The beat poet befuddled the future Sun business columnist
Article content
You would have never thought Vancouver Sun writer Mike Grenby would report about American beat poet Allen Ginsberg in a million years.
Article content
Grenby was a business writer specializing in personal finance. A renowned penny pincher, he once wrote a column about saving money on his hot water bill by having all three members of his family use the same bathwater.
Article content
Article content
Ginsberg was a radical writer who challenged society’s norms, famed for his 1950s poem Howl. It starts off “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”
Article content
Story continues below
Article content
But when you’re starting out in daily journalism, you get assigned all sorts of stories. And on Aug. 2, 1963, the 22-year-old Grenby was dispatched to cover a Ginsberg poetry recital at UBC.
Article content
Sun Spots
Article content
It’s a 1960s classic, what the beat generation would have called “square” newspaper reporting.
Article content
Grenby tried to interview Ginsberg a couple of days before the gig, but was rebuffed, and befuddled.
Article content
“Bearded beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg claims he is the man who isn’t,” wrote Grenby on Aug. 1, 1963.
Article content
“I don’t know who I am or that I am, therefore I am not somebody and cannot speak at all,” Ginsberg said.
Article content
“My body is walking around, but I have disappeared.”
Article content
Ginsberg said he didn’t like giving interviews to newspapers, because they always called him a beat poet. Which is true, but even an Allen Ginsberg Facebook page run by his estate calls him a beat poet.
Article content
Article content
In any event, on Aug. 3, The Sun carried another Grenby story on Ginsberg, headlined “Poet Who Wasn’t There Gives Real Beat Readings.”
Article content
“The bearded poet said he wasn’t there, but the 350 people who paid $1.25 to come and see him Friday night certainly were,” Grenby wrote.
Article content
Story continues below
Article content
The event was sold out — 350 “students, bearded poets, girls in shorts and adults in evening dress” were crammed into a classroom with seating for 250.
Article content
Read More
-
George Bowering has received the Order of Canada and the Order of B.C. He was Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, has written so many books of poetry and prose that it’s hard to count, and has given readings and lectures all over the world.
-
Lawrence Books has been a fixture on the corner of West 41st Avenue and Dunbar Street in Vancouver for decades. But it has also been shrouded in mystery, because it seems to have been closed for years.
-
Advertisement 1
Story continues below
Article content
But Grenby wasn’t impressed, describing Ginsberg’s performance as a “disjointed harangue laced with obscenity.”
Article content
Grenby recounted Ginsberg had said “his body was walking around but he had disappeared.”
Article content
But onstage, “he was sufficiently in his body to expound on beautiful boys, moving trees and hairy souls.”
Article content
Ginsberg gave a much longer interview to Ruth Pinkus of The Province.
Article content
“Talking to Ginsberg is like talking to a raw nerve,” she wrote, “a calm, smiling, bearded, wet-ringleted raw nerve” who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day.
Article content
“I tried everything going, but nicotine is the only thing that I ever got addicted to,” said Ginsberg.
Article content
Pinkus wrote that Ginsberg “had roamed the world searching for love, and now he had found out how to look for it.” She said, “He wants to get married, though he had not met the right woman yet.”
Article content
In fact, Ginsberg was gay and in a long-term relationship with fellow poet Peter Orlovsky.
Article content
Ginsberg said he had originally given away poetry for free, and wasn’t happy when “the beatniks” came in and started charging money to read their poetry in nightclubs.
