– and: an informative five-part evening, on June 4th, (the day after Allen’s birthday), a series of readings and presentations at Howl Arts/Howl Archive
The length of this posting/this transcript is such that it has become necessary to divide it into two sections (and, regrettably, the opportunity of providing still images of any of the images of the audio-visual presentations has been jettisoned)
Peter Hale, manager of the Allen Ginsberg Estate, introduces the Howl Arts/Howl Archives evening and provides brief introductory comments for each of the five participants
“This is something.. We knew we had to do something around Allen’s birthday, and showcase a handful of friends that really haven’t had the chance yet to share stories. (And) one of the stories I really wanted to focus on was Allen’s trip to India, 1961, 1962. It seems like he had been there for decades but it was only eighteen months. So Bob Holman here, who has done.. one film at least, following the footsteps of Allen in India and Deb Baker who’s great book (A Blue Hand..) also starts off kind of following the path of Hope Savage (who was this mysterious beautiful poet that was the inspiration for Allen to end up going to India. Well, it was Gregory Corso who eventually..who really wanted to go because he was in love with Hope. Allen ending up going and Gregory stayed back. So.. it’s funny how history works, so we’re going to open up with Bob and Deb…”
Bob Holman & Deborah Baker on “Ginsberg in India” (Holman begins, displaying images by Harsho Mohan Charrora. and reading haiku (his own compositions) to accompany them, Baker follows him reading from her history, A Blue Hand, the two then sit for discussion, Holman interviewing Baker and also fielding questions from the audience)
Next up, Gordon Ball.
Peter Hale – “I want to bring up Gordon Ball – He’s been friends with Allen since 1965..I want say.. you met Allen through Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin and Panna Grady.. (names that may not be familiar with many of you but sort of come to Allen through the film world, the avant-garde film world). He had the enviable task of managing Allen’s farm up in Cherry Valley, which he’s written about (in a book) called East Hill Farm , which is one of the most colorful sort of depictions of Allen’s life that’s out there, but he’s (also) responsible for these (photos) – [the Howl Arts/Howl Archive event, in addition, featured an exhibition of some of Gordon Ball’s images, as well as a publication/book-signing event for his recently-published collection Ginsberg and Beat Fellows]
A brief technical delay allows for a short interview with Peter Hale regarding East Hill Farm.
PH: when did you first get started in Cherry Valley?
GB: In 1968
PH Right, When Allen bought the farm?
GB: Well it took a few months, yeah
PH And from then when ..until 1970?
GB: 1971..so three years.
PH: Right, so every character came through there, tho’ this was a little too far from New York City to be a convenient location, just north of Cooperstown, two hours west of Albany
GB: 6.am. bus and it took arriving about 11 a.m.
PH: Yeah and it was on the north side of the mountains so you were facing the north so you couldn’t really grow much on it so..
GB: We could’ve grown a lot better but there was 120 inches of snow too!
PH: Right. (Peter) Orlovsky famously grew raspberries there and sometimes there’d be rhubarb..
GB: Yeah.
PH: Massive amounts of everything
[technical issues are solved]
GB ok thank you, thank you
Gordon Ball then begins his presentation, reading alongside a slide-show, “Allen As I Knew Him” (he dedicates the presentation to Beat Scholars, Ann Charters and Joyce Johnson)
As some of you may know, I spent three years with Allen on his upstate New York farm and worked with him on books, photos, and some of his public appearances at various colleges and universities, most importantly he was my friend for twenty-nine years and changed my life forever. So, on this auspicious occasion, honoring the 100th anniversary of his birth, let me revisit with you a few incidences that may suggest the significance of his life and work for mine…
Here (sic)‘s a fuzzy blow-up of a frame from tiny eight millimeter movie footage I shot some weeks before the incident I will describe, very close to the spot where it occurred. Here Allen is chanting or singing, accompanying himself on that harmonium which he’d bought in Benares in 1963. The incident: a sunny afternoon, third week of August upstate New York farm which Allen had purchased as a sanctuary for fellow poets and artists including Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and others, just before the start of the Democratic Convention in Chicago for which Allen was to leave. The situation in Chicago was already threatening, masses of youths facing police acting under aggressive orders from Mayor Daley as the unspeakable enormity of our American war in Vietnam continued to grow moment by moment. At the farm, my friend, filmmaker Barbara Rubin and lady-friend, Candy O’Brien and I left the house where we’d all lived together since the Spring and joined Allen, seated on the grass underneath large shady maple trees in dappled golden light. At a distance, Bessie mooed, hawk flew through blue sky and I looked Allen directly in his eyes: “We’re worried about you and about things here,”I began. Gregory had been rowdy as was his won’t; Allen’s lifelong love Peter was shooting speed and had violently broken our battery-operated record-player (we had no electricity), everyone feared working near him and he was abusing Julius, his smaller, catatonic schizophrenic brother. “Instead of going off to deal with national problems”, I continued, “maybe you could think about staying here, it would be a great existential act if you chose to stay” – “I’m not an existentialist,” he returned, immediately, dispassionately. So my effort at persuading Allen by glorifying the step we three hoped he’d take had fallen flat. Though he loved being at the center of many things, he wasn’t taken in by my sort of cheap Norman Mailer come-on. I wasn’t thinking of writing about him then and wouldn’t (except in diaries) for a long time, but when I did, I was sure to show his independence of thought.
