhile it is darkening as if to rain

  and the wind on top of the trees in the

  street comes through almost harshly.216

  So I’m looking out the window, direct observation, with a kind of erotic projection as you may notice. I was looking at what was going on outside and trying to sketch it, as a painter makes a little sketch. The description of the bricklayer is a bit awash with erotic feeling and the interest in what he did with the little kitty. Then, all of a sudden, this glimpse of the panorama of the space in the sky beyond. It’s a jump of attentiveness of the mind from a small thing to awareness of a giant panorama, just like there was a jump in the marijuana notation from thinking about how sick I am to suddenly realizing “It is December almost, they’re singing Christmas carols in front of the department stores down the block.” Clamping the mind back down on objects, getting back to reality. That was what Williams noticed and dug in the poems that I sent him.

  “A Poem on America” was another one. We were all reading Dostoyevsky’s Raw Youth, his penultimate novel, in which there’s a character, Versilov, and so I wrote, “America is like Russia. Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.” That was a painting described in the novel.

  A Poem on America

  America is like Russia.

  Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.

  We have the proletariat too.

  Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.

  Versilov wore a hair shirt

  and dreamed of classical pictures.

  The alleys, the dye works,

  Mill Street in the smoke,

  melancholy of the bars,

  the sadness of long highways,

  negroes climbing around

  the rusted iron by the river,

  the bathing pool hidden

  behind the silk factory

  fed by its drainage pipes;

  all the pictures we carry in our mind

  images of the thirties,

  depression and class consciousness

  transfigured above politics

  filled with fire

  with the appearance of God.217

  Well, I don’t know about the end. The alleys, the dye works, Mill Street in the smoke, the sadness of long highways. Kerouac loved it and then Williams immediately recognized that and liked it. It was just simple realistic stuff.

  CHAPTER 41

  Ginsberg and “The Green Automobile”

  That was still not energetic enough, it was still like a setting sun in a sense, the notions are still lacklove, haunted, defeat. What was necessary was some kind of a discovery of my own imagination. And that comes out in a poem called “The Green Automobile,” which is 1953. Basically it is a reaction to—if I could do what I want, then what would I do? Green is a gay color of Roman togas, or Roman galavant. The poem is prophetic because there’s a miraculous college of the body mentioned, which likely enough is an inkling of the Buddhist school Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

  The Green Automobile

  If I had a Green Automobile

  I’d go find my old companion

  in his house on the Western ocean.

  Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

  I’d honk my horn at his manly gate,

  inside his wife and three

  children sprawl naked

  on the living room floor.

  He’d come running out

  to my car full of heroic beer

  and jump screaming at the wheel

  for he is the greater driver.

  We’d pilgrimage to the highest mount

  of our earlier Rocky Mountain visions

  laughing in each other’s arms,

  delight surpassing the highest Rockies,

  and after old agony, drunk with new years,

  bounding toward the snowy horizon

  blasting the dashboard with original bop

  hot rod on the mountain

  we’d batter up the cloudy highway

  where angels of anxiety

  careen through the trees

  and scream out of the engine.

  We’d burn all night on the jackpine peak

  seen from Denver in the summer dark,

  forestlike unnatural radiance

  illuminating the mountaintop:

  childhood youthtime age & eternity

  would open like sweet trees

  in the nights of another spring

  and dumbfound us with love,

  for we can see together

  the beauty of souls

  hidden like diamonds

  in the clock of the world,

  like Chinese magicians can

  confound the immortals

  with our intellectuality

  hidden in the mist,

  in the Green Automobile

  which I have invented

  imagined and visioned

  on the roads of the world

  more real than the engine

  on a track in the desert

  purer than Greyhound and

  swifter than physical jetplane.

  Denver! Denver! we’ll return

  roaring across the City & County Building lawn

  which catches the pure emerald flame

  streaming in the wake of our auto.

  This time we’ll buy up the city!

  I cashed a great check in my skull bank

  to found a miraculous college of the body

  up on the bus terminal roof.

  But first we’ll drive the stations of downtown,

  poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail

  whorehouse down Folsom

  to the darkest alleys of Larimer

  paying respects to Denver’s father

  lost on the railroad tracks,

  stupor of wine and silence

  hallowing the slum of his decades,

  salute him and his saintly suitcase

  of dark muscatel, drink

  and smash the sweet bottles

  on Diesels in allegiance.

  Then we go driving drunk on boulevards

  where armies march and still parade

  staggering under the invisible

  banner of Reality—

  hurtling through the street

  in the auto of our fate

  we share an archangelic cigarette

  and tell each other’s fortunes:

  fames of supernatural illumination,

  bleak rainy gaps of time,

  great art learned in desolation

  and we beat apart after six decades . . .

  and on an asphalt crossroad,

  deal with each other in princely

  gentleness once more, recalling

  famous dead talks of other cities.

  The windshield’s full of tears,

  rain wets our naked breasts,

  we kneel together in the shade

  amid the traffic of night in paradise

  and now renew the solitary vow

  we made each other take

  in Texas, once:

  I can’t inscribe here. . . .

  • • • • • •

  • • • • • •

  How many Saturday nights will be

  made drunken by this legend?

  How will young Denver come to mourn

  her forgotten sexual angel?

  How many boys will strike the black piano
>
  in imitation of the excess of a native saint?

  Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high

  schools of melancholy night?

  While all the time in Eternity

  in the wan light of this poem’s radio

  we’ll sit behind forgotten shades

  hearkening the lost jazz of all Saturdays.

  Neal, we’ll be real heroes now

  in a war between our cocks and time:

  let’s be the angels of the world’s desire

  and take the world to bed with us before we die.

  Sleeping alone, or with companion,

  girl or fairy sheep or dream,

  I’ll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:

  all men fall, our fathers fell before,

  but resurrecting that lost flesh

  is but a moment’s work of mind:

  an ageless monument to love

  in the imagination:

  memorial built out of our own bodies

  consumed by the invisible poem—

  We’ll shudder in Denver and endure

  though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.

  So this Green Automobile:

  I give you in flight

  a present, a present