Let's beGinsberg again!

Unfortunately for you, I forgot to write a post last week and so you missed out on another punny title. I hope that the level of this week's one will satisfy you nevertheless.

In all sincerity, I apologise for missing a week, I suppose it had to happen eventually, and my only excuse is my focus on A Level revision during the Easter break. I should have come here to write and have a break but, alas, I forgot I had responsibilities.

I have no idea where I heard about this poet. Allen Ginsberg was writing in the late 20th Century and so many of the issues he covers are still pertinent today, like the state of the physical and political world, as discussed in the following poem:

Homework

If I were doing my Laundry I’d wash my dirty Iran

I’d throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the

birds and elephants back in the jungle,

I’d wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,   

Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,   

Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love

Canal

Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,

Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow

return white as snow,

Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie   

Then I’d throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange,

Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail

Gray of U.S. Central American police state,

& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean.

The layout of this poem is a little difficult to transpose here, so it night be best to find another copy of the poem, if you'd like.

The poet is American and so, reading the first line, I immediately tensed when I came across that final word 'Iran' attached to the adjective 'dirty'. Ginsberg makes the reader think he is just like his government, stereotyping and scapegoating other countries that they themselves have had too much involvement in. 'Dirty' appears to modify Iran because it complements it and is Iran's fault. But the next line is juxtaposed with this to plant in the reader's mind that the dirt has been caused by conflict with the USA.

I like how he then moves onto less political a message, about nature and how poorly we have treated it. His focus is external, not an American poem by and American poet but the work of a world citizen.

The metaphor of cleaning the world has been used before in colloquial terms, but I have not seen it extended to the image of one person casually cleaning one day. The fact that the narrator is alone in this poem and finishes it with the idea of '20 minutes or an Aeon' passing demonstrates how powerless each of us are in the battle for a better world when up against governments who will not deal with one another in a gracious manner. Hopelessness is not conveyed until this last line, and so comes as even more cynical, because surely the reader will have been thinking how impossible it is throughout the piece. Moreover, the brevity of the piece ironically contrasts to how long a real clean up would take.

I seem to like this poem and so will look further into Ginsberg, maybe trying to read 'Howl', a much longer poem.