Rejection X
Mr. Ginsberg, I haven’t even met the best minds of my
generation, but I have read your poems
and theirs, and seen their hair and yours, and watched them
flee Louisiana’s economy —
40,000 in 1987 alone — running — not starving, not hysterical,
not naked, but from
something more mundane, that caused the U-Haul stores to phone
their sisters in
neighboring states for backup stock.
Allen Ginsberg when I was 25 in Baton Rouge, statewide
unemployment was 15 percent.
Our poverty and tatters was a jobless economy & student loan
debt.
I dream of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, fresh from his North Beach
coffeehouses,
arriving with his BA in Creative Writing in 1988 Louisiana,
with no jobs but substitute
teaching, and 23,000 dollars in the hole.
What poems does he write after bicycling home from his 3 a.m.
shift at the Coffee Call
franchise bussing tables for $3.65 an hour?
Allen (mayIcallyouAllen?), in 1986 I stayed up all night
following the poemprints of “Howl” in
parody, blasting silly after silly, and found your breathing
theory — one lungfull per
line — worked perfectly for comedy, breathed out one 50-syllable
line, inhaled the laughter,
and breathed back out the next.
I tried to do you at a reading at the Gumbo Place in Baton
Rouge, when all the funnest people
had gone to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, and when I popped
the single remaining
lens out of my horned-rimmed glasses to get that Ginsberg
look, the glass cut my thumb,
and each page took my bloodprint.
But that restaurant was closed by recession; the repertory
theater, bankrupt; post-hippy
communal performance space, condemned; school budget,
dessimated; even the
university anticensorhip movement thinned out for lack of
interest and dissolved.
Allen-I-will-call-you-Allen, to answer your question, “Who wants
to be fucked in the ass anyway,
really?”: In 1993 the papers claim it’s 1.1 percent. 30 years
later your thousand angelic
cocks fell down upon their owners not as alarm clocks but as
virus. What you freely
admitted as pathology, we now embrace, insist — and are backed
up by the APA — is not.
Ginsberg, greybeard, my queer shoulder has been against the
wheel for years, but my poems never
spawned insanity trials reported on in Newsweek. When I sent
out my parody of Howl,
the rejection slip came back marked as if addressing my entire
generation:
generation, but I have read your poems
and theirs, and seen their hair and yours, and watched them
flee Louisiana’s economy —
40,000 in 1987 alone — running — not starving, not hysterical,
not naked, but from
something more mundane, that caused the U-Haul stores to phone
their sisters in
neighboring states for backup stock.
Allen Ginsberg when I was 25 in Baton Rouge, statewide
unemployment was 15 percent.
Our poverty and tatters was a jobless economy & student loan
debt.
I dream of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, fresh from his North Beach
coffeehouses,
arriving with his BA in Creative Writing in 1988 Louisiana,
with no jobs but substitute
teaching, and 23,000 dollars in the hole.
What poems does he write after bicycling home from his 3 a.m.
shift at the Coffee Call
franchise bussing tables for $3.65 an hour?
Allen (mayIcallyouAllen?), in 1986 I stayed up all night
following the poemprints of “Howl” in
parody, blasting silly after silly, and found your breathing
theory — one lungfull per
line — worked perfectly for comedy, breathed out one 50-syllable
line, inhaled the laughter,
and breathed back out the next.
I tried to do you at a reading at the Gumbo Place in Baton
Rouge, when all the funnest people
had gone to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, and when I popped
the single remaining
lens out of my horned-rimmed glasses to get that Ginsberg
look, the glass cut my thumb,
and each page took my bloodprint.
But that restaurant was closed by recession; the repertory
theater, bankrupt; post-hippy
communal performance space, condemned; school budget,
dessimated; even the
university anticensorhip movement thinned out for lack of
interest and dissolved.
Allen-I-will-call-you-Allen, to answer your question, “Who wants
to be fucked in the ass anyway,
really?”: In 1993 the papers claim it’s 1.1 percent. 30 years
later your thousand angelic
cocks fell down upon their owners not as alarm clocks but as
virus. What you freely
admitted as pathology, we now embrace, insist — and are backed
up by the APA — is not.
Ginsberg, greybeard, my queer shoulder has been against the
wheel for years, but my poems never
spawned insanity trials reported on in Newsweek. When I sent
out my parody of Howl,
the rejection slip came back marked as if addressing my entire
generation:
“Clever and energetic — but ultimately lacking a point.”
