JIM COHN

RECOLLECTING ALLEN GINSBERG

I never had a nine hour blowjob from Allen Ginsberg, but so what. Walking among the graves at the 9^th Street cemetery in Boulder, it occurred to me that his life and work gave exquisite credence to the unbearable weight of human love. Allen was from another Poetry Cosmos. He didn’t write with the wonder of Kerouac, but he refined the idiom in benefit of all beings. Because of his fame and reputation, the opportunities to extend his genius and generosity were always there. He holds the deed on the House of the Muse for his time.

For me, Allen’s reputation preceded meeting him by many years. I’d find posters in record stores and head shops in the Coventry district of Cleveland––holding placard saying “Pot is Fun,” with demonstrators during 1968 Democratic National Convention, with Gregory Corso during a poetry reading, with Uncle Sam hat atop head, and the famous intergenerational City Lights Bookstore alley shot with Robbie Robertson, Michael McClure, and Bob Dylan.

I first came upon Allen’s own photographs with handwritten captions––“celestial snapshots” he called them––and first books of poetry, up to Iron Horse (1972), at the Publix Book Mart, corner Prospect and East 9^th street, in downtown Cleveland. I hung out at Publix as often as I could. It was always an adventure, all that small press poetry, chapbooks. I got my copy of Woody Guthrie’s 1943 autobiography Bound for Glory from there.

For me, Cleveland was Alan Freed (1921-1965), who in 1952 organized the first rock and roll concert, The Moondog Coronation Ball, at the Cleveland Arena; underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar (1939-2010), author of the autobiographical American Splendor comic series; D.A. Levy (1942-1968)––author of The North American Book of the Dead I and II (Free Lance Press, 1965), and publisher of Renegade Press and Seven Flowers Press; blues legend Robert Junior Lockwood, who learned to play guitar from Robert Johnson, his quasi-stepfather; and Ghoulardi, a fictional character played by Ernie Anderson, hipster horror host of late night Shock Theater at WJW-TV, Channel 8.

I’d read the poems that ignited Ginsberg’s fame while in high school. The first time I saw Allen in person, he was giving a reading at Macky Auditorium at the end of my first year at the University of Colorado at Boulder. This was the infamous May 1972 benefit reading for Vajradhatu––the name Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Naropa’s founder, gave his umbrella organization and the community that formed around him after 1970 when he arrived in North America. The poets who read that night, in addition to Ginsberg, were Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, and Rinpoche. As Beat archivist Walt Smith wrote about the evening in 2010, “Trungpa appeared intoxicated and was clowning around much to the chagrin if not infuriation of Robert Bly. Trungpa’s behavior is said to have caused a major falling out between Bly and Ginsberg as well as Bly versus Naropa and the Beat poets.”

In the summer of 1972 I dropped out of college after my first year to study piano and live with my girlfriend, Lynn Fuller. We had a room at 31 Graves Avenue in Northampton. I was at the library at Smith College, taking a break from practicing, which I would do seven days a week, six or seven hours a day, and I checked out the Library of Congress February 27, 1959 recording of “Howl.” I also listened to the Fantasy Record “Howl” and Other Poems vinyl LP, released the same year. Allen’s breath and speech on these recordings are pure mystical union. I’d never heard anything like it before or since.

In the late 1970s, I sporadically attended Summer Writing Programs at Naropa. There were parties every night. Allen was always telling me to “lighten up.” One of the students I got to know was Denyse du Roi. She was one of the greatest surrealists poets around. We shared a love for Sandy Denny and collaborated on an “Ode to Sandy Denny” that we wrote back and forth through the mail. Denyse wrote a book with Anne Waldman––Sphinxeries (1979), and followed that with her book of poems Filmmaking (1992). Randy Roark was another young poet I met. We remained friends through the years, mostly, through correspondence. Roark was one of the most prodigious literary workers and travelers I ever met. If anyone from my scene will be studied after his life is over, it’s him.

