Allen Ginsberg [Portland, OR] to Nicanor Parra [Santiago, Chile] August 20, 1965

Dear Nicanor dear:

I got your letter from Santiago July 9 and am now up in Northwest with Gary Snyder an old friend poet who’s been living in Japan studying Zen Jap tongue and Chinese for last 8 years. We’re camping with sleeping bags in forests and beaches and preparing to climb snowy glacier mountains for a month. Then back to San Francisco and October 15-16 I take part in anti-Vietnam war demonstration and maybe end up in jail or maybe not for a month or so. Well I’ll see. Happy to hear from you, I had some very mad adventures since I left Cuba, I even spent a few evenings till 4 AM with Alessandro Jodorowsky in Cupola Cafe in Paris. But anyway to begin where we left off.

8:30 AM after the party at the Havana-Riviera where I last saw you in your pajamas giggling I woke up with knock on my door and 3 miliciano entered and scared me. I thought they were going to steal my notebooks, they woke me up in the middle of hangover sleep I’d only been in bed 2 hours. Told me pack my bags the immigration chief wanted to talk to me, and wouldn’t let me make phone call, took me down to office in old Havana to a Mr. Verona head of immigration who told me they were putting me on first plane out. I asked him if he’d notified Casa^* or Haydee and he said no, they had appointment with Haydee that afternoon and she would agree after she heard their reasons. What reasons? “Breaking the laws of Cuba.” “But which laws?” “You’ll have to ask yourself that,” he answered. As we drove to airport I explained I was simpatico with revolution and embarrassed both for self and for them and also explained that my month was up, the rest of, most of, the delegates were leaving that weekend anyway, wouldn’t it be more diplomatic and save everyone entanglement if they left me to leave normally with the rest for Prague, and why act hastily without notifying Casa? “We have to do things fast in a revolution.”

When I landed in Prague, I wrote Maria-Rosa long letter and mailed it at airport explaining what happened and asked for advice and said I won’t talk to reporters etc. and would keep quiet so’s not to embarrass her or Casa or Cuba but thought ultimately I’d have to tell friends. It would get out and look silly of Cuban bureaucracy, so perhaps best ask Haydee to invite me back, at least formally to erase the comic [expulsion] and so have been in contact with her and Ballagas ever since. Saw [friends] in Prague and later in London and they opined the police were using me to get at the Casa. Meanwhile I hear there’s been increased wipe-out of fairies in university and finally this month Manuel Ballagas wrote that Castro at university had spoken badly of El Puente and now El Puente is dissolved and he’s depressed. I certainly didn’t know what I was getting into consciously but I seem to have been reacting with antennae to a shit situation that everyone was being discreet about. I doubt if things would not have come to a head without my bungling, I mean it would probably have ended the same way if I weren’t there, the hostility and conniving was in the works all along, that was what I was sensing and yelling about.

