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.
“Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!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!The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman isholy as you my soul are holy!The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice isholy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holyKerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas-sady holy the unknown buggered and sufferingbeggars holy the hideous human angels!Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocksof the grandfathers of Kansas!Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bopapocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuanahipsters peace & junk & drums!Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holythe cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy themysterious rivers of tears under the streets!Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of themiddle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell-ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria &Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy MoscowHoly Istanbul!Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy theclocks in space holy the fourth dimension holythe fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy thelocomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina-tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy theabyss!Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!bodies! suffering! magnanimity!Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligentkindness of the soul!”
“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.”
“I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.”
“I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly.God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly.”
“Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on.”
“Our heads are round so thought can change direction”
“America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.”
“Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Spacethrough images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame”
“To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.”
“I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.”
“I'm with you in Rocklandin my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”
“Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. ”
“Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!”
“Just because I like to suck cock doesn't make me any less American than Jesse Helms.”
“We're all golden sunflowers inside.”
“If I had a soul I sold itfor pretty wordsIf I had a body I usedit up spurting my essenceAllen Ginsberg warns youdont follow my pathto extinction”
“My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.”
“My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.”
“with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls”
“I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.”
“The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.”
“Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.”
“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
“Candor disarms paranoia.”
“Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!”
“Forty feet long sixty feet high hotelCovered with old gray for buzzing fliesEye like mango flowing orange pusEars Durga people vomiting in their sleepGot huge legs a dozen buses move inside CalcuttaSwallowing mouthfuls of dead ratsMangy dogs bark out of a thousand breastsGarbage pouring from its ass behind alleysAlways pissing yellow Hooghly waterBellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddlesCoughing lungs Sound going down the sewerNose smell a big gray BidiHeart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracksCovered with a hat of cloudy ironSuffering water buffalo head loweredTo pull the huge cart of year uphill”
“The whole blear worldof smoke and twisted steelaround my head in a railroadcar, and my mind wanderingpast the rust into futurity:I saw the sun go downin a carnal and primevalworld, leaving darknessto cover my railroad trainbecause the other side of theworld was waiting for dawn.”
“I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator. ”
“This is the one and onlyfirmament; thereforeit is the absolute world.There is no other world.The circle is complete.I am living in Eternity.The ways of this worldare the ways of Heaven.”
“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”
“What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?”
“What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit-man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the treeswith a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images,I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming ofyour enumerations! ”
“I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.”
“I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows --/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now.”
“What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?- Howl”
“America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.”
“Everybody's serious but me.”
“The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight,the weight we carry is love. ”
“Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!”