I remember hearing Allen Ginsberg read standing on top of a box at the
corner of Grant and Green in North Beach, San Francisco in the spring
of1958. It was an afternoon in the middle of the Grant Street Fair. The
crowd was right up to his stomach and the sun was splashing all over his
face and all of us around him. I was barely 17. He was reading something
about a cosmic net that was about to come down and pick us up (he managed to
do this at the same time with great ironic humor).
A sure-fire performer his voice cut right through the air - a neo-Whitman
manifest.
I remember how refreshing, liberating that was to hear - somebody taking to
the air like that - in the middle of the last most repressive era of life in
America (tho the current stuff seems much, much worse.)
Yesterday I was thinking of Allen. I was in an waiting room of people with
eye cancer, or potential eye cancer from moles that sometime singularly or
multiply gather behind the eye ball. (I have one, but gratefully, it has
stayed quiet for the last 5 years since its discovery. But it was my annual
check-up). So there I surround by people from all over western america who
have come to see this rare specialists. Mostly, yestererday quiet, whispery
well behaved protestant types from small towns - professionals, mothers, the
retired, etc. And through the door this gray silver wigged, perhaps already
blind in one eye, woman, I suspect in her sixties, comes rolling in, her
wheel chair pushed by a Latino male nurse.
She looks around at all of us, throws up her arms, and shouts out in this
loud, Brooklyn Jewish voice, "I am so glad to see you are all here. Let's
start the committee meeting right now."
Boy, did that wake up the mutants and put some electricity and humor in the
air. Allen was some like that. He got the Committee meeting going - poetry
was suddenly able to jump over so many academic fences, American poets and
poetry could suddenly fully breathe, weep, be angry, feel and look at a
larger world again. For me, Kaddish and Howl and the Kansas __ Sutra were
his great poems/books. Much of the rest is not that interesting. Ironically
his snap shots from the rest of his life are often wonderful and somehow
beat what became most snap shot poetry.
But the force of that woman and her voice rolling into the Cancer ward
brought it all back, claiming life no matter how dark the oppression.
Stephen
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
New blog site / same archives!
> I didn't think of this when reading Stephen's post, but of course,
> there was the famous reading when Lowell & O'Hara read together, & the
> differences showed up all too fully. O'Hara had written a poem on the
> way to the reading & read it; Lowell was outraged.
>
> I confess, Howl is important to me as an event more than as a poem,
> although there is much there to admire (just not for me to copy). I was
> already too deep into Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Olson, etc.
>
> Doug
> On 25-Apr-06, at 2:31 PM, Roger Day quoted Stephen Vincent:
>
>>> (Bishop and Lowell do not
>>> fit into that diversity - however).
> Douglas Barbour
> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
> (780) 436 3320
> Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>
> Is that the flesh made word
> or is that the flesh-made word?
>
> Fred Wah
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