Born on June 3, 1926, Allen Ginsberg became one of the defining poets of postwar America, helping transform not only how poetry sounded but where it could be heard, what it could discuss, and who could speak openly within it. His long lines absorbed jazz, conversation, prayer, political protest, sexuality, travel, Buddhist practice, newspaper headlines, and the sprawling rhythms of American life. Poetry, in Ginsberg’s hands, could move from a private memory to a public outcry without changing voices.
His 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems became one of the landmark books of the Beat Generation and helped produce a famous obscenity trial that tested the limits of literary expression in the United States. Yet Ginsberg’s career extended far beyond Howl. Kaddish transformed the complicated memory of his mother into an extraordinary elegy, The Fall of America chronicled a nation unsettled by war and political conflict, and decades of poems, readings, recordings, photographs, teaching, travel, and activism made him one of the most visible poets of the twentieth century.
Ginsberg also belonged to one of the most remarkable networks of writers in modern American literature. Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs became close friends during his Columbia University years. William Carlos Williams encouraged his early poetry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Howl. Kenneth Rexroth introduced the famous Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg first performed the poem publicly. Later, poets and artists including Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Anne Waldman, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and many others entered the extraordinarily wide cultural circle surrounding him.
Through it all, Ginsberg remained committed to the idea that poetry could be a living, public art rather than something confined to quiet pages.
🎂 Born in New Jersey
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, on June 3, 1926, and grew up primarily in nearby Paterson. His father, Louis Ginsberg, was a teacher and published poet, while his mother, Naomi Levy Ginsberg, was politically active and deeply interested in left-wing politics.
Language and political argument were therefore present in the household from childhood. Allen encountered poetry through his father and social criticism through his mother, influences that would eventually combine within his own work.
The Ginsberg household could also be emotionally difficult. Naomi experienced recurring psychiatric illness and spent periods in hospitals, leaving Allen with memories of fear, confusion, tenderness, and responsibility that continued to haunt him long after childhood.
Those experiences eventually became central to Kaddish, one of his greatest poems.
Ginsberg’s willingness to write about family pain without turning it into a simple story of blame became characteristic of his work. He could be angry and compassionate simultaneously. He rarely believed people could be reduced to a single explanation.
📚 Discovering Poetry
As a teenager, Ginsberg read widely and became especially interested in writers including Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. Whitman would eventually become the more profound influence.
Whitman’s expansive free verse offered Ginsberg a model of poetry capable of containing enormous lists, physical bodies, sexual desire, geography, politics, spiritual longing, and the democratic confusion of American life.
The connection would last throughout Ginsberg’s career.
He did not imitate Whitman’s nineteenth-century language. Instead, he adapted the idea of the long poetic breath to twentieth-century America.
Cars replaced carriages.
Jazz replaced older musical rhythms.
Highways, supermarkets, apartment houses, psychiatric hospitals, factories, neon signs, radio broadcasts, protest marches, and city streets entered the poem.
The country had changed.
The long American poetic line could change with it.
🎓 Columbia University
Ginsberg entered Columbia University in New York City during the 1940s, originally imagining a more conventional professional future.
Columbia instead placed him inside the relationships that would transform his life.
He met Jack Kerouac.
William S. Burroughs.
Lucien Carr.
Later, Neal Cassady.
These friendships formed part of the loosely connected group that would eventually be called the Beat Generation.
At the time, there was no organized movement with a manifesto. There were simply young writers and friends arguing about literature, art, sex, drugs, politics, spirituality, crime, psychology, and the limitations they perceived in conventional American life.
They read one another’s work.
They stayed awake talking.
They moved between apartments, bars, universities, and cities.
They encouraged experiments that established literary institutions might have considered undisciplined or improper.
Out of those conversations came some of the most influential American writing of the postwar era.
🛣️ Kerouac, Burroughs & the Beat Generation
The friendship among Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs became central to Beat literary history.
Each writer developed a radically different style.
Kerouac pursued spontaneous prose, travel, jazz rhythms, Buddhism, and the restless movement associated with On the Road.
