Later, with hallucinogens, approximation of same “events” of consciousness, sometimes absolutely ecstatic and sometimes absolutely frightening. Complete literal dissolution of Self seemed to lead to immediate physical death. Never stabilized a continuously enlarged or widened area of consciousness.

That’s what I meant when I asked if you knew any “scientific step of consciousness.”

What happened to you with Blake? Any further significance to the sensation that nearly made you faint? Any hint of alternative to “the world of politics entailing lifeless organization... and... diminution of individual sensibility ...”?

“Act or Perish!” I’ve tried as poet 6 years to catalyze in others the sensation Blake woke. Meanwhile assembling long anti-bomb-politics poetry—which leads maybe action but not to awareness and depth consciousnesses.

But now you say “Imminent nuclear annihilation... this is the priority... the nuclear technology is faulty... Rockets hair trigger ... problem in elementary mathematical statistics: nuclear war is a matter of statistical near certainty ...”

I thought a week, hesitating to burden you with my individual sensibility and ambivalences. No time, no time. You’re blowing Gabriel clarion, it wakes individual hopes. Everybody’s entranced with death wish: Coffeehouse westernized Indians for instance: “What difference, does the universe really need Man?.... Who’ll care when it’s over?” or “I’d rather die a goofy disorganized human me than be compelled to organize against organization.” I feel that also natural, the bomb-doom and dissolution of my separate Ginsberg consciousness. I loathe to get involved in even friendly anti-bomb organizations. Even you gather power, by frightening or compelling (act or perish) individuals into accepting your evaluation reality and “statistical near certainty.”

Vague suspicions... I don’t want to become a monster ego gathering organization power by scaring people about death,.... introducing another factor into the mass of statistics, namely my own hysteria and ego scream contributing to the high tension that makes the military jittery

Laughing at death, laughing at bombs better reduce tension. Would Blake say that Tiger be scared by bomb? Yet your letter made me think that doom sounded serious.

Einstein and Buddha say that “all conceptions” of the universe are “arbitrary,” i.e. conceptions of a Conceiver, it doesn’t matter except to Man. To Be or Not to Be, is the question. You say, To Be? Why? This question is central, is the cause of the whole Apocalypse. Can anyone answer, except by acting, to blow it up, or stop it from being blowed up?

I mean the cancer at the heart of history right now is, disillusion with this life in space. That’s why I wonder if there is any deeper answer than “Priority.” What does Blake say to you?

All I know is, I’ve lived in the midst of apparent worldly events and apparent transcendental insights, and it all adds up to I don’t know what. I hardly trust any appearance anymore, statistical or intuitive. I’d rather drift and see.

How exact is your statement of statistical probability? Has comprehensive survey of bomb networks been possible to make, sufficient for anyone to project a date of “probable” occurrence of network error?

Can you boil down your awareness of danger into a verbal formula (not a slogan) of several sentences factual data and conclusion that can be plastered on walls everywhere, memorized and passed from mouth to ear. This might penetrate public consciousness in U.S. and Russia.

That is, if there is statistical near certainty that machine will explode, can you PROVE it SUCCINCTLY enough in public for basic facts to move thru mass media?

If you can’t do this, can you formulate a succinct request to governments that they provide you (or Pugwash) with enough data on bomb networks to make a specific projection of likely date and probably error that would precipitate holocaust?

The urgent request itself, even unanswered, would formulate the probability problem, and government equivocation of same, in public awareness.

I enclose some money—please have sent me any printed documents that back your assertion of probability. The assertion is powerful, coming from you, but I would like more basis to judge.

I hope you put your experience of Blake on verbal record in more detail, it may be helpful.

Koan of student off cliff.

Love or teeth and counting the steps of the sun Kali worship in Bengal next week.

 

 

Allen Ginsberg [Calcutta, India] to Robert Creeley [Vancouver, Canada] November 3, 1962.

 

Dear Robert:

 

All last months I’ve been hanging around the burning ghats watching corpses burn—empty—meat dolls—and reading religious books (Ramakrishna’s conversations especially, great book, 1000 pages mystic gossip with disciples 1880-1886, Calcutta excursions and people of those days, technical discussions of Hindu traditions and doctrines, strange scenes in which Ramakrishna suddenly goes off into Samadhi and comes out babbling to Krishna or Kali—photographs of him in that state even) and visiting saddhus (wandering holymen) and swamis (disciples of disciples of Ramakrishna) and Avatars of Kali (one lady Anandamayee) (big black haired woman whom Nehru visits supposed to be great bhakti (faith) saint)—long discussions with octogenarian healthy yogis. Best thing though, visiting burning ghats Tuesday evenings, all the saddhus and their householder visitor friends sit around in circles near the pyres and prepare little altars of flowers, incense and prasad (candy offered to Gods then distributed) and a little 3 inch fire, and they pass around big red clay pipes full of ganja and all get high with corpse smoke rolling round their heads. I sit with them and turn on and walk around the fires and look at ivory-yellow pudding of brains blackening in flame, skulls with flesh burning away leaving teeth gleam like movie horrors and eye sockets—detached feet swollen and toes spread in the heat and fat dripping down ankle pushed into center coals by bamboo pole attendants—nothing but a “pillow” I mean like burning a pillow —Ramakrishna’s remark. Then last week went up to village Tarapith (goddess Tara—pith means place of pilgrimage of which there are 54 in India, spots where breast cunt teeth hair eyes or other parts of body of Shiva’s first wife fell —big complicated legend the gist of which, she died and he danced wild tandava destruction dance with her corpse on his shoulders and parts of her body fell all over India—her Yoni in specially holy place in Assam Chittagong.)—Anyway Tarapith is little sleepy village miles from roads, walk there thru woods and paddy fields crossing rivers—finally a settlement on riverbank with a few dozen grassroof mud houses and tea stalls and a small old temple and altars nearby to different gods, and lots of tombs crowded in saints graveyard next to temple—half naked or saffron robed saddhus come pilgrimage here or settle down a few months or years to do yoga in peace and quiet. Last century a famous saint Bama Kape—naked lushing pot smoking madman—renewed the millennial holiness of the spot—so saints come now to meditate on his image, marble statue of fat man with fox and snake at his side, pink flesh colored marble. Anyway, the main thing everybody does all day here is smoke ganja, everybody, that’s all I did 4 days straight morn till nite, sitting around in huts and tomb-cells with saddhus, singing Baul religious songs and passing the pipe—just like Mill Valley writ large and 1000 years old tradition. These saddhus, I mean the saddhu network is nothing but a classical teahead network, I shoulda known it all along. That’s the whole basis of Indian mysticism. Advanced yoga or mystic possession rules out tea, sex, meat, travel, etc. but the massive preliminary conditioning, the general scene is nothing but a lot of perfected lifelong homeless hepcats wandering from holy place to holy place with their red ganja pipes and meeting other wanderers and sitting down with them to turn on, and exchange hobo information and breathing exercise techniques and sing to each other, “the sea has overflown with the milk of worms... the fish of water have given birth to the young ones upon the tree and while the dog was looking at it the cat took them away... an elephant is tied to the foot of an ant ... this is the primal teaching, says wise Kabir” etc. “The completely barren one has given birth and the child wants milk of the dove... by the kick of the mosquito the mountain is broken and the ant goes on laughing... the pond cuts the workman... The skillful man who can wreathe the peak of sumeru with a thread and snare elephant in spiderweb becomes eligible for secret love, etc.” Well I leave here and go visit another place Navadip (where saint named Chaitanya or universal bliss comes from—big saddhus convention there next week.) [ ... ]

Love,

 

Allen

India gets better and better.

[Although he was in India, Ginsberg was not isolated from issues back home. His friends kept him informed, and he was always quick to express his opinion and lend support. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Calcutta, India] to the Harvard Crimson [Cambridge, MA] December 5, 1962

 

To the readers of the Crimson:

 

I have seen a statement by Harvard officials on LSD and other drugs, and offer a few comments based on about thirty experiences (with LSD-25, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote and banisteriopsis caapi) spaced out over the last decade. Circumstances of ingestion varied from solitary trial to controlled academic setting at Stanford University and Harvard to watchful supervision by native curanderos in the Peruvian Amazon.

The statement is marred by faulty terminology: to label the above substances “mind-distorting drugs” is to make a mistake which confuses thinking. It’s an inaccurate epithet; it’s not precise language at all. More accurate to write “mind expanding” or “consciousness-widening” drugs in conformity with the experiences by almost all who have tried them. There’s sufficient mass of data published and unpublished to bear this out.

Wiser still to adopt neutral terminology “consciousness altering drugs.” The phrase “mind-distorting” pushes forward an arbitrary evaluation. It’s unnecessarily prejudicial.

The Harvard statement should be amended to exclude this impropriety of phraseology. The circumstances under which these drugs are taken inevitably affect the subjective experience. Unfortunately the formal warning against “mind distorting drugs” is now part of the setting in Cambridge. The echo of this official Sound will cause all sorts of nervous crises, not the drugs.

Good intentions abound; an alteration of only the direction of official concern is in order. It would make sense for Harvard to provide the situation where those interested in the effects of the consciousness altering drugs may have the experience in a secure and friendly atmosphere.

One concludes that although many circumstances such as final examinations, Ph.D. theses, love affairs or the reading of poetry “may result in serious hazards to the mental health and stability even of apparently normal persons” it will not be found necessary to warn Harvard men off limits in these areas.

With good cheer to all,

 

Allen Ginsberg

[Frequently Ginsberg’s letters from his trips contained detailed travel writing, such as this one to his old friend, Lucien Carr.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Benares, India] to Lucien and Francesca Carr [New York, NY] ca. January 15, 1963

 

Dear Lucien and Cessa:

 

Moved here to Benares a month ago, found a fine old room with black wood beams in ceiling, 9 wood-slat French doors and balcony surrounding—2 flights up—overlooking market one side and steps of Dasaswamedh (“10-horse-sacrifice-by-Vishnu”) Ghat, can see Ganges flowing by from balcony, little 3 story temple-peaks across street, constant noisy street all day, vegetable-basket women squatting on curb along the road, lines of leprous beggars with aluminum bowls set out before them, monkeys jumping in room to steal bananas, cows hanging around on street making sneak attacks at vegetable-greens and the old ladies beating them off every 2 minutes with a stick, like a great Breughel play, same scene every day, I recognize which cows steal the smartest by now even. Rent $9 a month—pandits (brahmin priest caste with little string looped around ear to belt) sitting watching bathers’ clothes on waterfront. It’s supposed to be holy ritual to bathe, so the pandits guard yr watch and put a little red third eye of incense-paste on your forehead when you come out to dry up. Too cold for me to dip much tho, have to wear wool sweater at nite, haven’t had a bath in weeks in fact. Holiest burning ghat in India (Manikarnika Ghat) is ten minute walk along waterfront which looks like Venice Grand Canal, Maharaja’s palaces and pilgrim rest houses with high stone walls against river towering over the bathing steps and little boats. I go there to get high with friendly Naga (naked) saddhu who got a little den for himself in basement cave under a Dharamsala (rest house for dying people who want to be burned here so they come here to die) overlooking the ghat—now been here long enough to settle back at desk. We took off for two weeks to Agra, spent Merry Xmas eve at Taj Mahal, slept inside for two nites (death anniversary of the lady buried there, the Moslem hereditary guardians of the Taj throw an Urdu singing-poetry party and throw the doors open for those two nites.) Taj Mahal an awesome surprise, the picture postcards don’t tell the vibrational story, it really is a sublime joint, like being inside a perfect symmetrical 3-D DeChirico canvas, you get that particular infinity sensation around it, like a time machine. Fortunately we lived in it for three days and never went out so got quite an exposure, plus as usual plenty ganja to sharpen the metaphysical thrill, and friendly atmosphere, most stupendous motel in universe I’m sure. Worth a trip to India just for that, as I’ve read people say, it’s true. Then we spent a few nites camping in abandoned Mogul city (carved red sandstone palaces and courts) some miles away (built by the grandpa of Shah Jahan who built the Taj. Shah Jahan incidentally had planned a black marble mirror image of the Taj set across the Yamuna river, both to be connected with a golden bridge, they finally put him in the boobyhatch before he went too far, actually locked him in a tower a few miles downriver where he could see the Taj Mahal). (He must have been a really great man, I can’t conceive how he ever got such a project, so fantastic in idea but so perfect when you look at it up close, completed, he must have laid down some strange con to get far as he did. Actually it was a sort of WPA project in its time and great economic benefit. But the idealism of the project is what’s so obviously striking, breathtaking because he got away with it) etc.—anyway first building I ever saw in the world I could call “glorious” without a doubt for the word. Then we spent a week in Lord Krishna’s homeplace, Brindiban, met some saints, it’s the center of Bhakti Yoga Cult in India, Bhakti meaning faith-love devotion yoga (as distinct from jnana yoga—knowledge—or karma yoga—works). They told me to practice Bhakti to Blake as he was obviously my GURU and stop looking for a human guru, best oriental wisdom I heard yet from any of the (many) holymen I’ve met. I was intrigued they’d come up with that as a path. Then came back here. I’m supposed to sit still and type a book of South American Journals I owe to a press in San Fran, I had promised it a year ago, but I’m too lethargic at desk now, probably get to it this month. My hair still growing, haven’t cut it for a year and it feels alright, looks right for the streets here. Will be flying back to Vancouver this June and then NY in fall so see you then. I hope with all that hair except it’s scary for the U.S., streets are so violent and juvenile delinquents etc., to say nothing of cops perhaps. Received friendly letter from Bill B. after year’s silence, sounds like he’s back on the planet—says he does nothing but write—and Gregory gossips that Bill stopt smoking pot; I’m intrigued. How’s Jack? We’re going to share a Penguin poetry book together. So everything here is fine, Peter says hello, he’s peeling a guava on the balcony watching the cows comedy. Happy New Year to all. My brother’s wife Connie enceinte again, they’ll be Brooks running all over Long Island when my hair turns gray.

Well, the world didn’t blow up, I guess [Bertrand] Russell miscalculated. But there now seems to have been a conscious decision by Kennedy Khrushchev also to compromise. I guess they got scared too finally, so Russell didn’t totally miscalculate, his urgencies did some good I imagine. All meaning I suppose that secretly the cold war is actually over except nobody been told yet and they still have to tell the Chinese. Incidentally the Indian War effort would really turn yr gut to see, creaky World War I style patriotic bands playing off key and chink restaurants scared.

Love

 

Allen

 

 

 

[Although Ginsberg’s poetry had been declared not obscene by the U.S. courts in 1957, censorship issues plagued him elsewhere.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Benares, India] to Arno Hormia and Pentti Kapari [Finland] April 29, 1963

 

Dear Mr. Arno Hormia and Mr. Pentti Kapari:

 

Forgive my addressing you directly although I do not know you; but I understand that you were kind enough to plan to publish translations of my poetry in Finnish—work done by Pentti Saarikoski and Mike Rossi and Anselm Hollo.

I received a letter from Mr. Hollo saying that you wrote to him to inform him that you would have to alter the book as planned to exclude certain poems (including Howl), for reasons of “obscenity”—tho the details are not clear.

I am familiar with the problem since the U.S. government and the San Francisco municipal government at one time tried to prohibit the circulation of these poems—that was almost ten years ago. Some reactionary bureaucrats, mostly Catholics, intruded into the literary field. We took them to court, the judge declared the poems to be NOT obscene, and we had no further trouble since then. The poems have been printed in various languages without difficulty, most countries being less neurotically Puritanical than the U.S.A.

Therefore I was surprised to hear that there was some hesitation (at this late date) in of all places the civilized land of Finland. I had always heard that Finnish people were less tied up in an adolescent approach to sex and literature than my own country America, which has been notorious for its prudery earlier in the century.

I am eager to learn what specific pressures you have upon you that makes you hesitate to print these poems which by now seem to me very mild and tame. Is it an external legal problem you are facing, or is it a question of your own internal taste? And what sort of legal problem specifically?

In any case you will understand that I do not wish, and cannot be expected to allow you, to publish a book of my writings in Finnish if the writings are censored or if the most important poem of the set, namely Howl, is to be excluded for reasons of censorship, particularly on the grounds of what they call “obscenity.” It is too old and tired and silly an issue to waste time on any more. If your country is so backward that it is impossible to see a representative selection of my poetry safely thru to the public, then I would prefer to wait another decade before seeing a book of mine in Finnish, if ever.

In other words DO NOT PUBLISH my book if you have to castrate it in the way that you propose. I am not blaming you, God knows you may have troubles of your own. It may not be your fault personally. Meanwhile you understand that I withdraw my poetry from your hands—under the circumstances that you have communicated to Mr. Hollo.

I should explain, in case you are not aware, that the basic method of my writing is to explore and communicate sections of my own consciousness, in other words to make a graph of all the movements of my mind in a particular space of time. To alter the graph, to exclude certain data therein, as “unpleasant” or “unacceptable” or “obscene” would be as dishonest as trying to alter or “doctor” industrial statistics. In addition I regard such tampering with the actual contents of my consciousness as a direct attempt to brainwash me and the reader. In addition I regard the accusation of “obscenity” as a filthy sort of personal insult. I don’t like it any more than you would if someone called the contents of your brains “obscene.” Actually it’s too stupid to consider, but I wanted to be sure you understood clearly.

I’ll send a copy of this letter to Mr. Hollo, and I leave it up to his discretion to make any further decisions, if the publishing situation in Finland becomes more reasonable in the future. He seems to know what he is doing, and was kind enough to offer to deal with the problem for me, since I am so far away and speak no Finnish. Whatever he decides I will back him up.

Thank you for your original good intentions and your present attention, and long live the human revolution!

Yours,

Whoever I may be, this time named

 

Allen Ginsberg

[Ginsberg had been reading about the new generation of Russian poets and was surprised to learn that the Communist Party bureaucrats didn’t believe the new poets were political enough. In recognition of his Russian kindred spirits, Allen wrote to Corso.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Benares, India] to Gregory Corso [Italy] May 5, 1963

 

Dear Gregory:

 

Well, listen, yeah, I’ll be back soon, waiting now to get tix, fly Japan and Canada and month in Frisco. So figure before Christmas anyways, but isn’t that a scream about Russia? I’ve been reading all I could get my hands on, Encounter, and Soviet New Times, Khrushchev March 8th speech. But Evergreen number 28, Voznesensky is a genius about hotels on the moon and 17 Voznesenskys now, that’s a really worthy futuristic poem with even some soft mechanical paranoia. Gregory, those Russian poets are probably our brothers and Voznesensky I bet a great young poet, that is judged from [Anselm] Hollo’s translations of Fire in Architectural Poem, moving on from one burning lot to another, and the fragments of Triangular Pear in Evergreen. So now we got more great souls, but this time, I think at least Voz [Voznesensky] really great word mouth, and I read somewhere in a Russian mag, Soviet Literature in answer to a questionnaire he says he writes spontaneously, and also his poesy a probe or exploration of his consciousness. Something is cooking. Just that one poem about New York hotels of the moon, and aluminum forests in one eye robots staring up at him from urinal. Unless it’s Hollo’s talent, and not Voznesensky’s genius. Ain’t that welcome, to have a whole nother world of poets in Russia? Some weird touches in Aksiev’s prose and Céline stupidity, in that guitarist-poet’s story about hopeless pants-sweating soldier in Encounter. I wrote to this Yolana Romanova lady of Writer’s Union and big novelist Simonov last week saying as fact that Yev [Yevtushenko] and Voz have converted me to Marxism, so they were good propagandists. Not the bad propagandists like we read in the mass media Time and Pravda. If these lovely young geniuses is Marxism I buy it, real exciting conspiracies in Moscow, if you follow. They making weird statements in Polish literary journals. Interviews just like our interviews, but they more sensible as bureau pistols hanging over their heads, yet they’ve said great things, like poesy will save man from technology. And explore consciousness, etc. Do read up on all that what you can find, it’s just like a big super-dooper Big Table Slavic scene, but they’ve got backs to wall.

Can you find Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, head of U.S. Communist party? She in New York City, cousin of Pete Martin, I met her once in restaurant and told her about metaphysical pot, and make her send privately or publicly, information to Moscow Writer’s Union and novelist Sholokov who said Yev was callow bad propagandist, that the young poets of U.S., meaning at least me, certainly LeRoi, for all his fuckupness, will have to love to swing on this as he met Yevtushenko. Hereby declare that Yev and Voz are their best propagandists ever, and made everyone sympathetic to communist Russia and catalyzed all sorts of new hope in despairing youth. Because actually the Podhoretzes of Russia are getting them on a bum rap in fact, accusing them of anti-Russian, or misinterpreting Russia creepily, when actually, from communist point of view, from their own Marxist point of view, the young poets were great 20th century diplomatists, which is not actually a lie. We should help them, and we maybe can, with comedy methods, announce we’re all Marxists, on account of their moon hotels.

