On the Fiftieth Anniversary of Ginsberg’s “Howl”
First public reading, Six Gallery, San Francisco
October 7, 1955
No lasting shame
accrues to his later
vanity – the water glass,
the microphone and cushion placed
just so or else he wouldn’t read.
The consumption
of Orlovsky, the playing
Goebbels to a drunk Tibetan Hitler
might stop the conversation
if there were any; but
with fifty useful pages in eight hundred,
there isn’t.
Incredibly, never bourgeois; slept anywhere.
Few levitate the Pentagon, he at least tried.
A month from death, he said:
“I thought I’d be afraid, but I’m EXHILARATED!”
And to have been there …
Being born too late
is no excuse, is actually false:
everybody was there!
Kerouac passing the hat
and bottles and yelling “Go!
Go!”, Creeley
off to one side smiling – less
importantly present
than the familiar, beetle-browed,
mustachioed, sickly, peering,
unnoticed figure heard
laughing twice that evening.
The first laugh was unpleasant
as he thought, This is the Slave
as poet, inciting
his insincere revolt.
The second laugh was joyous,
embodying the mood of the crowd – seeing
in this Jew “shaking with shame”
the Overman, the revaluator of values.
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