For
Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The
“Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With
Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"
By
Lance Lawrence
[In
the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases
covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff I admit that I knew
Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Janet always called me and those I knew Jan now late
daughter (she died in 1996) whom he
never really recognized as his despite the absolute likeness and later testing for
whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with like her father an early
death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast
Highway. We, a group of us from the Boston area who had been told by some guys
from North Adamsville, about forty miles south of Boston who we met through
Pete Markin* who I went to Boston University with before he dropped out in the
Summer of Love, 1967 about Todo and how it was a cooler place down the road
from Big Sur which had become inundated with holy goofs and tourists and a rip
off. That s is still true today although the rip-off part is submerged since it
in no longer a hippie Garden of Eden except among those who were so stoned that
couldn’t find their ways out of the hills above the ocean and have wound up
staying there as models for what the 1960s were all about (and what I remember
hearing a few parents tell their children to avoid at all costs-oh, to be very
young-then)
We
had been staying at a cabin owned by the writer Steven Levin (mostly novels and
essays for publications like City Lights and Blue Dial Press and regional
literary journals) when one Saturday night we held a party and in walked Jan
then maybe seventeen or eighteen, nice and who wanted to be a writer like her
dad. The hook for me to meet her was the Boston-Lowell connection (one of the
few times being from Boston did me any good). We became friendly the few days
she stayed at the cabin (at my request) and I saw her a few times later. I was
having my own troubles just then and as the world knows now she had a basketful
from that crass rejection by her father and frustrations at not being taken
seriously as a writer always following in her father’s two-million-word shadows.
Funny it did not take any DNA testing for me to see that she was pure Kerouac
in features and frankly from what I read of his style that too.
I
also knew Allan Ginsburg in his om-ish days when we fired up more than one
blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for
the stick) to see what we could see out in the National Mall where he would do
his sleek Buddha Zen mad monk thing and later Greenwich Village night where he
did serious readings to the Village literary set. I was just a little too young
to have appreciated his Howl which
along with the elegant Kaddish (for
his troubled late mother) fully since the former in particular was something
like the Beat anthem to Kerouac’s On The
Road bible. He had kind of moved on from beat and was moving on from hippie
a bit as well and it would not be until later when the dust settled that he
would go back to the later 1940s and early 1950s to explain to a candid
audience including me over grass and some wine what it was all about, what
drove the startlingly images and weird noises of that former poem. (Which I
have read and re-read several times as well as through the beauty of YouTube
has him reading forming background while I am working on the computer.
This
piece first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan
Ginsburg’s Father Death death without accordion and caused a
great deal of confusion among the readers, a younger group according to the
demographics provided to me by the advertising department when I was trying to
figure out where the thing got lost in the fog, why these younger folk missed
some terms I took for granted with which every reader was at least vaguely
familiar. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying
homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate
modernist poet. Meaning for Eliot aficionados the stuff that Broadway used to
make a hit musical out of although it would have been better if they, either
the confused young or the Broadway producers had counted their lives in coffee
spoons. That cat reference of mine actually referred to “hep cats” as in a
slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a
cat, the family pet.
Some
readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was
published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey
freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual”
and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in
the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsburg and his Peter although they were in
friendlier Frisco mainly thought I was referring W.H. Auden. There had been
some coded words for the sexual acts associated with homosexually then, and
maybe in some older sets still in use Jesus,
Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when
things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a
self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in
late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar
Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual
possibility. That despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what
he called the “Homintern.” Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read Auden
anymore once the Beats be-bopped.