Burroughs developed darker, fractured writing concerned with addiction, control, language, and systems of power.
Ginsberg built a poetry capable of incorporating confession, prophecy, prayer, political protest, sexuality, and street language.
They influenced one another without becoming interchangeable.
The term “Beat” itself eventually accumulated several meanings. It suggested exhaustion and social marginality but also carried spiritual associations with beatitude.
The Beat writers became famous for resisting the expectations of postwar middle-class American culture, but reducing them simply to rebels misses the literary ambition behind their work.
They read enormously.
They argued about form.
They studied writers from Blake and Whitman to Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Pound, and Williams.
Ginsberg’s apparent spontaneity grew from a lifetime of reading.
🌟 William Carlos Williams
One of Ginsberg’s most important early literary mentors was William Carlos Williams, the older modernist poet who lived not far from the Ginsberg family in New Jersey.
Williams encouraged Ginsberg to pay attention to actual American speech rather than adopting a poetic voice that sounded inherited from another era.
The advice suited Ginsberg perfectly.
He wanted poems that could contain the language he heard around him.
Conversation.
Arguments.
Street cries.
Political slogans.
Radio.
Jazz.
Private confession.
Williams also provided Ginsberg with a connection to the American modernist tradition while encouraging him to find his own form.
Later, Williams wrote an introduction for Howl and Other Poems, helping connect a rebellious younger poet with an earlier generation of American experimentation.
🌉 San Francisco
During the mid-1950s, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco and entered a literary community that would soon become internationally famous.
The city already possessed a lively poetry culture involving writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and others.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti had established City Lights Bookstore, which became both a gathering place and an independent publishing venture.
San Francisco offered Ginsberg something different from New York.
The literary hierarchy seemed less rigid.
Poetry readings mattered.
Bookstores became cultural centers.
Poets collaborated with painters and musicians.
New forms could emerge outside universities and major publishing houses.
This environment helped create the conditions in which Ginsberg’s breakthrough poem could be heard.
🎤 The Six Gallery Reading
On October 7, 1955, a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco became one of the defining events in Beat mythology.
Kenneth Rexroth served as master of ceremonies.
The participating poets included Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip Lamantia.
Jack Kerouac was in the audience.
That evening, Ginsberg gave an early public performance of Howl.
The poem had been developing through a combination of personal memory, experiments with long lines, biblical cadence, Whitman’s influence, jazz rhythms, and Ginsberg’s increasing confidence in writing openly about experiences that conventional literary culture often avoided.
The effect on the room was powerful.
The reading did not instantly create the Beat Generation, but it became one of the moments around which the later history of the movement was constructed.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti recognized what he had heard and soon offered to publish it.
📖 Howl
Howl and Other Poems appeared from City Lights in 1956 as part of the Pocket Poets Series.
The title poem was an enormous cry of grief, anger, celebration, accusation, memory, and companionship.
Ginsberg wrote about people whose lives had been damaged by poverty, institutionalization, addiction, war, conformity, sexual repression, and the pressures of modern American society.
Some were his friends.
Some were writers.
Some were psychiatric patients.
Some were wanderers.
Some were people living outside conventional expectations.
The poem insists upon seeing them rather than treating them as failures who could simply be discarded.
Its long lines build through accumulation. Images and experiences arrive one after another, creating a breathless sense of movement.
The poem does not sound like someone calmly observing society from a distance.
It sounds like someone standing inside the chaos and trying to name everything before the breath runs out.
🏭 Moloch
One of Howl‘s most famous sections revolves around the figure of Moloch, an ancient name that Ginsberg transformed into an image of destructive modern systems.
Industry.
War.
Money.
Bureaucracy.
Mechanization.
Social conformity.
Buildings.
Institutional power.
All become part of the enormous force against which individual human consciousness struggles.
Ginsberg’s America is never simply evil, however.
He loved the country enough to rage at what he believed it was doing to people.
That mixture of affection and accusation appears throughout his career.
