Word: ginsberg
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JACK KEROUAC'S been dead a while now. When he died in October '69, the Beat Generation was long gone; it had grown up, or broken down. Allen Ginsberg had taken up tripping with Timothy Leary, and had made, with Leary, his journey to the East. William Burroughs, Harvard '36, author of Naked Lunch (for which Kerouac coined the title), had moved abroad. Neal Cassady, an incidental Beat writer better known as Dean Moriarty (the hero-madman in Kerouac's On the Road ), and the subject of a 600-page character study by Kerouac, Visions of Cody, had gone...
...Scenes Along the Road is another, late chapter of the record of that life for the "Desolation Angels," a chapter of snapshots and drugstore prints to go along with the volumes of words. There is a picture of Allen Ginsberg while he was still at Columbia, a spare, clean-cut, serious, youthful New York intellectual in horn-rimmed glasses. There are two pictures of Neal Cassady taken in 1946 just before he left New York for Denver after his first visit with Kerouac and Ginsberg; they're the same pictures that Kerouac describes in On the Road...
Hare Krishna. As the train (and the book) proceeds, Bobby's intellectuals and the scores of people who knew him recall their encounters with him-sometimes momentous, sometimes amusing. It is hard to imagine many Senators, for example, receiving "Hare Krishnas" from Allen Ginsberg. Kennedy did just that. "I pulled out a little harmonium and sang through two choruses," Ginsberg recalls. "He stayed to listen. The 'Hare Krishna' mantra was more important than the whole conversation. So he stood there, and I sang for a minute and then quit." Kennedy was less patient with Poet Robert Lowell...
...Ginsberg had read his poetry at Boston University that night, and at about 2 o'clock in the morning he came over to the Yard to be with the tenants for part of that long night. Sitting in the center of a circle of about fifty people, he led a chanting of Blake poems, power mantras, and other songs...
...Allen Ginsberg is perhaps our only poet of any considerable reputation who also sees and hears them. We should be listening both to him and to Blake more closely now than ever before...