ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
The Many
Loves of
Dobie Gillis
(CBS, 19591963)
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Allen Ginsberg
ENGL 3370:
Modern American
Poetry
Michael McClure
Gary Snyder
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac’s fictional Gary Snyder:
Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1955)
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
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,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1955)
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine
in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, . . .
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Gary Snyder
1930-
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
I am setting the Way Back Machine for 1975. A much publicized event at
the University of Florida would bring some major figures from the Beat
Movement--Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure--to campus to
honor the great ecologist (and U of F faculty member) Howard T. Odum.
It was a fascinating week. I was teaching U of F's first-ever course on
Native American Literature, and Snyder, who had made himself available
for classroom visits, came to talk to my students. It was a wonderful 50
minutes, and Snyder struck me, as he had when I first saw him in Saint
Cloud, Minnesota three years before, as just about the most fullyactualized human being I had ever met. (I should note that this was my
LSD period, and I was attentive to such things.)
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Allen Ginsberg
Michael McClure
ENGL 3370:
Modern American
Poetry
Gary Snyder
Howard Odum
But the highlight of the week was a poetry
reading to be held in a natural amphitheater
around a small pond in the heart of the
campus. For events such as these, a
platform/stage was laid across the water,
and Snyder, McClure, and Ginsberg would
read from a podium placed upon it to the
assembled multitude. A crowd of several
hundred filled the outdoor theatre-in-theround. (A couple of years later I remember
hearing Norman Mailer and Hunter
Thompson--who pleaded with the crowd to
bring him any good drugs they had--read in
the same location.)
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
The reading would have been memorable in
its own right (Snyder is the greatest reader
of his own poetry I have ever heard in
person)--even without the heckler.
Wandering through the audience a very,
very drunk guy in his twenties continued to
harangue the poets on the pond. It seemed
he wanted to be included on the program-wanted to read his poetry.
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Finally, Snyder, who was acting as MC for
the evening, took the mike and, in an effort
to quiet the heckler (where was security?)
offered to let him read one poem if that
would shut him up. He accepted the offer
and made an anything-but-straight-line for
the stage over the pond.
The aspiring poet took the podium and
pulled a large manuscript of his poetry out
of his backpack (the size of the tome
brought a moan from the audience) and
threw it on podium. As he announced to the
hostile crowd "I want to read you my first
poem, "Getting a B*#@ J%*," he leaned
forward, seeking to steady himself, on the
podium, and it tumbled, the manuscript with
it, into the pond.
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
With barely a moment's hesitation, Gary
Snyder, in what seems now over thirty
years later a surreal moment, leaped down
into the shallow pond and retrieved the
manuscript. Soon after security arrived and
hauled the drunk off, and the reading
commenced without further incident.
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
“The Pagan Poet”
“seeks to contact in a very special way an
'other' that was not within the human
sphere, something that could not only be
learned by venturing outside the orders and
going into your own mind-wilderness . . ."
(The Old Ways 36-37)
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
From ”Long Hair”
Once every year, the Deer catch human
beings. They do various things which
irresistibly draw men near them: each one
selects a certain man. The deer shoots the
man, who is then compelled to skin it and
carry its meat home and eat it. Then the
Deer is inside the man. He waits and hides
in there. But the man doesn't know it. When
enough Deer have occupied enough men,
they will strike all at once. The men who
don't have Deer in them will also be taken
by surprise, and everything will change
some. This is called "takeover from inside.”
a prose poem
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen
In the high seat, before-dawn dark,
Polished hubs gleam
And the shiny diesel stack
Warms and flutters
Up the Tyler Road grade
To the logging on Poorman creek.
Thirty miles of dust.
There is no other life.
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Changing Diapers
How intelligent he looks!
on his back
both feet caught in my one hand
his glance set sideways
on a piant poster of Geronimo
with a Sharp’s repeating rifle by his knee.
I open, wipe, he doesn’t even notice
nor do I.
Baby legs and knees
toes like little peas
little wrinkles, good-to-eat,
eyes bright, shiny ears,
chest swelling, drawing air,
No trouble, friend,
you and me
are men.
and Geronimo
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Song of the Taste
Eating the living germs of grasses
Eating the ova of large birds
the fleshy sweetness packed
around the sperm of swaying trees
The muscles of the flanks and thighs of
soft-voiced cows
the bounce in the lamb’s leap
the swish in the ox’s tail
Eating roots grown swoll
inside the soil
Drawing on life of living
clustered points of light spun
out of space
hidden in the grape.
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Song of the Taste
Eating each other’s seed
eating
ah, each other.
Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread:
lip to lip.
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
By Frazier Creek Falls
Standing up on lifted, folded rock
looking out and down--
The creek falls to a far valley,
hills beyond that
facing, half-forested, dry
--clear sky
strong wind in the
stiff glittering needle clusters
of the pine--their brown
round trunk bodies
straight, still;
rustling trembling limbs and twigs
listen.
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
By Frazier Creek Falls
This flowing land
is all there is, forever
We are it
it sings through us-We could live on this Earth
without clothes or tools!
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
I Went Into the Maverick Bar
I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I'd left the earring in the car.
Two cowboys did horseplay
by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
"We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie"
And with the next song,
a couple began to dance.
Merle Haggard
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
I Went Into the Maverick Bar
They held each other like in High School dances
in the fifties:
I recalled when I worked in the woods
and the bars of Madras, Oregon
That short-haired joy and roughness-America--your stupidity
I could almost love you again.
We left-onto the freeway shoulders
under the tough old stars-In the shadow of bluffs
I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
"What is to be done."
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Prayer for the Great Family
Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and dayand to her soil: rich, rare, and sweet
in our minds so be it.
Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind
and rain; their dance is in the now
in our minds, so be it.
Gratitude to Air, bearing the roaring Swift and the silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
in our minds, so be it.
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Prayer for the Great Family
Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave, and aware
in our minds, so be it.
Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
in our minds, so be it.
Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep--he who wakes us-in our minds so be it
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
Prayer for the Great Family
Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars--and goes yet
beyond that-beyond all powers, and thoughts
and yet is within us-Grandfather Space.
The Mind is his Wife.
so be it.
after a Mohawk prayer
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
How Poetry Comes to Me
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry
What You Should Know to be a Poet
all you can know about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
the names of stars and the movements of planets
and the moon.
your own six senses, with a watchful elegant mind.
at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;
dreams.
the illusory demons and the illusory shining gods.
kiss the ass of the devil and eat sh*t;
f@#k his horny barbed cock,
f@#k the hag,
and all the celestial angels
and maidens perfum’d and golden--
What You Should Know to be a Poet
& then love the human: wives husbands and friends
children’s games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.
work long, dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and lived with and finally lovd.
exhaustion,
hunger, rest.
the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy
real danger. gambles and the edge of death.