The letter \u2018G\u2019 in the acronym LGBTQ+ stands for gay. Gay has several meanings, one usage of which is for happy or merry times. The word as used in this acronym is now specifically used to refer to homosexual males. Both American poets mentioned here were open about and did not hide their sexual preferences.<\/p>\n
Walt Whitman (b. 05\/31\/1819 – d. 03\/26\/1892) from Long Island, NY, is the father of Free Verse in American poetry. He helped and nursed wounded Civil War soldiers in a\u00a0hospital in Washington, D.C. during and after the war. He admired\u00a0President Abraham Lincoln and I have included part of a poem he wrote after Lincoln\u2019s assassination here. He could not get his now famous book of poems Leaves of Grass<\/em> published for years because of homoeroticism in it so he\u00a0published several editions on his own.<\/p>\n Allan Ginsberg (b.1926 – d.1997) was one of the leaders of the Beat Generation of poets, which preceded and influenced\u00a0the Hippies or Love Generation of the 1960s. I heard him read poems at my college, C.W. Post, L.I.U., in 1968 with Dr. Timothy\u00a0Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert aka Baba Ram Dass discussing LSD.<\/p>\n An early poem in 1956, Kaddish<\/em>, is a long poem of mourning\u00a0on the death of his mother, Naomi. Kaddish is a Hebrew prayer\u00a0in Aramaic, praising God in the language Jesus spoke. His poem includes praise of homosexuality. Ginsberg was against the war\u00a0in Vietnam. His poetry often contains vulgarities and obscenities.<\/p>\n With both poems I have offered only sections due to their length,\u00a0in hopes readers will look them up to read them in their entirety.<\/p>\n O Captain! My Captain!<\/strong><\/p>\n This poem is an elegy\/ dirge in\u00a0three octets written for President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 by\u00a0Walt Whitman after Lincoln was assassinated in Ford\u2019s Theater\u00a0in Washington, D.C. Following is the middle octet of the poem:<\/em><\/p>\n O Captain! My Captain! rise up and hear the bells,<\/p>\n Rise up\u2014for you the flag is flung\u2014for you the bugle trills,<\/p>\n For you bouquets and ribbon\u2019d wreaths\u2014for you the shores a-crowding<\/p>\n For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;<\/p>\n Here Captain! dear father!<\/p>\n This arm beneath your head!<\/p>\n It is some dream that on the deck,<\/p>\n You\u2019ve fallen cold and dead.”<\/p>\n AMERICA<\/strong><\/p>\n A free verse Beat poem written by Alan Ginsberg in 1956. There are more than 90 lines in the poem. I have selected lines that are relevant to today\u2019s headlines from this poem written 64 years ago:<\/em><\/p>\n (the beginning of the poem)<\/em><\/p>\n America I\u2019ve given you all and now I\u2019m nothing.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t stand my own mind.<\/p>\n America when will we end the human war?<\/p>\n Go f\u2026 yourself with your atom bomb.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t feel good don\u2019t bother me. I won\u2019t write my poem<\/p>\n till I\u2019m in my right mind.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (The rest of the poem is filled with anger, comments about politics, Communism, capitalism, labor unions. It exposes discrimination against Black Americans and American Indians, and some reference to\u00a0marijuana use. Ginsberg is upset with what he sees in American history.)<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n America you don\u2019t really want to go to war.<\/p>\n America it\u2019s them bad Russians.<\/p>\n Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.<\/p>\n The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia\u2019s power mad.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (He ends the poem on an upbeat note and alludes to his homosexuality.\u00a0Here are the last lines at the end of the poem)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n America this is quite serious.<\/p>\n America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.<\/p>\n America is this correct?<\/p>\n I\u2019d better get right down to the job.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true I don\u2019t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories,<\/p>\n I\u2019m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.<\/p>\n America I\u2019m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The letter \u2018G\u2019 in the acronym LGBTQ+ stands for gay. Gay has several meanings, one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":387597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15648],"class_list":["post-394767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-american-indians"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}