I missed the Beats (beatniks) the first time around. They were 'too far out' for my midwestern mind in the 1960s. I don't love their poetry, their novels. In 1965 they would likely have sailed over my pumpkin head. Now I recognize in them a kindred spirit.


A Supermarket in California

BY ALLEN GINSBERG - 1955

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Berkeley, 1955
Allen

"Howl" is maybe his most famous poem; Here is the link to the Poetry Foundation text. Below is a link to Ginsburg reading the poem. I honestly don't know if the poetry is better coming out of the authors mouth or not.

Howl, read by Allan Ginsburg

Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

------------

It shows how undeveloped my appreciation of poetry is that the poem I've chosen is one that I posted about back on the old forum. It's still the only one I know well.

As I said back then, I find it frustrating that the internet is full of allegorical interpretations of this poem, the hawk representing the Nazis or violent destructive humanity, for example. But it's not an allegory. I find myself wondering if the people who interpet it that way have ever seen a hawk before. Probably what's happening is that with the wider exposure to literary and film and art criticism that's been enabled by the internet, bad interpretations abound, with some folks apparently thinking that a non-allegorical interpretation of any work of art is simple-minded.

But it's the other way around. Hughes is describing what he appears to be describing, and that's hard. It's about a hawk, and as he said himself later, about nature in general.

I'm pretty much with Tolkien, although I'm not sure about "in all its manifestations":

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author. — Tolkien

But there's a deep difficulty about the poem, the thing that makes it interesting. The poem doesn't take the form of the poet's observations. It's the hawk talking, with some level of human-style self-awareness. To show the purity of an animal in contrast to the artifice of human lives (at least as the hawk sees it), but using a human point of view, is quite something. It's anthropomorphism but doesn't feel like it.

One thing about it I don't understand. Maybe poetry heads here can help. I think I get the full stops, but some of the other punctuation seems arbitrary to me. But it must be very deliberate.

For me, the Beats are represented Gary Snyder is a more significant exemplar of the Beats aesthetic than Ginsberg. Kerouac and Snyder were strong influences on me in my late teens:


The Bath

Washing Kai in the sauna,
The kerosene lantern set on a box
outside the ground-level window,
Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the
washtub down on the slab
Steaming air and crackle of waterdrops
brushed by on the pile of rocks on top
He stands in warm water
Soap all over the smooth of his thigh and stomach
“Gary don’t soap my hair!”
—his eye-sting fear—
the soapy hand feeling
through and around the globes and curves of his body
up in the crotch,
And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus,
his penis curving up and getting hard
as I pull back skin and try to wash it
Laughing and jumping, flinging arms around,
I squat all naked too,
is this our body?

Sweating and panting in the stove-steam hot-stone
cedar-planking wooden bucket water-splashing
kerosene lantern-flicker wind-in-the-pines-out
sierra forest ridges night—
Masa comes in, letting fresh cool air
sweep down from the door
a deep sweet breath
And she tips him over gripping neatly, one knee down
her hair falling hiding one whole side of
shoulder, breast, and belly,
Washes deftly Kai’s head-hair
as he gets mad and yells—
The body of my lady, the winding valley spine,
the space between the thighs I reach through,
cup her curving vulva arch and hold it from behind,
a soapy tickle a hand of grail
The gates of Awe
That open back a turning double-mirror world of
wombs in wombs, in rings,
that start in music,
is this our body?

The hidden place of seed
The veins net flow across the ribs, that gathers
milk and peaks up in a nipple—fits
our mouth—
The sucking milk from this our body sends through
jolts of light; the son, the father,
sharing mother’s joy
That brings a softness to the flower of the awesome
open curling lotus gate I cup and kiss
As Kai laughs at his mother’s breast he now is weaned
from, we
wash each other,
this our body

Kai’s little scrotum up close to his groin,
the seed still tucked away, that moved from us to him
In flows that lifted with the same joys forces
as his nursing Masa later,
playing with her breast,
Or me within her,
Or him emerging,
this is our body:

Clean, and rinsed, and sweating more, we stretch
out on the redwood benches hearts all beating
Quiet to the simmer of the stove,
the scent of cedar
And then turn over,
murmuring gossip of the grasses,
talking firewood,
Wondering how Gen’s napping, how to bring him in
soon wash him too—
These boys who love their mother
who loves men, who passes on
her sons to other women;

The cloud across the sky. The windy pines.
the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow

this is our body.

Fire inside and boiling water on the stove
We sigh and slide ourselves down from the benches
wrap the babies, step outside,

black night & all the stars.

Pour cold water on the back and thighs
Go in the house—stand steaming by the center fire
Kai scampers on the sheepskin
Gen standing hanging on and shouting,

“Bao! bao! bao! bao! bao!”

This is our body. Drawn up crosslegged by the flames
drinking icy water
hugging babies, kissing bellies,

Laughing on the Great Earth

Come out from the bath.

A Supermarket in California

BY ALLEN GINSBERG - 1955 — Bitter Crank

As Charles Montgomery Burns says, "I don't know art, but I know what I hate, and I don't hate that." It's well written and clear. The language is visually evocative and also "poetic." I get lost in poems where there isn't a strong rhythm guiding the way. When there isn't one, I find myself saying "Is this really poetry?" I often find it unsatisfying.

