Sandro chia circle fine art lithograph8/21/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Allen Ginsberg and Francesco Clemente, Poetry Project Poster, 1989 I shared a passion for all of these writers, so we had that in common from the start. In New York, he gathered a considerable library of American poetry (primarily Ezra Pound and the Beats-purchased from the Phoenix Book Shop when it was going out of business), and it became the basis of his studies. Later he told me that most everyone of his generation in Naples and Rome learned English by listening to Bob Dylan records and puzzling out the lyrics. Most likely, he didn’t want to speak English until he could speak it well. I suspect he’d already studied it in school and probably relied on it all those early years in India (he visited pretty much every year from 1973 onward), because he wouldn’t have gotten by with just Italian. But they both learned English quickly, especially Francesco. So in retrospect, it’s surprising that we became such close friends from our first few meetings. When Francesco and Alba first came to New York in the early 1980s, they didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t speak any Italian.
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