A few days ago, whilst researching a project, I stumbled upon an interesting newspaper article from the long-defunct Morning Call newspaper. This was a paper based in Ginsberg’s hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. It is not the same as the Morning Call newspaper that exists today in Pennsylvania.

It was quite interesting and seeing as it doesn’t appear to have been printed anywhere else, and is from a newspaper that went defunct 55 years ago, I thought I’d share it here. (Text below)

September 18, 1965

By Regina Sinaridge:

HE COMES home to be fed. Home is the place he knows he can always come back to. He refuels himself by arguing with his father.”

Louis and Edith Ginsberg talked about him for 3 hours. But it was of Allen, their son, they spoke mostly — and only occasionally of Allen the poet howling in the wilderness, the prophet not without honor.

What happens when this comet blazes his way back into the family?

The door . . . since I left it open … has graciously stayed open.

“Well, he was home over the Fourth of July weekend,” said Mrs. Ginsberg. “He came here from London, on the way to California.”

If I had a Green Automobile I’d go find my old companion in his house on the Western Ocean.

 “He arrived about 9 P. M., for 6 o’clock dinner. He had a bad cough because he smokes too much. And I scolded him.

“The first thing he said was, ‘That’s new,’ pointing to the carpet. ‘For what that cost I could have fed my friends. For months.’ It’s always, ‘I could have fed my friends.’ “I said, Allen, you like to live with wall-to-wall beds. Do I come over and say live with wall-to-wall carpet?

“Then we ate, and I left him and his father talking until very late.”

… talked continuously … down the stoops . . oil . . . out of the moon, yecketayakking … memories wad anecdotes.

 “After his father finally came to bed,” Mrs. Ginsberg continued, “Allen stayed up, and all night the refrigerator opened and closed, opened and closed.”

I say you, childless, lonely old grubber … poking among the meats . . . asking questions .. who killed the pork chops?

“My husband and I got up early, (Allen was asleep by now) had breakfast, tiptoed around, then stopped tiptoeing, and at noon I started the automatic washer. His room is right next to it.”

My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where in placed them.

“Allen got up, made his own breakfast, (he’s a very good cook, likes exotic food, but will eat anything), smoked, argued with his father, and then we all went to a barbecue.”

Who ravished into nowhere Zen New Jersey. . . .

“Among the guests was an East Side High School student, who works for the school paper. He’s still recovering, I imagine, from ‘the shock of finding and actually talking to Allen Ginsberg in a Paterson backyard. Allen put him at ease.

 “This is his great gift, putting people at ease by talking. Last year he was invited to a bar mitzvah for one of our nephews. It was at a very posh place in Newark.

“Of course at a bar mitzvah every one, including the men, dresses to the teeth. Allen appeared wearing torn sneakers, dark green corduroy pants, a pinkish-red shirt and, as a gesture to the occasion, a skinny string tie.

“He wasn’t in the place 15 minutes before he had everybody listening to him. All these people who had heard about him, but who seldom see him. All these relatives.”

America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max when he came over from Russia.

“He’s always bringing or sending me things,” Mrs. Ginsberg said. “Of course, some of them, I don’t think, fit into what Allen calls this middle-class luxury we are wallowing in.”

She approached a large Provincial breakfront, and withdrew a clay hut.

“He sent me this from Mexico. By the way, when he saw this breakfront, of course it started with, ‘I could have fed my friends’, and then he said, ‘If you had to buy something, why didn’t you get an old piece. This wood, it’s too new. It’s been made by a machine, it wasn’t made by a human being.’

“I know Allen, I said, but I don’t like old things. I’m very happy with this machine-made, in-human, perfectly gorgeous breakfront.

“He’ll be after this on his next visit,” she said, replacing the Mexican hut behind doors. “He never forgets anything. And if he misses something he sent me, he’ll go rooting around and cart it off to his place in the Village.”

By this time Louis Ginsberg, who had insisted on sitting on the front porch in the dark, to let his wife shine forth for a change, re-appeared and picked up the narrative.

Gentle Louis, with his glasses and school teacher ways. . . .

“When Allen came home from his long trip to India, I said come on, Allen,- I’ll buy you a new suit. ‘I could feed my friends,’ he said. Shoes, Allen, at least a pair of shoes. Sandals we don’t need in the winter in this country.

“Ah, my two boys, are they poets by nature or nurture?” said Mr. Ginsberg, a man given to musing aloud, who wields a mean pun.

His other son is Eugene, a lawyer, and also a poet who writes under the name of Eugene Brooks, his middle name. He lives on Long Island with his wife and five children.

“Allen often stays at his brother’s,” said Mr. Ginsberg, “and Gene, who is 6 years older, is a little amused, a little in awe of him.

“One weekend Allen arrived with Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and a couple of other beatniks.

“They came with packs on their backs. We don’t have beds? They have to bring their own?”

Some of the superficial differences between father and son began to out.

“We sleep at night. They sleep in the day. They all sit on the floor, and it’s a mutual admiration society. First one jumps up, reads a line, (it doesn’t rhyme), and they all say this is the greatest thing was ever written. Then they all slump down again into another coma.”

Salutations and low bows . . . each of us is poets.

“Art without order. What is it?” Mr. Ginsberg began musing again. “The poet releases splendor in Man, Browning tells us. The basic difference between Allen and me? I don’t think you can write if you are worrying about where your next meal is coming from.”

“They argue about politics, about shoes, about philosophy, about neckties. But above all, they argue about poetry,” Mrs. Ginsberg said.

“There are many singing birds in the forest,” said his father, himself the author of two volumes of poems whose work is included also in a shelf of anthologies.

“I sing in rhyme, because when you throw away rhyme, you throw away added enchantment. But Allen has to be free. To him, rhyme is a manacle. But freedom can enchain you.

“By the way, did you see the cartoon about him? Two men were at a cocktail party, and one said, ‘When Allen Ginsberg has a mortgage and a family, I’ll listen to him.’

The father has written of both his sons in a poem called “Where Am I?”

“This is a favorite with audiences when I give poetry readings,” said Mr. Ginsberg. “Maybe it explains my two boys and.me.”

“We used to play a game, my sons and I.

We’d lurk behind the screens and doors and hallways . . .

Years have gone by,

My two sons and I play hide and seek of a different kind,

Our secret selves behind our reticences

We still keep trying to find.”

Louis and Edith Ginsberg talked about him for 3 hours. And it was of Allen their son they spoke mostly.

“He comes home to be fed.”