More on my obsession with the Beats...

In Garrison Keillor's anthology, Good Poems, he writes: "Anybody who would rather read T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday instead of the love poems of Rexroth must be on the take. And yet Rexroth was never mentioned in the halls of the English Department when I was there, nor was Ferlinghetti, that great-hearted, God-gifted man. His City Lights bookstore has always been a mecca in San Francisco. His friend Allen Ginsberg, on the other hand, a good man, admirable in so many ways (especially for Kaddish), was something of a gasbag, not big on rewriting, and reading his Collected Poems is like hiking across North Dakota. I stopped just beyond Fargo."

I think that is only partially right: Ginsberg could be a gasbag and would have benefited greatly from an editor - and (always and... NEVER but) - and his vision of what was essential in poetry unlocked the mythic spirit of the sacred bard in Bob Dylan and rock and roll music has never been the same! For this Ginsberg and his Beat cohorts deserve more credit than they have achieved - and for the next few days I am going to explore the Dylan/Beat connection more fully.

Tonight, however, after a full and satisfying day, I am content with Rexroth even as I anticipate Dylan who wrote:

You are driving to the airport
Along the glittering highway
Through the warm night,
Humming to yourself.
The yellow rose buds that stood
On the commode faded and fell
Two days ago. Last night the
Petals dropped from the tulips
On the dresser. The signs of
Your presence are leaving the
House one by one. Being without
You was almost more than I
Could bear. Now the work is squared
Away. All the arrangements
Have been made. All the delays
Are past and I am thirty
Thousand feet in the air over
A dark lustrous sea, under
A low half moon that makes the wings
Gleam like a fish under water -
Rushing south four hundred miles
Down the California coast
To your curving lips and your
Ivory thighs.

Tomorrow, my lover and I will garden for most of the day, and then I will explore part one of my Beat/Dylan connection cuz I think the old man STILL gets it right.