Remembering Ginsberg and the summer of poetry

Poets gather outside the Vancouver home of Ellen and Warren Tallman in 1963. Allan Ginsberg is in the back row, third from left, standing beside a young, far-haired Dan McLeod in glasses. Warren Tallman is seated in the second row, far right. BELOW: The American poet Charles Olson in Vancouver, as photographed by Ginsberg.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
January 5, 2011

VICTORIA

Allen Ginsberg, fresh from an Asian sojourn, arrived in Vancouver with his hair and beard untrimmed, ringlets cascading from his face. The poet looked like an Old Testament prophet in an age of Brylcreem conformity.

He was a mad (holy) man amidst the Mad Men.

It was the summer of 1963. A three-week university course brought to the grungy port city with its neon-lit streetscapes an all-star lineup of hotshot writers known as the New American Poets.

George Bowering, at the time a student at the University of British Columbia who would go on to become Canada’s first poet laureate, had been reading these works for years. He intended to follow his favourite, Charles Olson. Instead, he found himself shadowing Mr. Ginsberg.

“Maybe it’s embarrassing to say it,” Mr. Bowering said Tuesday, “but he seemed to have some kind of spiritual aura. The air shone around him.”

He remembers the poet in Stanley Park so taken by its natural beauty to deliver an impromptu recitation of “Adonais,” a pastoral elegy to John Keats. “Pages and pages and pages of Shelley!” Mr. Bowering recalled. “I was astonished.”

The movie Howl, which takes as its title the famous poem written by the late Mr. Ginsberg, is being released on DVD this week after a limited theatrical run. The movie intersperses an interview with the poet, a reading of the poem, and a notorious obscenity trial in docudrama fashion.

For some who see the movie, it is unnerving, though not unsatisfying, to see Hollywood portray characters they knew in the flesh.

Stan Persky, a 69-year-old philosophy professor at Capilano University, knew many of the people portrayed in the film — Jack Kerouac (from whom he received a postcard at age 16 encouraging him in his writing), Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky (Ginsberg’s lover), and the poet himself, whom he met in 1959 while stationed with the U.S. Navy in San Francisco.

“Ginsberg was an advocate of gay liberation 10 years before it was invented,” Mr. Persky said. “Ginsberg was totally open about it. I’d be walking around Chinatown and see him on the other side of the street and he would call out, ‘Hey, have you got a boyfriend yet?’ ”

Mr. Persky worked with the poet in organizing an early anti-Vietnam War protest at Berkeley, Calif. When the local Hells Angels chapter made it known they were prepared to beat the peace marchers for not being patriotic, the poet went to visit them in their compound. He returned to announce the Angels had changed their mind, offering to provide security for the protestors, an entente negotiated after the long-haired, gay poet shared with the leather-wearing bikers a supply of LSD.

The 1963 visit to Vancouver coincided with several parties held at the Kerrisdale home of Ellen Tallman, a writer, and Warren Tallman, an English professor, at 2527 W. 37th Ave. The atmosphere was redolent of cigarette smoke and spilled Black Label.

At one point, Mr. Ginsberg posed outside the home with the host and several poets. Among those in the photograph is Dan McLeod, who would go on to co-found the Georgia Straight underground newspaper. Some years later, the Straight faced a substantial fine for criminal libel by having awarded a “Pontius Pilate Certificate” to a judge who convicted Mr. Persky on a loitering charge. The newspaper held a benefit to raise legal funds, attracting the support of folk singer Phil Ochs and Mr. Ginsberg. In a radio interview with Jack Webster, a hard-hitting interrogator from Scotland known as the Oatmeal Savage, the gentle poet used wit and humour to disarm the host. In the end, Mr. Persky remembers Mr. Ginsberg cajoling a $50 cheque from the Scotsman.

Looking back, the 1963 poetry conference is the day what we think of as the 1960s began in Vancouver.

Mr. Bowering likes to tell an anecdote about the conference.

At one point, the visiting poets were playing a friendly game of Monopoly at the Tallman residence. Savvy purchases and some luck with the die soon had Mr. Ginsberg demanding rent payments and calling mortgages on his fellow poets, as he ignored their entreaties for loans or leniency. The writer who decried the excesses of American capitalism was a whiz at tabletop real estate.


Fred Wah recorded a reading by Allen Ginsberg during the Vancouver conference. You can hear it http://slought.org/toc/Vancouver1963/ ">here.

Flower power on West Fourth Avenue

Lawrence Aronsen, a history professor at the University of Alberta, has written a sober-minded account of a wild era in "City of Love & Revolution: Vancouver in the Sixties." The terrific book cover was designed by noted rock poster artist Bob Masse.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 8, 2010

VANCOUVER

Once, West Fourth Avenue was home to head shops and record stores. Today, it is lined by upscale boutiques and fine-dining restaurants.

Then, tie-dye T-shirts. Now, Lululemon.

Then, hippie coffeehouses. Now, Starbucks.

Then, slow service at the Naam vegetarian restaurant. Today, slow service at the Naam vegetarian restaurant.

These days, the merchants’ association sponsors an annual Summer of Love (previously Hippie Daze), encouraging shoppers to visit the avenue with the slogan, “What a trip!”

Looks like The Man won.

