The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971

City Lights Pocket Poets No. 30 — Allen Ginsberg's National Book Award-winning collection, published in 1972 by City Lights and dedicated to Walt Whitman. The Fall of America continues the chronicle begun in Planet News: poems composed across the country by bus, car, and airplane between 1965 and 1971, the years of Vietnam, the assassinations, Chicago, and the unraveling of the American project Ginsberg had hoped for. The poems were tape-recorded or hand-scribed in transit, literal road poems, the flux of consciousness moving through a landscape in crisis.

The book is organized in four sections: West Coast to East (1965-66), Zigzag Back Through These States (1966-67), Elegies for Neal Cassady (1968), and Bixby Canyon to Jessore Road (1971). The acknowledgments page lists an extraordinary range of publications where these poems first appeared: Evergreen Review, Paris Review, Rolling Stone, the Berkeley Barb, and many others that no longer exist.