Thursday, April 15, 2010
AMERICA
January 17, 1956. $2.27. What’s the reference? I’m baffled, and so are a lot of other folks. No one seems to know what the reference is to in Ginsberg’s “America”. What I can tell you about “America”? It is the written in the voice of an angry person - a person questioning America on its character, morals and beliefs and how they differ from that of the speaker. America when… when… when… when will you take a good look at yourself from a place of equality of being one with the rest of the world! I think the speaker is a revolutionary because he refers to Trotskyies and communist cell meetings. Communist cell meetings may refer to Ginsberg’s counter-cultural upbringing by his mother. He talks about not reading the newspaper, yet is obsessed with Time magazine. Could that refer to Time’s critique of “Howl” as a profane tirade that railed against a conformist society? I think so. I say Hooray to Ginsberg for following his own soul, not conforming to what the papers might call the American norm. I must say I’m sorry that I am just a little bit too young to remember the “Beat Movement”.
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Wel, yes, we both unfortunately just missed it... in any case, you're on target about the goal/intention/impact of the poem. The exact references aren't as crucial. 1956, of course, situates the voice of the poem--the date of inscription; $2.27? Someone without a pot to ___ in, from the POV of mainstream Am. As in Howl, though perhaps not quite as blackly humorous, this is a call of urgency from the other/underside of conventional cutlture; we can also see the speaker as representing the distorting, dis-easing impact of that culture on anyone with sense/sensitivity, anyone who diverges from the norm...
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