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 paper? Don’t you trust your own mind?”
This was an idea Kerouac had been advocating from the beginning of their friendship. Kerouac’s practice of spontaneous composition appealed to Ginsberg, who had succeeded with it in a number of poems, most notably “Sunflower Sutra,” a gem with virtually no revision from its handwritten original draft. “First thought, best thought,” Ginsberg asserted, though he found it difficult to practice. The impulse to revise was too great. It was the thought, he insisted, that had to remain pure and unaltered.
Allen Ginsberg never published an autobiography or memoirs. His body of work, he felt, would suffice. He wrote much of it (particularly the letters and journals) with little thought of its ever being published, and to his credit he never held back after he attained international fame and his journals and letters were published. He continued to record his most private thoughts until he died.
This book, then, acts as a mosaic of Ginsberg’s life story and massive body of published and unpublished work, an introduction to readers unfamiliar with his poetry, prose, and photography. The contents represent only a small fraction of Ginsberg’s published output. One hopes that, after sampling the offerings in this book, curious or adventurous readers will delve deeper into Ginsberg’s work, and that they have a call to discovery—of a man, his times, and a personal odyssey that changed the face of poetry and dared others to step outside the containment of the ordinary.
—MICHAEL SCHUMACHER