Let’s Not Wait Till We’re Dead

Over poetry, you didn’t gush. You read it. You read it with the tongue. You lived it. You felt how it moved you, changed you. How it contributed to giving your own life  a form, a color, a melody. You didn’t talk about it and you certainly didn’t make it into the cannon fodder of an academic career.

Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

Wednesday 11 January 2017

Dear Carol,

Allen Ginsberg died in 1997 and still the books keep coming. 2016 saw a volume published of his uncollected poems, Wait Till I’m Dead. Ginsberg’s devoted archivist and biographer Bill Morgan provides extensive notes, Rachel Zucker adds an introduction (his poems encourage her “to keep writing, to write longer, to write messier, to write more authentically, with more ego and more humility, with everything I have and about everything I am”), and one of Ginsberg’s photographs grace each decade of poesy.

There are plenty of these poems that deserve only one read, never to return to again (unlike, for me, poems like his “Cosmopolitan Greetings,” “Yes and It’s Hopeless,” “Improvisation in Beijing,” “Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” “War Profit Litany,” “Plutonian Ode,” “Howl,” and “September on Jessore Road”). Still, several may provide some consolation or a goad in these times when our war-making state and corporate predators show signs of ramping up their rapacity.