As I promised in class, here’s Allen Ginsberg’s A Supermarket in California, a poem about one of Ginsberg’s encounters with Whitman. I’m a firm believer in Whitman-as-force / each’s-own-Walt, however we want to phrase the connections each individual seems to form to Whitman as both a historical object and a personal ghost.

...Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

Here also is a scan of Jack Kerouac’s Berkeley Song in F Major, scanned from the UMW Library’s copy of Poems All Sizes. Kerouac worked heavily in what he named spontaneous prose, a borderline style of automatic writing “in semi-trance (as Yeats’ later ‘trance writing’) allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so “modern” language what conscious art would censor” (Sic: Kerouac’s grammar is intentionally… uninhibited by convention.) This quote is taken from his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” see also his “Rules of Spontaneous Prose“.

I see telephone pole
A hundred miles high
With invisible wires
Of Transcendency--
Walt!   Jack!

I’m still working out my own feelings on Kerouac–I still have yet to tackle any of his novels. Still, this poem was the entry point for “my” Walt. Though I had prior exposure to Whitman’s work (especially The Wound-dresser), it wasn’t until I began writing response poems to Berkeley Song that Whitman started showing up in my life in the more total, personal ways we’ve been ascribing to each’s-own-Walt. That’s a story for another post, though!

About a million connections have been drawn from Whitman to the Beat Generation, especially in the context of defining the “American poet”. I’ll save the intellectualizing for class, though–the irrational, spiritual elements of these poems take the trajectory of a Whitman-esque poetic tradition beyond of the intellectual or metaphorical, and (especially in Kerouac’s work) continue Whitman’s philosophies as real practice.

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest

Check it out! –Danny