Elegy For Allen
That was a break
In the fiber of things
Sorrowful
When Ginsberg died
Because I still have students
Wanting to be Beats
And even some
Wanting to be Buddhists
Why not, but when
That brilliant Jew poet took
The train for the next world
American nirvana
Temporarily went with him.
Not that he ever attained
The tranquility
Supposedly sought,
He was so nervous
And somehow ailing,
The neurotic utopian
Prophetic fairy side
Of the guy never
Surrendered really
To those Asian things
And too much ginseng
Makes a man feeble-like.
Yes, B— says
You would be there
At a party and he’d say
Excuse me I have to follow
That young man, you’d think
Fine but why are you obliged
To announce it, why not
Just do it.
The greatest Jewish poet
After Celan and Amichai,
I cry, grieving, and
B— says better not try
To sell him as a rabbi
Though what else is he
For heaven’s sake
Beads and bells
And dreams of peace
And all.
~~~
The University of South Carolina and The Katie and Irwin Kahn Jewish Community Center Present
an evening of poetry with Alicia Ostriker
Thursday, March 20th at 7:30 pm
“I write as an American, a woman, a Jew, a mother, a wife, a lover of beauty and art, a teacher, an idealist, a skeptic. Critics seem often to remark that I am ‘intelligent’—but I see myself also as passionate. Actually, I am a combination of mind, body, and feelings, like everyone else, and I try to get them all into play.”
Ostriker has received awards and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Poetry Society of America, and the San Francisco State Poetry Center, among others. Ostriker has taught in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University and New England College. She lives in Princeton, NJ, is professor emerita of English at Rutgers University.
This event is FREE and open to everyone.
For more information, please call Laurie Slack at 787-2023 x201
.jpg)