Charlotte+Chapin

Charlotte's Project: Please note that the large combinations of letters following each poem was put there for formatting. They will be very distinct from the poem as they are not actual words, but if spelled out they will also specify that they are not part of the actual poems. Though Ginsberg was pretty trippy, he wouldn't go that far. Enjoy!

The image of Bo Peep has nothing to do with Allen Ginsberg but I feel as though he would appreciate me putting it there because it seems like a crazy thing to do. If I were sent to Rockland, he'd be with me, where my love for funny images will never be understood. That was a good joke. If you want to understand it, read //Howl//! ‍‍‍‍‍‍ ‍‍‍‍‍‍

To see why I chose Allen Ginsberg, watch this movie trailer: media type="youtube" key="Ba9yazkl0UE" height="315" width="560"

Or just read my rationale

Stand up against governments, against God. Stay irresponsible. Say only what we know & imagine. Absolutes are Coercion. Change is absolute. Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Observe what's vivid. Notice what you notice. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. If we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything. Remember the future. Freedom costs little in the U.S. Asvise only myself. Don't drink yourself to death. Two molecules clanking us against each other require an observer to become scientific data. The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal world (after Einstein). The universe is subjective. Walt Whitman celebrated Person. We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person. Universe is Person. Inside skull is vast as outside skull. What's in between thoughts? Mind is outer space. What do we say to ourselves in bed at night, making no sound? "First thought, best thought." Mind is shapely. Art is shapely. Maximum information, minimum number of syllables. Syntax condensed, sound is solid. Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best. Move with rhythm, roll with vowels. Consonants around vowels make sense. Savour vowels, appreciate consonants. Subject is known by what she sees. Others can measure their vision by what we see. Candour ends paranoia. thiscombinationoflettersisnotapartofthepoembutratherjustafillertoassistwithformat || ‍‍‍‍‍By punctuating the majority of the lines, Ginsberg reflects a hesitance to expand on their meanings, an insecurity about the truth of his bold statements. They become a grocery list of phrases, some of which seem even more meaningless as they contradict previous statements, moving from the command to “observe what’s vivid” to the statement “vividness is self-selecting”. With such pronounced sharpness, each line has the feel of being shot from the hip, not given the same care and polishing as planned thoughts or conventional poetic lines possess. Were the lines to be expanded on, they could truly mean something, but with their curtness they leave us to our own interpretational defenses‍. ‍‍‍‍ Yet as the poem rounds to its circular close, Ginsberg begins to acknowledge its existence as not only poetry, but nonsensical poetry. In a social mockery he claims “intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.” We have heard everything he’s writing before, with the same lack of elaboration, often from people who blindly follow these minimalist mottos. He understands the shallow value these saying provide, belittling them as “Cosmopolitan Greetings.” While the poem trashes language and syntax, it is truly a cry to add meaning to the words we use, and to choose them carefully. ||
 * < ‍‍‍COSMOPOLITAN GREETINGS ‍‍‍

I speak of love that comes to mind: The moon is faithful, although blind; She moves in thought she cannot speak. Perfect care has made her bleak. I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild. thiscombinationoflettersisyetagainjustafiller || Through an uncharacteristic use of conventional poetic form, Ginsberg attempts to alleviate the chaos of love in //An Eastern Ballad//. His speaker has been deceived by culture to believe that love is easy, whereas upon discovering the truth he sees it as “dark” and “wild”. Naivety has brought him to a rebirth in which he finds himself lost, led astray by the false imagery of romance. These images and poetic notions serve as no guiding light in the speaker’s time of need. He mourns the moon for her deception. Yet as the reader scans the title they too are being misled. Ballads often go on for pages and they require no rhyming pattern; An Eastern Ballad is a short eight lines and rhymes perfectly. It tells no definite story as ballads would, instead succumbing to the chaos of thought. Ginsberg robs from the reader all of their expectations, doling out the same treatment love handed him. ||
 * AN EASTERN BALLAD