America is beautiful.
America is absurd.
America is violent.
America contains spiritual possibility.
America is a machine.
America is also the people trapped inside it.
Those contradictions became one of Ginsberg’s central subjects.
⚖️ Howl on Trial
Publication quickly produced legal trouble.
Copies of Howl and Other Poems were seized by authorities, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights employee Shigeyoshi Murao became involved in an obscenity prosecution because of the poem’s sexual language and subject matter.
The resulting 1957 trial became a landmark episode in American literary history.
The central question was whether the poem possessed redeeming social importance despite language some readers considered obscene.
Judge Clayton Horn ultimately ruled that the work was not obscene under the applicable legal standard.
The decision helped establish greater freedom for publishers willing to print controversial literature.
The trial also transformed Howl from a small-press poetry book into a national cultural event.
People who might never have attended a poetry reading suddenly knew Allen Ginsberg’s name.
Censorship had amplified the poem.
❤️ Peter Orlovsky
In San Francisco, Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky, who became his longtime partner.
Their relationship lasted in various forms for decades and became one of the central personal relationships of Ginsberg’s adult life.
At a time when same-sex relationships faced severe legal and social restrictions in the United States, Ginsberg wrote openly about his sexuality and refused to treat homosexuality as something that had to be disguised within poetry.
This openness became historically important.
Literary representations of gay life certainly existed before Ginsberg, but few internationally prominent American poets of his generation spoke so publicly about same-sex desire.
Ginsberg’s work helped create cultural space later generations of LGBTQ+ writers would expand dramatically.
His poetry did not present sexuality as one isolated subject.
It belonged to the larger question running throughout his work: how freely can a person inhabit their own consciousness and body?
🕯️ Kaddish
If Howl made Ginsberg famous, Kaddish revealed another dimension of his poetry.
Written following the death of his mother, Naomi, the poem takes its title from the Jewish prayer traditionally associated with mourning.
Ginsberg combines memory, grief, family history, Jewish identity, psychiatric illness, childhood fear, tenderness, anger, and guilt into a long elegy unlike conventional memorial poetry.
Naomi does not become idealized simply because she has died.
The poem remembers the frightening moments as well as the loving ones.
That honesty gives Kaddish much of its emotional force.
Grief does not erase complexity.
A child can love a parent who frightened them.
An adult can mourn someone while remembering the difficulty of living beside them.
Ginsberg transforms that contradiction into poetry.
🧠 Poetry & Mental Experience
Ginsberg’s work repeatedly questions conventional boundaries between normal and abnormal consciousness.
His childhood experiences with his mother gave him a particularly complicated relationship with psychiatric institutions, while his friendships and his own experiences exposed him to people whose lives had been shaped by diagnosis, hospitalization, and social marginalization.
Rather than romanticizing suffering, his poems ask who has the authority to determine which forms of consciousness deserve acceptance.
This question connects personal experience with larger cultural criticism.
Postwar America celebrated order.
Ginsberg became fascinated by people who did not fit orderly categories.
Poets.
Mystics.
Outsiders.
Travelers.
Patients.
People experimenting with perception.
Those lives became part of his argument that human consciousness was stranger and larger than respectable society often wanted to admit.
🛒 A Supermarket in California
Ginsberg’s dialogue with Walt Whitman appears beautifully in A Supermarket in California.
The poem imagines the nineteenth-century poet wandering through a modern American supermarket, surrounded by fluorescent abundance.
The setting is deliberately ordinary.
Food is arranged for sale.
Shoppers move through aisles.
Commercial America glows beneath artificial light.
Into that environment Ginsberg brings Whitman, the great poet of democratic possibility, sexuality, bodies, and the American landscape.
The resulting contrast contains humor, loneliness, admiration, and disappointment.
What happened to Whitman’s America?
What kind of country has replaced it?
Where does a queer poet find belonging within the modern commercial city?
The questions remain unresolved.
Ginsberg walks through the store anyway.
