THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

I don’t have to sell persimmons on the streetcurb

in Baoding like the lady with the white bandanna’d head

Don’t have to push my boat oars around a rocky corner

in the Yangtze gorges, or pole my way downstream

from Yichang through yellow industrial scum, or carry water

buckets on a bamboo pole over my shoulder

to a cabbage field near Wuxi – I’m famous,

my poems have done some men good

and a few women ill, perhaps the good

outweighs the bad, I’ll never know.

Ginsberg, “Reading Bai Juyi” (16-25), in Ginsberg/Collected, 1987