It is easy to resort to cliche when looking back at the 1960s, an era easily lampooned by us 50-year-old whippersnappers.

A person lucky enough to be 21 during the Summer of Love is today aged 64, perhaps using marijuana not as a mind-altering recreation but as a pain-easing medication.

Back then, the promise of an exciting, freer way of life lured young people from the region and across the continent. They flocked to the Kitsilano neighbourhood, where large houses became crash pads. Cheap rents made it possible to live a modest life away from the shackles of 9-to-5 clock punching. The nearby beach and temperate climate encouraged a year-long summer holiday.

West Fourth became the Rainbow Road, a way station on the hippie highway.

Lawrence Aronsen, who has written City of Love & Revolution: Vancouver in the Sixties (New Star), says the hippie movement here was “an American cultural flow across the border. That’s the catalyst.”

“It’s the Baby Boomers coming of age, trying to find their identity. The hippie thing is a nice way to counter the mass consumption of the ’50s and ’60s.”

His book is a sober-minded account of a wild flowering in the city’s history — from the arrival of hippiedom and its embrace of peace and love; human be-ins and pot smoke-ins; the Gastown police riot and the appearance of the underground newspaper The Georgia Straight; a Jerry Rubin-led occupation of a campus faculty club and the Yippies’ cross-border invasion of Blaine, Wash.; the creation of a free university and the founding of Greenpeace; an anti-prison Be-Out and the formation of a squatter’s camp to stop a development at the entrance to Stanley Park; and, a general discombobulation of attitudes towards fashion and grooming and sex, the latter giving Vancouver a reputation as a Sodom of the North. Oh, and apparently the freaks and radicals were listening to groovy sounds, too.

Mr. Aronsen, a 62-year-old history professor at the University of Alberta, was born in Victoria and raised in working-class neighbourhoods in suburban Vancouver. His cultural influences were Californian. He dressed like the Beach Boys and twice hitchhiked south to surf, returning home to become “a weekend hippie.”

What would the “small-l libertarian” Lawrence Aronsen of 2010 tell the “mild-mannered Maoist revolutionary” campus radical of 1970?

“That I survived. I did some crazy things. My craziness is a kind of Canadian craziness. I knew after just two LSD trips that it’s not productive.”

Not all his contemporaries were as fortunate. Some were lost to drugs. Others never recovered from knowing they had already enjoyed the best days of their lives.

Originally, some Fourth Avenue merchants reacted to the hippies as though an alien life form had landed in their midst.

“They saw them as seedy characters,” he said, “but they didn’t see them as dangerous.”

He thinks the reaction to the tumult of the times was far more benign here than south of the border.

In Chicago, police struck hippies with billy clubs. In Vancouver, city council struck a Special Committee on Hippies.

Even the most notorious crackdown of the era, when police attacked pot smokers and bystanders in the infamous Gastown Riot of 1971, was followed the next weekend by a street party during which free hot dogs and watermelon were distributed by merchants, while police ignored public displays of pot puffing.

Confrontation with authority initiated dialogue, not violence. Dig it.


Vancouver's hippie daze recorded

It is June, 6, 1970. At the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, the audience eagerly awaits the appearance on stage of The Doors. The band is on a Roadhouse Blues Tour to support their album Morrison Hotel.

The tour manager places two microphones on the stage floor, recording the show on a Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder. The Doors are joined for four songs by blues legend Albert King, whose presence drives lead singer Jim Morrison to some unearthly vocals.

“You guys sure have a beautiful city here. You really do,” Mr. Morrison tells the crowd. “You can’t imagine how refreshing it is to come out of sewer like Los Angeles and breath some fresh air for a change.”

The band plays for two hours, a recording released last month by Rhino Records as “The Doors: Live in Vancouver, 1970.” It’s a scintillating souvenir of a single remarkable night in a tumultuous era.

A year later, the Lizard King is dead.


It ain’t the ’60s without a soundtrack

Regenerator Records of Vancouver has re-issued the hard-to-find Cool-Aid Benefit Album, featuring some of the city’s top psychedelic bands, as well as a jug band. Groove to the tunes of Mock Duck, Papa Bear’s Medicine Show, Hydro Electric Streetcar, and the Blacksnake Blues Band.



Amchitka

A year ago, Greenpeace released “Amchitka,” a two-CD live recording of the fundraising concert that launched the environmental group. It features live recordings of Phil Ochs, Joni Mitchell, and James Taylor.


Storming the Barricades

Rick McGrath, who was a rock critic and entertainment editor at The Georgia Straight, maintains a fascinating website about the characters who worked in Vancouver’s underground press. The underground newspaper, which debuted in 1967, fought in court to maintain freedom of the press. The passions ignited 40 years ago over its control remain undiminished.


Hippie hero

The cartoonist and illustrator Rand Holmes, who died at Lasqueti Island eight years ago, created hippie hero Harold Hedd, one of the more memorable fictional characters of the 1960s. Among the cognoscenti, Mr. Holmes is a peer of R. (Mr. Natural) Crumb and Gilbert (Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) Shelton. A 328-page retrospective was released this summer by Fantagraphics Books.

Harold Hedd, from the fevered imagination and slick pen of cartoonist Rand Holmes, became a favourite feature in The Georgia Straight underground newspaper.