Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

200px Allen Ginsberg (left) with his lifelong friend, poet Peter Orlovsky
Born:	June 3 1926(1926-06-03) Newark, New Jersey
Died:	April 5 1997 (aged 70)
Occupation(s):	poet, activist, essayist
Literary movement:	Beat, New American Poets, Postmodernism
Magnum opus:	Howl, Kaddish
Influences:	Neal Cassady,Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Ezra Pound, Christopher Smart, Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, Jean Genet, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hart Crane, William Shakespeare
Influenced:	Bob Dylan, LeRoi Jones, Robert Lowell, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Andrei Codrescu, Saul Williams, Beau Sia, Jacob Ehrlich, Jim Morrison, Michael Savage, Bono

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5 1997) was an American poet, famous for being a founding member of a major literary movement and an activist for human rights. Among his other lifetime pursuits were world travel, photography, songwriting, and teaching.

Ginsberg is best known for Howl (1956), a long poem about the self-destruction of his friends of the Beat Generation and what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States at the time.

Personal life

Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. Both of his parents belonged to the 1920s New York literary counter-culture, had their political ideals heavily influenced Ginsberg. His father, Louis, was both a teacher and poet; his mother, Naomi, was a nudist who suffered from poor mental health for most of her lifetime.

Naomi was also supported the Communist Party, and often took Allen to Party meetings. Ginsberg later said that his mother's bedtime stories often held the same premise: "The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them." Both her mental health and her social ideology had a tremendous impact on Ginsberg's world perspective. As a teenager, Ginsberg wrote letters to The New York Times about political issues such as World War II and workers' rights.

As a teenager, Ginsberg began reading poetry. He became acquainted with and enamored of Walt Whitman’s work, and named Edgar Allan Poe as his favorite poet. Upon graduating high school in 1943, Ginsberg had aims at obtaining a scholarship to Columbia University and pursuing labor law. He attended Montclair State University briefly, before entering Columbia University on a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson, (1949). He began his studies with the initial intent to become a labor lawyer. While at Columbia, Ginsberg contributed to the Columbia Review literary journal, the Jester humor magazine, won the Woodberry Poetry Prize and served as president of the Philolexian Society, the campus literary and debate group.

As a student at Columbia, he befriended William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, all members of the eventual Beat movement. Also around this time, Ginsberg experienced an auditory hallucination of William Blake reading his poems "Ah Sunflower," "The Sick Rose," and "Little Girl Lost." He refers to this experience his "Blake vision,” and late often pointed to it as an influential moment in his life and his work, which redefined 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 intuited that some hand had crafted that also, or rather that the sky was the hand that crafted itself. He explained that this hallucination was not inspired by drug use, but said he sought to recapture that feeling later with various drugs.

In 1954 in San Francisco, Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky, with whom he fell in love and who remained his life-long companion, and with whom he eventually shared his interest in Tibetan Buddhism.

Ginsberg's spiritual journey began early on with his spontaneous visions, and continued with an early trip to India and a chance encounter on a New York City street with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (they both tried to catch the same cab), a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master of the Vajrayana school, who became his friend and life-long teacher. Ginsberg helped Trungpa in founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg was also involved with Hinduism. He befriended A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement in the Western world, a relationship that is documented by Satsvarupa Gosvami in his biographical account 'Srila Prabhupada Lilamrta'. Ginsberg donated money, materials, and his reputation to help the Swami establish the first temple, and toured with him to promote his cause. Ginsberg also claimed to be the first person on the North American continent to chant the Hare Krishna mantra. He was mourned by the Hare Krishna's upon his passing in 1997. Music and chanting were both important parts of Ginsberg's live delivery during poetry readings. He often accompanied himself on a harmonium, 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.

Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, surrounded by family and friends in his East Village loft in New York City. He succumbed to liver cancer via complications of hepatitis. He was 70 years old. Ginsberg continued to write through his final illness, with his last poem "Things I'll Not Do (Nostalgias)" written on March 30.

Professional life

Though he had intentions to be a labor lawyer, Ginsberg wrote poetry for most of his life. His admiration for the writing of Jack Kerouac inspired him to take poetry more seriously. In 1954, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco. 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.

