Books by Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg CD Poetry Collection: Booklet and CD
A collection of recordings written and read by one of the greatest literary and cultural figures of the 20th. The collection is accompanied by a special 64 page booklet containing the poems.
Upon the release of his first published work, Howl and Other Poems (1956), Allen Ginsberg became the unlikely force of a movement that would change a generation: art, literature, sex, love, family and politics. None would ever be seen the same way again. The Beat Generation was born. And with it, the legend of the free-spirited, rule-breaking, brillian group of friends Ginsberg kept close--Jack Keroac, William Burroughts, Gregory Corso and Neal Cassady.
Including Ginsberg’s two seminal works, Howl and Kaddish, as well as nearly two dozen other works, this collection celebrates a cultural icon who was of his time, ahead of his time, and whose legacy will transcend time. The collection includes such important works as:
Who Be Kind To, White Shroud, Footnote to Howl, Sunflower Sutra, America, Supermarket in California, My Sad Self, Wales Visitation, Sad Dust Glories, Plutonian Ode, My Green Automobile, Neal’s Ashes, Many Loves, The Names, September on Jessore Road, Father Death Blues, and more...
What makes this collection very special is the accompanying 64 page booklet featuring the text of the poems.
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Selected Poems 1947-1995 (Perennial Classics)
Assembled by Allen Ginsberg, Selected Poems 1947-1995 is the definitive collection of the best works of one of the most influential and revolutionary poets of the twentieth century.
Allen Ginsberg, famous for helping catalyze the Beat Generation, wrote poetry for more than fifty years. His innovative verse and provocative attitudes of spiritual, political, and sexual liberation inspired countless poets, musicians, and visual and performance artists worldwide, and helped shape several generations' views of the world.
Selected Poems 1947-1995 commemorates Ginsberg's brilliant career as one of America's most distinguished poets. Here are well-known masterpieces such as the lyric "Howl" and the narrative "Kaddish" -- classic works of American literature -- as well as more recent gems, including the long dream poem "White Shroud," the visionary "After Lalon," and the political rock lyric "The Ballad of the Skeletons," a song he recorded in 1996 with a stellar band that included Philip Glass, Lenny Kaye, and Paul McCartney.
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Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets, No. 4)
The landmark, original publication of Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL & Other Poems!
HOWL & Other Poems, the prophetic book that launched the Beat Generation, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books in 1956. Considered the single most influential work of post-WWII United States poetry, the City Lights edition of HOWL has remained in print for more than 60 years, with well over 1,000,000 copies in print.
A strident critique of middle-class complacency, consumerism, and capitalist militarism, HOWL also celebrates the pleasures and freedoms of the physical world, including a tribute to homosexual love. In addition to “Howl,” poems in the book include: “A Supermarket in California,” “Sunflower Sutra,” “America,” “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound,” “Transcription of Organ Music,” and “Wild Orphan,” among others.
A History of HOWL:
City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti first heard Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” at the Six Gallery event in San Francisco, 1955, which featured writers Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, introduced by poet Kenneth Rexroth. Jack Kerouac was present, but did not read, encouraging and cheering the other poets on. Ferlinghetti was so impressed by Ginsberg’s performance, he immediately telegrammed him, referencing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s response to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?”
When the first edition of HOWL arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao. The two were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case was sent to trial. Ferlinghetti partnered with the ACLU to launch a defense of HOWL, and a parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses appeared in court to persuade the judge of its merits. In the end, famously conservative Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, but rather, as he stated emphatically, HOWL was a work of “redeeming social significance.”
The landmark decision signaled a sea change in American culture, and the City Lights edition of HOWL became a vital cornerstone in the ongoing struggle for free expression and representation. It continues to attract generation after generation of readers.
“It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages.”—William Carlos Williams
“Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius . . . probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.”—Bob Dylan
“Not only did he give us love and poetry, he reminded us of our civic duty to use our voice.”—Patti Smith
“Howl was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard.”—Michael McClure
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$7.95
The Yage Letters Redux
by Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs
In January 1953, William Burroughs began a seven-month expedition into the jungles of South America, ostensibly to find yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. But Burroughs also cast his anthropological-satiric eye over the local regimes to record trademark vignettes of political and psychic malaise. From the notebooks he kept and the letters he wrote home to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs composed a narrative of his adventures that appeared ten years later as “In Search of Yage” within The Yage Letters.
