The brutalist aesthetic

Reading Allen Ginsberg always affects me more profoundly than reading any other poet. Maybe it's familiarity, maybe it's the subject matter, maybe the playfulness. But today, much like he did whan he stayed up all night listeining to the Ray Charles Blues, I wept, realizing how we suffer. I don't know why more people aren't turned on this fellow. He is accessible and much deeper than it appears on first read. He did much for the children of the sixties, so if you approve of that kind of stuff, you should take a look. I'd post a link but I've lost my linky button, so no dice. If I were to write a rambling poem about sunflowers and locomotives, I'd be laughed out of the academy (so it's a good thing I'm not in the academy for literary things), but he was one of the first, who suffered in a mental institution so we could wear flowers in our hair and bang our saucepans on locomotives. Here was a man who led the first, and possibly only, mass be-in, where, I imagine, one showed up and, well, just was. They also liked Buddhism and chanting OM a lot. He went to India to find opium dens, enraged communists in Czechoslovakia, worked with the Clash and Pink Floyd, did his part to piss off the religious right. And then he became a professor and died.

Anyway, nobody makes me realize how we suffer like this man, who died recently, so recently that I might have heard of him before his death, but did not and regret it. Older poets are too stylized, and more recent poets are too brutalist about the reality of everything and the poetry of details, much like the general architectural philosophy of Robarts Library. I don't even want to start with abstract poetry and why it's wrong to consider it. Shakespeare loses me every time he invokes a high-faluting human sentiment that I fell I can justify skepticism about; Bukowski is the exact opposite: I know he is a real human, but there is no yeast in his bread; there is no soft inside which I crave, only a deeply tanned leathery face and a mirthless scowl. Eliot was too obsessed with image; Pound was a fascist; all the socialist realists were like Bukowski except sprinkled with bullshit. Too many other poets are self-important. At times I want to confound the whole poetic enterprise, but then I remeber who I am; I'm just a science student. They laugh at my amateurish dabbling and dismiss my comments with stony tutorial silences. I know there are other poets out there, but they don't add to my string of sentences, and time is limited. There is a short story in there somewhere. Anyone who calls themselves just a opet should for the most part be shot. I can't believe I harbor such resentment against a subject I so dearly love. I suppose that's what passion does: it opens the doors to hatred and love and despair and impatience, everything but calmness and a feeling of completeness.

I'd appreciate any referrals to what people consider their favourite poets and/or poems.

I will do a rare thing and have the quote at the end link up with the rest of the entry.

Consider: "Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive? / You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!"