Jan Herman

There was a time when Charles Plymell claimed that Bob Dylan stole his Nobel Prize. Charley was full of blustering anger in those days, calling his old friend Allen Ginsberg a phony, his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti a two-bit miser, and Jack Kerouac a Mama's boy whose 'On the Road' he never read. In more recent years, though he still claims not to have read Kerouac, Charley has apologized for his deprecation of Ginsberg and dedicated his latest book, 'Over the Stage of Kansas,' to Ferlinghetti. Because it would make poetic sense, I would like to date his change of heart, not only metaphorically but literally, to the time he had a heart attack and wrote this majestic, never-published poem.