remembering allen ginsberg

Remembering Allen Ginsberg
Poet, Musician, Photographer, Activist, Film Maker, Archivist, Scholar, Citizen, College Professor
by Richard Skelly

Take me,
said the
skeleton,
but leave
my bones
alone.
- Allen Ginsberg

When Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, the world lost a great scholar and teacher.

Ginsberg was 70, and according to his archivist and personal assistant, he worked right up to the end, calling friends to tell them he was dying, writing letters and writing a few last poems.

While the media image of Allen Ginsberg was one of a homosexual, radical, left-leaning activist poet, Ginsberg the person was something else entirely. He touched thousands of lives with his poetry and support for struggling musicians, actors, poets, novelists, journalists, film makers and photographers. He knew hundreds of people who came out to his poetry readings in numerous cities around the U.S., but he knew hundreds more around the world. Most of the time, he remembered their names, especially those who kept coming back to get more books signed.

Allen
The Lion For Real

In April, a week after his passing, a huge memorial service was held for Ginsberg at St. Mark’s Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the center for poetry readings presented by the Poetry Project since the mid-1970s. About a thousand of the poet’s friends remembered his intelligence, generosity, kindness and patience when they gathered on April 12. Among those who delivered eulogies for Ginsberg, in song and spoken verse, were rock poets Lou Reed and Patti Smith, Smith’s guitarist and collaborator, Lenny Kaye, guitarist Marc Ribot and Elliot Sharpe, Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth, poet Amiri Baraka, producers Hal Wilner and Sam Charters, and arranger/conductor/composer/musician David Amram.

St. Mark’s Church held a special place in Ginsberg’s heart, and over the years he delivered hundreds of readings and performances there. He gave much needed start up money to non-profit groups like the Poetry Project and PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists) in their formative years. Though Ginsberg had a great legacy as a poet, as author of “Howl” and “Kaddish,” two landmark statements in modern American poetry, Ginsberg also developed, over time, good musical sensibilities. He had a better than average singing voice, in the estimation of John Hammond Sr., the talent scout and Columbia Records producer who signed him to record for his own JHR Records in the early 1980s. Two decades earlier, Ginsberg was a major influence on “Hammond’s folly,” Bob Dylan, and later toured with the folk-rock-blues musician on his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue.

Sam Charters recalled that Ginsberg came to him in the mid-1960s, wanting to learn more about blues music, which Ginsberg had been fascinated with since his teenage years.

“He was interested in poetry that was composed on the tongue,” Charters recalled, and the tradition of classic blues musicians who would improvise lyrics on the spot.

“In those days, Allen sang the blues very loudly, not always in tune, but with great enthusiasm,” Charters said, “he was the most open, free-est person I’ve ever known. He didn’t let his ego get in the way of learning. He would come to me and say, ‘Teach me.’ That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about Allen.”

Patti Smith sang a Hank Williams song, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and introduced it by saying, “I’m not much of a musician, but that never stopped Allen. I’m gonna follow his example.”

Lou Reed read his song lyrics, “Magic and Loss” the title track from one of his recent albums dedicated in loving memory to the late songwriter Doc Pomus. Reed also held Ginsberg in high regard and acknowledged he was influenced by his poetry and his kind, giving nature.

In 1985, he put up Harry Smith for six months, when Smith had nowhere else to stay in New York City. The archivist, record producer, musicologist and photographer--now being recognized for his “Anthology Of American Folk Music”--released by Folkways on compact disc, was an eccentric and somewhat temperamental old man when Ginsberg offered a room in his apartment while Smith could get back on his feet. Such acts of generosity were typical of Ginsberg.

In 1995, Ginsberg sold his massive personal archives of photos, journals, writings and collected memorabilia consisting of thousands of file folders documenting life in modern America to Stanford University in California for $1 million. After years of living a spartan existence in a fifth floor walk up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Ginsberg moved in 1996, after the sale was completed, to a more spacious apartment building with an elevator on East 13th Street, one block up from where he was living.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926 in Newark, N.J., the second son of Louis and Naomi Ginsberg, and was raised in Paterson, N.J. He read and was influenced by the poetry of William Blake, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, Ezra Pound and Paterson poet William Carlos Williams. Williams taught Ginsberg that poetry should be written in the language of everyday life, or written as it is spoken. When he was 20, he got an assignment from the local weekly newspaper to interview Williams. He asked the poet, who was also a pediatrician, if he thought of himself primarily as a poet or as a doctor. When Williams replied he was a doctor first, “all my romantic illusions were crushed,” Ginsberg said in a 1985 radio interview. After holding a variety of day jobs, including working in marketing research and as a copy boy at the Associated Press, Ginsberg began to find recognition for his poetry.

He read his poem “Howl!” for the first time in San Francisco in 1956. That poem and “Kaddish,” his poem for his mother Naomi, who died in 1956 in a mental hospital, would later earn him his place in the world’s poetry community. Ginsberg’s books of poetry were published by City Lights Books of San Francisco, and later by Harper and Row and Harper Collins.

Among his many accomplishments, awards and honors were being inducted into the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1974, he received a National Book Award for his poem book, “The Fall of America: Poems Of These States,” (City Lights Books, San Francisco.)

By the end of his life, Ginsberg had produced an enormous body of work, including at least 16 volumes of poetry, 13 volumes of prose, two books of photographs, and more than half a dozen albums, as well as hundreds of sketches, paintings and photographs.

Too often overlooked are Ginsberg’s contributions to rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, folk music and blues. Ginsberg maintained that blues lyrics were the greatest body of American poetry to be found anywhere, and he urged the teaching of blues lyrics in university-level poetry classes.

Later, he would use blues lyrics for his own classes at Brooklyn College, where he was a Distinguished Professor of American Literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Over his more than four decades in poetry and music, he worked with numerous musicians, including Dylan, Amram, U2, the Clash, Sonic Youth, composer Philip Glass, and most recently, Paul McCartney, who performs on Ginsberg’s 1996 release, “Ballad of the Skeletons” on Mercury Records’ Mouth Almighty subsidiary.

He left behind a substantial discography, some spoken word and other recordings featuring his singing and harmonium playing. His recorded output includes “Howl and Other Poems” 1959, for Fantasy-Galaxy Records; “Kaddish” a collaboration made possible by longtime friend Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, released in 1966; “William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience Tuned By Allen Ginsberg” MGM/Verve, 1970; “First Blues: Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs” Folkways, 1981; “First Blues” a double album, now out of print, on John Hammond Records, 1982; “The Lion For Real” Island Records, 1989, and “Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs, 1949-1993” for Rhino Records, a boxed set on compact disc.

Most recently, Lenny Kaye produce an EP of Ginsberg’s music, “The Ballad of the Skeletons” for Mercury Records’ Mouth Almighty imprint. Reportedly, Ginsberg was looking forward to collaborating on an album of songs with Bob Dylan.

For me, one of Ginsberg’s all-time greatest songs was “Meditation Rock,” an electric guitar laden song on which he’s accompanied by his longtime sideman Steven Taylor, along with mandolin, bass and drums. This song, clean and radio-ready with an exciting beat, has never been issued on record. The lyrics urge the listener to meditate to “learn a little patience and generosity.” It is my hope that some record company, perhaps Mercury’s Mouth Almighty division, sees fit to issue this very important recording.

For those music fans unfamiliar with Ginsberg’s poetry, a good place to start are his two collected works books, “Collected Works” 1984, Harper and Row, and “Selected Works” 1996, Harper Collins.
- Richard Skelly