A Pleasant Surprise

The Poetry Foundation

sends us a poem every day (The Poem of the Day).

Today's poem is one I remember well, the poet's voice from his recording echoing in my mind.

It begins like this:

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—
—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past—
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— 

"Sunflower Sutra" was published in 1955. Firmly rooted in the American poetic tradition, and echoing the great nineteenth century poet, Walt Whitman, Alan Ginsberg's take on contemporary America shows a positive side compared with T S Eliot's "Wasteland".

I still regard the period of fifteen years after 1955 as the height of twentieth century culture. After 1970 everything went downhill. But the period following James Dean and Elvis Presley, which featured the Beatles, the court decision on "Lady Chatterley", up to the release of "Easy Rider" in 1970 was the golden age of twentieth century popular music, poetry, novels, and political action: Vietnam War protests persuading the politicians that that war must be brought to an end.

If you want to read the rest of the poem here is the Poetry Foundation's website:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org.