Just before his death in 1997, Allen Ginsberg wrote to President Bill Clinton advising him that just in case he was going to name an American poet laureate, this would be a good time to honor him. As we know, that never happened. But look around: Allen, over 20 years after his death, is everywhere. In Martin Scorsese’s documentary of Bob Dylan’s tour, Rolling Thunder Revue on Netflix, the poet is named “The Oracle at Delphi,” giving him some classic, other-worldly stature. Seated Buddha-style he lends a religious benediction to a rock and roll tour that features Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Sam Shepard, Anne Waldman, Ronnie Blakely, and others. Dylan’s great music is of course the star, but Allen exercises his chops. A highlight of the tour that starts in 1975 is a visit to fellow poet Jack Kerouac’s grave, near his birth home in Lowell, Massachusetts. Only recently dead since 1969, Kerouac may have enjoyed Ginsberg and Dylan cavorting and reciting from “Mexico City Blues” and otherwise paying homage to the dead beat.
And just opening: at the Morgan Library’s fascinating tribute to Walt Whitman, Ginsberg’s City Lights edition of Howl is on display, open to his “A Supermarket in California,” a dramatic monologue addressed to Whitman, his courage-teacher. Yes, Whitman opened the door for the American expression of our democracy in poetry, and the music that leads straight to Dylan and beyond. At 200, Whitman doesn’t get old either.
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