Reality Sandwiches is a book of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published by City Lights Publishers in 1963. The title comes from one of the included poems, "On Burroughs' Work": "A naked lunch is natural to us,/we eat reality sandwiches." The book is dedicated to friend and fellow Beat poetGregory Corso. Despite Ginsberg's feeling that this collection was not his most significant, the poems still represent Ginsberg at a peak period of his craft.[1]
According to legend, while Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were editing Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, Kerouac suggested the title; when Ginsberg asked what it meant, Kerouac said they'd figure it out later. This is perhaps an attempt at understanding. It is unusual for a Ginsberg poem because it is so overtly metaphorical. This is likely a purposeful deviation from his normal style since he, for example, ironically calls symbolic language and allegories useless "dressing" and "lettuce." The style overall suggests a parody of formal poetry. He uses allegories and near-rhymes: "those" and "Rose"; "us" and "lettuce"; "visions" and "prisons," and so on. The form would be considered an imperfect ballad stanza, with the first and third lines in each stanza being nearly an iambic tetrameter and the first and third lines being nearly iambic trimeter. This is a traditional form used, for example, by William Wordsworth. The mistakes in the meter are likely purposeful; Ginsberg's early poetry suggests that he was fully capable of writing metered poetry. But this is perhaps not only an homage to Burroughs but an homage to Ginsberg's mentor William Carlos Williams. Williams encouraged Ginsberg to break away from meter and focus only the object with no "symbolic dressing." [2]
"Dream Record: June 8, 1955"
An account of a dream about an encounter with the apparition of Joan Vollmer who was shot to death when her husband, William S. Burroughs, in a drunken stupor, decided to play William Tell with a shot glass. Ginsberg had been in Mexico City visiting the couple only a short time before the shooting. He says at the beginning of the poem that he has returned to Mexico City. There he encounters Joan, and they talk about their friends: Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, and someone named Kenney. Then, when Ginsberg realizes it is a dream and that Joan is dead, he asks more profound questions: "what kind of knowledge have the dead? can you still love your mortal acquaintances? what do you remember of us?" Ginsberg then sees a grave. This paratactical shift, according to Ginsberg, was a major breakthrough. [citation needed] This breakthrough was integral in the development of what he would call his "ellipse" technique or the "eyeball kick." [citation needed] Ginsberg's study of haiku, Ezra Pound, Paul Cézanne, and the poetry of the Surrealists was also important in the development of this technique, but Ginsberg often pointed to "Dream Record" as a breakthrough poem.[citation needed] This was also the poem that Ginsberg sent to Kenneth Rexroth which Rexroth hated because he said it was too stilted. Rexroth told Ginsberg he should free up his voice, write from his heart.[3] Soon after that Ginsberg wrote Howl. Howl shows the effects of his earlier breakthrough: the "eyeball kick," for example, is employed throughout the poem.
"To An Old Poet In Perú"
Allen Ginsberg was travelling in South America in 1960 with Lawrence Ferlinghetti. After being in Chile and Bolivia, he arrived alone to Perú, approximately in May.[citation needed] He spend some weeks camping near to Machu Picchu. Then in Lima he knew the Peruvian poet Martín Adán who was living in the Hotel El Comercio where Ginsberg rented a room. During those days he wrote some poems of Reality Sandwiches, like the long "To An Old Poet In Perú" that has three parts: the one that named the poem, "Die Greatly In Thy Solitude" and "The Dazzling Intelligence". [citation needed] The poem describes a closer relationship and fine sympathy between the two poets. The poem was translated to Spanish by the Peruvian poet Antonio Cisneros and published on the # 7 of the Amaru magazine on 1968.
Footnotes
↑ Morgan, Bill. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. Penguin Books. 2007
↑ Morgan, Bill. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. Penguin Books. 2007
↑ Morgan, Bill. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. Penguin Books. 2007
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians and made many appearances in films. He was also briefly known by the pen name William Lee. Burroughs created and exhibited thousands of paintings and other visual artworks, including his celebrated 'Gunshot Paintings'.
The Beat Generation was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon.
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers.
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time Magazine. He was also a prolific reader of Chinese literature.
Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat poets.
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco, which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetry avant-garde in the 1950s. However, others felt this renaissance was a broader phenomenon and should be seen as also encompassing the visual and performing arts, philosophy, cross-cultural interests, and new social sensibilities.
Carl Solomon was an American writer. One of his best-known pieces of writing is Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient.
Joan Vollmer was the most prominent female member of the early Beat Generation circle. While a student at Barnard College, she became the roommate of Edie Parker. Their apartment became a gathering place for the Beats during the 1940s, where Vollmer was often at the center of marathon, all night discussions. In 1946, she began a relationship with William S. Burroughs, later becoming his common-law wife. In 1951, Burroughs killed Vollmer in what he first admitted to and shortly thereafter denied as a drunken attempt at playing William Tell.
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s.
Herbert Edwin Huncke was an American writer and poet, and active participant in a number of emerging cultural, social and aesthetic movements of the 20th century in America. He was a member of the Beat Generation and is reputed to have coined the term.
The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955.
The Six Gallery reading was an important poetry event that took place on Friday, October 7, 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Mexico City Blues is a poem published by Jack Kerouac in 1959 composed of 242 "choruses" or stanzas. Written between 1954 and 1957, the poem is the product of Kerouac's spontaneous prose, his Buddhism, and his disappointment at his failure to publish a novel between 1950's The Town and the City and 1957's On the Road.
Howl and Other Poems is a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published November 1, 1956. It contains Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl", which is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as "A Supermarket in California", "Transcription of Organ Music", "Sunflower Sutra", "America", "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound", and some of his earlier works. For printing the collection, the publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another well-known poet, was arrested and charged with obscenity. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty of the obscenity charge, and 5,000 more copies of the text were printed to meet the public demand, which had risen in response to the publicity surrounding the trial. "Howl and Other Poems" contains two of the most well-known poems from the Beat Generation, "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California", which have been reprinted in other collections, including the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Richard William McBride was an American beat poet, playwright and novelist. He worked at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers from 1954 to 1969.
Chicago Review is a literary magazine founded in 1946 and published quarterly in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. The magazine features contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism, often publishing works in translation and special features in double issues.
"A Supermarket in California" is a poem by American poet Allen Ginsberg first published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956. In the poem, the narrator visits a supermarket in California and imagines finding Federico García Lorca and Walt Whitman shopping. Whitman, who is also discussed in "Howl", is a character common in Ginsberg's poems, and is often referred to as Ginsberg's poetic model. "A Supermarket in California", written in Berkeley and published in 1956, was intended to be a tribute to Whitman in the centennial year of the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
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