Allen Ginsberg was one of the most famous literary figures in the USA during the ninth and early decades of the tenth stage of history(1953-1997), from a Baha'i perspective. Ginsberg lived to the age of seventy(1926-1997). His poetry was strongly autobiographical in the tradition of Walt Whitman. In this poem I follow Ginsberg through the first half of the second Baha'i century(i.e.1944-1994) -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 16 July 2001; and "No More to Say and Nothing To Weep For: An Elegy For Allen," ABC TV, 10:45-11:35 pm, 15 July 2001.

The decisive moment came,

for you, on the eve

of the celebration

of the close of the first

Baha'i century.1

You developed a sense of oneness,

one mind, one universe,

as early as the year

Canada had its first NSA.2


Your famous poem Howl

was banned by US Customs

the year the Guardian died.

The best minds of my generation3

hardly got near this new and embryonic

Cause in those years of that 10 Year Crusade.

By the time I pioneered you were in India--chanting.4

But poetry was, for you,what it has become for me,

a revelation of an inner world. And that utopian

dream of your mother-crazy-then destroyed by

madness,starving hysterical naked3 can be seen

up-on-the-hill. Can you see it, Allen?

Can you see it? Kerouac would have seen

it as part of that 'beat-beatific.'5

Old poets do write about death,

each in their own way, but not

for me a Rimpoche,6 rather a

leavening force that leavens

the world of being and furnishes

a power through which I manifest wonder.

1 In 1943 Ginsberg had his first significant turning to poetry
2 In 1948 Ginsberg developed his first expression of that sense of Oneness which was to inspire his earliest poetry
3 This is the first(and second) line of the poem Howl
4 Ginsberg went to India in 1958; in the TV program that this poem gets its core of information we see him in India in 1962 chanting.
5 There were several definitions of 'beat.' To Kerouac it was 'sympathetic' and 'beatific.'
6 This was the Buddhist leader who most influenced Ginsberg.
Ron Price
16 July 2001

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More on Ginsberg....7 months after the above post, let me add another prose-poem about Ginsberg:
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FIRING A POETRY INDUSTRY

My conception of poetry in my teens and twenties changed as I got into my thirties and when I came across the poetry of Roger White at the age of thirty-five I found something which I could completely connect with. It was a rejuvenating experience. I had known poetry which was so obscure as to be quite indecipherable; I had known poetry which bored me to death; I had known poetry that for many years seemed to have the ultimate effect of turning me right off the genre. I began writing poetry in my mid-thirties, but not until my late forties did the experience really come alive for me. Much of my poetic writing had the style of improvisation. I wrote with my voice; for the most part there was an ease, a flow. I was what Robert Pinsky called an improvisatory poet.

There was an intensity in my poetry, in my philosophy, a poetry based on the cauldron of experience and the search for vivid fragments that would open doors of perception and conception. Perhaps this intensity was born in the shadow of the bomb, the cold war, in the fifties and sixties: the beats, Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc. when I was growing up, part of those times, those decades; perhaps it came from belonging to a religion which was nothing if it was not intense; perhaps it came from my relatively peripatetic existence which collected towns and people, that fired the cauldron of experience with enough vivid fragments to fertilize my poetry industry. -Ron Price with thanks to John Tranter, "An Interview with C.K. Tower," Riding the Meridian, The Internet, 18 November 2001.

I remember those strange lines,

shorter than most of the others,

so often obscure, quite beyond

my figuring them out and then,

in high school, the wet arm pits

and the anxiety over what does

it all mean, whatever does it mean?

It seemed to be a world beyond:

strange, unattractive, completely

without purpose, at least any

purpose I could connect with.

And then, after my brain got

lithium-stabilized and Roger

White's verse came into my life,

the whole picture changed.

Gradually, slowly, poetry

became a dominant force

in my life, a conduit for

my thought, my emotions,

my religion and all that was my life.

Ron Price
20 November 2001
(updated for Hindunet
22/1/08)
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