How+Americans+See+America

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 * To Each His or Her Own America: How Americans see America **

Howl[[image:ginsberg_allen3_med.jpg align="right" link="http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/ginsberg_allen/images/ginsberg_allen3_med.jpg"]]
//For Carl Solomon//


 * I**

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters 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 cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull... -From Howl by Allen Ginsburg

To learn about Allen Ginsburg go to: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/ginsberg_a.html#

-pg.45 ** -pg. 57 - From The Port Huron Statement by Tom Hayden
 * “We are people of this generation, bread in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
 * “The significance is in the fact that the students are breaking the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner alienation that remain the defining characteristics of American college life."

** **-From The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston**
 * From the fairy tales, I’ve learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them-business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye. **
 * -pg.48 **
 * The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar…What we have in common are the words at our backs…And I have so many words-“chink” words and “gook” words too-that they do not fit on my skin. **
 * -pg. 53 **

** I Hear America Singing ** by Walt Whitman I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Link to video clip about Walt Whitman http://www-tc.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/video/ww-yalp.mov

By Ali Zarrin
 * < ** Made You Mine America **

America in the poems of Walt Whitman Langston Hughes Allen Ginsberg the songs of Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez I made you mine rushing to you at night and daybreak by air and water-- on the land getting a social security number in the year nineteen hundred seventy working the grave yard shift for ITT a teenager four levels below the ground a cashier in a three by eight booth under the Denver Hilton Hotel sheltering derelicts who slept on beds of cardboard and newspaper pillows of shoes my young body luring late night prostitutes and transvestites hip to my accent the midnight thief pouring mace in my eyes escaping up the long ramp passing through barbed wires and waiting for hours in the INS lobbies facing grouchy secretaries overwhelmed by the languages they can't speak and accents they can't enjoy becoming naturalized in the year of bicentennial celebration the migration of my parents to your welfare state of millions living in tenement housing reeking with the smell of urine and cheap liquor traveling the US of A as large as Whitman's green mind white beard and red heart

||<

from the Deadman's Pass rest area on the old Oregon Trail to the Scenic Overlook at Dixie line, Maryland from White Spot--Albuquerque to Cafe Rose--Arlington from Gate's Rubber Factory--Denver to AC Rochester--Flint from Boulder High School to the University of Washington from Mountain Home--Idaho to Rockford--Illinois as large as Mark Twain's laughter and irony tear-drop by tear-drop from YMCA's casket-size single rooms in Brooklyn Chicago San Francisco to Denver's Republic Hotel corner of 15th and California the home of broken old men and women subsisting on three hundred sixty four dollars social security checks waiting on Denver oilmen in the Petroleum Club Nights of Jazz at El Chepultepek the Larimer of the past where Arapahoes lived in their tepees and now sleep on the sidewalks with battered lips and broken heads going door to door on Madison Ave, Seattle selling death insurance for American National servicing houses of bare minimum-- a TV and a couch drunken men and women lonely ailing old African women making quilts selling each for fifty dollars marrying a teacher a third generation auto worker whose parents shared crops in Caraway, Arkansas fathering two tender boys born in America with their blue and brown eyes

 ||< half origins of Asiatic Caucasianness substituting for teachers babysitting bored Middle School children driving them home in a school bus teaching your youth to write English and speak Persian loving your children daughters sons mothers fathers grandmothers grandfathers hating your aggression you aligned yourself with the worst of my kind exiled my George Washington-- Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq helped Saddam bomb my birthplace destroy the school of my childhood his soldiers swarming the hills of Charzebar where as a child I hunted with my grandfather sold arms to warmongers who waged battles on grounds that my great-grandfather made fifteen pilgrimages on foot to Karbala now I lay claim to your Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. I came to you not a prince

||< <span style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; FONT-FAMILY: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">who had lost his future throne not a thief finding a cover in the multitude of your metropolis hiding behind your volumes of law not a merchant dreaming of exploiting your open markets not a smuggler seeking riches overnight but a green-horn seventeen year-old with four hundred dollars after dad sold his prized Bretta and mom some of her wedding jewelry with a suitcase of clothes and books-- Ferdowsi Khayyam Hafez Baba Taher Rumi Shakespeare Nima Forugh and a small Koran-- my grandmother's gift not to conquer Wall Street Broadway or Hollywood I came to you to study to learn and I learned you can't deny me parenthood I lost my grand parents while roaming your streets traveling across your vastness you can't turn me down I gave you my youth walking and driving Colfax nights long I came with hate but now I love you America ||

For this last wall, instead of looking at mostly images relating to each other, I wanted to display writing from different famous American writers, showing what they thought of America. Each poem or quote is next to a picture of the author. I thought it would be nice for the people visiting the ‘wiki’ to get introduced to American writers, and some of what they had to say about America. It is not meant to be positive or negative (hopefully one gets the sense that the wall is both). The wall ends with a poem by Ali Zarrin that I think brings together all many of the elements of the museum: cruelty, dreams, overindulgence, and also hints of hope, and of love.