Book: Airplane Dreams: Compositions from Journals
Author: Allen Ginsberg
Located in Special Archives in Branson Library at NMSU
Call # PS3513. I74 A67

I'll start by saying that Ginsberg's autograph (this is a signed copy) is remarkably legible.  For all of Ginsberg's unconventional political leanings, his John Hancock here is textbook.  Not encumbered by flourish nor slack-handed, it reminds me of Babe Ruth's or Mickey Mantle's. A kid could spell it out, and it's geekily refreshing to see all those letters post-initials penned equally--not razed by the quick swish of the illustrious book signer. Sorry, Salman Rushdie, but:

Signature burn!  Take that, successful author.  (Honestly, mine's more than a scosche worse, Mr. Rushdie, I mean Sir.)  Anyway, I should probably talk about the book.  

Airplane Dreams was published in 1968 by House of Anansi Press, located in Toronto Canada.  Interestingly, this book was exported to the U.S. along with five thousand other copies to protest the Manufacturing Clause of American copyright laws.  From what I've read, it was a convoluted piece of legislation (the book's editor's note hints at this), and I couldn't quite figure it out--something about an excessive importation of foreign books resulting in the legalization of relevant piracy, but don't quote me. 

Ginsberg's prefatory note nods to this Canadian origin and also provides some explanation for what follows:

These are compositions from journals kept decades 1948-1968, a few solid fragments typed up, published out of context, not exactly poems: journal notations put together conveniently, a mental turn-on printed across the border by long hair youthful exiles disunited from these states by the war of sighs and spears.

-AG March 30, 1968

Personally, I'd rather get hit by the sigh.  No, we all know which war Ginsberg's referring to.  But it's an amusing note; "mental turn-on" just gets me.    

So these aren't poems...exactly.  Well, they kind of are.  At least the last two of the three sections (Understand This is a Dream and Consulting I Ching Smoking Pot Listening to the Fugs Sing Blake) could be read as poems.  The first section is almost journalistic, a comical inside scoop of a fish out of water--in this case, an FBI infiltrator caught in the fracas of a radical gathering of the Jewish Socialist Party.  My favorite part occurs when Ginsberg, high on Napthaline fumes, entreats the FBI man to remain with the group: "Smell it & get high.  Maybe we'll all get the Answer that way.  Don't give up the Ship."  (I wonder if Ginsberg knew he was capitalizing "answer" and "ship" when he said that).  It's a fun read to say the least, offering readers a vantage not only for the time period, but for Ginsberg's psychology.  The same thing could be said for every section in this slim volume.  What's more, there are some beautiful, striking lines, as in the last part of the second section: 

"the cocks crowing/ in the street./ Dawn truck/ what is the 

          question?

Do I need sleep, now that there's light in the window?

I'll go to sleep. Signing off until/ the next idea/ the moving 

          van arrives empty

at the Doctor's house full of Chinese furniture."  

(Pg. 9)

And in the third section: (I want to crib this one)

"That which pushes upward

               does not come back."

(Pg. 35).  

I'd invite anyone to check this one out.  I mean, you won't be able to check it out.  But feel free to examine it in NMSU's special archives.  It's an odd book, and I don't think you'll find any of this in a Norton anthology. But that's what gives it intrigue and demands our attention.  

Next time we'll be looking at a fairly obscure piece: & I dreamt I shot arrows into my Amazon bra by Piero Heliczer.  For great poetry you won't find anywhere else, fish as the wise do.  

-Paul French