O dear sweet rosy unattainable desire ...how sad, no way to change the mad cultivated asphodel, the visible reality... and skin's appalling petals--how inspired to be so Iying in the living room drunk naked and dreaming, in the absence of electricity... over and over eating the low root of the asphodel, gray fate... rolling in generation on the flowery couch as on a bank in Arden-- my only rose tonite's the treat of my own nudity. thiscombinationoflettersisnotapartofthepoem || //An Asphodel// depicts the intense emotional struggle between Ginsberg’s human need for social acceptance and his internal desire for homosexual companionship. The speaker of this poem wastes away in a cold-water flat alone and fantasizing with the image of an asphodel in mind. This flower is one that many in Greek mythology were tempted to ingest, yet its shape is phallic. Ginsberg’s imagining of the flower could be associated with his trapped and tortured homosexual longing which, in a time when it was condemned by society, was hard to successfully fulfill. Without it he was alone, as the speaker of this poem is. There is a combined resentment and desire in his juxtaposition of words such as “skin’s appalling petals”, and the grouping of “inspired” with “drunk, naked, and dreaming”. He regards his sexuality with a resigned acceptance, referring to it as “gray fate”, something that he will at one day succumb to but that for now he is maintaining a wall against. In his resistance, however, he takes no pleasure. Without his desired asphodel he bitterly states that his ‍“only rose” is his “own nudity”— ‍he is lonely and wishing for another man beside him. With the imagery of beauty and desire in the haunting, torturous object of the speaker, Ginsberg convers a war between his heart and the world around him. ||
 * AN ASPHODEL

Under silver wing San Francisco's towers sprouting thru thin gas clouds, Tamalpais black-breasted above Pacific azure Berkeley hills pine-covered below-- Dr Leary in his brown house scribing Independence Declaration typewriter at window silver panorama in natural eyeball-- Sacramento valley rivercourse's Chinese dragonflames licking green flats north-hazed State Capitol metallic rubble, dry checkered fields to Sierras- past Reno, Pyramid Lake's blue Altar, pure water in Nevada sands' brown wasteland scratched by tires Jerry Rubin arrested! Beaten, jailed, coccyx broken-- Leary out of action--"a public menace... persons of tender years...immature judgement...pyschiatric examination..." i.e. Shut up or Else Loonybin or Slam Leroi on bum gun rap, $7,000 lawyer fees, years' negotiations-- SPOCK GUILTY headlined temporary, Joan Baez' paramour husband Dave Harris to Gaol Dylan silent on politics, & safe-- having a baby, a man-- Cleaver shot at, jail'd, maddened, parole revoked, Vietnam War flesh-heap grows higher, blood splashing down the mountains of bodies on to Cholon's sidewalks-- Blond boys in airplane seats fed technicolor Murderers advance w/ Death-chords Earplugs in, steak on plastic served--Eyes up to the Image-- What do I have to lose if America falls? my body? my neck? my personality? thiscombinationoflettersisnotapartofthepoemsopleasedisregardit || The title, //Crossing Nation//, would indicate that this poem is about the entire United States as a whole. That is not the case, because Ginsberg sees a separation between two Americas—the socially activist America and the conservative, war-hungry America—that simply refuse to coexist. Yet they share the same beauty, the same treasured land. To contrast, Ginsberg suddenly strays from the picturesque landscapes and “pine-covered” hills to the death and arrests of their residents. He sees an endless bloodshed dealt by the conservative side both overseas and amongst its citizen activists, and he relentlessly spreads the fear it has wrought along the pages. Despite the clarity of his negativity toward the conservative side’s crimes, he distances himself from the activists by lending an emotionless, journalistic tone to the paragraphs describing the crimes, at times simply listing off headlines. This separation is a defensive one that many concerned citizens applied during the Vietnam War. If they were to speak their opinion, as Ginsberg frantically states in the final lines of the poem, they risked losing “(their) body”, “(their) neck”, or “(their) personality” (the latter most likely through shock therapy, which Ginsberg was no stranger to). //Crossing Nation// is a cry of chaotic hopelessness felt by many in Ginsberg’s time as they watched America tear itself apart. ||
 * CROSSING NATION


