This article is the first in a series of vignettes exploring the relationship between psychedelics and poetry. We begin here in the realm of LSD research in the 1950s.
I
One of the earliest recorded instances of someone writing poetry either under the influence of, or else as a result of taking, LSD was in an experiment carried out at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York in the mid-1950s.1 Under the auspices of Dr Harold Abramson’s research team, five subjects were given a tap water placebo and seven other different drugs over a course of days in order to determine what effect each one had on their handwriting. The elaborate set of substances the subjects were tested with included LSD, LAE-32, BOL-148, ergometrine, ethyl alcohol, methamphetamine hydrochloride, and scopolamine. On each experiment day, they were asked to write the same poem out verbatim.
At the top of a hill, on La Salle Avenue,
Stood a little hotel. It was called the Bellevue.
It had green window boxes full of bright flowers…
A gaily striped awning to keep off the showers…
On special occasions the doorman, in blue,
Rolled out a lovely red carpet too!
The poem chosen for this auspicious endeavour in the history of psychedelic literature is The Red Carpet (1948), with story and pictures by Rex Parkin; the author’s only known publication. The neat rhyming couplets of this children’s poem doubtless provided something not too challenging for the Mount Sinai team’s doped-up subjects. The poem itself describes a carpet being rolled out for the arrival of an important dignitary, but which quickly becomes out-of-control, rolling on and on through the town and into the countryside, causing havoc as it goes, with no-one able to stop it. Fortunately, it finally finishes unfurling at the local dock, just in time for the arrival of the Duke of Sultana and his retinue.
Once copied, the team examined the handwriting for slants, corrections, copying errors, paper coverage, spacing, letter size, pencil pressure and so on. The results were, perhaps unsurprisingly, variable. The researchers drew several generalizations, including scopolamine tending to produce the most errors, and the most noticeable irregularity and carelessness being seen with LSD. Interestingly, it was also LSD that produced the most answers when the study’s questionnaire was given to participants after each session—apparently they had a lot to say about what happened, although precisely what they thought, remains a mystery. Nevertheless, the red carpet had begun unfurling.
Unbeknownst to one of the study’s doctors at the time, Murray Jarvik, the money for the Mount Sinai team’s LSD investigations was coming indirectly from the CIA through the Geschichter Foundation; one of the many front organizations the CIA used to funnel money into their MK-ULTRA programme.2 His colleague Harold Abramson on the other hand would have been far more aware and has been widely implicated in the CIA’s activities at the time. Herein lies a crux in this song of insurrection and madness. Neither poetic sense nor the LSD experience are easily controlled; the poet and the tripper must ultimately find their own way, and every intention might maddeningly blow back.
II
Around the same time the CIA were rigidly controlling the nascent poetic output of the lysergically-minded, Dr Oscar Janiger (1917–2001) was actively encouraging its creation. Between 1954 and 1962, he gave over 900 doses of Sandoz LSD to people in an attempt to elucidate the broad effects of the drug. A spectrum of ages, sexes and professional backgrounds were included and Janiger even rented a house in Los Angeles in order to use a naturalized setting—a crucial step in LSD’s journey from the conditions of the clinic to the outside world.
The psychiatrist also famously conducted a sub-study investigating the creative process of over 100 artists, writers, and musicians. Participants were asked to draw a deer kachina doll; an exhibition of which Janiger famously put on in 1986. Unlike the artists though, little had been said on the writing that emerged from Janiger’s study. There is scant evidence, notably Exploring Inner Space (1961) by Jane Dunlap (the nutritionist Adelle Davis), and some reference to other writers who received LSD from Janiger and were likely included in the study, like Alexander Trocchi and Anaïs Nin.
Some other poems were written either on or after the LSD experience though, and these were included in an appendix to LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process (2003).3 Given that nearly all the poetry included has been centre-aligned, we must assume that some editing has taken place in transcribing the poems, however, they give a fascinating window into some of the earliest poetic aesthetics dealing with the LSD experience. The authors, only known by initials, are in a sense written out of this story, with only their poems left as signifiers to the kind of language and themes that emerged.
