Poetics, Disembodied

[David Casseres]

>Just a note to mark the passing of Allen Ginsburg, one of TRP's admitted
>inspirations (along with Kerouac, et al.).
>A very Sixties moment--sitting in an auditorium at the feet of the Bard,
>all hair and robe and sandals and beads, leading everyone in a chant
>to Siva on his harmonium.
> 
>The next time I saw him up close was at an academic lit. meeting where he
>had a neatly trimmed beard, a three-piece suit and looked (but didn't
>talk) like a professor of economics.

He changed all our lives.  Yesterday the newspaper quoted the lines about 
the angelheaded hipsters seeking "the starry dynamo in the machinery of 
night" in dark smoky apartments floating over the city, contemplating 
jazz (I sure wish I could actually quote it!) and I thought instantly of 
Pynchon, and of many other things -- Ginsburg sitting full lotus at the 
mike in front of the first Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, chanting 
BOOM, BOOM, MAHADEV -- years earlier finding out about "Howl" during my 
freshman year in college, when the court freed it for publication, and 
sitting in my room reading it with my eyes bugging out -- finding my way 
from there to The Naked Lunch to Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Sometimes a 
Great Notion to V. to Moby-Dick, to Gravity's Rainbow, and back to 
Ginsburg, over the years.... 

and then, so suddenly, the voice on the car radio talking about the 
Beats, about Ginsburg, my wife suddenly asking Why does he keep talking 
about Allen Ginsburg in the past tense?



Cheers,
David