The greatest poet of the Beat movement and one of the most renowned American writers of the 20th century, Allen Ginsberg transcended literary and intellectual barriers to exert a profound influence on the culture at large. His accomplishments are too numerous and his oeuvre too large for a music reference resource to do them justice; many other sources exist that offer more complete perspectives on his life and work. Ginsberg made sporadic recordings of his work, both formal and otherwise, starting in his heyday of the late '50s and continuing into the '90s.
Most of them were poetry readings, naturally, but Ginsberg also experimented with songs, often accompanying his singing on the harmonium. Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, in Newark, NJ, and grew up in nearby Paterson. His father Louis was a published poet, a teacher, and politically a socialist; his mother Naomi was a Communist radical, but unfortunately her bouts with mental illness (mostly severe paranoia) consumed much of Ginsberg's childhood.
He began writing in a journal at age 11, around the same time as his mother's suicide attempt, and discovered his major poetic influence Walt Whitman in high school. He enrolled at Columbia University in 1943, originally planning to become a labor lawyer, but soon fell in with a literary crowd that included Jack Kerouac (a fellow student), Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs.
Ginsberg began writing seriously around 1945, and around the same time he began to experiment with drugs, and had some of his first homosexual experiences. He graduated from Columbia in 1948 and began traveling, visiting Burroughs in Texas; there he was arrested as a reluctant accomplice in his roommates' burglary ring, and voluntarily committed himself to Columbia's mental hospital. He attempted to renounce homosexuality and took a job as a market researcher upon his release, but hearing the poet William Carlos Williams at a reading drew him back into literature, and he gave up trying to fit into mainstream society.
Ginsberg moved to San Francisco in 1954, and that year met artist's model Peter Orlovsky, who became his lover; their relationship, though nonmonogamous and marked by periods of separation, would prove to be lifelong. Though he'd written quite a bit of poetry by this point, very little of it had been published, and he was better known as an advocate of fellow Beat writers like Kerouac and Burroughs. That all changed in October 1955, when Ginsberg read parts of his new epic poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery.
An impassioned, defiant critique of American culture that served as something of a Beat manifesto, it was an immediate sensation. The local City Lights bookstore, which had just started its own publishing arm, released Ginsberg's first book, the seminal Howl and Other Poems, in 1956. The following year, City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested on obscenity charges for selling copies of the book; authorities objected mostly to its homosexual content.
A judge ruled that the book was not obscene, and the attendant publicity helped make Ginsberg a household name. He recorded his first album of poetry readings, also titled Howl and Other Poems, for the Fantasy label in 1959. Over the next decade, Ginsberg became a leading countercultural figure.
He spoke out in favor of the First Amendment and against the Vietnam War; he was turned on to LSD by Timothy Leary and to Buddhism by Kerouac; he traveled a bit with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters; he traveled all over the world in search of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment; he appeared in the background of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" music video; he took part in the famed antiwar demonstrations in 1968 that resulted in the arrest of the so-called Chicago Seven; he was, unsurprisingly, the subject of a massive FBI dossier. Of course, he also continued to write prolifically. In 1961, he published another lengthy signature poem, "Kaddish," which explored his relationship with his mother (she'd passed away in an institution in 1956).
Five years later, Atlantic Records issued a recording of the work titled Allen Ginsberg Reads Kaddish: A 20th Century American Ecstatic Narrative Poem. Ginsberg's next album was William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which set the works of one of his favorite poets to jazzy musical backing; it was issued by Verve in 1970. As time passed and his lasting impact became clearer, Ginsberg was increasingly accepted by the literary establishment, culminating in his winning a National Book Award for The Fall of America: Poems of These States in 1974.
He recorded with John Lennon and Leonard Cohen, and undertook several song-oriented sessions of his own during the course of the '70s, including a collaboration with Bob Dylan. The best results of these efforts were finally released in 1983 as First Blues: 1971-1981 on former Columbia executive John Hammond's own label. Additionally, Ginsberg performed the song-poem "Capitol Air" in concert with punk rockers the Clash, and appeared on the track "Ghetto Defendant" on their hit Combat Rock album.
