1968 - Mark Kurlansky [76]
1968 WAS ONE OF THOSE rare times in America when poetry seemed to matter. Telephone service in New York City in 1968 offered a “dial-a-poem.” A government pilot program that year sent poets around the country to public high schools to give readings and discussions. The response was wildly enthusiastic. In Detroit, poet Donald Hall was trapped in a hallway at Amelia Earhart Junior High School by excited students shouting, “Say us a poem!” Obligingly he shouted one, but then the crowd had doubled with new arrivals and he had to read it again.
Robert Lowell, born to a patrician Boston family in 1917, the year of John Kennedy’s birth, seemed a poet for the sixties. Like the Mobe’s David Dellinger, who was from a similar background, Lowell was a pacifist who had served a prison term rather than fight in World War II. In the sixties, he was a frequent fixture at antiwar rallies. By 1968 he was the most visible American poet, because he campaigned with Eugene McCarthy.
Allen Ginsberg, born in 1926, was closer in age to Lowell than he was to the students of 1968. But Ginsberg, even in his forties, balding and a bit paunchy, with his thick beard and wreath of wild dark hair, had both the personal spirit and literary style that characterized the sixties. He was really a fifties figure, a central figure of the beat generation. But by 1968 many of the beats had faded. Jack Kerouac was dissipated from alcohol and did not approve of the antiwar movement. He accused his old friend Ginsberg of being unpatriotic. Neal Cassady died in Mexico in early 1968 while undertaking a fifteen-mile hike following a railroad line. He said he would pass the time counting railroad ties. But along the way he managed to get himself invited to a wedding party, where he spent hours drinking and taking Seconal. He was found the next day along the railroad tracks where he had spent the rainy night. Suffering from overexposure, he soon died, exiting in that free and offbeat style that had made his group famous. According to legend, his last words were, “Sixty-four thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight.”
Despite losing many friends to alcohol and drugs, Ginsberg was a passionate believer in certain drugs, especially marijuana, psilocybin, and LSD. In fact, although he was a determined adversary of the Vietnam War and the American military and industrial war machine, there were three other topics that he seemed to bring up on most occasions. One was fair treatment for homosexuals. Always extremely candid in his poetry, some said graphic, about his own sexual preference, he was a gay rights activist before the term was invented. And he always championed his theories on the beneficial uses of narcotics as well as the unfair persecution of users. He was also a persistent believer in the value of Buddhist chants. By 1968, when Eastern religion had become a trend, it was easy to forget that Ginsberg had been very serious about his Buddhism for a number of years. Hinduism was also in vogue, especially having a guru, a new enough word in 1968 for the press to usually offer the pronunciation (goo-roo).
Mahesh Yogi, who gave himself the title Maharishi—“great sage”—had found a formula for instant meditation, which he promised would deliver samadhi, a holy state of expanded consciousness, without going to all the trouble of fasting and endless prayer. He converted Europeans by the thousands to “Transcendental Meditation” before arriving in the United States in 1968, bringing with him a fad for Indian clothes and Indian music. Many celebrities, including the Beatles and the Beach Boys, followed the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. But when the Beatles went to India to spend three months studying under the Maharishi, Ringo Starr, always said to be the least reflective of the quartet, returned with his wife, Maureen, to his suburban London mansion after ten days, unhappy with the great sage’s accommodations. “Maureen and I are a bit funny about our food, and we don’t like spicy things,” Ringo explained.
The Maharishi was of limited