Really, it’s all so vile. Podhoretzes with guns. Also E. G. Flynn should protest, in behalf of American Negroes, that their common people’s folk music, jazz, being attacked like that, more white shit, as Miles Davis saith, Khrushchev not making proper Marxist interpretation, hung on his own dreary hook, and LeRoi should contact his Cuban poets and make them ask Castro to intervene. Everybody now got to show their hand and be judged in the flower show. Curious how LeRoi will come up on this, because he can help them. I wrote him, care of Hettie, care of Wilentz and wrote Russia, and wrote all the Bengali and Hindi communist poets I knew. I got all excited in fact. If you got rhyme can you make up with him and we all everybody can throw some poetry at Russia? See, it needn’t be anti-American or anti-communist. Here is the scene where these artists are making communism come true and be a success like it’s supposed to be, historically. Like everybody waiting for. And, if in their spirit, Russia and communism grow into big modern spirituality and gentility, nobody can be unhappy over that, not even Jack, Jack’s mama. I think we should try help them, I mean serious. So not be big public nasty, anti-state statements. But by writing say to personal contacts, and explain to the afraid Russians that there’s nothing to be afraid of, gad, I’m glad I got that ticket to Moscow or will have it, except I figure to go there quiet like tourist, not to make big readings or publicity, but sneak around, see the poets, and the sights and explain Blake. Let’s go to Moscow, if they’ll let us, on New Year’s Eve, or Easter, yes, Easter in Moscow. Big symphonies and ballets and onion domes and handsome Russian poets and plenty girls, and we be gentle to everybody and have no official connections. And come on surprising, privacy angels again. From what I read there’s a whole base of young souls there, very free and sad like us. We see the future, too. As they’re a younger group than ourselves and roughly, I divine, they’re on same cosmic vibration. Actually, wouldn’t it be a gas if they were? Wouldn’t you be happy? The world becoming true again. There was always something missing. The other half of our mankind hid under Cold War aluminum wallpaper.

New development here. After 5 months in holy Benares passing the leper beggars lined up in my street one day last month, noticing one particularly hideous skeleton-like Buchenwald covered with brown loose feces and flies on huge yellow sores on hips and elbows, crouched in fetal position, naked in curve of urinal wall nearby, obviously dying, like several I’ve seen and given milk to, and they died, I saw their great-eyed bony corpses on street, days later. This one, I couldn’t stand seeing like that and cheerfully gave him some milk. Broke the ice. He too weak to take rupee I put in his hand. Dumb-mute, can’t talk, and yellow eyed pus couldn’t see, a brown shirt stuck to ulcerating shoulder and filthy shit and piss and mouth all old curry dribbles and one paw like a rabbit’s, withered and swollen, shiny skinned feet hung on end of stick-thin legs, literally that Buchenwald look, been there weeks, finally too weak to move, even if I gave him change, and dysentery and God knows what cancer and one swollen toe, leprous, and flies all over his eyes, and ass and maggots coming out of his right ear, all this literal photo not metaphor, couldn’t talk, but I heard him from my room, a high piercing wail-scream in quietness of street night, finally withered so he looked like another 10 or 20 hours left. Breathing heavy, gurgling. Next day we, Peter and I and an orphan boy, lives in that leper park where saddhus smoke ganja, nice looking healthy kid, his parents died there and he grew up there serving the beggars, we carried this man-corpse in his rags, to the Ganges and bathed him and got doctor to look, who said nothing but starvation was wrong, with its complications, so started feeding him milk and food and bought him a dollar mattress and hired boy to wash him in river every noon, Peter the nurse showed how, and put penicillin and afterward talcum on the open wounds and hydrogen peroxide in ears to sterilize and kill the maggots, bought him a sheet and pajamas and looked to him every day, under shade of big Bo tree in the park, branches over the ghat street where the beggars sit, so he slowly began stirring and writing in the dust, couldn’t talk, dude, that is milk, I bought him a notebook and pencil, he wrote in English first thing, “Sir I want to died because hearing anybody magi saying to me, he is thief Hardwar then some scrawls in Urdu and Hindi and couple letters Sanskrit, I want to go to my house where my family is, I want to Hardwar. I want my bed and clothes.” Hardwar being place, holy, upriver. One commits suicide there. So I hired the boy to feed and wash him, for 50 cents a day, a fortune, actually a laborer’s day’s wage, and got him new pajamas, white, he sat in, stupefied, shitting on the mattress, incontinent, smelly, but we undressed him every day and washed the shit off, and dried in heat on Ganges bank and finally I went away to go to Bodh Gaya two weeks ago and left money behind, Peter stayed and supervised. When I came back, he was a little stronger, and one day, in high squeaky pierced voice, spoke in English, his tongue’d been cut out during partition by Moslems, and he knifed all over crippled, but still so sick, still amazing to hear him talk. Finally, this week, sneaked him into hospital to get him off our hands, a nuisance, and he much better now and will live. One saintly Hindu postal clerk watching us one day on street, cleaning him, squatting down and got his family address and wrote letter. Tonight came by to say the family actually existed and answered saying the skeleton’s mother was crying alla time, missing him. He disappeared six months ago, they’re sending the brother down to Benares from Punjab 1000 miles away to get him. Fantastic, in that I wouldn’t’ve believed anyone in that condition could survive, much less the fortunate accident of our intervention succeeding and then the family appearing like in weird movie.

Meanwhile, I got all familiar with the beggar scene and been investigating around and visiting hospitals and corrupt beggars’ homes and even the mayor and health commissioner here, trying to set up help for the few really helpless street skeletons. Most beggars and lepers okay in that they can move and beg and make out. Lazily, not bad. But a couple a week are really in classic shit-rag death throes. A few nights ago, one just like junkie Iris Brody teeth and skeleton face and bones thin as my thumb, her legs and arms, but bright eyed, chattering and appealing to me in Hindi for help. Another today, I got some medicine for, been there a month, but last week lost all his flesh and down to bone, also dysentery. We get him in rickshaw tomorrow, I mean to hospital.

Anyway, regarding death, I keep seeing people dying in front of my eyes. I talk to them and give loot where I can or milk or food. See, my money is more than enough for that minimal 2 cents milk and oddly, just as I was worrying about loot, for payment, this one beggar’s care arrived. $100 gift from Nanda Pivano.⁴⁸ All the beggars together only cost $25. So it’s not money. If I stayed here I’d organize a Schweitzer brigade. Anyway, that’s my soap opera for the month. An orange robed zedanta saddhu connected with puritan Hindu group came up while we were bathing him and said, “Young beardy guy with evil nail-biting frau, you’re committing sin to intervene.” And so I said, “Yes, probably, I thought so, but I can’t help it. Pray for me.” Because obviously, that did cross my mind. The poor skeleton will get better and then you have to go all through the same horror later on anyway.

“Your sins are too big.” He’s still pacing around, staring at me, fascinated. I see him on the street. But it says in Bhagavad-Gita, don’t look to the fruits of action. So I don’t have to worry if it’s meritorious or de-meritorious, helping the skeleton. It’s not my business. I got no way of knowing. Only time I got emotional about it, except for a drag depression anxiety, followed me around for days as I got deeper involved. Realizing now I was hooked with the man in as much it was all up to me whether he lived or died, i.e., I wanted to get out of the situation, not be faced by thought of the skeleton lying under the tree in street, with a dwarf cow that hangs around him, which has crippled legs. It’s really a scene I didn’t want to face, but fortunately solved by getting him into the hospital. Tho worried what happens when I leave in a week. And now, like miracle, the family appears on horizon, like some kind of mysterious clockwork, the whole thing. Meanwhile, there’s this other man to take tomorrow, to hospital. India is a big mess. There’s money and beds and people enough just indifferently starved to death or rheumatic fever, t.b., waste away in front of the post office. Or milk shack, or lie there under the tree, there’s a city health office on the same block, with five men filling out forms about something else. Complete bureaucracy stasis. Like a parody. I still not sure how it all so fucked up, I mean why everybody’s so totally inefficient. People hanging around cigarette stall, like lawyers saying, “Oh, he can’t be starving, he’s probably got t.b.” So there’s nothing to do about it anyway, they think to themselves. Also, I’ve been discovering not to get mad and flip. Useless though enjoyable histrionics.

Okay, I go to bed,

Allen

[Robert Creeley arranged for Ginsberg to attend a poetry conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, in exchange for a round the world airplane ticket. On the way to the conference from India Allen took his first jet and stopped in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Japan. In Kyoto he stayed a few weeks with Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Kyoto, Japan] to Louis Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ] June 17, 1963

 

Dear Lou:

 

Traveling by jet plane kind of a gas, you do get in and out of centuries from airport hangars & glassy modern downtowns to jungle floating markets & 900 year old stone cities in a matter of minutes & hours instead of weeks & months. Like space cut-ups or collages, one minute paranoiac spy ridden Vietnam streets the same afternoon quiet Cambodian riversides. I spent a week in Vietnam talking with opium poets & U.S. directors & State Department spokesmen & Army public relations sergeants & most of all with newsmen & also the Buddhist priests. Horrible mess as you can read in the papers. Curious [thing about] the reporters is that they are all young & relatively eager there unlike most “hotspots” so this a rare instance if you follow the politics war there one can get a relatively straight account within the limits of assumed anticommunist slant & the euphemisms of ticklish situations (i.e. Diem government not referred to outright as Diem dictatorship, but as “Diem Government which has been called dictatorial” etc.) (i.e. phraseology picked to suggest idea rather than say it outright as is done with red dictatorships). Anyway I’m glad I saw what little I saw of that. Gave me nervous stomach after a week. Then spent a week in Angkor Wat ruins in Cambodia & now here in Kyoto with Snyder & his wife in neat little Jap house sitting typing on the floor. Big week of Zen meditation in the monastery, I’ve been going with Snyder & sitting 2 ½ hours immobile cross-legged the last 3 nights & learning proper belly breathing for that kind of sitting. Hard on the ankles but interesting subjective effects. I’ll be here a month & thence Vancouver. Japan amazing after all the other Asian & Arab countries—not much police state, everybody neat & keen stylish & motorcycles & transistors & cameras & civilized nobody starving in his shit in the street like India & everywhere else practically. Native Japanese quickness plus the fact they aren’t saddled with active participation in cold war so all their energy goes into self-improvement. Lucky they lost the war. Jap style living very lovely, houses with sliding walls & clean food & mat barefoot on floors leave shoes at door & sense of taste & cleanness in all the woodwork & carpentry & weird little careful gardens everywhere, and all the young people real chic like they stepped out of an Italian fashion magazine with girls Jackie Kennedy hair mops & the men hip downswept over forehead like Brando as Marc Anthony—just amazing to see all these Asians prosperous. Quitting now, 6:30 PM going out to sit early eve in temple.

Soon—Love,

 

Allen

 

 

 

[After leaving the Snyders in Kyoto, Ginsberg took an express train to Tokyo. En route he had another epiphany which led to the poem, “The Change.” He wrote about that to Kerouac from San Francisco. By that time he had decided not to return to India.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Jack Kerouac [Northport, NY] October 6, 1963

 

Dear Jack:

 

Kept thinking I should write you back fast huge love lovely belly flowers letter, received yours in Japan, I just got TOO MUCH to tell you. TOO TOO TOO much whoops where could I begin Japan or somewhere? India, Ganges I’m bathing all the time and praying for transcendentalist Blakes and visiting holymen and all they got to say is “Take Blake for your guru,” or “Your own heart is your guru,” or “O how wounded you and Peter are, Oh how wounded, Oh how wounded,” till finally I left when time was up and flew to Viet Nam and everybody killing everybody else hardhearted America paranoia and weeks in Cambodia ruins Angkor Wat and pot and Bangkok Chinese boys and finally peaceful Kyoto, sat in monastery with Gary and did belly breathing and that calmed my mind and then the sweetness of all those gurus sinking in to me and then Joanne and Gary both so nice to me both took me to bed even Gary made love to me and all of a sudden I dug Joanne since it was alright for me to feel what anyway I felt, I want a woman wife lady, I want I want, want life not death, wound up crying on train from Kyoto to Tokyo and wrote final poem: “On My Train Seat I Renounce My Power: So That I Do Live I Will Die” therefore accepting Christ see also, and no more mental universe arguments: I am that I am and what exactly am I? Why I’m me, and me is my feelings by gum and those feelings are located to be exact in my belly trembling when eyes say Yes and in my breast all along that’s my me NOT my head not Christ ideas not Buddha—Christ and Buddha are in my body not no where else. And everything else is arbitrary conceptions. So from now on I won’t take nothing but love and give same, in feelings, except—well I came back weeping to Vancouver and there was Olson Duncan Creeley Levertov all to teach together and I said, I can’t eliminate them from my universe or anyone even Norman Podhoretz they are all selfs too like me alas we been arguing and seeing each other like beatniks and poets and everything but crying self so I just cried and didn’t teach just went around feeling everybody up till we were all there together having a happy earth picnic with no ideas in head about put up poetry or put down poets NO MORE WARS all are immortal laugh and lie down no superior poets no inferior poets furthermore no more need ayahuascas or peyotes because already flowing from belly and breast is infinity when feeling’s open and that feels good not scary—all I saw in Blake 1948 finally came true, lasted weeks and weeks, lovely Jerusalem blisses, I even realized (finally) my mother died having seen and told me her last day the key is in the sunlight, but I didn’t realize what she meant and felt till I felt myself back home in my own body on earth and knew she had been there and knew it. So all’s well, I go get married and have little hairy losses someday—and I am not a hairy loss, I’m me, and me’s nameless, but certainly not a bad feeling OOK like hairy loss,⁴⁹ you put me under a spell for years, and Burroughs about killed me off with his cut ups. His cut ups fine since it cuts up the head but he wants to cut up his body feelings too, and that don’t feel good at all. Your hairy loss served to get me down off my high head too, but you coulda saved me faster by calling me tender heart, honey—everything’s fine we’re all going to be what? be what we is! ain’t that great. I’m too mental and hungup to explain right, but anyway Jack I’m telling you like you tell me, yup, everything is alright, in fact I can’t explain it anymore I just FEEL it and that’s better than explaining so next time we meet I’ll make you feel good. I’ll kiss you and pet you and read you little poemlets about ispy diddle and I’ll also kiss your mama and ask her forgiveness and ask her to love me and I done already prayed for your poppa and I go see my poppa and thank him for borning me and make him feel it’s all alright and I go back to human universe just as in prophecy of Dr. Sax (last chapters of which I read to class in Vancouver) THE SNAKE’S ALL TOOK CARE OF. And your letter full of tenderness so I won’t sermonize you anymore either, despite I do detect doubts in your mind whether it’s alright for you to have been born, well you go right over to your mother and REASSURE her that she did right giving life to you. And why right? Because god is feeling and it makes her feel bad you complaining alla time you didn’t want to be born. Wouldn’t you feel bad if your son told you he was mad at you for borning him. And wouldn’t you feel good if son came home and said, dad, we made it, I’m glad I’m alive you did right. Wouldn’t you feel better? and what else have we got but feelings, have we got some big ideas, or something else to be? besides our hearts? All the gurus in India say Abhya mudra⁵⁰ and so says Buddha and so I say to little English Kerouac, except we NOW are in the tents of god so let’s like lambs rejoice: and no more specters.

So now I’m here in SF going around asking everybody if I can kiss them. Pathetic isn’t it, asking everybody to love me? Which seeing I’m such a fucked up longhair goof naturally they melt and do, except it gets to be hard work. Nonetheless you look in those faces everywhere and what’s to be seen but same self all over been wounded and pissed on—and Lucien was here and we blessed each other anew—and Neal now. Well I’m in a big apartment with some quiet young Kansas poets I got backroom and Neal and his girl have another room (same Anne [Murphy] you saw in Northport) and he understands why it was too difficult there (in Northport)—and beginning I hope Monday we sit down and Neal actually write his blop again, anyway he quit job and Carolyn divorced him (I spent days with her) and I singing hours of calm hindoo mantras to him soften the air till he get back in his body from racetrack specters and unfeeling frenzy and we all be back together again o la tierra est la nostra. I come see you Xmas without hair if you so desire me or with hair if you so accept me, if you want calm weeks come here reunion NO LUSHING it destroy feeling in fact get off that lush. I no take drugs no more nothing but belly flowers. I sleep with girls I reborn I happy I sing harikrishna lords prayer ipsky diddle I weep Sebastian⁵¹ knew all we know nothing unless we do love. Now we go out save America from lovelessness. I reverse Howl, I write white Howl, no more death. O Walt [Whitman] Hello Jack!

I make movie of Kaddish with Robert Frank later you help me with dialogue?

I’ll write you soon again. Will you love me ever? Peter heading his footprints across Pakistan toward Persia and New York by Xmas.

We are all babies! Feels good. The word at last!!!

[Ginsberg had a large stack of unanswered mail on his desk, but he took time out to defend Philip Lamantia against Richard Howard’s negative review in Poetry.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Poetry Magazine [Chicago, IL] October 14, 1963

 

To Readers of Poetry:

 

“... and Ginsberg already have written the poems these spasms so relentlessly parrot...”⁵² Philip Lamantia and I share old friendship and similarity of sources—our insight into an American weir, its mechano hells (his words): our longing for breakthrough into the more natural universe of Self, all our true feelings: our experiments with alterations of consciousness catalyzed by drugs: our prayer, public communication, poetry. His interest in techniques of surreal composition notoriously antedates mine and surpasses my practice in a quality of untouched-ness, nervous scatting, street moment purity—his imagination zapping in all directions of vision at once in a cafeteria—prosodic hesitancies and speedballs—the impatience, petulance, unhesitant declaration, machine-gunning at mirrors nakedly—that make his line his mantric own.

Since I’m cited as stylistic authority I authoritatively declare Lamantia an American original, sooth-sayer even as Poe, genius in the language of Whitman, native companion and teacher to myself. “And for years I have been absorbed in contemplation of the golden roseate auricular gong-tongue emanating from his black and curly skull. Why Not.” Says Philip Whalen, and many poets his admirers Michael McClure and Robert Creeley others have spoken—thus I’ve composed this letter returning to Lamantia the last word:

“There is no agrarian program it is all economic war!

I make war! I declare this tribe, cool! this nation, spared!

this stupidity unlimited, put down! this slumbering beauty, waked up! this heap, fuckup, dead bitch—run down, put down, finished!

I liquidate by magic!”

 

Allen Ginsberg

[Orlovsky returned home from India overland via Persia, Turkey, and Eastern Europe. When he arrived in London, this letter awaited him.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Peter Orlovsky [London, England] November 1, 1963

 

Dear Peter:

 

Received cards from Yugoslavia and Istanbul—today November 1 maybe you in London already. I sent letter to Anselm Hollo and you at his address, enclosing poem I wrote in Japan—please look. If you have time stay a couple weeks in London look around it’s worth it. Blake in Tate Museum, British Museum, Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields, Simon Watson Taylor 33 Tregunter Road—at least he used to be there. Visit Stephen Spender in London maybe too—Encounter office. Also look up Dame Edith Sitwell c/o Sesame Club for Women and bring her this poem I sent you and Anselm. She be interested in our India and is a nice holy old lady.

I be in NY first weeks of December for sure—we probably arrive around the same time. I rush out and mail this. Neal’s OK.

Neal says “tell Peter how much I liked his last postcard well—as I sit in the kitchen on cold mornings looking at the grease in the frying pan that he once licked on a colder morning—in fact the first time we met stands out in mind—tell him we all love him.”

Love

 

Allen

 

I made picket sign for Madame Nhu here. I carried it in front of her hotel on Market St. 14 hours last week singing harikrishna mantra and Buddham Saranam Gochamil:

 

 

Man is naked without secrets Armed men lack this joy
How many person without Names?
What do we know of their suffering?
“Oh how wounded, how wounded” says the Guru
Thine own heart says the Swami
Within you says the Christ
Till his humanity awake says Blake
I am here saying seek mutual surrender tears
That there be no more Hell in Vietnam
That I not be in Hell here in the street.

 

 

That was on one side of the sign, on the other I painted 3 fish with one head at LaVigne’s using gold and silver paint on scales of fish and red white blue tails and wrote also:

 

 

War is Black Magic
Belly Flowers to North and South Vietnam
Name Hypnosis and Fear are the Enemy—Satan Go home!
I accept America and Red China to the Human Race
Madame Nhu and Mao Tse-tung are in the same boat of Meat.

 

Show to Anselm, I gonna write propaganda picket sign poems slogans like Mayakovsky, this was the first.

