Recollecting Allen Ginsberg

I never had a nine hour blowjob from Allen Ginsberg, but so what. I know a consummate poetry master when I meet one. Most of the poetry world is made up of self-inflated fakers talking in a colorless and unnatural speech. They couldn’t tell you where they were going even with the blindfold off. Allen was from another side of the Cosmos. I couldn’t care less what side that was. It doesn’t really matter. He holds the lease on the House of the Muse for our time. He didn’t write with the breathless wonder of Kerouac, but he refined the idiom in benefit of all beings. Because of his fame and reputation, the opportunities for him to extend his genius and generosity were always there.

There’s a lot of things I didn’t know about Allen. It doesn’t even seem worth mentioning. I don’t know if his kind of life is a curse. His celebrity required its dues. Everybody reaps what they sow. By the time I caught up to him, the passageway had just about closed between the Beat Generation and the altered guns that were to follow. You only see a poet reach the hearts of the masses once or twice in a nation’s history. There are no alchemical shortcuts or secret pay offs to it. The rest go under in the quicksands of style and taste. People were already putting him down as obsolete when I met him. About ninety-nine percent of them were just trying to get a piece of the action. People like Burroughs had warned the cut and paste generation. Allen showed you the way past the iron flowers of paranoia and crybaby rants to surpass all the mental loopholes and slipknots society has in store for you as its oyster.

There were sharpened yellow pencils all in a row. If you’d written anything of any worth, you learned from working with him at your side the trick of perceiving the small in the vast and the vast in the small. He had the template for looking under the hood of any poem and you would begin to feel it come on its own without knowing whose voice was talking and from what world it came. The feedback didn’t come at you like a mutilation or a utopia. It was on the roof of the ego where sometimes you need somebody to help you see that all the profit on earth is meant to be destroyed. He was formal but only insofar as it furthered his public love affair in a way that had not been heard before. He had politics that made you feel you were a part of the last of the human race. He approached the fall of America with dignity and a wild sanity and a memorable phraseology that would stand out when most everything was lost in the penitentiaries of abstraction and the effete barbarism of patriotism and all the hopelessly sad cycles resulting from nationalistic primitive values.

I was probably one of the first teaching assistants Allen ever had at Naropa that wasn’t interested in the whole spirit people were hoping would rub off on them. There was a feeling of anticipation all around that the transmissions offered at the Kerouac School were going to set off new waves, launch new poets. Even the press was interested. The school was flashy and provocative. It was part Playboy Mansion, part Los Alamos of the conventional mind. It was about as close as poetry ever got to mainlining the wasteland of pop culture with intelligence, wit, compassion, and artistry. I was working for Allen when he wrote a point-by-point rebuttal to Tom Clark’s The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. The air was filled with something lovely slowly being turned upside down. It was a very educational. I knew the era of the Beats was a phenomena all its own. I also knew that when it came to poetry after the Beats, most of those who got into it were going to be like piano players in a band that doesn’t really need a piano player.

After four years of nonstop poetic tradition snake hunting at Naropa and in the field of my own travels, in the spring of 1980 Allen asked me to work with him on a book for Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books. He was impressed with three very different younger poets––Andy Clausen, Antler, and David Cope. My job was to correspond with Michigan poet David Cope on Allen’s selections of poems for the project. That book deal was eventually scrapped. Antler’s book Factory was the final result. For me, it didn’t matter. The project wasn’t about creating futuristic clones of himself. What impressed me was a feeling of communal refuge being born that was going to be independent of him. That’s the medium poets cannot live without. If Ginsberg stood for anything that really meant anything to me, and he stands for many around the world as a deliberate nonviolent consciousness activist, it’s that he didn’t just give lip service to the subjective truth of the individual. He actually located and promoted others according to the measure of their ability to express the lineage of freedom across human history.

