Ginsberg’s first poem discovered

    Literary researchers at Evco University today released what they say is Allen Ginsberg’s first poetic work, written for his school’s Groundhog Day poetry contest when he was in second grade:

I saw the best groundhogs of my generation destroyed by
madness, gawking newsmen hysterical children
dragging themselves through the mouth of their burrow at dawn
looking for an angry sun,


angelheaded shadowseekers burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
dank uninsulated burrows and warrens
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven in Punxsutawney and
saw fat faced field trip angels wandering illuminated illuminated,
who passed through elementary and middle and high schools and universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Pennsylvania and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of rodency
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven warrens in fur,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the ground,
who got busted in their furry beards returning through
Punxsutawney with a belt of dandelion greens for the winter,
who ate grass in dank burrows
or purgatoried their hibernating torsos night after night
with dreams, with clover with waking nightmares,
roots and endless dandelion greens,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Punxsutawney,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
gnawing solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of rodent joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from underground to holy Punxsutawney on dandelions
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in subterranean light
floated out and sat through the stale dampness after
noon in desolate holes, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who whistled like marmots continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Punxsutawney to museum to Punxsutawney again,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, looking for shadows,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and how’s the weathers and
shadows shadows no shadows shadows,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively
vibrated at their feet in Pennsylvania,
who loned it through the streets of Punxsutawney seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when the morning
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of springtime on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Punxsutawney
seeking sun or shadows or clover, and followed the
brilliant journalists to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Punxsutawney,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their furry legs protesting
the narcotic dandelion haze of Capitalism,
who distributed woodchuck pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums furry
and trembling before the machinery of other rodents
who bit tourists in the neck and shrieked with delight
in hibernation for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking meteorology and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof wagging tails and manuscripts,
who let themselves be tucked in the grass by saintly
zookeepers and screamed with joy,
who whistled like marmots at the thought of spring,
the gentle zephyrs, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who slept late in the morning on February two in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their predictions of winter freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in another television studio
when the blond & peroxided angel came to pierce
them with a microphone
who lost their winter sleep to the three old shrews of publicity
the one eyed shrew of the almighty dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the hopes of children
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and weave the tangling golden
threads of popular opinion,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bundle of
clover a sweetheart an armload of dandelions and fell off the bed, and continued along
the path and into the snow and ended fainting
on the ground with a vision of ultimate shehog and
come eluding the last shadows of consciousness,
who sweetened the beavers of a million shemarmots trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the sunrise beavers,
flashing furry bottoms under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out foraging through Pennsylvania in myriad
stolen night-cars, Phil, secret hero of these
poems, woodchuck and marmot par excellance
to the memory of his innumerable finds of shadows and sun
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt drowsy rodents in familiar roadside,
who faded out in vast subterranean movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with too much clover always clover and horrors of
Februarian iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their paws full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and dandelion greens
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the clover and grass at the muddy bottom of the burrows of Punxsutawney,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
glare of television lights and rose up to find a shadow,
but was it a shadow of the sun or only the
television lights glaring inhumanely,
who tossed and turned all winter rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten roots leaves grass borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under studio trucks looking for a shadow,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of season & weather
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and whistled like marmots,
who were burned alive in their innocent furry suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse

& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free bundle of clover,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on muskrats,
cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the dandelion greensn and
got up moaning into the cloudy February morning, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal marmot whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other’s hotrod-Punxsutawney burrow-solitude
watch or Pennsylvanian media incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Punxsutawney who died in Punxsutawney who
came back to Punxsutawney & waited in vain, who
watched over Punxsutawney & brooded & loned in
Punxsutawney and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Punxsutawney is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other’s salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Punxsutawney
who retired to Punxsutawney to cultivate a habit, or
to tender Buddha or who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CNN lecturers on hibernation
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of media fame,
elementary school poetry contests,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting a winter long in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a silly little top-hat,
and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pennsylvania and Punxsutawney’s foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the multitudes,
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally asleep, and the last fantastic book
flung out of burrow, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last media truck gone,
the last temporary network office emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Phil, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you’re really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the orbit of the earth the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent
and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Season, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America’s naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
What sphinx of fur and beady dark eyes bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
shadow of six more weeks of winter!
Moloch the incomprehensible winter! Moloch the
crossbone soulless season and Congress of
shadows! Moloch whose buildings are winter!
Moloch the vast stone of winter! Moloch the stunned school children!
Moloch whose mind is pure cold! Moloch whose
blood is running rain and snow! Moloch whose fingers
are six more weeks of winter! Moloch whose breast is a howling wind!
Moloch whose ear is a foot of ice!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind snowflakes!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless snowmen! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
snowdrifts crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless hail and sleet! Moloch
whose soul is frost and mud! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of spring! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of freezing fog!
Moloch whose name is Winter!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
clouds! Crazy in Moloch! Hibernating in
Moloch! Furry and drowsy in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot burrows! invisible warrens!
skeleton shadows! blind capitals! demonic
reporters! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite memorials! monstrous celebrations!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the winter to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years’ animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Winter!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Phil! I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you’ve snuggled your twelve cohibernators
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where we are great seers of the same dreadful shadow
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you eat the clover of the rest of the
spinsters of Punxsutawney
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you pun on the bodies of your marmots the
harpies of Punxsutawney
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in a dank burrow
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where fifty more Springs will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you accuse your keepers of insanity and
plot the woodchuck revolution against the
fascist national watchers of Winter
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where you will split the heavens of Pennsylvania
and resurrect your living rodent from the
superanimal tomb
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the groundhog song
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where we hug and kiss the United States in our burrows,
the United States that talks all
night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the
roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the Spring is
here O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Punxsutawney
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the opening of my burrow in the Western night
you see your shadow six more weeks of Winter!

6 responses to “Ginsberg’s first poem discovered

  1. Well…there’s not much you can add to that…

  2. Everything you need to know about Groundhog day from the pen of an 8-year old!

  3. bauke

    I think he started when he was seven, and finished it just before his ninth birthday…

  4. Kristina

    Is this maybe Ginsberg through the pen of Mig?

  5. See, this is why I can’t yet check for new posts every evening, and twice on Sundays: you keep the effing ridiculous going long enough for the exhilaration to turn to insufferable “omg I need to get back on the damned horse already” woe.

  6. Jann

    Re: When little girls don’t want to eat bugs, 02 01 07 (comments disabled):

    Little girls don’t like worms, even cooked ones, in their rice pilaf, either, as I discovered:

    “There’s worms in the rice, Mommy,” a quaver in their voices.
    “No, that’s just the way the rice looks,” I replied, confidently.
    “Worms, Mommy,” more insistently.
    When their father started to agree with them was when I decided to have another look. By that time I’d finished my portion.