 

 

[By the beginning of the year, Ginsberg and Orlovsky had reunited in New York. They found an apartment together on the Lower East Side where Allen began a decade of heightened activism. Not only did he continue to write poetry, but he generously helped other people in their battles against the establishment. The government tried to shut down the avant-garde Living Theatre on trumped up charge of unpaid taxes.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Robert Morgenthau [New York, NY] January 30, 1964

 

Dear Mr. Morgenthau:

 

I am writing in behalf of Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre. I understand that the government has prepared a legal case against them. I have been away (in India) several years so have not followed the controversy. However I have been interested in the Living Theatre for a number of years, have given poetry readings there to raise money for the continuation of their work, and have contributed holograph manuscript of a poem Kaddish which was auctioned for their benefit for about 600 dollars. This was done at a time when I had very little money for my own use. I am saying this so that you will understand that I have a so to speak old time emotional/personal/artistic investment in their theater and their activities for many years in the center of the avant-garde artistic community in New York.

I understand that Julian has been proposed with 33 years in jail, if the government succeeds in its prosecution. The whole situation is so unthinkable that I certainly feel involved.

Difficult to know how to involve myself properly in a way that would do them any good, and at the same time not deny any ultimately legitimate grievances the government may (or may not) have.

The first thing I would like to know is, is the Government (which is to say the people and yourself, your staff etc.) aware of the cultural importance that the Living Theatre had, in its time, and of the present cultural importance of the Becks as theater dynamos and experimenters? And, do you and your staff look on their work with sympathy or antipathy?

I understand, from the violence of the language of the charges presented against them, that there is an element of cultural antipathy present, which must be dealt with, before any reasonable thinking on the problem can be done.

My request for information from you on this point is not irrelevant, since it is after all a matter of policy who to prosecute, how seriously to prosecute. And that policy would in any case be determined by the sympathies or antipathies of the government officials involved.

I understand you are an intellectual fellow and so take the liberty of asking you seriously for information and requesting reply.

Whatever actions I take in regard to this case in future will be determined by how the attitude of the government people feels when it is communicated. If I conclude that underneath the technical-tax-financial hang ups involved, that the basic problem is the city or federal government’s emotional antipathy to the work the Becks have been doing, or to their personalities, then my only conclusion can be that the case has definite social and political importance, and may be the beginning of a threat against many other avant-garde organizations in the city. In which case, despite my own aversion for hung-up hassles of this kind, the government may in the end have to put me in jail also, as well as a lot of other people in the artistic world in NY who may feel their artistic existence as citizens definitely threatened.

I am aware that from your point of view my attitude may seem alarmist and extreme, but I assure you that from my observations of the NY scene since returning from India, the government handling of the Living Theatre situation has already put a chill in the soul of several other organized groups, (magazines, movie writers, etc.) and already had a bad effect on that part of the avant-garde which has to deal with Government and public in an organized way such as Living Theatre tried. In other words the damage I speak of has already been done in a small way. If Beck actually goes to jail, there is no telling what kind of Pandora’s box the government will have opened in NY.

I have assignments or requests to write for various publications—Playboy, Esquire etc., as well as access to letter columns in NY Times or London Times, and I maintain correspondence with large magazines in India, Russia, France and England. It will be my duty to go all out and start screaming if I judge that the government policy decision ultimately amounts to political and/or cultural fuck up.

If you think I am misinformed or fucked up myself, please let me know. I’m not interested in fighting. Simply that the Becks are important cultural property and I want to know definitely if the people acting for the government are aware of it, sympathetic to the fact, and acting so, or if they are not aware, or feel that that awareness is a matter of indifference in the automatic cut and dried legal necessities involved. That’s really the crucial point involved, particularly for foreign readers observing the process of the case.

You may have noticed that in the Russian government persecutions of Pasternak, his girlfriend, and Yevtushenko etc. the poets, there was always also a legitimate legalistic point involved in the eyes of the authorities, who said publicly that it was not a political matter but a question of the rules, etc. From distance of perspective we here in U.S. could see that the “rules” were an excuse for bureaucratic action on the basis of emotional, cultural, political antipathies against the artists involved. I suspect that such appears to be the case in regard to the Becks, and that’s why I’m writing you so openly, to give you chance to consider this point, and give me the benefit of a clear statement on your part as to your own sympathies and that of your staff. I assure you that your own feelings are not irrelevant, as after all they are what makes you a man, and what after all, must finally determine your policy, your phraseology in dealing with the problem, your very tone of voice and the feelings which you communicate in person or by letter or private discussion or official conference, on this matter.

Thank you for your courtesy, I await your reply before taking any further action.

Yours,

 

Allen Ginsberg

[Due to Ginsberg’s national and even international celebrity, his participation was sought for a wide variety of causes. He tried to help wherever his name could be of use.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to the Wichita Beacon [Wichita, KS] April 16, 1964

To the Editor:

 

I understand, from several clippings from your newspaper that have been sent me, that local police have banned or threatened to take steps to ban the sale of poetry by me and several other writers—fellows from Wichita as well as San Francisco and other places.

Almost a decade ago there was a similar attempt to ban a book of mine in San Francisco, and my work was found to be NOT obscene by the courts. That settled that. Subsequently my writings have been included in anthologies, translated into a dozen languages, recited on television and movies, studied in English courses in universities. Meanwhile, I have taught or lectured in University of British Columbia, Concepción University in Chile, Oxford in England, Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, Yale and Princeton here in the U.S. This month I find myself listed in Who’s Who. Now what the heck is going on in Wichita?

Is the mayor’s office so provincial that it has no judgment and no control over local police officers and cannot better advise its captains? Are the citizens of Wichita so apathetic they have no control over their own bureaucracies in matters like this? Is the faculty of the local college so indifferent to the community that it cannot intervene and straighten this hassle out? Are the local patrons of arts and local lawyers so buried in their TV sets that they can’t bring moral suasions to bear on city officialdom to be more reasonable where such a crucial constitutional matter as freedom of expression is concerned? Is nobody home in Wichita?

I am writing a letter to your mayor to ask for an explanation. It certainly shouldn’t be left to me thousands of miles away to have to do that. Ladies and gentlemen, take good care of your own city.

 

Allen Ginsberg

New York City

[In support of comedian Lenny Bruce, Ginsberg cut off his beard and long hair. He sent them to New York’s Assistant District Attorney, Richard Kuh, who was prosecuting the Bruce case and other cases against Jonas Mekas and various underground film venues. Receiving Ginsberg’s shorn locks and beard did not soften the D.A.’s heart.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Assistant District Attorney Richard H. Kuh [New York, NY] ca. June 16, 1964

 

Dear Mr. Kuh:

 

Please don’t be confused by all these goodwill offerings... please accept the enclosed offering of my shorn locks as a sort of spiritual bribe that you look with friendlier kindlier heart on the earnest strivings of the artists of N.Y. to communicate with all men including myself and yourself. I think you have misunderstood the message thru mistrust and/or earlier bad experiences and so take amiss the real tenderness in the new movies and bodies. There is a definite social value I think you are going to be happily surprised to find. Meanwhile accept and guard this part of my head which I have cut off in your honor, as a devotional offering to the God in you.

 

Allen Ginsberg

 

[In a letter to Michael McClure, Ginsberg revealed how quickly he had been swept up into the hectic life of New York once again. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Michael McClure [San Francisco, CA] August 29, 1964

 

Dear Mike:

 

LaVigne got your hard-skin’d beast. [Lyndon] Johnson won’t get in so may Mailer follow thru. He veritable patron of arts, approved and token invested in Kaddish film says Robert Frank but I not seen Mailer in whiles and whiles. Went down to Atlantic City [site of the Democratic National Convention] with Peter and Ed Sanders on silent Vietnam picket vigil. Hot dogs Negroes klieg lights TV cameras Texan hats boardwalks bible-protestors Mississippi protestors leaflets and vast facade of convention hall we never went inside of but bussed back to NY before midnight.

Gregory here on floor and so also another Orlovsky nee Julius who been in bughouse last 12 (twelve) years Bartlebying—been with us a month now talking blue streak but hard to figure what next. The house is a chaos, 4 people in 3 ½ rooms, just the nightmare I was hoping to avoid—in addition Peter’s girls and now a little 19 year old LSD nymph moviemaker girl that shares my foam rubber mat. BIG heterosexual secret I finally learned after all this time is, if I lay back passive and let myself be made love to from nipples to knees and all over, I don’t have no trouble sloping getting with it and screwing later. But if I have to do all the work as I generally thought I was suppose to, or, no didn’t think that but somehow always wound up being on top and active, mainly because either I or the girls I was making it with were too inept to understand I wanted to be made love to first to at least get me going—anyway this little girl found the secret and now all’s pleasantly relaxed more so than before. Meanwhile plenty jizzum spurting around the house. Got some nice Indian records too, before borrowed phono collapsed. Totally broke and my typewriter in hock till Monday. I applied for a Carnegie Fund grant (that’s $500 to aid distressed writers) and got turned down. LaVigne got a gallery I think lined up and a patron and now moving into nice NY studio, so I guess he’ll be alright. Neal and Ken Kesey arrived in their hallucination bus and we all rode out to World’s Fair, some gang. Jack in town once and moved this week to Florida again. Finally I began screaming at him about politics—he’s always so sadistic to me yelling that I’m a fairy kike pinko and Goldwater’s a patriot from Arizona—and told him to tell his mother to eat her own shit—and that broke the ice a little so we were able to talk better—Ugh—Saw a chapter in “Signal” of Kirby Doyle I thought was energetic, not seen him around a month now. Damn earthquake never came off, I was took in.⁵³ You see Gary? Lower East Side turning into community, now there are 4 bars where poets photographers musicians meet, all around Avenue B. I registered to vote. You? So did Peter. If everybody in Lower East Side did that would be a huge voting bloc and could get all sorts of action. I guess that will come, tho it be hastened by someone’s energetics. All these cats who can’t write poesy, what do they do? All falling on poetry’s shoulders.

I been writing desultorily and wrote some poems but all this time in NY no time to type much up. Bonnie Bremser after me to save Ray from jail... agh... no peace here I get so easily sidetracked. At the moment un-ease, otherwise all’s well.

Love to Joanne,

XXX

 

Allen

[Even though Ginsberg was world-famous by the 1960s, he was also broke. He wrote to Lionel Trilling for a grant reference. The letter revealed that Allen still held his old professor in high esteem.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Lionel Trilling [London, England] September 30, 1964

 

Dear Lionel:

 

I am applying again this year for a Guggenheim grant—I did once 1960 before unsuccessfully (& if memory serves correctly you & W C. Williams were among my references)—have you any objection to writing a letter for me again? (Have you any ideas who would be helpful?) If it is inconvenient or you can’t conscientiously recommend etc. please don’t worry about it. I’m not sure who to ask at this point, actually. Most of my connections are among younger people who won’t be of much help. I’ve tried several places, the Merrill Foundation, Carnegie Fund, Author’s League, P.E.N. etc. and seem to get nowhere. What burns me up is that there is actually about a million dollars a year handed out (one way or another) to poets in the U.S.—some connected to institutional duties, some not, a great deal not. I’m totally broke so going about it more systematically this year. “Project” proposed is to type & edit another book of poems 1960-64-5 continue writing &, hopefully, visit Prague, Milan, Warsaw, Berlin, Moscow. I have books (collected or selected poems) prepared or in preparation in Czech & Italian & Moscow so want to correct consult translators while I’m at it. Also have not been in Eastern Europe before & been everywhere else so it’s about time. Might even do east-west relations some good. The State Dept. sent [Richard] Wilbur & Peter Viereck a while back but I doubt they’d send me and in any case it would not be a good idea to go under any official auspices Russian or U.S. (However the Guggenheim application is not necessarily centered on that trip—I just want money to subsist whatever I do.)

Happy to hear you’re traveling. I visited Oxford in ’58 with Corso & read for the Henry Vaughn Society and stayed a week with an Indian young poet Dom Moraes & met Edith Sitwell who was at the time very friendly, (said she adored Blake, Shelley & Whitman).

Saw final text of your letter re [Leslie] Fiedler⁵⁴ & myself in Partisan. I thought his bookhad a lot of insight into new material—i.e. new dissociations of American literary sensibility & “alterations of consciousness” & simply new sense of life mid-century & acknowledgement that something curious had happened in poetry & Burroughs prose—but the book was so badly written and so filled with gossipy secondhand information and egotistical theories & used-up academic attitudes—attitudes at which he’s not even a sophisticated past master in any case—and anyway he really lacks background in Stein Dada Transition Marinetti French poetry Mayakovsky Neruda Pound prosody Williams—i.e. XX century avant-garde—so the book was hopelessly sluggish. To think of college students reading up on modern writing from him, using his versions as source for their generalizations—ugh nightmare. If you think he hoked up our relationship—by gum its only one small detail in a mass of presuppositions & gossipy errors Augean stablic in proportions. Augean stables.

My opinion (which I know you didn’t ask for) of present day English poesy is: that unless & until there is a complete renovation of British prosody comparable to what went on in U.S., France & even Russia (to say nothing of Spanish changes) they’ll never get anywhere & the Beatles are more interesting. That is most English poets are still trying to write literature, as they once knew it, derived attitudes expressed in derived arbitrary accentual meter. Till they begin scoring the line on the page to follow as notations of breath, or some other basic physiological measure, standard—or some design that graphs the actual process of thought during the time of writing—they’ll just keep on repeating themselves more & more weakly. I haven’t read one really new great English poem for decades have you? It’s a simple matter, that all the energy is enclosed in old iambic box & till that box is broken open nobody will know what’s inside not even Pandora. Actually Pound & Lawrence & others made classical advances in how to compose, how to write, or approach writing little poems, which younger English poets just ignore & I suspect that’s a fault of emphasis in the educational system. There’s one English poet here in the Lower East Side Harry Fainlight who’s going back in half a year, he has poems in Encounter sometimes, he seems interesting, tho from texts he has here & not what Encounter has published.

Give my best to your wife [Diana Trilling]. While I have more space & apropos of nothing presently at hand I wish you would confirm for her my recollection that the message “fuck the Jews” was not the only message I left scrawled on Livingston Hall window. I also wrote “Butler has no balls” (a common gaga saying among the students at the time) & punctuated it all with a pirate’s skull-crossbones. I think later commentators on these esoteric graffiti have entirely misunderstood the intention—possibly thru reference to woefully incomplete text. And lack of subsidiary documentation. You see, the charwoman on that floor in Livingston was a real grumpy old freak who read Westbrook Pegler & took Daily News editorials for Bible. A slovenly little old lady in tennis shoes, who never cleaned my windows & made sour comments about kikes. I was hoping she’d get so upset by the message in the thick dust on the window she’d finally clean it off. So did roommate Bill Lancaster, who also thought the gesture was funny, tho admittedly we did have a normally irresponsible sense of college humor. What actually happened was that the charwoman was so freaky she did-n’t clean the window but instead thought it was important enough to report to the dean. And—the dean thought it important enough to send the director of student-faculty relations up to investigate the shocking phenomena. Unfortunately when he burst into my room without knocking at 9AM that Saturday morning he found me snoring in bed with Kerouac at my side (not even naked, it was all too innocent, at the time I was so inhibited I’d not had sex with men or women). Everybody immediately suspected the worst & later that morning in Dean McKnight’s office the first thing he said to me was “Mr. Ginsberg I hope you realize the enormity of what you’ve done.” (Kerouac had been banned from campus as an ‘unwholesome influence’). Lancaster who’d been with us all night went to the dean & explained, Lionel I think intervened sympathetically, my father came in tears, and in the end (a year later) I was able to get back into school with a letter from a friendly psychiatrist who avowed to the dean that I’d been treated for my morbid diseases. Really I felt surrounded by madmen. About that same year I first developed a taste for Céline, who’s very good describing that kind of humiliating chaos. I think this description will conform to yr recollection, if you show to Diana. Fiedler’s book reminded me.

As ever

 

Allen

 

 

[1965 was a pivotal year in the life of Allen Ginsberg. In a long letter to Nicanor Parra, who had shared the stage with Allen at a poetry conference earlier that year in Cuba, Allen gave a detailed description of those events.]

 

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 Casa⁵⁵ or Hayden [sic: Haydee] and he said no, they had appointment with Hayden 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 Hayden 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 Akhmadulina 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 Aksenov—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 Aksenov 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 Maitraya—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 by 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, may be. 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 Konvictskaya 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 39th 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 Tse-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

[After his trip to the Northwest with Gary Snyder, Ginsberg stayed in San Francisco for a few months and became more involved with the anti-Vietnam War movement. That involvement led to renewed correspondence with his father about the morality of the war.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Louis Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ] November 19, 1965

 

Dear Louis:

 

Been even more involved in Berkeley march than I expected; all the poets here got together to give a reading & raise money for the Vietnam Day Committee. The last march a swastika-studded band of crazy motorcyclists, the Hells Angels, attacked the march & were threatening to turn tomorrow’s into a riot; all the newspapers played up the threat, the Oakland police opposed the march & so everyone was afraid the police would let the Angels through as they did last time; all the VDC Marxists began talking counter violence and a dangerous situation was developing. I went down 70 miles to San Jose College to get on a platform with some representatives of the Hells Angels last week and did what I could to head them off; then the other night Neal Cassady & I and Ken Kesey went privately to their house, had a party with a lot of marijuana and LSD, sang and danced & talked to them till some kind of communication began getting thru. They’re paranoid, the police state conditions here fall heaviest on them as they’re stupid and brutal and sensitive, all products of the last Korean war, they think the communists are going to come here and liquidate them, that the march is a communist march (both last opinions they picked up from the Oakland Tribune & U.P.I. and A.P. and SF Hearst Examiner) and so the only way to defend the country and themselves is to attack the marchers (mostly apolitical teahead pacifist bohemians) with chains. At San Jose State I began singing Buddhist hymns, tried not to debate or argue but to inquire & explain. The audience mostly hostile, laughing & cheering—1000 young healthy Americans—when the Angels promised to come out & attack the march, I got up and asked if they really wanted to see wounds blood unhappiness on the march and a great youthful roar of “Yeah!” came up out of the crowded cafeteria where we were gathered with news photographers & TV cameramen. “You want to see UNhappiness?” “Yeah we want Unhappiness!” This a specially conservative provincial school with second-rate teachers, not like the larger universities, but the temper of the crowd was so sick I was surprised—the corruption of U.S. consciousness now advanced to a point enough to make even you ashamed. At the party a few nights later we did better & the Angels promised nonviolence & anyway the Oakland mayor got a court order he had to protect the march and so called out the State troops & National Guard—to protect a political parade! This sickness is the same sickness as your constantly reverting to calling me a communist—the same screams of the crowd “Pinkos, cowards, Commies, draft dodgers, etc., etc.”

I’m not an absolutist and naturally everybody has different opinions and sees things different but even THAT role-playing is over inasmuch as at this point it is necessary for everybody to compromise and come to one mental place where the diversity can exist, lest the earth be destroyed by this vast bomb which is not the atom bomb but the egotistical rage & frustration which you see daily in the editorial columns & screams of parade attackers. Free to his own opinion etc. but the U.S. has carried that too far in Vietnam at this point and now it’s not Johnson or McNamara at fault it’s the whole U.S.A. and how this country will ever get out of its Karma, how it will ever get out of having to pay for all that suffering and blood, I don’t understand.

As you remember a year or more ago we differed on other matters but one thing we did agree on, you agreed on, that the Vietnam War was a farce and stupid policy. Since then we’ve totally changed policy—at the time we were only advisors to a South Vietnam effort. The rationalizations are now all different, it’s our war now even if the South Vietnamese don’t want it—(and if you can find any scrap of printed paper saying the South Vietnamese DO want it you’ll send it to me despite that every day you can read exactly the opposite in the foreign press or even in the U.P.I. dispatches—that Vietcong would win an election because the people are so sick of the U.S.A.—that South Vietnam army no longer interested, many deserters, that there’s no Government except one general who likes Hitler as an ideal, etc.), but now I don’t understand how you changed your position to correspond to this last year’s government change of tactics???????????? You began against the war, now that it’s got serious thru U.S. escalation you’re suddenly for it? In 12 months? Now you’re saying it’s not a civil war? It’s Chinese absolutism threatening world peace? It’s EVERYBODY’S stupid absolutism threatening world peace including yours, Louis Ginsberg, and now you got blood on your hands.

And if you don’t like that, sit on it. You’re just like the Germans under Hitler and all your talk since 19Alpha is the same hypocrisy. They were trapped in history and so are you. And if I get my head busted tomorrow in Oakland walking along singing with my finger cymbals it’ll be a piece of the same television-hypnosis hysteria you carry in your heart that did it. That’s what Karma is.

Okay, enough of my own hysteria on you. I was kinder to the idiot Hells Angels than I am being to you. But you’re supposed to be more responsible so the frustration I feel is—ugh, I give up. This kind of screaming at you certainly doesn’t change your mind because it backs you up into a position where you have to defend yourself. And that, as usual in our letters, only brings violence back from you in answer to my own violence.

But I see why LeRoi Jones gives up on the U.S. whites.