Well anyway in Prague I found I had royalties for a new book, and back money due me for foreign Lit. mag and 2 years back royalties for stage performances of my poesy in Viola poetry cafe, enough to live well for a month and pay for 3 days intourist and train fare return to Moscow via Warsaw. Met a lot of young kids, heard all the gossip conducted myself discreetly, sang mantras all over the streets and literary offices, gave a poetry reading and answered questions for audience of 500 students at Charles University. They let me loose, I talked freely, the walls of the State didn’t fall, everybody was happy, sex relations with anyone male or female is legal over age of 18 (in Poland all [sex] over age 15 is legal) and I left for Moscow. See, when I came I explained to Writers Union friends what had happened in Cuba to forewarn them so they wouldn’t get into trouble over me, I also tried to be as little abrasive as possible and confined my criticism to ideological doubletalk instead of saying directly what I thought in my own terms. So that worked out fine and I went off in a train to Moscow. Spent the first few days with Rominova and Luria and little girl interpreter and got 2 weeks invitation, saw Akaionov and Yevtushenko night after night and briefly one day with Voznesensky and visited Achmedulina in country and his Buba and Aliguer who remembered and asked after you. I had hotel transferred to Bucharest below Moskovskya bridge and passed thru Red Square every morning and evening and wrote poems in snow by the wall and stood there at midnight watching the guards and yelling Slavic lovers in GUM [largest department store in the world] doorway, fast 4 days train to Leningrad Hermitage, saw my old cousins in Moscow (“It wasn’t Stalin’s fault, it was Beria, Stalin didn’t see, and Beria was in the pay of Scotland Yard” explained my uncle – and K. Simonov commented “Yr uncle is a very naive man”). Yevtushenko was godly reciting drunk one nite in composer’s house after midnight profiled golden against wall his neck cords straining with power-speech, but at first meeting very funny, “Allen I have your books you gran poeta nosotros respectamos mucho, consego hay mucho escandalo sobre su nombre, marihuaniste, pederaste, perro yo conosco no es verdad.” “Well, er – pero is verdad pero yo voy explicar” so I spent 15 min. trying to elucidate scientifically the difference between effects of alcohol marijuana heroin ether laughing gas lysergic acid mescaline yage etc. His gaze wandered, he had a headache, popped a codeine pill in his mouth, and finally said, “Allen I respect you very much as poet but this conversation demeans you. It is your personal affair. Please, there are two subjects do not discuss with me: homosexuality and narcotics.” Despite all this comedy I saw a lot of him while I was there and he was very open and simpatico with me and took me out a lot evenings and his wife and I were all drunk in the Georgian restaurant and he came to train to see me off the last day with Aksionov – another weird scene, as that very last day I’d succeeded in contacting [Alexander] Yessenin-Volpin and spent all day with him at his house talking philosophy of law, relations of individual and state. He’s working on big project to define socialist legality inasmuch as they put him in bughouse for complaining about police treatment. His sanity certification depended on him signing statement that police had not abused him at one point. He has fine sentimental sense of humor and human mind – in fact because of his position as sort of writers-union-rejectee he has more recognizably real sense of social humor and reality than anyone else – at least by my heart’s standards – very reassuring to see a completely natural mind working on basic emotional reactions rather than thru the medium of what’s socially acceptable for the season. So there was Yessenin-Volpin the comic pariah at night by the train door and up rushes fur-collared heroes Yevtushenko and tipsy manly Aksionov and they stumble on each other and meet socially for the first time as I waved goodbye from iron door as the train pulled out for Warsaw. I’d not had a chance to meet much younger people or even give a reading there, toward the end they let me meet a group of Univ. Satiric Club theater youths, and there were a few formal conferences with select professors and editors at Writer’s Union and Dangulov’s staff at Foreign Literature Institute and Foreign Literary Club but no opening for big poesy reading like kindly Prague. So I sang mantras to anyone who’d listen and Romanova listened and all the girls at Writer’s Union, in taxicabs.

Quiet month in Warsaw, I stayed alone mostly or drank with Irridensky a young rimbaud-ish marlon brando writer at Writer’s Union and long afternoons with editor of Jazz magazine who’d printed my poems, a Jewish good man who’d been in Warsaw Ghetto, escaped, and covered rest of war as journalist with Russian Army and stood across river from Warsaw at end and saw the city destroyed by Germans and nationalist underground killed off; apparently Stalin didn’t want to move his army across river to help them because he didn’t want competition in postwar control of Poland. Then a week in Krakow which hath a beauteous cathedral with giant polychrome altarpiece by medieval woodcarver genius Wit Stoltz, and car ride to Auschwitz with some boy scout leaders who were trying to pick up schoolboys hanging around the barbed wire gazing at tourists.

