One of six unique works in “A PICTURE OF MY MIND: Poems Written by Allen Ginsberg’s Photographs,” theVERSEverse’s inaugural collection of ekphrastic poetry using natural language processing technology and text-to-image/image-to-text techniques to respond to the iconic words and images of the legendary Beat poet. Developed in conjunction with The Fahey/Klein Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition “Muses & Self: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg,” in partnership with the Allen Ginsberg Estate, theVERSEverse member Ross Goodwin, and the support of the Tezos Foundation.
THE ESCAPE
Poet of steel and brick, visiting the old haunts –
you stood beside me dead-still in a profound kind of emptiness,
staring quietly at the accompaniment of lives suspended
across the backyard of America’s dream.
Clotheslines strung like verse catching the wind of change,
raw words on the horizon.
We were two sunflowers editing eternity,
no sunset salvation of nightfall over the restless river,
just mad grey shadows and eyes aflame with beauty.
All I wanted was to escape, run off and write a mile wide.
Ah, Jack! You know your own myth —
petals hellbent in the smoke of the ever ending sky.
– theVERSEverse after Allen Ginsberg, “Heroic Portrait of Jack Kerouac on Fire Escape, New York, 1953”