This prophesy Merlin shall make for I live before his time: the next great war crises for the U.S. will be in South America. For the last 8 years since everybody including you got conscious of the fact that there was a severe economic problem there, and that the answer would be either Communism or U.S. sponsored total reform, the U.S. has been putting in small amounts of minimal reform, not enough even to make up for the increasing social degradation, and pouring in large amounts of military energy there, cultivating right wing juntas etc. Dominica a perfect example. In ten years there’ll be a large scale war with U.S. on one side and nationalist communists on the other side. And the reason it’ll be all communist (at worst) is because the U.S. refused to let the steam escape any other way. And at that time it’ll be the same paranoid U.S. cry, “It’s us or them folks hurry up and get in the barroom brawl.” Exactly as now in Vietnam. Even though even you know (or knew a year ago) that North Vietnam was trying to ESCAPE from Chinese domination and was taking the soviet side of the sinosoviet dispute. The one consequence of the war you’re approving will be to FORCE on the Vietnamese exactly the thing you think you’re trying to prevent. You’ll force them to side with China. And then you’ll blame China for having paranoid world-conquest ambitions. Meanwhile the idiot masters of Communism and Capitalism will be rubbing their hands and gathering police state power everywhere. The Pentagon & McNamara, etc. are mirror images of the Chinese bureaucracy. But I must say it’s disgusting after years hearing you complain about flip-flops in the party line to see you doing a total flip-flop in your opinions on the Vietnam war. Which should show that the old party line you were so angry about was not an EVIL thing, just a thing of subtle belief & exposure to imagery, as your flip-flop has been.

And don’t say it hasn’t been a flip-flop because we discussed this for the last years and you were always very dubious of the Vietnam War, and there’s been nothing since (including the Stevenson last conversations) to change one’s mind except a continuous barrage of overheated imagery in the papers & a lot of pictures and soft soap on television.

And if for 10 years I’ve been screaming like a paranoid nut about Mass Hypnosis—this is a perfect example of it in action.

I also saw it in action at the first Vietnam march, attacked physically, attacked by “patriots” as seditious—attacked by Humphrey as seditious—and now suddenly in the last week now that war-dissent has become respectable in the newsprint of Reston Lippman & The Courts—suddenly legal and healthy. But there were a few dangerous days last month when those who organized the march were preparing for sedition trials. And if the wind had blown that way, I could not have depended on you to know the difference.

And that’s why I always get so bugged! MY OWN FATHER caught in the same mass hysteria and sadisms that is dragging planet to radioactive shit. My own high minded ex-socialist liberal family!

Well enough of my vomit. I’ll write in a few days. I spent the last week running around from VDC to Hells Angels to newspapers to insure the march would be peaceful so I wouldn’t get my skull bashed on the streets.

“Apollinaire: now is the time for prophesy without death as a consequence.”

as ever

 

 

Allen

This is a disgusting letter to write you. At least it’s better than the napalm you’re paying for and approving and justifying to your son. Oughta be ashamed of yourself at your age. But this tone of letter leaves no room for someplace to agree in. Forgive me. I’ll be more calm when the parade anxiety’s over.

 

 

[With Ginsberg’s encouragement, many of his old friends had become authors. At long last Herbert Huncke’s book, Huncke’s Journal, was published by Diane di Prima, and Allen wrote to congratulate Herbert.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to Herbert Huncke [New York, NY] December 5, 1965

 

Dear Herbie:

 

Everything here building toward more harmony, hints and scattered glimpses of the last 2 decades now becoming more manifest and natural making a continuity of high awareness and a public community emerging each person contributing his own privately experienced unthought-of discovery of light/unity/ self nature to the common outer world by action or talk or song or print, and the Them of all we envision begins to show up in bookstores and airwaves and even on the hats of kids in gas stations. I begin to feel the societal meanness and pain—like the China war—as just fear and suffering which grows acute because changes are coming on so fast one after another. Things unthinkable 10 years ago like our Word spread serious, like, I’m bald browed, or astronauts with long hair soon, or the Eve of Destruction broadcast to teenage home ears, or Dylan’s mysterious spirit speech, or Russia turning young again, or sexual blackout for teenagers ended with high school kid flashlights on cancer lunch under the covers or on the bedstead, Hells Angels high on LSD listening to Cosmos-is-Maya songs chanted to them / as if it were all pre-arranged by Universe-Cinemascope in déjà-vu, movies of world’s end apocalypse or else Buck Rogers space universal coming true scene by scene. Anyway seeing your blue first edition journal cover with “Huncke’s” in gay nineties-twenties type unexpectedly in City Lights was like seeing a comet or climbing a snowy mountain and reaching clear rock peaks and sitting down to look at the blue earth-gas in panorama low land valley floors and wondering how it could be so that the big heavy mountain was finally climbed to its grogtop since when we began way down below looking up at a real earth-god big mountain such as there were only library pictures of in Junior High School.

Your own book is the most interesting new truthful word-text I’ve read in recent years-era. You can’t imagine how awesome it is, how helpful, how magically influential on our same life as I know it, that what seemed real drops seeming and is here now for good. Once you completely manifest yourself in these detailed fragments, and the world has you out front like a big elephant-rock you can actually see and point out and look at up close.

What’s truthful in the book is that it’s a writing that’s by itself, for god knows who, which makes it raw (not like most art objects) nature, a part of life itself like on Uncle Fireside Story told so the family could know really who felt what in Newark some recent years. It feels truthful, the truth being an accurate record of you, a close version of whatever you know you are, close enough to be identical with your self-thought and inside noticing of all the scenes, written the only way it comes out without trying to “improve” your real nature’s image by calculated rearrangement of your story. So it’s like nature of things.

I keep getting glimpses of that, like recognitions of the actual scene as we know it so familiar but rare in conscious reflection and rarer in permanent writ-memory.

What I mean is your original self as I’ve always contacted it to be, is the same as the way the book is; and the closeness between your nature and your written version of what you’re minded of, is a rare thing in art (somehow not many people can come up with that simple such-ness in prose or poetry) and is absolutely precious vital social serum against the effects of mass-bulk false (like mis-comprehending mis-interpreting mis-reporting mis-taking) word products wholesale broadcast Niagaras an hour in everybody’s consciousness.

I’m meaning to say, one straight record like Cuba or In the Park or Youth to take the most obvious, (or Old Elsie)—one straight account like that is so recognizably true to what lie is, and true to what everybody’s natural sympathy feels like—true even to what one time or other at least, everybody has experience in his own scene—true to everybody’s first native mammal reaction—true to everybody’s inside knowledge—that it has the effect of waking or reaffirming that sleeping or timid self-recognition-and (offhand or incomplete, or dubiously or hastily jotted as you may have felt them to be during or after writing, unsatisfactory) because it does so clearly show some real, native, undisguised self to any reader’s obscure unaware self, that it can cut thru all the illusions of prejudice identity opinion—Cut thru millions of copies of official Time Digest Righteous Viewpoint language—and touch the actual huge nature underneath even the worst heart in the long run—and bring lost people back to them selves, back home to the original feeling for life.

Now all this I guess is really obvious to you, I’m only scribbling to you at such length the same repeated thought because (maybe out of some lack of confidence in your efforts) you always do say when low down that maybe your writings have no real value or function or purpose to yourself or anyone else for that matter, and why bother to publish them? I’m trying to explain clearly what is the value function purpose to the whole central population organized nation community. Which is now as you know so lost in the head it’s like to be the end of the whole show. Or the mind could be clarified in us and we transmit that clarity as you do in the book and it will certainly have an effect on others, that will return to you in the long run too.

So the point is, you have good reason to do something now about the larger manuscript—how many pages now 600?—and make an active effort to be sure all the scattered fragments are collected and arranged in some indicative order, and maybe whatever lesser material there is (less lively) cut out,—or better blue penciled in but retaining only associated phrases and sentences that are lively and pure, linked with “... ” to show you painted out the background for the gems. That’s the easiest most natural way, Williams recommend it—(if a poem has only 2 good lines, get rid of the poem and publish the 2 lines, there’s no reason a poem should be look finished or complete if the completion is shitty or unreal or just to make it look apparently complete) (he said and that’s how I prepared manuscript of Empty Mirror, from masses of journal jottings I boiled it down to those essential lines and fragments of writing that were interesting).

The present journals volume looks to me all high order writings. Is the rest of 600 p. manuscript the same as good? I thought of the title Confessions years ago but don’t know now if it’s appropriate. (I meant like St. Augustine’s or Rousseau’s Confessions).

Is the manuscript ready to submit to a publisher? I won’t be back in N.Y. till February or March but no reason you or Ella or Clive or someone—Sanders perhaps—could not start circulating it. Perhaps try Grove first. Ferlinghetti wants to see the manuscript too. You could give him an hundred page book; and then arrange to have that and Di Prima’s volume reprinted with the rest of the bulk by a hardcover NY publisher in a year or 2 or just go directly to Fred Jordan at Grove Press; or Jason Epstein at Random House etc. etc. I can send you more names and places but why not start there now? Probably 3 or 4 will reject it before one finally can see in the book what it is. If you do go to Grove or Random, tell them I advised you to and show them this letter too if they need any convincing.

Please send me a card (before the week is out because I’m leaving here December 15) let me know what the status of the manuscript is.

(If you feel that there’s more editing to do, Irving Rosenthal you know is really handy at that if he’s willing. If publisher wants to edit, better have it checked with Irving anyhoo.)

Everything socially here is very dramatic and charming. I see a lot of McClure, a lot of new young poetry and LSD and longhair anarchist boys, I’ve been active in the Berkeley Vietnam (anti?) war manifestation, mainly showing up, talking tranquilly to cool the revolutionary radical righteous hysteria freaks and singing peaceful mantras (I’ve learned some new Zen ones from Snyder) on the parades—to marchers and police both. Got in the middle of a Dadaist Happening, the Hells Angels (genuinely anticommunist motives but all sensitive dumb paranoid) versus the marchers. Now made friends with the Angels and cooled them out—sang mantras to them too—while Neal and friend novelist Ken Kesey turned them on to LSD—we had a big party 2 nites before the threatened riot scene and that (plus threat of state troops) cooled everything for peaceful communion march thru spade section of Oakland.

I see Neal all the time, he and Anne [Murphy] his love slave dearie stay over here in Julius’ bed several nites a week. Neal has entered new space-age dimension—all his old energy still full steam but after 13 years railroad 2½ years jail and now divorced and years of intensive pot and then all the reincarnation spiritualist cult monomanias and several years obsession with the racetrack where he lost about $10,000—and now several year’s omnivorous absorption of amphets by mouth (“jumpers” he says) and company with huge crowds of young Zonk-minded admirers, lovers of his legend, like, devotees of his energy and speed—he’s become a sort of fantastic continuously talking (on 7 or 8 levels of simultaneous association) teacher plus the fact that for ₂ or ₃ years he’s gone into the LSD mind too, also omnivorously more than even Barbara Rubin and friends did. Super expert master of Acid and Dar T etc.—in company with a huge clownish Utopian gang at house—commune in peninsula back roads woods of a novelist, friend Ken Kesey, who’s taken over appreciating him in his later phases as Jack once did. I think I told you or you heard about their big bus? all painted psychedelic ultraviolet orange green blue covered now with swastikas and hammer sickles and U.S. eagles and every conceivable identity emblem painted neatly along sides of the bus—and they go on trips to Idaho or L.A. everybody on acid including Neal the super-driver (it’s on the road in a mad ’60s dimension) hallucinating the gas pedal’s turned to spaghetti, but able to find his way thru side phantom cockroaches and deliver everybody safely—him sweating and talking furiously with tape microphone hanging over his head in driver’s cab and movie cameras grinding and radio hooked to loudspeaker atop the bus (where 6 or 7 youths and maids dressed in red white blue striped sweatshirts and pants and purple magic shoes lie around on mattress smoking grass)—and on this trip, said Neal the bus had no clutch, brake or reverse—he got all the way to Idaho and back, and thru a Calif. forest fire burning on both sides of the road.

Bob Dylan here a week and I see him every day and talk about poesy and fame and Eden Desolation—we may do something together, he produce a record of my mantras or a TV show or I act in a movie or who knows.

I wrote a lot, poems, letters—and a huge First Manifesto to End the Bringdown on the subject of pot. Maybe we’ll break thru soon, I do think—on many levels—work hard.

Love,

 

Allen

[Throughout his life, Ginsberg continued to promote his friends and fellow poets, as in this letter to Philip Lamantia. The proposed anthology he mentioned here never materialized.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Philip Lamantia [Malaga, Spain] August 20, 1966

 

Dear Philip:

 

Thanks for your letter & anyway post-belated answer to universe questions, all our sad language so charming, the effort. Can you reprint text of the Poetry mag letter? I hate bullshitting and I sorta codified formulated articulated thoughts about you there. Anyway, also, following project: for Random House, they asked me to do an anthology, I said no too much work & I haven’t finished editing my own scribbles, but did propose an easier maybe more useful book: put together ₅ or 6 poets whose work is great but not much yet published or if finely published not sufficiently available & circulated among 1966 youths like on street or in colleges. They said OK and I specified 40 pages each about, of 1) Sanders Russell because tho he write recent interesting Harlem works he never had much out, & Rexroth fiendishly urges; ₂) Ed Sanders because he’s funny ₃) Lew Welch because he’s readable in ₄₀ pages; ₄) Ted Berrigan because he’s exemplary of a whole new generation style growing out of O’Hara (now dead run over by a beach taxi in Fire Island aetat. ₄₀ a month ago), Ashbery & Koch, and also because Berrigan’s poor & never had book but mimeo ₅) Orlovsky because I sleep with him and he has about ₄₀ pages perfect collected works & noplace students can find him in bulk 6) yourself Lamantia because tho you have books they are hardly in circulation in the provinces. The volume would be a handy gas for younger & older heads, because all the poets are different, eccentric & rare one way or another—there’s no consistency of purpose except a handy place to set forth under-circulated blossoms in sufficient bulk to attract bees. Then I’ll have to write some general preface or short note on the poets, each.

Is this alright with you? My only requirement at Random was that there be no censorship, any shit goes, and that I do no work but their editor (Richard Billow) take care of all details & correspondence—he may have written you already.

So if it’s agreeable for you to make that scene, can you put together your signal classic work from youth to now, or else any mass of ₄₀ pages new compositions, or what you will, or do you want me to select out of Ekstasis & Destroyed Works & Blue Grace, etc.? I have my favorites that I think would please or teach readers but maybe you got some special idea what you want. The book in any case is free & open. Let me know what to do. Money I guess will be routine, royalties divided equally 7 ways including me. Please address all correspondence except high esthetic or urgent to Billow. He’ll collect manuscript or books for me, like, secty. [...]

Can’t find anything to differ with in your summation. I just don’t know what’s going on. We’ve all seen visions, & they come & go & fade; and the world fades too; so either way it’s all mysterious & apparently beyond my 1:30 AM Aug 20 ’66 brainbody comprehension. Jack calls drunk from Massachusetts. He wants to move to Florida and I’m stealing his prosody; Peter went out to get second crazy brother to live with us (Julius and Lafcadio) tonite; Bob Dylan is a wizard; & my father’s 71 yrs old.

Fatigue tonite

 

Allen

 

 

[Ginsberg also continued to lecture politicians about their various mistakes.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Leo Cherne⁵⁶ [New York, NY] December 3, 1966

 

Dear Mr. Cherne:

 

According to Mr. Scheer’s pamphlet you were considerably involved in creating the situation that led to the authoritarian violent rule of President Diem in South Vietnam.

As you know and as it says in both Western and Eastern wisdom books, violence leads only to more violence. Use of the word Freedom on the House over which you are Chairman is an abuse of language inasmuch as the House is not promoting freedom by continuing to promote violence. As in most cases, proposals for the use of force and violence on the general polis are projections of internal psychic conflict by the proposer.

It would seem proper that you begin purifying your own motive and sense of selfhood, rather than continuing to further complicate the original mistakes made a decade ago in the external world, as a consequence of your own misjudgment.

This letter rises as consequence of a letter signed by you in Times December 3, 1966, in which you continue to sanction the use of violence in resolving our primarily emotional problems in Vietnam.

The war is, and all war is, and always was, a consequence of personal aberration, not some mysterious consequence of non-human forces. Your own and my own personal aberrations are involved here as well as the obvious personal aberrations and fantasies of Eisenhower, Dulles, Max Lerner, etc. as well as the rest of the body politic.

Certainly after so many false starts, I should think you would be willing to be quiet for a while and more introspective, and try to make yourself peaceful. It will do you no harm to be able to die-in-life as many virtuous men have done. Continued justification of your own past Karma (Action) serves neither you nor me nor our fellow citizens any peaceful purpose.

Thank you for your attention.

Yours,

 

Allen Ginsberg, Poet.

 

 

[Ginsberg could not sit still and ignore poor scholarship and criticism when it came to the Beat Generation. He continually corrected authors wherever he perceived errors. In this letter to the publisher of one critical text, Allen documented the precursors and visionary importance of his own generation of writers. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Monarch Notes [New York, NY] December 3, 1966

 

Dears Messrs. Roy, Cooperman, Leavitt and Violi:

 

I wandered thru 8th Street Bookshop in NY last night and encountered your Monarch Notes “Beat Literature” pamphlet which I purchased and read with a good deal of dismay.

I realize that the author Mr. G. Roy was sympathetic and had friendly and objective intentions, and had done some research; but the scholarship displayed in the book is so incomplete, and the judgments and perceptions therefore so inaccurate (albeit sympathetic), and the inclusions and exclusions so arbitrary; and, finally, the information so dated—circa 1960 I’d guess—that the book will prove a stumbling block to understanding for young people rather than an educational help. In brief, problem with the book, is that it reflects the limited relatively unscholarly popular arguments pro and con circa 58-60: many of the arguments have been clarified or rendered obsolete by documents, events, texts, and changes of mind by the very critics cited, since those days—so that in effect, what is presented to students 1966 is an anachronistic and misleading critique, very vague in its generalizations, and worst of all, lacking even an out for the students to do their own research since the bibliography presented is so dated and meager and journalistic and, simply, incomplete.

I would not bother to write, as I have more urgent personal business preparing texts of collected poems for Grove and collected essays etc. for Random House and a lot of other projects. Besides since you have already issued your pamphlet there’s little hope of changing it or its effects on young people. But I am interested in education and for that reason do teach and write prose and give readings of poetry in colleges, and I despair when I see the incompetence of your Monarch pamphlet and realize that it will set another whole generation of unspecialized innocent students off on the wrong track again. And it will make more work for me and other artists who follow to clarify, over and over again, a few simple ideas, and inform, despite or in spite of your scholarly efforts, where texts are to be found and what texts are relevant.

So I thought I would write anyway.

In brief the flaw of the book is that the thinking, reading and analysis is all dated, as I said the book smells of popular yatter of 1959-61, discussions like “are they positive or negative?” “Do they abandon form?” “Are they posing?” etc. This is all such dreary irrelevant occupation for eager contemporaries. For instance the main insights presented by the beat writers of the 50s 1) the literal possibility of new modes of consciousness ₂) the literal bankruptcy of Cold War society—these are themes by now much more clearly realized and taken seriously and experienced by the generation grown up during Vietnam War and LSD. The whole wasted discussion of “is their rebellion a pose?” etc. was possible in 1960 but less useful circa 1965-1966 when professors of English at Columbia also take LSD and marijuana and march desperately in peace marches.

Regarding serious purely literary matters: The best anthology, the most famous anthology, containing all our work, also containing expositions of literary method and composition and prosody, is the Don Allen New American Poetry 1945-60—which is completely ignored. It is the one invaluable reference book—instead your students are given journalistic trivia like Manville’s Saloon Society which not even I have read.

The choice of representative “Beat” writers is localized primarily to those represented in a pre-1960s issue of Evergreen Review: heavy emphasis on Levertov, Everson (Brother Antoninus) and Duncan as Beat writers. They were always friendly poets and associates, but disclaimed often the Beat label for themselves. On the other hand poets like Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder (mentioned but hardly discussed), Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Charles Olson and a whole raft of others, all now very influential and respectable even, who did not disclaim the Beat label, but participated in readings with us and magazine publications, and who were, early (1957-62) damned with Corso, Kerouac, etc. as mere Beats, are completely excluded from consideration. Naturally it is hard to decide on who to label what: but if Duncan, Levertov, Antoninus are examined as specimens of Beat, it is hard to understand what happened to Creeley and Snyder, etc.

This is important because we now find Snyder after 10 years Zen study in Japan leading psychedelic ritual-tantric movements in San Francisco and marching with me in NY Peace Parades, carrying his Bollingen Award for scholarly studies under his arm. And we find Creeley reforming English studies at NMU and Buffalo U., armed with Guggenheim as myself, the unmentioned LeRoi Jones, etc. This obviated a good deal of the 1958-60 argument as to what our relation to “society” is.

