The Essential Ginsberg

440 Pages·2015·6.15 MB·English

by  Allen Ginsberg

CONTENTS
Introduction by Michael Schumacher
I. POEMS
The Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour (1947) (Empty Mirror)
The Trembling of the Veil (1948) (Empty Mirror)
The Shrouded Stranger (1949–1951) (The Gates of Wrath)
The Green Automobile (1953) (Reality Sandwiches)
Song (1954) (Howl and Other Poems)
On Burroughs’ Work (1954) (Reality Sandwiches)
Howl (1955) (Howl and Other Poems)
Footnote to Howl (1955) (Howl and Other Poems)
A Supermarket in California (1955) (Howl and Other Poems)
Sunflower Sutra (1955) (Howl and Other Poems)
America (1956) (Howl and Other Poems)
Kaddish (1957-1959) (Kaddish and Other Poems)
Message (1958) (Kaddish and Other Poems)
To Aunt Rose (1958) (Kaddish and Other Poems)
The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express (1963) (Planet News)
Kral Majales (1965) (Planet News)
Who Be Kind To (1965) (Planet News)
Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966) (Planet News)
City Midnight Junk Strains (1966) (Planet News)
Wales Visitation (1966) (Planet News)
Please Master (1968) (The Fall of America)
On Neal’s Ashes (1968) (The Fall of America)
Memory Gardens (1969) (The Fall of America)
Mind Breaths (1973) (Mind Breaths)
Ego Confession (1974) (Mind Breaths)
Don’t Grow Old (1976-1978) (Mind Breaths)
Plutonian Ode (1978) (Plutonian Ode)
White Shroud (1983) (White Shroud)
Cosmopolitan Greetings (1986) (Cosmopolitan Greetings)
Return of Kral Majales (1990) (Cosmopolitan Greetings)
After Lalon (1992) (Cosmopolitan Greetings)
The Charnel Ground (1992) (Cosmopolitan Greetings)
Death & Fame (1997) (Death and Fame)
Starry Rhymes (1997) (Death and Fame)
II. SONGS
September on Jessore Road (1971)
Gospel Noble Truths (1975)
Capitol Air (1980)
III. ESSAYS
Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs (1959)
“When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake” (1961)
Prose Contribution to Cuban Revolution (1961)
How Kaddish Happened (1966)
Statement of Allen Ginsberg, Poet, New York City, Hearings Before a Special
Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary—U.S. Senate (1966)
Public Solitude (1966)
“The Fall of America” Wins an Award (1974)
A Definition of the Beat Generation (1981)
Meditation and Poetics (1987)
Statement [on Censorship] (1990)
IV. JOURNALS
New York: ca. late-winter 1949
New York: May 20, 1952
San Francisco: June 8, 1955
Pacallpa, Peru: June 11, 1960 *
Benares, India: February 22, 1963
Havana, Cuba: Feb. 18-19, 1965 *
Cherry Valley, New York: October 22, 1969*
* previously unpublished
V. INTERVIEWS
The Paris Review Interview (Paris Review) (1965)
The Craft Interview (New York Quarterly) (1970)
VI. LETTERS
AG to Neal Cassady, ca. April 21, 1949
AG to John Clellon Holmes, June 16, 1949
AG to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, ca. February 1952
AG to Louis Ginsberg, ca. late-March 1956
AG to Richard Eberhart, May 18, 1956
AG to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, April 3, 1957
AG to William S. Burroughs, June 10, 1960
AG to Jack Kerouac, May 11, 1962*
AG to Nicanor Parra, August 20, 1965
AG to Robert Creeley, November 28, 1967
AG to Gary Snyder, July 8, 1968
AG to Diana Trilling, January 15, 1979
*
previously unpublished
VII. PHOTOGRAPHS
AG on rooftop [1953]
Jack Kerouac on fire escape [1953]
William S. Burroughs [1953]
Jack Kerouac [1953]
Neal Cassady and Natalie Jackson [1955]
San Francisco apartment [1955]
Gregory Corso [1957]
Group portrait, Tangier [1961]
AG in India [1963]
Neal Cassady and Timothy Leary [1964]
Lawrence Ferlinghetti [1984]
Anne Waldman [1985]
Orlovsky family [1987]
William S. Burroughs [1991]
Herbert Huncke [1993]
Self-portrait on 70th birthday [1996]
Acknowledgments
About the Editor
About the Author
Also by Allen Ginsberg
Praise
Credits
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
Allen Ginsberg, one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, was
such a familiar face in newspapers and magazines and on television that he was
internationally famous to millions who had never read any of his poetry. He
spent much of his life as an advocate for human rights, freedom of expression,
gay liberation, and other causes; he was one of the early, vocal opponents of the
Vietnam war. He was a teacher, Buddhist, essayist, songwriter, photographer.