In some it is possible to discern some of the wonder and cosmological significance that would become hallmarks of LSD’s character, yet it is often tempered by a playful yet sardonic earth-bumping reality check. CH wrote, for instance, ‘artists are only able to depict / an aspect of the infinite / wonder that is in each thing / but in their own way they / give it life / that in a way we create / like the creator / but lets face it we have a lot / to learn.’ Or, ‘the earth is our play pen / god has given us free reign of / area knowing that we will / only learn by hurting ourselves’.
Some of the poems are far more personal, with an echo of the psychotherapeutic, and also carefully crafted. FX wrote, ‘In the small circle and unkempt breezes / And rare mildews of good and sufficient love / For I owe all that I am / Not / To my mother.’ And also metrical, ‘There is a haunting echo in the wind, / And from the sea, an ancient, plaintive cry—/ The voices of the past, which will not still, / The ghosts of dreams to [sic] unfulfilled to die.’ With the former poem, an element of the sardonic is also present; the great cosmological joke twisting the reader back around.
These anonymous poets, whose creations only reached the light of day after the turn of the millennium, have in a sense been lost to the 1950s, their poetry existing as disembodied snapshots, offering something approximating the raw and rarefied moments of creativity in the era’s LSD research. Free verse, rhyming schemes, tight metrical order, the poems are almost as variable as the handwriting samples of The Red Carpet. And while reflections on the creative process and personal relationships are quite understandable given the research context—the cosmic joke starkly stands out.
Jonathan Cole, chief of the NIMH’s Psychopharmacology Service Centre noted, ‘If a person becomes more relaxed and happy-go-lucky, more sensitive to poetry or music, but less concerned with success and competition, is this good?’4 An odd question. One poet of that era stands in contrast to Cole’s presumption of a relaxed appreciation of the poetic, and the anonymity of LSD study subjects; one who also happens to be Janiger’s cousin. Deeply embodied, a larger-than-life figure, and as good a promotor of himself and his poetry as one could imagine—Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
III
Ginsberg first tried LSD as a subject in a study at the Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto, in May 1959, through the recommendation of cyberneticist Gregory Bateson.5 It was certainly not his first trip with a ‘classic psychedelic’, having taken peyote several times throughout the 1950s, and which had already proved excellent poetic material—a perfectly novel rhythm for the beat to capture.
Ginsberg first took peyote at home in Paterson in April 1952. It had a ‘metallic imaginary aftertaste’ that left him nauseated and with a heavy feeling in his body, which persisted for much of the trip. Looking outside, he saw the beauty of the day, the great mystery of Being, and felt that ‘Heavens, the universe is in order’. Meanwhile, inside was primitive. He was very sensitive to sights and sounds, but as he ambled around the abode he was interrupted by his relatives—‘Please Allen, will you hang that up?’ There are faces in windows, paranoic moments, but he carries a smile on his face. Musing between the infinite and the minute, ‘Peyote is not God’, he wrote, ‘but is a powerful force’.6
‘Rotting Ginsberg’, his poem ‘Mescaline’ begins, ‘I stared in the mirror naked today / I noticed the old skull, I’m getting balder’. The poem is distracted. One moment a light is bursting from God’s hand, the next a cat is scrabbling around the floor, while meditations on death and vain self-reflections are broken by the rhythm of a typewriter. It finishes with an exclaiming flourish, with no glory for man nor him, and then simply ‘No me! / No point writing when the spirit doth not lead.’ The poem finishes along with the poet, and the everyday world that stalked the margins of death and decay, its most virulent themes, disappear along with it.7
The second part of Ginsberg’s momentous ‘Howl’ was also composed during a peyote vision, while he injected amphetamines, with a little morphine and Dexedrine, to keep going through the one long sitting in which it took to write ‘Kaddish’. The set was of course slightly different in his first trip to the land of Lysergia. For one thing, he asked the doctor to procure some mandalas from the expert, Professor Spiegelberg, so he had some Sikkimese elephant mandalas on show.8 Some focused imagery to add to the distractions which in Palo Alto were of a very different sort.
