Columbia Celebrates Its Beat Writers

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

“Allen Ginsberg’s years here were formative. He met here the friends that would last him a lifetime,” said Columbia University comparative literature professor Ann Douglas at a Columbia Alumni Association gathering Friday called “Howl: Celebrating Columbia’s Beats.” The alumni gathered at the West End bar on Broadway near 114th Street, where Ginsberg once hung out with Jack Kerouac. Though twice expelled, Ginsberg graduated from Columbia in 1948, going on to become an iconoclastic poet, outspoken activist, and countercultural figure.


He was “probably the most famous Columbia graduate of the last 70 years,” said Ms. Douglas, who thanked Columbia’s director of communications for development and alumni relations, Jerry Kisslinger, for being the first official in the college’s administration to welcome the opportunity to celebrate Ginsberg.


Ms. Douglas described how Ginsberg met fellow student Kerouac, who she called “impossibly talented, impossibly beautiful, and impossibly vulnerable.” Ginsberg also met during those years the “thin, witty, desiccated, heavily ironic” William Burroughs, who introduced him and Kerouac to Oswald Spengler’s book “Decline of the West,” saying, “Edify your mind with the grand spectacle of fact.”


William Patterson University professor and poet David Shapiro was once taught by Ginsberg’s aunt at Weequahic High School in New Jersey. In a conversation with the Knickerbocker, he likened Ginsberg’s poetry to a huge space like a Jackson Pollock canvas “filled with little brush strokes of observation.” Ginsberg’s work contained “a vast voice but full of intimacy.”


At the event, Mr. Shapiro recalled a reading on campus in the mid-1990s that was so packed that people were hanging onto windows outside. Mr. Shapiro had turned to poet Kenneth Koch and asked, “When have you last seen an audience like this?” Koch replied, “The last time Allen was here.” Afterward, when a huge book signing line formed for Ginsberg’s poetry and a relatively small one for Mr. Shapiro, Ginsberg said, “I guess this is hard for you.”


Allen Tobias, who was a secretary to Ginsberg in the late 1960s, opened by praising Barney Rosset, the founder of Grove Press and Evergreen Review, who was unable to attend.


Mr. Tobias went on to describe Ginsberg’s visit to Israel where he met the prodigious historian of the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem. “A likeable fellow. Genuine. Strange, mad, but genuine.” Scholem’s wife asked Ginsberg, “Why don’t you come to live here?” Ginsberg looked at Scholem and replied, “Me? Your great ideal is to build a new Bronx here. All my life I’ve been running away from the Bronx, and here I come to the Jewish state and find that the whole big deal of the Zionists is to build a new Bronx here. If I have to go back to the Bronx, I may as well stay in the original one.”


But at this student haunt on the Upper West Side, there was no mistaking the delightful sound of the Columbia Jazz Ensemble playing as Michael Golston “channeled” a poem of Anne Waldman; Harry Bauld read haiku by Ginsberg; and writers Joyce Johnson and David Lehman performed.


David Gawarecki, Columbia ’75 and a 1991 graduate of School of International and Public Affairs, traveled from New Haven, Conn., to read his poem – a contemporary takeoff on Ginsberg’s “Howl” called “Scowl (A Lament, With Apologies to Allen Ginsberg).”It began:



I’ve seen the best minds of my generation silenced by manufactured fear,
Banalized by materialist want, marginalized by a creeping sense of anomie,
Angel-haired hippies once steeped in Sophocles and Kant
Self-chained like galley slaves to desks at law firms and banks.


The reading on the main floor traveled to the downstairs lounge through loudspeakers, where students listened on sofas and chairs. In that subterranean space with exposed pipes, student and alumni poets also read their own work. Nathaniel Farrell, a Ph.D. in Columbia University’s department of English, entertained the audience with a humorous poem about love.


In the upstairs audience were Sarah Stark, whose essay “Jack, Just in Case” was published in the Kerouac Quarterly; New York mathematician Jeff Cheeger, who studies differential geometry; and Jorge Daniel Veneciano, who is planning a program next year at Rutgers University for the 50th anniversary of “Howl.”


To be sure, Columbia graduates by no means universally laud Ginsberg’s achievements. One of his critics is Commentary editor at large Norman Podhoretz, who like Ginsberg was a student of Lionel Trilling. Mr. Podhoretz has sharply criticized Ginsberg over the years for glorifying drugs, extolling sexual promiscuity, and deleteriously impacting the culture.


What few would deny is that Ginsberg managed to get his work noticed. Ms. Douglas said when Ginsberg finished “Howl,” he went to Greenwich Village, found musician Thelonious Monk, and gave him a copy. Ginsberg returned a week later and asked, “Have you read it?” (Ginsberg was a pest, Ms. Douglas said.) Monk told him, ‘I’m almost through.” “Well?” persisted Ginsberg, eager to hear his opinion. “It makes sense,” Monk said.


gshapiro@nysun.com


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use