Not Just Any Day in the Life of America’s Chief Angel-Headed Hipster

By George Wallace

It's tough for even the most insistent ecstatic visionaries of 20th century America to maintain his sense of wonder, when he's slammed in the face with a national trauma of tsunami proportions. 

That's a big message to draw from Allen Ginsberg's poem Nov 23, 1963: Alone.

The poem has returned to the limelight this year, plucked from the canon of Ginsberg's collected works -- handset, letterpressed and handbound by Bottle of Smoke Press for an event organized by Three Rooms Press, marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy.

The poem makes for a compelling, if sobering read, as it takes us through Ginsberg's spiritual ruminations the day after that assassination.

In essence, we find Allen Ginsberg in a house at 1403 Gough Street, San Francisco, 'confused, shock-fingertipt' on a rented typewriter, the weekend after Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.

Over three pages and 34 lines, the reader re-experiences the poet's attempt to sift through his demystified world -- populated with literary hopefuls, hangers-on, meth heads, suicides and arrivistes -- stripped of the ecstatic character he might otherwise have invested in that world.

The man who had become famous by decrying his sense of alienation and aloneness in dominant American society -- and who helped magnetize an alternative community of self-described Angel-headed hipsters who sought to communally ward off that alienation -- finds himself alone again, in the cold light of post-assassination morning, confronted with a cadre of quite unmagical friends and associates.

Here's Charlie, muttering in his underwear-strewn bedroom. Here's Lucille, talking to herself. Anne is mourning her pockmarked womb. Lance, with his crummy painting, is smiling and wan. This one proclaims horses' teeth metaphysics. That one, fat with child, grieves her adolescent backseat romances. A weak whitehaired fellow is chewing on his teeth, lost in his own pointlessness. A gaptoothed poet has a bandaged tendon. Someone's trying to making a big deal about courtesy over the kitchen linoleum. Someone else has made an insulting collect call from back in New York.

There's blood in the furnace. "Go to Hell" is spoken on the street corner. Untrustworthy strangers appear at the door, trying to score. Obscure novels and magazines of beat writers (“Happiness Bastard, Sheeper…Soft Machine, Genesis Renaissance, Contact, Kill Roy, etc.") are strewn through the room.

At best, it is an unglamorous recitation. Where's the ecstasy? Where the celebration? Where the transformative power of camaraderie and visionary impulse?

In the last line, Ginsberg offers up a glimmer of hope that there is some direction in which to go. He declares that he will break off from the news of the world -- and from the tawdry, hangover-grim crowd which surrounds him -- and go into another room, 'where Adam & Eve lie, to get my hair spermy.'

Are we to buy it? Are we to take it as self-irony? Or as a legitimate assertion by Ginsberg that it's actually possible to rekindle the psychic self, to reignited the magic in our lives and in the lives of our Angel-headed hipster associates, through some frank sexual engagement, in another room, with the origin-myth figures of the Judaeo-Christian bible.

Before jumping into the sack with the folks from Eden, I for one would like Ginsberg to have given us a better clue as to just where this 'other room' is located -- the place to which, when the world has been demystified, we may vicariously lie with Adam & Eve, bathed and renewed, hair spermy in the original grace and innocence of their sexual congress.

Ginsberg does not address that question in Nov 23, 1963: Alone. What he does say, in abundance, is that even for hipsters and mystics, there may come a moment in our lives when the world shockingly intrudes, and we find ourselves alone -- locked in the same lonely self where we have always been -- stripped of the ecstatic vestments we have conferred upon our lives and our relationships.

What will we do?

A good way to start is to visit with Allen Ginsberg and the Gough Street crowd, through this exquisitely produced limited edition letterpress rendering of his poem.

120 copies of Nov 23, 1963, designed, printed and bound by Bill Roberts at Bottle of Smoke Press in Dover Delaware, were distributed gratis at Three Room Press’ JFK/NYC/OMG event in New York City on November 22, 2013. The poem may be found in COLLECTED POEMS 1947-1997, by Allen Ginsberg (HarperCollins 2006).

great weather for MEDIA Pushcart Prize Nominations

great weather for MEDIA is delighted to announce the following nominations for the 2015 Pushcart Prize - Best of the Small Presses Series. These nominations are for work published in 2013.

From our anthology The Understanding between Foxes and Light: 

Hala Alyan - Dear Gaza

Thomas Henry - My Grandfather Once Told Me...

Aimee Herman - you remember when our bones were just a slideshow to the rest of us

Ngoma - Song of the Shape-Shifter

Julia Vinograd - For Jack Gilbert, On Hearing He Was Dead

Amy Wright - A Hammock Made of Whistles

Want a taster? Here are the first few lines...

Dear Gaza           I'm sorry  

Dear Beirut           I still love you like an arsonist

-Hala Alyan

*

My grandfather told me once that I'm like my uncle, that my eyes roll in my head too much

- Thomas Henry

 *

August is the perfect month to lose one’s virginity because the night air is so dismissive to the sweat sweetly intoxicating fast-moving parts and although the mosquitoes tempted us with suggestions of an orgy, it was justus beneath the plastic swing-set held captive in her parents' backyard.

