How curious that he should lead the parade. When my own poetry practice was taking root, back in the early ‘70s, I was largely unimpressed compared, say, to Bob Dylan. I didn’t pick up on the gay dimensions, either, only the rage of Howl. In fact, though I had some poetry courses, I wasn’t blown away by much of anything until I encountered Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath’s searing despair. Everything was essentially head, not heart.

Over the years, my opinion of Ginsberg changed. I came to appreciate his lines that stayed close to their source of inspiration and the ways his poems faced current events. While much of his artistic voice is seen as an homage to Walt Whitman, I find his work is much more in the stream of the lives of the prophets in the Bible. I’ve come to love a masterful, righteous rant for justice, which his poems often are. (Just see my Trumpets of the Storm series, starting with Primary Care at my ThistleFinch blog).

I’ve also come to admire the seeming ease with which he presents an observation – his definition of New England as famed for red leaves comes to mind.

His 1973 collection, The Fall of America: Poems of These States, has been the volume I’ve returned to the most.

Despite his role as an avatar of drug highs or gay rights, he strikes me increasingly in his native Jewish robes more than in those of the Tibetan Buddhism he avowed. Maybe for that, you should read the book The Jew in the Lotus by Rodger Kamenetz.

Yeah, here we are already, with one author leading to another. But first, where is my set of Whitman?