By Laura Drawbaugh

In 1988 I worked on a theater piece based on Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish,” about his mother’s insanity and death. Eric Fischl, the painter, designed and painted the scenery for the production, done at a scummy little theater space on East Fourth St. Allen would sit at the back and watch the rehearsals. He was a quiet presence and gave every member of the production an inscribed book of his collected works after the show was done.

Allen died on April 5 of a heart attack in his East Village apartment, days after he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. I opened Collected Poems 1947-1980 again and looked at the daisy with his initials in the center. My name was written in black magic marker.

Allen was born in Newark, NJ, in 1926. His father, Lewis, was a poet, a high school teacher, and a Jewish socialist.. His mother, Naomi, was radical communist and nudist. She started to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia during Ginsberg’s childhood. She was convinced that she was surrounded by spies, including her mother-in-law, who was out to poison her.

Her voice is heard in “Kaddish”: “I am a great woman–am truly a beautiful soul–and because of that they (Hitler, Hearst, the Capitalists, Daily News, the 20s, Musolini, the living dead) want to shut me up–Buba’s the head of a spider network-” She frequently walked around the house naked complaining of three big sticks planted in her back and the wires in her head.

In addition to witnessing his mother’s behavior, he was also struggling to understand his early feeling of attraction to other boys. Naomi and Lewis divorced and Allen and his brother Eugene grew into adulthood as his mother deteriorated. In 1947 Allen and Eugene gave consent to have their mother lobotomized.

Allen went to Columbia University to prepare for a career as a lawyer but his friends Jack Kerouac, William Borroughs, and Neal Cassady put an end to it. Allen began a period filled with drugs, crime, sex, and at the same time experimenting with writing. He had his first homosexual experience with a middle-aged sailor.

Naomi continued to go in and out of mental hospitals and some have commented that Allen’s crazy life seemed like an attempt to “find the edge his mother had fallen over.”

Allen moved to San Francisco where he was associated with the “Beat Poets”; Kerouac, Burroughs, Ferlingetti, and Gregory Corso. Their style of poetry, “frequently chemically assisted” is a free form style that sounds best read out loud as if improvised, using rhythms of speech in long streams of words. Truman Capote jibed (of Kerouac) “That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.” Ginsberg’s “Howl” was published in 1956 and “Kaddish,” which many feel to be his best work in 1961.

From “Kaddish again, “Caw caw caw my eye be buried in the same Ground where I stand Angel.”

During the 60s Allen met Peter Orlovsky who was to be his companion for 30 years. Peter was with him when he died.

Allen “was always in touch with what was current or interesting in America, whether it was men on the moon, a gay bar in Witchita, the treatment of political radicals or what it was like to be mugged in New York.” He eventually turned away from drugs in the 1960s and began studying Buddhism. At the same time he enjoyed the celebrity he engendered from his outspoken homosexuality and unfettered political statements.

During the Reagan administration the FBI included him on its list of unsuitable paid speakers abroad. Coretta Scott King, Betty Friedan, and John Kenneth Galbraith were on the same list.

This was in the same year as he was kicked out of Prague for protesting against the Communist police. Other disapproving voices included John Glono, who called him “the founding father of bullshit liberals.”

Allen Ginsberg did spend much of this life challenging the government on issues of privacy and personal freedom. He gave large portions of his income to a charity set up to aid struggling poets. When he called to say goodbye, he asked Amiri Baraka, “Do you need any money?”

In the last 20 years of his life, Allen spent much of his time to the Buddhist college he co-founded, originally titled The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets at the Naropa Institute. He also taught poetry at Brooklyn College in 1979.