“The Two Ginsbergs”

This got me thinking of two things I learned from Allen Ginsberg, whom I briefly met 15 years ago after he read and sang to a large group at my alma mater:

(1) William Blake’s poems are meant to be sung. Ginsberg performed some of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” with a slightly slobbery awkwardly energy I would never forget. (I had yet to hear these.)

(2) When a 69-year-old gay elder statesmen of  beat poetry asks a fairly innocent 20-year-old man from Ohio at 9pm if he’d like to join him for “breakfast,” he’s neglecting to mention that breakfast would lie at the end of an unspoken chain of hoped-for events, implied by the shaky but confident placing of the former’s wrinkly hand on the latter’s corduroyed knee. Although flattered, I declined. No hash browns were had, but I made the most of my bragging rights.