He abandoned singing on his next album, 1989's The Lion for Real, a set of spoken word pieces with musical backing. That same year, he teamed up with composer Philip Glass to transform the antiwar poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra" into a musical theater piece; the collaboration worked well enough that they reteamed for a full album, 1993's Hydrogen Jukebox. In 1994, Rhino Records issued an exhaustive four-CD box set of Ginsberg recordings titled Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs 1949-1993.
Sadly, Ginsberg contracted liver cancer as a complication of hepatitis, and passed away at his New York City loft on April 5, 1997. Fantasy reissued Howl and Other Poems on CD the following year, and in 2002 the Locust label assembled the compilation New York Blues: Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs. ~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide (1926- ), poet.
Along with Robert Lowell, Ginsberg was the writer most responsible for a great shift in American poetry in the late 1950s. Poetry in the forties and fifties was dominated by formal, metrical, often rhymed verse, densely impacted with wit, irony, and allusion, as in Lowell's early poems. By the mid-fifties, however, both Ginsberg and Lowell had come under the spell of William Carlos Williams, who had worked for decades to bring his poems closer to the supple rhythms of prose and the transparency of spoken language.
Ginsberg was also influenced by the jazzlike flow and immediacy of his friend Jack Kerouac's as-yet unpublished fiction.
Ginsberg's breakthrough came in his long poem "Howl" (1956), written directly at the typewriter in imitation of Kerouac's methods of spontaneous composition. In it, he boldly revived an impassioned biblical rhetoric of the sublime.
Borrowing the kind of heightened yet prosaic long line that had been used by outcast poets like Christopher Smart, William Blake, and Walt Whitman, Ginsberg hallucinated a hipster's dream world of drugs, madness, and homosexuality as a counterpoint to " ," the straight world dominated by money, machinery, and war, which he saw as a prison house of the spirit.
When Ginsberg read the poem aloud first at the Six Gallery in in 1955 and again at readings across the country, the impact on the younger generation was enormous. Though attacked or ignored by most critics, accused of obscenity, incoherence, and sensationalism, the work of Ginsberg and Kerouac, along with the writings of friends like Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William Burroughs, became a flashpoint of cultural rebellion, the seedbed of the counterculture of the 1960s.
To some the was merely the triumph of public showmanship over literary values. Like earlier avant-gardes, the Beats tended to mythologize each other and aimed to provoke middle-class outrage. Their antinomianism could lead them to idealize the addict, the criminal, and the madman as "angelheaded hipsters" or doomed victims of society.
Yet Ginsberg's work had a long literary ancestry, from the incantations of the Hebrew prophets to the rolling catalogs of Whitman and the fantastic imagery of the surrealists. Some of his best short poems, like "America," shared the mocking humor of the surrealists. Ginsberg also continued to grow as a writer.
His next long poem, " " (1957-1959), a tormented elegy for his mad communist mother, was a wrenching piece of autobiography in a class with Lowell's cooler, more fragmentary Life Studies. It remains one of the most moving works in contemporary poetry.
Ginsberg was the only Beat writer to sustain a full career.
During the sixties he was a ubiquitous figure, an icon for the young and a pacifying presence; he was a key link between the counterculture and the anti-Vietnam War movement. His poems of the 1960s were collected in one of his best volumes, Planet News (1968). Later Ginsberg even became a member of the , a professor of English at , and a scholar and archivist of his own work, publishing volumes of letters and journals and annotated collections of his earlier poetry, managing the transition from Beat rebel to elder statesman with surprising aplomb.
In spite of his blunt homosexuality and his long sojourn in the underworld, itself an accepted literary conceit, Ginsberg's radical direction had been literary and traditional from the outset.
Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1989); Lewis Hyde, ed., On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg (1984); Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (1969).
