Blessed be the muses

dancing round my bed,

Crowning my balding head

with laurels Allen Ginsberg, "Reality Sandwiches"

Not a fan stirred the air in the smoky purple room at T.T. the Bear's bar in Central Square Monday night as the walls resounded with a Beat poetry tribute to the late great Allen Ginsberg.

"It's a drag man...a real drag," muttered one tie-dyed-in-the-wool Ginsberg devotee who goes by the name "Bongo Man."

"Ginsberg was one of the great minds of our time, not to be replaced," he added, as his eyes shifted to one of dozens of poetry readers making their way to the makeshift podium in this favorite Cambridge night spot, whose regulars range from the city's twenty-something crowd to the local middle-aged literati.

As an audience of more than 100 filled the small bar at 9 p.m. to honor Ginsberg--who had liver cancer and died of a heart attack Saturday at the age of 70--the mood was both melancholy and hopeful.

"Allen Ginsberg has inspired and will continue to inspire all of us," said Catherine A. Solmons, a Boston Phoenix poetry editor who read selections from one of the poet's more famous collections, "Reality Sandwiches." "He was the first to make people feel poets could be pop stars."

Ginsberg's work helped shape the 1950s Beat generation, primarily through the impact of his epic beat poem "Howl!," published in 1956, and other poems that also dealt with the gritty details of his homosexuality and communist origins.

Beat poetry--the stream-of-consciousness, "anything goes" style of verse--took the literary world by storm in the '50s as Ginsberg and fellow Beat pioneers Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac travelled to readings and poetry sessions around the nation.

Ginsberg was versatile, counting among his friends such literary luminaries as William S. Burroughs '36 and '90s youngsters who heard him read his poems on MTV.

"It was a community of shared challenges," said Jack Powers, who organizes the Monday night Stone Soup poetry series at T.T. the Bear's, of which the Ginsberg memorial reading was a part.

Powers said he and Ginsberg became friends in the late 1950s as part of a larger local poetry community. "Allen sprung the trap for me, and I was out as a being," he said.

Louisa Solane, owner of Grolier Bookstore on Plympton Street, took the stage later in the evening to describe her relation to Ginsberg as a fellow activist and poet.