The point I’m making is—the choice of representative poets, criticism of them, etc.—all dates to that issue of Evergreen—and that is not scholarship on Mr. Roy’s part—that is, in effect, as if he read cursorily in the popular items of that day and then stopped reading except to add a few books to Burroughs’ or my list of bibliographized items circa 1965.

Further, the dead horse of what is acceptable lasting literature—kicked over and over—seems to depend on texts 1956-7. Hardly anything on Kaddish or later works of mine; nothing about Burroughs’ work after 1960 which now seems the most influential among young—the cut-up method—obviously nothing of Olson’s Maximus or Creeley’s prose or poetry, much less Hubert Selby Jr. much less that later appearing but earlier described Herbert Huncke. In short a misleading mess for a young kid trying to get into the actual literature. In fact this book will lead students away from the material rather than draw them in to explore for themselves.

No technical discussion of methods of composition and prosody is even approached: a major defect. Nothing but the vaguest generalizations. Whereas there are innumerable reference documents at hand especially in the Grove Press Anthology edited by Don Allen—which might have clarified the whole specific problem of “form” so much loosely gossiped about in your Monarch pamphlet.

In regard to prose the lacunae are amateur again. Brossard, Broyard and a few others were considered hip Beat writers around 1956-7 but have not figured in much actual literary history. Prose by Creeley, Selby, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and after—all the writers anthologized in LeRoi Jones’ anthology The Moderns such as himself and Mike Rumaker and later Kerouac—are all ignored and supplanted by the dated middlebrow publicity of 1957. And page one’s introduction to prose doesn’t even mention the work of Burroughs, who historically and categorically was and is considered much more integral to the whole movement than Brossard. His influence is mentioned as if his texts were of no account or didn’t exist.

On page 7 a slipshod account of prosody presents Charles Farber as representative, as a “sample” but it simply is not, historically, a “sample” major text of the “movement” if we are considering “beat” literature to be a movement. Why of all people Farber? What happened to the major writers like Lamantia and McClure and Whalen and Snyder, etc. Farber’s work is—well, again, I heard of him in late 50s but don’t even know his work. Why are you referring students to this irrelevant and almost unobtainable text as a relevant typology?

Page ₁₀ Historical Background is completely ill-informed with the inclusions of Mallarme and Verlaine as salient influences, Yeats, Baudelaire, etc. None of the poets mentioned as primary “Beats” used much Mallarme, much less Yeats or Verlaine. Creeley, unmentioned in your sketch, did use Mallarme however.

Had you included Snyder and Whalen as Beat poets you might justifiably have used Rexroth as a forerunner: as it is he is not a forerunner of anybody you do mention except Antoninus and Levertov—the latter however disclaims Beat connections. Your list of favorite forerunners leaves out the real influences on me and Kerouac—in fact it’s just a mess. No reality to the generalizations, just a composite of vague ₂nd rate uninformed patchwork which doesn’t indicate any real direction. Kerouac for instance has as primary source Shakespeare, so has Corso and Burroughs and myself—yet Shakespeare is discounted as a source. Gregory Corso and I did like Marlowe and Shelley—and I, Keats—and Smart particularly, and Apollinaire and Blake, and Melville’s poetry, and Thomas Hardy, and Basil Bunting, and Catullus—all this is spelled out in various essays published. Why are we referred, contrariwise, to Kenneth Patchen and e. e. cummings? Patchen and cummings had NO influence on 1) Kerouac ₂) Corso ₃) Burroughs ₄) Myself much less Snyder Whalen McClure. They did have some influence on Ferlinghetti.

St. Jean Perse, Céline and Genet did always have influence on Kerouac myself Burroughs and everybody—they’re unmentioned. The traditional stable of U.S. influences mentioned are so irrelevant and vague as to be misleading to the student. Gide Kafka Hemingway etc. Just ridiculous. Of course we read all that, but we practically advertised for 10 years Melville’s prose, and Céline and Genet, and Dostoyevsky.

In sum your literary background paragraphs are ill informed and will misinform the young reader—who would be better pointed to Korzybski, Spengler, Suzuki, Yeats’ Vision, Smart, Céline, Genet, Artaud, Michaux, Shakespeare, Melville’s poetry and prose in Pierre, Emily Dickinson, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Perse, Mayakovsky, Yessenin, Lorca’s Poet in New York, etc. Your analysis is so vague and ill informed as to be totally useless. To the student.

Furthermore Lewis and Fitzgerald (p. 11) had no influence on those you cite as prose beat writers. Flat and simple as that. Wyndham Lewis yes, Gertrude Stein yes obviously influenced the dissociational improvisation of Kerouac, the speech of Selby, the psychological-state scientism of Burroughs. But all of this scholarly notation is on record by 1963 in various essays by everybody.

The main misconception of course, which leads to the overemphasis on Sinclair Lewis as a precursor, is that we are primarily concerned with rebellion or social protest—this was, again, the dated terminology of 1958-60 used by popular essay writers who still didn’t understand the basically MENTAL TRANSCENDENTALISM we are and were working out; i.e. visionary. Blake was also a social critic and rebel etc. but the ROOT of his work as of ours has been in exploration of modes of consciousness. If this isn’t by now obvious then I suggest you all update yourself to what I and Burroughs have been saying for 20 years and actually take a flyer with some LSD. If you can’t get the point thru our language then try some extraliterary means. Lewis’ basically political materialism is and was basically more inspirational for a political revolution—so he is popular in Russia and Genet unknown—but not for a revolution of psyche in space age.

Yet you have irrelevant page after page on Lewis and Fitzgerald. It’s maddening, and reflects the education of Mr. Roy, and not the specificities of the subject he’s chosen to examine, namely OUR influences, not his. This inaccuracy reduces the whole study to a nonspecific vague pointless repetition of generalities no different from any other academic school of composition.

Page 27: Mr. Corso is not mad. What a thing to inform students.

Accusations of “phony” madness against Oscar Wilde, whom I find an immensely sympathetic figure of letters, run thru the book as if it were important to the subject at hand. It isn’t.

The William Lee referred to on p. ₃₅ will not be recognized by the student as the same Mr. Eminent Burroughs.

1966 why spend so much time on Angries when you have the whole Voznesensky-Yevtushenko Russian complex more parallel; as well as Provos, Stilyagi, mod-rocker London generations, etc. everywhere? Your sociologic evaluations, again, are dated 1958/9. In any case I myself wasn’t elected May King 1965 in Prague for any psychic reason or social reason elected by Mr. Roy as relevant.

Page ₅₃ disclaims transatlantic influence while, contrariwise as I have pointed out, Artaud, Céline and Genet, as well as the whole Dada-Surreal-Gertrude Stein scene, were essential to Burroughs, Lamantia, myself, Kerouac, etc.

Paul Dreyfus mentioned p. ₅₅ as “Genuine and effective” beat poet along with di Suvero and others is absolutely ridiculous. There were millions of—or hundreds literally—not very good poets publishing as beat. The ones Mr. Roy mentions were singularly ineffective. Dreyfus! What kind of nonsense are you laying on students 1966? Absolute uninformed claptrap.

I was kicked out of Columbia for being found sleeping in bed with Kerouac not for the reason given p. 6₁. The whole book is inaccurate literary generalization and gossip. Nor, even, once, did I refer to a bughouse as a laughing academy, same page. Someone else may have. Not my language. Then I’ll have to face students in ₃ years and answer questions based on this Monarch pamphlet? Ye Gods what horrors you’re condemning us all to.

Page 6₃: The generalizations about my poetry really being iambic are so hopelessly ill-informed and so generalized as to be absolutely misleading to any innocent student trying to figure out what the fuss is all about. Dumb ideas like that because they sound easy will be picked up and passed from head to head like trench mouth exactly as they passed from Mrs. Trilling’s head to Mr. Roy’s. It’s not an accurate comment, and, in addition, not a comment that Mrs. Trilling would stand by 1965-6, actually.

The discussion on poetry-jazz again is dated, and inaccurate: based mostly on Rexroth-Patchen’s practice rather than Corso, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lamantia, John Wieners, etc. AD 1966 the real significance could be found in the developments that lead to Donovan and Dylan—all of which is unmentioned, tho it would be the one aspect that students nowadays have recognized and discussed —relationship between my own practice and Dylan. And mutual influences. Yet this is completely left out in favor of minor attempts (by older others) circa late 50s. In this sense all the data, texts, gossip, and arguments of the book, from Ciardi down, are all obsolete. Because of lack of scholarship since, I would guess, 1960. For a book published 1966 about a living movement, some time-lag is natural, but not such an obvious misjudgment about matters that are not only common knowledge these last few years but popular mythology even in Life magazine.

Page 6₅: Prose “No Revolutionary Developments.” This is of course debatable, what is a revolution? But Burroughs’ cut-up method—a number of very influential books Soft Machine etc.—are not even considered, tho many do consider them revolutionary as I do. Kerouac’s spontaneous prose method is obviously influential and revolutionary—affecting my own poetry as well as dozens of others who have Guggenheim grants. So this is generalized over and scanted without proper consideration. Of course since Mr. Roy takes Brossard, Broyard, as his salient beat prose writers and elides Burroughs, Selby, Creeley, Rumaker, etc. then no wonder he sees no change.

Constant reference to Lipton and contemporaries 1960 also dates the book to the first period of the most popularistic uncomprehending criticism. Newer work such as Paris or Partisan Review begins to put ideas into clearer order (as the middle class moves desperately left Vietnam).

Pages 69-70: Dr. Rigney’s book is completely misinterpreted. He concluded that the beats were trying to do something about it mostly. Mr. Roy’s emphasis is just the opposite, as will be read by high school or college soph.

Page 69: Venice West is not in San Francisco, it’s in L.A.

Counter arguments regarding religion, use of Zen etc. disregards the fact that someone like Snyder (hero of Kerouac Dharma Bums) is practically the only U.S. intellectual to have actually spent ₁₀ years in Zen monastery and is now on learned Bollingen; much less the fact that Orlovsky and I spent years in India, learned something, and are now spreading the teaching of mantra chanting with cooperation and approval of qualified swamis, over the U.S., and helping translate and apply Tibetan works, in cooperation with qualified Tibetan Buddhist functionaries here. Thus the arguments and counter-arguments about our use of oriental tradition as amateurs circa 1958 have already been rendered obsolete by public activities quite well publicized since 1963. Instead of factual material your student readers are presented with commonplace generalized debater’s point arguments which can lead to no useful knowledge, no practical understanding—not even to useful texts.

Arguments and counterarguments p. ₁₀6 as to the durability of texts are arguments that were going on 6 years ago before work by myself Burroughs Kerouac Creeley Lamantia McClure etc. etc. Olson were substantially included in grad school and now often even high school studies, so the information on which this argument proceeds (Ciardi’s expostulations circa 1961?) is already obsolete. Furthermore the reference to Burroughs’ single work Naked Lunch itself. Your students are presented with anachronistic generalizations and half-baked history. How can they make any sense of the whole shot? I couldn’t finish reading your book. It didn’t really touch on any central spiritual center, the whole psychedelic movement is really left out tho it is a major “social concern” in the U.S. right now to the students that will read the book.

I have written longer than I anticipated when I started this letter. I don’t mean to devalue Mr. Roy’s intentions and goodwill, I especially appreciate his clear understanding and sympathy in such a controversial consideration as it revealed p. 89. “The beat is a spiritually constructive entity dwelling in a society apparently intent on its own destruction,” and that is perhaps the most contemporary insight in the book, or hindsight, as may be.

But it is terrible to think that if students interested in the subject take their verbalizations and articulations and facts and estimates and reasonings and bibliographies from this book they will be left with a completely anachronistic dead horse, instead of a living literature which needs glossing, bibliography, scholarship and mature explanation to protect such literature from the distortions of the popular lowbrow media who would see nothing but rebellion eccentricity and poor manners. Tho lately, the media have been more kind—it’s taken a decade and a lot of pot.

A useful book with inclusive survey and discussions of influences from Smart to Céline, Buddhist Tantra, Amerindian Peyotism as influences, a book which puts into perspective the real career of Burroughs, which included McClure and Whalen and Creeley and Olson’s influence rather than such poor lost samples as Dreyfus or di Suvero would make sense. But as it is I am afraid your book confuses more than it clarifies and, personally, I hate to think of all the future wasted breath we’ll all have to expend trying to undo the vague language the Monarch series is fostering under the guise of scholarship. Alas this book will likely lead students away from texts rather than into them.

I don’t know what to suggest you do: scrap it and rewrite it, or forget it altogether. In the long run, while flattered to have my position in letters considered at such length and basically so sympathetically in your pamphlet, I would rather not see it happen at all, and would rather see the book scrapped. It is not only inadequate—it is a stumbling block to understanding. And you have to remember, many youngsters already understand a great deal more than they are given in that book.

Sincerely yours,

 

Allen Ginsberg

[Ginsberg wanted reporters to be accurate when it came to articles about the use of drugs. In this letter he took the New York Times to task for referring to marijuana as a narcotic.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, CA] to the New York Times [New York, NY] January ₂₄, ₁96₇

 

Dear Sir:

 

In a front page report from Tangier, Morocco on December 26, 1966, Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal mentions a substance which he refers to as “narcotic kief” and defines as “a local powdered leaf that is mixed with tobacco for a marijuana smoke.” He goes on to say that “after Mexico, Tangier is possibly the closest place to the United States where such narcotics can easily be bought.”

In its coverage of the drug problem the Times has frequently referred to marijuana as a narcotic. In so doing it reflects and helps to maintain a popular misconception about the drug which is also reflected in existing legal penalties.

On October 9, 1966, in a story headed “Marijuana Laws Held Too Severe,” the Times quoted Dr. Donald Louria, chairman of the New York State Council on Drug Addiction and a professor at Cornell University Medical School as remarking at a Cornell-sponsored symposium on Drugs and the Campus that marijuana, as a mild hallucinogen, must be legally distinguished from heroin, a narcotic. Dr. Louria’s classification of marijuana as non-narcotic is not unique in medical circles; as a matter of fact, impartial medical authorities tend to view the drug as a relatively harmless hallucinogen or anti-depressant which differs from narcotics like heroin, morphine, etc. in that it is not physiologically addicting.

The distinction is important because there is a growing body of responsible opinion to the effect that marijuana is a potentially useful drug which has been the victim of a well-intentioned but ill-informed propaganda campaign, and that it is time the harsh penalties for its mere possession were reevaluated. In September, 1962, for example, President Kennedy’s White House Conference on Narcotic and Drug Abuse found “long criminal sentences imposed on an occasional user or possessor of the drug” to be “in poor social perspective.”

In this period of rapid social change and resulting public confusion, the Times can help to improve our understanding of this emotionally loaded subject by using scientifically accurate terminology.

Sincerely yours,

 

Allen Ginsberg

[Ginsberg did have a sense of humor about some things as he displayed in this letter asking the CIA for $10 million in funding for liberal projects to counterbalance money awarded to conservative groups. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Richard Helms⁵⁷ [Washington, DC] ca. May 29, 1967

 

Dear Mr. Helms:

 

I do not know the appropriate section of your organization to apply to for monies so I am addressing this letter to you.

I am the treasurer of a tax exempt non profit corporation, properly registered and approved by the government. Our national and international activities, tho small, are extremely useful in the artistic world: we supply cash and comfort to artists and poets harried by society, police, themselves and the universe; or ill; or too poor to do their proper work. Monies I receive from poetry readings are made over to Committee on Poetry (COP for short) Inc., and given to poets less fortunate than others.

I notice that the C.I.A. has been giving money to groups rather arbitrarily chosen in the past. I am therefore asking for a proper redress of that secret balance, by means of a large grant from the C.I.A. thru its fronts, or preferably, directly from CIA to COP. I don’t see why, in the balance of things, C.O.P.—President Peter Orlovsky, Vice President Ed Sanders of Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts and the Fugs—doesn’t deserve equally to receive government stipend as did more conservative socially-minded organizations. In other words if social education is to be paid for, it should not be education so one-sided as to be communally square. Investment in some hip community is only fair. Otherwise one part of the citizenry has been unfairly defrauded of its prerequisites and dignities. And the government may be accused of brainwash. Certainly that is not the conscious intention of the CIA, and if it were it would have to be repudiated.

If your agency does not have information about my own educational activities and those of my fellow trustees, or of the activities of COP, I will be glad to supply more detail. Meanwhile I await your reply. The sum of $10,000,000.00 would be useful the next few years to begin to right the unbalance of cinema, poetry, publishing, legal protection for artists and persons of new consciousness—their poverty and second class alienated status where government monies have been going in more aggressively angry and war making direction, specifically anti-communist in an ambivalently intemperate way.

While I am at it I would like to know if the CIA has a dossier on the undersigned? This may be a paranoid question, but in case of paranoia it is always comforting to check back to the reality, by open question.

Yours truly

 

Allen Ginsberg

 

 

[In ₁₉6₇ a controversy arose when a nude photograph of Ginsberg by Richard Avedon appeared in a college newspaper. The offending issue was suppressed and Allen came to the defense.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Whom It May Concern [Portland, OR] May ₂₉, ₁967

 

Dear Sirs, Journals, Committees, Presidents and Other Poetry Lovers:

 

Such a great nonsensical flap has been made over the circumstances attending a poetry reading I gave at Portland State University on May ₂₇, 1967, that I would like to add a few clear words and perhaps calm those curious who are calmable.

I arrived in Portland after a reading tour of various respectable universities throughout the nation—private and state supported colleges where I had been invited by student organizations often but mostly by English departments many of which include texts by me in their academic curricula—and had thus visited U of Texas, Iowa State, Kenyon, U of Southern California, Nashville’s Vanderbilt, U of New Mexico, U of Colorado, etc., as well as U of Oregon and Oregon State and Reed, the later Portland State’s near neighbors.

Monies gained from these poetry readings are all turned over to a pleasant tax exempt educational foundation and redistributed among poets and artists whose work has not been properly rewarded otherwise by larger institutions.

Portland State’s student newspaper published a photo story prior to my reading. The text included an inaccurate report that the school had requested and I had complied with a request to behave at Portland State with some especial “propriety.” Fortunately for everybody’s sanity no such request had been made. It would have been a provincial and ill-educated request: it remains a provincial and ill-educated fantasy.

The fantasy was complicated by the student newspaper’s printing a photograph of me by the celebrated photographer Richard Avedon, originally printed in his book on American persons, Nothing Personal. The book has been reprinted nationally in paperback, has sold calmly in Portland for a year. The photograph, a remarkable one, is of myself as a poet mostly naked, except that the controversial groin is modestly covered by the left hand with a Buddhist mudra (hand gesture) signifying contemplation. The right hand is raised palm out in Abhya Mudra, gesture of reassurance.

There is nothing in the picture to offend, unless one is offended by the sight of not quite naked person; in which case any slick magazine or local newspaper carrying bathing suit or shower soap advertisements might be found offensive, but they are not.

The fantasy was complicated further by an inaccurate rumor, that in college “performances” I remove my clothes. It is not generally known that I am initiated into a school of Hinduism some members of which do go abroad in the city ash-smeared and naked; this is Shivaite Hinduism but I am not a practicing Naga (naked) holyman. So I have not removed my clothes at a public reading for, alas, ten years. The one occasion in 1957 on which I did remove my clothes is, as an anecdote, too oft repeated (as in an issue of Life magazine a year ago) to be worthy of further repetition; but since such a small tale has never reached Portland in accurate form, apparently, I do bear witness that in a private house once upon a time a red haired lush from Hollywood interrupted fellow poet Gregory Corso in the midst of his long poem Power and shouted “Whatter you guys tryana prove?” and I spontaneously shouted back, “Nakedness!” and he shouted back “Whadya mean nakedness?” and so thinking over my own language I silently disrobed, and then clothed myself again, and then Corso continued the reading of Power.

All this has very little to do with Portland State, except that I do find it surprising that educated journalists would expect me to give the same answer twice.

The Portland State College fantasy over my body was further complicated by President Millar’s late discomfiture over the Avedon photograph. I explained to President Millar that, as far as I was concerned, the photograph was representative of my own self, so to speak; I had stood still for it, and certainly had no objection to seeing it in the newspaper reproduced. It had been reproduced in various student papers before, for that matter. So there was nothing unusual there. Yet I found a Portland newspaper supposedly quoting President Millar days after my arrival and departure from Portland to the effect that the Avedon photograph was mis-representative of the invited poet and some sort of insult. I therefore hasten to reassure President Millar, and Portland media, and the State Legislature itself if necessary, that I am not one to be insulted by my own physical image, especially photo’d in the act of making religious hand signs.

