Allen Ginsberg
Born in 1926, Allen Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, the town immortalized in his mentor William Carlos Williams' epic poem. Ginsberg was a wild soul from the outset. As one biographer wrote, "He was from a family of Jewish Russian immigrants, his family had ties to the radical labor movement, his mother was insane, and he was a homosexual: four prescriptions in the conventional 1940s and 1950s for a sense of deep alienation."
While attending Columbia, Ginsberg hooked up with a bohemian circle of friends including Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs, who shared enthusiasms for literature, philosophy, drugs, sex and petty crime and who formed the core of the literary Beat movement. In the 1950s, Ginsberg relocated to San Francisco and joined its vibrant community of writers, artists and assorted hipsters. In a now famous 1955 poetry reading, he performed his most famous work, "Howl," with its famous opening line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." The publication of Howl and Other Poems and a high-profile, unsuccessful obscenity trial made Ginsberg famous as both a poet and a counterculture icon.
Unlike Kerouac, who retreated from the limelight and came to despise the 1960s generation, Ginsberg cultivated his outsider celebrity and became a ubiquitous figure in American radicalism. He travelled the world, often with his lifelong partner Peter Orlovsky, meeting with writers, artists, activists and world leaders. He embraced Buddhism, protested the persecution of homosexuals in both capitalist and communist countries, experimented with psychedelic drugs, led anti-war protests, helped organize the 1967 Human Be-In, befriended and collaborated with rock stars (Bob Dylan, The Clash), and of course, continued to write and perform poetry. To all these activities he brought a sense of fun, freedom, sensuality and spirituality. Ginsberg died of liver cancer on April 5, 1997.
In the tradition of Walt Whitman, Ginsberg's verse celebrated sexual pleasure as a liberating force for humanity. As Camille Paglia wrote after Ginsberg's death, "Allen Ginsberg was the apostle of a truly visionary sexuality. Like the expansive, sensual, democratic Whitman but unlike the twisted, dishonest, pretentious Foucault, he saw the continuity between great nature and the human body, bathed in waves of cosmic energy." From "Who Be Kind To" (in Planet News):
I want the orgy of our flesh, orgy
of all eyes happy, orgy of the soul
kissing and blessing its mortal-grown
body,
orgy of tenderness beneath the neck, orgy of
kindness to thigh and vagina
Desire given with meat hand
and cock, desire taken with
mouth and ass, desire returned
to the last sigh!
MAJOR SITES
The wonderful Literary Kicks features a
biography of Allen Ginsberg by Levi Asher, aka "brooklyn"; an exhaustive, well-organized
bibliography of Allen Ginsberg's works divided by genre; and a
bibliography of works about Ginsberg. Asher also contributes fine, quotation-rich essays on Ginsberg's famous poems
"Howl" and "Kaddish." This site has lots more material on the Beat Generation, so follow links and browse around.
Literary Kicks
The Naropa Institute features a
tribute to Allen Ginsberg including poems, essays, interviews and memoirs by the great Buddhist poet, plus a collection of poems and remembrances by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ann Waldman and others.
Naropa Institute
Ginsberg, etc. features several dozen Allen Ginsberg poems (including the complete Howl and Other Poems), a large thumbnailed image gallery, bibliography, biography and links list.
Ginsberg, etc.
INTERVIEWS
Gloria Brame
interviewed Allen Ginsberg in 1996 about
sexual freedom, censorship and contemporary poetry. Well worth reading despite the annoying white-text-against-psychedelic-orange-background formatting.
Eclectic Literary Forum
David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick
interviewed Allen Ginsberg about his fellow
Beats, madness and creativity, politics and revolution. This interview took place in 1992 and appears in the book
Mavericks of the Mind.
Harvey Blume
interviews Allen Ginsberg about
love, meditation, dreams, the canon and more.
Boston Book Review
In this 1996 interview, Allen Ginsberg talks about the
cultural climate of the Cold War and its influence on his life and art.
National Security Archive
Steve Silberman interviewed Allen Ginsberg for Wired in 1996. Silberman also gave Ginsberg his first encounter with the World Wide Web, browsing and searching for sites about Ginsberg and the Beats, to which Ginsberg replied, "Thank God I don't know how to work this."
Wired
ARTICLES
Rhino Records posts the complete
liner notes to the Allen Ginsberg box set Holy Soul Jelly Roll - Poems And Songs (1949-1993).
Rhino Records
Herbert Gold
remembers Allen Ginsberg after his death in 1997. "Like Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary, other icons of the counterculture recently ushered by Brother Death into the wings, Allen was a charmer and a trickster. He was a tireless organizer, traveler, funmaker." Four Ginsberg poems accompany Gold's tribute, including This Form of Life Needs Sex.
Salon
Camille Paglia pays tribute to
Allen Ginsberg's greatness as a poet, visionary and profound influence on a generation's intellectual adventures.
Salon
Mushroom collects several accounts of
Allen Ginsberg's first reading of Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955. There's also a report on the 25th anniversary reading at Columbia in 1981.
Mushroom
Biographical profile of
Allen Ginsberg by Thomas Gladysz.
Booksmith
The Knitting Circle's
reference page on Allen Ginsberg features a biography, a bibliography of works by and about Ginsberg, and excerpts from articles in the London press.
Knitting Circle
Canoe's feature page on Allen Ginsberg includes an obituary, a wire story about his cancer diagnosis, and an account of his
1996 reading at University of Toronto.
Canoe
James Atlas
reviewed Allen Ginsberg's career in Atlantic Monthlyin 1984 upon the publication of Collected Poems, 1947-1980. "Chaotic and hectoring, the long, Whitmanesque lines unfurl in apparent metrical anarchy, but no one who has ever heard Ginsberg read would call his prosody random. He has clearly served a rigorous apprenticeship, as the early imitations of Marvell and Donne (included in the appendix) demonstrate, and the long line he adopted in the 1950s exerts a hypnotic force. Poetry derives from oral literature; it was meant to be recited and sung. Ginsberg restores its original intent."
Atlantic Monthly
Jesse Monteagudo pays
tribute to the Beat Generation after the recent deaths of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Herbert Huncke.
Bad Puppy
Lloyd Schwartz reflects on the life and work of Allen Ginsberg,
"one of America's great poets."
Boston Phoenix
Tom Erikson discusses Allen Ginsberg's participation in the 1993 summer writing program at the Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Erikson also posts
six photographs of Allen Ginsberg taken that summer at the Naropa Institute.
Booksmith
Herbert Mitgang reviews the history of
US government repression against Allen Ginsberg, from his book Dangerous dossiers : exposing the secret war against America's greatest authors .
Al Filreis
WRITINGS
Poets.org features a biography of Allen Ginsberg, an extensive bibliography, text versions of Howl and Kaddish, and a RealAudio recording of
Ginsberg reading A Supermarket in California.
Poets.org
Rooknet has a short biographical profile of Ginsberg along with
six poems from Howl.
Rooknet
Another online version of
Ginsberg's "Howl," with nice big text and clever HTML formatting to reproduce the odd indentation.
Allen Ginsberg celebrated "the actual experience of the smoked herb" and denounced 1960s anti-drug propaganda in his classic article,
"The Great Marijuana Hoax."
Marijuana Uses
The Naropa Institute site prints Ginsberg's poem
Death & Fame, written six weeks before his death. "When I die/I don't care what happens to my body/throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em in East River/bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B'nai Israel Cemetery/But I want a big funeral."
Naropa Institute