One of the core members of the Beat Generation, he slipped easily into a
position of leadership among war protesters, college students, Flower Power
hippies, and political radicals. “It occurs to me that I am America,” he wrote,
semihumorously, in one of his early poems, but he wound up being much more
than that. Poet/editor J. D. McClutchy summed up Ginsberg’s influence in one
simple statement published in the New York Times following Ginsberg’s death in
1997: “His work is finally a history of our era’s psyche, with all its contradictory
urges.”
Given the man Ginsberg became, it’s hard to believe that, at one time, people
feared for his psychological well being—even for his survival. Louis Ginsberg,
Allen’s father, worried that he might be following the path of his mother, Naomi
Ginsberg, a bright but troubled schoolteacher who spent much of her adult life
institutionalized for mental disorders. William Carlos Williams, Allen’s early
mentor and sponsor, expressed his concern when, in his introduction to Howl
and Other Poems, he wrote: “I never thought he’d live to grow up and write a
book of poems. His ability to survive, travel, and go on writing astonishes me.
That he has gone on developing his art is no less amazing to me.”
How did Allen Ginsberg’s life develop from his difficult youthful days to a
point where he would be honored for his intellectual and artistic mind? This
book, aside from assembling selections of Ginsberg’s most memorable poetry,
prose, music, and photographs, will attempt to answer this question. Ginsberg
described his work as “a graph of my mind.” He spent a lifetime trying to
expand his own consciousness, employing everything from drugs to meditation
to provide different inducements to that expansion. He believed that his writings,
music, and photography might be “useful” (as he liked to put it) to readers,
whether that usefulness came from art in the strictest sense, from the way his
work pinpointed precise moments in history, or from assuring others that they
were not alone, that their thoughts and longings were part of a universal
consciousness greater than any individual’s.
Here, in a single volume, you will find a sampling of the range and
topography of Ginsberg’s mental landscapes. There are the long, rhythmic lines
found in Whitman, one of Ginsberg’s most significant influences; the prophetic
voice of William Blake, whom Ginsberg had heard in a series of auditory
“visions” in Harlem in 1948; the “bop prosody” of Jack Kerouac, novelist and
poet and enduring Ginsberg friend. There are dream notations, travel journals,
autobiographical fragments, chatty letters to friends, details of his expulsions
from Cuba and Czechoslovakia in 1965, photographs of the important people in
his life—even the testimony he gave to a U.S. Senate subcommittee. He writes
in great depth about the creation of “Howl” (1955) and “Kaddish” (1959), two
masterworks, and speaks of how his meditation practices informed and added
texture to his work. From the prose poem, “The Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour,” to
the rhymed lyrics of “Starry Rhymes,” one of Ginsberg’s final poems, the reader
is introduced to one of the most compelling minds that the American literary
world has ever encountered.
“Kaddish,” Ginsberg’s moving elegy to his mother, goes beyond providing the
details of Ginsberg’s difficult youth and his family’s dealing with Naomi
Ginsberg’s mental illness. The poem, like “Howl,” offers a powerful backstory
to Ginsberg’s lifelong empathy for the disenfranchised, the embattled pilgrims,
the souls wandering in uncharted space—the “beat.” Ginsberg’s empathy is
evident in “Portrait of Huncke,” a fragment of a large 1949 journal entry, in
which a naïve young Allen Ginsberg takes pity on a homeless street hustler and
invites him into his home, only to be dragged into his schemes and ultimately a
run-in with the law. His 1979 letter to Diana Trilling, essayist and wife of one of
his most trusted college professors, Lionel Trilling, is an account of an incident
that led to Ginsberg’s being expelled from Columbia University. Then there are
accounts (in his letter to John Clellon Holmes and in his Paris Review interview)
of his 1948 Blake “visions,” which alarmed his family and some of his friends,
and caused them to wonder if he was losing his mind. These “visions” started
Ginsberg on a fifteen-year quest to discover and expand the unexplored regions
of his mind.
And this was all before he celebrated his twenty-third birthday.