He studied under William Carlos Williams, who guided his development and introduced him to other prominent area poets, including Kenneth Rexroth and Michael McClure. With the help of Rexroth, Ginsberg and McClure organized a poetry reading at the new “6” Gallery. The result was "The Six Gallery reading" on October 7, 1955. 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. An account can be found in Kerouac's novel "The Dharma Bums" of the night, describing collecting change from each audience member to buy jugs of wine, and Ginsberg reading passionately, drunken, with arms outstretched.

An important figure when considering inspiration for "Howl" is Carl Solomon. The full title is "Howl for Carl Solomon." Solomon was a Dada and Surrealism enthusiast (he introduced Ginsberg to Artaud) 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 therapy, including electroshock therapy. Much of the final section of the first part of "Howl" is a description of this.

Ginsberg used Solomon as an example of all those ground down by the machine of "Moloch." Ginsberg said the image of Moloch was inspired by peyote visions he had of the Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco which appeared to him as a skull; he took it as a 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-World War II America focused on material gain, which Ginsberg frequently blamed for the destruction of all those outside of societal norms.

"Howl" was considered scandalous at the time of its publication due to the rawness of its language, which is frequently explicit. Shortly after Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956 by City Lights Bookstore, it was banned for obscenity. The ban became a cause célèbre among defenders of the First Amendment, and was later lifted after Judge Clayton W. Horn declared the poem to possess redeeming social importance. The work became one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two languages.

In 1957, Ginsberg left San Francisco, and after a spell in Morocco, he and Peter Orlovsky joined friend Gregory Corso in Paris. Corso introduced them to a shabby lodging house above a bar at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur that was to become known as the Beat Hotel. They were soon joined by William Burroughs and others. It was a productive, creative time for all of them. There, Ginsberg finished his epic poem "Kaddish," Corso composed "Bomb" and "Marriage," and Burroughs (with Ginsberg and Corso's help) put together "Naked Lunch," from previous writings. This period was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman, who moved in at about the same time, and took pictures constantly of the residents of the 'hotel' until it closed in 1963.

Style and technique

Portrait with Bob Dylan, taken in 1975

Ginsberg’s mentor, William Carlos Williams, hated most of his early poems. Most of his very early poetry was written in formal rhyme and meter like his father or like his idol William Blake, and included archaic pronouns like "thee." Williams told Ginsberg later, "In this mode perfection is basic, and these poems are not perfect." He taught Ginsberg not to emulate the old masters but to speak with his own voice and the voice of the common 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."

Ginsberg's poetry was strongly influenced by Modernism (specifically Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and most importantly William Carlos Williams), Romanticism (specifically Percy Shelley and John Keats), the beat and cadence of jazz (specifically that of bop musicians such as Charlie Parker), and his Kagyu Buddhist practice and Jewish background. He considered himself to have inherited the visionary poetic mantle handed down from the English poet and artist William Blake, and the American poet Walt Whitman. 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.

Ginsberg also made an intense study of haiku and the paintings of Paul Cezanne 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 spasm, or "kick." Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in haiku. 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 he wrote with Philip Glass).

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 famous long line could also be traced back to his study of Walt Whitman; Ginsberg claimed Whitman's long line was a dynamic technique few other poets had ventured to develop further. Ginsberg also commonly employed catachresis. For example, from Howl: "secret gas station solipsisms of johns" is perhaps designed to make solipsism (a noun used as a verb here) sound like a sexual act. Another example is "what peaches and what penumbra" from "Supermarket in California" is perhaps designed to make penumbra seem like a fruit or like something you can buy in a supermarket.

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.

Ginsberg developed an individualistic style that's easily identified as Ginsbergian. Howl came out during a potentially hostile literary environment less welcoming to poetry outside of tradition; there was a renewed focus on form and structure among academic poets and critics partly inspired by New Criticism. Consequently, 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 thoughts and feelings that were naturally poetic. 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 occasional use of meter (for example the anapest of "who came back to Denver and waited in vain"), Ginsberg denied any intention 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.

