Newly Discovered Ginsberg Poem… Or Another Beat Fake?

A recent video claims to present a lost Allen Ginsberg poem.

A few weeks ago, the Beat world was shocked by the announcement that a long-lost Jack Kerouac short story had been uncovered. The media reported this as a stunning find but many Beat experts were unconvinced. Personally, I found it extremely unlikely that it was real and I was happy to see that most knowledgeable people agreed. There were a great many problems with the document but for me it was the use of “beatnik” one year prior to the word being coined that showed the document as a forgery.

I think that when you look at what the various Kerouac experts have to say on the matter, you could not seriously believe this is a real document… but I must admit that it looks real. The signature is pretty good (in spite of the green ink) and it seems like an old piece of writing, so my guess is that someone made it in the 1960s or 1970s and then sold it to a collector. However, others have suggested that it is somehow AI-generated. The story certainly does sound like an AI version of Kerouac but I am not sure how someone could take an AI-generated story and turn it into a typed manuscript that has fooled at least a few professionals in the world of document authentication…

Now, a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading a previously unknown poem has magically emerged. More incredibly, it is accompanied by a film of Ginsberg shot by Bruce Conner. Peter Hale sent the video to me a few days ago, saying that the Ginsberg and Conner estates both believe the work to be fake. One clue was that it was released twice—once listed as a newly discovered Conner film and then as a newly discovered Ginsberg poem.

I watched it and immediately agreed with the assessment of it being a forgery. There were many clues, including its vague providence and the fact that—like the abovementioned Kerouac short story—it sounded more like a parody than the real thing.

I’m now going to pick this video apart and explain why it seems to me a fake. This isn’t just for fun. I believe that in these strange days we should all be a little more sceptical of what we see online and that we should be better at determining real videos from fake ones.

Although I don’t want to give the filmmakers more traffic, and I know that the video will likely be taken down in the next few days, I have embedded it here so that you can refer to my criticisms and make your own judgments.

First of all, it is beyond suspicious that the narrator says the film and poem came with “the discovery of a trove of old film cans, photographic negatives, onionskin pages, and recordings.” No more information is given. Where would these have been found? Why was this mentioned nowhere else except in a YouTube video with an embarrassingly small view count? The narrator stresses the importance of these two giants of American art collaborating in a previously unknown work but at no stage did the filmmakers try to contact the press or alert the Beat world of their discovery. This suggests that they knew it was not going to convince anyone.

Following this long, badly written introduction, we come to what is allegedly Allen Ginsberg’s newly discovered poem. It begins “Sutra for Hector Rondan.” Of course, there is no known poem by this name in Ginsberg’s archives but that holds with the story of a magically discovered box of artifacts. But who was this person? Google suggests it was a Uruguayan cyclist, famous in the early 1980s, but of course that is not logical. (Later in the poem, the name changes to something like “Roldon.”) As for “Sutra,” it seems like an AI bot’s suggestion for a generic Ginsberg poem title. If you fed it all of Ginsberg’s poems and told it to spit out a new Ginsberg poem, then “Sutra for [Random Name]” would be a pretty likely outcome. It imitates the title of “Howl for Carl Solomon” and of course Ginsberg used “Sutra” in various poems.

The first line sounds slightly Ginsbergian and the voice is pretty accurate:

Once again the angry teeth devour roots sunk deep into fertile soil and I am left to wander the lonely Moon-white streets of Ithaca gripped by monster angel sorrow

The language and cadence and long-breath line are not a bad effort at copying Ginsberg’s style. It is towards the end of this line, however, that we can hear a slight slip. Ginsberg has a pretty easily identifiable voice and here it briefly transforms into something else—a voice that is very clearly not Ginsberg’s. Later, this becomes much more noticeable. At times, it is very oddly English, and I’ve never heard him slip into an English accent when reading poems.

The more I listen to this, the more I realise how obvious it is that this voice is generated by an AI bot fed lots of Ginsberg recordings. Certain sounds are spot-on (“moon”) but others are poor efforts at imitation (“sorrow”). Keep listening and it becomes clearer and clearer that certain words were easy to copy and others were more difficult.

But more than that are the words, phrases, and themes. Does the above perhaps remind you of a rewriting of early lines from “Howl”? Can you perhaps see “angel-headed hipsters” and “angry negro streets at dawn”? If you were to take Ginsberg’s collected poems and feed them into an AI bot and tell it to make a new one, it would likely produce something like we have here, repeating certain words and phrasings and references. I see a lot from “Howl” but also from other poems of his, and there are even some more generic beatnik-type allusions sprinkled throughout. The sex parts sometimes sound like him but then at times they veer more towards Mills & Boon-style erotica. Did Ginsberg ever refer to a penis as a “hot magic sword”?

