Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan saved poetry for me and enriched my life!

Posted on by Opher

At Primary school on Wednesday afternoon we had this woman who would come in to take us for poetry followed by PE.

Her idea of poetry was to set a poem for us to learn rote for the following week. She used to like Tennyson and Wordsworth, I remember.

The lesson would involve her selecting victims. They were called on to stand up in turn and recite the verse from memory. You sat there anxiously waiting to see if you were going to be called on. When you recited your verse you were expected to be word-perfect. If you stumbled you received a glare. If you got too many words wrong or couldn’t remember the verse you were made to stay in while the others went out to do PE.

I loved PE. I spent many an afternoon with a poetry book propped in front of me peering out the window at the rest of the class outside enjoying themselves. Each week there was a panic as I tried to memorise some long Victorian ode. Fortunately I had a good memory and managed to get away with it a lot of the time. It didn’t endear me to the verse though.

My early experience was one of anxiety and frustrated resentment. I grew to hate poetry. There wasn’t any appreciation or love of the subject. Poetry was dead.

That was reinforced in secondary school. Here the poetry wasn’t appreciated for its beauty or content but analysed and pulled to pieces for examinations. It was a process that killed poetry. I grew to regard poetry as being written by dead people and the ultimate in boredom.

Then, when I was fourteen, Dylan appeared on the scene. I didn’t associate the words with poetry – they were lyrics – but they spoke to me. For the first time I was appreciating poetry without even realising.

Then there was Ginsberg – when I was sixteen I read ‘Howl’ and for the first time I realised that poetry could actually speak to somebody like me. It was speaking my language; it was alive; it screamed about the society we lived in with all its boring nonsense and shouted about a new type of quest with meaning – a way of living that made sense – that engaged with the big questions in life. I wanted those blasts of life – the jazz – the clubs – the madness – the wildness – the search for answers – the craziness – the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It stood for everything I was for and starkly spelt it out. That was how I wanted to live. I wanted to live! I wanted truth! I wanted to crawl down those streets at dawn with flaming eyes having lived!

Through Ginsberg I rediscovered poetry and unlocked all the gems of Frost, Owen, Mitchell, Kerouac, Keats, Yeats, Blake and the rest.

They’d opened my eyes and enriched my life. Thanks Bob and Allen.

28 thoughts on “Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan saved poetry for me and enriched my life!”

  4. Two of my favorite writers. Thanks for sharing your story. I think too many people have similar experiences in school that put them off poetry and literature.

    1. I think so. Poor education killed a lot of appreciation and creativity. I think teaching has become very much better though. Good to hear from you John.

      1. I hope you are right about it improving. Teachers when I was growing up in the 80s were a mixed bag for sure. But I loved reading from an early age and did have a few excellent teachers who fostered a love of learning and introduced me to a lot of literature I wouldn’t have otherwise known about. I think if Allen were taught in school s more kids would be more open to poetry, in my opinion. Thanks for the post, you made me think. I like that 😉

      2. The English Department in the last fifteen years have been brilliant. They bring literature and poetry to life. The kids love it. Just how it should be.
        I reckon teaching is only as good as the teachers you are lucky enough to get and the politics that shackles them.
        Dylan woke me up and Ginsberg wrote stuff that made me realise it wasn’t for the academics – it was for young lunatics like me.

  5. Don’t thank Bob and Allen – thank William S. Burroughs as he taught them everything they both ever learned.

    1. But I did not get into Burroughs until a couple of years later. He wasn’t responsible for turning me on. That started with Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and then Roy Harper.

  6. I was lucky at school, we were encouraged to write creatively and some of our primary school teachers made up stories for us. I think I had a new style English teacher at secondary after a year with one who made us analyse clauses. Still dislike grammar! I hope the new education regime for English doesn’t destroy the subject but creativity is hard to test! Good old Dylan even if he doesn’t go to the award ceremony !

    1. I wasn’t so lucky. It is amazing how important a good teacher can be. Creativity is key to education. I fear that the legacy of Gove is a narrpow curriculum, strict regime and a focus on what is measurable. The important things – like creativity, skills, team work, empathy, responsibility, respect, fellowship, honesty, lateral thinking, self-esteem and responsibility are relegated. Such a shame.

      1. Yes, one of my students, form is now doing teacher training and says it is all about how to get children to pass exams and nothing about child development. I remember the book, John Holt. ‘How children learn and the other How children Fail. Helped me understand a lot. Need one on How governments fail.

      2. Those stupid, narrow PISA international tables have a lot to answer for. The Tories are using them as a stick to beat education into submission. So narrow; so boring; so stupid.
        In the process they will not only destroy all that is good in education but cause all the good teachers to leave in despair. In the 5 years I’ve been left 70% of the teachers have left at my old school – including some spectacular teachers.

  7. Remember a book from the 60s called ‘Teaching As A Subversive Activity’ … looking back, my teaching failures always came when I played it safe. Ginsberg and Dylan never did!

    1. I don’t remember seeing that one. Is it still available? I might google it. I had a bit of a ‘fuck it’ policy to teaching. Somehow I’d got it into my head that I wasn’t staying long. I was passing through. So my job was to relate to the kids and undermine the conservative hierarchy. I ended up staying 36 years.

      1. Just noticed it on Amazon. Thought it might be a bit dated but at least one review says it’s still relevant. Must look out my old copy …

      3. It really should work both ways. No f-words, as per your co-complaint / co-agreement along with the all too fragile liberal last week. Apparently it’s deeply offensive and grossly undermines your point of view and people will automatically be prone to absolutely ignore everything within any such commentary containing such deeply offensive language.
        Either that or just man up about it.

      4. I quite agree Andrew. You wouldn’t catch me using the F word and undermining my argument – unless I was in a particularly bad mood.

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