My favorite poem

The last article that I published made me wonder, "Have they even heard of Allen Ginsberg?"

I know that the answer is probably "no." I had never heard of Allen Ginsberg either, until the day he died. I was a freshman in high school, and all over the news, commentators were talking about the effects of a man I'd never heard of on American life. He must not have been that important. I mean, I've never heard of him, I thought (This is a phrase that continues to cause me regret - and make me look stupid - even today). Then, one radio station played a recording of him reading his most famous poem, something called Howl.

It hit me in the gut. The first line - "I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness" - struck a chord deep down inside of me, in a place that I hadn't yet known existed. I went home to our brand new computer (this was in 1996, you know? we didn't even have Google) to look him up. All of a sudden, this brand new world was opened up to me. Ginsberg came from a time and place that I understood, where people cared about the world around them, and they wrote about it. All of sudden, the alienation - the different-ness - I'd felt for my young life had a voice.

Here's the poem that did that for me.