The American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary . He was a leading member of the " " and helped lead the revolt against "academic poetry" and the cultural and political establishment of the mid-20th century.
Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, to Russian-Jewish parents.
He had an emotionally troubled childhood that was later reflected in his poetry. His mother, , suffered from various mental illnesses, and was periodically institutionalized during his adolescence. Contributing to Ginsberg's growing confusion during these years was his growing awareness of his homosexuality, which he concealed from both his peers and his parents until he was in his twenties.
Ginsberg enrolled at with the intention of becoming a lawyer. At Columbia, he fell in with a crowd that included writers Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, as well as Lucien Carr and Neal Cassaday. Around the time he was a student at Columbia, Ginsberg got into some trouble with the police.
His apartment was used as a base for a robbery, and in order to avoid being charged as an accomplice, he pleaded insanity. He ended up spending several months in a mental hospital.
After graduating with a bachelor of arts from Columbia in 1948, Ginsberg worked as a market researcher in New York and then migrated to , where he became a principal figure in the " " literary movement.
The Beat movement was an American social and literary movement originated in the 1950s where artists, derisively called "beatniks," expressed their alienation from conventional society by adopting a style of seedy dress, detached manners, and a "hip" vocabulary. Generally indifferent to social problems, they advocated sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism. Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956), along with Kerouac's On the Road ultimately became the "Beat" movement's twin scriptures.
Howl's raw, graphic language dealt with human discontent and despair, moral and social ills, Ginsberg's homosexuality, and his mother's communist beliefs. Many traditional critics were astonished. While some commentators shared the attitude of Walter Sutton, who considered Howl "a tirade revealing an animus directed outward against those who do not share the poet's social and sexual orientation," others echoed the opinion of Paul Zweig, who argued that the poem "almost singlehandedly dislocated the traditional poetry of the 1950s.
" The publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, became a defendant in an obscenity trial, but was later acquitted after testimony led Judge Clayton W. Horn to rule that Howl was not obscene. Still, leading literary and popular journals typically complained that Howl was vulgar and undisciplined.
Another critic complained that "Ginsberg made it seem like anybody could write poetry.
Nevertheless, Ginsberg's triumphant synthesis of sociology and mysticism, Blake and Walt Whitman, and the Bible and , had found an audience. Declaiming his poems in coffeehouses, jazz clubs, and colleges, Ginsberg (with a thick, untrimmed beard and his balding head heavily fringed with hair) reinforced his dual image: a saint to the underground minority, a freak to the mainstream majority.
Ginsberg's next volume and Other Poems 1958-1960 (1961), delved further into his past. Based on the "Kaddish," a traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead, it poignantly expressed the anger, love, and confusion felt towards his mother while rendering the social and historical milieu which informed his mother's troubled life. Some critics considered this piece to be his most important work.
John Tytell explained "Kaddish testified for Ginsberg's capacity for involvement with another human in torment, for the acceptance of another's weirdness."
Ginsberg had visions while reading the poetry of William Blake. These visions led him to experiment with drugs, and he took under the guidance of the late Timothy Leary in the 1960s.
He said that some of his best poetry was written under the influence of drugs: the second part of Howl with peyote, Kaddish with amphetamines, and Wales - A Visitation with LSD. However, after a trip to India in 1962, where he was introduced to yoga and meditation, he, generally, changed his mind about drugs. He believed that yoga and meditation were far superior to raising one's consciousness, but still believed that psychedilcs could prove helpful in writing poetry.
Ginsberg was a visible political activist in the 1960s and 1970s. He coined the term and advocated "flower power," a strategy in which antiwar demonstrators promoted positive values like peace and love to dramatize their opposition to the death and destruction caused by the . He protested at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and later testified on behalf of the " " who were prosecuted on conspiracy charges.
Ginsberg was later jailed after demonstrating against President Richard Nixon at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. He was also a staunch advocate for gay rights. When asked to describe his social and political views, he simply responded "Absolute defiance.
