Ginsberg is something of a nemesis for me. not for atrocities so much as the way the AG character so completely suffuses a certain place in poetry. ook, am I able to say this, or will I drivel? well, press on. his celebrity is such a driving force, that it overwhelms much that he did. legendary, ubitquitous AG, hanging with Kerouac, with Dylan, with Waldman, with Olson, with Creeley, with Lennon. how seriously the world takes its pop stars. so much of his poetry wants to be poetry. it wants to be crazy Blake and wide spreading Whitman. and his poetry does reach those places. more often, tho, he worries it. invents it. tells it. and his iconic status puts a cheesy, flimsy force to his flabbiest poems. the original AG often gets lost in the effects of all his masters and instigators. his persona becomes the point. he'll probably always be read as beatnik hipster on the road, until such point those concepts ebb. I think we ought to let go of those romantic notions. just as we should rid ourselves of the notion of Dickinson as bluestocking gardener (a Thurber cartoon has a character say of a woman beatifically working a garden: "She has the true Emily Dickinson spirit, except sometimes she gets fed up").