Allen Ginsberg

Richard Escow remembers seeing Allen Ginsberg on the Tonight Show many years ago. It was either in early 1969—before Chappaquiddick—or a couple of years after that incident, when Ted Kennedy was once again being discussed as a Presidential contender.

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Dear President Obama,

If word reached me that you were being tortured, I would instantly feel tortured myself, because I would be. Torture is something an entire society feels, whether we are within earshot of the screaming or not. People don’t like to believe this, but there is no way human beings can remain unaffected by what is done to other human beings, or even to animals who are not human. If I heard this about you, I would do everything in my power to come to your aid, not simply because I know you to be rare and necessary to our planetary survival, but because you are simply a person, with feelings, aspirations, sorrows and dreams. And you have children. If I were a child and knew my parent was being tortured, day after day, what would I myself become?

It has already been recognized that “confessions” obtained by torture are useless. It is easy to see why. If someone is water boarding you and you think you will never see your little ones again, you would say anything. So would I. It is only in movies, I think, where the “hero” tells the torturer nothing as various body parts are cut, burned, frozen, electro-shocked or pulled out.

If one keeps company with cruel people, one loses, bit by bit, one’s own compassion. This is one of the reasons living in Washington, in the White House, as leader of the United States, is so treacherous. And why I said to you when we met briefly prior to my introducing you to my community in San Francisco, that failure to win the presidency had not insignificant value: you could have a fine life living as a writer, doing and saying what you want, and traveling the world incognito and free. Leadership has its down side, and one of them is who one has to associate with in order to “get things done.” When we look at the destruction, around the globe, caused by prior leaders of our country, and the terrible choices of how to behave, and we look at the White House today and see some of those folks still coming and going; what can I say? It gives us pause.

Ringing in my ears is something I thought I heard you say: America does not torture. And if this is true, now, under your watch, this letter is unnecessary. I also thought I heard you say Indefinite Detention Without Charge was gone with the wind of George Bush’s administration. Was I wrong? Writers, and especially poets, don’t always keep their ears to the political ground, and so we are likely to miss the daily dramas that keep others informed. I hope you are holding steady on these points, because if you are, you are right. The cruelty and injustice of holding anyone indefinitely without charge will not lead to carefree days and guilt-free nights for you or for any citizen of the U.S., and we want those days and nights in order to convince the youth of the world that there are basic human laws protecting their right to grow up without fear of endless detention.

I think about people in prison, being tortured, being bombed, being frightened and starved and humiliated, every single day. Voting for you was one way I felt I could reach out to them, fiction and poetry writing, even protests and arrests, having their limitations. You are the world’s hope for a better, a fairer, day. You have what few leaders of this country ever had: genuine affection and love from the people who elected you. We are good people, too, for the most part. And even if we weren’t, we can be improved by a leadership of compassion, a leadership whose basic human instincts of fairness and decency we can trust to look at the whole story, the entire state of affairs, and not close off any portion of it. A leadership unafraid to hold accountable those responsible for torture and abuse. This is our only hope, actually, to begin to soothe a little of the sorrow in the world. It isn’t a desire for vengeance, because we know vengeance, a karma, is created by Itself; it is instead a need to make right, to make whole again, by demonstrating to an injured and insulted world that we, as Americans, care about the harm other Americans, in our name, have done. We must show above all that we wish to understand our own madness in order not to continue growing and exporting it.

We know your plate is full. And I am always happy to hear of you and Michelle going off somewhere out of town for dinner. (No pun!) Any complaint about the cost is ridiculous: what your time away from your desk does for the world is priceless. You are a Leo/Ox and only someone with your combination of strengths could handle the presidency, which you do with grace. (What can I say? I love astrology!) Even so, it’s too much for one person, or two; I myself favor a council for leading the country, but that is far in the future. Maybe not too far! So, delegate. We need the world to know we don’t accept the behavior as usual of American presidents and others who do horrible things to people, and then retire, wealthy, into memoir writing and golf; as if the disasters inflicted on a vulnerable world never happened. I applaud and deeply appreciate all the good work you are, in fact, doing. It is huge. And beautiful, which I personally resonate with in world leadership. It has a beat. It has a heart.

In closing, I send this poem about torture that I wrote a few weeks ago and posted on my blog, http://www.alicewalkersblog.com

DYING
For those who with our taxes die of torture

What is it like
Dying?
Is it like
Sinking
Into a bath
Of warm
Milk?

Is it like
Lying naked
In the
Sun
Those first
Truly
Warm
Days
Of Spring
After
A winter
That
Froze
Your teeth?

Dying
I think
Can be
Like that.
Above all,
It
Is yours.
It is
A safe
Place.

They may
Be
Electrocuting
Your
Toes
At
The time
Or
Pulling out
Your
Finger
Nails
Or
Causing
Your terrified
Heart to stop
In
Other
Ingenious
Ways.

But
Dying
You
Escape
Them
Into
Peace.

They will
Never
Know
Something
Only
You
Can have.

Dying
Is yours.

Precious
Human being;
Whatever you
Have done.

Dying
Is
Your secret.

***

©2009 by Alice Walker

With loving kindness,
& despite the gravity
Of the subject, Joy,

Alice Walker
From the Ten Against Torture Campaign

Alice Walker is the author of The Color Purple and other novels and books of poetry. She can be reached through her blog.

A first look at the new music video for Bob Dylan’s new song Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, directed by Nash Edgerton and featuring Amanda Aardsma and Joel Stoffer.

Together Through Life, Dylan’s first studio album since 2006’s Modern Times, is characterized by tales of ordinary American lives of love, loss and regret. Just as his songs of the 1960s did so effectively, Dylan’s current writing captures the shifting nuances of the American dream and the optimism which defines it.

