Allen Ginsberg's Toilet Paper (Book Review)

Allen Ginsberg’s Toilet Paper

I’ve read a lot of poets in my life, and it never fails me, when I read Allen Ginsberg, especially his new book out, “Collected Poems,” 1947-1997, to think how this guy can write the way he did, did he have no shame. His new book is really 1200-pages of toilet paper. You can see in his book, the last 100-pages or so, he never liked getting old; he talks a lot about his failure to function as a man, or even as a human. Here is a writer, poet, who created some forms of poetry not so bad, just he did not put anything good in the lines he wrote. He had an over laborers lustful dominated mind. He gave no wisdom, nor insight, descriptive he was, and yes, he did explain well, if that is poetry in a nutshell, he did fine, but it is only a part of poetry; in the book, and as he said, he talked about himself quite a lot, perhaps the man he knew the best, and that was about all he knew. And so what can one learn from his 1200-pages? About him mostly, how he functions, dislikes this and that, not sure if he liked anything, or anybody but a few of his so called 1950s beat friends. They are all dead now, or most of them are, like him, and I suppose they are writing their morbid memos some place down yonder. Most of the book is toilet talk, with thousand-dollar flushes, pages upon pages of it. People like this, or poets like him, are curious for the onlookers, we are stunned by his behavior, a man with no morals, and values contrary to most of societies. He tells us what we already know, but adds a stunning sting to it, he knows he is doing it, and that it could infect young readers, but he does not care, matter-of-fact, he wants to go to bed with the young readers, as long as they are over ten. He looks at himself as a lone sheep, too bad he could not see in the mirror—clearer, he was a creep. To be frank, I am glad I never met the guy, even though I have read much of his garbage, he would be I think, infectious. A big mouth, with nothing to say, but enough guts to say it, and enough egos to believe he had something good to say, and perhaps we all simply liked the show he put on for us, and thus we got our monies worth, at his expense; for I doubt he did anything without the media close behind. The best I can say is, he had a lot to say.