" These experiences, as well as his conversion to , his concerns about aging, and the anguish over the deaths of close friends Kerouac and Cassaday, heavily influenced Ginsberg's work.
Ginsberg was a survivor, as he outlived enemies like J. Edgar hoover who thought he was a threat to the establishment.
He remained durable, and was an icon of American counterculture for four decades. It could be said that if one generation outgrew him, a new one rose to show their interest. In the 1990s, he was a favorite on , and collaborated with the band Sonic Youth and singer of U2.
In later years, Ginsberg's health began to fail. He suffered from cirrhosis of the liver, bouts of hepatitis, diabetes, and Bell's palsy, which left his face partially paralyzed. As he continued his relentless self-promotion and an exhausting schedule, Ginsberg accomplished what few writers attain: his acclaim and celebrity were at their height at his death.
He had always said he wanted to die peacefully, and on April 5, 1997, at the age of 70, just days after being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, he died, surrounded by "close friends and lovers" in his New York apartment. Ferlinghetti stated, "He went the way he wanted to go." Longtime friend and former California lawmaker Tom Hayden told CNN, "Allen was like a prophet of the 1960s.
" His most recent works before his death were Selected Poems, 1947-1955 and a rock cd The Ballad of the Skeletons.
Serious attention to Ginsberg's work is lacking, but Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (1969), is a sympathetic, excellent biography. Obituaries which extensively detailed Ginberg's life and his writings appeared in the April 6, 1997 editions of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Ginsberg's poetic method, so contrary to the formality of his peers, helps reshape modern poetry. Besides the title work, the collection includes well-known poems such as "A Supermarket in California" and "Sunflower Sutra."
Standing next to Howl as the poet's finest work, the volume includes Ginsberg's moving confessional lament for his deceased mother. Ginsberg also publishes Empty Mirror: Early Poems.
Ginsberg's collection of poems written from 1953 to 1960 are mainly of interest for their autobiographical revelations and the view they provide of the Beat lifestyle and sensibility.
This volume collects verse from ten previous volumes and includes an important preface and notes. The poetry also reflects Ginsberg's immersion in Zen Buddhism, jazz, and the drug scene and counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. As both a record of cultural history and of this poet's accomplishment, this book is a significant contribution to .
Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine, jiggling your knees blankly in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain. 
No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm. Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh. 
For more famous quotes by Allen Ginsberg, visit poet and his mother was a high school teacher.
Ginsberg's mother, Naomi Levy Ginsberg (who was affected by and such as ) was an active party meetings. Ginsberg later said that his mother "Made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them.'"
As a teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to about political issues such as and workers' rights.
When he was a junior in high school, he accompanied his mother by bus to her therapist. The trip disturbed Ginsberg and he mentioned it in his long autobiographical poem " ." This and other moments from his childhood dealing with his paranoid mother end up in the poem.
While in high school, Ginsberg began reading ; he said he was inspired by his teacher's passion in reading. Kerouac later described the dark (Ginsberg) and light (Cassady) side of their "New Vision." Kerouac's perception had to do partly with Ginsberg's Road
of Paterson, (1949). While at Columbia, Ginsberg contributed to the
bonded because they saw in one another excitement about the potential of the youth of America, a potential which existed outside the strict conformist confines of post-WWII McCarthy-era America. Ginsberg and Carr talked excitedly about a "New Vision" (a phrase adapted from ) for literature and America. Carr also introduced Ginsberg to , for whom Ginsberg had a long infatuation.
In 1948 in an apartment in , Ginsberg had an auditory hallucination of reading his poems "Ah Sunflower," "The Sick Rose," and "Little Girl Lost" (later referred to as his "Blake vision"). Ginsberg was reading these poems at the time, and he said he was very familiar with them; at one point he claimed he heard them being read by what sounded like the voice of God but what he interpreted as the voice of Blake himself. He had at that moment what he claimed to be pivotal revelations that defined his understanding of the universe.
