While I might not have been comfortable sat with my fifteen year old daughter as some poet's drew vivid portraits of homosexual sex from Ginsberg's own work there was no denying the passion and commitment that Allen Ginsberg brought to his work.
St. James's Church is the home of the William Blake Society. This is Blake's parish. The church was he was baptised. Master of ceremonies Michael Horovitz would allude to Ginsberg as the heir to Blake's legacy. Tonight tourists are told that the Church has been given over to a Ginsberg tribute and that anyone wishing to come in will pay either £12.50 to sit in the main Church or £6.00 to sit upstairs in the gallery. The event will not be packed save for the central aisles. Then there was a time when Van Gogh couldn't sell a painting. Now his work is buried by Japanese open cheque books buying art like a commodity.
Film cameras are everywhere tonight capturing the event. The camermen focus on the microphones and Bechstein piano while I focus on a familiar figure sat in the front pew. The grey beard, the stubble of grey hair, the tall figure sat, head down, engaged writing into a book can only be Lawrence Ferlinghetti. No other with that white fedora hung casually over the front pew.
In the space of a few short years I have come to know this man's poetry and remain in awe of his work. Lawrence Ferlinghetti never regarded himself as beat poet and would argue with his great friend Allen Ginsberg about Bhuddism. It was Ferlinghetti who went to prison for publishing Ginsberg's Howl. It was Ferlinghetti who championed poetry for the masses when he began City Lights in San Francisco. Without the beat generation of the late fifties the flowering of sixties troubadours might have remained impoverished of inspiration. Much is made of Ginsberg's undeniable role as a prime influence along with Jack Kerouac, less is made of Ferlinghetti's contribution which I consider equally immense.
So I stealed the opportunity to give Lawrence Ferlinghetti a postcard of Cowes circa 1997. "It has not changed much since you were last there in 1944," I suggested. On the postcard were the address and phone number of David and Judy Gascoyne. In what may have been Ginsberg's last reading in this country, film of David Gascoyne had been shown giving a reading from his Northwood home (Albert Hall, National Poetry Day). I thought it appropriate to present the postcard to Lawrence Ferlinghetti as Allen Ginsberg had been a great admirer of the last great Surrealist's work.
Minutes later Michael Horovitz began the evening. He looked in his late fifties, or early sixties, a thin bespectacled man who had been involved with mixing poetry and jazz in this country during the sixties. Not hard to reason that he must have drawn the influence from the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti with jazzman Kenneth Roxoth's quartet when they joined poetry with jazz in the fifties.
Michael Horovitz mentioned that the following night there would be a tribute to Kenneth Patchen (1911-72) at the Tate Gallery. Once again Lawrence Ferlinghetti, himself a painter and poet, would be there with Horivitz, Bernard Kops and Barbara Read to " . . . read and discuss the poetry and paintings of Kenneth Patchen." Tonight, however, it was Allen Ginsberg's night and Michael Horovitz introduced Adrian Mitchell.
Adrian Mitchell was a warm, affable, chap who told the audience that he was off to Scotland directly after his performance for another reading. I warmed to him immediately when he lambasted how Ginsberg had been ignored by members of the English chattering and literary classes. "Tight arsed English poetry reviewers who act like opera buffs reviewing Bessie Smith" was how he described them.
Mitchell read a 'Three Line Elegy to Kenneth Patchen', an 'Appreciation of Allen Ginsberg' and an 'Elegy for Allen and Patchen'. He told of how he had first met Ginsberg at a Roundhouse in Chalk Farm reading in 1966. How inspirational Ginsberg had been to him. How Ginsberg's 'Fear List' had prompted the poet to construct one of his own. The list had been Ginsberg's way of dealing with his anxieties. One that he would work through exorcising his fears with the dash of a pencil.
Mitchell concluded with applause ringing in his ears. He stepped down off the altar. Took his bag from a pew and promptly left the Church. Scotland bound.
The event now swayed from the advertised programme to have composer Philip Glass pay his tribute to Ginsberg. Glass was in town to perform his Masters of Grace at the Barbican. He explained he would play the music to "An opera for six voices" called The Hydrogen Jukebox that he had written in collaboration with Allen Ginsberg. The work would be performed in London during November later this year. Glass spoke of Ginsberg leaning in the cradle of a grand piano during their performances together listening intently.
Sitting down at the Bechstein piano Philip Glass proceeded to play the theme music to Hydrogen Jukebox. The piece swelled up in great rolling, rumbling cascades of bass runs, rippled with right hand arpeggio's into which the composer dropped vertical chords to arrest the tide. As Glass immersed himself into the piece I fixed his description of Ginsberg in my mind. Ginsberg had written Hydrogen Jukebox on a trip between Nebraska and Wichita in his VW bus. "Wichita," explained Glass, "is the geometrical centre of the United States." So Glass's music evoked, for me, a strange cocktail of plutonium and Ginsberg rolling across the plains of Kansas.
