FOR SCHOOL KIDS IN NEW JERSEY
Dawn, I’ve been up all night answering letters
– Now to write a Poem for 360 Child Poets:
Don’t Grow up like me, you never get enough sleep;
It’s 6 AM, my friends are arguing, Crying in the kitchen
Sausages are smoking on the stove, the poor pigs,
Taxis are passing down Avenue A to Work
Busses are grinding down the street empty
Birds are twittering on the Church Steeple, Cats
yowling in the Alley.
Punk Rock’s already playing on the phonograph
– It’s Thursday October 4’th, time to go to bed.
Allen Ginsberg, 1979
Over at Literary Hub – Inside the Unpublished World of Allen Ginsberg – “poems, proofs, mimeos, and more”
– Bill Morgan comments on the above poem: “As the title suggests, Ginsberg wrote this poem in response to a request for a poem from a school in New Jersey. It was published in their high-school magazine and is a good example of Allen’s generosity to anyone who wrote asking him for poems”.
See here at Literary Hub for more original pages
(the opening page of “New York To San Fran”, the long poem that appeared last month in Poetry magazine, a short poem, “Wyoming” that appeared in The St Marks Poetry Project Newsletter; vintage poems,”What’s buzzing” (“written while Ginsberg was living in San Jose with Neal and Carolyn Cassady during the mid-1950’s”), “Tokyo Tower” (from 1963), and, more observations and notations from Bill Morgan (including an excerpt from his introduction to the recently-published Wait Till I’m Dead – UnCollected Poems)