“BACK! BACK!

ABSTRACT This article explores ways in which the poems Allen Ginsberg wrote against the Vietnam War entailed resisting what he viewed to be effects of “coldwar subjectivity ” – in particular, the automation of thinking and feeling. Many of these poems are what Ginsberg called “auto poems”: lyrical flights of autobiography dictated while traveling in automated transport. I argue that in an auto poem like “Wichita Vortex Sutra, ” Ginsberg develops a poetic “potentialism ” whereby lyric language is made a vehicle for new possibilities and powers of individual feeling and dissent. Combating the anaesthetizing effects of war propagand