Word: poemes
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Inside McMillin Theater at Columbia University, an audience of about 900 assembles. Most appear to be younger than the poem they are to hear. A few are bearded hippies loyal to the Movement. A few are enervated, gentle, Buddhistic Wasps. A handful are black. All around are flannel shirts, funny hats, sleeping children, the emblems of safe bourgeois funk. Not many in the crowd notice, let alone cheer, the arrival of one honored guest, Radical and Felon Abbie Hoffman...
Most wait quietly, unsure of what to expect. Ginsberg is reading his epic poem of outrage and lament to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its publication. Media announcements have recalled the public theatrics of the poet, an ostentatious non-comformist, a self-described "Hebraic Melvillean bardic breath." He drew together the strident Beat Generation of the 1950s, led the flower children of the 1960s into Eastern religions, hymned the antinuclear movement of the 1970s. Throughout, he sustained his vernacular yet visionary voice-marked, said one admiring fellow poet, by a "note of hysteria that hit the taste of the young...
Some, perhaps, do not understand the poem. After a long litany using the name Moloch, a biblical god demanding human sacrifice, to invoke nearly every American banality and evil, two girls turn to ask a man behind them, "What is a Moloch?" Others, perhaps, are reflecting on their own older-but-wiser bemusement about antiwar and anti-Establishment excesses of the 1960s, a decade later than the poem. But Ginsberg's humor is intentional. His contemplative, rounded voice has tightened into singsong waggery...
Mockery is his theme through much of the night. He speaks of a poem by William Blake, whose work once plunged Ginsberg into perception of "a totally deeper real universe than I'd been existing in," as "a country-western S-M song." He then sings several of Blake's visionary eruptions, to cheerful nursery-like ditties of his own composition. Near the end of the evening he reads from recent verses describing himself as a failure. In one he confesses: "My tirades destroyed no intellectual unions of the KGB and CIA . . . I have not yet stopped...
...Harvard cheerleader and Moscow radical, consciousness-and hellraiser, Reed embraced contradictions as he ran like an Ivy League halfback through an archetypal American life-full, frustrated, tragically short. He knew everybody, did everything. His life was a passionate sonnet scrawled on a Wobbly poster-and when he finished the poem he died, in 1920, three days before his 33rd birthday. Jack Reed: artist-adventurer...