Allen Ginsberg and Ishmael Reed 1974 at The Library of Congress

                                                                [Ishmael Reed]

We've already noted the video of Allen reading in 1988 at the Library of Congress (see here), but here's an earlier (audio) recording, from April 29, 1974, introduced by Daniel Hoffman, of Allen reading at the Library's Coolidge Auditorium, in front of a boisterous and enthusiastic crowd, alongside Ishmael Reed. 
Allen reads second

Reed reads first, and Hoffman provides this introduction:

[sounds of laughter and applause] - ...that's just to soften up the audience. 
"Welcome to this, the next-to-the-last program of the current season, provided by the Gertrude Clark Whitttal Fund for Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress. The first poet who'll read tonight is Ishmael Reed . Mr Reed's earlier books bear such titles as Conjure and Mumbo-Jumbo and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and The Free-Lance Pallbearers and this certainly leads one to think that here's a man who's doing something right and has a unique and individual way of exploring his own past and the past of his people. Mr Reed, Ishmael Reed is a poet of marvelous gifts. He is endeavoring to comprehend and render in contemporary terms the full richness of the black cultural heritage going back to slavery times, to African times, as well as to current times. He combines this material with a very sophisticated grasp of what art is and where poetry is today. Ishmael Reed is, I think, an extremely gifted writer, and I think the best way to introduce him is in his own words. I'd like to anticipate his reading by reading you one short poem of his from his latest book called Chattanooga - This one is called "Jacket Notes" - "Being a colored poet/ is like going over/ Niagara Falls in a/ Barrel/An eight-year-old can do what/ You do unaided/The barrel-maker doesn't/ think you can cut it / The gawkers on the bridge/ Hope you fall on your/ Face/The tourist bus full of/ Paying customers broke-down/ Just out of Buffalo/ Some would rather dig/ The postcards than/ Catch your act/ Amile from the drink/It begins to storm/But what really hurts is/ You're bigger than the/ Barrel." - It's a great pleasure to present to you , Ishmael Reed, a very big poet indeed."

IR: I want to begin by reading from a new collection of poetry called The Flight to Canada, and what I try to do in this book is to capture the form and the essence of the poetry and ballads created by the slaves in the 19th and 18th century. There is a tradition of writing in this country of..and each day we're finding earlier poets and one of the forms was a humorous  satirical, what they would call in the classroom, a letter, tongue-in-cheek letter that the fugitive slave would write back to his master, after he had left the plantation for Canada and the title..it's the title poem, it's called "Flight to Canada" ("Dear Massa Swille:/What it was?/I have done my Liza Leap/ & am safe in the arms of Canada…"…"That was rat poison I left/In your Old Crow/ Your boy/John"
"Old Sam" was what the slaves called the devil and they also Sam Grant as a devil to the South , and he tried to trace it back and it couldn't be Samuel from the Bible because Samuel doesn't do what the devil does so, most likely is Baron Samedi, because there were slaves imported up here from Santa Domingo and Haiti and they brought their religion up here, and so "Sam" was probably short for Baron Samedi, as in Afro-American language you abbreviate, for example, blacks refer to Vietnam is 'Nam and Baron Samedi is represented by three hoes and three spades in Haitain religion.
"Skydiving" -   ("It's a good way to live and/ a good way to die.."…"You can't always count on/ things opening for you/Know when to let go/learn how to fall") 
The next poem is called "The Reactionary Poet" - ("If you are a revolutionary/ Then I must be a reactionary.."…."Make it by steamboat/I likes to take it real slow….")