Michael Horovitz next introduced a poet from Newcastle called Tom Pickard. Pickard, in his fifties with a thick Geordie accent told the audience that he had met Ginsberg in May 1965 performing in London and his native Newcastle. Pickard praised Ginsberg's commitment to fighting hypocrisy and championing the rights against wrongs. He told how Ginsberg had read at benefits for the striking miners in Thatcher's Britain of 1983 and 1984 in return for Pickard reading at events supported by Ginsberg.
Tom Pickard told a couple of asides that spoke volumes on Ginsberg. He told how he came to Newcastle in 1965 and a journalist for the Newcastle Sunday paper had asked the American poet how he had travelled from America to England. "Did you work your passage, Mr. Ginsberg?" To which the poet replied: "Do you mean, did I flog my arse?"
Pickard's second aside recalled a tuxedo evening in New York to which the Geordie accompanied Ginsberg. "Allen arrived in a tuxedo he bought from a Salvation Army shop, it was at the time of the Gulf War and there were speeches, lots of garbage about the war effort and I looked at Allen and I could see he was rumbling in his seat and finally he let out an almighty 'BULLSHIT' that silenced the room."
Pickard read some of Allen Ginsberg's poems that dealt with both homosexual and hetrosexual love right to the bone. Either side of his readings came music from guitarist Peter Kirtley and pianist and vocalist Lianne Carroll. One song was called Tonight My Lover and the last was Winter's Night. Kirtley's unmistakable amplified acoustic full of harmonics and pulled notes whilst maintaining the rhythm paired wonderfully by Carroll's bluesy piano work and earthy vocals.
Michael Horovitz concluded the first half of the evening. He alluded to the support for the evening from people like Paul and the late Linda McCartney noting that "1997 had been a sad year for poetry with the death of Laurie Lee, John Silken" and other poets I did not catch.
Horovitz's tribute was a lengthy one which stretched sitting on the uncomfortable wooden pews to the limit. However it was, no less enthralling or diverse as the previous contributions had been.
Michael Horovitz began by covering Blake's Sunflower as performed by New York poet and art rock band, The Fugs led by Ed Sanders. His Anglicised version didn't quite carry the authority of the Fugs but it was none the less quite something. Also of note was Little Planet Blues by a Japanese lady poet whose name I couldn't decipher but whose poem had been translated by Allen Ginsberg. Again this was a half sung, half spoken piece full of rhythm. Striking.
Horovitz also read Ginsberg's Studying Signs, Holy Communion, his own Inter City Animal, something about 'Graphic Wincers'? and a song for his late wife Francis Horovitz who died in 1983. This piece brought the introduction of a duck caller to embellish the work.
The duck caller would return for Horovitz's final piece, a marvellous jazz tune of Ginsberg's called Blind O'Clock Blues. Horovitz explained that in this piece the 'speaker is a bit stoned'. He was joined by a Jewish lady, Anna May Silver who sat at the piano and played marvellous gospel inspired jazz while Horovitz sang or played the duck caller between the verses. The effect of this strange combination was a work that swung like mad. It opened with the marvellous lines "25 past 11 or 5 to 5, is this jazz or is this jive?" and closed with the a wailing jazz riff by Horovitz on duck caller. Extraordinary.
Horovitz concluded with a Jewish chant of Ginsberg's before, appropriately, suggesting the interval would be "Ten minutes and when you hear Jelly Roll Morton and the Red Hot Peppers playing that will be the signal that the second half is about to start again . . ."
The congregation spilled out into the churchyard or spent their time investigating Etc.'s book stall which was packed by the City Lights works of both Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. I spotted folksinger Julie Felix when we returned. Lawrence Ferlinghetti had written scripts for her early British TV series as she had informed me at a folk evening at Bishop's Waltham in Hampshire recently.
The second half pivotted on the Bhuddist poets on the one hand and the great free thinker of our time, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Less a chasm between beliefs more a divide amongst friends. Pretty much, I should think, like the relationship between the Bhuddist inspired Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Anne Waldeman is the director of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, Colorado. Michael Horovitz introduced the black haired, beaming lady in the blue and black checked dress as "The spiritual wife of Allen Ginsberg." Anne Waldeman gave a powerful performance that burned like a Coltrane saxophone solo. It contained material taken from 'Old erotic poems of India' and extracts of various Ginsberg pieces such as Memory Gardens and Sorry. She performed something called The Spiritual Friend which 'incorporates 10 lines from Mind Breaths.
The depth of the material was truly eclectic. Ginsberg mixed with ancient text as old as Homer's Illyiad and steeped in Bhuddist kharma. An amazing piece called New Stanzas for Amazing Grace where Anne Waldeman sang Ginsberg's contribution to a work that featured poets all over the world.
