This Day in History, 1963: Mike Grenby howls about Allen Ginsberg

Poet Allen Ginsberg

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You would have never thought Vancouver Sun writer Mike Grenby would report about American beat poet Allen Ginsberg in a million years.

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Grenby was a business writer specializing in personal finance. A renowned penny pincher, he once wrote a column about saving money on his hot water bill by having all three members of his family use the same bathwater.

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Ginsberg was a radical writer who challenged society’s norms, famed for his 1950s poem Howl. It starts off “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”

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But when you’re starting out in daily journalism, you get assigned all sorts of stories. And on Aug. 2, 1963, the 22-year-old Grenby was dispatched to cover a Ginsberg poetry recital at UBC.

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It’s a 1960s classic, what the beat generation would have called “square” newspaper reporting.

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Grenby tried to interview Ginsberg a couple of days before the gig, but was rebuffed, and befuddled.

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“Bearded beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg claims he is the man who isn’t,” wrote Grenby on Aug. 1, 1963.

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“I don’t know who I am or that I am, therefore I am not somebody and cannot speak at all,” Ginsberg said.

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“My body is walking around, but I have disappeared.”

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Ginsberg said he didn’t like giving interviews to newspapers, because they always called him a beat poet. Which is true, but even an Allen Ginsberg Facebook page run by his estate calls him a beat poet.

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On Easter weekend in 1967, poet Allen Ginsberg came to Saint John, N.B. to read his controversial poem, Howl, in a church.

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In any event, on Aug. 3, The Sun carried another Grenby story on Ginsberg, headlined “Poet Who Wasn’t There Gives Real Beat Readings.”

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“The bearded poet said he wasn’t there, but the 350 people who paid $1.25 to come and see him Friday night certainly were,” Grenby wrote.

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The event was sold out — 350 “students, bearded poets, girls in shorts and adults in evening dress” were crammed into a classroom with seating for 250.

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But Grenby wasn’t impressed, describing Ginsberg’s performance as a “disjointed harangue laced with obscenity.”

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Grenby recounted Ginsberg had said “his body was walking around but he had disappeared.”

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But onstage, “he was sufficiently in his body to expound on beautiful boys, moving trees and hairy souls.”

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Ginsberg gave a much longer interview to Ruth Pinkus of The Province.

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“Talking to Ginsberg is like talking to a raw nerve,” she wrote, “a calm, smiling, bearded, wet-ringleted raw nerve” who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day.

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“I tried everything going, but nicotine is the only thing that I ever got addicted to,” said Ginsberg.

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Pinkus wrote that Ginsberg “had roamed the world searching for love, and now he had found out how to look for it.” She said, “He wants to get married, though he had not met the right woman yet.”

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In fact, Ginsberg was gay and in a long-term relationship with fellow poet Peter Orlovsky.

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Ginsberg said he had originally given away poetry for free, and wasn’t happy when “the beatniks” came in and started charging money to read their poetry in nightclubs.