Reconciliation to the city is only a prelude to our transformation. The conflict of cultures grows more acute as we develop new interests and language itself becomes the symbol and index of the conflict. At home we spoke Yiddish; in the street a form of American with a marked foreign accent, a singsong rhythm . . . ; in school we read and recited an English so pure, so lofty, so poetic that it seemed to bear no relation to the language of the street.

It was for her sake that he was occasionally invited to the house, for there was little love lost between Father and Uncle Peter. The latter, a devout Catholic, had objected to his sister’s marrying "a freethinker, a Mason, a downright infidel." This my father never forgave him, especially since he did not like Uncle Peter and called him a "superstitious relic of the Middle Ages."

Sol Funaroff was like a drowning man who lifts a guiding light for others while he sinks. In the midst of his own desperate struggle, he turned from the shore, remembering others. The promise of his life was drowned by the Great Depression of the 1930's. Yet despite his struggle for a bare existence he strained his meager physical and financial resources to bring the poets whose themes concerned labor, to the labor audience.

I knew Sol Funaroff, but I didn't know that he was physically ill. I remember a committee meeting where we worked through a long Saturday afternoon, planning a pamphlet on Loyalist Spain. I remember looking at his face as I sat beside him. Because I had read his poems I was particularly aware of him. I remember his physical image in a dark bare room. His image in poetry is the created opposite of that dark bare room.

There is no self-pity in Sol Funaroff's work. Let us not pity him; no poet is to be pitied. Strong emotions, not pity, are engendered by the story of his life.

In 1861, during a similar time of bitter and bloody conflict, a great American poet named Abraham Lincoln said, "This is a struggle to give everyone a fair and equal start in the race of life."

About 50 years later, in the America of 1915, a child whose father had died in Palestine and whose immigrant mother was away working in a nearby sweatshop was carried gasping and near to death from a burning tenement in New York's East Side slums. Neighbors pumped the smoke and fumes from the child's lungs and wrapped him in a blanket while they waited for their tenement home to burn down.

The modernist challenge to radical poetry was posed most directly by the verse and literary criticism of T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), to judge by the number of direct responses to Eliot's poetry and the centrality of his name in literary debates on the Left.|1|  Despite the elitism and arcane quality of many of Eliot's literary allusions, young poets found it unfeasible to ignore the profoundly novel approach to poetic form and sensibility that his verse represented.

Ginsberg, Allen (3 June 1926-6 Apr. 1997), poet, was born in Newark, New Jersey, the younger son of Louis Ginsberg, a high school English teacher and poet, and Naomi Levy Ginsberg. Ginsberg grew up with his older brother Eugene in a household shadowed by his mother's mental illness; she suffered from recurrent epileptic seizures and paranoia. An active member of the Communist Party-USA, Naomi Ginsberg took her sons to meetings of the radical left dedicated to the cause of international Communism during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926 and grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. His father, Louis, was a high school teacher and an accomplished lyric poet. His mother, Naomi, a Communist during the Depression, suffered from psychotic delusions. At times, she insisted there were wires in her head with which people could hear her thinking. Coming of age in a household of modest means, Ginsberg's early life seemed to steer him away from the conventional.

Six poets at the Six Gallery. Kenneth Rexroth, M.C. Remarkable collection of angels all gathered at once in the same spot. Wine, music, dancing girls, serious poetry, free satori. Small collection for wine and postcards. Charming event.

--- from postcard printed by Allen Ginsberg to publicize 1955 Six Gallery Reading

The Evening as told by Michael Schumacher in Dharma Lion

Photographs and other images of Allen Ginsberg distributed in various media have spread and shaped his reputation as much as--perhaps more than--his poetry has.  Like his literary forebear Walt Whitman, he has represented himself as not only a writer, but also, in a variety of poses and costumes, as a photographic image.  Ever since the obscenity trial for Howl made him a public figure, he has used the notoriety that proceeds from his poetry to make public statements on political and social issues.  By the mid-sixties, Allen Ginsberg, as a public figure, . . .