I want to read from Conjure and I'll close the reading from Chattanooga -
 "The Feral Pioneers"  - And if you're on the West Coast you get into West Coast mythology and one of the memories out there is the.. (not really, a historical incident which became mythology), the Donner Pass, where the people were trapped in the Donner Pass and were snowed in and starved there, and I call this "The Feral Pioneers" - ("I rise at two a.m. these mornings, to/ polish my horns to see if the killing/ has stopped…"…. "In the window, an apparition, Charles Ives;/tears have pressed white hair/ to face/")
I want to read "I Am A Cowboy in the Boat of Ra" which fuses ideas from Egyptian mythology with the American West, because, as you know, they were both cattle-herders, the Egyptians and cowboys, and what I do, I make a confrontation between two opposite Gods in Egyptian mythology into, like a gun-fighting OK Corral-type situation - ("I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra/sidewinders in the saloons of fools/bit my forehead…"…."..party pooper O hater of dance/vampire outlaw of the milky way")
I want read a blues. I did a record of blues, which you can hear us, which we did the singing..  I did the singing, because I couldn't get anyone else to do the singing. I'm a disgruntled lyricist who must sing his own songs. Anyway, if you want to buy them, there's a record called…The Black Box magazine, it's a cassette magazine that comes out of Washington here, and we have Ortiz Walton, who was the first black to play with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, impressive, and also Marcus Gordon, who's a voodoo drummer and who has performred in ceremonies in South America). So I'll just…I'll read one of them - "Betty's Ball Blues" ("Betty took the ring from her fabled jelly-roll..".."The calmest man in Sing-Sing is happy in his cell") 
"Man or Butterfly?" - ("It's like Lao Tse's dream/my stange affair with cities.."… "I am the lead-off witness"
I'd like to read a list called "Monsters of the Ozarks", which I wrote about three or four years ago, 1969  ("The Golligog, the Binghuffer…".."the Spiro, the Agnew") 
"Dualism in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man" - (" i am outside of/ history./ i wish i/ had some peanuts/ it looks hungry there in/ its cage/i'm inside of history/it's hungrier than I thought")
This one's a reply to a critic. I get real mad. I don't have the patience Allen has - guys who want to fight him, you know. So the title of this poem's called "Dragon's Blood" (which is also an incense used in Voodoo ceremonies, that you can buy in the drugstore) - ("just because you/ can't see d stones/don't mean i'm not building/you ain't no mason, how/d fuck would you know"). 
"in san francisco, they are/ taking up a collection. if/ the earthquake won't come/ they'll send for it"
It's appropriate that, since we're in the capital of the United States that I would read a poem about a historical event which happened, a very august and pompous event, which happened here in this capital and concerning one of the Presidents wives. The President himself was a matinee idol, he's considered the handsomest President in history, his wife was a recluse. So I call this "Mystery 1st Lady" ("franklin pierce's wife never came downstairs/she never came upstairs either") 
Here's a poem, dedicated to everybody who's 35, you know, and it's called "The Author Reflects On His 35th Birthday" - ("35, I have been looking forward to you for so many years now…"…"And 35?/Don't let me trust anybody/Over Reed but/ Just in case/Put a tail on that/Negro too")
"The Catskills Kiss Romance Goodbye" - ("After 20 years of nods he enters the new regime.."…"dreaming is still on the house") - It's like playing tennis, you know that?, or something… 
I'll read two more - (responding to Allen's muttered remarks) - No instructions from ring-side, please! -   No, I'm going to find something. I'm going  to read "Loup Garou Means Change Into", and you know "Loup Garou" is a werewolf in Haitian history and what he does he comes into the settlements at night and he drags off chickens and children, or whatever's around, so he's really a nuisance. And you also find, in my research in New Orleans, they also have a Loup Garou in New Orleans, but the Haitian Loup Garou is female, and in New Orleans Loup Garou is male. And, being, in modern times, more sophisticated than our country cousins, we try to see it another way. I see Loup Garou as a psychic presence that wears you down, (and I'm sure you know a lot of people like that). And the way you get rid of Loup Garou is you take ninety-nine beans and you put them in a plate and you put them outside your door and the Loup Garou coming for your energy will count the ninety-nine beans and will look all over all night for the hundredth bean, and he dissipates with the dawn - ("If Loup Garou means change into/When will I banish mine?"..."...I put out the beans that evening, next morning I was free.")  
And last, the last poem is called "A Nickel" ("If I had a nickel/ For all the women who've/ Rejected me in my life/I would be head of the World Bank…".."..all I'd think about would be going home")  

                                                                                    [Allen Ginsberg]