🌻 Sunflower Sutra
Another important poem, Sunflower Sutra, begins in an industrial landscape filled with machinery, dust, railroad debris, and pollution.
Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac encounter a battered sunflower.
The flower has been damaged by the environment surrounding it but has not ceased to be a sunflower.
The image becomes one of Ginsberg’s most powerful expressions of resistance to the idea that industrial ugliness can completely define human identity.
Damage is real.
But damage is not essence.
The poem reflects a recurring Ginsberg belief that something luminous remains possible inside environments that appear spiritually exhausted.
That belief helps explain why his angriest poetry often contains strange moments of hope.
🌎 Travel & the Search for Spiritual Traditions
Ginsberg traveled extensively throughout his life.
Europe.
Latin America.
India.
Japan.
North Africa.
Eastern Europe.
Different cultures gave him opportunities to encounter writers, religious traditions, political systems, music, and forms of daily life far removed from the United States.
Travel also suited the Beat fascination with movement.
The road represented more than tourism.
It suggested escape from fixed identity.
A person left home and encountered another version of reality.
Ginsberg’s most important spiritual travels took him toward Hindu and Buddhist traditions, especially during his journeys through India with Peter Orlovsky and other friends.
These encounters permanently changed his poetry and daily practice.
🇮🇳 India, Buddhism & Meditation
Ginsberg’s interest in Eastern religion deepened dramatically during the 1960s.
He studied meditation, mantras, Hindu devotional traditions, and Tibetan Buddhism, eventually developing a sustained Buddhist practice.
This did not require him to erase his Jewish background.
Ginsberg’s spiritual life remained characteristically hybrid.
Jewish prayer.
Buddhist meditation.
Hindu chanting.
Blakean visions.
Whitman’s democratic spirituality.
All could coexist.
In 1972, Ginsberg formally took Buddhist refuge and bodhisattva vows.
His association with Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa later became especially important and eventually contributed to the founding of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa.
For Ginsberg, meditation and poetry shared a basic activity.
Pay attention to the mind.
☮️ Poetry & Protest
Ginsberg became an increasingly visible participant in political protest during the 1960s and 1970s.
He opposed the Vietnam War and participated in demonstrations against militarism and government policies he considered destructive.
Yet his approach to protest could be unusual.
Rather than matching aggression with aggression, he sometimes introduced chanting, meditation, humor, flowers, or deliberately theatrical gestures into tense political situations.
The phrase “flower power” became associated with this attempt to imagine nonviolent responses to confrontation.
Ginsberg’s political poetry could be furious, but he was equally interested in what happened to the mind of someone consumed by hatred.
Political transformation and psychological transformation could not be completely separated.
A society built upon violence would not necessarily become peaceful simply because different people acquired power.
The individual mind mattered too.
🇺🇸 The Fall of America
Ginsberg spent much of the late 1960s traveling through the United States while recording impressions of a country transformed by war, protest, mass media, political assassination, counterculture, and technological change.
Those experiences became The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971.
The collection incorporates travel, radio broadcasts, headlines, landscape, conversation, political anger, personal reflection, and the continual movement of cars and buses through the country.
The title deliberately echoes both national decline and the literal experience of moving through America.
The poems ask what the United States had become during the Vietnam era.
Ginsberg does not provide a single answer.
Instead, he records.
The country speaks through radios.
News flashes across consciousness.
Highways unfold.
Cities pass.
War remains present even thousands of miles from the battlefield.
The book received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974.
🎶 Poetry, Song & Bob Dylan
Ginsberg’s fascination with rhythm naturally drew him toward musicians.
He became friendly with Bob Dylan and participated in various recording and performance projects over the years.
The connection made sense.
Dylan had helped bring literary ambition into popular songwriting, while Ginsberg had spent decades bringing musical rhythms into poetry.
Both understood the power of the performed voice.
A poem on the page and a poem spoken aloud are not identical experiences.
Breath matters.
Timing matters.
Volume matters.
Silence matters.
Ginsberg increasingly incorporated harmonium, chanting, singing, and spoken performance into his readings.
