American Change by Allen Ginsberg

First published: 1961; collected in Reality Sandwiches, 1963

Type of poem: Meditation

The Poem

“American Change” is Allen Ginsberg’s meditation on the figurative and literal meanings and values of money. Written in 1958, as Ginsberg was returning to the United States from a stint in the merchant marine, the narrative of the poem traces the speaker’s changing attitudes toward his country as he reflects on the American coins in his pockets. Without their value as American currency, these coins were only souvenirs when the speaker was at sea, but as the poem plots his return to New York, he removes the change from his pocket and revalues it.

The poem is structured in a free-verse form in the breath-unit line structure that Ginsberg popularized. In such a structure, each line represents what Ginsberg once termed “one-speech-breath thought,” fusing each line with equal emphasis on body, speech, and mind, a poetic concern Ginsberg borrowed from his Buddhist practice. “American Change” is divided into five stanzas, each organized according to the particular piece of money the speaker takes as his subject matter. Stanza 1 is devoted to the speaker’s meditation on an Indian-head nickel; in stanza 2 the speaker explores the cultural meanings of a dime; stanza 3 is occasioned by a quarter. The poet takes a five-dollar bill as his subject matter in the fourth stanza, and the last stanza is devoted to a meditation and description of the cultural significance of a one-dollar bill.

The speaker immediately contrasts the symbolic money of his country with the sacred potential of the land. The movement from materialism to idealism is appropriate, given that two of Ginsberg’s greatest influences, Walt Whitman and William Blake, perceived the United States as an idealistic answer to the threats to liberty inherent in monarchical systems of government. Ginsberg’s speaker, however, sees the Native American on the front of the nickel as a “vanished man” and the buffalo on the back of the nickel as a prophetic “vanishing beast of Time.” Ginsberg commonly synthesizes several religious traditions in his poetry, and “American Change” is no exception. The Native American is a “Rabbi Indian” whose “visionary gleam” has been swallowed by modern consumer capitalism. This “candy-store nostalgia of the redskin” is “dead on silver coin,” and the sacredness of his culture is “gone into the great slot machine of Kansas City, Reno—.” Ginsberg cuts off the line at “Reno,” suggesting that a continued list of empty, consumerist cities would only be redundant.

“American Change” is framed by this contrast between the sacred and the material. With every new coin or bill, the speaker finds that the visionary origins of the United States have been swallowed by a “Vision of Money.” This monetary vision is portrayed as a dead end; this path produces failure at both the figurative and literal registers of the poem. Figuratively, the money produces a “sexless,” impotent erasure of vision, leaving the speaker with nothing but a “poor pile of coins.” At the literal level, too, the poem dramatizes the “Vision of Money” as a futile one. The speaker reminds himself that the same money he took with him when he left the United States will buy much less now upon his return. Even when he attempts to be materialistic, the speaker despairs: “Money, money, reminder, I might as well write poems to you.” He “might as well” do so because he is returning to an America that has transformed the visionary into the material, and in doing so has left the imagination as a reminder of loss, incapable of originality.

Forms and Devices

As with two other poems of the same period in his career, “America” (Howl and Other Poems, 1956) and “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” (Reality Sandwiches, 1963), Ginsberg builds “American Change” on a shifting foundation of despairing and ironic statements. In the first stanza, the speaker opens with nostalgic articulations of home; yet as he meditates upon his return, he sadly realizes that the home he yearns for never existed. He longs for an ideal, and the tiny nickel in his hand contains within it all the deadness that prevents this ideal from coming into being. The next stanza introduces a dime, with its “sexless cold & chill.” The George Washington quarter in the following stanza is “snub-nosed” and reflects the wishes of a designer who idealized Washington as a “sexless Father.”

The speaker becomes miserable in the next stanza, emphasizing in the five-dollar bill “Lincoln’s sour black head moled and wrinkled.” The poem shifts to an ironic tone in this stanza. The speaker addresses his American change as the “dear American money” he clutches at his arrival at the Statue of Liberty. He accedes that he might as well dedicate his poetry to money—as if he, too, has been consumed by American materialism. Irony links this stanza to the final stanza, which begins with mock joy. His return to the United States is reflected in his return in the poem to George Washington—this time Washington on the face of a dollar bill: “Ahhh! Washington again, on the Dollar, same poetic black print, dark words, The United States of America, innumerable numbers.” The speaker reminds himself that the words “Legal Tender” actually signify the opposite of tenderness in a consumer capitalist culture and that the sacrifice of American idealism to American economics is as absurd as his own characterization of the country’s wealth as a collection of “innumerable numbers.”

Irony and despair combine in the poet’s final rumination on the dollar. He reflects on its unitary value—its currency as the singular dollar—by closing the poem with one word: “ONE.” Ironically, the unity of his country depends upon the suppression of difference and the extinguishing of passion. The speaker remarks that the back of the bill is dominated by the “Great Seal of our Passion,” a seal which indeed seals (contains) passion from further growth. The Treasury Department’s attempt to prevent counterfeit bills symbolizes how cultural practices outside the norm—outside the “ONE”—cannot achieve cultural currency in the country to which he returns. What remains, for the speaker, are empty symbols of mysticism robbed of their visionary claims: the American eagle and “halo of stars,” and the Masonic and Swedenborgian influences that early American leaders saw fit to adapt as images on their currency. Irony and despair combine in this final statement of “ONE” in “American Change,” suggesting ultimately that, for the speaker, America has changed from a visionary land to a culture that contains and restricts dynamic American “change.”

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