"Passages East, Brooklyn Unbound:
On Bridges, Bumbling and Allen Ginsberg"
by
Pamela Hughes
To my left, the cathedral arches of the Brooklyn Bridge
tower above the East River. Though the Brooklyn Bridge is the architectural
poster child for Brooklyn, I said all my prayers while driving across the
Manhattan Bridge. At my first crossing,
while stuck to the inside lane, never the right lane, I gripped the wheel
white-knuckled. I would not glance down
over the cliff-like edge that led down to the East river. Procrastination and
fear sometimes stopped me from taking practical steps in my life—crossing new
bridges—so, two weeks earlier when I was afraid to cross the actual bridge, the
expanse of the Manhattan Bridge that married Manhattan to Brooklyn—or vice
versa depending on how you looked at it—I had to have two friends come along
and coax me across. My transition from prayerful, slo-mo driver, was swift, and
complete.
Two weeks
later, I’m speeding like a taxi driver, weaving between the lanes across the
Manhattan Bridge. The Clocktower looms up alongside my right. Time this big
spurs me on, so I step on the gas and push from 55 to 60 where I can. I was about to be late for my first day of
class as a graduate student at Brooklyn College. It’s the late 1980s, long
before the new Dumbo or Jane’s Merry-Go-Round. All the other developments.
Along Flatbush
Ave, I race with other cars in the right lane and switch back to the left to
get around double-parked delivery trucks or cars. A few blocks away from Bedford Ave, I almost
rear end a double-parked Coke truck on the corner and veer over, cutting in
front of a brown Buick. I hit the brakes. The driver veers left sharply, just
missing an on-coming car, flips me the middle finger and drives on. I exhale,
relieved that we didn’t crash.
Around
fifteen minutes later, there’ll be an actual collision. Where crossing the Hudson to Brooklyn would
be part of my coming age story, a crush of poetry would be a sort of climax, a
small but concussive moment that would propel me forward, literally.
After
parking in an illegal spot on Campus Road and dashing across the quad, I race
into Boylan Hall and across the large entrance hall on first floor, thinking
about how much I did not want to be
late. This is when I crash into the poet, Allen Ginsberg. My books and his books tumble onto the floor
and lay askew around our feet. Alongside my upside down Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, my new blue spiral notebook is
splayed on the floor open like a gymnast doing a split.
Allen’s
eyes goggle ever so slightly out of his head like cartoon eyes that extend from
a character’s face so they can see more clearly or when they are surprised. He
has brown searching eyes. He is tuned into irony, tragedy, comedy and people’s
bullshit. He is a gay, Jewish, Buddhist,
Beat poet, and human rights activist, who didn’t take to being censored. At this point he didn’t have to be. It’s been
over 30 years since he stood trial for indecency charges for his book of poems,
Howl.
His lips remind me of Mr. Potato Head’s, kind of placed onto his face
over the contours of his salt and pepper beard. Though verging on old, somehow
he maintains a sort of child-like innocence.
“Oh,
Jeez,” I sputter, “I’m sorry. I shove his books into his arms, then pick up
most of my own. I notice that the last
book I thrust into his arms is William Blake’s, Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Allen is
oxymoron. You know, two things that don’t seem to go together, like jumbo
shrimp or loving hate. Innocent lamb, experienced activist.
“It’s Ok,”
he says, smiling, his demeanor calm and measured to my chaos and frenzy. He stoops to pick up my notebook. I didn’t want this older man who I just
barreled into to have to pick up my stuff, so I bend quickly to try to get it
first. In doing so, I just missed head butting
him. Apparently grace is not my strong
suit, though unintended physical comedy is.
Neither one of us is laughing.
He scoops
up my notebook first, closes it, and hands it me.
I don’t’
say: Oh my god, you’re Allen Ginsberg, the famous poet! Or: I met you at a
poetry reading in Rutherford, New Jersey during the William Carlos Williams
Centennial Reading. Instead, tardy, and
tongue tied, I mutter, “Thanks. Sorry. Sorry. I gotta run. I’m late for
class.” He smiles and takes off also in
haste towards the long staircase on the west side of Boylan Hall and I, unsure
of where my class is located, run towards the long stair case on the eastside.