In this 1968 instance under the maples, Allen also demonstrated his vulnerability as Barbara, who’d known him several years and had looked after Julius when Peter couldn’t, and who’d hoped to marry Allen, picked up where I left off. Her mouth widened as it did when she tried explaining things to people incapable of understanding:
Allen, look! The whole source of our problems here is Peter – don’t you see?!…Peter’s schizophrenic….He should be locked up in an asylum!”
“The problem is, with all the amphetamine..” Allen’s voice was quick, but still thoughtful.
“Allen!” Barbara shouted back, in red-faced exasperation that he couldn’t see what was elementary. “It’s notnaturally crazy to begin with!…He’s schizophrenic!….He needs serious medical attention!”
Allen had remained calm but now let go. “Well, you’re schizophrenic!” he shouted back.
Barbara gasped; Allen looked down, catching himself from saying more. No one said anything; finally each of us got up and went their way. That evening, Allen packed for Chicago.
I felt his last words to Barbara were a low blow. In a few months on the farm I hadn’t come to know him as well as I would, and some might say I idolized him – so his angry accusation was at odds with my image. Perhaps he had Barbara’s deluded marital intentions in mind, though they might’ve recently dissipated; certainly he may have been unnerved by the harsh reality of her words on the man he so loved – and recognized his own emotional excess. And at some level there must’ve been resonances of his experiences with his mother Naomi. He was only human, and realizing as much would, ultimately, help me appreciate even more all that he undertook, from altering the face and form of American poetry, to standing up against greed and cruelty, to vowing not to enter nirvana before all others. In my memoir East Hill Farm, I’d try to depict a more complex Allen than I might’ve earlier.
Back when I was in college before that moment on East Hill, poetry was mainly something existing on a page. We might, sometimes, read a poem aloud, cite a few phonic devices, note rhyme and alliteration, discuss meaning (often singular) with regard to image and symbol, repetition and refrain. It’s but a small exaggeration to say poetry was no weightier for me than a crossword puzzle: I don’t recall voicing a work in joy, in fear, or anything else within the whole universe of sonic response that a few printed words of poetry could generate.
Yet in another moment on East Hill after college days, I beheld Allen, hands at harmonium as his baritone tremolo intoned the “Introduction” to Songs of Experience, and was shaken in recognition that “the Bard” was equally William Blake and Allen Ginsberg:
“Hear the voice of the Bard!/ Who Present, Past, & Future, sees;/ Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word,/ That walked among the ancient trees..”
Poetry and music were linked, Allen insisted, and there’s no better demonstration of it than his own music for Blake’s poetry. Years later, when we studied poems at the Virginia Military Institute, or when I taught poetry writing at Washington & Lee, the sounds in which a poem lives and breathes were basic. And having examined some scholarship on the notion that Homer may have composed and performed orally, in 1996 I nominated Bob Dylan for a Nobel Prize in Literature (Allen wrote a nomination as well) and for a dozen years I ran a campaign to that end.
When I first read “Howl”, it left little impression. I certainly didn’t encounter it in the classroom, since Allen wasn’t taught at Davidson College and many another school in early or mid-1960s. And I’d grown up abroad – but for occasional furloughs, I knew little about life as lived in the United States – and then attended what was at that time a rather parochial institution. Certainly, my year following Davidson in avant-garde New York and months of cross-country hitchhiking with a spell in a Mexican jail heightened my sensitivity to issues within the poem, but it finally “lived” for me when I heard Allen deliver “Howl” in its full-charging railroad-train declamatory power.
Allen’s 1956 poem “America,” closes with: “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”.Now here he is, May 1968, fully engaged in an utterly grungy, utterly necessary task no one would seek: cleaning out our old well of seven years of gunk and mud as he stands bare from waist down in frigid water, handing a potful to me to cast away.
He was no Lord of the Domain, though he necessarily had to spend time at his desk. And though one day he left it and called out (with a chuckle) to us in the field, “Serfs!” he was typically ready to share burden or play rather than stay put on Parnassus. He was a joiner; once in the front yard when Gregory and I and others were playing softball with a wiffle ball and plastic bat, he happened to mention, wiffle ball in hand, “I used to pitch on my madhouse softball team.”
Of course a measure of this is bound up with his sense of friendship, which at times could seem without limit.
Here (sic), happy on a haystack is Carl Solomon, the dedicatee of “Howl” and to whom the poem’s entire third part is devoted in solidarity while Carl, unlike Allen, remained institutionally confined.
Herbert Huncke, the prose writer, raconteur, junky, conman, thief who used the word “beat” in its first sense to Kerouac, who coined the phrase “Beat Generation.” Allen provided longtime support, starting in 1949. Huncke was just one of many whom Allen cared for with astounding generosity.