That book, published by City Lights in 1963, was completed by the addition of Ginsberg’s account of his own experiences with yage as he traveled through South America in 1960, and by the addition of other Burroughs letters and texts.
For this new edition, Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to the original manuscripts to untangle the history of the text, telling the fascinating story of its genesis and cultural importance in his wide-ranging introduction. Also included in this edition are extensive materials, never before published, by both Burroughs and Ginsberg that shed new light on their adventures in exploration and writing
“A complete understanding of the literary legacy of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg is impossible without reading this amazing collection of letters and documents centered on yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. . . . These crucial texts go beyond simple curiosity about mind-changing drugs to set the foundation of what would later become a literary movement that changed American literature.”—Bloomsbury Review
"Burroughs' book about his search for the 'ultimate fix', The Yage Letters, possesses an equally strange and secret history. Published in 1963 but written a decade earlier, it has long been seen as a fascinating curio in the Burroughs canon, yet a new edition of the book, edited by Oliver Harris, places it more centrally in the list of key Burroughs texts. . . . The Yage Letters marks the point when Burroughs moved full-time into his own, fully realised universe."—The Independent UK
William Burroughs is widely recognized as one of the most influential and innovative writers of the twentieth century. His books include: Junky, Naked Lunch, Queer, The Wild Boys and The Place of Dead Roads.
Oliver Harris is a professor in literature and film in the School of American Studies at Keele University. He is the editor of The Letters of William S, Burroughs (Penguin) and the 50th anniversary edition of Junky (Penguin).
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Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First ... (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
“Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius...probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.” —Bob Dylan
First published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg's Howl is a prophetic masterpiece—an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century.
This annotated version of Ginsberg's classic is the poet's own re-creation of the revolutionary work's composition process—as well as a treasure trove of anecdotes, an intimate look at the poet's writing techniques, and a veritable social history of the 1950s.
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Collected Poems 1947-1997 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
“Taken all together, Ginsberg’s poems are X-rays of a considerable part of American society during the last four decades.” — The New Yorker
This magnificent volume gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half-century of brilliant work from one of America’s greatest poets.
A chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse in the tradition of Whitman, Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg’s raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry and popular song and speech, but also our views of the world.
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Collected Poems 1947-1997
“Taken all together, Ginsberg’s poems are X-rays of a considerable part of American society during the last four decades.” — The New Yorker
This magnificent volume gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half-century of brilliant work from one of America’s greatest poets.
A chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse in the tradition of Whitman, Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg’s raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry and popular song and speech, but also our views of the world.
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Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996
From his conversation with the conservative William F. Buckley on PBS to his testimony at the Chicago Seven trial to his passionate riffs on Cezanne, Blake, Whitman, and Pound, the interviews collected in Spontaneous Mind, chronologically arranged and in some cases previously unpublished, were conducted throughout Allen Ginsberg's long career. From the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, Ginsberg speaks frankly about his life, his work, and major events, allowing us to hear once again the impassioned voice of one of the most influential literary and cultural figures of our time.
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The Essential Ginsberg
Featuring the legendary and groundbreaking poem “Howl,” this remarkable volume showcases a selection of Allen Ginsberg’s poems, songs, essays, letters, journals, and interviews and contains sixteen pages of his personal photographs.
One of the Beat Generation’s most renowned poets and writers, Allen Ginsberg became internationally famous not only for his published works but for his actions as a human rights activist who championed the sexual revolution, human rights, gay liberation, Buddhism and eastern religion, and the confrontation of societal norms—all before it became fashionable to do so. He was also the dynamic leader of war protesters, artists, Flower Power hippies, musicians, punks, and political radicals.
The Essential Ginsberg collects a mosaic of materials that displays the full range of Ginsberg’s mental landscape. His most important poems, songs, essays, letters, journals, and interviews are displayed in chronological order. His poetic masterpieces, “Howl” and “Kaddish,” are presented here along with lesser-known and difficult to find songs and prose. Personal correspondence with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac is included as well as photographs—shot and captioned by Ginsberg himself—of his friends and fellow rogues William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and more.
Through his essays, journals, interviews, and letters, this definitive volume will inspire readers to delve deeper into a body of work that remains one of the most impressive literary canons in American history.
