My "Poetry Speaks" calendar reminds me that today is the birthday of Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997.
I remember going to see Ginsberg read and sing his poems at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica in 1982 with my friend Lisa, who died in 1989.
Lisa was even then fighting the cancer that would eventually kill her.
Most of our friends in L.A. went to movies or dance clubs or rock concerts on Friday and Saturday nights.
But Lisa and I went to poetry readings. We were especially drawn to the aging -- even then -- Beatnik poets.
A few months after we went to see Allen Ginsberg at McCabe's, we drove down to Laguna Beach to see Gary Snyder, a Zen Beatnik survivor still living and writing today at 79.
Every time we went to hear a poet the occasion had the importance of maybe being the last time.
As far as I know, that Friday night in 1982 was the last time Lisa ever saw Allen Ginsberg.
Despite his reputation for being the outrageous hero of the hippies, Ginsberg was impossibly gentle and charming and funny in person.
Lisa was fond of him because he was the kind of Jewish uncle she wished she'd had if she'd had better luck in relatives when she was growing up in Queens. A happy Buddhist convert rather than the dour Reds of her 1950s childhood.
The little bio on my Poetry Speaks calendar recounts Ginsberg's conversion: "After years of dabbling in various narcotic substances, a trip to India proved life-changing for Ginsberg. His exposure to Indian culture introduced him to meditation, a mode of mind expansion that replaced his former drug habit."
By the time Lisa and I saw him at McCabe's, Ginsberg was practicing Tibetan Buddhism at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He had taken on the happy outlook of the Dalai Lama. He was funny in a spiritual way.
That night, playing a harmonium usually associated with Hindu chants, Ginsberg performed his country western version of the Buddha's Four Nobel Truths. (You can see a video of his Gospel Nobel Truths on YouTube.)
The song is all about not taking your suffering too seriously and accepting life and death and everything in between.
The last verse says:
Talk when you talk
Cry when you cry
Lie down, you'll lie down
Die when you die
Lisa, in her gallows humor way, thought that was very funny.
It reminded her that although she was dying, as every one is eventually, there was no need to get ahead of herself.
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