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Volume 33 Issue 2 THE SIXTIES
 What do you think of when you think of the 1960s? Maybe, the first man on the moon. Maybe Civil Rights marches. Maybe you flash on Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, or the Grateful Dead at Merry Prankster acid tests, or Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire at Monterrey. Masters of War. China Cat Sunflower. Purple Haze. Maybe something else. This issue of Pilgrimage doesn’t intend to include all the events and voices from such a complex decade, but it does offer a few snapshots.
Make peace with yourself and see what you can do to relieve the sufferings of others. That’s the main compass.
~Allen Ginsberg
From Allen Ginsberg: The Executive of the Lower East Side
by Marlene Ladle
Allen Ginsberg, under a dark brown blanket with beard and complexion to match, greeted the morning after and his interviewer horizontally from the mattressed floor of his East 10th Street tenement.
? The doorbell rang and an admirer from the midwest asked the prone poet to give a? reading in Cleveland. Then, propped elbow-high, Allen?greeted a girl from?the block who had a studio?for rent and wanted to leave word at the?neighborhood action center.
? Between reaching for his rolodex to begin his multiple phone calls, and?making his?mattress with precision, he spoke about?his plans for a new book of poetry. “There’s no problem filling a book,” he said, opening a file drawer to show me 30 notebooks full of poetry done in?his small scrawl. “The writing doesn’t bother me. I write all the time. In cafeterias. Bars. On subways. Talking into?a tape recorder while driving across Nebraska. The real pain is editing and typing. What I need is a secretary.”
photo credit: 1960s clown: Larry Keenan (www.emptymirrorbooks.com)
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