I think it should be granted from the start that [Allen Ginsberg] is not much of a poet in most usual literary senses, though he may well be an admirable and important practitioner of poetic saintliness. Carefully going again through his three volumes of published poetry covering the 50s (Howl and Other Poems, Kaddish and Other Poems 1958–60, and Reality Sandwiches 1953–60), I find three pieces that could well bear rereading as poems: "Howl," "America," and "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!" Other passages here and there give a curious surreal twist or are informative of matters most Ginsbergian, such as the bitter-bathetic physical description of his mad mother in the elegy-prayer "Kaddish," or maybe of some other non-literary interest. But most of it is poorly realized, pastiches of awkward language which many a poet could rewrite into more consistent style and apprehendable experience. The stuff of it seems more often...