Good Summary of the Beat Generation Writers

Posted on by Opher

The writers and poets who changed America (msn.com)

My Favourite Poems: Allen Ginsberg – America

Posted on by Opher

The poor way that Poetry was taught in my crap schools turned me against poetry. It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that the Beat poets and song lyrics turned me back on to it. Allen Ginsberg was fundamental to that rediscovery. He, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and Roy Harper turned me back on.

I love the way Allen addresses America as if it is a person, an entity, reasoning with it, talking to it in some mad tirade of a conversation.

America

BY ALLEN GINSBERG

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?

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.   

Burroughs 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.

I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

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.

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 Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

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 Nearing 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 its 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.

Berkeley, January 17, 1956

Allen Ginsberg – America – a poem addressing America

Posted on by Opher

Allen Ginsberg – America – a poem addressing America

This was not so much a poem as a dialogue with a country – a country with a personality. He addresses the injustices, the shallowness and paranoia as well as his own situation and relationship.

This was a poem written in the mid-50s in the anti-Russian paranoia following the 2nd World War. There was a great fear of communism. The world was in a mess and the fear of atomic war was claustrophobic.

America

Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven 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?
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.
Burroughs 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.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and 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.
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 our 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 china man’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 goes 1400 miles and hour and
Twenty five 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 Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they’re all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
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 Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw 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 filling stations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes 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.

Poetry – Jack

Posted on by Opher

Jack

Society tried to sell me a dream:

                Work hard,

                                Fit in,

And keep your nose clean.

Jack sold me an alternative view:

                Go Go Go,

                                Live it,

Nothing less will do.

Opher – 22.4.2021

I was sixteen when I discovered Jack Kerouac. He came at the right time. I did not like the life on offer. I wanted something much more.

Jack offered sex, excitement, madness, exploration, wonder, awe, music, zen, marijuana and shared adventure.

That’s what I wanted.

It sounded much better than a career.

Poetry – Ginsberg’s Sandwich of Reality

Posted on by Opher

Ginsberg’s Sandwich of reality

I’m eating Ginsberg’s reality sandwich

Sitting under a nuclear explosion

Floating on a scum of solidity

Cooling in the void.

Aware, but only partially aware,

Of unfathomable weirdness.

Dining on black holes

Quarks and quantum thoughts.

I’m eating the bread first

And hoping someday to fully digest the filling.

Perhaps it will sustain me?

I’m licking the Zen of now

Salivating over my dreams

For they are all that I know

To be real.

Flavours tease my palate

As I devour the thoughts and ideas

Of all and sundry

In search of a glimmer.

I swallow it all.

I swallow everything I am told.

I swallow eternity.

I have the sandwich

But it is a mere snack.

Reality may reside in the main course,

Or the coffee,

Or the slumber that follows.

I fear this sandwich will not deliver

The absolutes it promised!

Perhaps it merely dulls the appetite!

Opher 21.1.2016

Ginsberg’s Sandwich of Reality

I was reading Ginsberg’s book of poems – Reality Sandwich. That is what inspired this poem.

I liked the idea of snacking on reality. Reality is a concept, a place we do not inhabit. Science has revealed much but the reality is so much more. Our senses are limited and our understanding more so.

We live on a thin skin on a cooling planet. Those plates are drifting around and we crawl about on them. A little way under our feet is a great seething mass of molten magma. Above us we are shielded from the radiation of a constant nuclear explosion. A thin layer of ozone and atmosphere protect us from a lethal dose of hard radiation. Within us a world of quantum mechanics flows unnoticed as subatomic particles stream back in time, exist in two places at once or connect in weird and wonderful forms.

I wonder what the Taliban make of all this? I know the Christian fundamentalists live in their own little world where science does not exist. All fundamentalists reject reality in favour of a rigid adherence to a set of ancient words put together by primitive people. Theirs is a world devoid of poetry, music, tolerance or love!

I prefer life and love.

Maybe love is the filling of that sandwich? That would taste good!

Poetry – Screaming for Beat

Posted on by Opher

Screaming for Beat

Screaming at the injustice

The insanity, the madness.

