Cuba, Mexico and eventually arrived on the West Coast – home to a vibrant, bohemian
literary community. (For more on the beginnings of Beat, check out "How
Beat Happened," a superb introduction to Beat Culture by Steve Silberman,)
Bearing a letter of introduction from the poet (and fellow Paterson resident) William
Carlos Williams, Ginsberg met Kenneth Rexroth, a distinguished man-of-letters and center
of what was then known as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance . Presided over by
Rexroth, this active Bay Area poetry community included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael
McClure, Gary Synder, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Josephine Miles, James
Broughton, Philip Lamantia and other writers, artists, filmmakers and avant-gardists. In
October 1955, Rexroth hosted a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco: the poets who
read that evening included Synder, Whalen, McClure, Lamantia and Ginsberg in what would be
his poetry-reading debut. Cheered on by Kerouac, Ginsberg gave an inspired, first ever
reading of "Howl."
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in
the
machinery of night
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and . . . .
So begins "Howl," one of the most widely read poems of the century. Ginsberg
composed it in what he calls his "Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath," a
free-verse form whose sources include the poets and writers Christopher Smart, Percy
Shelley, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Antonin Artaud,
Federico Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams. In the 1950’s (and into the
1960’s), Ginsberg also used drugs as a means of inducing visionary awareness, such as his
Blake experience had provided. Thus, exposed to new influences and literary friends in
California – Ginsberg achieved the open-form poetry which sets his work apart from the
largely traditional verse of the time.
After the Gallery Six reading – Lawrence Ferlinghetti offered to publish Howl and
Other Poems (1956) as part of his City Lights Books Pocket Poet series. In
1957, United States Custom officers and San Francisco police seized the edition, and
Ferlinghetti was charged with publishing an obscene book. The trial, in which well known
establishment writers like Rexroth, Mark Shorer, Walter Van Tilburg Clark and others
testified for the defense, drew local banner headlines and nation-wide attention. By the
time Judge Clayton W. Horn delivered the verdict that "Howl" was not obscene,
the Beat movement had been given a manifesto of-sorts and Allen Ginsberg was
famous.
On the road for the next decade – sometimes with Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso and his
longtime companion, Peter Orlovsky – Ginsberg roamed the country and the world. Beginning
in the early 1950’s, Ginsberg would venture to the Yucatan (where he helped discover a
notable Mayan archeological site), to Tangier’s (where he would visit the expatriot
community centered around Paul Bowles) and to Europe (where he would live for a while in
Paris). Sea voyages as a member of the merchant marine took him to Africa and the Artic.
In 1960 he would spend half a year in Chile, Peru, Bolivia and the Amazon region.
Most importantly during this time, Ginsberg exorcised some of his internal demons by
writing ‘Kaddish,’ a brilliant long poem about his mother’s insanity and death. Published
in book form in 1961, "Kaddish" is a prayer and lament for Naomi Ginsberg. It is
also widely regarded as his finest work. The poem gives a seemingly factual account of his
mother’s tragic journey through life, from that of a frightened Russian child to a young
women in America and onward "toward education, marriage, nervous breakdown,
operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad." A bittersweet epilogue to
"Kaddish," called "White Shroud," was published twenty five years
later.
Throughout 1962 and 1963, Ginsberg and Orlovsky toured the Far East. There, Ginsberg
came into direct contact with the traditions of Zen Buddhism. His interest in Buddhism and
Asian literature had been sparked by his Bay Area friendships with Synder, Whalen and
Rexroth. Ginsberg’s interest, which would shape the development of his poetry, has
continued to the present.
In 1965, Ginsberg went to Cuba as a correspondent for the Evergreen Review but
was deported when he spoke against the government’s persecution of homosexuals at Havana
University. He then journeyed to the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia, where he was
again deported after more than 100,000 people in Prague crowned him King of May in
1965. Back in the United States, the F.B.I. placed him on their Dangerous Security List.
Throughout the 1960’s, Ginsberg took an active role in the growing anti-war and
counter-culture movements. In 1965 he coined the term "flower power." He was
also a moving spirit (along with Synder, McClure and Timothy Leary) behind the first of
the hippie mass gatherings, the 1967 Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In held
in nearby Golden Gate Park. Later the same year he was arrested with Dr. Benjamin Spock
and others for his part in a New York City antiwar demonstration. During the 1968
Democratic Convention, Ginsberg was tear-gassed while trying to induce calm and chanting
"Om" at the Yippie Life Festival. At the trial of the demonstration leaders -
known as the Chicago Seven, Ginsberg testified for the defense.
