ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997 TAG: 9704070098
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: LARRY McSHANE THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The poet laureate of the Beat Generation's influence was widespread, including Bob Dylan and Abbie Hoffman.
Allen Ginsberg, the counterculture guru who shattered conventions as poet laureate of the Beat Generation and influenced the next four decades of art, music and politics, died Saturday at age 70.
The bearded, balding Ginsberg died in his New York City home surrounded by eight ``close friends and old lovers,'' said his friend and archivist, Bill Morgan. The poet was diagnosed eight days ago with terminal liver cancer, and he suffered a fatal heart attack, Morgan said.
``He made us see that poets were pop stars,'' said Lenny Kaye, guitarist with the Patti Smith Group and a recent Ginsberg collaborator. ``He had a sense of liberation - sexual liberation, philosophical liberation.''
Ginsberg, whose blend of drug-inspired visions, hedonistic sex and gut-wrenching autobiography first emerged during the 1950s, spent several days in a hospice after his diagnosis. On Thursday, he suffered a stroke, fell into a coma and never regained consciousness.
He had returned to his Lower East Side apartment a day earlier after expressing a desire to die at home. He wrote about a dozen short poems - one titled ``On Fame and Death'' - and ``wore himself out talking to friends,'' Morgan said.
Ginsberg's influence was almost inestimable. His followers include Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan, Czech President Vaclav Havel, punk poetess Patti Smith, Yoko Ono and Bob Dylan.
``Dylan said he was the greatest influence on the American poetic voice since Whitman,'' said Gordon Ball, Ginsberg's editor and friend of 30 years. ``I think that's certainly true.''
In 1956, Ginsberg wrote ``Howl'' - a profane, graphic poem that dealt with his own homosexuality and communist upbringing.
``I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,'' the poem began.
``Howl'' was dedicated to Carl Solomon, a patient he met during a stay in a psychiatric ward.
Forty years later, Ginsberg was reciting his poetry on MTV for Generation X-ers. His often-confessional poetry placed spontaneity over metered verse, frank language over flowery words.
``Kaddish,'' one of his most famous poems, dealt with his mother's life and death in a mental hospital. It was written in his Manhattan apartment, stream of consciousness-style, fueled by a combination of amphetamines and morphine.
His first exposure to the nascent counterculture came when he was a 17-year-old Columbia University freshman. There he met fellow future beatniks Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady. The group, disillusioned by conventional society, created their own subculture of drugs and hedonism.
``Basically, just a gang of friends who were very into being literate, and who were interested in art, and loved each other,'' Ginsberg once said of the Beat Generation's founding fathers. ``Some gay, some straight.''
Ginsberg became a proponent of homosexual rights - one of many causes he embraced. In 1960, he went on television to call for the decriminalization of marijuana. He was arrested in 1967 for protesting the Vietnam War in New York, and was tear-gassed a year later while protesting at the Democratic convention in Chicago.
``I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs when I was 17 that I realized I was talking through an empty skull,'' Ginsberg once said. ``I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.''
Ginsberg's first taste of notoriety came after the publication of ``Howl'' in 1956. Copies of the book were seized by San Francisco police and U.S. Customs officials, and Ferlinghetti was charged with publishing an obscene book.
In a 1991 interview with The Associated Press - where Ginsberg briefly worked as a copy boy in 1948 - he recalled the '50s as a time of ``total paranoia, suspiciousness, fear, the rich robbing the poor, and complaining about the poor. ... Marketized, mechanized fake emotions.''
Ferlinghetti was acquitted in 1957, but the case generated enormous publicity for Ginsberg and his work. Ginsberg was suddenly in demand.
Ginsberg became a guru to the counterculture movement. He coined the term ``flower power'' during the mid-'60s. He eventually became more accepted by the mainstream.
His National Book Award came in 1973 for ``The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971.'' He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1995 for his book, ``Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992.''
Ginsberg remained vital and active well into his 60s. Last year, he recorded his poem ``The Ballad of the Skeletons'' with musical backing from Paul McCartney and Philip Glass.
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS. Poet Allen Ginsberg stands in Jackby CNBKerouac Alley next to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco's North
Beach district in September 1994. color.