Ginsberg the Multimedia Man : Beat Generation Poet-Musician Due in Southland

Let us visit Mr. Ginsberg’s Neighborhood. It’s in a funky Lower East Side locale, right across the street from Mary Help of Christians Catholic Church and P.S. 60. You hear church bells ring, children shout.

Four flights up in an elderly four-room apartment sits Mr. Ginsberg.

Allen Ginsberg, poet, teacher, amateur photographer, a leading light of the Beat movement of the ‘50s, owner of a U.S. Army portable field organ on which he noodles the 12-bar blues he sometimes sings.

The Beat goes on for the 62-year-old poet, pal of Beat legends like Jack Kerouac, and a veteran of an almost-innocent era, when the true and knowing hipster stashed his weed in a small film container, then hid that inside the Herman Hesse book on the brick-and-board bookshelf, certain that the pot police would never case the Hesse section.

Although sometimes billed as the country’s laureate of alienation and protest since the ‘50s, when his now-classic “Howl” first was heard, Ginsberg would disappoint those expecting an anarchist of the wild-haired, up-against-the-wall kind rendered by Hollywood film makers.

He still revels in giving the raspberry to the Establishment, denouncing what he sees as the stupidity and evil of governments, be they American or Soviet. His passions are strong.

But when he speaks, it is softly, with wry, gentle humor. He carries no bombs. His black bushy hair and free-form beard, symbols of what ‘60s citizens called the counterculture, are history. The top is mostly bald now, the beard gray and neatly trimmed.

And he teaches poetry, although he doesn’t find that strange. Even in his early days as the experience-it-all bard of the Beats, “I was teaching then, in a sense.”

Nowadays, he instructs at a Colorado haven, the Naropa Institute, where he co-founded what is waggishly called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He also teaches at Brooklyn College.

He periodically ventures forth on expeditions of mostly-poetry-some-music performances, such as at McCabe’s in Santa Monica, where he has appeared before and where he’ll appear on Feb. 24.

The next night, he’ll be at Fullerton College in Orange County.

Few poets have recorded, as has he, seven albums of music and poetry, one a blues number produced by John Hammond, the late Columbia Records genius whose discoveries range from Billie Holliday to Bruce Springsteen.

One Ginsberg album, cut in 1969, even sets music to the poetry of William Blake, an early hero of his. The sidemen are such jazz guys as drummer Elvin Jones, trumpeter Don Cherry and French horn player Julius Watkins.

Next month, he has a new album coming out, “The Lion for Real,” (Great Jones Records, a division of Island). In it, he says, he both speaks and sings his poetry. He’s backed by a band--playing both free-form music and blues--whose members usually work with Tom Waits, the late-hour singer with the gravelly voice.

Also due out in February: “Photographs,” a $50 collection of black-and-white photos Ginsberg has taken since 1945, shots of the major and minor figures of the Beat and subsequent movements, and simply people he knows, with his comments about them.

Published by Twelvetrees Press of Altadena, it’s the first photography book by Ginsberg, who took up the camera because “I kind of worshiped the people I was taking pictures of . . . “So I brought the same attitude as I do in poetry in taking pictures--which is the vanishing moment, the poignancy in general.”

(Other looks at Ginsberg’s life, of Kerouac’s, and of such ‘60s heavies as Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale now are on display in a new documentary, “Growing Up in America,” which is playing at the Laemmle Monicas in Santa Monica, weekends only, through next Saturday.).

Why be a poet? Ginsberg, author of 15 books of poetry and 11 prose works, shrugs, then laughs, then explains.

“Bewilderment and inability to get along in the confusion of total lies. I was incompetent to fake it. I tried real hard.” A grin. “I applied for a job on Time magazine, but I wasn’t accepted.”

Is it not odd that kids raised in today’s TV age study poetry?

Remember, he says, “the tradition of poetry and music has had a revival,” much of it in rock, in the works of Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Waits. Remember, too, he says, that today’s kids “grew up on oral literature, not written, which is the oldest form of poetry.”

“Poetry and music always have been together, you know, from the very beginning, from Homer and Sappho on,” he says.

The United States, he feels, has something special going in that artistic arena: the blues.

“The greatest American poetry is the blues poetry,” he says.

The blues--and jazz--always were part of the Beat movement, with a dab of the Orient checking in now and then. All that came together, he recalls, when Kerouac, in the late ‘50s, recorded “Blues and Haiku,” an album featuring tenor sax greats Al Cohn and Zoot Sims.

Ginsberg reckons that he’s only been singing for about 20 years, a lot of that the blues. He first heard the blues, he says, as a kid growing up in a predominantly black section of Paterson, N.J., then listening to Leadbelly on the radio.

Why is it that he never tried the world of pop music?

“I would if I could, but I couldn’t, so I wouldn’t . . . I just try to write whatever comes into my head. What I think naturally is what I try to write.”

The poet, recovering from gall bladder surgery, moves carefully, almost gingerly around his neat, Spartan, book-filled apartment. But he grows animated in talking music, both jazz and rock, or sitting at his pedal-powered portable Army field organ, called a harmonium, playing the basic blues chord progressions.

He laughs when asked to describe his singing voice.

“Oh,” he says, deadpan, “it’s getting more on pitch.” He smiles.

“I just like to sing, like to sing in the bathtub, in the shower. You know, if poetry isn’t fun, and music isn’t fun, and art isn’t fun, and life isn’t fun, what good is it?”

This is Mr. Ginsberg’s Neighborhood.