Can you imagine having, as Eliot Katz did, the iconic Allen Ginsberg as your “generous teacher and friend” for twenty years? No wonder this poem radiates love, respect, and gratitude–not only for Ginsberg himself but also what Ginsberg stood for. Though Katz can’t, as he points out, “speak for the dead,” he can, and most certainly does, “help carry on” Ginsberg’s poetic and activist legacies.
-Associate Publisher, Teresa Carson
A Letter to Allen on the State of the State, May 2013
—Written for the 10th Annual Howl Festival in NYC
Ah Allen, another of your birthdays is coming and the world keeps
moving. I think it moves forward, but sometimes it can be tough
to tell—amid the zigzags and the circling back, the nuke-plant leaks
and the killer rains, the robot drones with minds of their own dropping
sloppy bombs on countries most Americans couldn’t even find
on a map. President Obama recently gave what was supposed to be
a landmark speech on changing direction of Bush’s global war on terror.
Viewers from across political spectrum seemed to inhale it like
a Rorschach smoke test, seeing what they wanted to see, and hearing
whatever they’ve been waiting all these years to hear. As a longtime
political animal, both optimist and skeptic, I heard some promising lines
that pledged narrowing the endless war, and other lines that awkwardly
attempted justify some of administration’s most chronically ill
and painful long-term schemes.
From beyond the grave, Allen, can you see whether there is an alternate
quantum universe where John McCain or Mitt Romney was elected
President? I have to believe it would be a far worse government than
this one. But President Obama, who seems like he wants to be a decent
person, appears to have lost the Constitutional Law books he once taught.
No matter how many times a U.S. president asserts that murder-by-drone
is legal under international law, I still haven’t seen the permission clause
for remote-control long-distance killing without trial written up in the
U.N. Charter or Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And after his
administration has practiced the new blood sport of Mixed Martial Arts
Mass Public & Media Spying, the president and his attorney general
are asking Congress to pass a reporter shield law, like Wall Street thieves
begging to be locked up so they can’t be tempted to rob again.
Allen, people keep asking me what you would say if you were still here
with us. My answer always the same—I don’t think it would be fair
to pretend an ability to speak for the dead, even a one-time teacher
and longtime friend, that all we can do with our major influences is try
our imperfect best to help carry on their legacies. But, Allen, if the dead
can ever communicate with the living, can you figure out a way one
of these nights to write out a few new suggestions in my night-table
notebook for moving this planet on a more just and ecological road?
I promise I’ll do my best again to read your difficult-to-read handwriting
like I did when I helped transcribe some of your great poems during
that one-month apprenticeship I took with you summer 1980 at Naropa.
It’s like with growing planetary crisis of climate change—the president
says he believes it a crucial issue, but hasn’t done anything concrete
about it yet. In his speech, President Obama noted the Guantanamo
prison has become a global symbol of an America that daily violates
the rule of law, but where was his promise to release immediately
those prisoners already cleared, many locked up over 10 years now
and hunger-striking, each day closer to death? Where his apology for
extending Bush’s clinically insane idea of indefinite detention sans trial?
Allen, I wonder whether you would have admired the creative Code Pink
activist, Medea Benjamin, as much as I did, for being the only person
in the room willing to shout out some tough questions? The only one
willing to press the president on some of our country’s key peace and
human rights concerns? Some later called her rude, but I thought her
interruption mild considering the boiling-hot issues at stake. With continual
wars across the planet, rock-stubborn ethnic strife, un-erased hunger
and homelessness, literal and metaphorical tornados, fanatical right-wing
groups rambling across the radio dial, one would think more reporters
might be willing to sing out for a more progressive course. Allen,
when you were writing “Howl” in the mid-1950s, how long did you
imagine it might take for our country and planet to get onto a more humane
and sustainable path? Deep in your heart, did you believe things would
dramatically improve by the 21st century? Or that Moloch-like greed
and mean-spiritedness might even wipe us out long before now? So soon
after the Holocaust and in the midst of McCarthyism, where did you
find the hopefulness to stare into a wide range of human eyes and declare:
“holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul.”
Do you think, sometime during this 21st century, activists will figure
out new ways to pressure elected officials into turning at least a little
more of our soul’s extra intelligent kindness into reality?
Eliot Katz, 5/13
Additional pieces on Allen Ginsberg by Eliot Katz include:
- Recalling Allen on The Brooklyn Rail
- Nutritious for a Thousand Years: Allen Ginsberg’s “Holy Soul Jelly Roll” on Literary Kicks
