Ginsberg, now and forever.

I came late to Allen Ginsberg. Too young to be a beatnik, too young to be a hippie, I missed out on the show and the showman. I was not of his generation, barely of the next.

Only after I stumbled into poetry, only after I worked my way from W.H. Auden to Adrienne Rich, did I bother to stop and take a look at Ginsberg to see what all the fuss was about.

I was not prepared for the rush and spray of the lines. I was not prepared for the manic "I." I was not prepared for the cock and the asshole.

I read "Howl." I was taken not so much by the famous first lines as by the denunciation of "Moloch" and the sweet doomed solidarity with "Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland."

I read "Kaddish," and shed tears the first time and each of the dozen times I've read it since, including this morning at 6:30 A.M.

I read "America," radical in 1956, radical in 1997:

America when will we end the human

war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom

bomb.

I don't feel good don't bother me.

I won't write my poem till I'm in my

right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

Ginsberg was never afraid to take off his clothes. Naked he stands throughout his collected poems; naked he would have us stand.

I went to see Allen Ginsberg on April 15, 1994, to do an interview for The Progressive, which we ran in the magazine that August. I rang the bell in the foyer of his apartment building on the lower east side of Manhattan, and he called me up. He didn't know The Progressive, but it was an interview day for him, and his office had made room for me.

His office, as far as I could tell, was his cramped apartment. I waited my turn, noting the picture of Whitman in the kitchen and the framed copy of Blake's "The Tyger" in the entrance way. A film crew from WGBH/BBC endlessly tried to capture a few sentences from Ginsberg on his relationship with Bob Dylan and John Lennon. He obliged, even changed his tie for the producers because it was too close to the one their previous guest had been wearing. After two hours of trying to get the light just right, they started to film, only to stop every time a siren rang. Finally, Ginsberg, exasperated, said softly, "A little noise won't hurt. This is New York. This is what it sounds like."

When the crew left, he apologized for the delay and asked me why I was there. I said I wanted to talk about poetry, especially his latest work, Cosmopolitan Greetings. "Oh, that'll be a nice change," he said, and off we went. Though not smoothly. I began on the wrong foot. I told him I was interested in political poetry. This sent him on a forty-five minute jag.

"I myself don't believe in so-called political poetry. I think what a poet does is he `writes his mind.' And like everybody else, his mind is concerned with sex, dope, and everyday living, politics included," he told me. He would have none of "the dictatorial monotheists from Pat Robertson to Stalin" who believed that "poetry should be moral, defined in their own terms--whether serving Christ, or the People, or the Central Committee of the Communist Party."

He grew agitated again when he discussed censorship of his own work in the United States. "I'm banned from the `main marketplace of ideas' in my own country--radio, television, and God knows what they can do when the FCC gets ahold of the information highway. That means the entire brainwash is all under the control of the FCC so that `who got fucked in the ass by handsome sailors and screamed with joy' will be banned from electronic media.... That means that a main avenue that I would have for articulation of my own thinking, my own ideas, whether social or political or aesthetic, is closed off."

We talked for four hours in his bedroom, and at one point he took down an old hardback copy of Whitman and began reading "old-age poems" from Sands at Seventy. "Soon to be lost for aye in the darkness--loth, O so loth to depart!/Garrulous to the very last," he read, adding, "Isn't it charming?"

On Sunday, April 6, I was up at dawn looking for my New York Times. It wasn't there yet, only house finches, cardinals, and robins. I did a load of laundry and emptied the dishwasher. I went back outside for the paper, and the Times had arrived, bearing the news of Ginsberg's death. A nice send-off, I thought, except for the obligatory put-down that his politics were "fashionable."

When I got to the office, I took out his red Collected Poems: 1947-1980, and then I grabbed the green galley of Cosmopolitan Greetings.

"I'll settle for Immortality," he writes in a poem called "Now and Forever."

Not thru the body . . .

But thru words, thru the breath

of long sentences

loves I have, heart beating

still

inspiration continuous, exhalation of

cadenced affection

These immortal survive America

survive the fall of States

Departure of my body

mouth dumb dust

This verse broadcasts desire....