[At approximately twenty-nine-and-a-quarter minutes in, Daniel Hoffman introduces Allen Ginsberg]:
"Ishmael Reed has shared with us the wonderful energy and inventiveness and joie de vivre  of his poetry and it was for these qualities that his last book before the current one, that is to say Conjurer, was nominated last year for the National Book Award in poetry at the same time that his novel Mumbo Jumbo was nominated for the National Book Award in fiction. That's a very rare thing to get two nominations in two different art forms the same year. Some of the qualities that we've already enjoyed in Ishmael Reed's poems, we're going to hear in a different transmogrified form in Allen Ginsberg's. Both of these poets share a commitment to primitive sources of joy and energy that go deep within ourselves, both of them have stepped around the conventions of literature and have found and have made for themselves other conventions and have thereby enriched literature by enlarging our definition of poetry so that it includes the wonderful things that they do. I've known Allen Ginsberg for a long time. We were both classmates together at Columbia College many years ago, and in those days, Allen, well, he wore glasses. I remember when Allen wrote poems that the careless reader might  have thought were by (Percy Bysshe) Shelley and then the following year he'd taken some more courses and you might have thought that maybe John Donne had come back, but shortly after that he developed a whole new curriculum, a curriculum that goes back to Christopher Smart and William Blake..and Walt Whitman, and includes the gifted mad underground poets of the Romantic movement in every country,  (Antonin) Artaud and (Vladimir) Mayakovsky and (Guillaume) Apollinaire and Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Allan Poe, and he's put all these together in a marvellous mix of the Hebrew prophets and mantric chants from all over the world that he gone around in his many travels, and like Ishmael Reed, he too is a voice of conscience, speaking out against oppression wherever he feels it, finds it and sees it and he has become the conscience of a whole generation. It's a great pleasure to welcome Allen Ginsberg to the Library of Congress and ask him to read to you now."

[At approximately thirty-two minutes in, Allen begins reading] 

AG: What I'll be doing is a variety of different poems and different forms, beginning with two very brief poems from the book, The Fall of America - "On Neal Cassady's Ashes" ("Delicate eyes that blinked blue Rockies all ash.."…"..all ashes, all ashes again")
Washington DC Peace Mobilization, May 1970 - ("White  sunshine on sweating skulls..".…… "...from the Paranoia Smog  Factory's East Wing") 
Ballad form - Since I.. I owe Ishmael Reed a debt. I wrote a little blurb for a mutual friend, Cruz, poet, …Victor Hernandez Cruz, saying that I thought his use of Puerto-Rican New York lingo tongue was great satisfactory to William Carlos Williams, who was, I thought, like, one of the great teachers of demotic speech and American-ese, and Ishmael in an essay reminded me that, really, like the teacher there, or the debt was owed to Bessie Smith and to the great black poets and poetesses, the actual blues singers, who were speaking an actual American more street-like and real than the literary white Americans, and so I thought more and more about that, actually, and got more into music and ballads and later into blues, and so what I'll be doing now is some ballads and some blues and mixing that with regular spoken poetry
This, a Bus Ride Ballad (on the) Road to Suva, which is in Fiji. So, a record of a bus-trip in Fiji  [Allen accompanies himself here on harmonium) - ("O ho for the bus that rolls down the dirt road"…. "Down there the white houses of Suva at last!")
(Next, sections from) "Returning to the Country For A Brief Visit"  ("Reading Sung poems, I think of my poems to Neal.."... "..I lift the book and blow you into the dazzling void") -  "You Live Apart On Rivers and Seas..." - "You live in apartments by rivers and seas, Spring comes.. When all these millions of people die, will they recognize the Great Father?")
(and)  "Night Gleam" - ("Over and over through the dull material world  the call is made.")

"I spent three months last Fall, studying meditation with Chogyam Trungpa, lama, Tibetan Buddhist mindfulness, vipassana practice, watching breath leave nostrils, dissolving into space, mixing breath with space, mixing mind with breath, mixing mind with space, thus interrupting mechanical thought-forms rising, taking account, inventory and profile of repetitive recurrent daydream, fantasy, thought-form, discursive babble, always returning to the breath. The place - Jackson Hole, Wyoming - Teton Village ski area in a cafeteria,  made over by the sangha, or a group of meditators, into a sitting hall."
(Allen next reads his long poem), "Mind Breaths"  - ("Thus, crosslegged on round pillow sat in Teton Space…"  a calm breath, a silent breath, a slow breath breathes outward from the nostrils.")
 (and, with harmonium) - "Stay Away From The White House Blues" - ("Stay Away From The White House, I wish you well.."  (including, (naturally), improvisation))

"Last poem. We have time. Last poem". - "Jaweh and Allah Battle"  ("Jaweh with Atom Bomb/Allah cuts throats of Infidels.."…."Shema Yisroel Adonoi Eluhenu Adonoi Echad!/La ilha illa' Allah hu!/OY! AH! HU!"