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Howl: A Graphic Novel
by Allen Ginsberg, Eric Drooker
First published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is a prophetic masterpiece--an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. Now a major motion picture, starring James Franco, Howl was directed by two-time Academy Award-winners Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, who hired Eric Drooker to animate the poem. Howl: A Graphic Novel visualizes the poem--stanza by stanza--with full color animation art Drooker designed for the film. [Printed on recycled paper with Soy Ink, this luxury art book has french flaps and spot gloss on cover.]
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Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg
"[An] essential Beat masterpiece." --The Village Voice.
Perhaps one of the last great dual correspondences of the twentieth century, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters reveals not only the process of creation of the two most celebrated members of the Beat Generation, but also the unfolding of a remarkable friendship of immense pathos and spiritual depth. Through this exhilarating exchange of letters, two-thirds of which have never been published before, Kerouac and Ginsberg emerge first and foremost as writers of artistic passion, innovation, and genius. Vivid and enthralling, the letters, which date from their first meeting in 1944 to Kerouac's untimely death in 1969, chronicle the endless struggle, anguish, and sacrifice involved in giving form to their literary visions.
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Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg
The first collection of letters between the two leading figures of the Beat movement
Writers and cultural icons Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are the most celebrated names of the Beat Generation, linked together not only by their shared artistic sensibility but also by a deep and abiding friendship, one that colored their lives and greatly influenced their writing. Editors Bill Morgan and David Stanford shed new light on this intimate and influential friendship in this fascinating exchange of letters between Kerouac and Ginsberg, two thirds of which have never been published before. Commencing in 1944 while Ginsberg was a student at Columbia University and continuing until shortly before Kerouac's death in 1969, the two hundred letters included in this book provide astonishing insight into their lives and their writing. While not always in agreement, Ginsberg and Kerouac inspired each other spiritually and creatively, and their letters became a vital workshop for their art. Vivid, engaging, and enthralling, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters provides an unparalleled portrait of the two men who led the cultural and artistic movement that defined their generation.
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The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952
by Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan, Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) kept journals his entire life, beginning at the age of eleven. These first journals detail the inner thoughts of the awkward boy from Paterson, New Jersey, who would become the major poet and spokesperson of the literary phenomenon called the Beat Generation. The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice covers the most important and formative years of Ginsberg's storied life. It was during these years that he met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, both of whom would become lifelong friends and significant literary figures. Ginsberg's journals--so candid he insisted they be published only after his death--also document his relationships with such notable figures of Beat lore as Carl Solomon, Lucien Carr, and Herbert Huncke. Conversations with Kerouac, his beloved muse Neal Cassady, and others have been transcribed from Ginsberg's memory, and information will be found here relating to the famous murder of David Kammerer by Carr--a startlingly violent chapter in Beat prehistory--which has been credited in New York magazine as "giving birth to the Beat Generation." It was also during this period that he began to recognize his homosexuality, and to think of himself as a poet. Illustrated with photos from Ginsberg's private archive and enhanced by an appendix of over 100 of Ginsberg's earliest poems, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice is a major literary event.
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Kaddish and Other Poems: 50th Anniversary Edition (Pocket Poets)
"As a pandemic rages and we are unable to gather to celebrate our dead, make our minyans, or hold one another’s hands, have our seders, I think of Ginsberg writing Kaddish for his mother. I think of him imagining a journey from bondage to freedom. . . . Kaddish is the perfect poem for these times."―Laurel Brett, The Forward
Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish," a poem about the death of his mother, Naomi, is one of his major works. This special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kaddish and Other Poems features an illuminating afterword by Ginsberg biographer Bill Morgan, along with previously unpublished photographs, documents, and letters relating to the composition of the poem.
Allen Ginsberg, founding father of the Beat Generation, inspired the American counterculture of the second half of the twentieth century with his groundbreaking poems.
Bill Morgan is the author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. He lives in New York City and Bennington, Vermont.
