Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

  CHAPTER 37

  Corso and “Power”

  One of the earliest of Corso’s one-word subject poems was “Power,” which is one of the most brilliant and I think one of the great poems of the century. [His publisher Lawrence] Ferlinghetti didn’t like it, he got scared of it. He thought it was a fascist poem because it was about power. Actually it was like an empty hand of power. Here he takes on another big subject and begins to play cadenzas on power. The opening is very strange, too, and was done [at the] same time as the Israel Hans poem.

  Power

  We are the imitation of Power

  Every man is to be doubted

  There is no mouth no eye no nose no ear no hand enough

  The senses are insufficient

  You need Power to dispel light

  Not the closing of an eye

  “You need Power to dispel light.” I don’t know what that means anymore. Probably to give out light, not the closing of the light, as if you’re blind. This is ambiguous, what he’s getting at to begin with. I don’t know whether he means dispense or dispel. I think he’s intentionally trying to get you confused.

  Since I observe memory and dream

  and not the images of the moment

  I am become more vivid

  Since he makes use of imagination, memory, dream, the mind, intellectual beauty, rather than just the materialistic literality, “I am become more vivid” rather than less vivid, he says, so he’s making paradoxical statements. He’s dealing here in paradox.

  And need not open the eye to see

  He’s at it again. Actually he doesn’t open up his eyes to see.

  With me light is always light

  How powerful I am to imagine darkness!

  He’s playing with ideas. He’s thought it in a very funny way that makes metaphors out of ideas. He’s manipulating ideas around, maybe because the ideas are attached to words and you can turn the words inside out, so you can confuse the reader. There’s a kind of con game going on where he’s trying to confuse the reader by saying something absolutely dumb-simple, which if you follow along logically will lead you upside down, constantly. The idea is to finally get to saying something upside down which will be absolutely right side up and true. What I like about this poem is that finally he arrives at a point where by saying everything upside down it’s absolutely correct and undermines the state and the universe and everybody’s bullshit. It undermines power, to begin with. What does he mean by power? He’s going to define power, but in sixteen different ways and then finally settle on one that’s so tricky it pulls the rug out from under power, out from under aggressive power.

  Since I depend on heroes for opinion and acceptance

  And depends on Kerouac or me or Burroughs. There’s almost a little sleight of hand in the language here. You never can tell if it means something or if he’s just suggesting that it might mean something, and it doesn’t. Like “how powerful I am to imagine darkness.” There’s always a little trickery, but when you begin examining it, at the bottom of the trick is always another little trick. So his trickery, precision, paradoxical inventiveness with language, like “I pump him full of lost watches,” a trick ending. It’s like a magic trick, you pull a rabbit out of the hat, or “guns rusting in their arthritic hands,” or the “hopping drooling desire awaiting flat against the trees with bloodstained fingernails.”

  I live by proper truth and error

  The heroes, well if you depend on heroes, you can’t go wrong.

  SHAZAM!

  The superhero, Batman or something?

  O but how sad is Ted Williams gypped and chiseled

  All alone in center field

  Let me be your wise Buck Rogers!

  Since I contradict the real with the unreal

  Nothing is so unjust as impossibility

  That follows logically from everything else. The discord idea was contradicting the real with the unreal, pipe butter, pipe is real, butter is real, pipe butter is contradicting the real with the unreal. His method in poetry is to take something that seems real, pipe, butter, all that, and then by combining them weird, fried shoes, pipe butter, to make something unreal out of it. To put two reals together to make something unreal, but beautiful, pretty. To make another reality in a sense, like fried shoes. It’s certainly real as a phrase. Fried shoes, it’s real, you could read it on the page. And at the same time it does give a real crinkle in your brain, some little shiver, or some weird little piss of beauty. It indicates how language works, that you can create imaginary things with language. You can make up pretty little things like that, but they’re unreal in certain respects.

  Gregory is saying that since his method of poetry is to contradict the real with something imagined, to contradict the real with the unreal (and by the unreal he means imagination), he hereby declares that nothing is so unjust as impossibility. Since the imagination is superior to appearance, nothing is so unjust as to limit yourself to only what you can see in front of you and eliminate the imaginative possibility. Impossibility is unjust because he likes to make impossible combinations, so therefore he is saying that impossibility is unjust to him as a poet. As a poet he demands justice, which is that he be allowed to play with the impossible, which is very human.

  He’s expressing that same tendency. The point I’m trying to make is, how witty that line is, “Since I contradict the real with the unreal, nothing is so unjust as impossibility.” It’s a very childish piece of insistency. Whereas all the other poets want to grow up and be mature and write books like In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Or they want to be grounded, or they want to be wise and truthful, like Robert Frost. They want to be disillusioned and have everything accurate and real, or they want to be grounded with their minds clamped down on objects, like William Carlos Williams, or they want to preach “no ideas but in things.” They want everything to be right. But Gregory says he doesn’t want everything to be right. He wants to be a poet of the impossible. His first statement of power.