[Daniel Hoffman thanks Allen, make some brief scheduling announcements and the evening concludes] 

addenda:
Ishmael Reed on Allen Ginsberg's unswerving political commitment - on the Allen Ginsberg Project - see here 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 161

Thirteen years ago today since Gregory Nunzio Corso passed away. We certainly won't forget him. Here's the opening track from the album, "Not In My Back Yard" by the Southern Italian band, Nimby - "Thin Lines Among Them", dedicated to him, and scored to footage from Matteo Scarfo's upcoming movie "Bomb! Burning Fantasy", a meditation on Gregory's poetry and life, (which will feature Nick Mancuso in the daunting role of.. Gregory). 

Corso is all over The Allen Ginsberg Project. How about here, here, here, here, here, here and here?
and how about here, here, here - and (unforgettably) here.

Bart De Paepe's Sloow Tapes label out of Belgium has just put out some early Ginsberg on cassette tape - London Mantra - Check out Gerard Bellaart's cover art. See below: 

 “It’s a recording George Dowden made at his home in July 1973" (so we're informed).

The tape features “Ginsberg solo on his harmonium, singing Indian mantras and a few of his own songs.”

The death of Amiri Baraka last week left a gaping hole and we're still coming to terms with the loss and with his achievement. Last week, we provided links to a number of obituary notices.  Here are a couple more - Hillel Italie's widely-distributed note on the AP wire-service may be read, for example (in an updated version) here. David Jones  (similarly updated) notification for Reuters can be seen here. Both choose to employ judiciously equivocal language. Hillel - "He was denounced by critics as buffoonish, homophobic, anti-Semitic, a demagogue. He was called by others a genius, a prophet.." - Jones - "He won fame in some circles, notoriety in others". The New York Times, perhaps, set the template, with its headline - "Amiri Baraka, Polarizing Poet and Playwright.." ("a poet and playwright of pulsating rage, (who)..was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others..") but it was one that was persistently repeated - the equivocal (or, more accurately, the dialectical (sic - not diametrical, certainly not singular)) - Neda Ulaby, for example, at NPR, leading off her "All Things Considered" report, under the heading "Amiri Baraka's Legacy Both Controversial and Achingly Beautiful".
Ishmael Reed (on the blog of the Wall Street Journal, no less! - it's own obit notice may be accessed here, incidentally) addresses this and other matters (what he fingers as "the indolent obituaries") in an honest, measured and intelligent piece that is, frankly, a "must-read" - "Amiri Baraka and I clashed. Often", Reed writes - And, of course, he was "controversial" - "(He) was controversial, because his was a perspective that was considered out of fashion during this post race ghost dance, the attitude that says because we [the US] have a black president, racism is no longer an issue, when the acrimonious near psychotic reaction to his  election only shows the depth of it..Baraka was the kind of writer who comes along once in a generation or so. I once said that he did for the English syntax what (Thelonious) Monk did with the chord. He was an original."
Another peer, Sonia Sanchez, is quoted in The Philadelphia Inquirer - "You don't want to believe this [his passing], because of the history and her-story of this man, his impact on our literature and our country. He has meant so much." 
She gets to further articulate her grief, as part of a four-person panel in the singularly most comprehensive (and most useful) post-January 9th coverage - Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales' irreplaceable "Democracy Now" (also on the panel, Felipe Luciano, Komozi Woodard, author of A Nation Within A Nation - Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics, and Newark, New Jersey activist, Larry Hamm   This one-hour show can be accessed here (with a further on-line only, extended interview, here).
More Baraka links, worthy of your attention - Baraka's son, Ras Baraka remembers his father here, Hilton Als fondly recalls his visits to the LeRoi Jones-Hettie Jones (Hettie Cohen) household, Joshua Furst defends Baraka against charges of anti-semitism in the Jewish Daily Forward.  Michael Gonzales in Ebony surveys the all-important, historically-significant, Black Arts Movement, Anna Merlan surveys Baraka's various appearances in the one-time "alternative", Village Voice... 
"Questlove" (Ahmir Thompson), drummer with The Roots, and author of Mo' Meta Blues. 
in last Sunday's New York Times - "In Baraka, Inspiration Came With Provocation", Hector Tobar and Carl Hancock Rux in the LA Times, Bernardine Everisto in The Guardian...   
His NPR 1986 Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross is available here. Pacifica Radio presents three seperate recordings - from 1964, from 1984, and a 2011 interview with Joanne Griffith.. 
An important trove of recordings are available on Ubuweb. PennSound's recordings are available here 
  
