Somebody must have turned back the clock. The iconic image of Allen Ginsberg, recalling his Meantime, Fugs leader Here’s the way Ed began “The Hairy Table,” a story published in 1968 in a San Francisco <\/P> (The story drew the wrath of a Midwest congressman, who foamed about it on Some day future anthropologists will thank Berrigan for his poetry. A leading figure (the I could cite many beautiful poems, like this one, excerpted from “The Sonnets NYC <\/P> But if nothing else in “So Going Around Cities” had made the Blue Wind collection <\/P> Berrigan was not the first poet to write about that. Ginsberg wrote about it much earlier in
\n“Pentagon Exorcism” days circa 1967 (stars-and-striped stovepipe hat, black-framed eyeglasses,
\nfull beard and riveting, innocent eyes), stares at me from corner newstands all over Manhattan.
\nHis face is on the cover of Time Out\/New York, which dubs him “the spiritual muse” of the
\nHowl!
\nFestival<\/STRONG><\/EM><\/FONT><\/A>, a weeklong celebration of the arts that just ended in
\nthe East Village.<\/P>
\n
\nmaking a splash with “The Fugs final cd, (part
\n1),”<\/FONT><\/STRONG><\/EM><\/A> their first release in 17 years. (
\nsongs.<\/FONT><\/STRONG><\/EM><\/A>)<\/FONT> They’re wrapping
\nup their “Last Reunion” tour with a free “Literary
\nConcert”<\/STRONG><\/EM><\/FONT><\/A> at the New York State Writers Institute
\nin Albany on Sept. 16. (Download link to
\n
\nin Time Out (not online, unfortunately) recalling his Peace Eye bookstore on Manhattan’s Lower
\nEast Side, an era when Life magazine put him on its cover because of his literary notoriety. In the
\nearly 1960s, he edited a mimeographed poetry journal called
\nArts<\/EM><\/STRONG><\/FONT><\/A> and wrote lyric poems that scandalized the literary
\nworld.<\/P>
\n
\nlittle magazine I once edited, decades before the vernacular became acceptable in magazines like
\nThe New Yorker: <\/P>
\n
\nHer delicate tongue of flame slid into the crinkles of my ass, jabbing
\nhere like a sparrer, there sucking like a cuttlefish. … I filled her snatch full of air and gently
\ndrew it out in funt-spurts, tasting the salmon moisture of the wheezes.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\n
\nthe floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in one of the earliest
\nbattles against the National Endowment for the Arts.)<\/P>
\n
\nstaked his own claim to literary notoriety in the ’60s, is about to launch a weekly column, “Zen
\nBastard,” in the alternative weekly
\nPress<\/FONT><\/STRONG><\/EM><\/A>. Just this morning there’s a review of
\na new book going over old
\nground<\/FONT><\/A><\/STRONG><\/EM> by Henry the K in The New York Times (free
\nregistration required)<\/EM>. And now Blue Wind Press has re-issued Ted Berrigan’s
\npoems from 1958 to 1979.<\/P>
\n
\nfather figure, really) of
\nPoets<\/STRONG><\/EM><\/FONT><\/A> — what I think of as the Kitchen Sink School —
\nBerrigan threw everything into his poems from the hair on his face to the amphetamines he took,
\nfrom the ice cream he ate to the bedsheets he slept on, from the streets he walked to the all-night
\nraps he talked, from the boredom he felt to the sex that excited him. He pretty much left nothing
\nout. <\/P>
\n
\n1963”:<\/P>
\n
\nSweeter than sour apples flesh to boys
The brine of brackish water
\npierced my hulk
Cleansing me of rot-gut wine and puke
Sweeping away my anchor in
\nits swell
And since then I’ve been bathing in the poem
Of the star-steeped milky
\nflowing mystic sea
Devouring great sweeps of azure green and
Watching flotsam, dead
\nmen, float by me
Where, dyeing all the blue, the maddened flames
And stately rhythms
\nof the sun, stronger
Than alcohol, more great than song,
Fermented the bright
\nred bitterness of love
I’ve seen skies split with light, and night,
And surfs, currents,
\nwaterspouts; I know
What evening means, and doves, and I have seen
What other men
\nsometimes have thought they’ve seen<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\n
\nworth re-issuing, this prose stanza from “Memorial Day 1971,” a long poem Berrigan wrote with
\nAnne Waldman, would have all by itself:<\/P>
\n
\nI asked Tuli Kupferberg once, “Did you really jump off of The Manhattan
\nBridge?” “Yeah,” he said, “I really did.” “How come?” I said. “I thought that I had lost the ability
\nto love,” Tuli said. “So, I figured I might as well be dead. So, I went one night to the top of The
\nManhattan Bridge, & after a few minutes, I jumped off.” “That’s amazing,” I said. “Yeah,” Tuli
\nsaid, “but nothing happened. I landed in the water, & I wasn’t dead. So I swam ashore, & went
\nhome, & took a bath, & went to bed. Nobody even noticed.”<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\n
\n
\nthe bridge wrong). He listed Kupferberg among “the best minds of my generation” as the
\nunnamed jumper “who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away
\nunknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even
\none free beer…”<\/P>
\n