I Remember

when Allen Ginsberg insulted me quite personally in 1971, when he refused to read “America” at Tufts, at a small gathering of poets, arrayed around him, rapt. I managed to sit cross-legged but not zazen, close enough to ask him to his bearded face, to please read “America.”

“No,” he said. “I’m only doing my new stuff,” and turned away to rock and chant with tinkling bells like little cymbals clamped on his fingers. “Om, om, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Hare.” His robe, however, was white, not saffron like the Hare Krishnas who danced around harassing us in Harvard Square that year.

Later, on another coast, I write about that time. A poem entitled “For Ginsberg,” and see it published in a small literary review from Berkeley. A wanna-be gonzo journalist reads it and when we are introduced by mutual friends, he says: “So you’re that cheeky woman who wrote that poem about Ginsberg in this magazine I saw in Berkeley.” That’s when I know I have found my people.

—From the author’s in-progress series of prose poems, I Remember *

For Ginsberg

i just want to say that i’m freaking out 
i just want ginsberg to know that 
i just want to say that i found out there’s no way to get it done 
there’s no way to live the good life 
there’s no way to stop the war 
there’s no way we’re going to be able to go into the supermarket 
	and get what we need without good looks 
there’s no way to get the armies out of ulster 
there’s no way to get the cops out of berkeley 
we’re not going to have revolution in our lifetime 
we’re not going to find true love 
we’re not going to be able to wean ourselves from tv commercials 
we’re not going to be able to sleep at night without looking 
	under the bed for snipers first 
there’s no way to get the government out of our phone conversations 
there’s no way to get god out of heaven 
there’s no way to get them to stop using us for filing cabinets 
we’re not going to be able to fuck whoever the hell we please and 
	not have them write dirty books about it 

i have lived here for twenty-three years now 
and already seen history repeat itself 
last night they came with cops hunting witches 
i just want to tell you, ginsberg and all, that this is freaking me out 
i have accumulated four half-empty coffee cups on my floor writing 
	poetry 
do you know there isn’t any poetry left 
do you know they’re drinking cold duck on the radio and i’m not 
	getting any 
can you look at the moon anymore with integrity 
can you honestly get up out of bed in the morning 
can you imagine what it’s like to be twenty-three years old and still 
	living in the city 

i hate cars and the only things i read in the papers are the funnies 
	and the bonwit teller advertisements 
i want you to know I put on my good clothes this morning and 
	it made me neither happy nor rich 
the tube has burned out inside its box 
there aren’t any pictures left 
there isn’t any news fit to print 
a long time ago they took the mystery out of the sky and replaced it 
	with a flag 
they cover their cocks with a flag 
or a rosebud it doesn’t matter 
your beard is oppressing me 
your head has grown too old for me 
i just want to tell you ginsberg i saw you 
	at tufts and you wouldn’t look me in the eye 
you wouldn’t read america you had everyone chanting hare krishna 
hare hare you sang you wooed them with your voice i can’t feel 
	your good karma anymore 
you lied to me in 1956 
you and eisenhower 
if you want to know what i’m going to do about it 
	it’s classified information 
i’m making war you can’t tell me anymore about love 
i don’t expect you to understand 

my friend ann read that in five years the oceans will die 
what are you going to do about it 
i expect you to set up a commission 
and laws, i want laws 
i want you to stop scaring us 
i want you to get tranquilizers for ann 
	so she can sleep at night 

i want you to pay me for this poem 

1 want to put a chicken in every pot 
and let me put pot in my chicken if 1 want to 
i want you to get off the moon that’s rape 
1 want you to go on trial for murder 
i want your imperial prick out of my brain 

did i tell you that you were my childhood idol 
ginsberg, i just want you to know i don’t blame you 
i’m learning economy 
already i’ve given up capital letters 
	as a waste of time 
and ginsberg, some of us will have babies 
	who won’t be brought up right 
and in two 
	or three generations 
		we ought to have this thing licked. 

Ginsberg’s poem “America” is reprinted at Poetry Foundation.

“For Ginsberg” by Dotty LeMieux was first published in Hyperion: A Poetry Journal (Issue 10, Fall 1973; Thorp Springs Press), and appears here with her permission.

Hyperion: A Poetry Journal (Fall 1973)

Hyperion: A Poetry Journal (Fall 1973), copyright and title pages

Dotty LeMieux

writes both poetry and poetic memoir. She has five chapbooks published, including two during the pandemic: Viruses, Guns and War (Main Street Rag, 2023) and Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her writing has appeared in numerous print and online journals such as Gyroscope, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Poeming Pigeon, Poets Reading the News, Rise Up Review, and Writers Resist, among others.

MacQueen’s Quinterly nominated her CNF “Spring Trip to Mazatlán” for Best of the Net 2024.

* More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ “I Remember: The Bin Laden Girls, September, 2001” in Issue 10 of MacQueen’s Quinterly, aka MacQ-10 (October 2021)

⚡ “I Remember: Me and Glenn” in MacQ-12 (March 2022)