- Aimee Herman

*

Since the middle passage my soul's been avoiding neckties and cruise ships crucifixes and bull whips

- Ngoma

 *

He took the clear stone island light with him into the sea of death. He took the silence where a snapping twig barked like a rifle and a bell around a goat’s neck rang like a church bell into the grave. 

- Julia Vinograd

*

My mother cans and my father canes. Over the summer, between gardening, they make their rounds to various flea markets and yard sales, collecting frame chairs that Dad stores in the attic for his winter projects. My mother likes chairs and my father likes tables. Theirs is a very harmonious relationship—founded and steadied on complement and opposition. A squirt of mustard, if it be all wrong for a white oxford, is delicious squirted into potato salad.

- Amy Wright

Congratulations to all our nominees and good luck!

The Understanding between Foxes and Light,great weather for MEDIA 2013

ISBN: 978-0-9857317-1-7 $15.00 7.5" x 9.25" 160 pages.

Remember we are currently accepting submissions for our next collection, so send us your fearless best. Be sure to check out our previous books. We look forward to reading your work.

What One Can Say of Portland - 11/19/13

What can you say about Portland?  That it's the slacker middle sibling of San Francisco and Seattle?  That it didn't used to have about a million hipkidz handcrafting, baristaing, and lining up in front of food trucks?  That it's got deep roots in native culture, healing arts, and old Oregon rock?  That is hosts a hidden tribe of stunning writers, ready to come out of the woodwork at just the right birdcall?  Yes!  Yes!  Yes yes! This town is a hard nut to crack, poetry-wise.  Try looking up readings online, and finding anything but Powells, Powells, Powells.  Try showing up and asking around for them in person (which I've done a couple times and failed).  But once you've found them, once you crack that nut, you're in for a whole fruitcake of ardent wordsmithing, and I mean one that lasts.

Our contacts for the last couple years, dearly sought, have been Christopher Luna and Toni Partington of Printed Matter Vancouver (that's Vancouver, WA, just north of Portland, and not B.C.).  Printed Matter is a small press and reading series that they've been chugging along with for several years now, and for our Portland event this year, we participated in a small press double-whammy, with P.M. and gw4M each calling forth their Portland-area wordbirds.  This was the last big event of the tour, and was held at the Clinton Street Theater, an old movie theater who lent us a couple hours of stage time for free (yes, you read that right, so go see a movie there, y'all!).  A bit strange munching on popcorn to poetry, but a trend that should definitely start NOW.

Chris and Jane Ormerod waved hello, and Chris intro'd the three Printed Matters poets-at-hand.  Whereupon:

TONI PARTINGTON immediately becomes storms and crows in her empathic lyrics that sneak into your head like portents of rain.

"Imagine me cawing at the neighbors, shiny black wings extended under afternoon sun."

Haw!  Haw!

JENNY PAUER launched us into the absolutely personal through a passionate diatribe on the state of public educationand her mom's mental health tribulations, leaving her

"like some human equivalent of a capillary wave"

Don't that zing the nerves.

CHRISTOPHER LUNA wrung us with personal and artistic dilemmas and transformations, tackled with lightness and a touch of wonder, even when he says,

"Don't you get the feeling that the teddy bear is about to explode?"

Yes, Christopher, I do.

Jane then threw us great weather bunnies up on the stage:

I once again asked appropriate questions, and this time got a few responses. To be less enigmatic:

"Do we raze the heap in a sated rage, and pummel the earth again into a shape that we can use, or do we let the vines come in..."

How's that for a question?

GINA WILLIAMS – who booked this fabulous space, btw – ladled out a stream of astutely observed social foibles run through with wit and optimism, noting that

"the corn this year looks like anorexic palms"

and of the politicos who couldn't notice less, she dutifully suggests,

"Let the bastards eat fish balls."

I'm warming some up right now.

Personal fave DAN RAPHAEL slammed us with his acute identification of body & earth, noting that he

"can't remember how my head looked before it was clear cut"

and wondering,

"Why am I peeing gasoline?"

Every time I see him, Raphael is overflowing with witty witty witty passion passion passion –

"like a police car turned into a fruitcake we keep regifting"

(no notes on what that's about and I don't care) and Note to All: THIS MAN KNOWS HOW TO END A POEM:

"As soon as my head is through the pillow, I'm no longer contained."

'Nuff said.

Let us not forget BRAD GARBER, a pro Portland reader who's been gracing this town with joyous eccentric whimsical constructions for decades, and who can actually get away with a philosophical piece on the picking of the nose:

"you search for the essence and garbage of every breath"

astride a gorgeous ode on the birth of his daughter:

"When you were born I stole you and walked through light clutching you to my chest."

Did I say pro?

And at last, JANE ORMEROD got a moment to share, and runs us over with a raging bull:

"moon over, come let's drink, right and left and right again like animals and more"

She's got that right.

Festivities continued afterward with a big gang at Dot's Cafe across the street, who proffered marvelous food and drink to our unexpected crowd with culinary and tapwise aplomb.  Implied, I know, but the food was great (as in great weather).  Go there.

And also go, if you're in Seattle, tomorrow, Wednesday, November 20,to the Breadline Series at Vermillion Theater, to catch the final installment of great weather West 2013, where Jane will cant, Mary Mackey will astound, and I will fling mud everywhere.  Seeya there!