Then by train thru Poland to Prague again April 30, and called up friends to walk with on next day May Day parade. Students heard I was back, and this year on May 1 afternoon they were allowed to hold Majales (Student May Festival) for the first time in 20 years – last few years students had battled cops with dogs and fire hoses, so this year Novotny President had stepped forth and reinstated the old medieval students fiesta. They have parade to park and elect a May Queen and May King, and the Polytechnic School asked me if I’d be their candidate for May King – each school proposes one – so I asked around if it was nonpolitical and safe and writer friends said it was OK so I waited in my hotel after marching in morning May Day parade past the bandstand on Wenceslas Street with the Chairman of the Ideological Committee and the Minister of Education and economics and shoes all waving down on the crowd – and a gang of polytechnical students dressed in 1890s costumes and girls in ancient hoopskirts came up to hotel near RR station to get me with a gold cardboard crown and scepter and sat me up on creaky throne on a truck and took me off with wine to the Polytechnic school where there were hundreds of students and a jazz band crowded in the courtyard and I was requested to make speech – which was short “I want to be the first naked King” – and we set out in procession thru the backstreets of Prague to the main avenues downtown. By the time we’d gone half-a-mile we had a crowd of several thousand trailing behind us singing and shouting long live Majales; stopping every ten minutes for traffic and more wine and so I had my cymbals and sang every time they put the bullhorn loudspeaker to my mouth for a speech – mostly sang a mantra Om Sri Maitreya – Hail Mr. Future Buddha – a mixed hindu-buddhist formula for saluting the beauty that is to be. By this time there were more and more people and by the time we moved into the old square in old town Staremeskaya Nameske where Kafka used to live there were floods of people crowding the huge plaza maybe 15,000 souls and I had to make another speech “I dedicate the glory of my crown to the beautiful bureaucrat Franz Kafka who was born in the building around the corner here.” (Kafka was published finally in Prague in ’61) and the procession moved on past the House of the Golden Carp where he wrote The Trial, which I pointed out to the crowd and got drunker on beer and sang more and louder, finally we crossed the bridge over the Vltava River people lining the bridge and the huge dragon-masses of cityfolk following before and after our trucks and Dixieland jazz playing ahead and citizens sitting on the cliff ahead watching it all with their children – everybody in Prague who could walk came out spontaneously. When we got to the park of Culture and Rest there were over 100,000 people and half a dozen rock-and-roll bands and everybody happy and amazed. They’d only expected 10 or 15 thousand out that afternoon. So finally at 3 PM the medical school candidate wrapped in bandages got up and made his speech in Latin and the law school candidate in kings robes got up and made a long sexy speech about fornication as his campaign speech, I got up and sang Om Sri Maitreya for 4 minutes and sat down, and finally was elected May King by the strange masses. So realized it was a politically touchy day and behaved myself, wandered around soberer than any one else with a gang of Polytechnic students. Meanwhile in this Garden of Culture and Eden the Chairman of the Ideological Committee and Minister of Education were wandering around complaining. I had slipped off to be alone a few hours and listen to music, I later learned they were looking for me; that night we all reassembled on the podium to elect a May Queen, I was sitting in my throne looking out at the crowds and floodlights and opened my notebook and wrote a poem and dwelled in my Self for a yogic fifteen minutes. Meanwhile the bureaucrats had given an order to the Student Festival committee to depose me, I didn’t know that, suddenly 10 brown shirted Student Police lined up in front of me and the master of ceremonies spoke a few sentences into loudspeaker saying I was deposed to be instead Prime Minister and a Czech student would be put in King’s place, and the police lifted me up off my chair and put me on the side with the May Queen judge and a drunken Czech student who didn’t know what was happening was put on the throne where he sat for an hour confused and embarrassed. But the crowd thought it was just another student prank and didn’t hear or know the difference everybody so drunk anyway the gesture was too late and small to be understood and May Queen was elected but I didn’t get a chance to marry and sleep with her as was tradition for the night. In fact I was supposed to have the run of Prague and do anything I wanted and fuck anybody and get drunk everywhere as King, but instead I went to the Polytechnic dormitories with 50 students and we sat up all night singing and talking – along with a couple of business-suited middle-aged fellows who brought some Scotch and a tape recorder. Said they were trading officials but I supposed they were agents, perhaps I’m paranoid. But anyway we made them welcome. Meanwhile I figured I’d better leave in a few days so at Writer’s Union next day made inquiries bout whether I had money in Hungary, next stop maybe, and waited for telegram answer, and wandered around Prague making movies with filmmakers and singing Hari Krishna and making tape recorded interview on consciousness evolution and sex logic and space age feelings for student magazines and had some secret nighttime orgies here and there and went to rock and roll concerts and wrote poems – and suddenly lost my notebook, or suddenly it disappeared from my pocket. But anyway there wasn’t much in it, it was sketchy and vague, names of people disguised, a number of dreams and six poems including the one I’d wrote under klieg lights and some political gossip (“All the capitalist lies about communism are true and vice versa”) and descriptions of orgy scenes with a few students and an account of masturbating in my room at the Hotel Ambassador kneeling on the bathroom floor with a broomstick up my ass – things I wouldn’t necessarily want anyone to read and for that reason have never published my journals so as to keep them raw and subjectively real – but nothing illegal and nothing I wouldn’t be happy to have read in Heaven, or by Man – embarrassing to a police ear or a politician’s – fortunately not detailed like in Cuba or Russia as I was enjoying myself too much to write anything but concentrated Poesy. That nite I went to Viola and met the two business suits who gave me vodka till I was drunk and went out at midnight singing Hari Om Namo Shiva on Narodni Street. Police car picked me up asking for identification – which I didn’t have since the hotel had my passport for registration. I explained at station I was May King Tourist Poet and they let me go I really wasn’t so drunk just happy. Next nite however, since I saw I was followed around all day by bald plainclothesmen, I stayed sober visiting the Viola, and left with a young couple to go to all night post office to mail postcards to you or someone and as we turned midnight corner on lonely street a man came up from around corner, hesitated, saw me and suddenly rushed forward screaming bouzerant (maricon [fairy]) and knocked me down, hit me on the mouth, my glasses fell off, I scrambled up and grabbed them and started running down the street, the couple I was with tried to hold him, he chased me and had me down on the ground again in front of the post