There
were a few others who were presented as candidates as the person I was
championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones
I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in
the mud of society. Jack Weir because of some West Coast references. Jeffery
Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope. All wrong. That poet
had a name an honored name Allan Ginsburg who howled in the night at the
oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory
and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd who refused to learn
from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBURG who wrote for
Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife in some
stone- cold crazy asylum and I now for him when he went under the ground. Lance
Lawrence]
*(We
have, those of us who knew Markin back in the 1960s when he hung around the
Cambridge coffeehouses with his cheap date girlfriends (he was a scholarship
boy who had no money, came from some slack family house so coffeehouses, the
ones with no admission charges and cheap coffee to maintain a seat), have often
wondered whether Markin and Kerouac would have gotten along if they had been of
the same generation. That generation born in the 1920s, his parents’ generation
if not lifestyle. From Markin’s end would Jack have been the searched for
father he had never known. From Jack’s end whether the two-million question
Markin would have clashed or meshed with the two-million- word Kerouac. I know
as early as in the 1980s when I was dating an English Literature graduate
student from Cornell that Jack was in bad odor as a literary figure to emulate
and subsequently anybody who wanted to be “school of Kerouac found hard sledding
getting published. This is probably worthy of a separate monogram in this 50th
anniversary year of the passing of Kerouac )
***********
I
have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen
that the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the
barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe
haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue
and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid
Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter
yelling out in unison “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty
twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to
commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by
girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime
looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time.
Thought that those angel-headed hipsters, those hep cats hanging around Times,
Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares crying in pools of blood coming out of the
wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for
their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of
Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable
college students whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed
students, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg
of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy
arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of
the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston
or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under
luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could
have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.
Saw
hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the
Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges
across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with
rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who
nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s
how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and
leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out
the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious
fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product
the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish
girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of
the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind
dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack
Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the
best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that
would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant
girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no
trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more
but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home,
Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least
played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to
even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs,
fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty
red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro
streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with
their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan
who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old
end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of
death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed
hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets and slamming
singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two- line
rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the
breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think
about the matter more closely hard times please come again no
more.
Saw
the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then
backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s
own angel. Some Norman Mailer white hipster turned her on to a little sister
and then some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for
high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that
sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make
her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like
she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of
“used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her
for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or
maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the
three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to
the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the
dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean
angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes
(everybody called it just that after they had been there one night), one after
midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished
to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke
dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks.
So please, please, hard times come again no
more.
I
have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of
silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world
that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was
to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made
hip to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house
that awaits us all.
**********
On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957)-The Life And Times Of Beat Poet Extraordinaire Allen Ginsberg
A YouTube's film clip of Allen Ginsberg reading from "Howl".
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th
Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for
something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that
had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or
some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a
name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet
Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a
junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in
flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on
every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes, I know that the actual term “beat” was first
used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane
journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will
crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis) Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line
backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told
me, maybe my older brother Alex they called “blowing to the China seas” out in
West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one
skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women,
life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate
repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get
caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home
parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell,
let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy
Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a
dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast
on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the
club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean
streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five
cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and
cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing
reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling
out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my
brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about
that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at
a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory
two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an
event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well
and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers,
connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to
trash those connection when they acolytes came calling looking for the “word.”
So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the
beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings
of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s
travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth
Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother
and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a
place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands). Literary
stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think
the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of
which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as
a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then
add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories
of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex
and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si,
Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine), Bart, and a few others still alive recently
had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love,
1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.
Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk
seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see
what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a
number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or
dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the
local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural
days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of
Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran
wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major
towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of other guys who took a very
different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of
a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had
caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the
story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause
Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a
ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even
now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for
their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part).
Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to
spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant
dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high
through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a
while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and
other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that
was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not
always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first
back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into
the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more
years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end. With maybe this
difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what
is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except
commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes.
Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin
included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung
around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money
fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants any way they could as
anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s
goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger”
takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not
the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close
thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But
back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now
too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners
anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor
corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe”
from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high
school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although
Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for
books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most
of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds
would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as
silk Frankie now also a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was
why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer
later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him).
Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide
in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social
pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That
sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten
billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him
about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy
life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae
for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get
out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to
folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still
doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny
Bob Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and
his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956
which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less
Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that
they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road.
They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about
some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a
mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my
brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown
up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he
had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some
grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the
base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several
times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was
having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping
almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper
scroll in about three weeks. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the
Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the bug
to you.