  The logical end of this kind of poetry is to make all of ordinary reality appear to us as strange, fresh, new, and weird, new-minted, newborn, as it is all the time without our noticing it. He’s deconditioning us to our ideas, he’s cutting up our ideas, cutting up logic. He’s throwing the brain into chaos, he’s throwing mind into chaos, he’s dealing with chaos in order to do the classical thing that poetry does, which is to show us the beauty or wonder or strangeness of the actual world.

  And with a heart of wooing mathematics soar to passion a planet

  O but there are times SHAZAM is not enough

  There is a brutality in the rabbit

  That leads the way to Paradise

  He’s just saying the realistic cynic element, not a Kewpie doll, Walt Disney rabbit, but a real rabbit, that has teeth, that kind of understanding can lead to Paradise or Heaven. However a fourth contradiction comes. “There is a brutality in the rabbit.” It’s quite consistent within itself. There’s the element of ordinary fuck-up evil death, aggression, the element of teeth in the rabbit proposes a psychological realism that is the only paradise we have, and that doesn’t include a sugar candy god.

  There is a cruelness in the fawn

  Its tiger-elegance gnawing clover to the bone

  The fawn cruelness is eating the grass, the clover. The faun’s cruelness, from the point of view of the clover. The faun is some kind of tiger elegance. But there’s the disharmony again, the “tiger-elegance gnawing clover to the bone.” Now he finally gets into the middle of his subject.

  I am a creature of Power

  With me there is no ferocity

  I am fair careful wise and laughable

  I storm a career of love for myself

  I am powerful humancy in search of compassion

  My Power craves love Beware my Power!

  Know my Power


  I resemble fifty miles of Power

  I cut my fingernails with a red Power

  In buses I stand on huge volumes of Spanish Power

  The girl I love is like a goat splashing golden cream Power

  Throughout the Spring I carried no Power

  But my mission is outrageous!

  I am here to tell you various failures of God

  The unreasonableness of God

  There is something unfair about this

  It is not God that has made Power unbearable it is Love

  Here he’s going to contradict everything and denounce love.

  Love of Influence Industry Firearms Protection

  Man protected by man from man this is Love

  Good has no meaning and Sympathy no message this is Love

  THINK signs will never give way to DREAM signs this is Love

  We are ready to fight with howitzers! this is Love

  This has never been my Love

  Thank God my Power

  That’s just a simple, straightforward attack on middle-class sentimentality, which leads to patriotism, aggression, or self-­contradiction, implicit in that. He takes the idea and carries it from one logical extension to another, taking it further and further from where it began, but going through all the possible changes on the word or the idea or the conception. This depends on the actual mind to provide the contradictions, because everybody can think of all these.

  Who am I that sing of Power

  Am I the stiff arm of Nicaragua

  Do I wear green and red in Chrysler squads

  Do I hate my people

  What about the taxes

  Do they forgive me their taxes

  Am I to be shot at the racetrack—do they plot now

  My monument of sculptured horses is white beneath the moon!

  Am I Don Pancho Magnifico Pulque no longer a Power?

  He’s just empathizing as he did under the hood of the executioner, now he’s empathizing into the psyche of the dictator.

  No I do not sing of dictatorial Power

  The hail of dictatorship is symbolic of awful Power

  In my room I have gathered enough gasoline and evidence

  To allow dictators inexhaustible Power

  He’s saying, “In my room I’ve got enough poetry and intellectual evidence to be an inexhaustible source of power.” This is more like the American Indian use of the word “power,” which is to say spiritual presence or imaginative presence, ultimately self-confidence, undauntedness, majestic posture, unobstructed humor, and royal elegance of language, as well as complete confidence in the kingdom that he owns and rules, which is the kingdom of the imagination. Most people don’t own their own imaginations and are afraid of the imaginations of others. It’s a literal thing, that this power poem cracks the code of military dictatorship power, because it takes up the word “power” and examines what is power. You find his definition of “power” accords with the ancient definitions, of Taoists, or Indians, or Whitman, and does not accord with the mechanical power of the modern hyperindustrialized, hypertechnocratic state.

  I Ave no particular Power but that of Life

  Nor yet condemn fully any form of Power but that of Death

  The inauguration of Death is an absurd Power

  Life is the supreme Power

  Whoever hurts Life is a penny candy in the confectionary of Power

  Whoever complains about Life is a dazzling monster in the zoo of Power

  Anybody neurotic complaining “you’re a dazzling monster,” just another monster, just another dazzling creature.

