On a Photograph by Marion Kalter

Jean-Jacques Lebel

This photograph, which dates from June 1, 1979, was taken on the occasion of the inaugural session of the first POLYPHONIX International Festival of Direct Poetry, which took place at 261 boulevard Raspail in Paris at a time when the American Center had not yet become the Cartier Foundation. The American Center, a private institution not to be confused with the branch of the American Embassy located on rue du Dragon, was welcoming to the counterculture and the experimental arts. The scene unfolds in the garden, during a break in the final rehearsal.

The four people in the photo are, from left to right:

Steven Taylor, a young professional musician a singer and guitar player who had been recruited by Allen Ginsberg during the decade when Ginsberg toured internationally, performing in concert halls, university amphitheaters, and/or recording studios with this same trio;

Allen Ginsberg the legendary scribe of Howl and Kaddish, two literary masterpieces that did a lot to inject some dynamism into poetic thinking during the second half of the twentieth century;

Yours truly (new French translations in hand), placed behind Orlovsky; and

Peter Orlovsky, a significant Beat Generation poet and author, in particular, of Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs (published by City Lights Books in San Francisco).

Steve holds his instrument close to his chest. Allen is seated cross-legged on the grass in front of his harmonium, listening to my translation of one of his poems that will be read at the microphone in between readings of the originals. The Ginsberg photographed here is not the doomsayer of the Pentagon and Wall Street, nor is he the naked bard who was photographed in India on the banks of the Ganges, nor the half-naked Beatnik jammed with Gregory Corso into a shower stall where the posh photographer Richard Avedon had posed them, nor the shaggy, stoned shaman with biblical-Buddhist beard who, along with Jack Kerouac, Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Bob Dylan, had upended poetic discourse and, in doing so, had somewhat “changed life” (to borrow a line from Arthur Rimbaud). Here he is in coat and tie with short hair, clean shaven, his thick beard having been cut and donated to the filmmaker Jonas Mekas (this unexpected relic is conserved in a shoe box at the archives of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, now known as Anthology Film Archives, in New York). Peter, all dressed up, too, is wearing an impeccable white suit, matching socks, a tie, his ponytail elegantly cascading down his shoulder, his banjo and his guitar set on the grass beside him.

Orlovsky’s gaze is intense: he is aware of the giddy feeling that comes with the bodily balancing act of switching between the oral and the scriptural. The moment is an intimate one, as if suspended in air, the photographer having succeeded here in capturing both its fragility and the emotional content. Four friends are on the point of embarking upon a risky adventure: the first bilingual performance, before a large and well-informed American Center of Paris audience, of a singularly different version of Beat poetry, not diminished, not subdued quite the contrary, since the subversive force of the texts brooks no censorship but presented in sensuous form, set to music or sung, as did indeed happen with William Blake’s poem, “The Tyger,” which Ginsberg was accustomed to recite at the start of his public gatherings. The leap was truly perilous, the gamble in no way guaranteed to pay off in advance. When he performed on stage as the curtain-raiser for the Rolling Thunder Review the historic tour of his friends Bob Dylan and Joan Baez Ginsberg faced a lot of setbacks: he sang out of tune and Dylan’s fans took a visceral dislike to his harmonium. For this, he was to be heartily booed, just as, decades later, Patti Smith would be when she alighted upon the unfortunate notion of appearing in Stockholm in Dylan’s place to bellow out horribly in song there, during the acceptance ceremony for the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to the author of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” who did not himself see fit to make the journey. A heavy load of suspicion automatically weighs down upon those who, well- or ill-intentioned, seek to pass themselves off as someone who they are not. From the start, poetry and show business are at loggerheads. Yet that has not kept a few exceptionally gifted individuals Langston Hughes, Kerouac, Michael McClure, Jayne Cortez, Ted Joans, Amiri Baraka, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Michael Smith, among others—from “jazzifying” their writings with the help of some excellent musicians, the idea being to exit from the restricted social circle in which poetry lovers are shut up, to rip the text from the page and to add a soundtrack, the better to spread a poetic utopia out among listeners who never buy a book and who never lend an ear to insurgent and visionary thinkers. Whence the hieratic fragility that emanates from this image. Ginsberg and Orlovsky came to Paris for the first time in 1957. They lived, and wrote quite a bit, at the celebrated Beat Hotel at 9 rue Gît-le-cœur—in the company of Corso, Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and many others . . . jazz musicians, artists, writers of various origins, all of them broke, expatriated, nomadic, glorious dharma bums. Here they were in Paris, twenty-two years later, Ginsberg and Orlovsky, famous, of course, but more lucid than ever about the fate of planet Earth buckling beneath the ever-more-totalitarian grip of “Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!” (Howl, part II).