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Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) |
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American poet and diarist, a highly visible figure with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs in the beat generation literary movement, that burst into prominence in the 1950s. Allen Ginsberg's poem 'Howl' (1956) is one of the most significant products of that movement. However, before the radical work he underwent a long apprenticeship in traditional rhymed and metered lyrics. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. His parents,
second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants, were left-wing radicals
interested in Marxism, nudism, feminism, all modern ideas. Louis
Ginsberg (1895-1976), his father, was a teacher and poet, whose work
appeared such publications as the New York Times Magazine.
During Ginsberg's mother, Naomi (Levy) Ginsberg, was diagnosed as
suffering from paranoia; she was institutionalized, eventually
lobotomised, and she died in an asylum
in 1956. Her tragic life is the subject of Ginsberg's poem 'Kaddish,'
which was written in one 40-hour session as a compensation of her
funeral service, where there weren't enough male mourners present for
the rabbi to read the funeral elegy, the kaddish. The poem begins with
Ginsberg's sense of loss and moves on to document his mother's life and
death. "blessed daughter come to America, I long to hear your / voice
again, remembering your mother's music, in the Song of / the Natural
Front — / O glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave suck / my
first mystic life & taught me talk and music / from whose pained /
head I first took Vision — ". ('Kaddish: Proem, narrative, hymmnn, lament, litany & fugue,' in Kaddish and Other Poems 1958-1960, City Lights Books, thirteenth printing: March 2003, p. 29) During the Depression era, when the family lived in Paterson,
Ginsberg
found the poems of Walt Whitman.
"Where are
we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. / Which way does
your beard point tonight? / (I touch your book and dream of your
odyssey in the supermarket and / feel absurd.) / Will we walk all night
through solitary streets? The trees add shade / to shade, lights out in
the houses, we'll both be lonely." (from 'A Supermarket in
California,' in Collected Poems 1947-1997, HarperCollins, 2006, p. 144) After graduating from a public high school Ginsberg decided to study law. He won a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson to Columbia University, where he changed his major to English. Ginsberg became a star student, but also gained fame in the off-campus underground, making friends with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. For a period he dated Elise Cowen. None of her poetry was published in her lifetime. She committed suicide in 1962 by jumping out of the window of her parents' living room in Washington Heights, New York. An important person in Ginsberg's life was Neal Cassady, whose enormous sexual appetite helped Ginsberg to accept his own homosexuality. In 1943 he met and fell in love with his fellow student Lucien Carr. In the aftermath of a murder investigation, in which Carr was convicted, Ginsberg was ordered to undergo a psychiatric counseling. He was suspended for a year from the university. Before receiving his B.A. from Columbia University in 1949, Ginsberg worked as a welder in the Brooklyn naval yards, dishwasher, night porter, and in other odd jobs. Ginsberg's troubles with the law continued. His flatmate, the writer and hustler Herbert Huncke, used their house as a repository for stolen goods. They were arrested after a car chase; Ginsberg's name was found on papers left in the stolen car. Ginsberg pleaded insanity – he had heard in his East Harlem apartment a disembodied voice reciting Blake's Songs of Innocence And Experience – and he spent eight months at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute. After returning to Paterson, Ginsberg met the writer William Carlos Williams and the young poet Gregory Corso. Ginsberg also began to experiment with peyote; later he campaigned for the liberation of American anti-drug laws and become with Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey a central figure of the psychedelic movement. Ginsberg's drug poems include 'Mescaline,' Lysergic Acid' and 'Laughing Gas'. Before devoting himself entirely to poetry, Ginsberg worked
for a short time for Newsweek
and as a market research
consultant in New York and San Francisco (1951-53). In San Francisco
Ginsberg lived in the Nob Hill apartment of his girlfriend, Sheila
Winters, planned to settle down, get married, and have a life in
advertising. At the same time he had many homosexual encounters.
