Remembering Allen

Harvey Silverglate, a partner at Silverglate & Good, is a well- known trial lawyer and a noted civil libertarian. A long-time friend and confidant of Ginsberg, Silverglate over the years helped Ginsberg fight efforts to censor the poet's work.

Joe Perry has been lead guitarist and co-songwriter for Aerosmith since 1970. He and his wife, the poet and photographer Billie Perry, were longtime friends of Allen Ginsberg. Some of Billie's work is currently on display in the show "Being There," at the Photographic Resource Center.

Dave Herlihy, a musician and lawyer, was lead singer and songwriter for O Positive and continues to perform. He also represents artists as an attorney and is a vehement anti-censorship activist.

Robert Creeley, the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at the University at Buffalo, and the author of more than 50 works of poetry and prose. Like Ginsberg, he has helped recast the face of contemporary literature.

Gary Snyder, a poet and a Zen master, was the inspiration for one of Jack Kerouac's best books, The Dharma Bums (1958). It's been said that if Ginsberg was the Beat movement's Whitman, then Snyder is its Thoreau.

Lydia Lunch helped launch the "no wave" noise rock scene in New York City, circa 1977, as frontwoman for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. She has since gone on to participate in a variety of music, spoken-word, film, and performance pieces, collaborating with the likes of Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, Hurbert Selby Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn), musician/producer Clint Ruin (aka Jim Thirlwell, aka "Foetus"), and Exene Cervenka of the LA punk band X.

Jim Carroll has been publishing poetry since he was a teenager. His prose volume The Basketball Diaries gained Carroll recognition from the likes of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs after portions of it were published in the poetry magazine The World (edited by poet Anne Waldman) in 1968. Later, Carroll brought his poetry to the punk-rock world with his first album, Catholic Boy (1980), and its anti-anthem "People Who Died." The Basketball Diaries was released as feature film starring Leonardo DiCaprio in 1995.

Richard Hell was a poet and bookstore clerk in New York City before playing in the seminal punk bands Television and the Heartbreakers. His band the Voidoids -- whose ripped clothing was said to influence Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols -- released Blank Generation on Sire in 1977. Hell continues to write poetry and give readings.

Anne Waldman ran the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project, in New York's East Village, during the 1960s. A Buddhist, she studied with the same guru as Ginsberg did, and worked with the poet to create the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, at the Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colorado.

Ed Sanders was a founder of the legendary folk/rock group the Fugs. In his satiric memoir, Tales of Beatnik Glory, he tells how reading Howl in 1957 changed his life, prompting him to go to New York City to become a poet. In the 1960s, he ran the Peace Eye Bookstore, in the East Village, and edited Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. He lives in Woodstock, New York, where he publishes the Woodstock Journal.

Elsa Dorfman was a long-time friend of Ginsberg. The internationally known Cambridge photographer has made some of the most enduring images of the poet. Just before his death, Ginsberg made what turned out to be the last of countless visits to Dorfman's home.