He believed that he witnessed then the interconnectedness of the universe. He looked at lattice work on the fire escape and realized some hand had crafted that; he then looked at the sky and concluded some hand had crafted that, or rather the sky was the hand that crafted itself. He claimed that this "vision" was not inspired by drug use, but he said he sought to recapture that feeling later with various drugs.
Also in New York, Ginsberg met in a bar and introduced him to the rest of his inner circle. In their first meeting Corso said he'd been fantasizing about a woman who lived across the street from him. The woman just happened to be Ginsberg's girlfriend during one of Ginsberg's sporadic forays into heterosexuality.
In 1954 in , Ginsberg met , a young man of 21 with whom he fell in love and who remained his life-long lover, and with whom he eventually shared his interest in Tibetan Buddhism.
the Beat Generation in a broader sense. Ginsberg's mentor wrote an introductory letter to San Francisco Renaissance figure head who then introduced Ginsberg into the San Francisco poetry scene.
Ginsberg also met there three accomplished poets But McClure handed the duties off to Ginsberg. Ginsberg advertised the event as "Six Poets at the Six Gallery." One of the most important events in Beat mythos, known simply as "The " took "reference"> The event, in essence, brought together the East and West Coast factions of the Beat Generation.
Of more personal significance to Ginsberg: that night was the first public reading of "Howl", a poem that brought world-wide fame to Ginsberg and many of the poets associated with him.
Ginsberg's principal work, " ", is well-known to many for its opening line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." "Howl" was considered scandalous at the time of its publication due to the rawness of its language, which is frequently explicit.
Shortly after its 1956 publication by 's , it was banned for obscenity. The ban became a among defenders of the Clayton W. Horn declared the poem to possess redeeming social importance.
Howl is not only a biography of Ginsberg's experiences before 1955, but a history of the . Ginsberg also later claimed that at the core of Howl was his unresolved emotions about his schizophrenic mother. Though Kaddish deals more explicitly with his mother (so explicitly that a similar same emotion.
Though references in most of his poetry reveal much about his biography, his relationship to other members of the Beat Generation, and his own political views, Howl, his most famous poem, is still the perhaps the best place to start. Though "Beat" is most accurately applied to Ginsberg and his closest friends (Corso, Orlovsky, Kerouac, Burroughs, etc.), the friendship with Ginsberg.
(Friendship with Kerouac or Burroughs might also apply, but both writers later strove to disassociate identification of Ginsberg as the leader. Ginsberg never claimed to be the leader. He did, however, claim many of the writers with whom he had become friends in this period shared many of the same intentions and themes.
Some of these friends include: , who, after reading "Howl", wrote a letter to Ginsberg on a sheet of toilet Later in his life, Ginsberg formed a bridge between the movement of the 1950s and the of the 1960s, befriending, among others, , , , and .
Ginsberg's spiritual journey began early on with his reported spontaneous visions, and continued with an early trip to with , a meditation master of the school, who became his friend and life-long teacher. Ginsberg helped Trungpa in founding the School of Disembodied Poetics at in .
Music and chanting were both important parts of his live delivery during poetry readings. He often accompanied himself on a handheld organ called a , and was often accompanied by a guitarist. Attendance to his poetry readings was generally standing room only for most of his career, no matter where in the world he appeared.
friends in his East Village loft in New York City. He succumbed to liver cancer via complications of . He was 70 years old.
Ginsberg continued to write through his final illness, with his last poem Ginsberg is buried in his family plot in Gomel Chesed Cemetery, one of a cluster of Jewish cemeteries at the corner of McClellan Street and Mt. Olivet Avenue near the city lines of Elizabeth and Newark, New Jersey. The family plot, located toward the western edge of the cemetery at the far end of the walk from the third gate along Mt.
Olivet Avenue, is marked by a large Ginsberg and Litzky stone, and Ginsberg himself and each family member have smaller markers. Though the grave itself and the cemetery are neither picturesque nor otherwise notable (Ginsberg's grave is located near the rear fence of the flat cemetery, which is in the midst of an industrial area), and it has not become a major place of pilgrimage, there is a steady trickle of admirers.
