“The first time I actually met Allen Ginsberg was when he came and gave a reading at Princeton University (where I wasn’t teaching, but my husband was). I was already a fan of Allen’s. I thought he was great (he was great) but this time I was… I was lifted off my seat by his voice. If you ever heard Allen read, his beautiful resonant baritone voice would come rolling out as if there was no tomorrow, as if he could just go on infinitely, never bothering to take a breath. It was the voice of the spirit, and the body and the spirit were one..were one thing. It was so beautiful. Now, I had a question I wanted to ask him, because I was just starting out, I was in my twenties, and I was off-the-scale shy, I was shier than you can possibly imagine. And when I tried to read a poem I would sort of read it, read it into my shoulder-blades so nobody could hear me? – and I wondered how Allen could do that. He used to say that he had that long resonant voice to fit the length of his long rhymes in the poems and that the long lines were to match his voice. But I had a question about that because I had heard an early recording of him reading Howl and his voice was not deep and resonant and his voice was not long, it was..it was short sentences, taking breaths all over the place. So I went the party afterward and I asked hm, “Allen, did you really write those long lines to fit your natural breath like you always say?”. And he said, “Well, I wrote those long lines to fit my potential breath”. And I thought that was a good answer. But then, of course, I wanted to know how could a person train themselves to do that? And he said, “Well, its simple, you could just fill the bath-tub up with water, lie face-down and say poems”. And I thought, “Well, well.. well, that’s a cute answer”. But then Allen looked at me, for just a split-second, and he saw who I was, he saw into me, and he said, “It should be easy for you. Just use your breath the way you learned to do it in child-birth classes”. And I thought, “How did he know that?! – How did he know that this little shy chickadee was a Mom, that, of course, she had taken child-birth classes, that, of course, the experience of child-birth for her was a high spiritual experience? How did he look at me for one second and know that? And then I knew Allen Ginsberg is a saint and he can just do that kind of thing. And that was true, in fact, always. He was kindness personified and I always saw him doing very much the same thing with other people. He wanted to love people, he wanted to care for people. And his.. his social-consciousness and his passion for social justice was part of what he cared about, about individual human beings. Well, he was someone who taught this little chickadee what it means to perform, and that you have to not worry about making a fool of yourself when you’re trying to perform poetry. In fact, you have to be ready to make a fool of yourself, you have to want to make a fool of yourself, for poetry, for what you care about. And, so, I’ve tried to do that all my life.
