FUNNY, profound, declamatory, energetic, street smart and benign, Allen Ginsberg, the guru of the Beat Generation and one post war avante garde icon who never became passe, is dead, at the age of 70. Once described by the FBI as "an entertainer who chants unintelligible poems", Ginsberg, who died on Saturday, was an exhibitionist shrewdly aware of the political, significance of his offbeat behaviour. Yet he did not consider himself a commentator. Nor did he like being described as a performer, despite the strongly performance aspect of his rhythmic chanting delivery often accompanied by a harmonium. I'm a stenographer of my mind," he told me in 1995, the voice weary but the mind as sharp as ever. I write down what passes through it, not what goes on around me. I'm a poet."
His knowledge of poetry - ancient and modern - was immense. Accepting Whitman's enduring influence, he stressed his own long verse line came from an earlier source, Christopher Smart. He also revered Blake and often performed passages from Blake's Songs Of Innocence which he had set to music.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926, Ginsberg was a student at Columbia University, alongside William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg's father had been a published poet, while his mother spent most of her son's life in an institution. Ginsberg had a stint in a mental home in 1949 and claimed he had a vision of Blake and later of God. Troubled by his sexuality and literary inhibition Ginsberg's first poems are formal, often highly wrought and tense. But by late 1955 the opening sections of Howl, with its balance of the lyric and the obscene, were ready for public reading. Appearing in the volume Howl (1956) two years later, the poem featured in an obscenity case in the battle against literary censorship. From Kaddish (1961) onwards, his work became more political. As late as 1988, then US president, Ronald Reagan issued a directive banning Ginsberg's work from US radio and television. It was later amended, permitting broadcast between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. It reconsolidated his outsider status.
Had he enjoyed his life spent as a poet? "Yeah," he answered me, "it's a great job." Few artists appear to have actively enjoyed their artistic lives quite as much as Allen Ginsberg, a never complacent showman with a conscience.