All gossip I have heard to date emphasizes the fact that all this great flapping and fantasy are traceable back to groups of ladies and gentlemen over college age who neither attended the poetry reading nor understood the significance of the photograph, and who assume that I am some sort of obscene quack ripping off my clothes in public, mouthing four letter words exclusively and mouthing them exclusively at Portland State, all this supposedly done for private financial gain or in an un-American attempt to subvert our tender youth who should be in training to die in Vietnam rather than listening to filthy poetry readings. This mentality has invaded the editorial columns of local and supposedly serious Portland newspapers; and in fact, one hears, it is a similar opinionation held by various State Legislators that has caused President Millar to take rash action, issue statement about my nudity to newspapers, suspend and burn the Portland State student newspaper, etc.

Reviewing the entire situation, I judge that there is a sickness of language and opinionation in Portland, a clear lack of basic information, a failed sense of humor, overwhelming anxiety for no real reason—almost all official persons concerned seem subject to nineteenth century fainting spells, the official kind that our Eastern grandmothers complained of.

Thank you for your attention,

 

Allen Ginsberg, poet

 

 

[An indication of just how busy Ginsberg was during the 1960s is given in this letter.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [London, England] to Gary Snyder [Kyoto, Japan] July ₂6, ₁₉6₇

 

Dear Gary:

 

Been in London—arrested for reading “Who Be Kind To” poem in Spoleto —opera Bouffe. Since here had great time at Poetry International for British Arts Council, reading as a team with ₇8 yr. old [Giuseppe] Ungaretti, Italian friend of Apollinaire—nicest old poet I met since WC.W Met Pound [at the Spoleto festival], silent just like Julius—looked in my eye tiny blue friendly pupils for ₅ minutes, held my hand wordless.

Evening with Paul McCartney, and several evenings with Mick Jagger of the Stones—we plan to make a side of Hari Krishna together for next Stones album—what beautiful Karma! Spent one nite watching Jagger, Lennon and McCartney composing “Dandelion Fly” hairy new record at studio. Looked like ₃ graces w/ beads and Persian shirts. They’re all turned on and dig the Diggers and new Fresh Planet. McCartney—“We’re all one.” They got out of their fame paranoia this year—treated me like familiar holy phantom and all turned on yaketing about high soul—chanted prajnaparamita to all, and all understood already—beautiful blue skies in London.

Now International Dialectics of Liberation—[Stokely] Carmichael angry and yelling, I stayed calm and kept chanting prajnaparamita. Gregory Bateson says auto CO₂ layer gives planet half-life: 10-30 years before ₅ degree temp rise irreversible melt polar ice caps, ₄₀₀ feet water inundate everything below Grass Valley⁵⁸—to say nothing of young pines in Canada dying radiation—death of rivers—general lemming situation. P. [Paul] Goodman sez welfare should save money by paying folks to live in the country. He has great ideas on rural reconstruction. Enclosed note from Gershon Legman.

I’m making big TV British poetry conversation chanting scenes—wearing bright red satin shirt hand painted by McCartney—color TV—Hari Om Namo Shivai. Maretta [Greer] here. Peter may come, and my father in one month, I’ll take him ₃ weeks London Paris Rome. Love to Philip—love to you. Emmet [Grogan] here too, organizing vast circus Hells Angels, Dead, McClure travel Europe.

Allen

 

 

 

[Ginsberg’s relationship with Orlovsky was always rocky, but as drugs became more important to Peter in the 1960s, Allen began to write letters from afar to calm situations that had spun out of control back home.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [London, England] to Peter Orlovsky [New York, NY] August 10, ₁967

 

Dear Peter:

 

Irving [Rosenthal] wrote and Barbara [Rubin] wrote, said you were on meth, thin, thinking house was afire, window moldings bugged or electrified, etc. and had begun taking them out. I don’t know how far you are into that thought process, but I am worried about the house, my manuscript etc. I can’t do much from here if things blow up. I wish you would quit playing with meth completely, you’ve seen in others it’s always created sensory or idea quirks that you didn’t like from the outside. There’s now so much chaos and craziness on all sides that I wish we two could be calm and not swept up into violence. I say, fix up the house, fix windows fast, quit all needles and all meth, clean up, and come over here to England.

Apparently Julius is more talkative now. Let that responsibility slide off your shoulders, quit that as much as possible, let Barbara and others take care of him for the summer.

I’m just talking straight rather than avoiding facts to you. If you get in such state that you lose weight, are obsessed with spy-bugging, call fire dept. for imaginary fires, wind up with police in house and yourself temporarily in Bellevue—things is gone too far.

I’d rather be with you than without you. Stop meth, cool everything, come over here. Phone me collect at Panna’s [Grady]. I’ll send you ticket immediately. Panna has big house, plenty room for both of us. My father and mother [Edith] will be here August 15, I’ll take them for ₃ weeks on continent—you can stay here in England and groove with Miles and others in big backyard artist’s studio that Panna has, she told me to tell you come here. I come back after I see my father off and we can all go to Russia.

Whatever you do please stay off meth. It’s always created problems bigger than can be cleaned up. It’s not a way of efficiency or accomplishment or getting things done, just the opposite.

That’s what I think is facts. [...]

I give reading here tomorrow night. Went up to Wales and took lovely acid trip, nature, lambs, cows, fogs drifting over mountain, immense float of air thru valley fanning the foxgloves and ferns. No worries, I fell on moist grass, it smelled like sweet brown vagina, and sighed with pleasure.

Sigh with pleasure and relax honey. I’ll write Barbara and Irving. Maretta was here with her Tony, needed money to leave and camped in my bed for weeks, they left an hour ago.

OK—Love

 

Allen

[Orlovsky didn’t go to Europe and Ginsberg didn’t return home, but he tried via correspondence to straighten things out between the two of them. It was really an impossible situation from that distance, but Allen tried to reassure Peter nonetheless. ]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Milan, Italy] to Peter Orlovsky [New York, NY] October 7, 1967

 

Dear Peter:

 

Sorry to be so slow writing. I received all the mail forwarded. I’m sorry also I’ve left you with all the ambiguity and anxiety of dealing with a lot of the financial problems which are strictly of my own making like the high phone bill and car insurance worries, etc. Now: enclosed find two checks signed to your name totaling $114.51. I also enclose the phone bill. Can you pay that bill (cashing checks at Ted or Grove) and that leave almost ₃₀ dollars extra for your own use?

I have money coming to me here from Italian book (Nanda’s Hydrogen Jukebox) so I have extra money now and no finance problems. I think I will come home soon-I really want to settle down quiet several months and do nothing social, just work on poetry books. I don’t know when yet—want to see Pound in Venice again first. I’ll send you another hundred in a few days, as soon as I get the Italian money (may be 6₀₀ or more so no worry). Have you got the tanpura yet or has money been too short? Please let me know. Your harmonium is in good health, and I use it daily and sing to everyone—practicing St. Francis Canticle to the Sun in Italian, and singing prajnaparamita in Italian too.

I hope you live years “₅₉₄ yrs., now,” but I never heard of anyone doing that except Methuselah in Bible. I don’t want to be a wet blanket except sometimes making simple plans for our life time when we are together you and me, I would be happier to be able to feel some security and make practical plans for the next year to come or at most next decade. Beyond that I’m no prophet.

Well I’m happy making it with you alone as long as we make it. I just chase after boys as substitute when I get the idea that you don’t want to be stuck with me and that I’m generally too old and repulsive to you now after so much familiarity. I mean I really got the idea the last year especially that you basically don’t dig making it with me and so as not to lay my needs on you I diverted sex lovemaking to others and accepted the situation cheerfully rather than getting hung up on it and laying guilt on you or me. I don’t in any case want to monopolize all your sex imagination and don’t fantasize monogamy for you or me. If you’ve been at all avoiding lovemaking with me because you think I need or deserve younger various cats, well stop that thought and let’s make it more again, I’d rather stick with you, if it were still pleasant to you. But basically—I think you’ve told me—that I’m getting physically too unappealing—which is no betrayal or fault of yours, that’s nature—so I’ve not wanted to force myself on you lest I seem even more unappealing in the cold light of detached awareness. I have need for love touch and sex come but I’m not so nuts as to think that you or anyone has to find me sexy—so I’ve just been taking what comes to me without my having to force the situation by willpower. Anyway, all I meant was, don’t get nervous about having to keep making it with me for ₅₉₄ years or ₄₅ if it ceases to be pleasing. The money situation and some inter-dependencies in household complicates our subjective schemes and fantasies.

The worst thing has been the meth—I never know who you are or where you are in the universe—and yet as long as there are practical attachments, as long as there are sex attachments of some kind also, there has to be some reliable meeting place. Otherwise I get scared my manuscript will disappear or you’ll change your mind in the middle of a trip and denounce me for being an old singing fink.

Well well finish later. Spent ₃ days with Inge Feltrinelli in castle in country-side of Lombardy, just got back. I’ll send another hundred soon hopefully tomorrow. Working with Nanda. Inge asked after you and so does Nanda and Ettore say hello. Julius OK?

Love

 

Allen

 

 

 

[Ginsberg stayed in Europe longer, in part, so he could visit Ezra Pound. That was a very important meeting for Allen, and he described it in detail.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Robert Creeley [Buffalo, NY] November 28, 1967

 

Dear Bob:

 

Came back to Lower East Side ₂ weeks ago, cleaned house up and foot thick pile of letters war resistance brochures books telegrams off desk answered finally, Peter back from driving Irving Rosenthal cross-country to settle near [Dave] Haselwood in S.F., Julius living with Barbara Rubin and girlfriends up on ₃rd Ave and talking and socializing a little at last; so I finally started picking thru last 7 years poetry for City Lights book, house clean quiet and phone off.

The bulk of the scribblings difficult to range together because except for ‘historic’ paeans like The Change or May King or Who Be Kind To, the mass of other occasional journal-writing has “too many words” (said Bunting); what I got is a lot of spontaneous music and natural language gaiety but I can put my finger thru holes in every other line. So I’m revising a little mostly blue-pencil to condense words already there, put them closer together and cut syntactic fat. Only fear is the stiffness that comes from revision, unnatural compression. I’d like a surface you can read clearly like clear talk and not have to “study.” So now about a third thru the poems, maybe done in couple weeks; then put together another book re U.S. Vietnam-States-Volkswagen tape machine Wichita Vortex, that’s about 100 pages I hope.

I’m scheduled to read in Buffalo March ₅, not seen correspondence (handled by agent)—is that a poetry festival? Will you be there then? I heard rumor you were going back to New Mexico, and then opposite gossip. John W [Wieners] with long peroxide blond hair?

Got busted by local cops in Spoleto over Who Be Kind To text (came for me in coffeehouse half hour after reading, out of blue, unexpected, in fact surprising, I didn’t do nothing, in fact I thought when they said ‘come with us’ it must have something to do with dope which fortunately I didn’t have any on me). Menotti said he’d take care of legalities (according to Italian law anything formally “art” is exempt from obscenity bust so everything is ultimately safe.) Trouble is that Italian legal structure (prosecutors and upper courts) is still operating on fascist premises, i.e. laws and personnel the same, unchanged, as in Mussolini’s day. Opposite U.S. where best chance is elders of Supreme Court, the last appeal Constitutional Court in Italy is all old men who were respectable judges during fascist days and so all Vatican and old order oriented; and the laws were patchwork thru 30s uncancelled by postwar constitution—requiring definite legislative revision or Constitutional Court decision to liberalize in line with theoretically liberal constitution. So to this day all public gatherings over ₅ people require formal authorization by police as “manifestation”—except for political gatherings which don’t require license. That’s fine except it excludes anybody unorganized as a political party i.e. you can’t have be-ins. So everything in Italy’s ossified, as far as polis goes; so for years police vans have been swooping down on Duomo Sq. Milan or Spanish Steps Rome arresting “Capelloni” —longhairs—so naturally by good fortune when I went with family to Italy en famille staying at Hotel Engleterre ₂ blocks from Keats’ death room over Spanish Steps, and sat down on steps one dusk to converse furtively with local ragazzi I did by god get busted again for ₃ hours. I tried to get out of it by sneaking across street when vans rumored arriving but got nabbed just after I thought I was safe.

Anyway that was later: went to England from Spoleto and stayed in style with Panna Grady and ran around a lot, finished proofs small book now published Cape-Goliard, yakked on TV and sang Hari Krishna in Hyde Park pot picnic, spent evening with Paul McCartney (He says “We are all one” i.e. all the same mystic-real being), spent a lot of evenings with Mick Jagger singing mantras and talking economics and law-politics during his court crisis—found him very delicate and friendly, reading Poe and Alistair Crowley—on thick carpets with incense and wearing ruffled lace at home—later spent nite in recording studio with Jagger, Lennon and McCartney composing and fixing voices on pretty song “Dandelion Fly Away” everybody exhilarated with hashish—all of them drest in paisley and velvet and earnestly absorbed in heightening the harmonic sounds inch by inch on tape, turning to piano to figure out sweeter variations and returning to microphone to try it out—lovely scene thru control booth window, I got so happy I began conducting like a madman thru the plate glass.

Waited in London for my father and stepmother, they stayed a week at Panna’s in garden studio, we gave a reading together at Institute Contemporary Arts and he came on so vibrant (first time in Europe after 71 years) one of the smaller publishers offered him a book, which he needs and hasn’t been able to get since his last, ₃₀ years ago, so that was a capital event; then we went on to Paris and sat on Pont des Arts and looked at the summer trees along the Seine and sat in cafes and sightsaw, I got hotels and taxis and carried luggage and had the pleasure of him realizing how much I knew of the outer world, and him experiencing that dimension, outside of images of movies and newspaper books—his big dream always was to stroll by wooden bookstalls on Left Bank, and so we did just that and bought views of wooden bookstalls etchings. Then a week in Rome where my arrest livened things up (he came down to the questura to try and get me out and saw the scene and so in reality and person was on my side in what otherwise would’ve been for him a faraway dubious newspaper scandal hallucination) (Tho I was already out of jail, nonetheless he said he enjoyed striding into police station resolved to get an explanation from the culprit authority.) And saw Vatican and a lot of statues, family began getting tired, a couple days in Venice refreshing, then they left for U.S., he wept—old nostalgia—going thru ticket taker to plane ramp.

So I stayed in Milan with Nanda Pivano a month, worked on translations with her—rewrote poems into Italian word by word for next book—amphetamine babble syntax difficult but I think we did something novel in the tongue. FINALLY, got reply from Olga Rudge and went to Rapallo to spend afternoon with Pound, he wouldn’t talk except “Would you like to wash your hands, she asks?” before lunch; and during lunch said “Ouvert d la Nuit” when Olga R and I asked him name of book by Paul Morand ₃₀ years ago-drove to Portofino with him for hour’s silent sit in cafe, he nodded negative when I asked if he’s ever tried hashish. Sang Prajnaparamita and Hari Krishna. I babbled a bit, but basically he’s stubborn as Julius was, I figured probably for similar reasons (Julius thought good was battling evil in universe and all the evil was coming from him so figured it was best to not do or say anything.)

Then went back to Milan and worked some more and wrote asked Rudge for date again in Venice, she wrote yes so I went alone to Venice and stayed in pension round corner from her tiny house. First day came to lunch as invited and brought gift Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Blonde on Blonde and more Beatles and Dylan and Donovan, drank some wine and smoked a stick of pot at table over coffee (without calling attention) looked Pound in eye and said, “Well old man, how old are you?” so he finally spoke “8₂ in several days.” Then turned on Beatles and Dylan, recited lyrics so he could distinguish “Sad Eyed Lowland Lady” words, he wouldn’t say nothing but sat thru ¾ hour of loud rock smiling, then I sang for an hour and went away and got drunk in Harry’s Bar.

Then for the next 2½ weeks I hung around, saw him on street, we went to concert Vivaldi in church one night, ate occasionally together in pension on days when Rudge didn’t cook, Italian TV was there making birthday documentary (he was 8₂ October ₃₀). After a day or so I began asking specific questions textual. “Where are the soap-smooth stone posts at San Vio, I went and looked and there they’re all rough” and he began answering. I kept record of everything he said, so, in sum stringing it all together exact words but sans context over ₂ weeks: “No! No! (to Rudge’s demand he have more Zucchini)...Yes, when the font was filled, now they’ve changed it, it used to be like that (to my question about “in the font to the right as you enter / are all the gold domes of San Marco” in Pisan Cantos) ... Don Carlos the pretender (what’s this “house that used to be of Don Carlos”?) ... Yes but my own work does not make sense ... Too late (when I asked if he’d like to read in Buffalo) ... Bunting told me there was too little presentation and too much reference... A mess... my writing, stupidity and ignorance all the way through... the intention was bad, anything I’ve done has been an accident, in spite of my spoiled intentions, the preoccupation with stupid and irrelevant matters... I do (give me, Allen, his blessing, after I demanded it)... but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice, all along that spoiled everything... I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron... I should have been able to do better... No (smiling) he never said that to me (when I reported W C. Williams told me Pound had a mystical ear)... (Cantos) it’s all doubletalk... it’s hard for me to write anything... I didn’t read enough poetry... (Cantos) it’s all tags and patches... a mess... my depression is mental not physical... it would be ingenious work to see any influence (his on younger poets as I described it including quoting from memory some of your poems, Robert) ... Williams was in touch with human feelings ... You know a great deal about the subject (replying after I’d explained LSD pot scene asking if I was making sense to him)... Worse, and alive...” That’s weeks boiled down.

So, I hung around till I thought my presence was getting heavy and left for States—having delivered many concise accurate pep-talks—nicest evening was his birthday, Olga R. invited me in to sing for him by fireplace late in evening, alone, sang Prajnaparamita “No Nirvana no path no wisdom and no attainment because no attainment” he sat quietly, sad, ate some birthday cake, sipped some champagne, said no he hadn’t read Crane’s Atlantis (which I thereat recited 20 lines from memory), signed 110 Canto pamphlet for “Alan Guinzberg dall’autore.” (Had said he hadn’t read any of my poetry, knew yours or recognized your name quickly knew who you were—also responded very fast yes head nod he’d received Briggflats [by Basil Bunting]).

Olga Rudge says that oddly nobody has invited him to the U.S. lately, the last invitations situation wasn’t sure and Laughlin I think’d interfered, or someone had. I asked if it would be alright to make discrete inquires at Buffalo or Berkeley. I think if it were handled gently, without too much fuss, he could be invited to Buffalo (Rudge knows about your and poesy activity there, as a center) especially for a festival. She said there is an invite for Opera Villon from Buffalo. But if situation is OK there, is it possible to invite him to appear like for a short poetry reading,—which he can and does still do—(as he still does write)? I think they would come. It would be glorious if it worked. They’re worried about a fuss (political and otherwise) being made—need a smooth journey and comfort/privacy/attention for an old man—would presumably have quiet dinners with few people, maybe attend a concert or reading, and give a reading. He has spry physical strength. Don’t know how much money they’d need. But we could all get together and contribute. Mainly I said I’d inquire (said to Rudge) if inquiries could be made without large gossip. Meant to write you earlier. I told Rudge the great scene also would be for him to visit SF read perhaps at Berkeley or SF State. If something can be done at Buffalo, and Rudge and Pound are willing, maybe contact Parkinson. I don’t think they’d be able to do more in public than that, if that. Rudge sort of takes care of him, food, letters, visitors, travel arrangements, etc. Can write her, she said not to circulate address, otherwise.

OK—Bravo! Cheers! love to Bobbie, and where’s Olson? Tell John Wieners salve. Peter says “Tell him a lotta good things.”

As ever

 

Allen

Tone of this letter strange to me. I waited so long to write, the letter got to be long, and I couldn’t figure out where to begin about Pound so kept describing other things. Also saw Pasolini, Antonioni, Quasimodo, Montale, Ungaretti and all the Feltrinellis, Mondadoris and Balistrinis and Nonos in sight.

 

 

[At the urging of his close friend, Barbara Rubin, Ginsberg decided to buy a farm in upstate New York as an artists’ retreat. He hoped friends like Kerouac, Orlovsky, Corso, and Huncke would use the farm as an escape from the city and a place to break their various addictions. He wrote a beautiful letter to the old woman who owned the land, coaxing her to sell it to him, which she eventually did.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Mrs. LaSalle [Buffalo, NY] May ₉, ₁₉68

 

Dear Mrs. LaSalle:

 

The farm land that you own on East Hill is to my heart quiet, green pines at the state-land edge where there’s still a stream in May with trees I don’t know names of except pussywillows which I remember from New Jersey where I grew up near woods—we had a house on what’s now main street. I’ve lived in New York most of my adult life, but traveled a lot in Far East and done some wilderness-backpacking and mountain climbing so have developed more taste for mother nature that I had not known younger. I live now in Lower East Side New York in what would be called stone slum and am cheerful here and do my work but I become increasingly conscious that all the noise, metal motor, stone, gas smog, no green life is not healthy for me or others, and so want more and more to find a place where I can see sky, clear air, movement of wind on trees and trembling of branches and flowers and weeds. I know the city well, and have prospered, have some grey hairs in my beard as my great grandfather did (whom I remember alive) and while I have energy want to learn to live and learn more of Earth than I know.