Rereading my post it seems to me I must like the poem after all. I really do feel myself in the supermarket. I can smell the produce and feel the cold when I walk through the freezer section.

As I said back then, I find it frustrating that the internet is full of allegorical interpretations of this poem, the hawk representing the Nazis or violent destructive humanity, for example. But it's not an allegory. I find myself wondering if the people who interpet it that way have ever seen a hawk before. Probably what's happening is that with the wider exposure to literary and film and art criticism that's been enabled by the internet, bad interpretations abound, with some folks apparently thinking that a non-allegorical interpretation of any work of art is simple-minded. — jamalrob

I like the poem a lot. It's very sensual. As you note - it says what it means and it means what it says. Nothing hidden here. Not an allegory.

I have also been frustrated, and often amused, by interpretations of Robert Frost poems. One in particular I remember was an interpretation of a poem written in 1915 that was identified as an example of Frost's proto-postmodernism. And there was the interpretation of "A Dust of Snow" in which the author referenced "hemlock" as a symbol for death, unaware that the "hemlock" Frost was referring to was a North American evergreen, not a toxic bush used for making poison.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, — Tolkien

I do have some sympathy for digging into the language of a poem looking for deeper meanings. I remember an interpretation of Frost's "Wild Grapes" that identified and explained some of Frost's allusions to Greek myths. It added depth and perspective without changing my basic understanding of the poem.

I do have some sympathy for digging into the language of a poem looking for deeper meanings. I remember an interpretation of Frost's "Wild Grapes" that identified and explained some of Frost's allusions to Greek myths. It added depth and perspective without changing my basic understanding of the poem. — T Clark

Yeah I'm all for digging into the language for deeper meanings in the way you describe. But the habit of identifying allegory and symbolic schemes in works of art that I see so much of seems much more primitive and lazy than that.

I'm not familiar with Robert Frost. Basically I know some Ted Hughes poems and this one by Ezra Pound:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

----------------

I always seem to go for the nature imagery.

I find it hard to get along with anything that rhymes. It's hard for me to grasp. I can't do the rhythms and absorb the meaning at the same time. It never feels right.

Good poem - "Reason." Good poet - Carl Dennis.

I hope I never speak ill of you,
Dependable homely friend who prods me gently
To turn to the hour that’s now arriving,
Not to the hour I let slip by
Twenty years back. No way now, you say,
To welcome a friend I failed to welcome
When she returned to town in sorrow,
Fresh from her discovery that the man
Who seemed to outshine all the others
Could also cast the densest shade.

You’re right to label it magical thinking
When I say to a phantom what I never said
To flesh and blood, as if the words, repeated enough,
Could somehow work their way back to an old page
And nudge the silence aside and settle in, a delusion
Not appropriate for a man no longer young
At the end of a century where many nations
Have set many things in motion they can’t call back
Though the vote for reversal is unanimous.

I’m glad you ask, clear-sighted Reason,
Before what audience, if my speech can’t reach her ears,
I imagine myself performing. Who is it
I want to convince I’d do things differently
This time around if the chance were offered.
You’re right to say that half an hour a day is enough
For these gods or angels to get the point
If they’re ever going to get it, which is doubtful.
Right again that if part of myself
After all my efforts still needs convincing
I should leave that dullard behind
With the empty dream of wholeness and move on.

I should move along the road that is not the road
I’d be moving along had I said what I didn’t say
To someone who might have been ready to listen,
But a road as good, you assure me, Reason,
One that might lead to a life I can be proud of
So the man I might have been can’t pity me.
Thanks for contending I can solve the problems
He may have wanted to solve but hadn’t the time for,
Preoccupied as he was with another life,
The one I too might be caught up in
Had I heard the words you now speak clearly
Just as clearly long ago.

I always love to listen to sung poetry.

Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather
Whiplash girl child in the dark
Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him
Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart
Downy sins of streetlight fancies
Chase the costumes she shall wear
Ermine furs adorn the imperious
Severin, Severin awaits you there
I am tired, I am weary
I could sleep for a thousand years
A thousand dreams that would awake me
Different colors made of tears
Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather
Shiny leather in the dark
Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you
Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart
Severin, Severin, speak so slightly
Severin, down on your bended knee
Taste the whip, in love not given lightly
Taste the whip, now bleed for me
I am tired, I am weary
I could sleep for a thousand years
A thousand dreams that would awake me
Different colors made of tears
Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather
Whiplash girl child in the dark
Severin, your servant comes in bells
please don't forsake him
Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart

It feels as if the whole of life is comprised in this rather erotic imagination. Thanks T.Clark, for giving me this opportunity to spread the word. It's the velvet underground, by the way. With that incredibly long aching end.

I don't really like this poem that much, but I love the way it feels in my mouth when I read it out loud.

Laughing Song - William Blake

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;
When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing "Ha, ha he!"
When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of "Ha, ha, he!"

One funny association for me. The line "When painted birds laugh in the shade" made me think of "The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosiński, one of the bleakest novels I've ever read.