Monday 20 November, 2006

A different kind of camp

Collected Poems 1947-1997 by Allen Ginsberg has just arrived through the post. A gorgeous 1185 pages. I started reading his work seriously when I began writing Dharma is a Girl's Best Friend and it was a falling in love of sorts: a recognition of shared obsessions (not Campers) being part of that. India, Russia, Buddhism. You name a fad of mine, he's written a poem about it. Which seems to be more than enough excuse to reproduce the fourth section from his extraordinary poem 'Kaddish':

O mother

what have I left out

O mother

what have I forgotten

O mother

farewell

with a long black shoe farewell

with Communist party and a broken stocking farewell

with six dark hairs on the wen of your breast

farewell

with your old dress and a long black beard around the vagina

farewell

with your sagging belly

with your fear of Hitler

with your mouth of bad short stories

with your fingers of rotten mandolins

with your arms of fat Paterson porches

with your belly of strikes and smokestacks

with your chin of Trotsky and the Spanish War

with your voice singing for the decaying overbroken workers

with your nose of bad lay with your nose of the smell of the pickles of Newark

with your eyes

with your eyes of Russia

with your eyes of no money

with your eyes of Aunt Elanor

with your eyes of starving India

with your eyes pissing in the park

with your eyes of America taking a fall

with your eyes of your failure at the piano

with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an ambulance

with your eyes going to a paining class at night in the Bronx

with your eyes of the killer Grandma you see on the horizon from the Fire-Escape

with your eyes running naked out of the apartment screaming into the hall

with your eyes being led away by policeman to an ambulance

with your eyes strapped down on the operating table

with your eyes with the pancreas removed

with your eyes of appendix operation

with your eyes of abortion

with your eyes of ovaries removed

with your eyes of shock

with your eyes of lobotomy

with your eyes of divorce

with your eyes of stroke

with your eyes alone

with your eyes

with your eyes

With you Death full of Flowers

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