 * ======**Howl: Part I**======

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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,======

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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 Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,======

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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,======

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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,======

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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,======

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who copulated ecstatic and insatiate 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,======

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who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,======

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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 petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,======

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who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,======

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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,======

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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 sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,======

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who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, 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 steamwhistles,======

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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,======

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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,======

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who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,======

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Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,======

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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 furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—======

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who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 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======

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to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,======

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and rose incarnate 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 butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
thoughitmighttakesomeconvincingihopeyoudonotbelievethiscombinat || //Howl:// //Part I// embodies the jazz-style chaos found crossing the tumultuous, groundbreaking, yet exasperatingly contained America of the 1950’s, as it depicts a mind that saw the country during that time. Ginsberg begins bold with the line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” crashing through all optimism, form, and frill former poetry had tried to preserve. He doesn’t describe citizens who are the ideal: instead he describes the reality as he sees it, with poverty-stricken people stuck in “cold-water flats” just as he had been for much of his maturation. In an obsession with insanity, he writes lines dripping with the deconstruction of the human mind, “whole intellects disgorged” just as his mother’s had been and just as he’d seen so many during his stint at a mental hospital. There is suicide in the pages. There are drugs and innumerable copulations, recurring accounts of homosexual trysts. Homosexuality was taboo at the time—even Ginsberg saw it as a condition instead of a sexuality. But the first part of //Howl// was written as a promotion of frankness on the subject, frankness about the pleasure it brings as those “fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists” scream with “joy”. He wanted to throw a truth into the air, a truth that the way of life condemned by so many was not an unfortunate one. Frankness on a subject that mainstream culture was disgusted by, he hoped, would promote frankness in other subjects as well. Taking full advantage of the freedom of speech, he wanted to give other people freedom to claim their own enjoyments. Beyond that he wanted to commemorate his life, specifically the people who affected him most. Mentioning Denver, Colorado and a man named Neil Cassidy, he honors the second man he fell in love with, the first to return affection and the first to break his heart. Dedicating the entire poem to Carl Solomon, he remembers the man he spent time in an asylum with, a man who, perhaps more than anyone else he’d ever met, indulged in similar thoughts to his own, thoughts that could get him locked up in a hospital and that resulted in shock therapy for Solomon. Ginsberg wrote what he saw, with language that he heard and with experiences that shook him to the core of his being. In this way, the beginning of //Howl// is a freedom in itself, a freedom of words and moments packed into a poem that is free of the bounds of grammar and form. In the entire length of the poem there is nothing restrained. Ginsberg tosses us reality without guarding it in euphemism or metaphor. This poem is simply and loudly truth as he saw it. ||

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable 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 judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal 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 Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke 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! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! 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! Despairs! 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! pleasedisregardthiscombinationoflettersitwaswrittenbyCharlotteChapinnotAllenGinsberg || Howl: Part II pinpoints the root of the evils done to Allen Ginsberg’s America: a supernatural being named Moloch. Moloch was the demonic God Ginsberg’s mother claimed took her sanity, but in this poem he allots Moloch to all the forms of torture that clamed “the best minds of (his) generation”. This god destroyed everything that he loved, from America to activists to Carl Solomon himself, and Ginsberg screams his pain with impacting punctuation and apocalyptic references. By both personifying and de-animating the being of Moloch from one with a “soul” to one with “factories”, he instills an overwhelming tone that hints that Moloch is inescapable, inevitable, and ubiquitous. In this way, the second part of Howl is the most hopeless: Ginsberg is telling us that destruction is the only thing certain about America. It is, in fact, our world. ||
 * HOWL: PART II


 * ======HOWL: PART THREE======

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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 collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free======

