Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

When Bernie Sanders Walked Out of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry Reading

When did Allen Ginsberg and Bernie Sanders first meet? What were the circumstances? Even people close to Sanders and Ginsberg do not agree on that history, explored in a recent piece in the Forward. But a photo that surfaced after the story went to press shows the poet, whose outlook reflected socialist ideas and the socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont together in Sanders’s office.

The 1983 photo, which prompts new questions about meetings between the two men, was taken by Phyllis Segura, at the time a freelance photographer on assignment for Yoga Journal. She was following Ginsberg and others with him on a tour of Vermont, reading poetry and singing. The image shows an intense-looking Sanders and a more relaxed (and more formally dressed) Ginsberg engaged in what seems like serious talk across Sanders’s desk. What has them so engaged? “I don’t recall what they were talking about,” Segura told the Forward, from her home in upstate New York. “I wish I could remember what they talked about. Another person who I think was in the room at the time was Steven Taylor, a musician who played with Allen.”

Steven X. Taylor traveled extensively with Ginsberg between 1976 and 1996, a guitarist and multifaceted musical collaborator. Reached in Brooklyn, he said he remembered the encounter, says it was a “very pleasant, cordial” discussion, but the years have eclipsed just what was said. Then, Taylor recalled a public incident between Sanders and Ginsberg that seems like it was not particularly pleasant for Sanders, as Taylor describes it. He says it may have happened on the 1983 tour, but isn’t sure, and Phyllis Segura says she’s certain it did not, “because I went where Allen went on that tour and I never experienced that.”

Image by Phyllis Segura

Taylor said that on one visit to Burlington, Sanders introduced Ginsberg at the start of a reading-performance for which Taylor was on stage with his guitar. “What happened was we gave a show in some big municipal building…and Bernie got up and introduced Allen.” Sanders, he said, sat down in the front row. “Bernie was proud to present Allen. And Allen was then in the habit, if he had a new poem, he’d try it out on people…and he had a very graphic poem about anal sex. He had this kind of dirty streak, and he liked to talk dirty in public. It was partly gay activism and it was also something he did.”

The poem was called, “What You Up To?” and it appears in the final edition of Ginsberg’s “Collected Poems.” Sanders, Taylor said, “stood up” from his seat as Ginsberg read, “turned and walked out. You know I thought (at the time), ‘What a nightmare for a politician.’ I thought, ‘Oh, God, he’s a socialist. Already he’s got problems. But now he’s got Allen up here reading about anal sex.’ It was not a good thing for Allen to do. He should not have done it. He should have been more careful, but he got excited. He got excited when he performed, and he was a great performer…”

I told Taylor that, in the 1983 photo, Sanders looks more like a poet and Ginsberg — the poet famous for explosive poetry so conventionally well-dressed in tie and jacket — looks like the small city mayor.

“Oh, he bought those at the Salvation Army,” Taylor said of Ginsberg. “Allen got all his clothes from the Salvation Army.”

The Sanders campaign hasn’t responded to requests for comment about the photograph or the reading incident. Ginsberg and Sanders — two iconoclasts — had a few contacts over the years. The poet’s visits to Burlington included one in 1986, when he wrote a poem called, “Burlington Snow,” which clearly pays homage to the virtues he finds in the socialist values with which Sanders governed Burlington. Ginsberg gave a reading of the poem in a local bookstore. The poet traveled quite often to Vermont to spend time with his Buddhist teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, at a Buddhist center about an hour from Burlington. Segura took other photos of him there and elsewhere on his 1983 tour. She knew Ginsberg going back to the 1970s, having been introduced to him by the poet Gregory Corso. At 72, she says that Bernie Sanders’s recent surge of public visibility sent her back to her files, where she had an image of a poet and a politician that she realized had the new context of a presidential campaign.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.