For all the difficulties in his late-teens and twenties, Ginsberg never
abandoned his extremely self-disciplined writing of poetry. The early work,
derivative of poets he studied in high school and college, evolved rapidly after
he met Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and others—all of
whom served as mentors in his intellectual and creative development. “The
Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour” (1947) and “The Trembling of the Veil” (1948), two
poems fashioned from journal entries, pleased William Carlos Williams when
the older poet saw them, and with Williams’s encouragement, Ginsberg shed the
skin of his youth. He grew at an astonishing rate, especially in the mid-1950s,
after he moved to the West Coast, met Peter Orlovsky, became involved in what
became known as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, and wrote such classics
as “Howl,” “A Supermarket in California,” “America,” and others that were
included in Howl and Other Poems, his first published collection of poems.
Ginsberg’s lengthy explanatory letter to Richard Eberhart on the writing of
“Howl” proves, if there was any doubt, that Ginsberg’s work was the result of a
convergence of acquired knowledge, a continuous process of self-discovery,
experience, and creative courage.
The Beat Generation phenomenon, coupled with the attention Ginsberg
garnered from “Howl” and its successful defense in a celebrated obscenity trial,
changed Ginsberg’s life. He enjoyed celebrity status, his poetry was in constant
demand, and the press sought his opinions on just about every imaginable topic.
Ginsberg basked in the limelight, and he used the interview and occasional essay
to expound on a wide spectrum of subjects, from literature to politics. He grew
up listening to his parents bicker over politics and had nurtured an interest in
political and social issues dating back to his teenaged years, when he and his
older brother, Eugene, wrote letters to the editors of area newspapers, including
the New York Times. Fame became Ginsberg’s soapbox, and from the 1960s he
was not shy about expressing his views on censorship, psychedelic drugs, gay
liberation, international politics, Vietnam, and the suppression of individual
freedoms. Poems such as “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and “Plutonian Ode” smoulder
with Ginsberg’s passionate feelings about the war in Vietnam and the
proliferation of nuclear power. A calmer, yet still firm and reasoned, approach
can be found in his senate subcommittee testimony on LSD or his statement on
censorship. His accounts of his 1965 misadventures in Cuba and
Czechoslovakia, found here in a previously unpublished journal entry and in his
letter to Nicanor Parra, are exceptional supplements to “Kral Majales,”
Ginsberg’s poem on his election as King of May and subsequent expulsion from
Czechoslovakia.
Ginsberg believed that one of the keys to effective writing (and self-
awareness) was to “notice what you notice,” and his travel writings, in general,
found him in this state of mind, whether he was sending William S. Burroughs a
letter about his trip to South America in search of the hallucinogenic drug,
ayahuasca, or offering, in “Wales Visitation,” one of his most beautiful poems,
his observations of the minute particulars of the natural wonders of the Welsh
countryside. His massive, previously unpublished letter to Jack Kerouac about
his extended journey to India is a strong contrast to a journal entry written during
the same 1962-1963 stay. Ginsberg’s travels rewarded him with a profound,
mature worldview that added depth to all of his writing.
Jack Kerouac had been encouraging Ginsberg to study Buddhism as far back as
the early 1950s, a study that Ginsberg, with all of his other preoccupations,
undertook only sporadically. But his exposure to Eastern religions while he was
in India and the Far East nudged him more in that direction. He chanted mantras
as part of his poetry readings and began a rudimentary, undisciplined meditation
practice. His 1971 meeting of Chögyum Trungpa Rinpoche, a controversial but
influential Buddhist teacher, helped him focus—and, to a large extent, focus was
what he needed. In “The Change,” his long poem inspired by his meditations as
he watched bodies being cremated at the burning ghats in India, Ginsberg had
written about the need to return to his own body and mind, rather than search for
answers elsewhere; the thought might have given him peace of mind, but it
wasn’t all that different from ideas expressed much more simply in his 1954
poem “Song,” written shortly after his return from an extensive visit to Mexico.
Trungpa preached a form of meditation that required the following of one’s
thoughts as they emerged through the exhaling of one’s own breath. One
meditated by sitting in a relaxed position, eyes fixed on a nearby point. As
Ginsberg illustrates in “Mind Breaths,” thoughts formed and expanded not
unlike the way they had when he was experimenting with mind-expanding
drugs. Trungpa encouraged his students to have faith in where their thoughts
would take them. On one occasion, when Ginsberg insisted that he could not
improvise poetry onstage, Trungpa scoffed, “Why depend upon a piece of