From About and Public figures
Maezumi Roshi and a few of his senior students were scheduled to teach in the Summer of 1977 at Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado. I was excited for them, partly because I knew that Allen Ginsberg was teaching there too. At that time of my life he was one of my culture heroes.
About a week before they left, as I was doing some cleaning up in my back yard, I found the remains of an old wooden crate in the tall weeds. I pulled out the one remaining piece of the box, which was clearly stamped in large letters that said “Ginsberg and Sons”. It looked like a shingle you might hang in front of a store in an old cowboy town. It felt to me like a magical omen of connectivity with Ginsberg from outside ordinary space and time. I called my friend Daishin Buksbazen, who was about to leave for Boulder, and asked him if he would take it and give it to the poet as a gift from me.
When Daishin returned after the summer he had a thank you gift for me from Ginsberg. It was a small yellow envelope with the syllable AH written on the front in black pen. Inside was a yellow piece of paper folded in half, about the size of an RSVP note for a formal event. On the inside of the paper was a handwritten poem which Ginsberg produced on the spot after he asked Daishin to tell him a little about who gave him the weathered wooden sign. Daishin must have told him that I was the drummer in a band called Mount Rushmore after I took LSD and dropped out of college, something about the Farm in Tennessee, and something about my Antioch portfolio. This is what Ginsberg then scribbled onto the card:
