Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
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Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) is a person who was a poet.
References
2014
- (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg Retrieved:2014-11-28.
- Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression. Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem “Howl", in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. [1] [2] [3] In 1957, "Howl" attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it depicted heterosexual and homosexual sex [4] at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. “Howl" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. [5] Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?" [6] Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in second-hand stores and residing in downscale apartments in New York’s East Village. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University at Boulder, Colorado. [7] At Trungpa's urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974. [8] Ginsberg took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs. [9] His poem "September on Jessore Road," calling attention to the plight of Bangladeshi refugees, exemplifies what the literary critic Helen Vendler described as Ginsberg's tireless persistence in protesting against "imperial politics, and persecution of the powerless.” [10] His collection The Fall of America shared the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979 he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. [11] In 1986 he was awarded the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings in Struga, Macedonia. [12] Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992.
- ↑ Ginsberg, Allen (2000), Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995. Foreword by Edward Sanders. New York: Harper Collins, pp. xx–xxi.
- ↑ de Grazia, Edward. (1992) Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. New York: Random House, pp. 330–31.
- ↑ About Allen Ginsberg. pbs.org. December 29, 2002
- ↑ Ginsberg, Allen "Howl" pp. 13–15.
- ↑ Kramer, Jane (1968), Allen Ginsberg in America. New York: Random House, pp. 43–46, on Ginsberg's first meeting with Orlovsky and the conditions of their "marriage.” Also see, Miles, pp. 178–79, on Ginsberg's description of sex with Orlovsky as "one of the first times that I felt open with a boy.”
- ↑ de Grazia, Edward. (1992) Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. New York: Random House, p. 338.
- ↑ Miles, pp. 440–44.
- ↑ Miles, pp. 454–55.
- ↑ Ginsberg, Allen Deliberate Prose, the foreword by Edward Sanders, p. xxi.
- ↑ Vendler, Helen (January 13, 1986) "Books: A Lifelong Poem Including History", The New Yorker, p. 81.
- ↑ Miles, p. 484.
- ↑ Allen Ginsberg. strugapoetryevenings.com
1966
- (Ginsberg, 1966) ⇒ Allen Ginsberg, (1966). “The Great Marijuana Hoax.” In: The Atlantic, Nov 1966.
1956
- (Ginsberg, 1966) ⇒ Allen Ginsberg, (1966). “Howl and Other Poems.” City Lights Books. ISBN:0872860175
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 high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
…