I've long held Allen Ginsberg in high regard as a queer elder. I've read "Howl" and the early poems and the final poems. I've seen him as a guru and placed him on my own personal altar, have felt him in our bedroom early in my relationship with Seth, a ghostly voyeur watching from the corner. His "queer shoulder to the wheel" line even opens my 2018 chapbook, Tourist. Beyond that, I knew what the casual reader knows of Ginsberg but recently felt called to take a deeper dive, searching for some new (old) way to survive the American onslaught against kindness, compassion, and connection. This is not my America, and America in the 60s wasn't Ginsberg's America, either, but he never gave up the fight to make it his, meaning to make it a place where art and connection and freedom thrived. In many ways, he succeeded, and much of the experiences I've enjoyed as a poet, and a gay poet, came from his unyielding, sometimes egotistical, sometimes insane, belief that his vision and his artistic work, and those of his fellow artists, carried the power to transform. He believed in the good of people.
I'm 500-pages deep into I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg by Bill Morgan. At the same time, I'm reading Ginsberg's Collected Poems, now with what feels like a cheatsheet. Thanks to Morgan, I get the references, and I know the inspiration behind the first thoughts/best thoughts. Now, I wouldn't want that with every poem or every poet. I've long believed the reader completes the equation of the poem by bringing in their own interpretation. But right now, I need a roadmap, from someone whose lived through some awful times that were spearheaded by some awful people.
Ginsberg was flawed, and I love that his flaws were transparent. I don't expect my heroes to be perfect, any more than I have the ability to be perfect. What I do hold my heroes to is their intent. Ginsberg wasn't an old soul. He was a young soul with youthful ambition and idealism. He was fascinated by the erotic lineage he traced from Whitman down to him. As I've read Ginsberg, I've also been thumbing through Whitman's Specimen Days. I talk to them both.
Years ago, while walking the Chelsea High Line, poet/publisher Ian Young stopped me, explained that lineage, of which he is part, and then kissed me on the lips. "Over to you, dear boy," he said.
Transmission complete. I like to think I put some of that inherited energy back into the world through my work with Sibling Rivalry Press, but I know there's still work to do, and I'm looking for angels and spirits to guide me. That is why I return to the old gods.
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