Topic 2: Ghosts and Ginsberg
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 loco-
/motive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American/locomotive?
(‘Sunflower Sutra’ 20).
Strange Prophecies anew! She wrote—‘The key is in the/window, the key is in the
sunlight at the window—I have the/ key—Get married Allen don’t take drugs—the key
is in the/ bars, in the sunlight in the window./Love,/your mother’/which is Naomi—
(‘Kaddish’ 57).
Drawing upon relevantideas from chapter 18 of Bennett and Royle’sAn Introduction to
Literature, Criticism and Theory, discuss the presence of
ghosts in any two poems by Ginsberg that we have studied this semester.