It would be unfair to Ginsberg and history to omit mention of his involvement with Hinduism.
Ginsberg befriended A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krsna movement in the Western world, a relationship that is documented by Satsvarupa Gosvami in his biographical account based on oral history, Srila Prabhupada Lilamrta.
Ginsberg donated money, materials, and his reputation to help the Swami establish the first temple, and subsequently toured with him to promote his cause. Ginsberg also claimed to be the first person on the North American continent to chant the Hare Krsna mantra, several years before the Swami's arrival in New York. Ginsberg was mourned by the Hare Krsnas upon his passing in 1997.
significant figure in the 1960s. But Ginsberg continued to broach controversial subjects throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. When explaining how he approached controversial topics, he often pointed to : he said that when he first got to know Huncke in the 1940s, Ginsberg saw that he was sick from his heroin addiction.
But at the time heroin was a taboo subject, and Huncke had nowhere to go for help.
Likewise, he continuously attempted to force the world into a dialogue about controversial subjects because no change can be made in a polite silence.
Ginsberg also played a key role in ensuring that a protest of the which took place at the Oakland-Berkeley city line and drew several thousand marchers, was not violently interrupted by the California chapter of the notorious motorcycle gang — the — and their leader, .
The day prior to the scheduled march, the Hell's Angels attacked the front line of a smaller scale protest where a confrontation between police and demonstrators was brewing. The Hell's Angels came in on motocycles and slashed banners while yelling "Go back to Russia, you fucking communists!" at the protestors.
The Hell's Angels then vowed to disrupt the larger protest the next day.
Ginsberg traveled to Barger's home in to talk the situation through. It friendship and goodwill.
In the end, Barger and the other Hell's Angels that were present came away deeply impressed by the courage of Ginsberg and his companion Kesey. They vowed not to attack the next day's protest march and furthermore deemed Ginsberg a man who was worth helping out.
Ginsberg never gave up his love of protests.
He was present the night of the massive in 1988 and provided an eyewitness account to Mentofreeist group and was assaulted by its leader, Vargus Pike, who was arrested. He was later released when Ginsberg, sporting a black eye, refused to press charges.
were recent memories.
Later he travelled to several Communist countries to promote free speech; he claimed Communist countries, China for example, welcomed him in because they thought he was an enemy of but often turned against him when they saw him as a trouble maker.
against Cuba's anti-marijuana stance and its penchant for throwing homosexuals in jail, but also for an alleged remark referring to revolutionary as "cute."
King of a May Day parade, Ginsberg was labeled an "immoral menace" by the Czech government because of his free expression of radical ideas and was then deported.
Many important figures from Communist Bloc countries such as point to Ginsberg as an important inspiration to strive for freedom.
One contribution that is often considered his most significant and most controversial was his openness about , including his love of youths. Later homosexual writers saw his frank talk about metaphor.
Also, in writing about sexuality in graphic detail and in his frequent use of language seen as indecent he challenged — and ultimately changed — obscenity laws. He was a staunch supporter of others whose expression challenged obscenity laws joined to make a statement. According to Ginsberg in "Thoughts on NAMBLA" published in Deliberate Prose: "NAMBLA's a forum for reform of those laws on youthful sexuality which members deem oppressive, a discussion society not a sex club.
I joined NAMBLA in defense of free speech." This was a controversial decision: many who supported his gay rights advocacy could not support this decision.
teenage boys (see for example, "Sweet Boy Give Me Your Ass"), there are no indications that he ever had relations with underage persons.
Ginsberg saw his attraction to youths as the celebration of the beauty and holiness of youth (a celebration of "lambs" or "angels"). As Camille Paglia put it, "Ginsberg's celebration of boy-love was pure and sinless." Like much of his political activism, Ginsberg saw this as a demystification of a baseless taboo.
