In March of 1984 Ginsberg came to American University in Washington DC where I was an MFA student in writing. At the time I was in the writing workshop at AU and was the hot shit poet (HSP). Hot shit poet was the nomenclature of the time and I wore it proudly. I made jokes about Ginsberg, in fact, before he arrived. I made up a poem based on Howl that had the line: “I saw the biggest fags of my generation…” as the first line. I tell you this not to show you how hip it is to be the HSP, but to show you what an ignoramus I was.
I wore my sunglasses to the first day of his 4 day workshop, and carried my poetry journals in a knapsack. I smoked a cigarette, if I remember correctly as I waited. (This was in the days when smoking wasn’t against the law everywhere on the planet.) When Ginsberg got there I smirked at my brother/sister poets and sat at the end of the table facing him.
After a few minutes I began to feel foolish. Ginsberg was nice to us, pleasant. He seemed like a regular guy. He was a fabulous teacher, talking to us in common language about what poetry meant to him. I was a colossal idiot who immediately lost the much-sought for attention of my brothers and sisters in the program. At a break I took off my sunglasses, stopped smirking, and started listening.
Ginsberg was to give us 4 workshops, broken up with a Wednesday night concert of his music at Kay Chapel on campus. On Tuesday I was asked to drive him back to his hotel after the workshop. On the drive I told him how much I had enjoyed his “First Blues” record that had come out a couple of years before. He asked if I knew some of the songs on it. “Sure,” I said, even though I was lying broadly. His usual guitar player (a nice young man who was also Allen’s lover at the time) didn’t make the trip and Allen didn’t have anyone to play guitar.
We made plans to rehearse briefly Wednesday before the concert. That night I stayed up in my apartment in DC listening to that damn record, learning as many songs as I could for the next day. Wednesday afternoon I went to the Georgetown Hilton and he sat on a bed with his harmonium (a sorta primitive accordion you hold in your lap), and I sat in a chair with my acoustic guitar and we worked out a dozen songs.
The whole time was just a blur. This was a guy who is generally considered the most important, influential poet of the last half century, and I was playing bad blues with him in a hotel room. I no longer felt like the hot shit poet. I felt lucky to just be along for this ride.
That night we walked onto stage in front of over a thousand manic fans. I sat in a chair next to the great man. Between us was a table with hot tea, incense, and flowers. We played a couple of songs and then Allen read some poems. I thought it a good idea to disappear off stage while he read, but he grasped my arm, poured me a cup of tea and asked me to stay. So I sat there while he read “Sunflower Sutra,” my favorite poem of his, and others. We sang some more songs, me playing bad guitar to his bad harmonium, both of us warbling away. We did some Yeats poems that he had put to blues progressions and we got a standing ovation at the end.
My then girlfriend Beth snapped some photos of the great night, and the last one caught Ginsberg bowing in my direction.
It wasn’t until years later that this moment and that night all sunk in. For me and many others, Ginsberg is like da Vinci and Michelangelo. Like their work, his poems still exist, even though the man no longer lives. My memory of him still does. In my file cabinet I have our set list from that great night, an event that I once told my friend Steve was the most important thing I had ever done in my life.
I have one of the photos right here now. Thirteen years ago I was thinner and had more hair. I wish I still had that guitar I’m playing in that picture. I wish I could go back and live that night again.
I learned much that week. Much about poetry. Much about being a poet. Much about dignity and respect and honor. I was an asshole as a youth, of course, like many of us. This week helped me learn something about being a man.
Allen Ginsberg
1926-1997
-W.T. Pfefferle
