September, 1996
The distinguished professor of English was stepping out of a cab near his Lower East Side apartment just off Manhattan's Tompkins Square Park one hot August midnight in 1988, when a young man, spotting the professor by his bald pate and beard, came over and introduced himself. "I think you'd better get out of the way," Eric Drooker said to Allen Ginsberg. "The cops are getting jumpy."
On a nearby lamppost was one of the many intense posters by artist Drooker that, as it happens, poet Ginsberg had been admiring and collecting for months. This one showed the police coming down on Tompkins Square in helicopters.
Actually at that moment there were police everywhere in the immediate vicinity of that disputed turf--overhead, on foot, atop horses. "An apocalyptic scene," says Drooker today. "A biblical scene."
"The cops on horseback chased me all the way to Second Avenue," says Allen Ginsberg, whose epic Howl and 35 other crucial Ginsberg poems of the past 40 years are now reissued in a beautiful volume illustrated by Drooker, the Lower East Side artist 32 years his junior whom he first encountered that night of the police riot in Tompkins Square.
The book is called Illuminated Poems (Four Walls Eight Windows), and those with memories long enough will see in Drooker's illuminations of Ginsberg's words something of the sharpness, graphic energy, and proletarian passion of etched or woodcut wordless 1930s picture-novels by Lynd Ward, Frans Masereel, and certain others.
"Lynd Ward entered my brain early," said Ginsberg recently. "I remember a poster by him I first saw in my Aunt Rose's library in Newark in the Thirties." One of the inspirations for the Moloch sections of the Fifties bombshell that was Howl ("Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! screaming under the stairways! ... Old men weeping in parks! ...") was, its author says, "the image of an artist dwarfed by the canyons of a Wall Street megalopolis" in Lynd Ward's blockprint novel God's Man.
When God's Man was first published--the week of the 1929 stock market crash--Allen Ginsberg was 3 years old.