During a peyote trip, seeing the silhouette of the Sir Francis Drake
Hotel, he experienced a vision of Moloch, the Old Testament God. "A cat by the way sits on my shoulder as I write this," Ginsberg informed Kerouac in a 1954 letter. (Writers and Their Cats by Alison Nastasi, 2018, p. 15) When the relationship ended, Ginsberg moved to North Beach to share an apartment at 1010 Montgomery Street with a Russian painter, Peter Orlovsky.There he started to compose 'Howl,' determined to write "what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble lines magic lines from my real mind... write for my own soul's ear and a few other golden ears." (San Francisco: A Cultural and Literary History by Mick Sinclair, 2004, p. 183) William Carlos Williams, his mentor, said that Ginsberg had finally found his voice. The work, which gained immediate fame on October 7, 1955, at a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Light Press, with a foreword by Williams: "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell." The police seized the entirely printing on the grounds of
obscenity: Ginsberg's loudly declared homosexuality was explicitly
expressed in the book. The matter went to trial and Ginsberg used his
fame in the publication of Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and
Burroughs's Naked Lunch
(1959). The poet Joanna McClure, who
had attended the historical reading, befriended Ginsberg. With her
husband Michael she founded a press in their basement in San
Francisco. Like it was the case with many other writers with
dangerous ideas, the FBI kept a file on Ginsberg, primarily interested
in his contacts with Cuba. In a report from April 1965 the FBI stated:
"His activities, while bizarre, have not indicated any direction or
being inimical to the interests of the US." (Writers Under Surveillance: The FBI Files, edited by JPat Brown, B. C. D. Lipton, Michael Morisy, 2018, pp. 145-149) 'Howl' is a long, free-verse poem, reminiscent of Walt Whitman and influenced by the American Trancendentalists. It exemplifies Ginsberg's poetics of spontaneous composition with attention paid to the natural wanderings of the mind and the rhythms of breathing. "All you have to do," Ginsberg once stated, "is think of anything that comes into your head, then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each." ('Ginsberg, Allen' by Jodi Cressman, in The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture, edited by Justin Wintle, 2009, p. 294) From the beginning, the work was designated to be read aloud. Howl! became one of the symbols of the liberation of American culture in the 1950s from an academic formalism and political conservatism. Influenced by the mysticism and poetics of Blake, 'Howl' celebrated and lamented with Old Testament rhythms the casualties of capitalism and consumer society, and in particular the lives of bohemians, his friends. The final part, 'Footnote to Howl' is a hymn of praise: because of human love, the world is holy, despite the nightmare. The work was dedicated to Carl Solomon, a disciple of Artaud, whom Ginsberg met while at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute. After the death of his mother, Ginsberg signed onto a ship
sailing to the Arctic Circle. It marked the beginning of his travels
both at home and abroad. Trips to the far East and India with his lover
Peter Orlovsky inspired the collection The Change (1963).
From the position of Beat Generation spokesman, Ginsberg continued as
one of the central characters of the counter-culture in the 1960s. With
Jack Kerouac and Peter Orlovsky he visited William Burroughs in
Tangier. Burroughs stayed in his room eating hashish with a young
Moroccan boy. When he once tried to call Paul Bowles, who had
settled permanently in Tangier in 1947, Jane Bowles happened to
answer to phone. "Hello, this is Allen Ginsberg, the bop poet," he
said.Jane said, "The what?" ('Paul Bowles in Exile' by
Jay McInerney, in Conversations with
Paul Bowles, edited by Gena Caponi-Tabery, 1993, p. 190) Ginsberg lectured at universities, opposed the Vietnam War, marched against the C.I.A. and the Shah of Iran, and was arrested in the riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Cuba deported him after he protested at the regiment's treatment of homosexuals and called Che Guevara ''cute''. The students of Prague elected him "The King of May" – he was soon deported by the Czech authorities. Ginsberg's turning to Buddhism and a follower of guru Chögyam Trungpa affected deeply his poetry and world view. After Kerouac's death he helped to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist university, and also taught there. Among Ginsberg's major collections in the 1960s are Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), Reality Sandwiches (1963), which includes 'The Green Automobile', a fantasy about Neal Cassidy, and Planet News (1968), echoing the anti-war demonstrations and 1960s radicalism. In the 1970s appeared First Blues (1975), Poems All Over the Place (1978). In 1972 Ginsberg won the National Book Award for The Fall of America. Some of his talks on poetry and politics were published in Alle Verbatim (1974). In the 1970s Ginsberg was jailed for his part in an anti-Nixon protest, he toured with Bob Dylan, and campaigned on ecological issues. He wrote 'Plutonium Ode' to be read aloud at a public demonstration in Colorado and was arrested again. In the 1980s he opposed Reagan's covert policies in Nicaragua, worked as a visiting professor at Columbia (1986-87), and taught at Brooklyn College. His 800-page Collected Poems 1947-1980 was came out in 1984. Journals, Early Fifties Early Sixties appeared in 1977 – throughout his life Ginsberg kept scrapbooks, cuttings files, journals, notebooks, and other records of his life and activities. This journal was an account of Ginsberg's trip to South America in the footsteps of Burroughs to find the hallucinogen yagé. Selected Gay Poems and Correspondence (1978) was a collection of poems and letters, exchanged between Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. In Plutonian Ode (1982) Ginsberg returned to the peaceful protest outside a plutonium bomb trigger factory, in which he succeeded with his friends to stop a train carrying nuclear waste. Ginsberg died in 1997 of liver cancer at the age of 70. The plans for a MTV Unplugged performance with such musician as Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney were never realized. Ginsberg's personal archives are collected at Stanford University. For further reading: Allen Ginsberg in the Sixties by Eric Mottram (1972); Naked Angels by John Tytell (1976); Allen Ginsberg by Barry Miles (1989); Dharma Lion by Matthew A. Schumacher (1992); The Response to Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1994 by Bill Morgan (1996); Beat Culture and the New America by Lisa Phillips et al. (1996); Women of the Beat Generation by Brenda Knight (1996); Ex-Friends by Norman Podhoretz (1999); Screaming With Joy by Graham Caveney (1999); The Beat Generation by Jamie Russell (2002); I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg by Bill Morgan (2006); Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg by Michael Schumacher (expanded edition, 2016); First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher (2017); Don't Hide the Madnes: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg, edited by Steven Taylor; photos by Allen Ginsberg (2018); Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, edited by David Stephen Calonne (2019); The People vs. Ferlinghetti: the Fight to Oublish Allen Ginsberg's Howl by Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover (2019); Material Wealth: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg by Pat Thomas (2023); Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness by Stevan M. Weine (2023) Selected works:
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