Kenneth Edward Hart

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Archives for December 18, 2011

Ginsberg’s Kiss

December 18, 2011 by admin

The auditorium at the state college was packed. I sat with my girlfriend in a front row seat off to the left of center stage. It was 1973, and I was excited. My poems were flowing with what I was sure was a never ending regularity. I was in love. I had just given my first public reading. What more natural thing to do than to go and hear Louis and Allen Ginsberg read?

We sat politely through the father’s reading.  I’m sure that I don’t remember a line but I applauded. In retrospect, the old man must have felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment while the audience waited for him to finish do that they could hear his son.  Louis had written regular verse for the now defunct Paterson Morning and Paterson Evening News.  I remember thinking what kind of a poet wrote for a 3rd rate newspaper?

The Dean of Humanities at Montclair State introduced Allen.  The audience stood for the dark haired, paunchy, bespectacled man who said when he reached the microphone, “I wanted to come here to read because my brother attended this college for four years and never got laid.” We laughed hard as the flustered Dean tried to be gracious. We forever bookmarked Montclair State as a place where no one had sex.

His voice was an unearthly thing that came from inside of a different place from what we all have. My girlfriend took hold of my arm. He sang and roared and uncovered the beauty of words with elongated lines that were like enormous breaths of consciousness.  He read Howl. He read from the collection of poems that was to become The Fall of America. He sang the songs of William Blake and accompanied himself on a strange looking squeeze box that he said was like the one that Blake had played. He stretched the possibilities of who we could be. He taught us that the war in the Middle East was a battle of the gods. He rode language through the air as if he were an enormous gliding bird floating on the dizzying currents of wind that soared through our canyon. When he was finished, we cheered.

There was a small crowd of people around him on the stage. He was packing his notebooks into a knapsack, slumped forward in a chair with a pile of poems scattered in front of him, a dark shag of hair covering his face.  I stood in the center of the ring and spoke in my clearest voice, “I love the way that the language dances for you.” He parted his hair with his hands and looked at my lean body and smooth face. I felt the power of his eyes on me. Then he got up and folded me into his arms and kissed my mouth. He whispered into my ear, “You are a beautiful boy.”

My mind and body went into shock. I wanted to squeeze my girlfriend’s breasts and feel the rhythm of her hips beneath me.  But a famous poet thought that I was beautiful and he must know.  All I could say was “thank you.” I waited for him to say something else and I suppose he waited for me or dismissed me as one more well-wisher. I’ll never know.

His words were in my mind. The feeling of his inspiration in my heart, but also the feel of his lips were on my face.  She teased me for the rest of the night but knew that I needed to expiate my pettiness with sex before I slept.

Filed Under: Essays

Good-bye

December 18, 2011 by admin

The word Good-bye is a hyphenation of God be with you. Tonight it feels as if it is being said to me as I am shown down the way from heaven. When lovers part, the farewell can be so strange and poignant! For those brief moments, all of the circumstances that have pulled them apart dissolve and they see each other as they once did, with the new eyes of love: so fresh, so rewarding, so filled with anticipation. I have seen that it is sometimes like that with people who are about to die, the famous last rally. Often the survivors will report that the recently deceased appeared to be getting well and improving, just at the onset of demise.

The tender good-bye and its seduction pull at the corners of lovers’ hearts and steal into the crevices of their minds. Sometimes it causes them to believe that the good-bye was a mistake. How can they be choosing to part from someone who feels so incredibly good? What is to become of all the intimate knowledge that they have gathered and stored with delicate care? How can a person who is part of daily life cease to play that role when the kiss is still sweet and the time still feels so precious?

They walk together and feel the timing of their steps and remember the way that they marveled when they first discovered themselves in unison. There is a brief interaction; perhaps the removing or putting on of a coat, perhaps it is passage through a door and they are made aware again of how well they have come to know each other. The body almost swells with the memory of such knowledge. They are unable to speak because it is the language of words that has probably deserted them by now.

Relationships die a little at a time. Just as some senses leave early in the presence of death while others stay on longer: the unspoken closeness, the special taste of a lover’s body lingers for a time. It is bittersweet. It ages youth but sometimes it can be savored.

Why is it not before then that we realize why we were in love? What part of the process is it that brings these feelings to us as they depart? I am sure that there is some scientifically chemical explanation. Some enzyme that is released in the brain and flows to some sensor and causes the production of a synapse connection that bridges to experience, but I am not intrigued by the compounded explanation that tries so hard to deprive the being of magic, to erase the mystery and define us as no more than a series of glandular releases.

Tonight I miss her. And I will miss her tomorrow too. I will wish that what is were not so, and friends will tell me that they understand. They will enable me to keep her close through that recounting of my feelings over and over in a resuscitation that seems to fight off distance and silence. The illusion that if something is still treasured it will live.

There are those that use anger as their antidote to these feelings. Anger can burn out the tenderness of a good-bye. It can act as a repellent that protects the heart from all of these feelings and with the strength of its ferocity drive people more quickly apart. It is placed on the outside of the body like armor. It squeezes the life out of the good-bye feelings quickly. It changes the time into something else and, with the force of its resentment, kills love.

While it seems obvious that we can learn from this time, less apparent is the lesson, the purpose for the pain. T. S. Eliot wrote, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” I wish to learn the meaning, and so I see my way through this good-bye, this time, feelingly. I stare up at the dark night and see the clusters of stars, beautiful and distant, and for a few seconds I know why it is that I loved her, but that knowledge is fleeting and I have not put it into words and it passes through me. I hope that somewhere it has left, in its residue, a lesson.

 

Filed Under: Essays

Welcome

December 18, 2011 by Kenneth Hart

     Thanks for stopping by. This website was created to help people access a group of novels, a set of songs, a collection of short stories, a variety of poems and several essays. It is my hope that you will enjoy your time here and want to come back. There will always be new pieces added and your comments are welcome.
     I never knew that there were so many people in the world named Ken Hart. I’m the one who was born in Newark, New Jersey and attended Elliot Street School and Our Lady of Good Counsel gramnmar school. I graduated from Glen Ridge High School. I earned a BA in English at William Paterson University where I also earned a Masters Degree in Educational Leadership. My doctorate comes from Drew University. My adult life has been devoted to education and I have taught in a number of New Jersey high schools and colleges both public and private. I also spent 15 years as a school administrator.
     During all of this time, I have been writing and making music and now that I have retired from that career, I am able to persue writing on a full time basis. I hope that my stories can make you laugh and can make you cry. I hope that they make you think. Above all it is my fondest wish that they bring you enjoyment.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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