• Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem for Bernie Sanders back in 1986, and it’s the kind of Ginsberg I like, the Ginsberg that you find in poems like “A Supermarket in California.” I love the turn in the middle of the poem, when the goofy tone gives way to sincerity:
Aren’t the snowclouds blocking the airfield Social Democratic Appeasement?
Isn’t the socialist sky owned by the socialist sun?
Earth itself socialist, forests, rivers, lakes, furry mountains, socialist salt in oceans?
Isn’t this poem socialist? It doesn’t belong to me anymore.
• Incidentally, if you haven’t cried enough over the course of the last few days and you still have some tears stuck to the backs of your eyes, clinging like the last bits of peanut butter in a jar, then go ahead and watch Old Ginsberg sing “Father Death Blues”. The part where he sings, “Pain is gone / tears take the rest” punches me right in my melancholy parts. Hope those saintly motorcyclists are still treating you well, Ginsberg.
• Speaking of mum and dad and fucking, Philip Larkin will be honored with his own stone in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. He’s got good company in William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and D.H. Lawrence, who have been honored there as well. Larkin is one of those poets who is huge in England but not so huge here. He’s an adorable turtle of a man who once described the act of sex thusly: “like asking someone else to blow your nose for you.” He also wrote maybe the last poem anyone needs to write about death, “Aubade.” Read that one when you find yourself without people or drink.
• After you read that poem you should shop off your steely-eyed realism at Edge of the Circle Books. A customer loyal to the cause is trying to get people to shop at the store between 5 and 9 p.m. on Monday. The idea is to make it rain $$$ all ovah in order to ease the store’s move to another location. If you didn’t hear, Capitol Hill’s store for all things occult got the boot last week. Their landlords said they had to be out by August 1. Incidentally, the mondo marketplace of twee, Etsy, has begun a little witch hunt of their own, taking down metaphysical objects like spells, wands, and crystals. Witches are pissed because they’re not going after Christians and Jews for selling items they claim as remedies for serious diseases.
• Looking for a mostly local and witchy place to submit your poems, short prose pieces, or art? Look no further than the Ghostwriters of Delphi.
