Friday, September 07, 2007
"to be meek, alone, beside a big dark lake at night -"
Planet News, 1961-1967 (Pocket Poets)by Allen Ginsberg
It really pays to read Allen Ginsberg in the original City Lights Pocket Poets series. Each one has the special flavor of its cultural period in America. Planet News traces Allen's transformation from weary Fifties beat figure (1961) to his flowering as the bearded, iconic hippie prophet in the Uncle Sam hat (1967). Allen Ginsberg, Superstar.
Allen is approaching Forty as John Kennedy is killed & the old, leftist folkie beat scene gets k.o.'d by the one-two punches of The Beatles & Dylan Electrified. So, A.G. brings it all back home, "Here at the atomic crack-end of Time XX Century..."
Of the several small epics within Planet News, "Wichita Vortex Sutra" is the Ace. This long plane flight - actually one section of an infinitely long spin toward the Event Horizon - brings us face-to-face with the Vietnam Apocalypse & the growing cancer on America's soul, to be continued in the Fall of America.
But the beauty-soul of Planet News is found in the shorter poems: the lovely "Galilee Shore;" "Big Beat" & "Portland Coliseum," where The Beatles astonish him, no easy feat; The legendary "First Party at Ken Kesey's with Hell's Angels," Allen doesn't seem terribly impressed; Crowned the "Kral Majales" in the short Prague springtime; "Death News" of his friend, poet William Carlos Williams; Waking up the Royal Albert Hall crowd with "Who Be Kind To," can you envision Marianne Faithful? & let us not overlook "Patna-Benares Express," "I Am A Victim of the Telephone" & especially "Why is God Love, Jack?" Yes, that Jack.
At last, The Pentagon Exorcism: "Pentagon awake from planet-sleep!" & of course it never has from that day to this. But it did rise ten feet off the ground & spin like some nauseating carnival ride. At least, that's what I heard. Beautiful thing.
(Amazon.com review 2000)