He could move from poetry recital to musical performance without recognizing a firm boundary between them.
📷 The Photographer
Ginsberg was also an important photographer.
He carried cameras through decades of friendships and literary history, photographing Kerouac, Burroughs, Orlovsky, Corso, Snyder, and many others.
These photographs possess enormous documentary value because Ginsberg was not an outsider photographing literary celebrities after they became famous.
He was their friend.
The images often capture writers in apartments, streets, kitchens, hotel rooms, and informal gatherings.
His handwritten captions add another layer, transforming photographs into miniature acts of memory.
Ginsberg’s camera participated in the same project as his poetry.
Pay attention.
Record the people around you.
History may already be happening.
🧘 Naropa & the Jack Kerouac School
In 1974, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman helped establish the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The school brought together experimental writing, Buddhist practice, oral performance, and literary traditions often excluded from conventional university curricula.
Writers including William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, and many others participated in the wider Naropa community over the years.
Ginsberg became an energetic teacher of poetry.
His interests ranged widely across centuries and movements, demonstrating once again that the famous Beat rebel was also a serious student of literary history.
He could discuss Blake, Whitman, Pound, Williams, Buddhist texts, song, blues, mantra, and contemporary poetry within the same course.
Experiment, for Ginsberg, required knowledge.
🎓 Teaching at Brooklyn College
Later in life, Ginsberg also taught at Brooklyn College, where he became a distinguished professor.
The position was an amusing reversal of the outsider identity that had defined his public reputation decades earlier.
The poet once prosecuted indirectly through an obscenity case had become a professor.
The Beat rebel had entered the academy.
Yet Ginsberg did not simply become conventional with age.
He continued performing, protesting, traveling, practicing Buddhism, photographing friends, experimenting with music, and publishing poetry.
If anything, his institutional recognition demonstrated how dramatically American culture had changed around him.
Ideas and writing once considered scandalous had become part of literary history.
🏆 Recognition
By the later decades of his life, Ginsberg had accumulated substantial literary recognition.
The Fall of America received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. He received the Robert Frost Medal and was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. France named him a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
His work was studied at universities and preserved in major archives.
This institutional acceptance never completely erased his identity as a countercultural figure, however.
Ginsberg remained unusual because literary fame and public activism were inseparable within his career.
He did not believe poets needed to become invisible once they became respectable.
A poet could still show up.
At a protest.
At a reading.
In a classroom.
At someone’s apartment.
With a camera.
With a harmonium.
With another poem.
🌈 An Openly Gay Literary Voice
Ginsberg’s significance within LGBTQ+ literary history extends beyond individual poems.
He lived openly enough that his sexuality became part of his public identity decades before such openness was widely accepted in American public life.
His poetry names same-sex desire directly rather than treating it as coded subtext.
That openness brought risks.
Laws criminalizing homosexual relationships remained widespread.
Government agencies monitored gay people.
Employment discrimination was common.
Public disclosure could destroy careers.
Ginsberg nevertheless insisted that sexual identity belonged within honest literature.
This was consistent with his larger poetic principle.
If something mattered deeply to human experience, poetry should be able to speak about it.
📖 First Thought, Best Thought?
Ginsberg became associated with the phrase “first thought, best thought,” often connected with spontaneous composition and later with Buddhist-influenced poetics.
The phrase can be misunderstood as an excuse for careless writing.
Ginsberg’s own practice was considerably more complicated.
He revised.
He studied prosody.
He read other poets closely.
He worked with manuscripts.
He thought intensely about breath, rhythm, line length, syntax, and performance.
Spontaneity did not mean ignorance of craft.
It meant attempting to remain close to the energy of perception before excessive self-censorship destroyed it.
This idea links Ginsberg with Kerouac’s spontaneous prose while also reflecting Buddhist attention to the immediate movement of mind.
Write what appears.
Then learn how to hear it.
🕯️ Final Years
Ginsberg continued writing and performing almost until the end of his life.