  The lovers of Life are deserved of Power’s trophy

  They need not jump Power’s olympics nor prove pilgrimage

  Each man is a happy spy of Power in the realm of Weakness

  That’s pretty good too. We’re all weak, but we all realize that we’re weakened and that’s what our power is. Basic Shambhala [Buddhist] teaching is that this comes from realizing that you’re weak and vulnerable. People who don’t realize that they’re weak and vulnerable are going to die or they’re a bunch of nuts that go around kicking dead dogs. The people who realize they’re weak are a little more tender toward what they see in front of them, they know it’s all as vulnerable as they are.

  Power

  What is Power

  A hat is Power

  Now he’s going to get to it. What is power? “A hat is Power.” That’s the best line in twentieth-century poetry. This is like “gas” or “couch,” “a hat is Power.” It’s almost the same thinking process to finally [get to] where he’s saying that poetry is the realization of the magnificence of the actual, even just a word like “gas” or “couch.”

  The world is Power

  Being afraid is Power

  What is poetry when there is no Power

  Poetry is powerless when there is no Power

  Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is Power

  And this is the greatest line I think: “Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is Power.” There’s no intent if there is no intentionality. If there’s no preconception, the mind is open, therefore supreme power of awareness and imagination possible. Supreme power of possibility, because you’re not limited.

  The angel is not as powerful as looking and then not looking

  Will Power make me mean and unforgettable?

  This is funny as a monologue because from line to line he’s taking the word “power” and bringing every possible subtle change you could imagine. This poem is really smart. That’s the great thing about it. It’s smart in the way that most people are dumb and don’t understand their own smartness, because they don’t believe their own minds. This is an amazing declaration. I would say it is Gregory Corso’s first major adult poem, his empowerment of himself, and his empowerment of poetry.

  Strangely enough at this time, Ferlinghetti thought that this was a pro-power, pro-fascist poem. Ferlinghetti thought it was something to do with Hitler, not realizing that it was inside out. If you get that powerful, will you become like other people that he likes, or will he be like Jimmy Dean or Marlon Brando, mean and unforgettable?

  Power is underpowered

  How did he arrive at that? “Power is underpowered.” This is the key. It’s absolutely logical in the course of this and yet it’s the same discord, the same contradiction. The same thing as poetry, really. Poetry is not poetry. You try and write poetry and you get all hung up in self-conscious ambition, and you just write your ego. The actual definition is right there.

  Power is what is happening

  Power is without body or spirit

  Power is sadly fundamental

  Power is attained by Weakness

  Walt Whitman also said that. “Not till the sun rejects you, do I reject you. Vivas to those who have failed, vivas to the losers, vivas to those whose ships have gone down in the sea and those who lost the battle.”

  Diesels do not explain Power

  In Power there is no destruction

  Power is not to be dropped by a plane

  A thirst for Power is drinking sand

  I want no song Power

  I want no dream Power

  I want no driven-car Power

  I want I want I want Power!

  Power is without compensation

  Angels of Power come down with cups of vengeance

  They are demanding compensation

  The angels from heaven, like a heaven and a hell, with cups of vengeance they want compensation, they’re not as powerful as looking and then not looking, of being wounded and then letting go. Being insulted and letting go.

  People! where is your Power

  The angels of Power are coming down with their cups!

  I am the a
mbassador of Power

  I walk through tunnels of fear

  With portfolios of Power under my arm

  Look at me

  The appearance of Power is there

  I have come to survey your store of Power—where is it

  Is it in your heart your purse

  Is it beneath your kitchen sink

  Beautiful people I remember your Power

  I have not forgotten you in the snows of Bavaria

  Skiing down on the sleeping villages with flares and carbines

  I have not forgotten you rubbing your greasy hands on aircraft

  Signing your obscene names on blockbusters

  No! I have not forgotten the bazooka you decked with palm

  Fastened on the shoulder of a black man

  Aimed at a tankful of Aryans

  An image of the black soldiers during World War II after the war in North Africa. Tobruk and whatnot. A bazooka decked with palm fronds or palm leaves as disguise, as camouflage, on the shoulder of a black man aimed at a tankful of Aryans.

  Nor have I forgotten the grenade

  The fear and emergency it spread

  Throughout your brother’s trench

  You are Power beautiful people

  And that brings it to the climax. Well, we might as well go on with this, this is what we’re into. Then there’s a little halt, a break before he goes on to consider all this, going back to childhood life.

  In a playground where I write this poem feeling shot in the back

  Wanting to change the old meaning of Power

  This is a reaction to our situation in 1958 in Europe, reading Time magazine, which was announcing this as the American century, announcing this as the century of unlimited American power, military power. We were just beginning to send CIA liaison people into Laos. The French had been beaten in Indochina and were still fighting in Algeria. They’d lost their colony five years earlier in Indochina and America was replacing all this colonialism with its own world guns. There was lots of talk about the man of distinction and responsibility and power.