I don’t much like poetry—but I especially don’t like modern poetry. I do have a certain affection for the Beats that I’ve read (mostly William S Burroughs, to be honest), and I put off reading this quintessential Beat landmark till I could find the appropriate format: an old, beat-up paperback copy from that era. I haunt used bookstores looking for various items, and though I was always on the lookout for such an edition, all I ever found was reprints or reverential compendia of Ginsberg’s seemingly considerable output. Until a few weeks ago, when I came across an original printing by City Lights of San Francisco, dating from ’68 (as, coincidentally, do I). So I repaired to a U District coffee shop, got a tall coffee, and started in.
What dreck. This is what inspired a generation? It’s not good poetry, not an interesting use of language, not a good evocation of its subject, the unfocused anguish of the best minds of its generation. Some OK metaphors and some jarring imagery, but overall, I’d have to agree with an admonition I’d been given: just take the acid yourself, it’s more fun that way. At least when Burroughs does it, it’s as flat prose with no pretensions to call itself poetry. (Did Burroughs ever say NAKED LUNCH was a novel?) I didn’t mind another poem in the volume (which I read just as a control), “In Back of the Real”: that at least has the benefit of Wallace Stevens-like brevity.
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