Anne Waldeman ended her first solo section with a 'Plutonium Ode' dedicated to the day in 1978 when Ginsberg and Waldeman led a group called the Rocky Flats Truth Force into a sensitive military area in Colorado. Clearly Ginsberg wasn't someone content to pontificate from the lofty view of a university professor.
Andrew Schelling joined Anne Waldeman for more Indian texts something which they titled 'Polly Canon'. A text first written down in 80BC but having an oral tradition far earlier than that. Earlier Tom Pickard had alluded to how Ginsberg had used finger cymbals and tambourines and chants to envelope an audience, encircling it once, twice, three times as he laid down his gospel. The Schelling, Waldeman pieces were etched deep religious overtones and drenched in eastern mysticism.
Schelling did some solo pieces. One was called Allen Ginsberg Death Notes about his passing. Another was called, I think, Vienna. He remarked on a statement by Ginsberg that there was no difference between poetry and meditation. He recalled going to Ginsberg's apartment in New York and being cooked meals. One day Schelling bought him a teflon frying pan. "Don't you think I can do my own dishes?" answered Ginsberg refusing the gift. "He wanted to feed everyone and do the dishes afterwards," recalled the poet.
The final piece, with Anne Waldeman again was about Las Vegas, a Ginsberg poem drenched full of takes on America's fixation with power and money. Waldeman had spoken of Ginsberg's last days when he had busied himself at his apartment phoning around the world to all his friends. "It's Allen, he had said, as there was only one Allen," recalled the lady from Colorado. Waldeman spoke of Allen Ginsberg's spirit transported across the world, down telephone lines as though she were speaking of an Old Testament prophet. Her description of making that tearful last plane trip to Ginsberg's New York apartment on his death was telling.
Fittingly her introduction to Lawrence Ferlinghetti marked the friendship between Ginsberg and the poet and Ferlinghetti's own remarkable legacy. Waldeman remarked that Ferlinghetti had been in Florence opening another City Light's bookshop to mirror the original on Columbus Ave in San Francisco. As the poet rose from the front pew Waldeman came to greet him. She hugged him and the big, tall poet from Yonkers, New York, stepped up onto the the altar stage. He spread out papers and books before him on a music stand and joked about City Lights in Florence.
From his lips there would come one piece by Allen Ginsberg and three short poems that Ferlinghetti has written as a tribute to his long standing friend. Lawrence Ferlinghetti speaks quietly, unhurried, assured like a man at peace with himself but his lines are powerfully laid.
Appropriately Lawrence Ferlinghetti begins with America by Allen Ginsberg. The poem from Howl effortlessly falls before us. How these lines must evoke those days in the fifties when Ferlinghetti stood his ground in Eisenhower's America. The audience are laughing at every twist and turn in the poem as Ginsberg sends up America and volunteers to put his 'queer shoulder to the wheel' against the threat from Russia who: ". . . wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take the cars out of our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help."
The reading recieves a mass of applause. Lawrence Ferlinghetti follows it with three poems, one long, two short written for Ginsberg. He alludes to the power of Allen running down telephone lines in his last day as he contacted friends across the world to say he was dying. Ferlinghetti alludes how he had sat with Allen on his bed. He had never got that close to him in all the time he had known him.
It is a fitting conclusion to the evening that Ferlinghetti is there to read his own elegy's to Allen Ginsberg. He stands pretty much on his own, a humble giant of literature, still razor sharp in his vision and tonight quite sombre as he reads three poems to Allen Ginsberg. The first poem is written two days before Allen's death. The second poem is written at Big Sur during May 1997, forty nine nights after Allen's death and the final poem is written on June 16, 1997.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti steps down from the altar to great applause. He has told the audience that there will now be some recordings of Allen Ginsberg and he hopes that we will sing along with the chorus. As he steps down from the altar Lawrence Ferlinghetti will stop, hold his hands up in prayer, bow his head to the audience and retake his seat.
A jaunty blues, called, I think, Further Death Blues, follows with Ginsberg on record singing along and the audience transfixed by it all. This is followed by Meditation Rock. Both are gloriously tonque in cheek. One has a line about Laurel and Hardy 'knuckling down' and the other based on a 'dumbed down' radio format boogie that pleads "It's never too late to tell the superpower to stop and meditate." Sounded fit for Country Joe and the Fish at Woodstock.
As the crowds disperse into the warm air of this balmy London evening people are gathering around Lawrence Ferlinghetti who remains sat signing books and pamphlets in the front pew. Julie Felix sits down beside him, waits and then catches his attention. "It has been so good to see you after so many years," she says beaming her radiance into his eyes. She hugs and kisses him.
It had been a rare night that celebrated the depth of Allen Ginsberg's influence. It had also given me my first opportunity to hear Lawrence Ferlinghetti read. Winning the Lottery wouldn't come anywhere close to it. Priceless.
Mike Plumbley