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385 Chapter 23 on A PorCh in boulder Part of me had never been part of the Beat Phenomenon. I had always stood a little aside from it, my back to the wall and my eye on the door. By nature I was an outsider (even among outsiders), a marginal man who went off by himself to think out the meaning of things, and yet I felt an unaccountable sense of kinship with the men and women with whom I had spent the last days. It demanded no expression, it required no recognition. Simply, they were my crowd. I knew the things they knew. We had been shaped by the same weather in the same world. We had the same certainties and the same hopes. And suddenly I recalled having felt that same sense of fraternity years before, after my first awareness of what seemed like a new vision, and saying to Kerouac, “Something may come of this, after all. ” —JOHN CLeLLON HOLMeS, “envoi in Boulder”1 The mornings were quiet on the wide porch of the old wooden house above Boulder. There was a dining room inside where anyone who got up early could have breakfast. After a cup of coffee a casual crowd slowly gathered to sit on the porch. In later years there would be other gatherings in other cities of some of the same people who sat talking on the Boulder porch, but this would be the last time so many of us would come together at the same moment. It was the summer of 1982, and Allen Ginsberg had gathered everyone who could come to Colorado to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of On the Road. It was a celebration of Kerouac and his major book, but it was also a celebration of the Beats and of everything they had achieved. So many of us had come, and so much was happening that there was no one place large enough for us to stay. Ginsberg had scattered us through this small city in apartments and in spaces of the Naropa Institute where the celebration was centered. The largest group of us were on a Porch in boUlder 386 together in this old building, the Columbine Lodge, that had been part of the city’s Chatauqua Center, a near-forgotten cultural movement of nearly a century before. It was in Boulder that Ginsberg and Anne Waldman had established their center for Beat studies at Naropa, an institution they named the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Ginsberg sometimes hurried over to greet new arrivals. Carolyn Cassady , new to many of the people here, found herself the center of respectful groups who pulled up chairs to sit close to her. Ginsberg had arranged for filmmaker and friend Robert Frank to document whatever he chose of the gatherings on the porch, since it was obvious that it wasn’t an occasion that would be repeated. During the ten days of the conference, the Columbine Lodge was home to Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Herbert Huncke, Diane di Prima, Carl Solomon, Robert Frank, Michael McClure, David Amram, Ted Berrigan, Jack Micheline, Ray Bremser, Carolyn Cassady, Abbie Hoffman, the Charters, and John Tytell and his wife, Mellon. Other writers like Anne Waldman, William Burroughs, and Ken Kesey had been given rooms closer to the conference center. Occasionally one of the participants, his appearance over, would leave for the airport a day or two early. Others showed up on the porch steps in the darkness after a late-night flight had brought them to Boulder for the next morning’s panel. Ginsberg had put Holmes and the Charters together in Columbine Lodge. Ann and I were on the second floor and Holmes was only a few doors away on the same corridor. He’d come without Shirley, and because of the years he’d spent at his typewriter in Old Saybrook or in the classroom at Arkansas he’d never met some of the people who had been given rooms in the somewhat worn, but respectably clean house. Herbert Huncke was in a room downstairs, and he and Holmes had picked up their old friendship as if so many years hadn’t intervened since Holmes had first met him in Ginsberg’s apartment in 1949. Holmes often was busy with one of the media events, workshops, or readings that Ginsberg had scheduled, but at the any of the large gatherings he found his way through the crowds...

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