By the 1990s, he had become one of the surviving elders of a movement whose rebellious youth had long since entered literary history.
Kerouac was gone.
Cassady was gone.
Many other friends had died.
Ginsberg became increasingly conscious of aging and mortality, subjects that naturally entered his later poems.
In the spring of 1997, he learned that he had advanced liver cancer. Even during his final illness, he continued writing.
Allen Ginsberg died in New York City on April 5, 1997.
He was seventy years old.
The poet who had once seemed to embody youthful rebellion had spent more than four decades expanding the territory of American poetry.
📚 Beyond the Beat Label
Calling Ginsberg a Beat poet is accurate.
It is also incomplete.
The Beat Generation provides the historical doorway through which many readers encounter him, but his career extended far beyond the movement’s most famous years.
He was a Jewish poet.
A queer poet.
A political poet.
A Buddhist poet.
A photographer.
A performer.
A teacher.
A literary archivist of his friendships.
A student of Blake and Whitman.
A traveler.
A public intellectual.
A collaborator with musicians.
A defender of free expression.
The Beat label helps explain where he began.
It does not explain everywhere he went.
🌎 Changing the Public Life of Poetry
One of Ginsberg’s most lasting achievements may be the way he changed expectations surrounding what a poet could do in public.
Poetry readings existed before Ginsberg.
Political poetry existed before Ginsberg.
Confessional poetry existed before Ginsberg.
Public literary controversy certainly existed before him.
Yet he combined these things with unusual intensity.
A reading could become an event.
A poem could become part of a court case.
A poet could participate in mass demonstrations.
A book could circulate through underground culture and university classrooms simultaneously.
A literary figure could collaborate with rock musicians, Buddhist teachers, filmmakers, activists, photographers, and students.
Ginsberg helped make poetry visible in places where poetry was not expected.
That visibility influenced later generations of spoken-word poets, performance poets, musicians, activists, and writers working beyond conventional publishing structures.
📖 Why Allen Ginsberg Still Matters
Ginsberg remains important because he expanded the range of experience American poetry could contain.
Family trauma could enter.
Mental illness could enter.
Gay desire could enter.
Buddhist practice could enter.
Political protest could enter.
Drug experience could enter.
News broadcasts could enter.
Dirty apartments could enter.
Highways could enter.
Supermarkets could enter.
The poem did not have to become less literary simply because ordinary or uncomfortable life entered it.
Ginsberg also understood that America itself was a poetic subject too large to treat simply as either heroic or corrupt.
He could love Whitman’s democratic dream while distrusting the machinery of modern power.
He could condemn war while remaining fascinated by the country sending soldiers into it.
He could criticize consumerism while walking through American supermarkets.
He could be appalled by the present while still searching for spiritual possibility inside it.
Those contradictions keep the work alive.
🎂 Remembering Allen Ginsberg on His Birthday
June 3 offers a fitting occasion to return to Allen Ginsberg, a poet who helped make American poetry louder, more public, more personal, and considerably harder to police.
Born in Newark in 1926 and raised in Paterson, Ginsberg entered Columbia University, met the writers who would become the core of the Beat Generation, moved west, found a thriving San Francisco poetry community, and eventually stood before an audience at the Six Gallery reading a poem that would alter the course of his life.
Howl made him famous.
But Ginsberg kept moving.
He wrote Kaddish.
Traveled through India.
Studied Buddhism.
Opposed war.
Photographed his friends.
Crossed America.
Won the National Book Award.
Helped establish a poetry school.
Taught students.
Collaborated with musicians.
And continued writing almost until his death in 1997.
Through all of it ran one persistent conviction: experience should not have to become respectable before it becomes poetry.
The overlooked person.
The frightened child.
The psychiatric patient.
The traveler.
The protester.
The queer lover.
The aging poet.
The person standing beneath fluorescent supermarket lights wondering what happened to the American dream.
All belonged inside the poem.
Allen Ginsberg spent his life opening that door wider.
American poetry has never completely closed it again.
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Berkeley, 1955
-Allen Ginsberg
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