Geoff Manaugh on Allen Ginsberg continues from here
Not long after we met, Allen and I started writing postcards and letters to one another. He would sometimes call me in my dorm room at college where my roommate, the conservative son of a Baptist minister, alarmed by Allen’s homosexuality, occasionally picked up. Opening an envelope to find my own poems mailed back to me with Allen’s handwritten edits in the margins was a thrill; I continued putting pamphlets together and posting them up to him in New York City.
When I turned 19 and told Allen I wanted to spend my birthday in New York, he invited me up to use his apartment in the East Village, despite being out of town the first couple of days. Peter Hale welcomed me in; I remember seeing a portrait of Walt Whitman in the kitchen, Buddhist paintings hanging on the walls, and a closet, barely large enough to walk into, filled with bookshelves, dozens of books of poetry on each of them. I remember getting high by myself my first night there, turning on public-access television, and sitting through a screening of “The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes,” a 1971 film directed by Stan Brakhage that consists of a complete human autopsy. It felt strangely Buddhist, in unexpected resonance with the art on the walls. I thought of Allen’s early poem, “Paterson,” written when he was 23, which he ends with a vision of “blood streaming from my belly and shoulders / flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways / by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.” Poetry, too, is a form of autopsy, a way to figure out what injures us.
On subsequent visits, Allen asked me to participate in some readings here and there, including at New York’s Knitting Factory, where we performed alongside poet Nanao Sakaki. Nanao was lithe and athletic, with ropey forearms and a mad white beard, as well as a tendency to laugh while reading his own poems; I was intimidated, enamored, and wanted to age like that. Without fail, whenever I came back to the city, Allen would introduce me to new writers, artists, and painters, from Gregory Corso to George Condo. One year, he brought me out to the American Academy of Arts & Letters as his guest, where, starstruck, I met Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Serra, Paul Cadmus, Stephen Sondheim, and dozens of others. Allen also continued to send my poetry around—to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William Burroughs, and even to Bono from U2 (who sent me a postcard in response). While this risks sounding like adolescent name-dropping, it’s difficult to convey just how otherworldly all this felt for me at the time. I was 19 years old. I had gotten kicked out of high school for my writing. But Allen’s generosity was such that he would fling open the doors of the city for you—and it was up to your own poetic instincts to make something of the entry.
There were so many highlights. At the end of March 1996, not long after I turned 20, Allen, Peter Hale, and I traveled to Europe together; it would be my first trip to the continent and Allen’s last. Allen was scheduled to do some book events and several readings, and had invited me to perform my poems with him in Prague, at a theater called the Divadlo Archa. Remarkably, we flew to Paris aboard TWA 800, the same flight that exploded off Long Island four months later, killing everyone on board—through the eyes of a young poet, that’s a near-miss. Not long after landing, we met Jacques Chirac, the President of France; in Milan, we went out for lunch with designer Ettore Sottsass and writer Fernanda Pivano; we also traveled to Prague with composer Philip Glass. I remember one night sitting beside Allen in semi-darkness behind the curtains as Philip performed some of his “Metamorphoses” onstage. I remember sitting next to Peter as Allen spoke quietly over the phone with James Grauerholz, the longtime friend and editor of William Burroughs, because William had had what appeared to be a stroke, then waiting for updates, positive or negative. I remember Allen checking his blood sugar each morning, usually near an open window or at his hotel room desk. I remember him shopping for a Borsalino hat in Milan and being scolded by our host for potentially buying a counterfeit. I remember completely misunderstanding what jet lag was and thus staying awake for three days, with no idea why I couldn’t sleep; I just thought I was excited.
One night in New York, during my final stay in Allen’s newly-purchased loft—it was the last time I would see him alive—his laughter woke me up. I asked him what was going on, and he responded in the voice of a TV commercial, as if debuting an ad for a satirical new business. Giggling at himself, he read me what would become “Bad Poem” (1996):
“Being as Now has been re-invented/ I have devised a new now/Entering the real Now/at last/which is now.”
By that time, of course, his body was already failing. Another synchronicity that has always stood out for me is that Allen’s death, just a few months later, in April 1997, was the same week as the Hale-Bopp comet. The night of his death, I was camping with two friends on an island off the coast of North Carolina. Allen and I had already spoken by phone and said goodbye. The comet burned in clear view above us, a stationary glow in the sky that looked almost like an eye. It might sound mawkish, but the comet felt to me like an act of celestial punctuation, both material and divine, that helped lead Allen away to safety.
By the time I got home, Allen was dead, my answering machine alight with condolences from friends and family. Between the fact that my last conversation with Allen took place over the phone and that my answering machine continued filling with messages of support, I became uncannily convinced that at any minute Allen was going to call, that, whenever the phone rang for days afterward, it might be Allen, checking in to assure me he was okay.
In 1958, on an earlier trip to Paris, when he was 31, Allen went to visit the grave of poet Guillaume Apollinaire. “I hope some wild kidmonk lays his pamphlet on my grave for God to read me on cold winter nights in heaven,” he wrote in “At Apollinaire’s Grave.” Alas, the poem continues several lines later, “the universe is a graveyard and I walk around alone in here.”
Allen sought—and found—friends, lovers, companions, and family, but that is the project of a lifetime; it never ends; it is an effort that must always be renewed. People move away or forget. People change. People die. Poetry for Allen was many things, of course, but amongst its functions was a way to discover others, to pray for others, to seek acceptance from others, to meet others struggling on their own paths, to offer others solace and to ask for comfort in return; and poetry became a way for him to demand release for everyone, to pound as loud as possible on the doorframe of the absolute, demanding admission, even if what opened the door might destroy us. Poets, put your pamphlets on each other’s graves, always, cross through one another’s lives like comets, forever, flame out into the stars that watch and await you.