«I LOVE ALLEN'S THINGS...HE'S SUCH A GREAT POET»

Allen Ginsberg, along with Marshall McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, was one of the central figures of my college years in the '60s. He had enormous influence on my intellectual development, and I would be proud to call him my guru. I was introduced to Ginsberg's masterpieces, "Howl" and "Kaddish," by a brilliant teacher, the poet Milton Kessler, whose fierily rabbinic recitations of those bardic lines are emblazoned in my psyche. Ginsberg's hallucinatory imagery, incantatory rhythms and jazz syncopations are the ultimate, operatic expression of 20th century sexual and political radicalism. I raptly studied and treasured the small, black-and-white City Lights Books editions of the two poems as if they were sacred texts from the Jerusalem that was then avant-garde San Francisco.

-Camille Paglia