Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997)

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Allen Ginsberg Photographs by Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank (Designer)

Since the early 1950s, Allen Ginsberg has carried a camera, pointing its lens randomly at the counterculture around him. His subjects include Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Robert Frank, and the dozens of other writers, painters, and friends involved in the Beat movement of 1950s America. In recent years, Ginsberg has continued their visual history with a new series of portraits. Beneath each photograph the poet writes of remembered circumstances relating to the photograph or its subject.

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams (Introduction)

The epigraph for Howl is from Walt Whitman: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Announcing his intentions with this ringing motto, Allen Ginsberg published a volume of poetry which broke so many social taboos that copies were impounded as obscene, and the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested. The court case that followed found for Ginsberg and his publisher, and the publicity made both the poet and the book famous. Ginsberg went on from this beginning to become a cultural icon of sixties radicalism. This works seminal place in the culture is indicated in Czeslaw Milosz's poetic tribute to Ginsberg: "Your blasphemous howl still resounds in a neon desert where the human tribe wanders, sentenced to unreality". 

Deliberate Prose : Selected Essays, 1952-1995 by Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan (Editor)

Allen Ginsberg's essays, collected here for the first time, were written over the course of a long, productive, and politically engaged life. With his finger ever on the pulse of America, Ginsberg was consistently outspoken and passionate about his beliefs. Whether criticizing the American government, protesting the proliferation of nuclear weapons or the waging of war in Vietnam, or denouncing the injustice of capitalists Ginsberg gave voice to a moral conscience of the nation. His views on free speech and the drug, culture, his quest for inner peace, the creation of the Beat generation, and his innovative poetics reflect the, concerns of a postwar American culture that he helped shape.

Arranged by subject, these essays offer a fascinating counterpoint to Allen Ginsberg's poems. Hey are provocative, playful, eloquent, and of the moment. In the section titled "Politics and Prophecies," Ginsberg takes on everyone from the Federal Drug Administration to the Pentagon to the Hell's Angels. Included here are his notes on how to make march/spectacle (drawn up in 1965 when a march was planned at Berkeley to support the cause of peace in Vietnam and to protest the draft), and his thoughts on how the raging issues of the day:  China, Vietnam, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In another section, "Censorship and Sex Laws," Ginsberg's pieces demonstrate the strength of his belief in the right to free speech, which leads him to defend NAMBLA (North America Man Boy Love Association), comedian Lenny Bruce, and writer William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch. Ginsberg's essays on "Writers" focus on those he particularly admired, including William Blake. Walt Whitman, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Robert Creely. Through a combination of literary criticism and personal reflection, Ginsberg illuminates the life and work of these artists. Also, profiled are such influential figures as jean Genet, W. H. Auden, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, and Philip Glass, artists whose work and sensibility deeply affected him.

Personal as well as political, Deliberate Prose is more than a collection of essays from one of the greatest cultural figures of our time. It is also a social history of modern America that reminds us of the events and issues that preoccupied the minds of a nation in the postwar years.

Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, a son of Naomi Ginsberg and lyric poet Louis Ginsberg. In 1956 he published his signal poem, Howl, one of the most widely read and translated poems of the century. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French minister of culture in 1993, and cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world, Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997.

Ashes and Blues:  An Allen Ginsberg Memorial

By DHARMAGEDDON

Site includes a short biography, a discussion forum, links, bibliographies and essays in memory of Allen Ginsberg.

Biography:

Allen Ginsberg, b. Newark, N.J., June 3, 1926, is an American poet and leading apostle of the beat generation. His first published work, Howl and Other Poems (1956), sparked the San Francisco Renaissance and defined the generation of the '50s with an authority and vision that had not occurred in the United States since T. S. Eliot captured the anxiety of the 1920s in The Waste Land. Ginsberg's bardic rage against material values, however, was in a voice very different from Eliot's scholarly mourning for the loss of the spirit. In his second major work, Kaddish (1961), a poem on the anniversary of his mother's death, Ginsberg described their anguished relationship. In the 1960s, while vigorously participating in the anti-Vietnam War movement, he published several poetic works, including Reality Sandwiches (1963) and Planet News (1969). The Fall of America received the National Book Award for 1974. Collected Poems, 1947-85 (1995) contains all of his important work; White Shroud (1987) includes poems from the 1980s. Ginsberg sees himself as a part of the prophetic tradition in poetry begun by William Blake and continued by Walt Whitman. He names his contemporary influences as William Carlos Williams and his friend Jack Kerouac.

Allen Ginsberg's FBI File

from Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous dossiers : exposing the secret war against America's greatest authors (New York : D.I. Fine, 1988)

Excerpt:

Allen Ginsberg, poet, social activist and member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, also engaged the attention of the FBI record keepers. "I have a stack of documents three feet high," the . . . poet said, and showed me a sampling of them. He has devoted much of his time to challenging the government on issues of privacy and personal freedom - including sexual preference - and arousing his fellow writers to campaign for freedom of expression...

Allen Ginsberg

From the Naropa Institute

Site Includes:

Allen Ginsberg:  Shadow Changes into Bone

Names Index:
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