A Different Beat From A Talented, Indignant Voice

As an English professor for 40 years, I have been privileged to meet and on occasion become friends with a number of famous writers, and of these Allen Ginsberg easily stands out as the most fascinating and compelling.

Our relationship began when I was a doctoral student in English at the University of Southern California in the mid-1950s. I was asked to pick up a relatively unknown young poet from San Francisco named Allen Ginsberg. He was coming in at the downtown Greyhound Bus Station in Los Angeles, and certainly being asked to meet him was no particular mark of distinction. I was tapped because I was available and had an old car.

At the time, Allen was emphatically not a famous poet; he was one of those “crazy” City Light Bookstore writers from San Francisco, and he was coming to Los Angeles to give a reading of his new and still unpublished poem, “Howl.”

My wife Jan and I had been to many poetry readings, and we fully expected to pick up a poet in a dark suit or a collegiate, tweedy ensemble. Instead, Allen turned out to be a young, bearded, rather scroungy fellow in dirty jeans and an open flannel shirt.

We drove to a beautiful home in Beverly Hills where the reading was scheduled. As I remember, the home was packed, and not all were sympathetic to this young iconoclast, who already was developing a reputation as a poetic and social rebel.

Allen was introduced and immediately began chanting the powerful lines of “Howl” in a loud, vigorous voice, not at all like the calm, measured tones most of us had associated with “proper” poets at “proper” poetry readings. I did note that there were no members of the USC English department present.

At the time, the formalism of Victorian poetry was still de rigueur, and even T.S. Eliot was considered a daring experimentalist. Poetry readings should be genteel, cerebral - a time for reflection and philosophical musing. But here was a raging poetic bull, with fire in his eye, shouting of “angelheaded hipsters” and the “narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism” and “Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs.”

We were stunned, then intrigued and fascinated, as were most, but not all, that night. A few began to heckle Ginsberg, calling him foulmouthed, bawdy, indecent.

Allen stopped his reading and without hesitation began to take off his clothes, to prove, as he put it, his purity of spirit. While some were offended at Ginsberg’s symbolic shedding of pretense and artifice, most accepted the gesture as an honest attempt to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt one’s aesthetic and intelleccual integrity.

A few left in a huff, but most stayed and insisted that Ginsberg go on. Sensing victory, Allen put his clothes on and happily went on not only with “Howl,” but with a number of his other poems.

The evening, strange and exotic as it was, was a triumph for Allen, and forevermore he would be known as that young poet who took his clothes off at a poetry reading to prove a point of personal integrity.

I think we were all mesmerized that night by the sheer, dynamic force of his poetry. It was a reading never to be forgotten, for here was the genesis, the sparkling, almost mythical beginning of the poetic “beat” movement in Los Angeles, and, in many senses, throughout the world.

We were up most of that night, talking our young heads off about poetry and romanticism and philosophy and politics. Allen’s use of the word “vision” particularly fascinated me because he went back to Blake and the romantic preoccupation with new ways to perceive reality, new “visions” which would demonstrate the primacy of nature over technology and the applied sciences.

Ginsberg, in many ways, seemed to me a latter-day Shelley or Keats or Wordsworth. “The World is Too Much With Us,” proclaimed Wordsworth in 1807; Ginsberg, in “Howl,” speaks of “Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!”

We saw each other from time to time as the years passed, at a reading at Gonzaga, Eastern Washington University or some other university, or at a book signing. He never forgot the bizarre poetry reading in Beverly Hills where we met, nor have I.

Allen read to a standing-room-only audience at Gonzaga (I believe this was in the ‘70s) after a lengthy trip to India.

I remember that he convinced the entire audience to chant “OM” along with him as he accompanied his verse with a small harmonium held in his lap. And another time, after a reading at EWU, over desert and coffee, he talked at length about another life he might have lived as a professor.

That night he drew for me a Buddha on the title page of his published “Journals.” The drawing has a humorous, whimsical quality, so typical of Allen. As serious as he was with his poetry, he had a marvelous capacity to listen, to learn from others, to quietly take in the universe. Never needing to be the center attraction, he served as an example of humility to many.

As Whitman and Blake before him, he saw the world afresh, and allowed us to glimpse that world through the alchemy of his art. After the night of the Buddha, I was never to see him again.

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