December 06, 2004
what's in a name?
Wanna know why I chose angelheaded hipster as the title of this blog? It's from an Allen Ginsburg poem called Howl. Here's the poem with notes.
My favorite excerpts...
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection...who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating
Arkansas and Blake-ligh tragedy among the scholars of war ...with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
endless balls ...a lost batallion of platonic conversationalist ...
who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop
kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in
Kansas ...who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind
but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered
in fireplace Chicago,who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and
shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out
incomprehensible leaflets,who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic
tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets
in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos
wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry
also wailed ...who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison
Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron
regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the faireis of
advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were
run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality ...who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left
with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury ...who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
images and joined the elemental verbs adn set the nouns and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotems
Aeterna Deusto recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand
before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected
yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
naked and endless head,the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
what might be left to say in time come after death,and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn
shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for
love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that
shivered the cities down to the last radio ...Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the
American river!Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of
sensitive bullshit!Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the
flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and
suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
...I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our
own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop
angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginatry walls
collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of
mery the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
Posted by cj at 08:59 PM | Comments (3)