who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia . . .
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 and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and poor measure of 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 reincarnate 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
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
Allen Ginsberg, 1955
Next | TOC> For My People> Wright J
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry,
Ohio
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in
Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast
furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of
Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.
James Wright, 1962
Next | TOC> For My People> Sandburg
Limited
I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: "Omaha."
Carl Sandburg, 1916
Next | TOC> For My People> Sandburg
Chicago
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's
Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them,
for I have seen your painted women under
the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer:
Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill
and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is:
On the faces of women and children I have
seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to
those who sneer at this my city, and I
give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted
head singing so proud to be alive and
coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling
job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set
vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action,
cunning as a savage pitted against the
wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth,
laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing
as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs
who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is
the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of
the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter
of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be
Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and Freight Handler
to the Nation.
Carl Sandburg, 1916
Next | TOC> For My People> Sandburg
Jazz Fantasia
Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes,
sob on the long cool winding saxophones.
Go to it, O jazzmen.
Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go husha-husha-hush with the slippery sandpaper.
Can the rough stuff . . . now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo . . . and the green lanterns calling to the high soft stars . . . a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills . . . go to it, O jazzmen.
Carl Sandburg, 1920
Next | TOC> For My People> Williams W
The Dance
In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.
William Carlos Williams, 1944
Next | TOC> For My People> Roethke
Night Journey
Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.
Theodore Roethke, 1940
Next | TOC> For My People> Jeffers
New Mexican Mountain
; I watch the Indians dancing to help the young
corn at Taos pueblo. The old men squat in
a ring
And make the song, the young women with
fat bare arms, and a few shame-faced
young men, shuffle the dance.
The lean-muscled young men are naked to
the narrow loins, their breasts and backs
daubed with white clay,
Two eagle-feathers plume the black heads.
They dance with reluctance, they are
growing civilized; the old men persuade
them.
Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world
has not changed; the beating heart, the
simplest of rhythms,
It thinks the world has not changed at all; it is
only a dreamer, a brainless heart, the
drum has no eyes.
These tourists have eyes, the hundred watching
the dance, white Americans, hungrily too,
with reverence, not laughter;
Pilgrims from civilization, anxiously seeking
beauty, religion, poetry; pilgrims from
the vacuum.
People from cities, anxious to be human again.
Poor show how they suck you empty! The
Indians are emptied,
And certainly there was never religion enough,
nor beauty nor poetry here . . . to fill
Americans.
Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world
has not changed. Apparently only myself and
the strong
Tribal drum, and the rockhead of Taos mountain,
remember that civilization is a transient
sickness.
Robinson Jeffers, 1932
Next | TOC> For My People> Snyder
Milton by Firelight
"O Hell, what do mine eyes
with grief behold?"
Working with an old
Singlejack miner, who can sense
The vein and cleavage
In the very guts of rock, can
Blast granite, build
Switchbacks that last for years
Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves.
What use, Milton, a silly story
Of our lost general parents,
eaters of fruit?
The Indian, the chainsaw boy,
And a string of six mules
Came riding down to camp
Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.
Sleeping in saddle-blankets
Under a bright night-sky
Han River slantwise by morning.
Jays squall
Coffee boils
In ten thousand years the Sierras
Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.
Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees.
No paradise, no fall,
Only the weathering land
The wheeling sky,
Man, with his Satan
Scouring the chaos of the mind.
Oh Hell!
Fire down
Too dark to read, miles from a road
The bell-mare clangs in the meadow
That packed dirt for a fill-in
Scrambling through loose rocks
On an old trail
All of a summer's day.
Gary Snyder, 1966
Next | TOC> For My People> Magee
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the
tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared
and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with
easy grace,
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee, 1941
Next | TOC> The Highwayman> Sandburg
Jack
Jack was a swarthy, swaggering son-of-a-gun.
He worked thirty years on the railroad, ten
hours a day, and his hands were tougher
than sole leather.
He married a tough woman and they had eight
children and the woman died and the children
grew up and went away and wrote the old
man every two years.
He died in the poorhouse sitting on a bench in
the sun telling reminiscences to other old
men whose women were dead and children
scattered.
There was joy on his face when he died as there
was joy on his face when he lived—he was a
swarthy, swaggering son-of-a-gun.
Carl Sandburg, 1916
Next | TOC> The Highwayman> Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
GENERAL PROLOGUE
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
When April with its showers sweet
The drought of March hath pierced unto the root
And bathed every vein in such liquor
Of which engendered is the flower;
When Zephyr too hath with his own sweet breath
Inspired in every farm and heath
The tender crops, and the young sun
Hath in the Ram his half course run,
And small birds are making melody
That slept all night with open eye
(So does nature prick their courage up),
Folks then long to go on pilgrimages,
And palmers to seek strange shores,
To distant shrines, known in sundry lands;
And specially from every shire's end
Of England, to Canterbury they wend,
The holy blissful Martyr for to seek,
Who helped them once when they were weak.
THE WIFE OF BATH
A good wife there was from Bath.
Who suffered a slight deafness, which was sad.
At weaving, though, she had a skill
Surpassing those in Ypres and in Ghent.
Nor in all the parish was there a wife
Who to the Offering ahead of her dared go
And if one did, her certain wrath was enough
To cancel any thought of charity.
Her scarves were of the finest weave around,
I dare say they weighed a full ten pound,
That on a Sunday were upon her head.
Her stockings were fine scarlet red,
And shoes, well laced, were soft and new.
Bold was her face, and fair, and red of hue.
She
was a worthy woman all her life:
Of husbands married in the church she owned
to five,
Not counting the companions of her youth—
But that's another story.
Three times had she been to Jerusalem
And passed over many a strange stream.
To Rome she'd gone, and to Boulogne,
To Spain, to Santiago, and Cologne.
And she knew much of wandering on the way.
Gap-toothed she was, to tell the truth.
Upon an ambler easily she sat,
Well wimpled, aye, and on her head a hat
Broad as is a buckler or a jouster's shield;
With a great rug wrapped round her large hips,
And on her feet a pair of sharp spurs.
Ready to laugh with friends, and gossip, too.
She understood the remedies of love,
And knew its ancient dance.
THE MONK
A Monk there was, fair masterly,
An overseer who loved venery,
A manly man, to be an abbot able.
With many a fine horse in his own stable
And when he rode, men could his bridle hear
Jingling in the whistling wind as clear
And, aye, as loud as the chapel bell
Where the Monk was lord and keeper of the cell.
The rule of St. Maurus or St. Benedict—
Because it was old and somewhat strict
This Monk let, with other old things, pass
Following instead the new world ways.
He cared for that text not a plucked hen
Which said that hunters could not be holy men,
Or that a monk without rules
Is like a fish without water—
Or one might say, a monk out of his cloister.
But for all this text he cared not an oyster;
As I said, his opinions were strong.
Why should he study and make himself sore
Over a book in a cloister, always to pour
Or work with his hands, and labor
As St. Augustine bid? How would the world be
served?
Let Augustine have his sweaty way preserved!
Instead, he would rather be a hunter bright:
Greyhounds he had, swift as birds in flight;