Author Description

These letters tell the tale of the changes Allen Ginsberg and I went through as we passed two decades as friends: we began with a shared love of Reznikoff and Williams, and he exhibited an enormous patience with me-I was a gifted, but loudmouthed and sometimes tactless kid, still evolving out of an angry teenaged punk, sometimes pretentious when I should have shut up and listened. In some sense, these letters form a kind of bildungsroman, the growth of the young man's mind and the tutelage of a wise elder. In many ways, we were very different from each other: he the famed world traveler, I the mental voyageur working in my garden, more or less indifferent to travel and sophisticated scenes in big cities, he the gay icon, I the eternally questioning heterosexual with a long-term marriage, raising three kids. After key publications, awards, meeting my peers through his good offices, I grew, and I think he may have as well, through a whole series of shared labors. The end heralded a major change of life for me, with his call on the night of his death, thanking me for our friendship and saying farewell. In the morning he was gone, and while thankful for the many things we shared, I knew that I'd have to reinvent myself yet again. I was not unique in this respect-Allen had many deep friendships, and taught us all to love and respect others whose gifts might be very different from our own, to nourish that light that we could share if we would learn how to overlook each other's failings, to build that sense of community which he nourished in the outrider poets of my generation.