I write poetry and live modestly in the city, but more money comes to me than I need, and so half year ago with friends began to look around for a place of retreat that I could buy for myself and a few other old or young sensible people that felt it was time to turn back and look at the land and cultivate it, or try to learn how to plant and grow some organic food for ourselves—we are mostly accustomed to vegetables and not much meat at all. The main idea was a quiet retreat in nature where we could learn something by working, where we could find some peace.

Your old farm is like a lonely Eden, the people we have met there like Ed Eurick [Urich] have been friendly and helpful and understood our lack of experience and we’ve followed Ed’s advice how to cheer up the valley—begun by digging out the muck/ dust from the well so it’ll work (get rid of the foot of silt at the bottom)—planning to lay a plastic pipe to kitchen and install a pump thru Mr. Keller who came up and advised us—then later get a back-hoe dig a trench and lay the pipe under frost line—then later put in storm windows, get in gas for heat, fix up the house for winter use cozy, (they tell us it’s snowbound as far as machines)—and begin now (as Ed was arranging) get an acre or two ploughed for planting some vegetables in the next weeks. Begin slow and do one thing at a time. There’s a young couple there, who want to stay thru winter, (as I will be often away teaching or lecturing, and then back for weeks at a time). And one or two other friends who’ve worked on farms before and appreciate the beauty and isolation of East Hill, and like Ed Eurich [Urich]—so it all seems to be working out fine as we’d all hoped since we first saw the land and offered to buy it; Mr. Watrous and Mr. Kramer said $7500, and because I’ve just finished a poetry reading tour of about twenty colleges from Buffalo U. to Sacramento State U and Houston State, all over the country Salt Lake and all, I have the cash on hand to buy it without having to borrow from banks or complicate matters with delay in payment. So the day I saw it I put down $100 Mr. Watrous asked.

My brother who is a lawyer (with five children who would love to run around in the woods down by that stream) tells me that there is technical difficulty with the title, and that seems to be the only cloud in the sky, and says that should be cleared up or I shouldn’t take a big step like this. I guess I should follow his advice, and tho the situation seems to be unclear, I am hoping that some way will be found that we can all go through with the purchase in a way which would be happy for everybody concerned.

I feel strongly enough about the purity and goodness of the land itself that I think that if we humans can solve our complications East Hill will show itself a good and healthy place to live—I talked to the Simmons’ who had lived there after the turn of the century and they encouraged the project too. So I would like to make an effort as strong as possible to win the place by trying first to resolve the technical difficulties of the title, title insurance, etc.—so that everyone will feel secure and reassured. I would like to come up to see you in Buffalo with a friend who’ll help on the farm, you can look us over and see if we look fit to care for your land with the right attention it deserves, and maybe sitting down together we can figure some way to straighten out all our problems and worries together—that’s always the sensible-est thing to do when there’s doubts. I wouldn’t be happy to buy the land unless you also felt it a good thing in the end, I pray that you will.

Respectfully yours,

 

Allen Ginsberg

 

[Once settled on the farm, Ginsberg wrote to Gary Snyder to tell him about it. He referred to building a cabin on land he had also purchased next to Gary’s property in the Sierras. He also hinted at his involvement in the upcoming 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Cherry Valley, NY] to Gary Snyder [Kyoto, Japan] July 8, ₁₉68

 

Dear Gary:

 

Kept putting off writing because I had so much to say, so I’ll be brief. I bought (or am buying) a farm upstate NY, isolated ₂₀₀₀ feet up near Cooperstown, surrounded by State Forest—70 acres and old 8 room house $9,000.00, spending a few thousand more to fix up for the winter. Peter and Julius been up there several months, Gregory Corso and his girl, Barbara Rubin pining for me (ugh!) (ouch I mean) and a young competent film-maker farm couple. We have ₃ goats (I now milk goats) 1 cow 1 horse (chestnut mare for pleasure) 15 chickens ₃ ducks ₂ geese ₂ fantail pigeons, small barn right size, nearby a friendly hermit been up there sans electric since 1939 teaching us how to manage and what to repair. More Kibbutz than commune, very loose, but the place is getting organized, Julius has work to do and speaks, Peter’s mostly off meth and calm. No electric, now hand pump, we’re digging well up in our woods so as to have gravity fed running water. 15 acres of woods one side, the other sides all state woods permanent—pine oak and maple etc. Got lotsa books on flowers. Table is meatless, we eat fish tho. So that’s started. Will also build simpler place sooner or later in California land. Visited Tassajara finally one nite.

Local (U.S.A.) sociopolitics confusing. This yippie hippie be-in shot in Chicago has been a big drag since undercurrents of violence everywhere (state and street Black Mask etc.) make peaceful gestures seem silly. Yippie organization’s in wrong hands sort of. Would like to get out or redirect it to some kind of prepositional new nation confabulation, but I don’t have time.

Finished proofs of Planet News Poems 61-67 for Ferlinghetti, and Indian Journals for Auerhahn Haselwood. Next, collected poesy volume and collected interview/essay/manifesto volume to compile—all work’s done except editing that.

Skandas Snyder??? Sounds Norwegian (Poor l’il Skandas). Well let’s see, a name—let’s see the body of bliss first. Other gossip—I’d spent ¾ hour w/ Robert Kennedy discussing pot, ecology, acid, cities, etc. a month before he started running for Prexy and died. Peter/ meth big Karmaic problem. Gave up (drifted off) sex with him to take off pressure if that was it. Lightens our relations a lot.

I’m driving to Mexico w/ brother and ₅ nephews and sister in law, ₂ weeks and thence to SF again meet my father and show him around ₂ weeks—then likely back to the farm—maybe trip out to convention Chicago and back, hole in for several months.

Wrote one fantastical poem about being screwed in ass with repeated refrain “please master” which really got me a little embarrassed, but read it at last SF Poesy Renaissance big reading and it turned out to be, as usual, universal, one hole or another, one sex or another. Really amazing year after year I stumble on to areas of shame or fear and their catharsis of community awareness takes off the red-cheeked bane.

How’s fatherhood? Babyhood? I wrote Kapleau and he sent me his prajnaparamita translation—he chants it English monosyllables one of the Tassajara Senseis or Roshis is a Sanskrit expert, we can check out w/ him on your next trip here. Any plans? OK.

Love, as ever

 

Allen

I keep straying on mental anger warpaths, and then come back to milking the goats.

 

 

[The farm never became the escape from addictions that Ginsberg had hoped. Everyone just smuggled drugs in under Allen’s nose, but he eventually tried to be more strict. In the end he was unsuccessful.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Cherry Valley, NY] to Herbert Huncke [New York, NY] February ₁6, 1969

Dear Herbert:

 

Leaving for NY tonite to lecture at New School, arrived here last night. Maybe see you in NY. In case I miss you and you return here while I’m gone hello.

Louis [Cartwright] left this afternoon, to get job in NY; David went with him, unable to sleep most of last night, still sick, saying he was going into city to work music and stay clean. I tried persuading David to stay, but as I was leaving today myself it lacked force. I told him he was welcome to rest / cure /, but NOT welcome to wobble back and forth between here and NY scoring weekly which he, you and Louis have been doing.

As you remember this place was set up as refuge from chemical city conditions, and it worked with difficulty reasonably well for you the first months. Since Louis and then David been here and since you’ve been adamantly guarding yr spike [syringe] the last month, that original condition has degenerated more and more till the issue’s muddy.

So I’m taking it on myself to clarify the original proposition to which you originally agreed, and repeat it clearly: you’re welcome to home here, but no needle drugs and no needles on the premises. If there are no needle drugs here there’s also no function for needles. Their presence is not sentimentality, it’s practical. If this condition doesn’t meet with your approval, then the whole house is not a viable situation for you and I suggest you make some other arrangement, and go back to the city.

This is nothing new, just repeat of the old conditions. If you don’t think it’s suitable that’s up to you, and you’re free to choose another household elsewhere.

I mean this seriously enough, once for all, to be understood. As you do have a tendency to deceive and burn yourself and others I will have to insist on your following the ground rules already agreed to. If I have any suspicion that you are creating illusions, speaking false words on the subject, I will not hesitate to search your room and your person.

As you may remember the last time round your words did not mean what they said and were meant to confuse me.

My own words above mean what they say: you’re welcome here without needle, without needle drugs. You are not welcome here with needle and needle drugs. You’re welcome here to kick and lay out. The house-social and town-social situation won’t support the strain of needle drugs.

I’m leaving this explicit here, including the flat statement that I won’t hesitate to search if I’m being double-crossed on the matter. It’s not very pleasant but there seems to be no other way of definitively, actually, clearly and straightforwardly ending a problem which has been too long prolonged by my hesitancy and your insistency on having needle and drugs here. OKOKOK.

As ever,

 

Allen

I’m showing this note to all concerned and leaving it to be given to you on yr return if I’m not here, so there will be no ambiguity

 

 

[During the late 1960s, Allen joined the War Tax Resisters and refused to pay income taxes that would go toward military spending. He clearly stated his position in this letter to the Secretary of the Treasury, David Kennedy.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to David Kennedy [Washington, DC] July ₁6, 1969

 

Dear Mr. Kennedy:

 

This is response to your Department’s notice of 11 July, 1969 concerning tax assessment against me of $1488.68 plus interest asserted as $₂1.₂₅ for the year 1968.

I am not able to pay this money into our Treasury to be expended in the present illegal and immoral effort to kill or subdue more Vietnamese people.

I have retained attorneys with regard to your claim against me and am instructing them to present the appropriate documents and authorities to your office as necessary to manifest my anxiety and inability to pay for this painful war.

I am obliged to inform you that I spent all of the modest amount of money I earned that last year in keeping alive and helping others maintain their lives. You should also know that I am physically, mentally and morally unable to earn moneys to pay for the Vietnam war. Basic, traditional ethics of my profession of poetry prohibit me from assigning money earned incidental to the publication of literary compositions pronouncing the inhumanity and ungodliness and un-American nature of this war toward funding the very same war. My religious feeling is of a divine nature in persons so I wish to waken the divine in yourself by clearly explaining that I conscientiously object to and am incapable of paying money into the Treasury for war use in Vietnam. Equally clear is an awareness that so much as I may finance violence to others, equal measure of such violence shall be returned inevitably to my own person. I am absolutely afraid of this retribution.

As my religious apprehensions and convictions and my psychological condition prevent me from paying taxes into the treasury of the Vietnam war, an equally commanding practical and personal awareness of socially and economically deprived millions of fellow persons in America prevents me from supporting an inequitable and unfair tax system which places the costs of an horrific war so heavily upon poor, ecologically disoriented and hungry people, and transfers so much money as profit to investors in questionable military-industrial enterprises encouraged by and consequent to this constitutionally inappropriate war.

I am willing to pay your tax assessment by donating what money I will have to any tax exempt program acceptable to your department which will benefit money-poor Americans or protect natural resources wasted as consequence of war-haste.

I humbly request an appointment to meet with you with my attorney to discuss the policy decision which you must soon make as to how the numbers of persons who feel as I do are going to be treated by your department. We plan to offer reasonable alternative to paying taxes supporting the Vietnam war. I can’t live in peace with myself and pay taxes into a fund which goes directly into the Vietnam war. This prospect has made me physically ill. If our tax system is so inequitable it cannot find a reasonable alternative such as payment of these taxes into a fund which is not used in this war then I am willing to go to jail.

Sincerely yours,

 

Allen Ginsberg

[Ginsberg’s greatest political debates continued to be with his father. This letter was in response to Allen’s support of the militant Black Panthers. Louis disapproved of their tactics, in part due to Panther support of Arab interests in Israel.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Cherry Valley, NY] to Louis Ginsberg [Paterson, NJ] February 15, 1970

Dear Lou:

 

Take it easy don’t blow your top, I took it easy & didn’t blow mine this last few weeks despite attacks of rage similar to yours in letter “My rage will know no bounds.” I think probably the Panthers feel exactly the same emotions we do, and the Arabs feel that precise violent sense of outrage, and the Jews identifying with Israel feel that adrenaline brilliance pounding in the gorge & forehead.

I do imagine that it’s as Burroughs suggests some sort of trust of giant insects from another galaxy operating thru manipulation of images to drive everybody out of their skulls in states of outrage so blind it will blow up the planet so the insects can take over. Or if the metaphor’s too outlandish, it’s a trust of secret military bureaucrats (Israeli military vs. Egyptian military, Russian military vs. Pentagon) who have an interest in each other’s mounting opposition—symbiosis like Narcotics Police & Mafia who have a mutual interest in keeping the junkies (100,000 in NY) persecuted as badly as Jews or Arabs or Blacks anywhere.

My direct experience of the Panthers hasn’t been the same as your newspaper clips. I spent time smoking pot with [Eldridge] Cleaver & [Stokely] Carmichael in Nashville while the Nashville Banner newspaper incited a riot to coincide with Carmichael’s presence in Nashville & was with both of them the night of a violence which was blamed directly on them by U.P.I. and NY Times. Panther means fight back when attacked. As I don’t believe in this strategy I part ways with them there; and I think they’ve stuck to fighting back when attacked, and they have been attacked illegally & grievously, despite accountings of Reisel & others, in accounting by Life and ACLU & enormous mass of weekly reports I’ve read from dozens of cities in underground press for ₂ years now, material which you haven’t seen. Which I can send as I keep it all here in boxes, tho it will only fatigue the reader with such a welter of “institutionalized” violence that you realize the Panther cries are just what we hear, of an unnumbered & unreported myriad illegalities, beatings, false arrests, insults, unconstitutional force & illegal court process so deep and vast from south where it’s acknowledged to north where it’s complained about, suffered thru, & bears scars from head from. Panthers in context are Irgun⁵⁹ in context. The amazing thing is that Black Violence and Zionist Violence come head on like immovable force & unpushable object round the corner of the world, each with the same fear of extermination and violent sense of outrage. It is precisely the same anxiety that motivated Panthers-like military competence in Israel that motivates Dayan-like⁶⁰ language and behavior & propaganda among the Panthers.

As I would not see myself as Black if I were black, I don’t see myself as a Jew as I am a Jew, & so don’t identify with nation of Jews anymore than I would of nation of America or Russia. Down with all nations they are enemies of mankind! And nationalism is disease. If this be renegade treason etc. remember that’s precisely the rhetoric the Panthers apply to blacks who cooperate with white culture police.

You can’t have Jewish integrity at the expense of Panther sympathy or Arab reality any more than you can have Arab integrity at price of Jewish extermination. Napalm & violence & bombing from Jewish or Arab hands has already escalated the problem beyond reasonable solution. I don’t have a solution except not to take sides that involve bloodying anyone’s ass or any kind of political violence. If however everyone insists on being violently right, then we will all have to suffer it through & die violently at various idiots’ hands, Jewish idiots, Arab idiots, American idiots, Maoist idiots, liberal idiots, reactionary idiots. All the same violence and it’s always proved wrong. By hindsight I wonder if WW II actually solved anything? How many more would’ve been killed unnaturally if Hitler had his madness enacted, than have already been killed as we’ve had our madness enacted? I dunno. Obviously no reality to that thought except as it’s a thought entertainable among many nowadays.

I didn’t read Dave McReynolds’ circular. Generally his judgment is good. He was among the first to protest A-bomb drills, and in the 1960’s was early organizer with [David] Dellinger and others of anti-war movement. He then took a pacifist position on war buttressed with reasonable arguments against the Vietnam war which arguments are now considered universal—e. we have no right fighting their war, we shd hold elections as per Geneva Convention, it’s wrong war wrong place etc. He also gave 10 years working against that war while others including myself had not yet had our consciences roused. He’s not “communist.” He may have different opinion re Panthers than you but his sincerity is unquestionable and it doesn’t help reconciliation to refuse his essay any dignity. It’s reconciliation or death for everyone, that includes you as well as Arabs and Panthers. So don’t blow your top.

I’m meanwhile worried about Dellinger going to jail, & the rest of the conspirators, because I suppose it’s getting nearer. I’m next unless I begin to shut up & give in and participate (i.e. pay taxes) for the war. The thing that really amazes me is slow discovery of how much of my comfort & ability is the result of labor of others and suffering of other forms of life. I don’t think that we in U.S. with all our ease are in a position to be very much outraged at disturbances being made by people living in subhuman or nonhuman circumstances. Be glad you’re not black & living on River Street or behind the market by the docks in Port Au Prince & that I have a nice typewriter & comfy light to write you a letter with. Remember most people ain’t got what to eat, and it’s going to get worse.

Until we can recognize & solve Black problems we’ve created—like, in N.J. mafia dominated police and politics that we’ve refused to acknowledge for over a decade tho blacks were outspoken about it—& that includes Paterson especially you know—we’re not in position to lecture Panthers. I once asked Carmichael what he’d do if he were me—he said sensibly, “Pacify the white violence, calm the whites.” Obviously that’s one thing we can do, it makes no sense to lecture Panthers on their violent rebellion against the police until you can, at very least say that the police and mafia are not working together in NJ as well as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, etc.

Well ok, don’t blow yr top, realize the actual problems drive people mad because they are maybe insoluble with present population pressure anyway. I blew my top with Eugene like you blew your top with me, rather than lay it back on you, & that’s the net result of violence—passing it on down the line till it returns to the self. Well this is all obvious.

Regarding Reisel, Evans & Novak articles: They have reduced the number of probably killed by police to a dozen or ₁₀ depending on count; & blamed all violence on the Panthers. This is just doublethink. The number of publicized deaths may well be only a dozen. ACLU has more extensive analysis and details, even Life shows a different picture. I remember that the Panthers first began on West Coast after years of abuse of Blacks in Oakland, & I remember the context, Panther as “fight back when & only when attacked” from the beginning. You’d have to rewrite all the newspaper work SF 1960-65 to eliminate that context. Read Cleaver’s book. OK

 

Allen

[A short note from Ginsberg to Carolyn Cassady described Kerouac’s funeral a few months earlier. It showed just how deeply Allen was moved by the loss of his friend.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Cherry Valley, NY] to Carolyn Cassady [Los Gatos, CA] February 19, 1970

 

Dear Carolyn:

 

Jack’s funeral very solemn, I went with Peter and Gregory and John Holmes in Holmes’ car, saw Jack in coffin in Archambault funeral home on Pawtucketville Street Lowell, same name and funerary home from Jack’s own memory—and pallbore thru high mass at St. Jean Baptiste. Jack in coffin looked large headed, grim-lipped, tiny bald spot top of skull begun but hair still black and soft, cold skin make up chill to finger touch on his brow, fingers wrinkled, hairy hands protruding from sports jacket holding rosary, flower masses around coffin and shaped wrinkle-furrow familiar at his brow, eyes closed, mid-aged heavy looked like his father had become from earlier dream decades. Shock first seeing him there in theatric-lit coffin room as if a Buddha in Parinirvana pose, come here left his message of illusion—wink and left the body behind.

Sad I didn’t call you before, but too much woe, life and business on my desk till this dusk. Take care of yourself.

OK—as ever

 

Allen

 

 

 

[Once again writing to Gary Snyder, Ginsberg touched on a wide range of topics from practical matters such as a wind charger to his continued interest in drug experimentation.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Cherry Valley, NY] to Gary Snyder [Nevada City, CA] August 24, 1970

 

Dear Gary:

 

Home on farm since mid-May, I’m finally catching up with masses of unanswered letters a year old, and cleaning desk.

Have been continuing organ practice and can now notate and play and sing melodies and chords simultaneous; so been setting new songs more elaborately than before. If you didn’t receive the Blake record (and also Indian journals) send me a card.

Wind-charger’s now set up here on platform next to the ram house, with batteries and a solid state inverter set down below frost line in ram house, and wires leading to remote switch in house by radiophonotape machine units. And it all doesn’t work.

At least not in summer, we’re told winter winds much more ample will provide plenty of electric. As it is the batteries just run down slower than before. We may have defective batteries. All these kinks to be ironed out in the next year, by then we’ll have some workable system to produce ₄₀₀ watt’s worth—four hundred watt litebulbs. Using neon lights you get brighter illumination for 20-30 watts by the way, if electric’s scarce. Meanwhile, if you’re interested, you can run TV or minor electric equipment off car or golf cart batteries. I’ll let you know what we work out.

I wake every morning totally depressed, ₄ or ₅ AM, Leary and [John] Sinclair in jail in my mind, the weight of sustaining the farm heavy in light of apparent continuing disintegration of social order. Vast garden crops coming in, and we’ll have canned 100 cases of vegetables (corn peas stringbeans etc.) enough, really, for winter survival, I’m amazed to see—by the end of harvest. Great organic garden this year, ₃’d year of Gordon Ball’s experience and study —also planted orchard of fruit trees and permanent strawberry and asparagus beds on hill above house.