Allen’s thinking had a way of causing a roar in your head. His persona was like that of a divine gangster breaking ego’s kneecaps with a baseball bat before seducing it in the back seat of a car on a long ride to the Oscars where it would receive its award. He wrote like a siddha, blowing up endless psychological crisis points until the thought forms got so big the suffering seemed inextricable. Then he would take you to a place where no thought was bigger than a grain of sand in the void. If he surpassed Blake and Whitman, it was only because he had the means to address the fallacy of America in its modernity, the moral darkness that had stained all that it had stood for at one time. You don’t see that kind of talk in churches, temples, or mosques or out of the mouth of any head of state. You don’t get it much in class or home. You don’t really see it much in art. Surely the major poetry centers within the United States seemed to have moved on to other lesser matters. But I’ve heard the poet Sharon Olds talk about growing up in a family that said nothing over dinner and how she would put a copy of “Howl” under her blouse during mealtime because the long lines of the poem helped her endure the silence of her family.

One day I drove Allen to a doctor’s appointment. He was having a problem with his medication. We got to discussing Pound in the waiting room. He was talking about Pound’s notion of Golden Ages of Poetry, how they happened when vernacular street language made its way into the official decrees of government. I’d had a growing interest in sign language. Afterwards, I was walking down the street and a lightbulb went off. With my work at Naropa completed, I moved to Rochester, New York, to study American Sign Language at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. In 1984, I set up a meeting of Deaf poets with Allen who was traveling through town. At that Deaf-Beat summit, he posed a question about translation to the audience. Using the phrase “hydrogen jukebox” as an example, he said that his experience working with translators of his poetry had taught him that only “clear, hard images” of language translated best. He wondered aloud how sign language, based as it is on the pictorial, would handle the political and social critiques embedded metaphorically within the enjambed “hydrogen jukebox” formation. The deaf actor and ASL poet Patrick Graybill in one smooth series of spontaneous motions outlined the shape of a jukebox, the arm grabbing a record, putting it on the turntable, and the needle bar coming down. Then he showed the record going round faster and faster until it blew up like a bomb. It was a revelatory moment. A whole new era of ASL poetics began right then and there.

On account of Allen’s visit, I struck up a life long friendship with Peter Cook, the revolutionary American Sign Language poet and with his help went on to organize the first National Deaf Poetry Conference in 1987 which brought Cook critical recognition and later, an international following. Allen had that ability to get people to open up and work together. I mean, it was him that influenced Bono to try his hand at convincing presidents to bring the WTO to forgive the debts of the poorest nations on earth and to commit big bucks to treating AIDS in Africa. Of course, everybody operates according to his own karma. Mine was tied to living into the early years of the postbeat era, a time marked by the opening of museums to rap and language poets that don’t disturb the mass denial. You can see the turntables and the clothes and layouts of words on a page all you want. Instead, I got to know a small group of poets that wouldn’t give out like the Army Corp of Engineers did the levees in New Orleans. David Cope and I have corresponded since we first were introduced, before he came out with his Quiet Lives in 1983. By knowing Allen, I’ve watched the poetics achievements of Andy Clausen pile up in his 40th Century Man, and Antler in his Selected Poems. Poets and their works that continue to affect me from my own student years at Naropa are Randy Roark and his Mona Lisa’s Veil, Tom Peters’s 100 missed train stations, Eliot Katz’s Unlocking the Exits, and all those uncollected small mag poems by San Francisco Vajra poet Marc Olmsted.

I don’t know why it happened like it did. Maybe it was because Allen endorsed Prairie Falcon, my own first major book of poems. Whatever the reasons, angelic or mundane, the friendships I made were a gift from Allen. Others have their own influences, heroes, mercurial mentors, wise men and father figures. Some of those influences are nothing better than Judases, loudmouths and shams of the first degree. After knowing them you feel kind of sick, thrown off course. Looking around, you see a lot of exalted men that weren’t as good as they thought. Mass killings and everything exactly the same as it was only with a more urgent rhetoric that rings out that everybody’s going to soon explode. Allen had his own life to live, but I caught up with him one last time in 1996 to go into the studio and rerecord his song “Lay Down Yr Mountain” for an album I was working on. He was wearing red suspenders and using a cane. Under doctor’s orders to slow down, which he disregarded, he’d just received a mix by Paul McCartney of his “Ballad of the Skeletons” and we listened to that first. “Lay Down Yr Mountain” was written at Plymouth Rock while on tour with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review in the fall of 1976. He came in like Frank Sinatra to the Capitol Records sessions, warmed up his harmonium and voice, and did two versions in one take, at the end of the first run through redoing the whole piece in a higher key. I asked him what the lyrics were about. He said the idea of behind “Lay Down Yr Mountain” was a simultaneous renouncing and proclaiming of your ego. It was written for Dylan. You could go up on the mountain and receive the word of God, but you had to come down and deal with the world as it is.