office and a police car full of captains pulled up immediately and I found myself on the ground with 4 police rubber clubs lifted over my head, so I said OM and stayed quiet, they pulled me into police car and we spent all nite in police station telling the story, the couple I was with said what happened accurately, the kafkian stranger said we’d been exposing ourselves on the street and when he passed we attacked him. Finally I asked to call lawyer or U.S. consulate and they let me go and said it was all over, nothing more would be heard of it, I was free. Well I reported all that in to Writer’s Union and Foreign Literature mag. friends and decided I’d better leave town, tarrying foolishly for Hungarian telegrams, still, and next day I was followed again and in evening in remote cafe with student friends on outskirts of town was picked up by plainclothesmen: “We’ve found your notebook, if you’ll come to lost and found with us and identify it we’ll return it to you and you’ll be back here in half an hour.” So I went to Convictskaya Street Police and identified and signed paper for it and soon as I signed the detective’s face froze and he spoke, “On sketchy examination we suspect that this book contains illegal writings so we are holding it for the public prosecutor.” Next morning at breakfast downtown I was picked up with student friend I knew slightly who volunteered to stay with me that day make sure I didn’t have troubles and taken to Convictskaya Street again, same plainclothesmen, brought upstairs to office with 5 pudgy-faced eyeglassed bureaucrats around polished table: “Mr. Ginsberg we immigration chiefs have received many complaints from parents scientists and educators about your sexual theories having a bad effect on our youth, corrupting the young, so we are terminating your visa.” They said the notebook would be returned by mail, maybe. I explained that I was waiting for Hungarian telegram, and if that didn’t work out had plane ticket to London so could leave on my own the next day, and it would be more diplomatic and spare them the embarrassment of exiling the May King if they left it to me to go voluntarily. I certainly didn’t want to get kicked out of ANOTHER socialist country. And it might be difficult to explain to the students etc. Deaf ears, incompetent bureaucracy again. So was taken out to hotel and sat in my room with detective all afternoon and not allowed phone call to Writer’s Union or U.S. Embassy or friends and put secretly on plane for London that afternoon and pretty girl I knew who was receiving LSD thereby at state mental hospital met me at hotel door wanted to speak with me but cop stepped in between us. At airport the eyeglass bureaucrat said humorously “Is there any last message you want to deliver to the young lady who met you at the door of your hotel?” Also the last I saw of my student guard from breakfast, he was being pushed around a little and asked for identity papers by the police on Convictskaya Street as I was being led upstairs in elevator. So I flew off to England on plane, and kept my mouth shut again. I didn’t want to make a stink or get anybody I knew connected with me in scandal there, so was discreet from May 7 on when I flew in air to England and also wrote a nice poem Kral Majales, I’ll send you in a month when printed – big paranoid hymn about being May King sleeping with laughing teenagers – and landed in England and found Bob Dylan (folk singer, you remember, I had his record in Havana?) was there spent days with him watching him besieged by a generation of longhaired English ban-the-bomb girls and boys in sheepskin coats with knapsacks – and in his Savoy hotel spent a drunken night talking about pot and William Blake with the Beatles, gave a few small readings in London Liverpool Newcastle Cambridge and met my NY girlfriend there, made more film and had a birthday party after reading at Institute Contemporary Arts, took off all my clothes at 39^th birthday party drunk singing and dancing naked, the Beatles came at midnight and got scared and ran away laughing over their reputations, then Voznesensky came to town and we met again – we’d seen each other another night in Warsaw – and Corso and Ferlinghetti came over from Paris so we hired Albert Hall and filled it with 6,000 hairy youths and bald middle-aged men of letters, Indira Gandhi and Voznesensky sitting at my side holding hands, 17 poets English German Dutch all read, Voznesensky shy to read because Daily Worker wrote it up as anticapitalist antiwar demonstration and perhaps too political for his visit, Neruda said he’d come read but didn’t, went to some official university scheduled for him alas instead, big funny night all the poets filled with wine, a lot of bad poetry and some good, but everybody happy and England waked poetically a little. A few nights later Ferlinghetti, Corso and I read at Architectural Assn. together and Fernandez and Voznesensky and another Georgian poet came, I read from Kaddish and Gregory read Bomb poem and last Voznesensky got up and read like a lion from his chest, poem dedicated to all artists of all countries who gave life and blood for poesy, poem imitating sound of Moscow bells in Kremlin towers, he read better than anyone and was happy and came up and kissed me after and stuck his tongue in my mouth like a Russian should in Dostoyevsky, we said goodbye, then I flew to Paris but had no money left I’d taken no money for Albert Hall or other readings so had to walk street all night with Corso first night and finally slept a week upstairs in Librarie Mistral bookstore room with customers sitting on bed reading Mao Tze Tung at 10 AM when I woke, and flew back to NY on still-valid Cuban ticket, arrived in NY and as I entered customs was stopped by U.S. guards and taken into room and searched, they collected the lint from my pockets looking for marijuana. I was scared, I’d stayed with Tom Maschler a few weeks in London and he’d given me his old clothes and I didn’t know what he’d ever had in his pockets, but they found nothing tho they stripped me down to my underwear. I saw their letter of orders they negligently left on the desk face upwards “Allen Ginsberg (reactivated) and Peter Orlovsky (continued) – These persons are reported to be engaged in smuggling narcotics. . .” and meanwhile back in England on May 18 I heard rumors and got phone calls from journalists and found that the Czech Youth Newspaper had big article attacking me as dope fiend homosexual monster who’d abused Prague hospitality, so they didn’t have enough sense to shut up about their own idiocy. They didn’t report any accusations I hadn’t already said myself publicly in my own way, I never made a secret of the fact that I smoke pot and fuck any youth that’ll stand still for it, orgies etc., that’s exactly the reason they elected me May King in the first place – aside from Mantras and Poesy – the journalese rhetoric like in an old creaky movie – and they published a drawing and a few selected pieces of dirty writing from my notebook – properly censored so as not to be too offensive – suppressed the fact that I’d been elected May King while they were at it. Anyway the police there still have my notebook and some poems I didn’t copy out – fortunately they can’t destroy it or they destroy their own evidence so it’s safe – probably in fact copies of it are being passed around and read by amused littérateurs in the Party, it’ll find its way down to the students in time even and back to me in 1972 in Outer Mongolia from the hands of a lamaist monk who practices ancient tantric sex yoga or Neruda will find it in his Ambassador hotel room drawer next time he visits Prague.

