Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997).

I've been rereading Allen Ginsberg's early poems. Despite their unflagging energy, long lists of Whitmanesque "yawps," all-embracing compassion, and stinging eroticism, I'm impressed anew at how melancholy they mostly seem. Listen:

"...all movement stops

& I walk in the timeless sadness

of existence...

my own face streaked with tears

in the mirror

of some window -- at dusk

where I have no desire"

Or listen again to the notorious opening of "Howl":

"I saw the best minds of my

generation destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the

negro streets at dawn looking for 

an angry fix. "

-- followed by a thousand lines of depressing fervor that in 1956 established Ginsberg, at the age of 29, as our most influential American bard.

The verses recall my own mother, who spent her life as an activist for pacifism and for all civil rights. When the world did not listen, she gave up and died. Ginsberg never gave up. Yet with the years he became less and less the subjective poet and more and more the objective sloganeer for the teenage minds of the 1960s and '70s: mantras, flower power, LSD, counterculture. But he was also crucial to more worldly movements: gay rights, environmental protest, Buddhist solutions to violence. Like Hemingway, he grew to be more guru than creator.

Was it in 1958 that we met? I recall a drunken bunch of us piling into a cab from Virgil Thomson's at the Chelsea to Kenneth Koch's on Perry Street, with me seated happily on the lap of Allen's boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky. Did Allen mind? "Not if Peter doesn't," said he and began to sing, "Where is the world we roamed, Ned Bunn? ... who roamed a world young lads no more shall roam." For the next four decades, whenever he saw me my name would spark those verses of Melville.

Cut to Tangier in 1961, when this entry appears in my diary on August 28: "Allen Ginsberg, who breakfasts on eclairs in the Socco Chico, who inhabits a shack-penthouse at the Hotel Armor with Gregory Corso, who takes strong pills with William Burroughs and who announced `all' to the New York Post two years ago... "

The "all," uttered to a leering reporter, had been: "Yes, I'm queer as a two-dollar bill." In 1966, when Paul Goodman's Five Years and my Paris Diary were published, we became America's three unapologetic queers.

Over the years Allen and I corresponded. We "spoke" of poetry as it pertains to music and as its subject is gay (though neither of us used that word). I was cranky; he was patient. He never raised his voice. Saints don't raise their voices; they inform through example. Still, saints are a dime a dozen and never really change the world, while poets are rare as rubies and leave us in another dimension.

I prefer to remember Allen as a poet. If he grew to be less the dreamer and more the rebel, Allen nonetheless in 1973 accepted membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, at whose prestigious dinner parties he ambled from table to table photographing fellow members. (Those included, after 1983 and thanks to Allen's prodding, William Burroughs.) It was at the academy that I most frequently ran into Allen and with whom I felt most at ease gossiping about who "was" and who "wasn't" among the distinguished immortals.

Now I am 74 -- 32 months older than Allen, who is gone forever. Thus he enters the realm of those who can no longer be talked to but only talked about. Like all true artists he was one of a kind. The "kind" was bardic, didactic, personal, where the artist's presence is as crucial as his work. No one was better at this than Allen Ginsberg. One may hope that the best of what he has to say, despite his absence from our fickle society, will last forever.