I’ll admit that there are lines that could well be Ginsberg. There are certain words and rhythms that are close to his style and there are his obvious concerns and interests. He certainly did write about his penis a lot and he did mention his hometown and his religious or philosophical pursuits and he did write about marijuana and LSD from time to time. But there is so much crammed into this one poem that it seems more of an attempt at a Ginsberg poem than an actual Ginsberg poem. And I think that is one of the biggest giveaways.

That said, there is perhaps one element that is more obvious than any other, and that’s the final section, in which Ginsberg begins chanting “Sacred”:

Sacred sacred sacred sacred is 4-billion-years-old Moon

Sacred rocks

Sacred ocean

Sacred Earth

Sacred time

Sacred love

[…]

My body is sacred

My eyes are sacred

My beard is sacred

My cock is sacred

My balls are sacred

My jism is sacred

It goes on like this in a clear imitation of “Footnote to Howl.”

And what of the video?

Supposedly, we have a film made by Bruce Conner that shows Ginsberg on the beach, but there is no way this was made by Conner or filmed in 1970. These sequences show the stereotypical big beard and long curly hair that we know from so many late-sixties photos. Glimpse at the screen or blur your vision and it certainly seems to be Allen Ginsberg on a beach. However, it’s all carefully cut and composed to obscure his face. If this were a real film of Ginsberg, would that have been the case? It seems highly improbable. The camera always pans away or finds Ginsberg’s face in the shadows. It is presented as artsy and playful but in fact it is precisely this that shows the filmmakers are trying to deceive us. They want to fool the viewer into thinking this is really a video of Ginsberg.

The film makes heavy use of overlaid images in an attempt to make Ginsberg’s features less clear. This could pass off as the work of an experimental filmmaker using grainy footage perhaps to simulate an acid trip… but more likely it is a way of hiding the fact that the man in the video is not Allen Ginsberg. Here are a few examples:

When they dispense with the double-exposure technique, they have Ginsberg’s face hidden behind a camera:

I did manage to catch what I think are the clearest pictures of Ginsberg’s face in this video and I think here it becomes apparent that this is not him. Yes, the beard and glasses are pretty similar, but the face is not Ginsberg’s:

For a while, I thought this was an AI-generated video that was based on photos of Ginsberg from that era, but later I came to believe this was not the case. There are several reasons, including the fact that the above few photos look like someone simply dressed up as Ginsberg. I think certain techniques have been used to not only hide his face but also to make 2020s video footage look much older. When you look even more closely at the non-Ginsberg parts, you see something that I often notice in social media videos purportedly of the late 20^th century, which is that the footage is simultaneously hi- and lo-resolution. In other words, they have really vivid and clear film of water flowing over sand but they’ve downscaled it in order to make it look older than it is. It is made to seem artificially grainy but this is just a digital filter. You can also see close-up shots of Ginsberg’s hands at one point and AI is notoriously bad with hands, so that suggests they might have used real footage at least there.

As for the supposed facts behind Ginsberg’s trip to the beach with Conner, I cannot say for sure and I do not presently have the time to dig into his archives. (Also, given the evidence so far, I hardly feel it is worthwhile making the effort to disprove something so obviously fake.) A quick look over my notes suggests that in 1970 Ginsberg was mostly on the East Coast aside from a trip to the Caribbean. Of course, he travelled often for reading engagements, so he could quite easily have visited the West Coast for a few days or a week, but I see no references to this in his letters and he does not mention being with Bruce Conner at all. As for textual evidence, there are references to Kerouac and Cassady being dead, but that actually holds true for they died in 1969 and 1968.

Conclusion

I think it’s abundantly clear that this is not a film of Allen Ginsberg on the beach in 1970. The poem is almost certainly not his and the audio recording seems very much a fake as well. The first time I watched this, I thought it was entirely AI-generated but now I’m not entirely sure. I think realistically the poem either is the work of AI or just someone’s attempt at a Ginsberg parody, and the voiceover is either AI or a pretty good (but not perfect) human imitator. As for the film, I think that the filmmakers dressed someone up and had him play around on the beach, then edited it to make it look like old footage.

Altogether, this might have been an interesting attempt at an homage to Ginsberg but the fact that they’ve tried to pass it off as a real lost work is a little sad, and violates the filmmakers’ own code of ethics as stated on their website. We live in an era of deception and many the values of the 20^th century seem to be fading away. We don’t need more of this sort of thing. We need more originality and less of whatever this is. It is fine to play around with literary influences and whilst I dislike generative AI, I recognise that it is not all bad; however, the deceptive element is off-putting. Had the filmmakers been upfront about their intention to make a fake Ginsberg-Conner collaboration, it would be quite a different matter.

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In case you missed it yesterday, I wrote about our latest publication—a book about William S. Burroughs called The Bunker Diaries. You can read more here…