Amiri's wake takes place from 4 to 9 today at the Metropolitan Baptist Church on Springfield Avenue in Newark. The funeral will take place tomorrow at the Newark Symphony Hall. 1020 Broad Street. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem will be hosting a memorial on February 8th. 


[Amiri Baraka doing the jitterbug and Maya Angelou doing the Texas hop at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in honor of Langston Hughes] 


Burroughs Centennial preparations continue apace -  the Creative Observer show opens with a reception tonight in Lawrence (Kansas) at the Lawrence Art Center. This stunning exhibit consists of an extraordinary amalgam of "shot-gun art", stencil work, collage work, writings, scrapbook presentations, alongside full-scale artistic collaborations. Yuri Zupancic, one of the curators (and the art director of William Burroughs Communications) is creating a multi-media installation in the front gallery - "a projection of Burroughs' face will turn a mannequin wearing his actual suit and hat into a talking effigy, reading from his novels"


[William S Burroughs (1914-1997)]




[Yuri Zupancic oversees the installation of the William Burroughs Creative Observer show at the Lawrence Art Center]

[Untitled Triptych (three sheets of plywood) by William S Burroughs - spray-paint and shotgun blasts on plywood, 22 inches x 15 inches, 1993 - appearing in "William S. Burroughs - Creative Observer"]

- and just opened in London, England, at the Photographers' Gallery, (through to the 30th March) William S Burroughs - Taking Shots. For a review and more on that - see here - and here 


[Jack Kerouac, Tangier, 1957 - Photograph by William S Burroughs, included in "William S Burroughs - Taking Shots", at London's Photographers' Gallery]

Ginsberg Apolitical? - I don't think so!

[Allen Ginsberg protesting Madame Nhu's visit in San Francisco, October 30, 1963. Placard reads: Man is naked without secrets (?) Armed Men Lack this/how many million person without names/what do we know of their suffering?/"Oh how wounded How wounded!" Says the Guru/Thine own heart says the Swami/Within you says the Christ/Till his humanity Awake says Blake/I am here saying seek mutual surrender tears/That there be no more hell in Vietnam/That I not be in hell here in the street. (photographer unknown)]

A couple of better-late-than-never responses to Lee Siegel's [October 10, 2010]  New York Times Book Review article (first noted here) that made some loose and somewhat bizarre parallels between the Beat Generation and the right-wing political phenomenon, the "Tea Party". We include Eliot Katz's in its entirety below. Ishmael Reed's we've excerpted below that, but you can get the whole piece at Counterpunch.


Dear Friends (who were also friends of Allen’s):

In the October 10th New York Times Book Review, there was an article by Lee Siegel comparing the views of Beat Generation writers, including Allen’s, to the right-wing Tea Party movement. I wrote a letter to the Book Review editor in response because I thought it was important to challenge Siegel’s misrepresentations, particularly with the elections coming up and so many crazy Tea Party candidates running. Of course, it’s difficult to get letters to the editor published in the NY Times (although I have managed to get in a few in the past) because they receive so many more letters than they can publish. Since I just found out that this one isn’t going to get in there, I thought I would at least send it around to friends who were also friends of Allen’s in the hope that some of you might appreciate it. With all best wishes,
Eliot Katz.

