Allen Ginsberg
Long incantatory works and books of known American poet Irwin Allen Ginsberg, a leading figure of the Beat Generation, include
Howl
(1956) and
Kaddish
(1961).
Naomi Ginsberg bore Irwin Allen Ginsberg, a son, to Louis Ginsberg, a Jewish member of the New York literary counterculture of the 1920s. They reared Ginsberg among several progressive political perspectives. Mental health of Naomi Ginsberg, a nudist, who supported the Communist party, concerned people throughout the childhood of the poet. According to biographer Barry Miles, "Naomi's illness gave Allen an enormous empathy and tolerance for madness, neurosis, and psychosis."
As an adolescent, Ginsberg savored Walt Whitman, though in 1939, when Ginsberg graduated high school, he considered Edgar Allan Poe his favorite poet. Eager to follow a childhood hero who had received a scholarship to Columbia University, Ginsberg made a vow that if he got into the school he would devote his life to helping the working class, a cause he took seriously over the course of the next several years.
He was admitted to Columbia University, and as a student there in the 1940s, he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom later became leading figures of the Beat movement. The group led Ginsberg to a "New Vision," which he defined in his journal: "Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art."
Around this time, Ginsberg also had what he referred to as his "Blake vision," an auditory hallucination of William Blake reading his poems "Ah Sunflower," "The Sick Rose," and "Little Girl Lost." Ginsberg noted the occurrence several times as a pivotal moment for him in his comprehension of the universe, affecting fundamental beliefs about his life and his work. While Ginsberg claimed that no drugs were involved, he later stated that he used various drugs in an attempt to recapture the feelings inspired by the vision.
In 1954, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco. His mentor, William Carlos Williams, introduced him to key figures in the San Francisco poetry scene, including Kenneth Rexroth. He also met Michael McClure, who handed off the duties of curating a reading for the newly-established "6" Gallery. With the help of Rexroth, the result was "The '6' Gallery Reading" which took place on October 7, 1955. The event has been hailed as the birth of the Beat Generation, in no small part because it was also the first public reading of Ginsberg's "Howl," a poem which garnered world-wide attention for him and the poets he associated with.
Shortly after Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956 by City Lights Bookstore, it was banned for obscenity. The work overcame censorship trials, however, and became one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two languages.
In the 1960s and 70s, Ginsberg studied under gurus and Zen masters. As the leading icon of the Beats, Ginsberg was involved in countless political activities, including protests against the Vietnam War, and he spoke openly about issues that concerned him, such as free speech and gay rights agendas.
Ginsberg went on publish numerous collections of poetry, including Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), Planet News (1968), and The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973), which won the National Book Award.
In 1993, Ginsberg received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (the Order of Arts and Letters) from the French Minister of Culture. He also co-founded and directed the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado. In his later years, Ginsberg became a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College.
On April 5, 1997, in New York City, he died from complications of hepatitis.
“I broadcast thru Time”
“Machine chaos on Earth, Too many bodies, mouths bleeding on every Continent”
“Hairy Mammal whaddya want”
“Forget pleasure and Ambition”
“Trees scream and drop bright leaves”
“Eat Meat and your a beast”
“our means in America to control the money munching war machine, bright lit industry”
“that blue flame burnning? Industry!”
“Empire State's orange shoulders lifted above the Hell”
“The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene”
“We the People - shelling the Vietcong”
“What Patriot wrote that shit?”
“Television concentrates its blue flicker of death in the frontal lobe”
“more diamonds and pearls of electricity”
“Unless Chase Bank quits I prophesy blood violence”
“a communist conspiracy among the youth ... speakers on campuses/trained to condition idealistic brains”
“Trees hang their branches”
“YOUR NAME IS WRITTEN IN HEAVEN”
“senseless, senseless coughs of emotion”
“LSD Shakti-snake settles like Gas into Consciousness”
“...salute the new sunset”
“...my man world will blow up”
“You too must seek the sun...”
“Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?”
“Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!”
“Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!”
“We talk about our assholes. We talk about our cocks. We talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re gonna fuck tomorrow…Everyone tells one’s friends about that, right? So the question is, what happens when you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your muse? The trick is to break down that distinction, to approach your muse as frankly as you would talk to yourself, or to your friends. It’s the ability to commit to writing, to write the same way you are.”
“Absolutes are Coercion.Change is absolute.”
“one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others”
“I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?What price bananas? Are you my Angel?”
“It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.”
“Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon”
“Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question "How does one become a prophet?"]”
“Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!”
“Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.”
“who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism”
“All these books are published in Heaven.”
“…we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re all blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment(Sunflower Sutra)”
“Inside skull vast as outside skull”
“We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”
“Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!”
“I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?”
“Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph”
“I know too much and not enough”
“The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!”
“I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view. ”
“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 our 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. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”
“Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.”
“America, why are your libraries full of tears?”
“The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and handand asshole holy!Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere isholy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's anangel!”