DVD Review
The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg, his family, his lovers and his “beat” and hippie friends, New Yorker Films, 1994
Recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. It all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space near the Merrimack River.
Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s “bad boy”, the “king of the 1950s beat writers, Jack Kerouac. And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and a whole ragtag assortment of poets, hangers-on, groupies and genuine madmen and madwomen come to mind. So that is why today we labor under the sign of one Allen Ginsberg.
As I pointed out in recent review of a film documentary about the life of Jack Kerouac, “What Happened To Kerouac? (which I gave a five-star rating to, by the way) I was just a little too young to be directly influenced by the “beats”, and just a little too driven by the quest for political solutions for what ailed me and what I thought ailed this society. Nevertheless, as I recounted in that review entitled, “On The Road” And On The Sidelines”, after I came of political age I kind of crept back, like a million other members of the “Generation of ‘68” and re-evaluated that influence. In short then, starting with Kerouac’s “On The Road”, through William Burroughs “Naked Lunch” and on to Ginsberg’s madman-like, but provocative, “Howl” and sensitive “Kaddish” I devoured every “beat” thing I could get my hands on.
And that last sentence is a good place to start in reviewing this one and one half hour production about the trials and tribulations, the fight for literary recognition and the journey of discovery of one hell of a beat poet, Allen Ginsberg. The film speeds through the now rather familiar saga (for that generation that was born between World War I and II and formed the core of what is deemed “the greatest generation”) of a dysfunctional Jewish immigrant family, additionally burdened by a very overwrought and frequently institutionalized mother. The real story for our purposes, however, starts in the neon-driven glitter of 1940s New York where some very alienated youth like Ginsberg, Kerouac, Holmes, etc. and their mentors like Burroughs meet up and start a quest, literarily and physically, to ‘discover’ America. And they did it on their terms, at least for a while.
Along the way Ginsberg becomes very aware of his innate poetic skills, that unique beat in his head, his previously submerged sexual orientation and his almost surreal sense of the absurdities of living in post-war America, at least on the “squares” terms. Things begin to happen though in the 1950s . His classic “Howl” was premiered in San Francisco in 1956 to critical acclaim, Kerouac’s “On The Road” finally got published to rave reviews and suddenly in Eisenhower’s America it becomes almost a rite of passage for the young to show up at some poetry reading in some smoky café, or dress in the de rigueur black, or like black musician-driven jazz. And that is where my generation and I come in. That is where, if nothing else, we owe a debt to the beats- and to the king hell beat poet who, unlike Kerouac who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make the transition, came over with us when we started pushing back against the monster.
And that is the positive side of the Ginsberg story, the ability to transition, as least partially, as the leftward cultural currents shifted. I would not, and I believe psychologically that I could not, go on that psychic consciousness-raising trip that led him to Buddhism for a while. Moreover, in viewing the film of his role in the 1968 Democratic Convention as a messenger of tranquility only brought the hard fact that that was not the way to fight the monster home. But, I was then as I am now very indulgent of our precious poetic spirits, the protest song singers, and the other cultural figures who “rage against the monster”, in a politically correct manner or not. What bothered me in this presentation more than anything though was Ginsberg’s fate in his later career when he was no longer front and center in the public eye. In one of the many informative Ginsberg interview segments that dot this documentary, which was produced in 1994 just a few years before he died he notes, I believe while he is reciting one of his poems that one of his life achievements that he was proud of was that he had become a 'distinguished professor' (I assume, of literature) at Brooklyn College. That is an unpardonable sin Brother Ginsberg, Where did you go wrong?
Note: One of the great things about this documentary were the great number of evocative photographs, including many taken by the closet “shutter-bug” Ginsberg himself, of various personalities of the “beat” generation that I had not seen before like the young Ginsberg, Burroughs (was he ever young?), Cassidy and Kerouac. Additionally, for poetry buffs, there are a number of segments included where Ginsberg read from his works (and with his poet father in join readings, as well). You do not know how really good and provocative “Howl” and “Kaddish” are as poems of rage and remembrance, respectively, until you hear his readings.
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