For Peach and Be Bop and Garbo. Allen would have liked them.

Occasionally there comes a talent so big and ripe, so robust and undeniable, that arrogance is as foreign to it as mediocrity. Then the undeserving world receives a gift. For those who know genius when they hear it sung, here's a small sampling of the Ginsberg sites and tributes that spread across the web like wildfire when the poet died. There are many more, and the sites selected here will point you to them.

Why not begin with Howl? The Poetry of Allen Ginsberg offers the text of this groundbreaking work and of more than a dozen others, as well as various bits of arcana pertaining to the man from whose soul the poem exploded in 1955. The most interesting link is to "SCRAP LEAVES: LITTLE POEMS: Hasty scribbles from Journals / Hither too puzzling for me to publish / BUT INTERESTING NOTATIONS / FOR TH'AKASHIC ARTY RECORDS/ Transcribed January 18, 1968 by hand of / ALLEN GINSBERG." Scrap Leaves... includes both a transcription of the text and facsimile manuscript pages deliriously and deliciously decorated by the poet. This site, the very best kind of tribute and a labor of love by web designer Alex Vigdor and Ginsberg student Steve Silberman, with photos (including the image of Ginsberg's hands below) by Marc Geller, is a gem. Go. And after you've savored every scrap, move on to Brooklynite Levi Asher's fine site dedicated to all things Beat. You may remember reading about Asher's Literary Kicks here last year. It's still as heartfelt and as exhaustive as ever, but the Ginsberg department has been expanded. In addition to Asher's earnest and hyperlinked thumbnail bio of the poet, there are links to all sorts of interesting stuff by and about Ginsberg (including a bibliography of works biographical and critical). And Asher's eminently appropriate exit line is a link to an audio clip of Ginsberg reading from Blake. This site is well worth a visit; in fact, let's count it a must. From Asher's digs a more or less logical jump (Let's not tie ourselves up in linear strictures; Allen wouldn't like it.) is to the wildly exuberant Allen Ginsberg: Shadow Changes Into Bone, a colorful collection of links subtitled "The Clearinghouse For All Things Ginsberg." Here, in addition to the expected collection of links to Ginsberg sites of varying quality and content, you'll find pointers to all manner of funeraria, including news of memorial gatherings around the country, to which anyone is invited to contribute. All in all, Shadow does a nice job of pulling into a single basket a tangle of disparate threads. We'll leave it to you to decide which ones to weave into your own personal Ginsberg's Web.

New! While it's true that we've all been beaten half to death with half-baked 60s nostalgia in the mass media, the University of Virginia Library deserves credit for putting together The Psychedelic 60s: Literary Tradition and Social Change, a well thought-out chronicle of this critical period of the waning century. The online exhibit does a nice job of bringing to the 60s some badly needed perspective by, for example, grounding the decade's artistic and political icons in the work and thought of their 19th- and 20th-century precursors. Of particular interest to Ginsberg readers and fans will be two sections detailing the ways in which the Beats set the stage for the hippies and yippies, the Grateful Dead and Country Joe, the Diggers and the Merry Pranksters, Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver: the Beats in New York and in San Francisco. The exhibition is nicely illustrated, too, with 60s poster art (including Ginsberg's Who Be Kind To, thumbnailed here), manuscript pages and many photos. If you're up for a good wallow, this site is the place to do it.

Words . . . The professionals wasted no time in affixing the imprimatur to Ginsberg's graceful shuffle to another plane of consciousness. Hungry Mind Review, for example, featured the comfortably chatty Public Heart: An Interview with Allen Ginsberg. Wilborn Hampton wrote an obit for The New York Times, Allen Ginsberg, 70, Master Poet of Beat Generation, that, with the exception of a singularly stupid segue (subhead: "Authorization for a Lobotomy"), gave the poet his hometown paper's patented good gray send-off, complete with color photos, excerpts from landmark poems, and lots of nice comments from Ginsberg's friends and admirers. (Link Watch: The Washington Post and especially The Village Voice gave the poet nice send-offs, too, but the articles, alas, are no longer on line and the links have been removed.)

& Images . . . Here's ours (feel free to send us yours): A few years ago, the American Booksellers Association annual meeting in Los Angeles. Colette is working, rounding up authors for a literacy volunteers benefit, and I'm whiling away an idle afternoon in the bar of The Biltmore Hotel. Suddenly, in the hall beyond the bar, a great commotion, as if a squall is passing, noisily. I bestir myself to see what's going on. It is Allen Ginsberg, fresh from signing copies of Cosmopolitan Greetings in the convention hall, bone tired, surely. You'd never know it. He is talking a mile a minute, matching his steps to the tempo of his voice, trailing in his wake a motley train of reporters and television lights. His glasses and the eyes behind them flash splinters of white light, both self-generated and reflected. He is telling them a story in bite-size bits, made up as he goes along in response to their questions and the occasional barb. He is a poet and he makes them like it. I return to my stool and order another martini. I tell the barman, in answer to his question, who it is who has passed by with such energy and in such high good spirits. I drink and smoke and smile until Colette returns with a smile of her own, in her hand a signed copy of the poet's latest Earth shaker.

And . . . one sad but indispensable footnote: so that we don't forget the desperate social and political context in which Ginsberg lived his remarkably joyful life, take a quick look at Herbert Mitgang's chilling Dangerous dossiers: exposing the secret war against America's greatest authors: Allen Ginsberg's FBI file. The comfort in it is that it didn't stop Ginsberg from singing the news from his great heart and clear mind. No power, not even death's, could do that. And that's the power of the printed / spoken / shouted / whispered / translated / sung / recorded / bootlegged / hyperlinked word.