Ginsberg’s literary efforts during the 1960’s and early 1970’s were many and varied. At
the time, poetry was chiefly the written art of academic craftsman. Ginsberg took it out
of the study and classroom and onto the podium, becoming a skilled public performer of his
poems. His books from this period include Reality Sandwiches (1963), The Yage
Letters (with William S. Burroughs) (1963), Indian Journals (1970) and The
Fall of America (1972) – for which he was awarded National Book Award. Planet News
(1968) constitutes a poetic record of his travels in Eastern Europe, the Indian
subcontinent and other parts of Asia as well as the United States. Included in this latter
collection is "Wichita Vortex Sutra," one of the poet’s most accomplished and
well known works. It is also one of Ginsberg’s most political works.
. . . Kansas! Kansas! Shuddering at last!
PERSON appearing in Kansas!
angry telephone calls to the University!
Police dumbfounded leaning on
their radiocar hoods . . .
In 1974, Ginsberg helped found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the
Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world. Earlier,
Ginsberg had met Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist who had recently arrived in the
United States. Trungpa taught full acceptance of sensual experience as the route to
enlightenment and "the sacredness of immediate experience, sexual candor, and absence
of censoriousnes." These Buddhist believes echo many notions found in various Beat
writings.
With the end of the war in Vietnam, Ginsberg refocussed his political energies on
efforts to expose alleged CIA subsidization of drug trafficking; in attempts to reform
American drug laws (including testifying before Congress); and in the antinuclear,
environmental and gay liberation movements. He has also spoken out against covert action
by the United States government, including domestic harassment of the counterculture.
Following a pattern set early in his career, Ginsberg has continued to produce and
publish work in many fields. The last two decades have seen numerous books and small press
editions, including Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties (1977), Mind Breaths
(1978), Plutonian Ode (1982), Collected Poems (1984), White Shroud
(1986), Cosmopolitan Greetings (1994) and Journals Mid-Fifties 1954 – 1958.
These last four titles were published by Harper, and mark Ginsberg’s first publishing
agreement with a major publisher.
During the 1970’s and 1980’s, Ginsberg recorded and occasionally toured with Bob Dylan,
John Hammond, Sr. and the Clash. In 1994, Rhino Records released Holy Soul Jelly Roll:
Poems and Songs 1949 – 1993, a four-disc compilation of the poet’s many spoken word
recordings. This multiset disc and its accompanying booklet serve as a kid of
"selected works" of Ginsberg’s spoken word recordings. Other recent CD releases
have included The Lion For Real (1989) and The Ballad of the Skeletons
(1996), as well as collaborative efforts with Philip Glass, Hydrogen Jukebox
(1993), and the Kronos Quartet, Howl U.S.A. (1996).
In 1960’s, Ginsberg appeared in some of the most famous experimental films of the
decade, including the well known Pull My Daisy. His longtime interest in the visual
arts – especially photography, a practice encouraged by his longtime friend Robert Frank -
have now been collected in two books, Photographs (1991) and Snapshot Poetics
(1993). Ginsberg’s photographs were also represented in a groundbreaking exhibit organized
by the Whitney Museum of Art, "Beat Culture and the New America: 1950 – 1965."
Since 1974, Ginsberg has also been a member of the American Institute of Arts and
Letters – the highest official recognition he has received. Ginsberg has also been named a
Guggenheim fellow, and is currently a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College. To
date, "Howl" has been translated into some 23 languages, including Chinese,
Japanese, Czech, Hebrew, Macedonian, Norwegian and Polish. The just published Selected
Poems, 1947 – 1995, chosen by Ginsberg from throughout his long career, collects many
of the poet’s well known works – and in the words of Ginsberg, "isolates & points
attention to work less known, more subtle, rhetorically wild, beyond ‘Beat Generation’
literary stereotypes."
Online Source