So back in NY after I got thru Kafkian customs search I came home, dope-fiends had visited and robbed Peter Orlovsky’s Indian harmonium and my last typewriter and then we came out to San Francisco to a Berkeley University poesy conference with Creeley and Olson and Gary Snyder and more raving barefoot apocalyptic teenagers. This country slowly revealing its total madness also, I wound up with the Berkeley student sit-in demonstrators singing mantras thru microphone to them in front of courthouse where they were going to be tried by judges. I’m supposed to take part October 16 in more teach-in protests, meanwhile with Guggenheim money award I bought Volkswagen transistorized camper miniature bus-trailer that rides 65 mph and lasts 10 years or more with bed and icebox and writing desk and radio and tiny closets inside and now riding thru redwood forests and reading maps and visiting Snyder’s northwest youth country to climb maybe Mt. Olympus before he goes back to Zen monastic studies this fall. We get up in morning with his girlfriend and read a chapter of the 100,000 Songs of Mila-Repa (Tibetan 12th Century saint poet all about illusion and dream stuff of universe) (and flying thru the air) – stopped over in friend’s household with children and cats and typewriter, everybody now asleep but me it’s midnight past, so I shut up with abrazos and saludos and dosvedanyas and laegitos, feliz and fatiguado, adios por uns momentito Shri Shivati Comrade Comanchero Sir Zeus Nicanor, Senor.

Love 
Allen