That was the last time I saw him. The day he died I was at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. I had gone there to see what lyric drafts they had on exhibit. Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” was on display, written on a simple sheet of paper. Jimi Hendrix’s early scribbles on legal pad of “Purple Haze” was there. Neil Young’s black marker handwritten lyrics to “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” on the front and back of a file folder was also on exhibit. I was driving down Euclid Avenue past the Cadillac dealership when the 1:00 o’clock ABC radio top of the hour news announced that Allen was dead. That night, at my mother’s house, I had a dream that the entire Beat literary canon would be wiped out by a combination of forces––American amnesia, disposable culture, right wing literary squads. The next morning I had the idea of starting an online site dedicated to the heritage of the Beats and to those poets before and after Ginsberg that carried on the great tradition of vivid experimentation and naked candor. By 1998, I’d produced the first few pages of the Museum of American Poetics and spent several years expanding it in several directions at once. Today it stands as a representation of diversity oriented poetry exhibits in the first wave of transition to the digital highway. One of many pages I developed was on doodles and drawings made while Allen signed books for friends. With the assistance of Bob Rosenthal and Peter Hale at the Allen Ginsberg Trust and Colorado archivist Walt Smith, those images somehow express in a nutshell circumstances that will never repeat themselves, but determined the arc my own life would take.

Maybe they’ll say that Allen Ginsberg was an enemy of democracy, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on it. Now that he’s gone, I still think about him going to Philadelphia to read all of Poe, his prodigious camera memory for poesy that made everyone jealous, the love of metrics and scanning for prosody the way lobbyists in long limos scan for speed traps on their way to illegal fundraisers, his masturbation dream testimony during the Trial of the Chicago 7, his sitting on the tracks at Rocky Flats nuclear trigger factory, his being the first global poet in any true sense of the word, the importance he gave to good filing, the way he saved everything, seeing him in the subway heading uptown to go rehearse with Don Cherry or some new crater-faced punk band, being around him during the writing of Plutonium Ode, the way he could get you into an author’s head by relating to the past with examples from the present––like “Tom Campion was the Dylan of Shakespeare’s time.” I sometimes remember weird things, like his use of the Eisenhower warning against the “military industrial complex” and how that phrase had slowly but surely dated him to a fading time. Other times, I am flooded with the feeling of how empty I feel compressing the new delusions of grandeur America has embraced since he entered Poetry Heaven. Not only did he write out of a sense of continuous epiphany, his entire collected works is beyond category. Maybe it remains for the people of the future to name a universe after him, but sometimes you just wish you could step into a ringing phone booth some grievous rainy neon nights and find his voice calling out from the dead.

Some days I have to ask myself, “What do I do about the fact that I knew this person?” Did he leave me with a job to do? Am I doing it in anyway that really matters? Do I just block it out and go on as if we’d never met? Nobody can help me answer these questions and most people couldn’t care less. They live in a time of political morality where it’s easier to sell the public on an endless supply of poison than it is to get to the bottom of things. At the apex of poetry there is a very small room big enough for only one person. There are elevators and stairs leading up to it from lobbies and streets crowded mostly with recognizable figures and the rare actual nonconformist. Anyway, it doesn’t clear it up. Sometimes everybody is irrelevant and sometimes you just don’t notice. The rest you do on your own, without hindrance, immune to dread, blowing smoke rings at anyone who’s disappointed, throwing in a line from Johnny Cash or the Buddha now and then.

Jim Cohn

11 March 2006