Delicatessen Intellectual

A nun introduced me to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. Back when I was a 14-year-old misfit troublemaker, I re-shelved books in my high school library during study period to work off my steadily accruing detentions. One day, Sister Patrice Marie, the library supervisor, approached me with an open book in her hands—a poetry anthology, I could see by the cover. She pointed to a poem that looked like a story, with long lines in paragraphs. Growing up a verse-loving teenager on the working-class South Side of Chicago, daughter of parents who never went to high school, I wasn’t hip to prose poems. But Sister Patrice, who shared my literary interests, was hip, surprisingly. She’d noticed the poem as she was cataloging the book and figured I’d like it. She was right. I was drawn in by the first sentence:

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

The poem was called “Sunflower Sutra.” I read it over and over, amazed. Allen Ginsberg, whoever he was, had become my favorite poet.

Thirteen years later I had moved to New York to study in Brooklyn College’s MFA in Poetry program, and my still-favorite poet was about to be my professor. As I walked along Flatbush Avenue toward the campus for my first workshop, I imagined that Allen, as a teacher, would be as expansive and generous as his work. I’d already met him back in Chicago in 1982. My best poet-friend and I groupied him after a reading and breathlessly described our idea to kidnap him so we could get ourselves on the cover of Time magazine. (He was all for it, asked what newspapers we’d contacted, and said he had names if we needed any. Too bad we didn’t have a plan.) But I was unpleasantly surprised at how serious and business-like he was as he entered our seminar room (called, mysteriously, the Cosmic Room). After briskly reading our names off the roster, he told us to introduce ourselves and say what poets we’d read. When my turn came, I rattled off the names of every Beat poet I could bring to mind to impress him—I knew a lot more about poetry by then. He nodded distractedly. After we’d all introduced ourselves, he handed out a course pack. The 11 stapled pages, some of which looked like bad copies of mimeographed sheets, included Jack Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” a synopsis of all 30 metrical systems, reading suggestions for Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams (both his poems and his essays), and a “No Shame Poetry Questions” survey.

I thought: Is this the course pack of the most famous—even notorious—poet in America? The guy who’d won an obscenity trial? Who chanted “om” in Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention riots? Who performed onstage with The Clash and Bob Dylan? The “No Shame Poetry Questions” concluded with a request to “underline poets you read a lot.” Among our choices were Chaucer, Campion, Donne, Marvell, Dryden, Milton, and Melville. The most contemporary choices were Ted Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, and Anne Waldman (one of only three women out of 53 choices, the other two being Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore).

I thought: Is this the course pack of the most famous—even notorious—poet in America? The guy who’d won an obscenity trial?

Near the end of the workshop, Allen gave us an in-class writing exercise: write a pledge of allegiance to someone or something. When time was up, he called on Jeffrey, who read his pledge to gay and lesbian poets.

“It’s just a list,” Allen said. “Where’s the music?”

“It’s a list poem,” Jeffrey said, defensively. Allen shot him a look that communicated I know what a list poem is, son, then turned his attention to Toni, who read a poem about roses.

“Nice, but they should be a specific kind of roses,” he said. “Schenectady roses maybe.”

“But I’ve never been to Schenectady,” Toni protested quietly as Allen moved on to the next person: me. My hands were shaking as I read my pledge to my old Chicago neighborhood, Back of the Yards.

“That line about the lagoon full of dead secretaries,” Allen declared, “reminds me of Apollinaire. Who’s next?”

I couldn’t believe he compared my line to Apollinaire. It made me think we’d get along just fine. But it was the biggest boost he gave me that whole first semester.

In the classroom, Allen had little patience with students whose work exuded a whiff of abstraction or Language Poetry. William Carlos Williams’s maxim “No ideas but in things” was his oft-repeated prescriptive if he felt there weren’t enough visuals (along with “take out all those articles”). He loved to assign forms and made recommendations about which best suited each student. For me he assigned Skeltonic verse, also called “tumbling verse,” named for the English poet John Skelton, who died in the 1500s. (I don’t think I did that assignment, though I pilfered Skelton’s Selected, which Allen loaned me, despite his handwritten “Not for giveaway—return to A.G.” on the flyleaf.) He used his own poems as examples of how to deploy these forms and frequently referred to the texts that informed the four parts of “Howl.” Even though he’d been steeped in poetry long before he wrote that poem, his theories about his most famous work’s underpinnings felt like they’d coalesced after the poem was published because so many people kept asking him about it. Personally, I loved hearing him discuss it because I loved that poem, but I also wished he’d try to meet us where we were coming from and imagine where we wanted to go with our work.

During my second year, I had tutorials with him at his 12th Street apartment. In those days, professors met students off-campus, a practice no one questioned. I was nervous about being one-on-one with him because, even though he frequently (briefly) praised the poems I presented in class, he acted like I was stalking him whenever I said hello to him in the hallways. For our first meeting, he let me in as another student was leaving, then asked for my work so he could read it during his bathroom break.

“OK!” he called out to me in the kitchen when he was done. “Let’s go over these on the bed.”