I take the
steps three at time so that the cartilage in my knees jar and my shoulder-length
spiral curls rise up into the air, then crash down over my face. I did not want to be later than I was
already. It was bad form, but mostly because it would be embarrassing and my
face might turn bright red under florescent lights of the classroom.
As I open the door, trying not to breathe
too heavily after my sprint up the many stairs, I see Allen sitting at the head
of the table. He nods up at me and smiles, as I place my books on the
conference table the other students are sitting around, and drop into the chair.
He asks the students to introduce themselves.
I had no
idea that Ginsberg would be my teacher or that he was teaching at Brooklyn
College at all. Still a clumsy waitress--an oxymoron or an occasional moron--I
had just graduated from college and was big on winging it--a carpe diem kind of attitude that often
had consequences. Besides the dangerous
stuff, like nearly being mauled by a wolf in the Prague zoo while trying to pet
it as a rehearsal to touching the tiger, or riding my motorcycle alone into NYC
to go clubbing and then ending up stuck on the desolate covered roadway outside of Hoboken on the
return, being out of the loop was one of them. It turned out John Ashbery had
been teaching at Brooklyn College before Allen.
I didn’t know that either. Two of my undergrad, creative writing
professors, Klein and O’Brien—I called them by their last names--also poets,
told me that said I had to get my MFA
in Creative Writing, so without much forethought or research, winging it again,
I applied to Brooklyn College and got in.
On the
classroom wall to the left of me, hangs what looks like a real Miro
painting. The disjointed reds, green and
blues of the flying triangular figures are as frenetic as my thoughts. Wow, Allen Ginsburg and a Miro! As an undergrad, I was an English major and
an Art minor, so poetry and art, still plush and new to me, were like twin
babies I wanted carry around in my arms all day. Myself and seven other students, including
future published poets and writers: Paul Beatty, David Trinidad, and Karen
Kelly, are sitting around the rectangular wooden table. We were about to get to
know each other, each other’s poetry and Allen.
He was never elitist or highfalutin. Allen used to have us, his graduate students
of Creative Writing, over to his apartment on East 12th Street in
Manhattan for potluck gatherings. We
would sit on his couch and look out at the beautiful white church across the
way with its bright turquoise pediment, the odd, yet pleasing, mix of Greek
columns and two Spanish-influenced bell towers (now all lost to condos) and
chat about poetry. Or art. Or anything all. Because Allen was a vegetarian, I
cooked up a big pot of cream of mushroom broccoli soup and toted it to his
place to share.
He shared
his knowledge and his friends with us.
Once he had Gregory Corso take over his class. Wild-eyed, Corso railed
about how we had “save words,” that people were no longer using as many words
as they used to—vocabularies were getting thinner and thinner so “YOU—THE
POETS—NEED TO SAVE WORDS!” (Corso was
wild-eyed and flirtatious. He also tried to chat me up, which I played dumb
to.) Back at Allen’s apartment, among others, we met Allen’s partner, Peter
Orlovsky and writer, Herbert Huncke.
Allen was
the real deal. He cared about the well being of others, and us, his students. I can’t speak for my classmates, but I
appreciated his quirky smile and wry wit, the way he cocked his head to the
side when he listened carefully to you.
His graciousness.
When Allen
died in 1997, Brooklyn College held a memorial reading. Poets, former students
and his friends read poems in honor of him. Allen had many connections to poets, present and past. In a visionary experience, he
met William Blake, who recited some of his poems to him. But what about Walt I
found myself thinking? He and Walt
Whitman would have gotten along great, Bards and friends of Brooklyn. If Whitman were to read a poem at Allen’s
funeral, he
would probably read some lines from his poem “Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry” with
its shuttling passengers from one place to another and setting sun:
Others will enter the gates of the ferry
and cross from shore to shore,
Others will
watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see
the shipping of Manhattan north and west,
and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others…will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in
of the flood-tide,
the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
But somehow that somber resolution
doesn’t seem a perfect fit. Allen was an upbeat Beat, celebrating both the
metaphysical and the physical worlds.
Although he sometimes came off as a sedate academician in class, he
could be zany-humored and fun. If Allen were to read a poem at his own
funeral, he might recite a few lines from
a poem he wrote with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy:
Pull my daisy
Tip my cup
All my doors are open…
Pope my parts
Raise my daisy up
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