VMI cadets read "Howl" in 1991 (photo by Gordon Ball)

[swag]

via yesterday's NYT Book Review:

[Magrittes Pipe]

1. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...

...starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

[Sugar Smack]

2. who bared their brains to Heaven

under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall