Does everybody in here knows who Allen Ginsberg is?
Sometimes you have to ask.
In fact, I read this poem at a reading at a college,
and after the reading somebody came up to me
and said they had been in the elevator,
and some of the kids going in the elevator said,
I really liked that reading, but I especially
liked that Alec Guinness poem.
So sometimes you have to give an introduction who
Allen Ginsberg is.
OK, I'll tell you.
He was like the 60s guy that did with Burroughs,
and On The Road, that Kerouac, and he was the poet.
Well actually, he was the one that
began it all with the publication of Howl that
got-- the FBI confiscated all the copies of Howl,
remember that?
And the New York Times wrote it up the next day,
that the FBI had confiscated when Howl arrived on the docks.
It had been printed in England, and when
it arrived on the docks here, the FBI,
because it had foul language in it, and they confiscated it.
And the New York Times put it in the headlines the next day,
and there went a million sales.
Once again the FBI did it, a great success story.
And then he led all the political--
a lot of the political struggles during the 60s, and the drugs,
and all that.
Well anyway, now Allen Ginsberg wears a suit
all the time, and a tie, and he's, of course,
one of our great living poets.
And I wrote this poem called "Allen Ginsberg."
"Once Allen Ginsberg stopped to pee
at a bookstore in New Jersey.
But he looked like a bum, not like the miracle laden Christ
with electric Adam juice.
Not like the one whose brain is a river in which
was plunked the stone of the world,
the one bathing fluid to wash away 25,000 year half lives.
He was dressed as a bum.
He had wobbled on a pee-heavy bladder,
in search of a gas station, a dime store with a quarter
booth, a Chinese restaurant, when he came to that grocery
store of dreams.
Chunks of Baudelaire's skin glittered in plastic.
His eyes in sets, innocent as the unhoused eyes
of a butchered cow.
In a dark corner Rimbaud's genitals hung like jerky,
and the milk of Whitman's breasts drifted in a carton,
dry as talcum.
He wanted to pee and lay his head on the cool stacks,
but the clerk took one look, and thought
of the buttocks of clean businessmen
squatting during lunch hour, the thin phalanx of pretty girls
buying poetry for school.
Behind her, faintly, the deodorized bathroom.
She was the one at the gate, protecting civilization.
He turned, walked to the gutter, unzipped his pants, and peed.
Do you know who that was?
A man from the back came forth.
And soon she was known as the woman in the store on Main
who said no to Allen Ginsberg.
And she is proud, so proud she told me this story
pointing to the spot outside, as if still flowed
that holy stream."
[APPLAUSE]