Ginsberg, now and forever.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Allen Ginsberg - Column

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...