His first acid trip took place in a small room, with no windows to the outside, surrounded by medical equipment, and under the supervision of Dr Joe Adam. After dosing, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and the voice of Gertrude Stein played as he was given several psychological tests, before being attached to EEG apparatus hooked up to a flicker machine so he could watch the rhythm of his own alpha waves riding the lysergic wave. He felt anxious, and reflecting on it twenty years later, said,
I had the impression that I was an insignificant speck on a giant spider web, and that the spider was slowly coming to get me, and that the spider was God or the Devil—I wasn’t sure—but I was the victim. I thought I was trapped in a giant web or network of forces beyond my control that were perhaps experimenting with me or were perhaps from another planet or were from some super-government or cosmic military or science-fiction Big Brother.9
He stayed with his supervising doctor that night and composed ‘Lysergic Acid’. It begins with a million eyed monster, a vast spiderweb in which he is a separate consciousness, a strand within it, laying listening, hoping to hear cosmic vibrations, wanting to know God. Like ‘Mescaline’ he looks in the mirror at his thinning hair, seeing decay, ‘Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!’ he wrote. The sombre motifs of death and decay pepper the poem, a monster invades his consciousness. Then, in the final stanza, staring at the mandala, ‘Gods dance on their own bodies’, he sees the ‘Creator’, ‘This is the Work! This is the Knowledge! This is the End / of man!’
In a letter to his father Louis a few days later, Ginsberg described the trip as ‘astounding’ and how he fell into a fantasy world, comparing it to Coleridge’s claim that Kubla Khan emerged from an opium vision, in which he ‘saw a vision of that part of my consciousness which seemed to be permanent and transcendent and identical with the origin of the universe—a sort of identity common to everything—but a clear and coherent sight of it.’ As he understood it in those days shortly afterwards it was an automatic route to the mystical experience. ‘Science’ he added, ‘is getting very hip.’10
Ginsberg continued to play with psychedelics, but eventually became a little more ambivalent over their power to automatically produce a mystical state, instead seeing them as exploratory vehicles and a matter for creative inspiration. In the mid-1960s, he reflected, ‘drugs were useful for exploring perception, sense perception, and exploring different possibilities and modes of consciousness, and exploring the different versions of petite sensations and useful then for composing, sometimes, while under the influence.11 In short, they are keys for the poet’s muse.
In later vignettes, the lysergically-minded Ginsberg returns, using the Black Mountains in Wales for a poetic backdrop. Outside the clinic, as with ‘Mescaline’, different crossroads of consciousness are reached with poetry and psychedelics. For the Beat poets generally, as we shall see, the mid-century was an intense period of pharmapoesy and cactus-consciousness.
The red carpet roles on anon.
Robert Dickins is the author of Cobweb of Trips: A Literary History of Psychedelics (2024) which is available to pre-order. Out in June 2024.
Hirsch, MW, Jarvik, M.E, & Abramson, HA (1956) ‘Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25): XVIII. Effects of LSD-25 and Six Related Drugs upon Handwriting’ in The Journal of Psychology: 41(1), 11–22
‘Conversation with Murray Jarvik’ (2001) in Addiction: 96, 1241–1252
De Rios, MD & Janiger, O (2003) LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process. Rochester: Park Street Press. 193–209
Qtd. in Oram, M (2018) The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 113
Miles, Barry (1990) Allen Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: HarperPerennial 260
Ginsberg, A (1960) ‘From the journals, Sunday, April 19, 1952’ in Kupferberg, T [ed] (1960) Birth: 3, 1, 71–78
‘Mescaline’ in Ginsberg, A (1961) Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958–1960. San Francisco: City Light Books
‘Allen Ginsberg, The Art of Poetry No. 8’. Interviewed by Thomas Clark. The Paris Review: 37, Spring 1966
Lee, MA & Shlain, B (1992) Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond. New York: Grove Press. 59
Ginsberg, A (2008) The Letters of Allen Ginsberg. Da Capo Press. 293–294
‘Allen Ginsberg, The Art of Poetry No 8’. Interviewed by Thomas Clark. The Paris Review: 37, 1966