Poetry Collection Emmet Allen

Allen Ginsberg was an American writer with ambiguous, but blatant, ties to Marxism in the era of McCarthyism. He authored a number of poetry collections, including his most famous Howl. This collection was seized by U.S. customs and its publisher was arrested and tried because of the "obscene" content of the title poem. In addition to his relationship with communism, his reference to drug use and his descriptions of his own homosexuality broke from previous norms. His openness was the fuel for many of his critics, but it was also the reason that he had such a lasting influence over those who accepted his work.
Howl is a collection that addresses all of the typical subjects of Ginsberg's. It addresses his political affiliations and, more importantly, discontents. It directs attention to his sexuality, as well as his drug use and the drug use of his peers, which influenced him greatly. His discontents with American society are articulately throughout, particularly in his poem America.


America, written 1956


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 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 goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged 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're 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 fillingstations.
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.


Ginsberg's disenchantment with contemporary affairs are noted several times throughout the poem, presented in exclamations such as "Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb" or realizations mocking realizations of the "power mad" Russians who desire to "eat us alive."
Additionally, he references cases such as that of Sacco and Vanzetti that illustrate some of the most grievous departures from conservative America.
His drug use is also noted, he strove to "smoke marijuana every chance [he had]."
Overall, the most striking aspect of his poetry is his dedication to individualism, the recognition of his "psychopathic" nature and his resolve to put his "queer shoulder to the wheel."
This is the continuity throughout Ginsberg's writings: the affirmation of the individual choice of each human being, within or external to the social platform upon which one is placed.


There are several aspects of Ginsberg's work that I feel a similar connection to, for instance my dislike for current political affairs. However, sexuality and drug use are far less important to my life to date, and there are other issues of social importance I would prefer to focus on. One example is American, and global, relations of race, religion, and lifestyle (the latter being another focus of Ginsberg's, however one that manifests itself mostly in discussion of homosexuality in this collection.


Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and other poems. San Francisco, City Lights Press. 1956.

The Flea

In his poem "The Flea," John Donne implores his lover to take part in the activity he suggests, as it is not in fact a "sin". Donne explains that his suggestion is nothing to be fearful of, because the "swells of one blood made of two" have been present before--if the flea has done it, why shouldn't they?

Donne reveals that his intentions are entirely superfluous in the closing lines, where he abandons his previous argument (that their "wedding" had already taken place, and that their union was so severe that further developments would change nothing) upon his lover's realization that, despite his impressive metaphor, she can simply avoid seduction with no true problem. To this, Donne replies with the claim that, since the previous union is unimportant and can be ignored, seduction cannot hold any significant problem. Essentially, Donne wants to argue his case without consistency--the conclusion is all that he cares about.