Dylan offers a lively portrait of an idea of America, struggling against the indifference of circumstance, for a sense of its own worth. The track may seem like an acknowledgment of defeat – “Beyond here lies nothing/ nothing done and nothing said” – but it’s equally an affirmation of the need to always ‘go beyond’ regardless of circumstance.
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Robin Blaser died last Thursday just a few days shy of what would have been his 84th birthday. Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser grew up in Idaho, and came to Berkeley, California in 1944. There he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, becoming a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and early 1960s. He moved to Canada in 1966, joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University; he held the position of Professor Emeritus.

Blaser was also well known as the editor of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, which includes Blaser’s essay, The Practice of Outside. The 1993 publication The Holy Forest represents his collected poems to that date.

In 2006, Blaser received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize. Blaser won the Prize itself in 2008.

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Steve Silberman’s photo exhibit labor of love provides a touching legacy to the spirit of Allen Ginsberg.

Click here to see the Exhibit

http://www.poetspath.com/Video/Barakapoem.flv

GINSBERG’S KARMA is a documentary from Rattapallax Films about the legendary poet Allen Ginsberg and his mythical journey to India in the early 1960s that transformed his perspective on life and his work. Ginsberg traveled to India with Peter Orlovsky, to escape the media pressure of being an icon of the “Beat Generation” and to recover from writer’s block after writing several of the most important poems of the 20th Century including Howl. He hoped to re-create the hallucinatory “William Blake” vision that inspired his earlier work and search for a new muse other than drugs. Poet Bob Holman traces the two years Ginsberg spent in India by visiting the places where he stayed and talk with the people he met and influenced, as well as, intimate interviews with Beat poets Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, Anne Waldman, John Giorno and others. The film is inspired by Ginsberg’s collection, Indian Journals, and Deborah Baker’s book, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India. By discovering Ginsberg’s experiences in India, Bob Holman traces how Ginsberg effected the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and Buddhism in America.

http://www.vimeo.com/2206303

In June 1958, Allen Ginsberg wrote to Jack Kerouac about a series of catastrophes that had befallen members of their circle on the West Coast. Neal Cassady was in the San Bruno county jail, awaiting trial for having offered marijuana to a pair of undercover policemen. A woman friend — “little doomed Connie” — had fallen in with “some evil teaheads or something” and been strangled, according to an outside source, “Tuesday AM by a . . . seaman who confessed that PM.” Al Sublette, who features in Kerouac’s novel “Big Sur” under the name Mal Damlette, was also in prison — “I heard for a burglary.” All the news from out West, much of it conveyed by Cassady’s “haggard” wife Carolyn, with whom Ginsberg had been on unfriendly terms since she disturbed him in bed with Neal, “sounds evil . . . except letters from Gary.” In a note to Cassady himself two weeks later, Ginsberg admitted being at a loss to offer practical help. “I wrote Gary Snyder, he’s the only one with a strong sense . . . to . . . find what need be done.”

The graph of Ginsberg’s emotional life rose and fell alarmingly over the years (he died in 1997, at 70). The early correspondence in “The Letters of Allen Ginsberg” reflects a multifaceted distress: at his mother’s “severe nervous breakdowns,” related fears for his own mental health, and a comprehensive sexual anxiety. In 1949, having fallen in with some petty criminals, he was arrested for harboring stolen goods and subsequently committed to the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he met the future dedicatee of “Howl,” Carl Solomon.

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I never knew death until I saw the bombing of a refugee camp
Craters filled with disfigured ankles and splattered torsos
But no sign of a face, the only impression a fading scream
I never understood pain
Until a seven-year-old girl clutched my hand
Stared up at me with soft brown eyes, waiting for answers
But I didn’t have any
I had muted breath and dry pens in my back pocket
That couldn’t fill pages of understanding or resolution

In her other hand she held the key to her grandmother’s house
But I couldn’t unlock the cell that caged her older brothers
They said, we slingshot dreams so the other side will feel our father’s presence
A craftsman
Built homes in areas where no one was building
And when he fell, he was silent
A .50 caliber bullet tore through his neck shredding his vocal cords
Too close to the wall
His hammer must have been a weapon
He must have been a weapon
Encroaching on settlement hills and demographics

So his daughter studies mathematics
Seven explosions times eight bodies
Equals four Congressional resolutions
Seven Apache helicopters times eight Palestinian villages
Equals silence and a second Nakba
Our birthrate minus their birthrate
Equals one sea and 400 villages re-erected
One state plus two peoples…and she can’t stop crying
Never knew revolution or the proper equation
Tears at the paper with her fingertips
Searching for answers
But only has teachers
Looks up to the sky and see stars of David demolishing squalor with hellfire missiles

She thinks back words and memories of his last hug before he turned and fell
Now she pumps dirty water from wells, while settlements divide and conquer
And her father’s killer sits beachfront with European vernacular
She thinks back words, while they think backwards
Of obscene notions and indigenous confusion

This our land!, she said
She’s seven years old
This our land!, she said
And she doesn’t need a history book or a schoolroom teacher
She has these walls, this sky, her refugee camp
She doesn’t know the proper equation
But she sees my dry pens
No longer waiting for my answers
Just holding her grandmother’s key…searching for ink

Remi Kanazi is a Palestinian-American poet and writer based in New York City. He is the co-founder of PoeticInjustice.net and the editor of the forthcoming anthology of poetry, Poets for Palestine. He can be contacted at Remroum@gmail.com. Read other articles by Remi, or visit Remi’s website.