Farewell Allen Ginsberg

By: Harold Norse

Allen Ginsberg and Harold Norse (photo by Gerard Malanga, 1973)

The great beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, died this week in 1997. April 5th to be exact. The following is a poem by the little-known yet “potent and prophetic figure in Twentieth Century poetics”, Harold Norse, written a few months after Ginsberg's death.

According to his obituary in the Gaurdian, Norse was “a talented writer in his own right, he cultivated an extraordinary number of relationships, both personal and professional. In the early 1940s Norse met Ginsberg on the subway in Manhattan and became friends with Baldwin in Greenwich Village. He also spent a summer with Tennessee Williams as the playwright put the finishing touches to The Glass Menagerie, and survived drinking sessions with Dylan Thomas in 1950. He was awarded his master's degree at New York University the following year.”

I hope you enjoy this poem as much as I do.

Wasn’t afraid of God or death after his 45th year. — Ginsberg, “Ego Confession”

I know I am deathless… Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five-thousand years.—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

A peck providing a morsel of love, a blessing,
always a kiss on the mouth, a gentle greeting,
connecting, networking, always a voice of truth,
Shamanic bard heard round the world,
your electronic voice will haunt us forever. 
Two-thousand years ago a poet described us all:
"Nothing exists but atoms and the void," he wrote. 
Thus Lucretius survives as you survive, larger than life,
visionary, sage, poet, great ambassador of the universe.

Crowned King of the May in Czechoslovaki,
followed by thousands of youths who kissed you
and pulled your carriage thru the streets of Prague,
you got booted out by the communist secret police
who confiscated your notebooks of dangerous propaganda
for peace and love, for tearing the veil from everyone's eyes,
for exposing truthless beliefs, for exploding popular delusions, 
for stirring up youth with flower power and for writing poems
that open the doors of perception and shatter walls of hallucination. 

We first met in an empty subway in wartime 1944, New York;
you were a drunken boy, 18, reciting aloud "The Drunken Boat"
by another drunken boy, 19, and you sat across the aisle from me
and I yelled "Rimbaud!" over the roar of the train and you howled,
"You're a poet!" and we both sloshed thru the snow in deserted streets
of Greenwich Village dawn 3 AM to my icy room by the slaughterhouse
and you nervously showed me your poetry and I shyly showed you mine
and that was about all we showed each other, to my everlasting sad 
regret. 

A nervous virgin you shyly departed as chaste as you had arrived
and I watched you rise like a meteor and we remained good friends
for more than half a century. Perhaps in another life we'll meet again
and I'll ask, "Haven't we met before?" And you'll say, "You look familiar
Was is five-thousand years ago?" And I'll say, "Sure, let's be friends
again!"

I will always remember you
on late night New York subways
as a shy virgin in a snowbound trance.
You've taken your last ride underground
and Corso and Kesey wept at your bedside. 
Now you're all gone and the world mourns.
Once you said, "You should wanna make love
to everyone in the universe," and you almost did. 

Clicking finger cymbals, wearing colored beads and 
sitting cross-legged chanting OM in your deep gravel voice
you changed the world. We were mobbed in L.A. you and I
by young people after our reading and we got a great ovation
and on the stage you lifted me up in an ardent brotherly embrace
and pulled the veil from everyone's eyes exposing false delusions, 
false beliefs, false accusations, false insinuations, false exaggerations. 
O Great courage-teacher, you'll haunt us forever in your eternal absence. 

San Francisco 7/21/1997

You can find this poem in Norse’s — In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems