On Allen Ginsberg's Centenary

From the age of 19 until about 30, I took these two books everywhere. If I was going to a girlfriend’s house for the weekend then they were in my bag. When I’d visit my parents for a few days, I’d pack these two books first. Back packing around Europe when I was 23, these were my companions. At home, they’d sit in my bag or by the side of my desk or take up residence on top of the large wooden speakers of my stereo.

There weren’t many around me who read poetry and much less these same two dead poets. It wasn’t something I could discuss with people often. I didn’t love everything written but it spoke to me. I understood it and worked at understanding it deeper. Finding out why certain phrases or images or poems worked. What made the effect as powerful as it was for me, then I’d figure how could I use that in my own writing. Threads of these two writers are tangled up in all the writing I did in my twenties – extensive arts journalism, three novel manuscripts, four collections worth of poetry, four albums and two EPs worth of music. I took enough images from Rimbaud to be able to spot them easily in the wild in the works of other writers – like in the bridge of U2’s Beautiful Day.

It wasn’t just the work itself. I would reread Rimbaud’s letters trying to learn some other idea about poetry, how to become a seer. How to mess with language. I’d write out passages and pin them by my desk. I’d trawl through Ginsberg’s lectures on archive.org to hear him talk about writing then go to the library and sit with the books of haiku or Sappho or Blake that he’d talked about.

Today marks Allen Ginsberg’s centenary.

It also marks the anniversary of me leaving Western Australia for Berlin.

Coincidence? Probably.

About two years after I moved to Berlin, through the weird way that collaborations and introductions work in the arts, I spent an afternoon with folk musician Happy Traum. He knew Ginsberg well. Happy had recorded music with him and travelled through Europe with him. At least once a year Allen and his partner would travel upstate and stay with Happy and his wife June.

“Yes,” June said to me, “Allen was a friend.”

Later that evening at Happy’s show June introduced me to others as, “our friend, Jason.”

Now I could say that Allen Ginsberg was a friend of a friend. I don’t read these two volumes as often anymore though they still take permanence residence by my writing desk. Every time I do pick them up, however, it’s like connecting with someone who understood me while I was still trying to figure out myself, how I wanted to write, when I was starving, hysterical, naked.