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i Poet.com and The Homeless Poets' Cafe

Proudly Present Bard:
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image: Allen Ginsberg drawing by Adot Webb and tWerks Co

Allen Ginsberg !

featured works:
Sunflower Sutra
<(Thanks to poet Zoe Anna for suggesting the above superlative poem)
HOWL
Kaddish 44

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BIO: Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926, Allen Ginsberg published Howl and Other Poems in 1956. He was a member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters and a co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He once said he wanted to be known as a man who "distributed monies to poor poets & nourished the imaginative genius of the land." God bless him.

Mr. Ginsberg died in New York in 1997. For more info try: Ashes.&.Blues or City Lights Bookstore.

AND BE SURE TO READ:
William Blake and Allen Ginsberg: Poets of a Fallen World

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Berkeley street poetess, Julia Vinograd,
tells a poignant true anecdote about Allen here:

GINSBERG

No blame.  Anyone who wrote Howl and Kaddish
earned the right to make any possible mistake
for the rest of his life.
I just wish I hadn't made this mistake with him.
It was during the Vietnam war
and he was giving a great protest reading
in Washington Square Park
and nobody wanted to leave.
So Ginsberg got the idea, "I'm going to shout
'the war is over' as loud as I can, "he said
"and all of you run over the city
in different directions
yelling the war is over, shout it in offices,
shops, everywhere and when enough people
believe the war is over
why, not even the politicians
will be able to keep it going."
I thought it was a great idea at the time,
a truly poetic idea.
So when Ginsberg yelled I ran down the street
and leaned in the doorway
of the sort of respectable down on its luck cafeteria
where librarians and minor clerks have lunch
and I yelled "the war is over."
And a little old lady looked up
from her cottage cheese and fruit salad.
She was so ordinary she would have been invisible
except for the terrible light
filling her face as she whispered
"My son.  My son is coming home."
I got myself out of there and was sick in some bushes.
That was the first time I believed there was a war.

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