Status Updates From The Essential Ginsberg

"But traveling in countries like Cuba and Viet Nam I realize that the people that get the real evil side effects of America are there—in other words, it really is like imperialism, in that sense. People in the United States all got money, all got cars, and everybody else starved on account of American foreign policy. Or is being bombed out, torn apart, and bleeding on the street (...)." ~ p. 274

"It's the ability to commit to writing, to write, the same way that you... are! Anyway! You have many writers who have preconceived ideas about what literature is supposed to be and their ideas seem to exclude that which makes them most charming in private conversation. Their faggishness, or their campiness, or their neurasthenia, or their solitude, or their goofiness, or their—even—masculity, at times." ~ p. 265

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy!

“hurtling through the street
in the auto of our fate
we share an archangelic cigarette
and tell each other's fortunes:
fames of supernatural illumination, bleak rainy gaps of time, great art learned in desolation
and we beat apart after six decades...”

i had to pause my reading because the next poem is howl and i’m too tired to fully enjoy it

i’ve always liked ginsberg poems and i’m happy to finally have a collection to read from

“Deviants from the mass sexual stereotype, quietists, those who will not work for money, or fib and make arms for hire, or join armies in murder and threat, those who wish to loaf, think, rest in visions, act beautifully on their own, speak truthfully in public, inspired by Democracy — what is their psychic fate now in America?”