I walk around, tears in eyes, looking looking for a changed world. See students in goatees, so beat, but they’re smiling, they don’t know, don’t care, you’ve been reduced to a fashion. But you’re here, in the air we breathe, that smell of liberation, of just stand up and laugh and prank and listen to the soul sex spirit bursting within. Smile through the solitary puritanism that keeps everyone apart.

But where are you remembered? Where’s the drum circles? Needing something now, I buy the latest Waldman anthology in bookstore, thirtieth street train station, full of time magazine, hustler, romance novels, lottery tickets. Cashier looks at book, says someone else just bought it too. Oh joy, no drum circles but at least other lost souls not knowing how to share the loss but to remember the immortal words, the words now history, set forever in twelve point times to be read as another Dead White Male poet.

I tell cashier, friendly middle aged black woman that he—points to your out-of-focus head in photo of Corso, the Orlovskys, Kerouac—is dead. “Who is it?” “Allen Ginsburg.” “Oh, that’s him, hmm?” I say, I hope, that there’ll be a lot of people buying these books now, but know yet another illustrated history of Vietnam will be their best seller.

Nightime now. I can’t help it, I look to the sky to see if there’s a new star in the firmament. But overcast, smoggy, orange-skied Germantown doesn’t open to the cliché.

I miss you. You taught so much. How to combine poetry and liberation and politics and the search for wondrous lovely spirit. Since I first saw you speak—1988 Rutgers, Radical Student Conference—I’ve become activist nonviolence publisher, Quaker seeker. You spoke to me, told me I could spin my own life of joy if only I could be open and humble, ready to laugh, but also ready to take lightening bolts upon my head for standing up in row-after-row movie theater America, watch us perform, give us six bucks America.

In new book you say prescription for this America is:

more art, meditation, lifestyles of relative penury,
avoidance of conspicuous consumption that’s
burning down the planet.

To that I say merely, ‘a‑okay,” let’s get back to work. I love you Allen. Peace be with you.

Recovered via Archive.org cache.

This is a style of photography I got into a few years ago. It’s appeal is simple: it takes little technical expertise and the process itself is limited in time. Everything boils down to basic form: a successful photo depends on setting up a good shot and then bringing it’s potential out in the burnishing.

HOW IT’S DONE:

Anyone who used Polaroids as a kid will remember the wait. When the film comes out of the camera, it’s still black. Within a few minutes a ghost of the photo begins to appear, a image which is fleshed out in about ten minutes time. During this time, the photo is developing inside of it’s plastic casing. If you press hard on the plastic before the photo comes out, all sorts of effects can be achieved. Depending on the pressure and temperature, you can get colors to bend, scratches to streak across the photo, etc. If done well, the burnishing can take on the effect of brush strokes and create an impressionististic photograph.

This is not a burnished Polaroid of course. I took this with more traditional photographic equipment in the summer of 1991. I was on British Columbia’s Gabriola Island for the annual meeting of my employer, New Society Publishers, a meeting place which allowed for wonderful outdoor distractions. One was sea kyacking through the passes around the island.

What we didn’t know was that one particular channel served as the take-off strip for the island’s seaplanes. I was safely onboard a boat at the end of the pass when I saw the plane start out of the docks you see in the distance. Two workmates were leisurely paddling their way toward us when they heard the sound behind them. As Barbara relates, she knew if that plane didn’t get airborne in time she’d be goners. Luckily it made it and so did they…
 Last updated January 28, 1997

Copied from Archive.org’s cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20030118215701/http://www.nonviolence.org:80/personal/martink/artshots.htm