Gathering all of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry into one place is not a new idea by any means. Ginsberg himself considered doing just that in 1960, when he had been publishing his work for little more than a decade. Yet for one reason or another it wasn’t until 1984 that his first “collected” edition of poetry was released by Harper & Row. Even at that point it contained little more than half his poetic output, while weighing in at over 800 pages. At the time of his death in 1997 the collected was enlarged to nearly 1,200 pages to accommodate his last published books, but nothing was done to gather Ginsberg’s stray poems until now.
More than anything else, Allen Ginsberg was a steady and prolific poet, and his poetry chronicled his busy life. He wrote incessantly for more than fifty years, from the early 1940s until a few days before his death in April 1997. He was extremely generous with his work, often composing poetry on demand, although he disliked the pressure that put him under. In the wee hours of the night he wrote poems that would be sent off in the morning to support a cause or encourage young students to write poetry. Sometimes he would send his first and only copy, so that he didn’t even have a complete record himself of all he had written. At times he grew weary of the work and complained that he was overburdened, but the complaint often took the shape of a poem itself. Once he wrote back to one of his solicitors, “Want more poems? Wait till I’m dead,” and from that note comes the title of this book.
There were hundreds of poems composed and never collected, poems spanning the broad range of his life and career. Ginsberg loved gathering his works together. He kept copies of his essays, his interviews, his music, and his speeches and organized them in large file cabinets in his office. I spent most of the 1980s and 1990s helping him organize his journals, press clippings, manuscripts, and correspondence, as well as his enormous photography archive. It was always with the knowledge that some day they would be made available, another example of his generous nature. So it gives me great pleasure to once again work on a project that Allen would have loved — collecting the uncollected.
A Note on the Arrangement of Texts
Ginsberg saw his first collected poems as an autobiography, and so it is with these materials. They should be read as an extension of that and as such they are also in chronological order as much as possible. Virtually everything that Ginsberg created was kept in chronological order from notebooks to fan mail and continuing that practice seems to make sense here too. In so doing notes have been added where necessary to help place the poetry into the context of Ginsberg’s life, not to explain the poems per se. Allen pointed out that his poetic energy was cyclic, that every few years his creative powers would ebb and flow, and this collection also displays “a panorama of valleys and plateaus,” as he put it. The reader will be overjoyed to find so many strong, fresh poems that never made it into the collections published during his more fertile periods of inspiration.
A Note on the Selection of Texts
All of Ginsberg’s most successful poems were attempts to capture his spontaneous thoughts and insights, what he called “ordinary mind.” Composed in that way, in the act of “catching himself thinking,” it remained for me only to select the very best examples of his mind at work. This was achieved through careful reading and rereading of texts, whittling the mass down to those poems that best achieved that goal. If the mind was shapely, the art created by that mind would also be shapely was his creed. It also gave this editor the opportunity to reexamine every uncollected poem and select only the best from the entire span of his life without regard to subject matter. So here we follow his creative genius from his earliest political satire at the expense of his local congressman Gordon Canfield through his own “on the road” experiences worldwide. We conclude with his personal thoughts on mortality as he watched himself and his close friends such as Carl Solomon grow old and die.
Footnotes
Extensive notes, also something much favored by Ginsberg, follow at the end of the book so as not to interrupt the texts. The notes will aid in placing the poems into the context of their contemporary worlds. Ginsberg often quoted Heraclitus by saying “You can’t step into the same river twice,” here meaning that with the passage of time memory fades, while history and meaning evolve. These notes may help put specific references into the context of their times or lead interested readers to additional information. Younger readers may not recall that Richard Nixon was vice president of the United States twenty years before Watergate, for instance. A note explaining the importance of the Dasaswamedh Ghat to Ginsberg’s development of a philosophy of life or why he sometimes referred to himself as the King of May might also save a lot of electronic trips to planet Google. Some notes might reveal the circumstances that led him to write particular poems too. I find it interesting to know his poem “The World’s an Illusion” was written for high school students in New Jersey in 1971. Further notes acknowledge the original publication data for many poems, if and when they are known.
Within the texts of Collected Poems, Ginsberg made some alterations to previously published work. Not having Ginsberg here as the final arbiter, I have not made changes to either the texts or the layouts of the poetry. Some typographical errors and an occasional misspelling have been corrected whenever these errors seemed unintentional.