And here (sic) are Allen & Gregory near Allen’s East 10th Street apartment, August 1973: poetry kinsmen longstanding, from the 1951 moment when Gregory was “graced with a deep-eyed apparition” who’d teach him of “contemporary poesy.” Until an admirer began covering Corso in 1992, Allen was a major means of support.
My teaching the Literature of the Beat Generation included Gregory’s “Marriage,” of course, but also his brilliant shaped-verse frolic-like satire of our fear of nuclear weapons: his masterpiece “Bomb.” Allen defended and celebrated this “alchemical poem,” as he called it, most dramatically when at a reading at Oxford one of Bertrand Russell’s disarmament people threw a shoe at Corso. I admired much in the poem, from the pair of alliterative epithets (“Budger of history, Brake of time”) at the start, through the vivid mayhem of the bomb’s blast and the sound poem portion near the end, with which Allen told me he helped.
In 1983 I taught for a year as Fulbright Specialist Lecturer in American Literature at three universities in Tokyo, and traveled a good bit around the country, from Hokkaido to Kyushu, giving guest lectures. I taught or spoke on the Beats in Sapporo, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Fukuoka and Nagasaki. I did not speak about, or even begin to speak about, “Bomb.”
Does poetry in its wildest dithyrambs, its most magnificent odes, fail in an ultimate encounter with Truth? Is its value purely a matter of audience? I can’t think of a better basis for asking such questions as still I struggle for an answer.
Of course, it goes without saying that family was of great value to Allen, and I’m grateful to have been included in his relations with his.
Here’s Edith, Allen, and Louis at his parents’ apartment, Paterson, August 1973 (sic). Allen and his stepmother got along well; planning the new loft he’d move into shortly before his death over two dozen years later, Allen set aside a room for Edith.
I was always struck by the patience and care I saw Allen extend to his father, even as they argued over Vietnam and the Mideast. And Louie was an incurable punster, and Allen would sit there pokerfaced and forbearing as he heard for the hundredth time the same puns (some, like “I hear in Greenwich Village lads are making lasses of themselves” and “Life? Depends on the liver” were funny the first time.) During these later years, Louie was sometimes a guest reader at Allen’s readings.
My father, a West Virginia farm boy from a family of twelve who’d made a career for himself with what is now Citibank, was never keen on Allen. Yet here (sic)’s a photo my sister took of an historic meeting in her home just a month before my father died, spring 1977: Allen listens intently to Gordon Senior, who’s speaking in a now-weakened voice. Earlier they’d sat side-by-side on the living room couch as Allen held his hand, then picked up his finger cymbals while Peter with his banjo sang, shouted, and yodeled his “Raspberry Song.” Then Allen gave my father his cymbals, and with his harmonium sang Blake’s “Spring” and “Nurse’s Song” as Gordon joined in on the refrain “And all the hills echo-éd.”
A few years earlier Allen had written me a letter in which he expressed appreciation of the care I showed my parents as they were failing, my mother with Alzheimer’s, and my father, later, with a stroke. When in 1979 I screened for him my recently completed film on my mother’s death, he was moved to tears, and wrote very generously of it. And I imagine that the extraordinary candor in “Kaddish”, with which he depicted Naomi’s decline, in some way gave permission for my direct and unadorned yet sympathetic treatment of my mother’s.
So I’d say that both by example with his own father and mine, and his appreciation of my concern for my parents and my artistic response to their circumstance, he only strengthened my own resolve to empathize and honor.
Once he began receiving income from poetry, Allen took an informal vow of penury, to not keep for himself and Peter more than what they needed for subsistence; he valued the needs and well-being of others not only in the larger public, political realm but in the smaller, intimate everyday: when in 1991 I visited with my daughter Daisy, then ten, and Allen returned from travels our last night, he insisted – this was only typical – that we remain in his double bed as he>took a mattress on the floor. Four years later I was with him just after he’d suffered a pulmonary embolism and was spending the weekend in bed, in great pain, before rising to speak at the NYU Kerouac conference Monday. When several more friends entered his apartment, he rose from bed to greet them: “The fridge is full of food, but I’m too weak to cook for you.”
So for me, on a personal level, that’s Allen Ginsberg. “I hate this world without Ginsberg in it,” activist John Sinclair told me a while after his death. (Allen had campaigned tirelessly for John’s release after he was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years for possessing two joints.)
For a great many of us today, our world is vastly different without Allen’s vibrant, fearless, generous spiritual presence. Often have friends and I exchanged yearnings that he be with us now amidst the seemingly endless, unparalleled, baldfaced, morally reprehensible governmental corruption we continue to witness. And so in this celebration of his birth I must return to the sad fact of his death,
Gordon concludes with a poem he wrote:
“Since Allen died/ I read more Buddhism & practice Tai Chi/ Since Allen died/ I want to tell the world what’s gone/ Since Allen died”
transcript of the evening continues tomorrow