Beat Guru Ginsberg Recalled by His Fans

Blessed be the muses

dancing round my bed,

Crowning my balding head

with laurels Allen Ginsberg, "Reality Sandwiches"

Not a fan stirred the air in the smoky purple room at T.T. the Bear's bar in Central Square Monday night as the walls resounded with a Beat poetry tribute to the late great Allen Ginsberg.

"It's a drag man...a real drag," muttered one tie-dyed-in-the-wool Ginsberg devotee who goes by the name "Bongo Man."

"Ginsberg was one of the great minds of our time, not to be replaced," he added, as his eyes shifted to one of dozens of poetry readers making their way to the makeshift podium in this favorite Cambridge night spot, whose regulars range from the city's twenty-something crowd to the local middle-aged literati.

As an audience of more than 100 filled the small bar at 9 p.m. to honor Ginsberg--who had liver cancer and died of a heart attack Saturday at the age of 70--the mood was both melancholy and hopeful.

"Allen Ginsberg has inspired and will continue to inspire all of us," said Catherine A. Solmons, a Boston Phoenix poetry editor who read selections from one of the poet's more famous collections, "Reality Sandwiches." "He was the first to make people feel poets could be pop stars."

Ginsberg's work helped shape the 1950s Beat generation, primarily through the impact of his epic beat poem "Howl!," published in 1956, and other poems that also dealt with the gritty details of his homosexuality and communist origins.

Beat poetry--the stream-of-consciousness, "anything goes" style of verse--took the literary world by storm in the '50s as Ginsberg and fellow Beat pioneers Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac travelled to readings and poetry sessions around the nation.

Ginsberg was versatile, counting among his friends such literary luminaries as William S. Burroughs '36 and '90s youngsters who heard him read his poems on MTV.

"It was a community of shared challenges," said Jack Powers, who organizes the Monday night Stone Soup poetry series at T.T. the Bear's, of which the Ginsberg memorial reading was a part.

Powers said he and Ginsberg became friends in the late 1950s as part of a larger local poetry community. "Allen sprung the trap for me, and I was out as a being," he said.

Louisa Solane, owner of Grolier Bookstore on Plympton Street, took the stage later in the evening to describe her relation to Ginsberg as a fellow activist and poet.

Ginsberg visited the store several times, both to read his own poetry and to listen to that of others.

"He was such a fiber in my life--I had taken him for granted," said Solane, pausing to wipe away a tear. "Anyway, old man, I love you."

Several readers Monday night exploded with emotion, recalling memories of the poet himself when he delivered pieces like his revolutionary "Howl!," a tirade of deliberately shocking and sometimes obscene verse.

"He knocked down the walls of the academy," Powers said. "And democratized poetry for all of us."

In keeping with Ginsberg's tradition of encouraging individuals to explore personal emotion in a literary form, participants read from some of their own original works, many of them inspired by Ginsberg.

Part of Ginsberg's charm for contemporary poets may be his revolutionary bent and refusal to conform to accepted standards of poetic form.

Rather than attempting to emulate classic poets or British traditions, Ginsberg and other members of the Beat generation opened up the possibility of free, unconstrained poetic expression, poets and scholars say.

"The Beat generation was a major force in the expedition to free the American voice, the inner American voice," said local poet Bob Buckley. "Everyone's here tonight--the beatniks, the hippies, the yuppies. Everyone recognizes what [Ginsberg's] voice brought about."

Powers said he hopes the youth of today can learn from Ginsberg's ground-breaking example.

"As humans, we get habituated to our condition," Powers said. "We need to challenge it through terms of expression, and tonight is an example that there's a thirst for challenging those perimeters we discover."