In Defense of Allen Ginsberg, American Poet
In Defense of Allen Ginsberg, American Poet
I was in Cairo in the weeks before the first Gulf War. In the cafes five hundred miles from “the front,” the impending war was the only thing everyone was talking about. I spent most of my time with the locals who spoke English, and learned many things both about the reasons for (and possible solutions to) Islamic fundamentalism, as well as some of the political background to the invasion of Kuwait that I’ve still never seen reported in American media.
I flew out of Athens on the day we started bombing Iraq (January 17, 1990), and when I was back on American soil, my bus stopped in Boulder in between the two sides of a political demonstration in front of the Boulder Public Library. On one side of the street people were shouting and waving signs that said “No blood for oil” and on the other was a group of people shouting and waving signs that said “Free Kuwait.”
I realized immediately that neither of these groups had any idea what they were yelling about. They were hurling bricks out of longseated hostilities and fears of one sort or another at phantoms of their own imagination; and not surprisingly, considering what our government was doing half-a-world away. I decided at that moment that I would—as much as possible—defend nothing of which I do not have personal experience. Which brings me to the current matter.
I definitely have a great deal of experience of Allen Ginsberg and his time at Naropa University in its early days. In fact, I came to Boulder in 1979 solely to apprentice with him, and we worked together in various capacities until his death in 1997. I have even written about my apprenticeship with Allen in a piece published in 1981 as “The Object Is to See Clearly,” which I will make available on my website (www.randyroark.com) because it’s too long to quote here. But if you’re looking for sex, drugs, and irresponsible behavior, you won’t find it there. It’s mostly about poetry and the personal commitment necessary to be a poet, beyond the mere happenstance of having written a poem every once in a while.
There is also considerable amount of information about Allen’s stay in Boulder available in the introduction to my selected poems (which is also too long to quote here, but I will make it available on my website as well). There is, however, one paragraph that attempts to summarize some of what I learned during our association.
Allen and I disagreed about nearly everything (especially poetry, politics, and sexuality), but I learned a lot from our time together. I learned that in poetry, and life, you should pay complete attention to whatever’s in front of you—what’s really there—first. I learned that the cool thing about money and time is that you get to make things out of them. I learned that you only really learn when you’re really listening, and that when you’re completely listening, you’ll learn. That compassion and humility are your best defenses. That what’s wrong with your poetry is what’s wrong with your life—and to work on one is to work on the other. That your enemies and critics are your allies: that they’re trying to tell you something, and that you’re trying to tell them something too. That the limits of your life are the limits of your imagination. That whenever you try to help someone else, you always end up helping yourself more. That you should at least feel as good about feeling good as you do about feeling bad. That every time you tell the truth, a part of you becomes real, and that absolute candor dispels paranoia. That by being honest, you give others permission to be honest too. I learned that the only real answer is “I don’t know”—and that if you don’t know that, it just means that you’re stuck somewhere a little while longer. And I learned that it never gets easy—that if I’m not a little bit scared it’s because I’m not working hard enough. I became hungry for everything—all of it, the “whole trip”—before it was all gone.
My interest in literature developed as part of my personal process of becoming more fully human—I could sit with William Blake and have him introduce me to a sunflower, I could walk with Walt Whitman and take those same awakened eyes into my 7-11, I could hear Diane di Prima put herself in personal danger in order to protect those who had no other protectress, I could sit beside Yeats while he told me a story that softened the boundaries between the visible and invisible worlds.
Unfortunately (for someone like me) the level of dialogue in my extended “artistic community” has meant that I have deliberately protected myself from it for well over a decade now. Even after I better understood some of the motivations for the behavior I saw going on, I still decided to avoid it. But in the absence of community and personal consequences, the “democratic” anonyminity of the internet seems to bring out the worst in the very worst.
Anyone can hurl a brick, but it’s much more difficult to build an academy—especially since it seems to bring out something surprisingly vicious in others, especially those who have never really built (or been responsible for) anything remarkable at all.
But to address a couple of the specific points in this thread, if it’s true that by extolling LSD on Dick Cavett made Allen responsible for every bad thing that ever happened to that person who followed his advice should surely be balanced by his being responsible for a lot of good things that happened to people who followed his advice–like me, for instance. And if one is to conjecture that someone might possibly take LSD and kill himself (it’s possible!), not to be insensitive, but really, they’ve got other problems. And I don’t even dispute that Allen may have said that he was starting a poetry school so he could have sex with his students—I only suggest that what’s really important is not what he said in a used bookstore (and, if he did, certainly in jest) but rather what he did, what he accomplished, and (most importantly) who he was.
Finally, when I arrived in Boulder I was half Allen’s age and not completely unattractive, but in all of the time we spent together he never once said or did anything inappropriate to me or around me. In fact, he did the exact opposite—he spent hours with a 25-year-old kid, one-on-one, patiently explaining why my poetry sucked—and it did: it wasn’t coming out of the real me. By forcing me over and over again to express what I really felt and believed or saw, he in essence gave me myself. I only wish that everyone may have someone like that in their lives.
As for the legacy of Naropa University, its influence is as far beyond my ability to describe it as it is past my abilities to document it—but it’s certainly international, intergenerational, and just beginning.
And as for what was taught there, the evidence is available to anyone with enough interest to go looking for it. Allen, Anne Waldman, and Diane di Prima—the poets who organized the first summer program at Naropa in 1974—were determined from the start to document the oral history of their poetic times, and that record is preserved by Naropa University’s audio archive department. And, if you really want to find out what’s taught there, class is still in session.
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