I certainly wasn’t worried about sitting on his bed—I couldn’t believe I was actually doing that—and he was respectful. In the classroom, he had a knack for rooting out everyone’s “placeholder phrases”—places where we just threw anything in because we were either inattentive or lazy. During that first tutorial, he went deeper into that advice while looking at one of my poems.

“The word ‘stanza’ means ‘room’ in Italian,” he said. “So look around the room—is there something interesting you’re not seeing yet? Maybe left out? Something the lines need in terms of visuals or music?” He leaned over and pulled his briefcase up from next to the bed, fishing out the 11-page course pack and flipping to “Thirteen Steps for Revising.” He read #10 out loud:

“‘Review it for weak spots you don’t like, but just left there for inertial reasons.'”

He was different in person, I noted. Warmer, funnier—like his poems. He asked questions about the work I showed him, and the intentions behind certain lines or phrases. When he pointed to some lines he termed “too opaque,” I told him I was referencing something from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which had just been published. He shrugged and said, “I don’t know this theory stuff. I’m just a delicatessen intellectual.” He suggested I stick to referencing poets, including women, and named about eight. I brought up the dearth of women in his course pack.

“Yeah, I need to update it,” he said, a bit sheepishly. “It’s really too bad Elise Cowen’s work has been lost,” he said, referring to the late poet known to most people as his last straight girlfriend. “You’d like her. She was quite brilliant.” (Fortunately, a collection of her work, Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, edited by Tony Triglio, was published by Ahsahta Press in 2014).

He shrugged and said, “I don’t know this theory stuff. I’m just a delicatessen intellectual.”

During our subsequent one-on-ones, he talked more about his life than my poetry—probably because I kept asking questions—but this was where I learned the most from him. His best advice came the day I tearfully told him, during a tutorial in his kitchen, that I’d just learned my father back in Chicago had just received a cancer diagnosis, and I couldn’t afford plane fare back. He put down the fountain pen he was using to scratch out my stanzas, faced me.

“Listen,” he said with quiet urgency. “Do whatever you need to do to be with him right now—go into debt, lose all your friends—because this is the only time both of you will be able to say the things you need to say to each other. My teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, told me that when my father was dying. You want some soup?” he asked, getting up. “You like lentil?”

As he plucked a bowl and a spoon out of the dish drain and plunged a ladle into the pot, he reminded me of my Polish grandmother: “You want me make you some eat?” she used to say the minute I’d set foot in her kitchen.

“How is it?” Allen half-smiled, hovering over me as I slurped. “I made it.”

It tasted like salty feet.

“Delicious,” I said. “Thank you. I was starving.”

As he walked back to the sink and filled a glass with water, I worried that I seemed pathetic to him.

“My teacher also told me,” he said as he set the glass on the table in front of me, “‘Mourn your father completely, then continue your celebration.’”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“That means after you mourn his passing you live your life. Be a self-actualized person. Do you meditate?”

My mouth full, I shook my head no.

“Wanna learn? It’ll help. Normally,” he grinned, “a student has to ask three times. So just ask me three times.”

I laughed and obliged.

In early January 1997, a Japanese literary magazine put me up at the Chelsea Hotel for a week and told me to “have experiences and write about them.” I phoned Allen to ask if I could interview him about his time there. (I’d already interviewed him for Cover magazine after his 1989 CD, The Lion for Real, had been labelled for explicit content by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center). Bob Rosenthal, his secretary, answered and said Allen was out of town but he’d call when he got back. He did, but by then it was mid-February, and I’d already finished the article and sent it. He asked if I wanted to talk about anything else. I didn’t want to impose on his time, so I thanked him but said no, chatted a bit, then hung up. I had no idea it would be the last time I’d speak to him. He was diagnosed with liver cancer on April 3rd and died two days later.

Why didn’t I take him up on his offer? I knew by then he liked my work: he’d nominated me for the scholarship that covered my final semester tuition, chose me to represent the MFA at the Poetry Society of America’s annual “Best of New York Writing Programs” in 1989, even called me at my boyfriend’s apartment because he thought he’d forgotten to write a recommendation for me (he’d called my place first, and my roommate assured him it would be OK to call me somewhere else). He’d even agreed to read with me at an NYU event where teachers read with their students (and afterward told me I’d read too long). I didn’t have a topic or a deadline, so I could’ve asked him anything. If I had, it would’ve been one of the last interviews he did. Maybe the last. I’d forgotten his advice to look around the room and discover the interesting thing I wasn’t seeing yet. Had I looked, I would’ve found a million things to talk to him about.

Allen wasn’t only my favorite poet, he was my poetry teacher. He wasn’t my favorite poetry teacher, but what I learned from him went far beyond how to write better poems. I don’t normally pass his suggestions on to my students. But I do repeat his advice about how, in writing and in life, it’s good to look around and find something interesting you’re not seeing yet. And then I relate my cautionary tale about how I didn’t follow it.

Also in the magazine:
“Knowledge that Speaks in Difficult Times: A Conversation with Sharon Mesmer” by Talia Aharoni

Featured image: Allen Ginsberg 1979.