On Burroughs’ Work (1954). Summary and Description

“On Burroughs’ Work,” published in his fourth collection of poetry, Reality Sandwiches, pays homage to the writer William S. Burroughs, a fellow proponent of the American Beat movement. The first two lines of the poem, “The method must be purest meat / and no symbolic dressing,” refer to the Beats’ insistence that literature relate only a pure and honest record of human life. As with Ginsberg, Burroughs’s brutal honesty (often to the point of relating vivid sexual and drug-related details) led him to face censorship in his writing career. In the third stanza of the poem, Ginsberg alludes to Burroughs’s seminal and experimental work, Naked Lunch.

The novel graphically recounts a drug addict’s travels through both physical space and hallucinated worlds, which Ginsberg refers to as “Prisons and visions presented / with rare descriptions / corresponding exactly to those / of Alcatraz and Rose.”

The poem also alludes indirectly to Jack Ker- ouac, another major Beat writer, who suggested the title Naked Lunch for Burroughs’s novel. Among other works, Kerouac wrote On the Road, one of the most important books of the Beat generation. In the novel, Kerouac writes about his cross-country travels in verbose, page-long paragraphs using a version of the stream-of-consciousness style, in which a character’s thoughts are presented with little regard to grammatical constraints. This unrestrained depiction of consciousness exemplified the writing style of Kerouac, a close friend to Ginsberg, and his artistic influence is seen more clearly in Ginsberg’s later poems.

In the last stanza, Ginsberg uses the phrase reality sandwiches, which he adopted as the title of the collection. When asked about the title of his own book, Burroughs described a naked lunch as “a frozen moment in time when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” For Ginsberg, this “frozen moment” translates into his trademark spontaneous poetry, in which he composed poems over the course of a few minutes that documented a specific moment in time. He writes that “allegories are so much lettuce,” demonstrating his skepticism of traditional works of literature that use one story to tell another, often moralistic, tale. His last line, “Don’t hide the madness,” is a call to arms to other Beat writers to follow in the tradition of Burroughs’s work and portray the depths of their souls without regard to social norms or literary tradition.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Modernist poetry had roots in imagism, an artistic movement based on the precision and clarity of figurative language. Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” demonstrates the influence of imagism, as does William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” What makes Ginsberg’s poem, although it certainly exercises economy of language, different from those modernist standards?

2. Discuss the problems inherent in the phrase actual visions. How does the fact that Ginsberg and Burroughs treat visions as reality complicate their philosophy?