Re: It's been a while!
WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Mon, 11 May 1998 10:16:10 -0600 (MDT)
A quick scan of Ginsberg's mid-fifties journals shows no mention of mr.
salinger, but it would be a pretty certain piece of speculation to guess
mr. ginsberg read catcher and knew of salinger and visa versa.
I doubt there's a fabulous piece of obscure lit history (I could almost
imagine the two writers having chinese food near columbia as Ray Ford and
Christine do in "The Inverted Forest," but not really) in the interaction
of mr. salinger and mr. ginsberg, but what I liked about john's post is
that these two writers may be more closely linked if we consider their
visions of poetry...I think Allen Ginsberg may not have written great
poetry but was still a great poet, bringing the spirits of whitman and
williams to modern poetry as powerfully as anyone in my time...and mr.
salinger makes seymour a poet for non-poetry writing reasons as well...in
otherwords, both mr. salinger and mr. ginsberg saw being a poet as
something more than writing poems, as something deeply spritual and beyond
the "biz" of writing and publishing poems...will