Screaming in the face of destruction, devastation.

Screaming at the rape of nature, the slaughter.

Screaming at the mindless billions

Swamping all that is good and pure

With their synthetic plastic, neon boredom.

Screaming at myself for being

Part of the of the machine,

Within the machine,

Of the machine,

And at the whim of the machine.

Screaming at myself,

Consumed with guilt,

At my impotence,

Inabilities,

Limitations,

And inadequacies.

We should all be screaming

Instead of placidly sitting,

Buying, consuming

And politely talking

Platitudes;

Voting for psychopaths,

Allowing transgressions.

We should all be screaming

As the world is being torn

From our grip,

Nature eradicated,

And the planet

Transformed

Into a plastic theme park,

With Muzak, playgrounds, wheel-chair access and a curfew.

Where it is safe,

Comfortable

And there is no raucous noise to disturb the peace,

No insects to bite

And no, absolutely no, need

To think.

Opher 21.1.2016

Screaming for Beat

The Beat poets were the start of a movement that wanted no part of the machine that society had become. They wanted life. They were on a mad crazy journey to experience, feel and gain knowledge, insight and satori. They smoked hash, took peyote and heroin to change reality and explore the dimensions of mind. Life was a journey, a vivid set of possibilities to be experienced. Every moment was vital. It had to be squeezed and its essence extracted. Life was for living, for kicks, for crazy, but also for love, satori and spiritual exploration. Life was Zen.

There were no rules or boundaries. There were poems to be created and shared; emotions to be garnered, sex to be shared, music to be bopped to and journeys to be undertaken. There wasn’t a second to waste.

Society was on a mad controlled rush to consume, exploit and use up. It was devoid of love, poems and purpose. Everything was regimented, made to fit, reduced or eradicated. Nature was unwanted unless confined to trimmed lawns, tidy flower beds and ornamental plants. If it moved – kill it.

For me that vision of society was a vision of a nightmare – an existence sucked dry, leaving life as a desiccated husk of a life devoid of feeling and passion.

The world was being tamed, destroyed, consumed and made to fit the plastic model. People were being controlled, trained to work and consume and tamed. Their desires were repressed. Their feelings controlled. Their passions doused.

The world was being transformed into a plastic nightmare of consumption and order. Nature and wilderness are being destroyed before our very eyes as the juggernaut of progress bulldozes the planet in its relentless greed.

We are being fenced in, tied up with laws and placed in our cubicles in orderly lines. I want the chaos. Fuck the safety – I want the excitement – I want to live each second. It’s not about the length of a lifetime; it’s about the quality.

Poetry – Meaning Jack and Allen

Posted on by Opher

Meaning Jack and Allen

Searching for meaning,

Truth and beauty

In the back streets

Away from the plastic

Neon falsity of Mammon.

Searching for a raw

Unprocessed chord,

A burst of inspiration

Blast of energy

Among the processed

Refinement of rehearsed notes.

Searching for energy.

Searching for words of passion,

Fury and eloquence,

Words that are meant,

That are revealing,

Inspiring and awakening.

Searching for candour

Amid the controlled,

Those robbed

By the political correctness thieves

Who steal souls in the name of respect.

Searching for compassion

Among the dead

Moribund corpses

Who walk the well-lit streets

Without a mind,

Regurgitating indoctrinations

And believing it.

Searching for someone to offend

Argue with

And learn from.

Who has the balls to speak;

To scream the images

That adorn the inside of their skull.

Searching for reality

In the midst of a culture

That has sold its spirit

To both religion and business,

That is bankrupt,

Devoid of ideas;

That consumes the planet

In the madness of its death throes;

In a mindless self-fuck;

That thinks plastic is perfect –

It’s what the suckers want –

It makes bucks.

Searching for the spirit

Of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassidy

On one long crazy rapture

One night of endless madness

With no limits,

No end.

Spitting words, dreams, visions and thoughts

In sounds

Beyond words

Beyond meaning.

