“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”
This opening salvo from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America” follows me around. I think of it when I am unappreciated, underpaid, underloved. I think of it when I think I’m over, and before I was over, I never really appreciated it. I know that good stuff can come when one is successful, but that is when success is disappointing, or when the well of misery is so deep, no fame or fortune can be of comfort. This poem was published in Howl, which became a scandal, a lawsuit, a James Franco movie, and the beginning of a brilliant and sometimes filthy career. It was written by someone who had a little bit of cash in his pocket, a rap sheet, and an entire country to argue with. The America of “America” is impossible. Oscar Wilde—another literary icon turned scandal—wrote that a map without Utopia on it is not even worth glancing at. Yet here we are. We have to live and work and feel here, and we will never get there.
When I was 17, I brought a CD of Ginsberg’s astonishing album The Lion for Real, scored by Hal Wilner. We were reading Whitman in AP English, and Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” imagined finding the great bard of the barbaric yawp among the groceries, and it made me feel that, in our own minds, everyone was present, that the poetic idea of America could actually exist if we could cultivate our gardens. When my AP English teacher Dr. Northouse left the room, I played a disco song sung by Ginsberg, which repeated the phrase, “Turn me on your knees, spank me and fuck me.” It got more explicit after that. We were 17. We laughed, really at the audacity of it, and of this eminent poet singing something so raw. The teacher came back into the room and we went back to “To Aunt Rose.”
“I’ve given you my all and now I’m nothing.” This is what we say when a relationship is not working. This is what we say when we know that we are better than that. We want a democracy that includes us.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
I think of Ginsberg, on Firing Line, telling William Buckley how difficult it is to speak without obscenities, then charming him by chanting at him. The chant transcended the need for obscenities. Buckley looked delighted for a minute, as if a conversion was possible, just for a second.
When I was 19, I met the lion for real at MOMA. There was a photography exhibit about the Beat Generation. I was looking at a picture of William Burroughs taken by Ginsberg, I turned around and—whoosh—there he was, Allen Ginsberg. The most remarkable part was that he looked just like Allen Ginsberg. I was starstruck. We chatted, and soon I would know many people who had much more substantial Ginsberg encounters than me. But I was 19, and it was pearls beyond price.
There was a girl who knew me well enough to know that my reading On the Road and other Beat things was against the grain for me. I was not Beat, she told me. I did not go with the flow. I was not ever going to drive aimlessly across the country in search of beatitude. And that was surely true. Later, when I truly went crazy, I found my own way.
the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
I was more of a mad one than I knew. Some of these people, the mad ones, would be the ones who truly understood. Ginsberg, who taught at Brooklyn College, also taught a course on The Beat Generation at the CUNY Graduate Center English department shortly before I entered the Ph.D. program there. I was told that he brought every special guest you could imagine—Huncke! Burroughs!—and led the seminars in group meditation at the start of every class, but that he was remote and distant. And this was reported to me by a brilliant student who told me he thought being a cute boy would get him somewhere.
“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”
In the summer of 1999, I taught a 20th Century American poetry course at Hunter College. Ginsberg had died a couple of years earlier. There was a man around 80 years old, in the Ginsberg generation, maybe slightly older. He asked me if I allowed seniors. His name was Joshua, and he could not afford the audit fee. Every time he spoke, he wanted to talk about Carl Sandburg, who was not on the syllabus. But by the time we got to “America,” and I asked if anyone wanted to read aloud, he raised his hand with great passion. He had note cards spread across the desk. And the minute he started reciting, I heard that entire lifetime of disappointment and longing in the voice of this crusty New York Jew.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
He could have been Eli Wallach or a Sunshine Boy. I had seen Ginsberg read, and I was sure this was better than Ginsberg. It was as if he was the Allen Ginsberg of Allen Ginsberg. He was the secret history.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
The problem with democracy, even if we truly had it, is that there are so many of them and only a few of us. There is no poet’s lobby. Can you imagine a US Senator beholden to the interests of Big Poetry? That takes us to Oscar Wilde’s map, to the America of America, which is a poem and not a country.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
I did time in a mental hospital, not Columbia-Presbyterian, where Ginbserg worked on Howl, but across town from it. I was there for maybe three weeks, and as soon as I walked out, I said, “I never want to see any of those fucking people for the rest of my life,” and I never did. I guess that girl had me right. Even when I was officially crazy, I wasn’t Beat.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked
I saw Allen Ginsburg read at a Jerry Brown rally in 1992. My girlfriend and her future husband teased me for going. My girlfriend had brought Ginsberg to read at Stuyvesant High School. I wanted to appeal to that girl, but she said, “And what does Allen Ginsberg know about economics?” She was a few years older than me and very smart, and I wondered if this was the price of maturity.
If recent history has taught us anything, it is that the people who know about economics don’t really know about economics, but the true poets really know about poetry.
Joshua, the old guy who read “America” in my class, got a standing ovation from everyone. They told him he should travel around the country reading “America.” Everything in his life apparently led up to reading that poem for us. He gave us everything he had. Ginsberg said that if the student does not become better than the teacher, the teacher has failed. At that moment, I felt what it was all about. That might have been the most Beat moment of my life so far.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind
I’m still trying to get there.
I thought about what I looked like at 19 when I met Ginsberg at MOMA, and he invited me to his apartment on E. 12th Street, but I couldn’t go because I was meeting the girlfriend, the one who brought him to Stuyvesant, but who now said that he didn’t know anything about economics. As time went by and my hair fell out and I got glasses and a beard, I realized that I now kind of looked like Allen Ginsberg. And now I must lead my classes—shellshocked from Covid—with meditations, and I will channel Allen to do it.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Allen Ginsberg was and was not America. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, said Shelley. Most of them are very unacknowledged. “I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.” I have no idea what happened to Joshua, my elderly auditor, after that class, but inhabiting that poem allowed him to inhabit himself in ways that must have resonated. Maybe he did go on a tour. Maybe he read it on street corners and at parks, and when he did, the people who got it felt a little less alienated from their own country. Poetry, said Ginsburg, is words that are empowered that make the hairs on your body stand on end. He probably did not know much about economics, but he knew everything about that.
Gorgeous essay. How can you possibly think you are not beat?
An amazing piece. Boy do you get Allen at being Allen. 25 years gone.