From Ai Weiwei’s extraordinary new memoir – 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows ( the title is from one of his father’s poems – “Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows/Not a trace can be found“) – memories of Allen Ginsberg:
“In late December 1984, at a poetry gathering in St Mark’s Church <https://www.2009-2019.poetryproject.org/about/history/>, a heavily bearded Allen Ginsberg, dressed in a dark suit, read his poetry on the rostrum while a crowd listened keenly below. He was talking about the trip he had just made to China – “I learned that the Great Leap Forward caused millions of people to starve, that the Anti-Rightist Campaign against bourgeois “Stinkers” sent revolutionary poets to shovel shit in Xinjiang Province a decade before the Cultural Revolution drove countless millions of readers to cold huts and starvation in the countryside Northwest“. [ – from “Reading Bai Juyi” – Part V – China Bronchitis”]
Ginsberg was a smoldering charcoal fire, warmly drawing people to him on this winter night. When he finished I went up and told him that I was the son of the revolutionary poet he had just been talking about. His eyes grew big as he listened. Gazing at me intently, he said that his warmest memory in China was the hug that my father had given him. We left the church and went to the Kiev, a Ukrainian diner nearby. When I told him I didn’t drink coffee, he ordered an egg cream for me instead.”
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, published by Penguin, should be available in all your favorite bookstores.
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