Gay Poets

"Gay poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Spicer set a post-beatnik tone for the dropout culture."

"At the start of the Iraq War, Bush issued an executive order banning photos of soldiers' caskets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, neatly decoupling the disastrous war from its body count. Following Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration's decisive intervention was to ban images of dead bodies floating down the boulevards of New Orleans. And President Bush's advance team has banished protesters from appearing anyplace where cameras might capture them. It is all part of an elaborate effort to create a Potemkin presidency, where reality is defined and managed by those in power. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg explained the rationale best: "Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.""

"I am also happily quite unable to suppress the surreal occasion when Alan Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, the distant "Beat Poets" of San Francisco, made a curious kind of state visit to the Universities. It was something of a genial occasion – Alan Ginsberg was a genial poet, I remember, – and read his sub-standard Walt Whitman rhetoric for a long, long time. At the end, eventually, the undergraduate hippy-colony was joined by a few members of the Senior Common Room (I think the occasion took place in New College), among them Lord David, after dinner at High Table, dressed in a dinner-jacket. I was standing next to Lord David, when the bearded Beatnik asked him: "Who do you love, man?" To which Lord David replied: "my family and my friends"."

"A few days after the Congress ended, David and I encountered Allen Ginsberg in Hyde Park talking to a large crowd of flower children. Someone in the crowd around him asked his opinion of Che Guevara. Ginsberg replied that Ché was uptight, that he should just sit down and get stoned on coca leaf with the Indians in Bolivia. The questioner grew angry and yelled to the crowd: "The Indians chew coca to numb hunger pains, not for fun, and that's why Ché is there, it's about hunger and disease, not about getting high." Ginsberg laughed, and said, "I'll bet those are some happy, hungry Indians, chewing coca," and resumed chanting."

"He (Bob Creeley) introduced me to Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg-and Ginsberg has been a major model of mine. Olson has been a major model."

"1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't even get out of the game."

"You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism."

"Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose."

"I could issue manifestos summoning seraphim to revolt against the Heavenly State we're in, or trumpets to summon American mankind to rebellion against the Authority which has frozen all skulls in the cold war, That is, I could, make sense, invoke politics and try organize a union of opinion about what to do to Cuba, China, Russia, Bolivia, New Jersey, etc. However since in America the folks are convinced their heaven is all right, those manifestos make no dent except in giving authority & courage to the small band of hipsters who are disaffected like gentle socialists. Meanwhile the masses the proletariat the people are smug and the source of the great Wrong. So the means then is to communicate to the grand majority- and say I or anybody did write a balanced documented account not only of the lives of America but the basic theoretical split from the human body as Reich has done- But the people are so entrenched in their present livelihood that all the facts in the world-such as that China will be 1/4 of world pop makes no impression at all as a national political fact that intelligent people can take counsel on and deal with humorously & with magnificence. So that my task as a politician is to dynamite the emotional rockbed of inertia and spiritual deadness that hangs over the cities and makes everybody unconsciously afraid of the cops- To enter the Soul on a personal level and shake the emotion with the Image of some giant reality-of any kind however irrelevant to transient political issue- to touch & wake the soul again- That soul which is asleep or hidden in armor or unable to manifest itself as free life of God on earth- To remind by chord of deep groan of the Unknown to most Soul- then further politics will take place when people seize power over their universe and end the long dependence on an external authority or rhetorical set sociable emotions-so fixed they don't admit basic personal life changes-like not being afraid of jails and penury, while wandering thru gardens in high civilization."

"The CIA and the Mafia are in cahoots"

"America, Sacco & Vanzetti must not die."

"I smoke marijuana every chance I get."

"America I've given you all and now I'm nothing."

"America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

"Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland where you’re madder than I am I’m with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange I’m with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother I’m with you in Rockland where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries I’m with you in Rockland"

"who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness."

"who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may."

"who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather 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."

"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."

