"America Politica Historia, in Spontaneity"

(Gregory Corso)

O this political air so heavy with the bells

and motors of a slow night, and no place to rest

but rain to walk—How it rings the Washington streets!

The umbrella’d congressmen; the rapping tires

of big black cars, the shoulders of lobbyists

caught under canopies and in doorways,

and it rains, it will not let up,

and meanwhile lame futurists weep into Spengler’s

prophecy, will the world be over before the races blend color?

All color must be one or let the world be done—

There’ll be a chance, we’ll all be orange!

I don’t want to be orange!

Nothing about God’s color to complain;

and there is a beauty in yellow, the old Lama

in his robe the color of Cathay;

in black a strong & vital beauty,

Thelonious Monk in his robe of Norman charcoal—

And if Western Civilization comes to an end

(though I doubt it, for the prophet has not

executed his prophecy) surely the Eastern child

will sit by a window, and wonder

the old statues, the ornamented doors;

the decorated banquet of the West—

Inflamed by futurists I too weep in rain at night

at the midnight of Western Civilization;

Dante’s step into Hell will never be forgotten by Hell;

the Gods’ adoption of Homer will never be forgotten by the Gods;

the books of France are on God’s bookshelf;

no civil war will take place on the fields of God;

and I don’t doubt the egg of the East its glory—

Yet it rains and the motors go

and continued when I slept by that wall in Washington

which separated the motors in the death-parlor

where Joe McCarthy lay, lean and stilled,

ten blocks from the Capitol—

I could never understand Uncle Sam

his red & white striped pants his funny whiskers his starry hat:

how surreal Yankee Doodle Dandy, goof!

American history has a way of making you feel

George Washington is still around, that is

when I think of Washington I do not think of Death—

Of all Presidents I have been under

Hoover is the most unreal

and FDR is the most President-looking

and Truman the most Jewish-looking

and Eisenhower the miscast of Time into Space—

Hoover is another America, Mr. 1930

and what must he be thinking now?

FDR was my youth, and how strange to still see

his wife around.

Truman is still in Presidential time.

I saw Eisenhower helicopter over Athens

and he looked at the Acropolis like only Zeus could.

OF THE PEOPLE is fortunate and select.

FOR THE PEOPLE has never happened in America or elsewhere.

BY THE PEOPLE is the sadness of America.

I am not politic.

I am not patriotic.

I am nationalistic!

I boast well the beauty of America to all the people in Europe.

In me they do not see their vision of America.

O whenever I pass an American Embassy I don’t know what to feel!

Sometimes I want to rush in and scream: “I’m American!”

but instead go a few paces down to the American Bar

get drunk and cry: “I’m no American!”

The men of politics I love are but youth’s fantasy:

The fine profile of Washington on coins stamps & tobacco wraps

The handsomeness and death-in-the-snow of Hamilton.

The eyeglasses shoe-buckles kites & keys of Ben Franklin.

The sweet melancholy of Lincoln.

The way I see Christ, as something romantic & unreal, is the way I see them.

An American is unique among peoples.

He looks and acts like a boyman.

He never looks cruel in uniform.

He is rednecked portly rich and jolly.

White-haired serious Harvard, kind and wry.

A convention man a family man a rotary man & practical joker.

He is moonfaced cunning well-meaning & righteously mean.

He is Madison Avenue, handsome, in-the-know, and superstitious.

He is odd, happy, quicker than light, shameless, and heroic

Great yawn of youth!

The young don’t seem interested in politics anymore.

Politics has lost its romance!

The “bloody kitchen” has drowned!

And all that is left are those granite

façades of Pentagon, Justice, and Department—

Politicians do not know youth!

They depend on the old

and the old depend on them

and lo! this has given youth a chance

to think of heaven in their independence.

No need to give them liberty or freedom

where they’re at—

When Stevenson in 1956 came to San Francisco

he campaigned in what he thought was an Italian section!

He spoke of Italy and Joe DiMaggio and spaghetti,

but all who were there, all for him,

were young beatniks! and when his car drove off

Ginsberg & I ran up to him and yelled:

“When are you going to free the poets from their attics!”

Great yawn of youth!

Mad beautiful oldyoung America has no candidate

the craziest wildest greatest country of them all!

and not one candidate—

Nixon arrives ever so temporal, self-made,

frontways sideways and backways,

could he be America’s against? Detour to vehicle?

Mast to wind? Shore to sea? Death to life?

The last President?

Gregory Corso (1930-2001) was described by Allen Ginsberg as an "awakener of youth." When Corso was sixteen, he went to jail to serve a three-year sentence for theft. There he read widely in the classics, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Chatterton, and Christopher Marlowe. After his release in 1950, he worked as a laborer in New York City, a newspaper reporter in Los Angeles, and a sailor on a boat to Africa and South America. It was in New York City that he first met Ginsberg, the Beat poet with whom he was most closely associated. The pair met in a Greenwich Village bar in 1950 while Corso was working on his first poems.