America

Robert Pinsky recently did a piece for Slate answering questions about modern poetry. I thought it was completely awful. He started the article by quoting David Garrick:

The gentle reader loves the gentle Muse.
That little dares, and little means;
Who humbly sips her learning from Reviews,
Or flutters in the Magazines.

This basically says, "Hey, fuck you if you don't get it. You probably don't deserve to. And even if this article is claiming to help you understand modern poetry, it's not going to, you fucking fuck."

And then he just supplied a bunch of poems with the sage advice to "Read the following aloud, listening to the vowels and consonants, the sentence movements" There was no "see how the alliteration speeds up this line?" Or, "See how the rhyme scheme falls apart here? Don't you think it's for a reason?" Nope. Never mind that as a former Poet Laureate, he should be dedicated to forcing people to love poetry. The whole article was an exercise in complete ass hattery.

He did, however, point readers to "America." This is one of those poems that, had I been required to write a line-by-line analysis for, say, Poetry and Poetics, I would have been miserable. It's all over the place. That being said, it's one of those poems that I--I don't even know how to explain it, exactly--understand viscerally. Does that make sense at all? Well, here it is. Uh, listen to the vowels and the consonants:

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 1935 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.

--Allen Ginsberg

Anyway, I go back and forth on Ginsberg. As you both may or may not know, I went through a deeply obsessive Beat phase in seventh and eighth grade. In fact, I have to admit that I'm pretty sure the first adult penis I saw was Allen Ginsberg's (in his book Snapshot Poetics). As a result of my Phase, I knew, at twelve, more about sex between two men than I did about the act in any other form. I also started reading the Tales of the City books about the same time, so I was able to supplement my knowledge neatly. When I think about the writers now, it's not with completely the same devotion I once had. I still like Ferlinghetti, I have come to find Kerouac tedious. Ginsberg's somewhere in between. Sometimes I think, "Well, that's just a bunch of words strung together." And sometimes he hits me right between the eyes.

One thing's for sure, though: Robert Pinksy's an asshole.