Verse 3: Ref. Police frame-up of political poet Amiri Baraka, 1966, later thrown out of court.

     Verse 4: Ref. J. Edgar Hoover’s amative relationship with assistant Clyde Tolson and his withholding of Kennedy assassination information from Warren Commission. See Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets (New York: Penguin, 1991); and Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Putnam, 1993).

     Verse 5: Ref Oswald’s role as government intelligence informant within Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

     Verse 6: Ref. Jack Ruby, courier to Cuba for Mafioso boss Santos Trafficante, Jr., former drug lord of Havana.

     Verse 7: See “N.S.A. Dope Calypso” pp. 58–59, stanzas 3–6, and note.

     Verse 8: Ref. Oliver North, Richard Secord, etc.

     Verse 9: Ref. Elliott Abrams, former Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, pardoned by outgoing President Bush 1992 after guilty plea to withholding Iran-contra scam information from Congress.

     Verse 13: Charles H. Keating, Jr., 69, founder, Cincinnati Citizens for Decent Literature, later Citizens for Decency Through Law, was convicted 1993 on state and federal charges of swindling investors, fraud, and racketeering in collapse of Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. “The collapse of Lincoln, which was based in Irvine, California, in early 1989 is estimated to have cost taxpayers $2.5 billion” (New York Times, September 4, 1992). Along with pedophile Father Joseph Ritter, former director of wayward youths’ Covenant House, Keating was outstanding homophobe on President Reagan’s Meese Commission on Pornography.

(p. 1026) Research

     Verse 6: Rev. W. A. Criswell, mentor of TV Bible evangelist fundraising theopoliticians Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Billy Graham, decrees the Bible 100 percent “Inerrant.”

     Verse 11: John Rousas Rushdoony, fundamentalist author, leader of Chalcedon Foundation’s Christian Reconstructionist exertions, disapproves homosexual emotions.

(p. 1029) Put Down Your Cigarette Rag

     Originally published in First Blues (New York: Full Court Press, 1975). Here updated statistics, additional stanzas.

(p. 1033) Violent Collaborations

     Epigraph remembered from 1940s college days, heard by classmate from his mother, perhaps 1920s flappers’ ditty.

(p. 1038) The Charnel Ground

     Epigraph and final quotation, “The whole point seems to be the idea of giving away the giver,” taken from lectures on The Sadhana of Mahamudra, by Ven. Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, Karma Dzong, December 1973, privately printed.

(p. 1047) In the Benjo

     Gary Snyder, No Nature: New and Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1992).

(p. 1048) American Sentences

     On Hearing the Muezzin Cry Allah Akbar While Visiting the Pythian Oracle at Didyma Toward the End of the Second Millennium

     Didyma, Asia Minor’s shore site where Magna Mater and Pythian oracle were displaced by Judeo-Christian-Islamic Father God. In response to imperial Roman request for prophecy circa 4th century A.D., the oracle’s last utterance declared the gods had departed, Apollo no longer inhabited the temple’s pillars.

        Rainy night on Union Square … Answering office mail late night, response to request from little magazine.

(p. 1049) Approaching Seoul by Bus in Heavy Rain

     Bus over steep mountains from Kangnung to Seoul one rainy night was delayed along precipice by a mile of ambulance lights marking crash of bus I’d missed, scheduled an hour earlier.

        Monoprix, familiar department store, onetime right bank of Seine across from Place St. Michel.

DEATH & FAME POEMS 1993–1997

Edited by Bob Rosenthal, Peter Hale, and Bill Morgan

Foreword by Robert Creeley

Afterword by Bob Rosenthal

Thanks to the hospital editors, variants of these writings were printed first in: Aftonbladet, Allen Ginsberg e Il Saggiatore, The Alternative Press, American Poetry Review, American Sentences, Ballad of the Skeletons [recording], The Best American Poetry 1997, Bombay Gin, Booglit, City Lights Review, Cuaderno Carmin, Davka, Harper’s magazine, Harvard magazine, Illuminated Poetics, Lettre International, Literal Latté, Long Shot, Man Alive, The Nation, New York Newsday, New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, Off the Wall, Poetry Flash, Poetry Ireland Review, Shambhala Sun, Tribu, Tricycle, Viva Vine, Viva Ferlinghetti!, and Woodstock Journal.

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to acknowledge the following people for their help and support: Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfant, Jeff Posternak, Terry Karten, Megan Barrett, Jaqueline Gens, Eliot Katz, Steven Taylor, Ben Schafer, and Regina Pellicano.

Foreword

Vale

This is Allen Ginsberg’s last book, particular to his determining intent, his last writings when in hospital aware of his impending death, his last reflections and resolutions—his last mind. When he was told by the doctors that he had at best only a short time to live, he called his old friends to tell them the hard news, comforting, reassuring, as particular to their lives as ever. Despite the intensely demanding fame he’d had to deal with for more than forty years, he’d kept the world both intimate and transcendent. It was a “here and now” that admitted all the literal things of each day’s substance and yet well knew that all such was finally “too heavy for this lightness lifts the brain into blue sky/at May dawn when birds start singing on East 12th street…” He was, and remains, the enduring friend, the one who goes with us wherever we are taken, who counsels and consoles, who gets the facts when it seems we will never be told them, who asks “Who’ll council who lives where in the rubble/who’ll sleep in what brokenwalled hut/in the moonlight…” He kept a witness of impeccable kind.

The playful, reductive, teasing verses, which could sometime make this world seem just the bitter foolishness it finally has to, sound here clearly. What is the grandness of death, of a body finally worn out, at last the simple fact of stubbornly reluctant shit and a tediously malfunctioning heart, of “all the accumulations that wear us out,” as he put it, when still a young man? There is no irony, no despair, in delighting as one can in “No more right & wrong/yes it’s gone gone gone/ gone gone away…” No poet more heard, more respected, more knew the intricacies of melody’s patterns. He took such pleasure in the whimsical, insistent way the very rhythms could take hold of attention, bringing each word to its singular place. “Chopping apples into the fruit compote—suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer!” His company insisted upon music and he danced with a consummate grace.

Now we must make our own music, albeit his stays with us forever. William Blake’s great call, “Hear the voice of the bard …,” now changes to “The authors are in eternity,” because ours is a passing world. Yet the heroic voices, the insistent intimacies of their tenacious humanity, hold us in a profound and securing bond. Where else would we think to live? Our friend gave his whole life to keep faith with Whitman’s heartfelt insistence, “Who touches this book touches a man.” So Allen Ginsberg will not leave us even now. “To see Void vast infinite look out the window into the blue sky.”