[Unpublished letter to the NY Times Book Review Editor by Eliot Katz:]

To the Editor:

As a poet, activist, and longtime friend of the late Allen Ginsberg, I wanted to challenge the characterization of Ginsberg’s political views and work in Lee Siegel’s provocative article, “The Beat Generation and the Tea Party” (Oct. 10). Introducing his piece with the claim that the Beat Generation writers were driven mainly by a desire for individual freedom, Siegel writes that they were “essentially apolitical” and that “insofar as they had sociopolitical ambitions, their goals…were the stuff of poetry, not organized politics.” After portraying Ginsberg as uninterested in working practically to improve government policies, Siegel then proceeds to link the ideas of Ginsberg and other Beat Generation writers to the right-wing Tea Party’s project of downsizing government’s role in ensuring people’s social and economic needs and rights.

Siegel’s portrayal of Ginsberg as uninterested in organized politics could hardly be more misleading. In both his poetry and his life, Ginsberg was one of the most politically engaged writers of his era. Influenced by such literary predecessors as William Blake and Walt Whitman, and raised by his communist mother Naomi, and his Debsian-socialist father Louis, Allen Ginsberg learned how to turn his political ideas and observations into some of the most memorable and widely read poetry of the second half of the 20th century. And in his personal life, he actively supported and participated in a wide range of organized political movements, beginning with the movement to end the Vietnam War and, in ensuing years, movements for such progressive causes as gay rights, civil rights, environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, and avoidance of the first Gulf War in 1990-91. He served on the advisory board of numerous organizations, including the progressive media watch group, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and a national student activist group that I worked with during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Student Action Union. In the years that I knew Ginsberg, from 1980 until his death in 1997, he was constantly writing or calling government offices to advocate for improved social policies and urging younger writers like myself to do the same. Most of the policies for which Ginsberg advocated—such as stronger social safety nets for homeless persons; deep cuts in military spending; and a more active government role in protecting civil rights, human rights, and the environment—do not at all resemble the right-wing policy calls that we have been hearing from Tea Party circles and candidates.

As Siegel notes, Ginsberg certainly believed strongly in individual freedoms, including freedom of expression; and he was a hard-working member of PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee, protesting literary censorship and working for the release of imprisoned writers in both the East and West. But contrary to Siegel’s narrow portrayal, Ginsberg also believed deeply in the importance of solidarity and well understood the reality of human interdependence. In his most well-known poem, note for example the key third section of “Howl” with its repeated assertion to fellow writer, Carl Solomon, who was at the time in a psychiatric hospital, that “I’m with you in Rockland”--an expression of interpersonal solidarity that works in the poem as a tonic to the sense of alienation decried in the poem’s previous and politically charged “Moloch” section, and that, beyond the poem itself, prefigures the kind of collective effort and movement building that is necessary to create meaningful social change. Throughout his life, Ginsberg was a Great Introducer, consistently trying to bring writers and activists together for the benefit of social-justice causes. For just one interesting example, it was Ginsberg who introduced Abbie Hoffman and Dave Dellinger to each other, an introduction that would help lead to the historic Chicago 1968 protests outside the Democratic Party convention and the subsequent Chicago 8 trial, in which Hoffman and Dellinger were defendants. Ginsberg kept a comprehensive rolodex of writers, political organizers, and journalists working for both the mainstream and the alternative press, a rolodex which was incredibly helpful in the pre-Internet days to those of us who needed difficult-to-find phone numbers or addresses in order to help organize or publicize upcoming meetings, events, and rallies. In recent years, many of Ginsberg’s old friends and colleagues have been working with coalitions like United for Peace & Justice to call—first from the Bush administration and now from the Obama administration—for an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for a renewed respect for civil liberties and human rights. Again, we have not yet heard such calls coming from the Tea Party.