In "Thoughts on NAMBLA" Ginsberg claims that this general. He says that appreciation of youthful bodies and "the human form divine" has been a common theme throughout the history of culture, "from Rome's Vatican to Florence's Uffizi galleries to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art."
Ginsberg also talked often about drug use.
Throughout the 1960s he took an active role in the demystification of LSD and with worked to promote its common use. He was also for many decades an advocate of marijuana legalization.
Though he had intentions to be a labor lawyer, Ginsberg wrote poetry for most of his life — encouraged by his father, the poet father or like his idol .
His admiration for the writing of inspired him to take poetry more seriously. Though he took odd jobs to support himself, in 1955 upon the advice of a psychiatrist Ginsberg dropped out of the working world to devote his entire life to poetry. Soon after his life.
Since Ginsberg's poetry is intensely personal, and since much of the vitality of those associated with comes from mutual inspiration, much credit for style, inspiration, and content can be given to Ginsberg's friends.
Ginsberg claimed throughout his life that his biggest inspiration was Kerouac's concept of Spontaneous Prose. He believed literature should come from the soul without conscious restrictions.
However, Ginsberg was much more prone to revise than Kerouac. For example, when Kerouac saw the first draft of "Howl" he disliked the fact that Ginsberg had made editorial changes in pencil (transposing "negro" and "angry" in the first line, for example). Kerouac only wrote out his concepts of Spontaneous Prose at Ginsberg's insistence because Ginsberg wanted to learn how to apply the technique to his poetry.
An important figure when considering inspiration for "Howl" is Carl Solomon. The full title is "Howl for ." Solomon was a and enthusiast (he introduced Ginsberg to ) who suffered bouts of depression.
Solomon wanted to commit suicide, but he thought a form of suicide appropriate to dadaism would be to go to a mental institution and demand a lobotomy. The institution refused, giving him many forms of , including a description of this.
Moloch, to whom the second section is addressed, is a to whom children were sacrificed.
Ginsberg may have gotten the name from the poem "Thou Shalt Not Kill," a poem about the death of one of Ginsberg's heroes, . But is mentioned a few times in the and references to Ginsberg's Jewish background are not infrequent in his work. Ginsberg said the image of Moloch was inspired by symbol of the city (not specifically San Francisco, but all cities).
Moloch has subsequently been interpreted as any system of control, including the conformist society of post- America focused on material gain, which Ginsberg frequently blamed for the destruction of all those outside of societal norms.
control — and therefore go against Moloch — is a form of self-destruction. Many of the characters Ginsberg references in "Howl", themselves through excessive substance abuse or a generally wild lifestyle.
The personal aspects of "Howl" are perhaps as important as the political aspects. , the prime example of a "best mind" destroyed by defying society, is associated with Ginsberg's schizophrenic mother: the line "with mother finally ******" comes after a long section about Carl Solomon, and in Part III, Ginsberg says "I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother." Ginsberg later admitted that the drive to write "Howl" was fueled by sympathy for his ailing mother, an issue which he was not yet ready to deal with directly.
He dealt with it directly with 1959's " ."
background. He considered himself to have inherited the visionary poetic mantle handed down from the English poet and artist The power of Ginsberg's verse, its searching, probing focus, its long and lilting lines, as well as its New World exuberance, all echo the continuity of inspiration which he claimed.
of writing his epic poem about the industrial city near his home. Ginsberg, after attending a reading by Williams, sent the older poet several of his poems and wrote an introductory letter. Most of these early poems were rhymed and metered and included archaic pronouns like "Thee.
" Williams hated the poems. He told Ginsberg later, "In this mode perfection is basic, and these poems are not perfect."
Though he hated the early poems, Williams loved the exuberance in Ginsberg's letter.
He included the letter in a later part of American. Williams taught him to focus on strong visual images, in line with Williams' own motto "No ideas but in things." His time studying under Williams led to a tremendous shift from the early formalist work to the brilliance of his later work.
