1968 - Mark Kurlansky [77]
By the 1960s Ginsberg had become one of the most venerated living poets and was invited to speak around the world, though in many of these countries, including the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and Italy, he found himself in legal difficulties for the things he said.
Known for his kindness, he is still remembered in his East Village, New York, neighborhood as a soft-spoken gentleman. His free-form passionate verse was from its first publication both controversial and widely recognized as brilliant. He sometimes gave readings with his father, Louis, who was also a poet. Louis, a New Jersey schoolteacher, could not resist the more than occasional pun in his comments and wrote well-constructed, lyric poetry, often in rhymed couplets. The relationship was one of love and mutual respect, though Louis thought his son should be a little less free-form. He also thought his son should not use scatological words that embarrassed people and wished he would be a little less forthcoming about his homosexuality. But that was the way Allen was. He talked publicly about whom he loved, whom he lusted after, and how. Once he went too far and referred to an extramarital dalliance of his father’s, and Louis got him to remove the lines. Their readings together, in the age of “the generation gap,” were considered a great show—Louis in his tweeds and Allen in his beads.
In 1966 they had appeared together in the Ginsberg hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. Louis read to his many local fans, and the more famous son read political poems but also his poem about Paterson. They talked about how father and son had visited Passaic Falls the day before, Louis calling it an intimate moment shared. Then Allen, who always volunteered the unrequested detail, said that while at the falls he had smoked marijuana, which had added greatly to the experience. The next day Paterson mayor Frank X. Graves, contending that he had received numerous calls about the drug confession, got a bench warrant for the younger Ginsberg’s arrest, whereupon the police found and detained a man with a beard and glasses, mistaking him for the wanted poet, who was by then safely back in the East Village.
By 1968, when they appeared together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a bearded, pot-smoking hippie was more commonplace, though it was still curious to see the two together. Louis began by punning and Allen began by chanting a mantra that The New York Times reviewer said was longer than any of his poems. They ended the evening with a family squabble about LeRoi Jones’s recent illegal firearms possession conviction. To the son it was clear the black playwright had been framed—to the father it wasn’t. The audience was also divided, and each Ginsberg had his cheerers.
LeRoi Jones was also one of the popular poets of the 1968 generation. His most famous line was fast becoming “Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick-up.” A 1967 East Village “affinity group” named themselves “the Motherfuckers” after the Jones poem. An affinity group used intense intellectual debates as an underpinning for carrying out the kind of media-grabbing street theater that Abbie Hoffman could do so well. During the New York City garbage strike, the Motherfuckers hauled garbage by subway from the redolent mountains of it left on the sidewalks to the newly opened Lincoln Center.
The bestselling poet of 1968 was Rod McKuen, who penned rhythmic little bon mots that he read in a raspy voice suggestive either of emotion or bronchitis. A Hollywood songwriter, clean-shaven with V-neck sweaters, McKuen was a long way from the beats. But by early 1968 he had already sold 250,000 volumes of his unabashedly sentimental verse. His two books, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows and Listen to the Warm, were selling more than any book on The New York Times fiction