Lobbyist for Tenderness

I first read Allen Ginsberg’s City Lights paperback Howl and Other Poems late one autumn night 1980 with friends at the White Castle at the corner of Bardstown Road and Eastern Parkway.  A few months…

The Good News, 3.8.2017

I once asked Mayuko and Minami (both in my fall 8 a.m. MWF Humanities class) if they had heard of Sei Shōnagon (清少納言). Of course they had!  They had read her years ago in school. …

Forty Years of Letters

Bill Morgan,  I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career:  The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg —1955-1997 I read a lot of Ferlinghetti in the 1980s, and loads of Ginsberg…

My Bronx, Your Bronx

When Allen Ginsberg visited Israel in 1961, he met up with the eminent scholar Gerschom Scholem.   Scholem found Ginsberg “A likable fellow. Genuine. Strange, mad, but genuine.”  At one point in their getting acquainted,…

Classroom

It was back in 1982 We had a guest in our theology and lit class Ten years older than me He’d come of age in the Sixties Allen Ginsberg had recently been in town Our…

Writing to Wake Up

1. Natalie Goldberg: I also place on the altar a photo of Allen Ginsberg in a yellow wood frame, sitting in a white shirt, cross-legged, his face captured in an uncanny smile. He is our…

On Bhakti Yoga

1. Allen Ginsberg: Well, the Hindus say that this is the Kali Age or Kali Yuga or Kali Cycle, and we are all so sunk in matter, the five senses are matter, sense, that they…