SOURCE: Peters, Robert. “Funky Poetry: Ginsberg's The Fall of America.” In Where the Bee Sucks: Workers, Drones and Queens of Contemporary American Poetry, pp. 113-19. London: Asylum Arts, 1994.

In the following essay, Peters provides a stylistic analysis of Ginsberg's verse, defining it as “funky” poetry.

Funky poetry is my invention for a genre of poem best executed by Allen Ginsberg. Poetry in Salvation Army clothes hung with rusted medals and pendants culled from the trash heaps of America and from the head shops of eastern mysticism. Poetry in Whitman's easiest colloquial, cataloguing, suspiring manner, of the Whitman clad in frayed and soiled Big Mac overalls just in from the barn of the universe, that Vedantaesque-pseudo Blakean-Kerouacian stables. The poet is to locate nuggets in the animal-magical ordure of this life—these states.

Yes, a tatty form, a diarrhea (frequently) of phrases and projective verse breath group clusters, a...