America when will we end the human war?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.
It occurs to me that I am America. America I am the Scottsboro boys. [Member of the crowd: "You are!]
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct?
[Crowd stomps and cheers.]
There are many more but if ever there were a poem in which the words on the page do not do justice to a reading this would be one. Ginsberg's stoned humor is infectious. He builds the crowd to a frenzy. I don't know literary poetry from the scrawlings in a public bathroom, some of latter of which this reading actually resembles. But I get Ginsberg is "undressing" America, dressing her down, waxing sentimental about the radical dreamers like himself residing in her flower pots, mocking America, teasing her with a pinch of hopefulness and delirious despair.
If you don't know you oughta listen to it at least once. And if you do know it what a performance, eh?
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