Allen Ginsberg in Cherry Valley, New York, 1972. Photo: Peter Orlovksy. Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Estate.

In 1965, Bob Dylan gifted Allen Ginsberg with a Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder, which Ginsberg was to use to record his thoughts and observations as he traveled throughout the United States. Ginsberg, already heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac’s methods of spontaneous composition, felt the taping was an ideal way to pursue his own spontaneous work. He began planning a volume of poems, a literary documentary examining contemporary America, not unlike what Kerouac had done in On the Road, or what Robert Frank had accomplished in his photographs in The Americans. He would add one important element: the violence, destruction, and inhumanity of the escalating war in Vietnam—an edgy contrast to what he was witnessing in his travels, particularly his country’s natural beauty. The public’s polarized dialogue over Vietnam—and, earlier in the decade, the civil rights movement—convinced Ginsberg that America was teetering on the precipice of a fall.

He initiated what he called his “auto poesy” recordings that fall, when he and Gary Snyder roamed the Pacific Northwest and the mountain trails there. Ginsberg used recently awarded Guggenheim money to purchase a Volkswagen camper, which he stocked with a desk, a small refrigerator, mattresses, and other items needed for life on the road. The visits to Oregon and Washington presented a good setting for Ginsberg’s observations. “Beginning of a Long Poem of These States,” the official opening of The Fall of America’s auto poesy, offers a sampling of Ginsberg’s most affective writing to that point: descriptive poetry in the objective tradition of William Carlos Williams, one of Ginsberg’s early mentors and influences; spontaneous writing similar to that of Jack Kerouac; and lengthy lines in the style of Walt Whitman (and like that in such early Ginsberg works as “Howl,” “Sunflower Sutra,” and “Kaddish”).

In most cases, Ginsberg transcribed his tapes, shortly after composition, into his notebooks. While doing so, he eliminated extraneous sounds on the tapes (conversations in the vehicle, the sounds of the radio, and so on) and he engaged in light editing. In the transcriptions, he broke down his taped speech into the form he wanted his individual poems to take. In “Beginning of a Long Poem of These States,” for instance, he used long breath- and thought-length lines for structure. In other poems, a line would be broken down and arranged on the page in order to accentuate words or phrases depending on his mood and what he thought was best for the poem. Auto poesy was not bound by form. Read More

Aerial view of Levittown, Pennsylvania. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“The property they [developers] built on had been farmland, overlooked by a big rickety-looking wood frame house,” the science fiction writer William Gibson tells me of his time living in a Charlotte, North Carolina, suburb (“on Blackberry Circle, where all the homes seem to have been built in 1954”) that today is called Collingwood. “I once referred to it [the farmer’s home] as a poor people’s house, and my father corrected me, saying that they [the farmer who owned the land] had lots more money than we did, because they’d sold the rest of their land to the company he worked for, which had built the development,” he recalls of the property the homes were built on.

Gibson once described living in that suburb as “like living on Mars,” with no grass and orange clay all around. I remember reading that and thinking about how much his suburban experience sounded like an old sci-fi story.

In the eighties, Gibson introduced readers to a burgeoning strain of science fiction dubbed “cyberpunk,” a noirish, computer-and-technology-choked futurescape. Nearly forty years after his groundbreaking 1984 novel, Neuromancer, some would describe Gibson as a modern-day prophet. Set largely in the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (basically the bulk of the Eastern Seaboard), Neuromancer depicts a near future affected by war, environmental catastrophe, huge wealth gaps, dependence on the internet, and people looking for any way to dull the pain, from drugs to entertainment. The nickname for this area is “the Sprawl,” and it always struck me as a sad, lonely place. Read More

The balloon seemed to come not so much from another place, but another time. Out of the past, or maybe the future. From a different summer anyway, one with birthday and graduation parties, a summer we’d seen before or one yet to come.

It fell slowly, floating toward the field during the bottom of the eighth inning of Opening Night of the 2020 Major League Baseball season, a game under the lights at Dodger Stadium, where the Dodgers were hosting the Giants. A square, multicolored foil balloon, the kind everyone professes to hate because they get caught in power lines and take a million years to decompose, but which remain a staple of celebratory gatherings. Celebrate! was, in fact, printed across the front. In this pandemic summer of isolation and distance, where there wasn’t much to celebrate, the balloon seemed lost. On the ESPN broadcast, play-by-play announcer Karl Ravech sounded incredulous. “How does that happen,” he asked, “with nobody in the stands to blow up balloons?”

The balloon touched the infield dirt between first base and second, just a quick kiss, then rose again, drifting low over the ground. None of Ravech’s broadcast partners had an answer to his question. The telecast was silent for a long moment. The players, the umpires, all of us at home watched the balloon. Finally, Ravech asked again into the silence. “Where did that come from?” He sounded shaken, awed. A masked ball boy ran out and grabbed a foil corner, pulling it off the field. The Dodgers’ quick-thinking organist began playing Nena’s eighties hit 99 Red Balloons, the plaintive chords echoing through the empty stands.

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