I was living in a little shack in Missoula during the winter of 1978-1979, auditing a seminar by Richard Hugo, writing plays and working at a greenhouse nursery. My place was so cold the pipes froze and the sink blew off the wall. That winter, Randy wrote me to say that Allen was accepting applications for teaching assistants and he thought I might consider applying. I immediately sat down and wrote a Hail Mary essay, slipped it into an envelope, and put it in the mail. In that little one-room Missoula shack, the night I received a letter saying my application had been accepted, I had a revelation that my purpose in life was to be a poet. For me, it was a case of the old Buddhist proverb: when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

In the summer of 1979, I left Missoula for Gillette, Wyoming where I hired on at Burlington Northern Railroad headquarters. I was assigned to a track siding gang moving up and down the North Platte River Valley––from Nebraska to Wyoming, laying siding track all that summer through Thanksgiving when the entire gang was laid off. I lived in my truck. The money I earned from working for the railroad paid my tuition, room and board for the year at the Kerouac School. During that season laying track, I wrote a long montage of a poem, Gandy, in my Toyota pickup long bed camper on a manual typewriter by kerosene lantern light.

Once my apprenticeship began, Gandy is what I chose to show Allen in my first one-on-one tutorial. There were sharpened yellow pencils all in a row. From just watching his process of going through the poem line by line, you learned to admit to yourself what language was working and what wasn’t. Once you knew that, you knew. Language changes poetry, but the best poetry is the best for reasons of language that are not subject to change. Of course, you could override the universal power of diamond hard images by sheer Kerouacian colloquial emotion or just your own wild instincts. You could always break the rules. The making of poems became an expression of personal honesty, aesthetic integrity, street credibility, and a yearning for liberation.

Dave Cope once showed me a letter he received from Allen that talked about me as if I was working by remote control. I compare my experience apprenticing with Allen to the old Zen story “Smelling Essays.” A student sets out to find the most accomplished writing teacher of the period. After numerous tribulations, months of searching, the student comes to a clearing, following the scent of wood smoke. There, in the middle of the clearing, is an old man sitting by an open fire. The student introduces himself, lets out his hand, only to discover that the teacher is blind. “Give me your essay,” says the blind man, “and I will judge it.” The mortified student hands over the paper. The teacher throws the essay into the fire. “Ah!” he says, sniffing the air. “That was a good essay.”

The most important lesson I received from Allen was that the poet’s life is not about seeking validation outside one’s self. The locus is internal. Otherwise, it’s just a Frankenstein complex––wretched effects of allowing ambition to push one to aim beyond one’s capability, miseries created by obsession for wisdom, outdated theories of science that focused on achieving natural wonders instead resulting only in hideousness––the beauty of the dream vanished, breathless horror and disgust filling the heart. Since I could not dispute the necessity of my creation, it would never matter if others liked it or didn’t. No Jack London ten thousand rejection notices. I wasn’t going to end up lost in a vendetta against my own embittered creation.

By the time I was working for Allen, he had adopted a professorial Salvation Army appearance––ties, sport coats, dress pants, button-down shirts, shoes. His clothing seemed to offer him a kind of status quo protection any feminist might suggest was the invocation of his privilege to both criticize and participate in patriarchal white male America. 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, a wild sanity, and a memorable phraseology that would stand out when most everything was lost in the penitentiaries of abstraction and the barbarisms of patriotism.

I was probably one of only a few assistants who wasn’t interested in the whole spirit people around me seemed to hope would rub off on them. I thought of fame as a kind of disease. There was a feeling 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. Journalists were the first to describe certain people like Bob Dylan and Patti Smith as “post-beat.” The school was flashy and provocative. It was part Golden Buddha Playboy Mansion, part Kali Yuga Feminist Poetics Shangri-la. It was about as close as poetry ever got to crossing over into pop culture. The Kerouac School had an effect on a certain kind of avant-garde. Allen was the primary reason behind the exposure.

I was working with him when he wrote a point-by-point rebuttal to Tom Clark’s The Great Naropa Poetry Wars (1980). Tom’s book had a polarizing effect on the Kerouac School, both within and outside of it. Ed Sanders, with his Investigative Poetry class at Naropa, offered a journalistic account of the affair in The Party: A Chronological Perspective on a Confrontation at a Buddhist Seminary (1980). “Buddhagate,” as it was called by Paul Berman, was based on “The Merwin Incident” of October 31, 1976. During Trungpa Rinpoche’s 1976 seminary near Snowmass, Colorado, poet W.S. Merwin and companion Dana Naone were absent from a naked Halloween party. When located, they refused to join in, only to be dragged from their barricaded room to the gathering at Rinpoche’s insistence. An argument followed. The couple was forcibly stripped.