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
againpleasedisregardthisjumbleoflettersthatwillneverbelongenough || //Howl: Part III// claims the repetitive voice of a parent trying to soothe a crying child. Through Ginsberg’s repeated line of “I’m with you in Rockland”, he attempts to comfort Carl Solomon, a man trapped in an “armed madhouse” of a mental institution. Nineteen times he reassures Solomon of his solidarity as Solomon “murder(s)”, “scream(s)”, and “accuse(s)” from his cage. The quantity and solidity of Ginsberg’s reassurances bleed dedication. The commitment of Ginsberg to this ruined man moves the poem like an earthquake in its variation. At some instances he fights a battle against the institution with Solomon at his side, “drop(ping) angelic bombs” on Rockland to free its “skinny legions”. The association of a heavenly image with destructive, man-made devices shows that Ginsberg has decisively chosen Rockland as worthy of a tumultuous and violent fall. He’s returning the torture they gave to Solomon. In other lines Solomon is a weak victim, not Ginsberg’s sidekick in strength. He dreams that one day this refugee will trek across America, though broken and “in tears” to simply wind up at his cottage door. Even then he is just waiting, not acting on the flood of emotion he feels toward this man. Rockland, and all institutions at that, is too strong for anything but his words to deconstruct. He is fighting the same hopeless battle he saw with Moloch in //Part II//, the repetitive battle to try to save the “best minds” that think differently from the majority. //Part III// of //Howl// ends the poem with reason—Ginsberg saw in America the same struggle he saw in Carl Solomon. Overwhelmingly creative and dreamy, his generation was compressed by the government as well as the generations before his. And he’s praying, writing this poem and howling, that nothing he loves so much will ever “die ungodly”, in Rockland, or in the clutches of any authority. ||

Now mind is clear as a cloudless sky. Time then to make a home in wilderness. What have I done but wander with my eyes in the trees? So I will build: wife, family, and seek for neighbors. Or I perish of lonesomeness or want of food or lightning or the bear (must tame the hart and wear the bear). And maybe make an image of my wandering, a little image—shrine by the roadside to signify to traveler that I live here in the wilderness awake and at home. justsoyouknowthisisnotpartofthepoem || A Desolation's words imitate Thoreau's or Emerson's in their yearning for insight, yet through a procedural tone Ginsberg addresses the lack of originality their ideas have come to possess. To his speaker it is simply "time" to abandon society-- he requires no great epiphany to reach this falsely revelatory conclusion. By involving the conjunction "so" before addressing the major changes the speaker plans to "build" into his life, Ginsberg turns these wilderness revolutions into inevitable events. In the times we know now, as poetic as leaving the congested cities and checkerboard suburban towns may be, it is nothing new. It's a repetition, a cover of a song written and sung in 1854. Yet the third stanza admits desperation, a groping need for a cure for fear. The speaker claims a desire to escape risk of harm by legitimate causes of death such as "lightning" or "want of food", hoping to overshadow the admission of his true fear: that he may "perish of lonesomeness". Escape from population will give him an excuse for succumbing to the power he thinks stronger than himself: that he will die alone. In the wilderness, reclusiveness is popular. Beyond that, it is the only way anyone dies. Instead of rooting through his true fears, Ginsberg dismisses them, bringing the conclusion full circle with his remarks on shallowness by embodying the human need to make our uniqueness known. Like Thoreau, like Emerson, Ginsberg's speaker needs to make their isolation known to the public with an "image" or a "shrine". He wants to let others know that he is different from them by publicizing his whereabouts and praying for someone to see them. In the "Desolation" of wilderness, he has not escaped anything. ||
 * A DESOLATION

