by Acadia Branch
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was a poet who helped found the Beat Poetry movement in the 1950s. He was a teacher and cofound of a poetics school. His best known poem, Howl, was put on trail for obscenity. Ginsberg often talked about taboo topics, and Howl included multiple instances of both heterosexual and homosexual intercourse. At the event that was later described as the birth of Beat Poetry, Howl was the first piece to be debutted. Other beat poets include Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs (along with others.)
Ginsberg is best known (and loved) through anecdotes of his personality and his poetry:
At a reading in Los Angeles a heckler harassed Ginsberg throughout his reading (of Howl) and was quieted only when Allen promised to give him the chance to express his opinions after the reading. However he continued to disrupt the reading after Allen had turned it over to Gregory Corso. At one point, Gregory proposed a verbal duel with the heckler, the winner being the one with the best “images, metaphors (and) magic.” The heckler was more interested in engaging Corso in a fistfight. He taunted the poets, calling them cowards, insisting they explain what they were trying to prove onstage.
“Nakedness,” Ginsberg replied. When the heckler demanded further explanation, Allen left the stage and approached him. He accused the man of wanting to do something brave in front of the audience and then challenged him to take off all his clothes. As he walked towards the drunk, Allen stripped off all of his clothing, hurling his pants and shirt at the now retreating heckler. “Stand naked before the people,” Allen said. “The poet always stands naked before the world.” Defeated the man backed into another room.
The famous first line of Howl:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,”
Allen Gisnberg reads America
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
December 12th, 2013
by Acadia Branch
Let me just start by saying that I loved the opera. The first act certainly was slow, but as time passes I found it absolutely breath-taking and enchanting. I have certainly fallen in love.
The glittering silver costumes Octavian and Sophie were so incredibly perfect. They fit together, shimmering under the spot light. That said, that was the only time this couple really matched. Oddly enough, the costume designers choose a more untraditional role in matching couples costumes by not matching their costumes. Most of the couples were put in scenes together with contrasting colored outfits, while enemies had complimentary tones. This is usually not so.
Also, I loved the characterization of the Marschallin through her costumery. She not only had the finer clothing of the cast, but also was much taller as well. This played into her large stature and mature viewpoint. The Marschallin was by far my favorite character, and I really appreciated her view point.
This doesn’t relate to costumes, but I figured I throw it in. I honestly don’t think that this had a sad ending. Yes, in the end, the Marschallin gives up her love, but she does so without pouting or complaining. She knows that Sophie is best for him (for she still has a husband.) The young love of Sophie and Octavian is done very well, very sweetly and true to life, but also in such a way that it does not rub such love in the Marschallin’s face. I think while the ending is not perfect, but it is very beautiful and true to how life is. I appreciate the Marschallin accepting her fate, and in such, see a stronger and more powerful character who I truly admire. It would be a sad ending for me if she had let down my standard of her.
December 3rd, 2013