"I saw Bob Dylan a couple of weeks ago (this being, what, December 1994?) and he was saying… “Who owns all the money? Who owns the media?”. As he travels around the world, he notices that all the media change their story every week, and someone is directing that. And “Who owns all the money?”, he was saying. And it was like he knew that he had a great deal of power, to influence people’s psyches, or minds, or thinking, or psychology, or opinion-ation, and yet his power was miniscule, compared to the power of the moguls of the media. And in America it’s only 22 people who run… who own… 80 percent of the mass-media, so that the… it would be very difficult for a poem… for a poet… to overcome that barrage of bullshit. On the other hand, poetry is the only place where you get an individual person telling his subjective truth, what he really thinks, as distinct from what he wants people to think he thinks (like a politician or someone preparing an editorial in a dignified newspaper). So if you need the historical truth of what people think inside, you have to follow Shelley (and his admonition is that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the race”) — or what William Carlos Williams said more acutely was, “The government is of words”. After all, the people making political speeches, they’re writing prose, if not poetry, and they are trying to get a little flowery language in there, but the language is shifty, and the language is manipulative, and people who are advertising, or even doing ordinary mass-media, are still inhibited and can’t say what they really think, but the poet can say what he really thinks, authentically, and that’s the advantage, and it’s longer-lasting than the immediate radio-broadcast or television-broadcast, because a poem is like a radio that can broadcast continually, for thousands of years. And so, in the long run, it may have an ameliorating effect on the spirit."

"Millions of fathers in rain Millions of mothers in pain Millions of brothers in woe Millions of sisters nowhere to go Millions of daughters walk in the mud Millions of children wash in the flood A Million girls vomit & groan Millions of families hopeless alone Millions of souls nineteen seventy one homeless on Jessore road under grey sun A million are dead, the million who can Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan"

"The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found—the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it."

"I have been less pleased with this perusal of the Œdipus Tyrannus than I was when I read it in January; perhaps because I then read it all at one sitting. The construction seems to me less perfect than I formerly thought it. But nothing can exceed the skill with which the discovery is managed. The agony of Œdipus is so unutterably grand; and the tender sorrow, in which his mind at last reposes after his daughters have been brought to him, is as moving as anything in the Greek Drama."

"The Philoctetes is a most noble play; conspicuous even among the works of Sophocles for the grace and majesty of effect produced by the most simple means. There is more character in it than in any play in the Greek language; two or three of Euripides's best excepted."

"Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day."

"The tyrant is a child of Pride Who drinks from his sickening cup Recklessness and vanity, Until from his high crest headlong He plummets to the dust of hope."

"I will never reveal my dreadful secrets, or rather, yours."

"How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be When there's no help in truth!"

"θεοῖς τέθνηκεν οὗτος, οὐ κείνοισιν, οὔ."

"Men of ill judgement oft ignore the good That lies within their hands, till they have lost it."

"ἐχθρῶν ἄδωρα δώρα κοὐκ ὀνήσιμα."

"χάρις χάριν γάρ ἐστιν ἡ τίκτουσ᾽ ἀεί ὅτου δ᾽ ἀπορρεῖ μνῆστις εὖ πεπονθότος, οὐκ ἂν γένοιτ᾽ ἔθ᾽ οὗτος εὐγενὴς ἀνήρ."

"Ὦ παῖ, γένοιο πατρὸς εὐτυχέστερος, τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλ᾽ ὅμοιος: καὶ γένοι᾽ ἂν οὐ κακός"

"Of all human ills, greatest is fortune's wayward tyranny."

"ἀλλ᾽ ἢ καλῶς ζῆν ἢ καλῶς τεθνηκέναι τὸν εὐγενῆ χρή"

"Γύναι, γυναιξὶ κόσμον ἡ σιγὴ φέρει."

"στέργειν δέ τάκπεσόντα καί θέσθαι πρέπει σοφόν κυβευτήν, ’αλλά μη στένειν τύχην."

"Thoughts are mightier than strength of hand."

"No oath can be too binding for a lover."

"Fortune is not on the side of the faint-hearted."

"The dice of Zeus fall ever luckily."

"The truth is always the strongest argument."

"Children are the anchors of a mother's life."

"If I am Sophocles, I am not mad; and if I am mad, I am not Sophocles."

"If ills you do, ills also you must bear."

"πῶς," ἔφη, "ὦ Σοφόκλεις, ἔχεις πρὸς τἀφροδίσια; ἔτι οἷός τε εἶ γυναικὶ συγγίγνεσθαι"; καὶ ὅς, "εὐφήμει," ἔφη, "ὦ ἄνθρωπε: ἁσμενέστατα μέντοι αὐτὸ ἀπέφυγον, ὥσπερ λυττῶντά τινα καὶ ἄγριον δεσπότην ἀποδράς."

"Heaven ne'er helps the men who will not act."

"If it were possible to heal sorrow by weeping and to raise the dead with tears, gold were less prized than grief."

"War loves to seek its victims in the young."