‘Poet Is Priest’ in a Time of Truth and Change

I sold Allen Ginsberg’s poetry back in the early ‘60s, when San Francisco police would occasionally come through the door of City Lights Books looking to bust my boss, poet publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, because one of the authors he published had used the “f” word.

The officers’ literary standards were quite specific, and my protestation that Allen Ginsberg, often the target of their inquisition, was the most remarkable poet of his time--even celebrated by the likes of William Carlos Williams--was to no avail.

These days there are streets near City Lights named after Beat poets, and even the cops in that now sophisticated town would likely agree with Williams, who wrote in his introduction to Ginsberg’s first collection that “poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.”

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News of Ginsberg’s death sends me down to the Midnight Special bookstore on the Promenade in Santa Monica, where “angelheaded hipsters”--franchised now like the espresso from San Francisco’s 1950s North Beach--do congregate but don’t read and are probably not the best minds of their generation. Although that’s what stuffy established people said about Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and were they ever so wrong.

With a fevered haste that would have caused Ginsberg to giggle, I grabbed the last copy of his extraordinary pamphlet poem “Howl,” which was once again missing from my bookshelf. It was borrowed often, but rarely returned, by those old enough to savor it as the obituary of the oppressive ‘50s and as the first screaming rebirth pains of the maniacal love of freedom that this funky reincarnation of Tom Paine would push past the batons of cops and into the hands of the young who never know better than to think that life doesn’t have to be as it is.

Ginsberg’s naked courage is not always evident to us today because of the many battles that he helped win. The love of a man for a man, what Williams referred to in his 1956 introduction to “Howl” as the “affrontery to love a fellow of his own choice and record that love in a well-made poem,” is admitted if not accepted as a fact of life. In the days when Ginsberg dared to celebrate his same-sex loves, gay was “fag” and it was, as I recall even in San Francisco, almost always used pejoratively.

Ginsberg’s love was universal, and at a time when America, even in the North, was rigidly segregated, Ginsberg was one of those whites who plunged into the most alienated strata of ghettoized America, “dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn,” as he wrote in “Howl,” “looking for an angry fix” and ending with a poetry that was wedded to the sounds of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk.

A lifelong pacifist who eschewed violence no matter the cause in which it was employed, Ginsberg was one of the first--at a time when kids were ducking under desks in A-bomb civil defense drills--to mention the unmentionable: there would be no survivors, let alone winners, in a nuclear war; there were no good warriors, not Americans or Russians or Vietnamese, only humans led astray to kill.

No one was his enemy, not the police or protesters. I once came upon Ginsberg, a bearded Buddha chanting his calming mantra in the midst of a tear gas rain forest in the Yale yard. We were caught in a mini-riot following Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, and I tried to explain to Ginsberg that events were out of control and he’d better get out of there. He had the most benighted but quizzical response to my entreaty to leave, and asked me how his departure could possibly make things go better for those being clubbed. He was right then as he was throughout the protests of those years, never betraying his pacifist faith to rage, rhetoric or the expediency of cause.

“Poet is priest,’ ” I wrote of him back in 1960 in a tiny, brown shingle shack in Berkeley where Allen Ginsberg had previously lived and where we collated copies of Root and Branch, the first New Left magazine. It was a warning to myself, as much as to the readers, to heed the message of Ginsberg that truth is inevitably chaotic, personal and never organized and official.

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For more than 40 years, he has been a shadow on our conscience, reminding us of the potential for harm by even the best intentioned. His was the anarchist’s independent spirit, but one obsessively nonviolent and always governed by the temperament of the lover.

“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel,” he wrote in 1956 in his poem “America.” What a brave and gentle patriot and, of course, poet Allen Ginsberg was.

His unfettered love could be summed up in a line from one of his earliest poems, “Sunflower Sutra”: “We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside.”

Scheer is a contributing editor to The Times.