Early breakthrough poems include "Bricklayer's Lunch Hour" and "Dream Record."
and Surrealism continued to be an influence (for example, sections of such poems as Jubilate Agno. Ginsberg claims other more traditional influences, such as: , , , , and even .
Ginsberg also made an intense study of and the paintings of from which he adapted a concept important to his work, which he called the "Eyeball Kick." He noticed in viewing Cezanne's paintings that when the eye moved from one color to a contrasting color, the eye would , or "kick." Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in .
Ginsberg used this technique in his poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images: something weak with something strong, an artifact of high culture with an artifact of low culture, something holy with something unholy. The example Ginsberg most often used was "hydrogen jukebox" (which later became the title of an opera in "Howl" as well as a direct quote from Cezanne: "Pater Omnipitens Aeterna Deus."
developed an individualistic style that's easily identified as Ginsbergian.
came out during a renewed focus on form and structure among academic poets and critics partly inspired by (see "Open Form vs. Closed Form" in the section), so Ginsberg often had to defend his choice to break away from traditional poetic structure, often citing Williams, Pound, and Whitman as precursors. Ginsberg's style may have seemed to critics chaotic or unpoetic, but to Ginsberg it was an open, ecstatic expression of his thoughts and feelings.
He believed strongly that traditional formalist considerations were archaic and didn't apply to reality. Though some, Diana Trilling for example, have pointed to Ginsberg's toward meter and claimed instead that meter follows the natural poetic voice, not the other way around; he said, as he learned from Williams, that natural speech is occasionally dactylic, so poetry that imitates natural speech will sometimes fall into a dactylic structure but only ever accidentally. Like Williams, Ginsberg's line breaks were often determined by breath: one line in Howl, for example, should be read in one breath.
Ginsberg claimed he developed such a long line because he had long breaths (saying perhaps it was because he talked fast, or he did yoga, or he was Jewish). The long line could also be traced back few other poets had ventured to develop further.
feature of Ginsberg's style.
However, he claimed later this was a crutch because he lacked confidence in his style; he didn't yet trust "free flight." In the 60s, after employing it in some sections of Kaddish ("caw" for example) he, for the most part, abandoned the anaphoric repetition.
poems.
In the original draft of Howl each line is in a "stepped triadic" format reminiscent of Williams (see "Ivy Leaves," for example). He abandoned the "stepped triadic" when he developed his long line, but the stepped lines showed up later, most poems, are both organized as an inverted pyramid, with larger sections leading to smaller sections. In "America" he experimented with a mix of longer and shorter lines.
starkly dissimilar images. The line in Howl starting "who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue" contains several examples of eyeball kicks, such as "mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors."
Ginsberg also commonly employed .
For example, from Howl: "secret gas here) sound like a sexual act. Another example is "what peaches and what penumbra" from "Supermarket in California" is perhaps designed to make seem like a fruit or like something you can buy in a supermarket.
"Lightning's blue glare fills Oklahoma plains, the train rolls east casting yellow shadow on grass Twenty years ago approaching Texas, I saw sheet lightning cover Heaven's corners.
.. An old Girl.
.. How can we war against that?
" (From Iron Horse, 1972)
In live shows, recites more of the poem.
Tributes to Allen Ginsberg made and poetry read from Adrian Mitchell, Michael Horovitz, Aidan Andrew Dun and Joe Duggan and a screening of 'Wholly Communion ' and highlights of 'Allen
Penguin Books. New York. 1992.
ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0 14
3.1 (1968) pp.279-320.
(2001), paperback, 628 pages, ISBN
). Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son. Bloomsbury (2002), paperback,
. New York: St.
"Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context." Harrington Park Press,
Howl for Now: A 50th anniversary celebration of Allen Ginsberg's epic protest poem. West . Modern American Poetry website.
Retrieved on 2005-10-20.
Biography Project. Retrieved on 2005-10-20.
Retrieved on .
News RSS