Let’s Not Wait Till We’re Dead
Over poetry, you didn’t gush. You read it. You read it with the tongue. You lived it. You felt how it moved you, changed you. How it contributed to giving your own life a form,…
Tag: Allen Ginsberg
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…
15 Reasons You Might Reconsider Your Boycott of Me and Resume Communication at Some Point in 2007 (But There Isn’t Any Reason to Rush or Anything)
I reminded you of Whitman, told you to read him BEFORE the morning news avalanche of expected accounts of horrific rapacities and Bush Administration deceptions and delusions, because we are larger, better than I thought;…
Epistolary Ecstasy (Love Letters, Notes of Gratitude, Postcards with Brio): An Autumn Writing Class
“Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.” Alice Walker, The Color…
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,…
Chris
Some people are able to focus, laser-like, on one thing—athletes, musicians, scientists. For Chris Wallach, it’s mindfulness. It’s a gift. It’s a talent she’s deliberately cultivated over the last several years. It’s a whole set…
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…
After Reading Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A Life
July 2005 It was one month ago that I began to read Whitman in earnest, and, while I still have far to go in prose and poetry, an impression has been made, a fire has…
On Ginsberg’s HOWL
It was a cri de coeur, an alarm, a vision. Its structure matched its energy which seemed the voices of many, not one. It was a rhizomic collage, just like life, a pastiche of the…
Passage to India: From a Letter by Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac
May 11, 1962 I do wish you were here, only calm and peaceful and not yelling at me much, as we could take long 3rd class comfy train trips to the Himalayas and read Mahabharatas…