DETROIT’S ALTERNATIVE PUBLICATION OF NEWS AND THE ARTS
VOL. 2,NO.4
NOV. 26-DEC. 10, 1981
The Poet
Hasa New Beat Allen Ginsberg returns to read and sing at the Detroit Institute of Arts. by Chris Tysh : n the brisk evening, a steady stream of people converges towards the John R entrance of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The lobby of the auditorium is lit up with anticipation and excitement. That unmistakable aura which precedes. great premieres lingers about, sweeping people’s faces as they exchange greetings, happy to be here. Everyone has come, it seems. Detroit’s intelligentsia, usually so hard to move, already adorns a few rows, patiently waiting. The crowd, this elusive entity, betrays
its composition graciously. The strata bear the usual labels: teachers, students, radicals, punkoids. They walk in, the way they’ve always walked in, to any public place. Poets and musicians are easily spotted by that extra eye or ear they wear on their lapels. Undoubtedly, quite a number of others, lucky ones, get by without being pigeonholed. — What is going on? Is this a French movie? A nuclear teachin? A thousand people are here to see Allen Ginsberg. It is a -demonstration of loyalty and_ respect to America’s best known public poet. Allen Ginsberg, that 55-year-old beatnik, Buddhist
Jew, boy lover, America’s dark mouth, its troublesome conscience.
In the few minutes before Allen’s appearance | feel an electric thrill connect each row to ~ the next, all the way to the balcony. We are together. The hall settles down and I almost expect the houselights to go out. Butof course we must see. A small low table with teapot, a chair. Allen Ginsberg walks out onto the stage, dressed in dark suit, striped tie. He sits down promptly and begins playing a harmonium as a preface to his reading. This sweet-voiced traveler who likes to sit on rail-
road tracks at nuclear plants is sitting down to a Blakeian song. “And when Thy heart began ~ to beat, What dread hand? What dread feet?” The audience is already his. What happens next is a narrative voyage through These States by a poet markedly unashamed of speaking the truth, of baring his heart, his armpits, his very navel. The language seems to be a mineral block, so
“accurate and clear as to withstand the erosions of time and its servants. “America stop pushing!” the poet once said and now Continued on page 21
Stockman Lets Cat Out of Bag Remember candidate George Bush calling Reagan’s economic plans ’’Voodoo economics”? Now — Stockman, the man who spent the last year implementing those policies, has something to add... by David ananen
J
eeze, David Stockman has really done it this time,
hasn’t he? He went and told the truth about Reaganomics and made the president mad. For that, Stockman had to contritely offer his resignation and apologize to Reagan, claiming he really didn’t mean those nasty things he told
the Atlaatne. Better he should apologize to the American people for lying through his teeth for the past year about the true nature of supply-side economics. That’s not likely to happen, however. - Stockman likes his job too much to jeopardize it again. It’s interesting casting, Stockman as a whistleblower on the policies he helped sell to Congress. Of course, the
whistleblowing was unplanned. awash in “blatant inefficiency, The whiz-kid budget director poor deployment of manpower — thought he was speaking off the (and) contracting idiocy.” @ The Kemp-Roth tax-cut plan record when he let down his blowdried hair and dissected is a “Trojan horse” designed to Reaganomics by allowing that: hide tax breaks for the rich. @ Government budget cutters @ Supply-side economics is just made “snap judgments” about a trendy name for traditional what programs to slash during the - conservative trickle-down policies, search-and-destroy hysteria of last in which the rich are allowed to summer. do what they want in hopes @ The Pentagon is a “swamp” Continued on page 6 .
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