THE POETRY AND LIFE OF ALLEN GINSBERG

A labor of love by one of the second-generation Beats. Sanders, founding member of the Fugs and editor-creator of the notorious Fuck You: A Review of the Arts, was a longtime friend of Ginsberg and has chosen a somewhat unconventional way of paying tribute to the late poet—a faux epic poem that recounts his life and work in copious chronological detail. Starting with Ginsberg’s family (chased by anti-Semitic pogroms through the Pale of Settlement), Sanders walks readers through what seems like every reading, lecture, demonstration, and poem Ginsberg ever did. As poetry, this is negligible stuff. For the most part, Sanders uses the three-part line made famous by William Carlos Williams, but what he writes is little more than prose-with-line-breaks. Given the project’s genesis, this is not especially surprising: Sanders set out to write an elegy for Ginsberg, then began taking notes for a course on the older poet that he was teaching in Germany—and the whole mess seems to have found its way into this volume. Attempting to find an epic form, Sanders uses “Homeric” epithets, which consist mainly of referring to Ginsberg as “the great bard” every few pages. Regrettably, Sanders quotes sparingly from Ginsberg’s verse, so the uninitiated must take it on faith that Ginsberg really was a great poet. On the other hand, Ginsberg does emerge as a great human being, generous to friends, acquaintances, and even strangers, deeply caring and amazingly sweet-tempered. Sanders doesn’t sugar-coat the portrayal—we learn of Ginsberg’s rather amusing thirst for awards and recognition—and the figure that emerges from this book is a well-rounded one.

But it isn’t really poetry.