Blandly mother takes him strolling by railroad and by river --he's the son of the absconded hot rod angel-- and he imagines cars and rides them in his dreams, so lonely growing up among the imaginary automobiles and dead souls of Tarrytown to create out of his own imagination the beauty of his wild forebears--a mythology he cannot inherit. Will he later hallucinate his gods? Waking among mysteries with an insane gleam of recollection? The recognition-- something so rare in his soul, met only in dreams --nostalgias of another life. A question of the soul. And the injured losing their injury in their innocence --a cock, a cross, an excellence of love. And the father grieves in flophouse complexities of memory a thousand miles away, unknowing of the unexpected youthful stranger bumming toward his door. ifimakeabigwordlikethiswilltheybeunabletoruintheform || Framing his narrative stanzas around two unanswered questions, Ginsberg poses fate with vulnerability in //Wild Orphan//. With familiarity, the speaker provides the inner and outer worlds of this boy, and assuredly tells us of the future in which the boy will be “bumming” toward his father’s lifestyle. However, the two central questions are shrouded in uncertainty. Their specificity reflects not a knowledge that the son will one day “hallucinate his gods”, but rather that the speaker has done so himself and is waiting to see whether the son will follow in his unfortunate footsteps. The narrator’s completion of this boy’s future indicates a sadistic yearning for the boy to succumb to his own downfall of desperation. The same omniscient tone proves this boy an orphan despite the present mother who raises him “blandly” amongst the “dead souls” of a wealthy New York suburb. His sole missing parent is his “absconded” motorcyclist father who instilled an urge to ride and slum in his child’s brain. With the boy’s “nostalgias of another life”, his absentee parent is the only one he truly belongs to. He does not feel this “injury” yet, but the speaker assures us that he will one day grow to find the scars his father donated with his chromosomes. He will leave the parent he has, becoming the “Wild Orphan” that Ginsberg names him before the poem and the story begin. ||
 * WILD ORPHAN

Hey Father Death, I'm flying home Hey poor man, you're all alone Hey old daddy, I know where I'm going Father Death, Don't cry any more Mama's there, underneath the floor Brother Death, please mind the store Old Aunty Death Don't hide your bones Old Uncle Death I hear your groans O Sister Death how sweet your moans O Children Deaths go breathe your breaths Sobbing breasts'll ease your Deaths Pain is gone, tears take the rest Genius Death your art is done Lover Death your body's gone Father Death I'm coming home Guru Death your words are true Teacher Death I do thank you For inspiring me to sing this Blues Buddha Death, I wake with you Dharma Death, your mind is new Sangha Death, we'll work it through Suffering is what was born Ignorance made me forlorn Tearful truths I cannot scorn Father Breath once more farewello Birth you gave was no thing ill My heart is still, as time will tell. pleasedisregardbecausethisisn'tpartofthepoem || By naming death as his family, Ginsberg conveys that he was conceived of death as he would be a “father”, and that death runs through his veins just as all of his inherited traits do. In claiming death as people he wishes to be, people who taught him everything he lives by, and idols he prays to, the speaker surrounds himself with death as the only thing he can trust. Death is reliable, something he will “wake with”, and it is also collaborative, someone he will “work it through” with. This huge association and sympathy with death conjures up the image that life is in fact the hardship. He must work through life, and he prays to death that it will be over soon. Ginsberg wrote //Father Death Blues// to be sung, and hearing him sound out the words of death with such relish and love adds further meaning to his companionship with mortality. Death is a solution to him, this haunting notion bleeding through in his regretful uttering of “birth”. Innocence is noted with spite, “Children Deaths” associated with pain and “ignorance” turning the reader “forlorn”. He cherishes the “tearful truths” that took away his childhood, no matter how painful they were to swallow. //Father Death Blues// are the blues of a living man yearning to be put in the earth and reunited with what he knows he loves: his own demise. || WORKS CITED Howl: Parts I, II, and III http://www.wussu.com/poems/agh.htm Wild Orphan http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/allen_ginsberg/poems/8362 Father Death Blues http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/father-death-blues/ A Desolation http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/allen_ginsberg/poems/8346 Crossing Nation http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/crossing-nation/ An Asphodel http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/an-asphodel/ An Eastern Ballad http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/an-eastern-ballad/ Cosmopolitan Greetings http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/cosmopolitan-greetings/
 * FATHER DEATH BLUES

Here are my __**VOICETHREADS**__ (the poems were found at the same location as the ones above, and I will get to the extended works cited in a second): [|Howl VT] [|Wild Orphan VT]

Extended Works Cited: Ginsberg, Allen, and Lewis Hyde. //On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg//. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1984. Print. Morgan, Bill, and Nancy J. Peters. //Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression//. San Francisco: City Lights, 2006. Print.