Legacy

Ginsberg won the National Book Award for his book The Fall of America. In 1993, the French Minister of Culture awarded him the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (the Order of Arts and Letters). He was named a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College, and he also helped found and direct the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado.

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 visitors as indicated by a handful of stones always on his marker and the occasional book or other item left by other poets and admirers.

Bibliography

• Howl and Other Poems (1956), ISBN 0872860175.
• Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), ISBN 0872860191.
• Reality Sandwiches (1963), ISBN 0872860213.
• The Yage Letters (1963) – with William S. Burroughs
• Planet News (1968), ISBN 0872860205.
• First Blues: Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs 1971 - 1974 (1975), ISBN 0-916190-05-6.
• The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems 1948–1951 (1972), ISBN 0872860175.
• The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973), ISBN 0872860639.
• Iron Horse (1972), ISBN 0872860779.
• Mind Breaths (1978), ISBN 0872860922.
• Plutonian Ode: Poems 1977–1980 (1982), ISBN 0872861252.
• Collected Poems 1947–1980 (1984), ISBN 0809591324.

  Republished with later material added as Collected Poems 1947-1997, New York, Harper Collins, 2006, ISBN 0061139742.

• White Shroud Poems: 1980–1985 (1986), ISBN 0060157143.
• Cosmopolitan Greetings Poems: 1986–1993 (1994), ISBN 006016770X.
• Howl Annotated (1995)
• Illuminated Poems (1996), ISBN 1568580703.
• Selected Poems: 1947–1995 (1999), ISBN 0788164988.
• Death and Fame: Poems 1993–1997 (1999), ISBN 0060192925.
• Deliberate Prose 1952–1995 (2000), ISBN 0141181850.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• "Home Page".The Allen Ginsberg Trust. Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• "Allen Ginsberg", Poets.org. Retrieved September 22, 2007.

Further Reading

• Bullough, Vern L. "Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context." Harrington Park Press, 2002. pp 304-311.
• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0140151028 (pbk)
• Clark, Thomas. "Allen Ginsberg." Writers at Work — The Paris Review Interviews. 3.1 (1968) pp.279-320.
• Gifford, Barry (ed.). As Ever: The Collected Letters of Allen Ginsberg & Neal Cassady. Berkeley: Creative Arts Books (1977).
• Podhoretz, Norman. "At War with Allen Ginsberg," in Ex-Friends (Free Press, 1999), 22-56. ISBN0-684-85594-1.
• Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. London: Virgin Publishing Ltd. (2001), paperback, 628 pages, ISBN 0-7535-0486-3
• Hrebeniak, Michael. Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2006.
• Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. ISBN 0-520-24015-4
• Schumacher, Michael (ed.). Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son. Bloomsbury (2002), paperback, 448 pages, ISBN 1-58234-216-4
• Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.
• Trigilio, Tony. "Strange Prophecies Anew": Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. ISBN 0838638546.
• Trigilio, Tony. Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. ISBN 0809327554
• Tytell, John. Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1976. ISBN 1-56663-683-3
• Warner, Simon (ed.). Howl for Now: A 50th anniversary celebration of Allen Ginsberg's epic protest poem. West Yorkshire, UK: Route (2005), paperback, 144 pages, ISBN 1-901927-25-3

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Allen Ginsberg

• "DVD Home Page". The Life & Times of Allen Ginsberg. Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• "BBC Interview with Allen Ginsberg". Google Video. Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• "Allen Ginsberg's 1966 visit to Wichita, KS". The Wichita Vortex. Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• "The Ballad of the Skeletons- Performed by Allan Ginsberg & Paul McCartney". Youtube. Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• McChesney, John. 2006,"After 50 Years, Ginsberg's 'Howl' Still Resonates". NPR Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• "Main Page". Allen Ginsberg-Live in London . Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• "Conversation #1 with A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Srila Prabhupada's Lectures. Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• "Conversation #2 with A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada". Srila Pabhupada's Lectures. Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• "Petros meets Ginsberg". The Art of the Interview. Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• "Allen Ginsberg". Rolling Stone. Retrieved September 22, 2007.
• "Allen Ginsberg interviews the Maharishi". Google Documents. Retrieved September 22, 2007.

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