Although Allen must have been under a lot of stress, I found him very rational, keen for debate––a quality he’d exhibited since a teenager writing letters to his brother, Eugene, and his father, the poet Louis Ginsberg. I understood this characteristic better after Bill Morgan sent me a copy of The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (2008). Even as Allen was being painted as some kind of brainwashed apologist for Trungpa, who was being described as a fascist, I could see just how skilled he was in the ability to communicate sanity in a climate of extreme neuroticism. I thought he would have made an interesting Supreme Court Justice, like Learned Hand or Thurgood Marshall.

In the spring of 1980, around the same time that the so-called Poetry Wars was running its course through the Kerouac School, Allen asked me to work with him on a book for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books. He was impressed with three very different younger white male poets––Andy Clausen, Antler, and David Cope. My job was to correspond with Michigan poet David Cope in Allen’s behalf regarding the project. Eventually, that 3-way book deal was scrapped. Instead, City Lights published Antler’s book-length poem, Factory (1980).

If Ginsberg stood for anything that really meant anything to me, and he stands for many around the world as a deliberate and nonviolent agent of awakened consciousness through poesy, 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 lineages of liberation 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.

He conducted himself like a siddha, blowing up psychological crisis points until 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 of its history, the calamity of its absurd and insatiable hungers. America, in his work, was not a place with a cohesive national narrative, a singular patriarchal story. He juxtaposed the dominant national narrative with the more discordant voices and imaginings of revolutionary heroes and rebellious slaves.

One summer afternoon in 1980, I drove Allen to a doctor’s appointment. He was having a problem with his medication. We got to discussing Ezra Pound in the waiting room––Pound’s assessment of “Golden Ages of Poetry,” how they happened when vernacular street language came into direct action against the official decrees of state. Two years later, I moved to Rochester, New York to become an American Sign Language interpreter. At the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Allen’s words about “Golden Ages of Poetry” made perfect sense to me. In February 1984, I set up a meeting between deaf poet, Robert Panara, the great historian of twentieth century written Deaf poetry, and Allen who was coming through town.

Poetry comes from all over the world in all times from all peoples. The lineages travel from teacher to student across color, gender, religion, class, language, and ability. I don’t know why my own life in poetry went the way it did, why I met the people I met and how it was I continued. I have no idea why Allen Ginsberg, with congestive heart failure, was more energetic than poets a third his age. I don’t know why it occurred to him to mention Golden Ages of Poetry to me while waiting for Phil Weber, his doctor, and how that brief explication left me to dream the poetry life I lived. Maybe it was because Allen endorsed Prairie Falcon (1989), my first book of poems. Whatever the reasons, angelic or mundane, the friendships I made were a gift from him.

I caught up with him one last time. It was June 26, 1996. He came over to Fergus Stone’s Audio’s Amigos Studio in Boulder to re-record “Lay Down Yr Mountain,” a song he had written to Bob Dylan in 1975 at Plymouth Rock while on the Rolling Thunder Revue. His brother, Eugene Brooks, and one of Eugene’s four sons, accompanied him. That recording, known as The Last Session: Allen Ginsberg: “Lay Down Yr Mountain” (MusEx) was not released until 2011. His voice was very clear and strong. He sang it like a bluesman. I had always heard the song as a gospel number. It has the feeling of prophecy, of promise. That was the last time I saw him alive.

I still think about him going to Philadelphia for a couple weeks to hole up in a hotel and read all of Poe. He had a love of metrics and scansion the way lobbyists in long limos live for illegal fundraisers inside the beltway. There was his masturbation dream testimony during the Trial of the Chicago 7, his sitting on the tracks at Rocky Flats nuclear trigger factory. I saw him once in a Manhattan subway heading uptown to rehearse with Don Cherry and some new crater-faced punk band. This was around the period of the writing of Plutonian Ode. He wrote out of a sense of continuous epiphany. 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 night and find his voice calling out on the other end of the line.

11 March 2006, Revised 5 August 2010

[Jim Cohn. From Sutras & Bardos: Essays & Interviews on Allen Ginsberg, The Kerouac School, Anne Waldman, Postbeat Poets & The New Demotics. Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2011.]