Michele Madigan Somerville, the author of Black Irish and WISEGAL (2001), has written about religion for the New York Times (online) and the Huffington Post. She lives in Brooklyn. Here she turns her gaze to Allen Ginzberg, who is in the news these days because of Howl, a feature film about the poem and the censorship trial it caused.

One afternoon in fall of 1977, I sat in my college professor’s office talking about Yeats or Wallace Stevens when a fellow student poked her head into the open door to apologize. She wouldn’t be able to make it to Allen Ginsberg’s November 1st reading at the Neuberger Museum later that week. She was Greek Orthodox, and bound to observe All Saints Day with her family. I didn’t know the fellow lit major, but I’ll never forget the professor’s sotto-voce wisecrack as her footsteps faded down the corridor: “But Allen Ginsberg is a saint.”

A saint? No. An angel? Maybe. I know I “got religion” that night as I heard Allen Ginsberg read “Kaddish” in the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y. more than 30 years ago. The call came: a tap on the shoulder that doubled as a lightning bolt; an epiphany was had, and a conversion — not forced but seduced — transpired. I left the museum that night, on the Feast of All Saints, with a mission to “throw down” with life as a poet.

Amid the fresh fervor for Ginsberg and the Beats that is being fueled by the impending theatrical release of the motion picture Howl, I notice that my first thought — which Ginsberg might therefore insist is my best thought — is a of poet not so much hip as rabbinic. Schoolmarmish, even. Allen Ginsberg was my professor for two years in the late 1980s. He was a conscientious teacher. He came to class early, was always well prepared, made copious remarks on students’ work, and always wore a necktie. I had been a teacher for four years when I first began to study with Ginsberg, and it was clear to me, early on, that he had uncommon respect for educators. (Poet Louis Ginsberg, Allen’s father, had worked as a teacher for many years.) Read more at the Huffington Post.