Riding through Somerset he talked about notation, the mode he says he learned from Kerouac and has used in composing his enormous journals he read from an account he’d made of a recent meeting with the poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky in Moscow, and then, looking up at a knot in a withered oak by the road, said, “ The tree has cancer of the breast. Then, hitchhiking toward London, we were unsuccessful until Ginsberg tried using Buddhist hand signals instead of thumbing half a minute later a car stopped. Leaving the town, we were caught in a rainstorm and took a bus to Bath. (“Dope makes me come out all over in spots,” she’s supposed to have said.) As we came out of a tea shop in Glastonbury (where customers had glanced cautiously at the bearded, prophetic-and unfazed-stranger), Allen spoke of Life’s simulacrum of a report of his Oxford encounter with Dame Edith Sitwell. He carefully studied the exhibit of tools and weapons under the huge conical chimney of the ancient king’s kitchen, as later in Cambridge he was to study the Fitzwilliam Museum’s store of Blake manuscripts Ginsberg’s idea of a Jerusalemic Britain occurring now in the day of long hair and new music meant equally the fulfillment of Blake’s predictions of Albion. Ginsberg and I left Bristol the day after the reading and hitchhiked to Wells Cathedral and then to Glastonbury, where he picked a flower from King Arthur’s grave to send, he said, to his lifelong companion, Peter Orlovsky. He read that night I hadn’t heard him read before and was struck that evening by the way he seemed to enter each of his poems emotionally while reading them, the performance was much a discovery for him as for his audience.

I didn’t know he was in the country, but one night in Bristol before a poetry reading I saw him in a bar. He had been traveling for several months-in Cuba, Russia, and Poland-and from Prague he flew to London to negotiate the English publication of his poems.

Soon afterward, he was expelled by the Czech government. Photograph by Michiel HendryckxĪllen Ginsberg was elected King of the May by Czech students in Prague on May Day, 1965. Interviewed by Tom Clark Issue 37, Spring 1966Īllen Ginsberg, ca.

Allen ginsberg poem howl