Continuing our spotlight on Allen’s family members, today, his poet-lawyer brother Eugene Brooks
Eugene and Allen are both interviewed for Barbara Delatiner’s 1991 article on their joint reading in Long Island, in The New York Times
Eugene: “I was going to be a teacher, too, just like Louis (my father), until I changed my mind and went into law. Besides, right from the beginning, Allen had the bigger talent.”
On the difference between them?
“I only wanted to write a few poems that could be remembered and anthologized after my death.. Allen exploded, with more emotion, verbal gyrations, “I mean, he’s a great, major poet.”
Allen: “We both had equal genes, equal capacity.. But Gene tends to minimalize, doubt his role as a poet. Why, he wrote before I did, and in the beginning I was imitative of him and our father.”
Born in 1921 (six years before Allen), Eugene served in a radar unit in Britain and France during the Second World War. Following his discharge from the Army, he changed his name. He graduated from Montclair State Teachers College and New York University Law School becoming a highly-respected specialist in international law
His poems (included many that were written during wartime), were eventually collected in a self-published collection – Rites of Passage (1973).
Here’s one of them (an instance of his extraordinary gift for sensitivity):
Description of Pure Loss
Describe pure loss?
Nail a tongue too the tip of your heart.
Might as well give blue, speech-power
or plug a record player into Picasso
But I remember the feeling —
Ocean that emptied its autumn into my chest —
Last goodbye I waved, one saffron noon
At Pennsylvania Station to a girl going home;
And once I took leave
Of a ramshackle house and its seaweed doorstep
After a sea-sand coral summer.
I always feel it, I discard friends
Tearing away their familiarities,
Soiled undershirts that hang around my neck.
Ache even without suffering personal loss,
Sunset generally,
A ship slips away from its pier
Sounding its iron lungs, sad phantom.
In requiem for departed whales,
Usually there’s
Old mahogany clocks ticking,
Silent wheels swinging slowly in the earth.
Mostly its myself I say goodbye to,
On a thousand railway platforms where trains
recede,
At a thousand beaches at summer’s end
Dust settles over a thousand towns.
I broke my pledged word to return.
All over the world I hear three billion people
Close their cold doors at my slow departure.
And here’s one post-Rites of Passage, an extraordinary piece – his memorial poem for his brother:
Poem For Allen Ginsberg
Wherever you hover, Spirit, mind-deep in space
Where God signs his name in hydrogen italics
Among Oort Cloud comets that brought water to Earth
For our throats’ thirsts and tears for our eyes;
or drifting over mountain crags west of Boulder.
Where you touch ethereal fingers to wingtips of eagles;
Or under the world’s oceans admonishing sharks
To clamp their teeth into little fish more thoroughly;
Or lounging among Cherry Valley ferns, watching with daisies’ eyes
Through a lattice of tree twigs a red sun sliver
Slide below the horizon’s rim; nightfall crickets chirp
The common epics of their lives; or sitting with us
Invisible in the 13th Street 5th floor eyrie
As church bells toll the heartbeat of time into song
Now you know all, Allen, while earthbound our senses fail.
You can see time gone and time to come, how the Cosmos started and ends.
How the rose builds its lovely carbon body out of photons and rain,
You watch the girl in her bedroom cursing her face in the mirror,
You watch the long legged stripling toss
Basketballs through hoops – move on, you’re past all sex.
Well, hardline Capitalism triumphed in your time,
It had to, crushing your outcries in a torrent of plastic,
Toyotas, color TV, computers, digital disks;
The doe-eyed, the misfits still cram jails and bughouses,
The Statue of David shines in the Academy
While Europe and Africa pile up their corpse mountains.
So shower your pity on the nation you scolded;
Pity our soldier dragged in Mogadishu dust,
Pity the homeless in their cardboard chapels,
Pity the neck-slashed girl and the death cell halfwit,
Pity our midnight soul fears and dark dream tremors;
Pity our workplace gouging of each other
That our children not fall under the spiked wing of poverty.
Pity the comrades you wordlessly deserted,
Pity your brother’s self-pity, the vanity of his grief.
Pity the human race its illusion of permanence.