In looking at Ginsberg’s body of poems over five-plus decades, I have written elsewhere that his political philosophy was flexible and pragmatic, not rigidly ideological, but that his political views were always within a broad spectrum of democratic-left traditions—including a consistent belief in values like civic participation, economic fairness, peace and international cooperation, accountable institutions, ecological protection, and civil liberties and other human rights. Right up until the end of his life, Allen Ginsberg never wavered from his dedication to progressive causes, which is why I think it is so important to challenge this article by Lee Siegel, whose work I have previously read and enjoyed. While it is true that not all of the Beat Generation writers shared the same politics, in the case of Ginsberg (and many of the other writers associated with the Beat Generation), Siegel would have been fairer and more accurate if he had shown how Ginsberg’s legacy continues to be seen in the contemporary and international anti-war movement; in recently increased efforts to urge the government to play a stronger role in halting the questionable bank-driven housing foreclosures that have led to vastly increasing homelessness in America; and in the global justice movement (as seen most visibly in the Seattle 1999 WTO protests and most recently at the September 2010 G-20 protests in Pittsburgh), with this movement’s effective and theatrical demonstrations and its poetically phrased insistence that “another world is possible.”

Eliot Katz

Astoria, NY

Eliot Katz is the author of six poetry books, including Unlocking the Exits, and, most recently, Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America’s Skull. He has published several essays on Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and is a coeditor, with Ginsberg and Andy Clausen, of Poems for the Nation, a collection of contemporary political poems that Ginsberg was compiling in the year and a half before his death. Katz currently works as a writer for the Center for Constitutional Rights. [2015 update - He is also the author of the recently-published The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg from Beatdom]

Ishmael Reed:Voting With Hard Hats Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, T-Shirts
(via Counterpunch)

... I was surprised when Lee Siegel, writing in The New York Times Book Review, made a bizarre attempt to link The Beats to the T-Shirts. He wrote “The Beats, though pacifist, were essentially apolitical.”

Apolitical? He hasn’t read Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which condemns war politicians by name, is one of the best antiwar poems. I asked Kerouac biographer Gerry Nicosia his opinion of the Siegel claim.

“It is absurd to say the Beats were apolitical. The Beats—speaking now of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, among others—were deeply shaped by World War II. They understood the necessity of fighting evil – Kerouac volunteered for the merchant marine—but they also believed that militarism for its own sake was a highly dangerous path and likely to become addictive to those in power. The Beats were, to a man and woman, appalled by the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese, and they felt that the rapidly escalating buildup of American military armaments after World War II and the concomitant Cold War—with its threat of mutual destruction—was absolutely insane. Kerouac comments on the show of empty-headed military might in On The Road as Kerouac and Cassady drive through Washington, D.C. at the time of Truman’s inauguration and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) wonders why a good “man from Missouri” like Truman had “fallen asleep at the wheel.” When Kerouac defined Beat Generation for John Clellon Holmes, he also talked about the need to transform America into a kinder and gentler nation (long before George H.W. Bush used it as a political catch-phrase)—a nation that would welcome and try to understand other cultures and religions, not bomb them. Ginsberg’s poem “Hum Bomb!” is of course the most obvious satire and condemnation of America’s propensity to bomb rather than love and understand peoples who are different from us, but Ginsberg’s whole career twined with antiwar activism—culminating with his great poem against the madness of the Vietnam War, “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” As for Burroughs, almost his entire oeuvre is about the misuse and abuse of power, the continual institution of control systems which limit human growth and fulfillment, and an exploration of the destructive effects of government on the course of human cultural evolution. If Naked Lunch were not so threatening to the established system of government, and to the constrainment of natural human behavior that government seeks to enforce, the U.S. government’s strenuous efforts to suppress it would be almost incomprehensible.”

Moreover, while the T-Shirts seek to cut off knowledge from the world by banning Ethnic Studies in Arizona, and banning the teaching Islam in Texas (in the name of Western civilization about which they also lack knowledge), Allen Ginsberg, a Buddhist, and his followers were always known for their cosmopolitanism. A few years before his death, Ginsberg taught Black Literature at Brooklyn College; I was one of his guest lecturers.

All one has to do is read the ads for writing workshops, conferences, retreats, etc. carried in Poets and Writers, The American Poetry Review, and AWP, to see that Naropa University, founded by Ginsberg and now run by poet Anne Waldman, is one of a handful that appreciates diversity beyond tokenism. The American literary scene is as white separatist as the Tea Party.

While the man who occupied the White House at the time enthralled the majority of Americans, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s document ends with Eisenhower’s resignation. Continue reading at Counterpunch >>http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/11/02/brown-shirts-black-shirts-t-shirts/