Q3 Journal 2

While searching for good poems to use for my paper on Allen Ginsberg, I found a poem called “America.”  This free verse poem uses many different voices in first person that air their grievances about the United States, and it grabbed my attention from the first line:  “America I've given you all and now I’m nothing.”  Those who do not know Ginsberg would probably think that this would be some sort of patriotic poem, but that first line surely proves them wrong.  The narrators in “America” range from a weary person who feels like America has taken everything away from him to an angry narrator who has become tired of America’s demands, someone who has become obsessed with Time Magazine, a worried politician, one who makes outcries of America’s abuses, an uneducated person who blames the Russians and Chinese for everything, and a voice who seems driven to change America’s condition.  I found it very interesting how all of the voices were in just one poem, sometimes not even separated by different stanzas.  Still, it was not tough to find out where the voices changed because of the shift in tone and sometimes grammatical structure.  At first I did not understand a few of the numerous allusions, all of which related to the Cold War era, but I was pretty sure that all of the events would be very clear to any readers of Ginsberg’s time because they usually related to America’s abuses.  I noticed a few similarities among all of the voices such as the use of anaphora and relatively short sentences.  Lastly, the line “It occurs to me that I am America” struck me the hardest in the poem.  It is probably the most important line, and it is an almost jarring change because the narrators have been complaining about America for the entire first half of the poem only to realize that they are talking to themselves.  I feel that this means that in some way each voice has become part of the corruption of America’s society, which I thought was a very powerful message from Ginsberg.  “America” certainly made me want to read more of Ginsberg’s works even though I knew that next up was “Howl,” a poem more than twice this one’s length.