I got 12 dollar sleep bag and sleep out under stars in full moon now—stayed out for Perseid meteorite shower last week.

Not getting much literary writing done but now recently converting ₄AM depression energy raw consciousness of disaster into articulate notes in notebook at bedside, so it lightens my mind load and in a few months I’ll know or be able to read back and see what’s bothering me.

Ferlinghetti got invite ₁₃ readings Australia next May so I said I’d go along (as I was invited) if the money was all right, and spend a month down under. Thence see Bodrubadur or Polynesia or Philip Whalen, return via India Persia take time. I think I need to go around the world again (like pulling a chain—“I think I need to go to the bathroom again”).

Don Allen phone today said you were starting your house walls, beams and rafters and roof must be in? What’s happening? In brief, send me a postcard.

The cities—I went to Yale Panther Rally May Day and saw Genet, he gave a great “commencement” speech which I got a copy of and prefaced for City Lights to publish—teargassed there chanting om a hum. Then to Washington May 9 and teargassed there singing plain Om. Have been immersed here ever since, walking in woods and sleeping recovering from city shock—catching up with paperwork.

O! I got one cylocybin Mexican authentic mushroom (silk-smooth purplish cap) and ate it—with Maretta and others—tastes fine unlike peyote or any other preparation—absolutely easy, natural, not a trip i.e. no departure from any normal custom, you just eat some food, some food, soma-esque food, but basically just regular body food that tastes like ordinary Jap dried mushroom if you soak it halfway and chew it—found myriad tiny fish making ripples in the green backwater behind the beaver dam, frog sitting haunch in mud, head stuck out looking around the woods where we passed—walked 6 hours all over neighbor’s hills and found old woods familiar and neighbor lake set in valley below reminiscent of Tolkien landscape. First such experience since 6₇ and just about imperceptibly smooth transition from quotidian activity and perceptions. So all’s well there. Collecting fly agaric here as per Wasson’s Soma book but won’t try till I find expert.

Saw Sakya Lama last spring in Seattle—he said “Marijuana? O that’s fine” —but hadn’t tried LSD. Saw Trungpa Tolku and had long happy high talk, sang and chanted. He demonstrated proper phat sound—a “hike!” in back of throatskull like a soprano baby shriek, very lovely.

Maretta Greer here, back from street sadhu begging sadhana year in Rawalpindi—she wants to go back and settle in Ladakh. Very good shape, meditates and does mantra quietly all day like the Sakyapa old man did, she also reads extensively now, got herself together quite neat, everyone remarks on her beauty and quiet demeanor, and she helps out here and there with gardening or canning or curry cooking—we take long silent walks in woods. Ray Bremser and wife and babe here almost half year. Peter strong and marvelously straight compared to last year—he don’t drink smoke or speed—I don’t smoke now also. Practically no sex also—all dem vegetables. OKluv, regards to Masa and kids. I hear you’re overproducing your scheduled Changes? Well I guess we’ll have to colonize the sun.

As ever

 

Allen

[Ginsberg often cited the British system in which they dealt with junkies as a medical issue and not a legal problem as a step in the right direction. He was never able to get much support from politicians in this country, however. In this letter he made his case to his congressman, Ed Koch.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Ed Koch [New York, NY] September 22, 1970

 

Dear Representative Koch:

 

I’ve by now read and pondered March 30, 1970 NY Times’ survey of British easy handling of junk problems, and a series of associated articles, by Richard Severo, which you cited to me as influencing you to impression that my proposition of total medicalization of U.S. addict problem is unsupportable by British experience. I’ve also been in brief correspondence with Severo, who has not been communicative. I have the impression he’s a philosophical conservative who probably thinks I’m mad, or immature. In any case I can’t get any dialogue going with him, to discuss his position. That’s why it’s taken so long for me to get back to you on this point we spoke of at Moratorium May ₉, D.C.

OK—my conclusion is that, again, NY Times and Severo are continuing same vast misjudgment that’s been going on for decades and has created the U.S. junk problem.

Put simply, the British practice has been effective in CONTAINING the number of addicts and avoiding all the hideous fallout characteristic of police and police-mentality dominated system in U.S.A.

It would take more time to document criticism of Severo’s evaluation of British system than I have right now but briefly bear these obvious facts in mind:

NYC with population similar to London has 100 to 200 thousand addicts and they’re multiplying while London has one hundredth the number—2000 presently “known.”

Now that simple fact is the whole story. Present narco bureau line, and Severo’s reasoning, is that there is a huge jump in addiction in Britain in last ₁₀ years. Yes that’s so, but for various reasons (see below) NOT mentioned by Severo. Causes of rise in number of British addicts include:

1. General historic escalation of drug culture adding a limited few hundred more junkies to rolls, not a mortal problem.

2. . Confusion and spotty black market caused by shift over from individual doctor to clinic system and stricter “state” control. At beginning many junkies were cut off from doctors and assigned to clinics which didn’t yet exist except on paper during transition year 1965 or 7 around then. This caused slight black market, and junk-spread.

3. . Invasion-influence of panicked neurotic U.S. addicts who sought refuge in London bringing their U.S. “criminal” paranoia with them—I know many personally, i.e. overflow of anxiety from U.S. and overflow of U.S. malpractice by addicts conditioned to police state black market conditions. Continuous pressure by high level U.S. drug-police bureaucracy and police-connected MD’s on British to change their system and persecute junkies led also to some unsettlement of conditions there, i.e. premature and possibly unnecessary shift to clinic system and depersonalization of medical attention. What was needed was slightly more supervision of doctors as a few were overwriting. Transition to clinic system was influenced by U.S. pressure.

4. . Increased efficiency in statistics gathering and registration due to transition from relatively unsupervised and basically workable private doctor system to strictly registered clinic system. This latter is probably one of the biggest factors in paper rise of addiction statistics in Britain.

 

If you examine Severo’s articles closely you find they are based on a paper statistical rise in number of registered or “known” addicts (Opiate addicts) from 437 in 1960 to 2,782 in 1968. The greatest numerical rise came after stiffening of registration procedures. Severo and narco bureau reasoning does not include any of the ₄ key considerations above—and Severo and narco bureaus in non sequitur extrapolate this paper-large but practically small rise in addiction to the following scare argument which I propose is irrational:

“What would happen if the present (U.S.) addiction problem grew geometrically, spawned by a free heroin program... ?” (later Times article May 30, 1970. Severo)

This is non sequitur because:

1. “Geometrical growth” of British addiction was mainly on paper and due to factors outlined above, and not “spawned” by medically supervised legal opiate supply, which is improperly termed “free heroin.”

2. . Best medical sociology in U.S. attributes giant growth of U.S. addiction quite specifically to the opposite: cash nexus of black market. This historic point completely ignored by Severo and U.S. drug bureaucracy, is a major point made officially by historic and frequently ignored 1963 NY Academy of Medicine Bulletin Report on Drug Addiction: “It is reaffirmed that profit is a major force in the spread of addiction.”

 

All these conditions and considerations are completely ignored by Severo who has presented a partial and prejudicial view of what is in fact the successful containment of the same problem which in the U.S. is the single largest cause of breakdown of urban morale law and order. The fact that in Britain the entire problem is contained mainly to small group in medical control, and does not overflow to be the cause of vast street and house crime, overload of courts, breakdown of legal procedure, alteration of constitutional propriety in stop and frisk laws, etc., has simply not been taken into consideration. Severo’s analysis in the end relies on a slight rise in physical addiction and huge rise in paper addiction, all of which he attributes, in his own prejudicial and inflammatory phraseology to “free heroin.” The rest of his article is sensationalist interviews with a few lost junkies in London. His articles do not take into account the comparative sociology of NY-London junk scene, crime fallout, breakdown in fabric of society. Nor are basic constitutional and humane considerations taken into account. In the long run common sense and humane treatment of sick addicts by medical service rather than police service is the only sane way, both practically and sociologically and also from human-relations emotional point of view. U.S. policy of police state control in this area has been deliberately brutal, and we are now paying for that breach of common civility. “Do unto others”—200,000 junkies in NY are doing unto middle class exactly as middle class has done to them—i.e. violence and corruption.

I enclose a little documentation of the present crisis escalation of the junk problem in NY. Please Xerox and return this to me rapidly.

1. Overwhelming mass of informed medical opinion thinks U.S. system is historically crazed.

2. . Bulk of lobbying for police nonmedical system comes from police not from qualified medical experts. Report after official report says police system is wrong and criticizes police pushiness.

3. . Bulk of narcotics police Federal State and local in U.S. themselves historically have been pushing, and thus have self interest in scarcity drug market. This third point is a key point, with all its implications, and it is entirely documentable from the NY Times over last few years, see enclosed clippings.

Present repressive drug bureaucracy inside U.S.A. is itself responsible for the entire junk plague. Until that point is understood in all its shocking grandeur, you will never understand the entire breakdown of law and order in U.S.

Please remember: There exists documentation of the assertion that the bulk of U.S. drug police themselves sell. As you may remember, Ramsey Clark indicted ₃₂ out of 80 Federal Narcs in 1967. He recently remarked that 1) that was all he could get evidence against, ₂) this condition had been going on for at least a quarter century. That’s what he told me.

My documentation of drug peddling and extortionary activities of police comes mostly from the press, oddly. There is now sufficient data on this fact on public record. It is completely ignored as crucial to understanding of drug problem. On one page we read of universal corruption in drug police bureaus; on another, fascist demands for more police to solve the drug problem. No politician has ever put these idiot facts together in one analysis.

As ever

 

Allen Ginsberg

Scribe

 

 

 

[Ginsberg’s continued frustration with the articles he read in the New York Times is evidenced in this letter to columnist C. L. Sulzberger. Allen continued to correspond in this manner with Sulzberger and years later won an apology from him concerning some of his points about CIA involvement in drug smuggling.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [Cherry Valley, NY] to C. L. Sulzberger [New York, NY] November 26, 1970

 

Dear Mr. Sulzberger:

 

U.S. agents immediately became active with the “new authorities” in Cambodia according to Charles Meyer New York Times November 20, 1970; followed by vast U.S.-Saigon invasion, as well as enormous open military aid to strengthen pro U.S. Cambodian Government. Given the history of covert CIA and infra-CIA activity all thru the area it would seem likely that Prince Sihanouk was headed in “that direction,” as you put it, mainly because of U.S. activity (including your own depressing verbal activity, cosmic military babble, etc.)

Despite fragmentary objections to covert invasions and destruction of democratic politics by CIA in SE Asia and elsewhere there still has been no comprehensive exact inventory of that activity in the Times over last 20 year period. This may not be news fit to print for you but it is news I am interested in.

I enclose the notes from Greek jail I mentioned. As you will see there is assertion that Greek secret police KIP and U.S. CIA share offices in Athens. Plus a good deal of other information that might be checked regarding shift in heroin manufacturing to Greece from fabled Marseilles. Given KIP CIA connection, and older history, I don’t see how I can accept your “personal conviction” that CIA had nothing to do with prospectus, planning and consolidation of Colonel’s Coup. And later growth of heroin traffic in Athens.

In column after column your consideration of cold war balance of forces depends entirely on limiting your arguments’ range of thinking to interests of the secret police /army bureaucrats of both sides, rather than to larger interests of citizens not involved in jobs making money in cold war. Yet your rhetoric strays: “The argument is that democratic societies can no longer limit themselves to weapons known to be outmoded...” etc.

The sloppiness of your use of the word democratic here strikes me as same vagueness of language or pseudo-reference as old U.P.I. habit of referring to U.S. dominated military dictatorships in South America as “Free World Governments.”

From your letter: “You know, Allen, we really went through those original ‘tips’ on ‘the CIA and Dope’ and the findings are very, very slim—often invisible. Everybody knows lots of opium is grown in Laos and everybody knows the CIA is active in Laos but it is hard to draw invidious conclusions from that —especially ones that are not libelous.”

You know, Cy, my “tips” weren’t original, where they linked CIA with Indochinese opium trafficking activity, they were drawn from Senatorial statement backed by learned Princeton area-specialists from WHO [World Health Organization] field researchers on the spot (Dr. [Joel] Fort); scholars, newsmen, Senatorial subcommittee conclusions, labor experts in area, etc.

If you have examined the Xerox material I left with you carefully you will see that a relationship is already so heavily established between CIA and opium traffic, that you already have the story. It would be advisable for the Times could do some real research into it but I don’t feel there’s the will there. Because the material I gave you completes one aspect of the story that “everyone” (yourself for instance) didn’t know or believe, I suggest that you simply publish the material as it stands; i.e. that Sen. Gruening’s Subcommittee report says Marshall Ky made money on dope in CIA operation Haylift; that Sen. Tunny asserts CIA had made deal with Meos (on basis of Princeton Prof. McAlister’s research); that Nationalist Chinese armies in SE Asia have always been opium traffickers as Stanley Karnow reports at great length in September February 22, ’64 which I’ve now read; that Madame Anna Chennault owns Air America, a CIA franchise outfit for covert military activities long hidden from U.S. public, which according to innumerable scholars reporters newspapers etc. transports opium, and that also Mme. Chennault’s a close friend to [Melvin] Laird, [John] Mitchell and J. E. Hoover at Watergate parties; that the proprietress of “Air Opium” as it is called did heavy fundraising for Nixon ’68; etc. etc. All this material’s already on record. That you can say all the above is “invisible” or “thin,” Cy, is about as astonishing as your use of the phrase “democratic societies.” Are we talking the same language? A little professionalism, please!

As ever

 

Allen Ginsberg

Have you actually read all that Xerox material I gave you?

 

 

[New York politico Donald Maness was quoted as calling Ginsberg a “Commie,” which drew an immediate response from Allen. The letter also showed how Ginsberg had refined his explanation about what had happened in Cuba and Czechoslovakia in 1965.]

 

Allen Ginsberg [New York, NY] to Donald Maness [New York, NY] December 22, 1970

 

Dear Mr. Maness, and Others Concerned:

 

I am not, as a matter of fact, a member of the Communist Party, nor am I dedicated to the overthrow of this or any government by violence. I am in fact a pacifist and object to the actions of the United States in attempting to subvert and overthrow Indochinese and Latin American governments by violence, just as I object to Soviet Bloc use of internal and external police violence to overthrow popular governments. I must say that I see little difference between the armed and violent governments both Communist and Capitalist that I have observed; or more precisely that the problem on both sides is police bureaucracy armed and violent against respectable citizens both in U.S.A. and in Russia, with differences of degree and different forms of exploitation and oppression practiced by such governments not only against their own citizens but also against Mother Nature herself. I have experienced police state conditions in Cuba, which I count a police state much like Florida for some of her minority citizens; I was in fact expelled from Cuba in February 1965. This situation rose because I had consistently criticized the police bureaucracy of Cuba for persecution of homosexuals, repressive laws against marijuana use, and harassment of bearded hiply dressed youths. Taken by uniformed guards from my hotel room and cut off from communication with other officials or friends, I was put on a plane for Czechoslovakia.

As I have spoken my mind freely against party hacks and repressive police in Chicago, and in favor of legalization of mind manifesting drugs and end of government war violence during 1968 Convention, so also I had spoken in favor of psychedelic drugs, sexual freedom, and liberty from oppressive police bureaucracy in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1965. For that I was elected May King by ₁₀₀,₀₀₀ Prague citizens on May Day at a student’s festival; and to spite that election the Prague police bureaucracy arrested, detained and expelled me from Czechoslovakia on May 7, 1965. The poem “Kral Majales” in my book Planet News records that incident and contains an attack on Marxist police bureaucracy. That same year I found myself arrested on the steps of the Whitehall New York draft board with Dr. [Benjamin] Spock for protesting the draft of young American fellows to fight in an unjust tyrannical war inspired by U.S. police bureaucracies including the CIA.

All the above information and political opinion is, however, irrelevant in a discussion of a literary text which cannot be judged, either here or in Russia, as to whether it toes the correct party line—just as in Russia, authors are stupidly attacked by party hacks and loud mouthed art-hating agitators, so here in America authors and their texts can be attacked by small organized groups representing special political interests, like Jacksonville’s United White People group whose spokesman at Duval County’s School Board special meeting claimed that “Allen Ginsberg, is an admitted communist, but actually has written some of the most filthiest, vulgar books that was ever written in America.” Such claims, aside from their perverse grammar, inaccuracy of fact, and silly overstatement, are exactly like the claims of Communist party hacks attacking authors like Solzhenitsyn, Voznesensky, or Alexei Ginzberg in Russia. The whole school board meeting was parallel to a particularly confused meeting of Communist bureaucrats and outraged so-called workers chewing over the supposed “anti-patriotic” or “degenerate” tendencies of any number of communist poet free spirits who’ve been censored or jailed or suicided from Mayakovsky in the 30s to Moscow’s rebel poet-editor Alexei Ginzberg (a friend of mine incidentally) in jail this year 1970 in Russia. The White Citizen’s Council and friends’ rhetoric sounds similar in tone and abusiveness and impoliteness and insensitivity and authoritarian insistency and imprecise accusation to the worst of Communist literary criticism. As a poet, I would say that they are, in lack of free human spirit, the same people in fact. And I believe that these enemies of humor and liberty on both sides of the cold war need each other, feed on each other, and often make their living from each other’s mythical existence. And that, precisely, is the point and humor of the text “America,” a take-off on U.S. police-military-industrial bureaucracy hysteria.

That poem and “Wichita Vortex Sutra” are widely known as examples of respectable legitimate poetry, are taught in hundreds of schools and colleges in the U.S.A. and outside of it, and are included in a number of standard anthologies, some, like Grove Press’ New American Poetry, already a decade old, others among several dozen, published in the last year, like Wadsworth Publishing Company’s custom anthology, Readings for Composition [by Logic, edited by Sidney P. Moss], for English 1-2-3 Freshman English. In my own travels for poetry readings in schools and colleges throughout the country over the last 15 years —hundreds of readings, and extensive teaching—I’ve been informed that “America” particularly, and later “Wichita Vortex Sutra” are commonly used as texts in high schools and colleges, and are particularly acceptable to a new generation of open and thoughtful minded students. The “America” text’s been used for years in New York State, Pennsylvania, California, Kansas and Texas high schools among other places, according to letters I’ve received which are on file at Columbia University Library’s special collections archive, where my literary papers are now housed.

For these and other poems I received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow’s grant in 1963 and a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in 1968, was elected to PEN Club Executive Board and am now a member of that international literary organization’s four-man Committee on Censorship. The poem “Kral Majales” above-mentioned received $500 award from the U.S. Government’s National Council of Arts in 1968. If any abusive critic wishes to found the right of juniors in an American literature class in high school in Duval County, Florida, to read what I have written, they will have to measure their opinions against that of the above Establishments, as well as every anthology of XX Century American Poetry issued in the last decade, as well as the January 1970 opinion of a Federal Court in Miami which declared my poems to be protected by the U.S. Constitution.

The United States is going through many changes, as is the entire planet. This country with a small percentage of the world’s population consumes half the world’s raw material supply, and according to respectable essayists in the New York Times each of us Americans pours more poison waste into fresh water and ocean than any thousand Asians. The world’s oceans may be dead as Lake Erie by the time Duval’s high school students are middle-aged, near ₅₀ years old in the year 2000, if we have not stopped our war on Mother Nature and our wars on our own human kind. The study of natural wisdom has always been the subject of youths’ education from classical time, and that natural wisdom always lies within human heart and mind if it is not drowned by violence or unnatural electronic fantasy: education means, historically, the lead out that wisdom from heart and mind: that is the root of the word education—from Latin duc (to lead) plus e (out). Poetry has always served that function of bringing out in public what is within heart and mind privately, and was among all races and climes the chief ritual of social communication, carrying prophecy history and natural science in its rhythmic language in human memory preserved for the community whilst cities have burned and culture and pyramids risen and disintegrated. Poetry is the most sensitive speech we know, poetry is the tender heart of man uttered on the tongue. Attack and insult and ban poetry to our youths and you dumb their hearts, defend and praise and teach poetry to our youths and you lead their own natural hearts to utterance. The visionary poet William Blake, a revolutionary and friend of Tom Paine, prophesied for us singing two hundred years ago in “The Schoolboy”:

 

O! father & mother, if buds are nip’d
And blossoms blown away,
And if the tender plants are strip’d
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and cares dismay,

 

How shall the summer arise in joy
Or the summer fruits appear.
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear.

 

So till that summer when children live with poetry safe on American earth, I remain,

Your faithful Bard,

 

Allen Ginsberg

[Ginsberg was asked to sit on the National Book Awards committee for poetry. He was happy to be recognized as an authority in the field, but when his fellow committee members chose to give the top prize to Mona Van Duyn, Ginsberg couldn’t believe it and wrote a formal protest to the committee.]