"or down the Avenue to the south, to—as I walk toward the Lower East Side—where
you walked 50 years ago, little girl—from Russia, eating the first poisonous
tomatoes of America—frightened on the dock—
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?—toward Newark—
toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice cream in
backroom on musty brown floor boards—
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and
learning to be mad, in a dream—what is this life?"

The Beats wore their emotions not just on their sleeves, but also on their trousers, their jeans, their berets, their socks, and their underwear. Their hearts were exposed everywhere, at all times. Take this poem, for example.

"Kaddish" is about a son who is both mourning and celebrating the life of his mother. It stands in stark contrast to the wild, confrontational, and irreverent tone of "Howl". The piece shows a much more tender side of Ginsberg; Beats were, if nothing else, very human.

And, believe it or not, they all had mothers, too.

Writing a poem to a ghost can get complicated. So Ginsberg called in his buddies for this one. Here, he draws on a few canonical elegies written by some of his favorite American poets, including Emily Dickinson.

Dickinson's poem "Because I could not stop for death" has a similar thematic structure. In that piece, the narrator walks through landscapes where the deceased once strode and played. Check it out if you don't believe us.

By the by, elegiac poetry is all about loss and ghosts and asking the question, "what is life, really?" Here, Ginsberg walks where his mother had walked fifty years earlier. She's a ghost now—just a memory held in the landscape.

Wow, our writing is so lyrical, we're starting to think we should become poets. Just kidding.

Reading "Kaddish" might make you exclaim, "Wow, Mr. Ginsberg was really into dashes." But he wasn't the first poet to play with the meaning of the dash. Once again, we can trace this element of the poem back to Dickinson's poetry.

"I heard a fly buzz, when I died" is one of Ginsberg's favorite poems, so we're guessing it influenced his use of the dash in "Kaddish." We don't know if you've heard, but the dash is a pretty fun punctuation mark. While commas link things together in a proper, rule-based fashion, dashes can do whatever they like.

Or, rather, whatever the author needs them to do. They can separate or connect ideas. They can introduce or alienate phrases. The dash is kind of like the rebel of the punctuation world.

And since Ginsberg and Dickinson were all about bein' rebels, you can understand why they'd be into exploring the possibilities of the dash. Rock on, you crazy kids.