Five storeys up in a nondescript apartment building, workmen are hammering and sawing, renovating a sunny Manhattan loft in a cacophony of Italian song and shouted curses. Amid the clatter, lying on a modest double bed, Allen Ginsberg - original beatnik, gay iconoclast, Buddhist peacenik, hippie guru and, arguably, America's Last Famous Poet - is taking a nap. As incense wafts through the room, he seems a pool of repose surrounded by what he once called "the vast animal soup" of the everyday world. It is tempting to view the professorial, diminutive gentleman as a saintly figure - a madman-poet who has at last found peace. But as Ginsberg, roused from his sleep, begins to talk about his twin passions - poetry and politics - it is clear that he remains a clear, energetic, even dangerous thinker. "Candor is the whole key [to poetry]," he says. "It's exactly what we're missing in politics. Everybody is a bunch of hypocritical liars in public - everybody knows they are, and yet the whole system sustains itself on secrecy and lies.