On an endless drive

Of desperation

Roaring across plains,

Up mountains,

Down canyons

In search of crazy;

In search of ultimate kicks.

Goofin’ with eternity,

Lost in honking sounds,

Mad fuck

And high on anything –

Just so long as it will never stop,

Never be understood,

Never be explained.

But it is there –

It exists

In the Zen of an instant,

A rock, a sax solo, a raving stanza,

A drooling poem

Spontaneously bursting into existence

Climaxing from the tongue

In an orgy of sudden understanding,

Realisation

Real

Unfettered, furious,

So orgasmic and crude

That it throbs through your groin

To explode in your brain

With uncontainable joy.

Searching for an explanation

For the madness

Wreaked on humanity,

On the planet,

The poor trussed planet;

The enslavement of humanity

The taming,

The reduction

Containment and boredom,

The pressures

That causes people

To explode

In cruelty and barbarism.

Searching for the love

That melts the soul

In ecstatic waves;

That swamp, crash and churn,

So that we are absorbed,

Enlightened,

And reborn totally alive,

And free.

Searching through words,

That squirm and metamorphose,

Through my mind

My dreams –

Searching for expression,

Substance and delirium.

Searching through images

Extracted from the mundane,

With shape, texture and colour

Never before glimpsed!

Creating poems to reflect

The turmoil;

Truths that stalk the coils

Within the skull.

Opher 21.1.2016

Meaning Jack and Allen

It is great to reconnect with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg every now and again. The visions they espoused created images in my head.

Allen altered poetry. He opened my head up and gave me eyes to see. He brought poetry to life from the rotting carcass it had been.

For me Allen’s forte was that there were no rules.

Allen wrote poetry in the same stream of consciousness that Jack wrote prose. It was a revolution.

That revolution brought a whole new way of writing, thinking and feeling. It created the modern world. Others had done it before – Henry Miller for one, but nobody connected in to that ‘reality’ the way Allen and Jack did. They were searching for the meaning in life, the ultimate kicks, to tune in to the craziness of life, to live.

They weren’t satisfied with the plastic, the superficial, the mundane; they wanted something that had depth; which meant something.

Society is empty.

Real living was to let everything out – all that emotion, feeling, energy and joy.

They wanted to live and life had to burn. If it wasn’t real it wasn’t worth a fuck.

Allen Ginsberg – America

Posted on by Opher

Allen is one of the great poets. His Howl turned me back on to poetry. Now that the USA is melting into idiocy with Trump’s mad narcissism and fascism it’s time to take stock.

America

BY ALLEN GINSBERG

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven 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?
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.   
Burroughs 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.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
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.
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 Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
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 Nearing 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 its 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.

Berkeley, January 17, 1956

Poetry – Jack Kerouac – Mexico City Blues

Posted on by Opher

Jack is remembered for his incredible prose and the Beat Generation. But he wrote some amazing poems too.

Got up and dressed up
      and went out & got laid
Then died and got buried
      in a coffin in the grave, 
Man—
      Yet everything is perfect,
Because it is empty, 
Because it is perfect
      with emptiness, 
Because it's not even happening.

Everything
Is Ignorant of its own emptiness—
Anger
Doesn't like to be reminded of fits—

You start with the Teaching
      Inscrutable of the Diamond
And end with it, your goal
      is your startingplace, 
No race was run, no walk
      of prophetic toenails
Across Arabies of hot
      meaning—you just
      numbly don't get there

Today’s Music to keep me SANe in Isolation – Jack Kerouac.

Posted on by Opher

I just felt like getting back into the old fifties Jazz. Jack Kerouac put some of his music to jazz music. It captured something of that mad time – jazz, sex and travel, reefer, zen and crazy. Life was for kicks and Sartori.  There was no time to waste. Crazy, crazy, crazy, man.

Back when I was young these were like diamonds. You couldn’t get them. Thanks to the internet we have access to all manner of gems.

The only question is whether having such easy access makes everything less important.

Today I’m listening to Jack creating a whole new era out of black music and the search for truth. Go, Go Jack. You changed the world!!