"In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural and gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other."―Allen Ginsberg from Kaddish
"Kaddish, Ginsberg's ode to his mother after her death, is streaked with references to Judaism and to the funerary prayer recited by a male mourner for the passing of a parent or relative. Like the prayer, Ginsberg’s poem is a celebration of his mother, but it also delves into―and, indeed, dwells on―the darker side of her life. . . . Ginsberg bears witness to his mother's pain and struggles; he intones her name―another act of remembrance―over and over again as if to deify her."―Maria Eliades, Ploughshares
"Kaddish, Allen Ginsberg's most stunning and emotional poem, tells a story that is entirely true. As a young boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, Allen watched his mother succumb to a series of psychotic episodes that grew progressively worse despite desperate attempts at treatment."―Levi Asher, Literary Kicks
Kaddish, which Ginsberg wrote between 1957 and 1959 and published in 1961, is, at its core, a poem about a son learning to grieve for his mother. But Ginsberg's emotional and intellectual rawness make this poem an investigation about what it means to grieve, or even to be a son or mother. A deeply intimate portrait of his family's life, Kaddish nonetheless embeds itself in specific historical contexts: of Jewish life in the United States and after the Holocaust, of left-wing political activism before and during the Cold War, of a fiercely independent woman who died as second-wave feminism was only just beginning to be formulated."―Joshua Logan Wall, The Yiddish Book Center's "Great Jewish Books, Teacher Resources"
"Ginsberg’s long, graphic, lamenting elegy for his mother is one of the most shattering poems written in this century. Harrowing. Grotesque. Hilarious. Non-stop in its verbal energy....I love these little City Lights collections―they’re certainly more fun than the big Collected Poems (Harper), easier to carry, easier to hold, and easier to read."―Lloyd Schwartz, Grolier Poetry Book Shop
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$12.95
I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955-1997
by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti will forever be linked as the respective writer and publisher of Howl, and this irresistible collection of their correspondence shows the depth of their friendship and working relationship
an impressive volume that is a must for every Beat aficionado."Publishers Weekly, starred review
In 1969, Allen Ginsberg wrote to his friend, fellow poet, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Alas, telephone destroys letters!" Fortunately, however, by then the two had already exchanged a treasure trove of personal correspondence, and more than any other documents, their lettersintimate, opinionated, and action-packedreveal the true nature of their lifelong friendship and creative relationship. Collected here for the first time, they offer an intimate view into the range of artistic vision and complementary sensibilities that fueled the genius of their literary collaborations.
Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were two of the twentieth century's most influential literary rebels, and their correspondence documents a time when both were rising to the peak of their notoriety and international fame, traveling, writing, publishing, and performing their poetry during times of unprecedented social and cultural experimentation and upheaval. Ferlinghetti was Ginsberg's publisher and editor, and the correspondence begins with a telegram from Lawrence after hearing Allen's legendary reading of "Howl" at the Six Gallery: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?"
The majority of the letters collected here have never before been published, and they span the period from 1955 until Ginsberg's death in 1997. Facsimiles and photographs enhance the collection, an evocative portrait of an inspiring and enduring relationship.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an internationally renowned poet, painter, publisher, and founder of City Lights Books.
Allen Ginsberg was a leading member of the Beat Generation and an award-winning poet best known as the author of Howl & Other Poems, among many other works.
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Wait Till I'm Dead: Uncollected Poems
Rainy night on Union Square, full moon. Want more poems? Wait till I’m dead.Allen Ginsberg, August 8, 1990, 3:30 A.M.
The first new Ginsberg collection in over fifteen years, Wait Till I’m Dead is a landmark publication, edited by renowned Ginsberg scholar Bill Morgan and introduced by award-winning poet and Ginsberg enthusiast Rachel Zucker. Ginsberg wrote incessantly for more than fifty years, often composing poetry on demand, and many of the poems collected in this volume were scribbled in letters or sent off to obscure publications and unjustly forgotten. Wait Till I’m Dead, which spans the whole of Ginsberg’s long writing career, from the 1940s to the 1990s, is a testament to Ginsberg’s astonishing writing and singular aesthetics.
Following the chronology of his life, Wait Till I’m Dead reproduces the poems together with extensive notes. Containing 104 previously uncollected poems and accompanied by original photographs, Wait Till I’m Dead is the final major contribution to Ginsberg’s sprawling oeuvre, a must-read for Ginsberg neophytes and longtime fans alike.
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Wait Till I'm Dead: Uncollected Poems
Allen Ginsberg’s poems, from Howl” to Kaddish” to The Fall of America,” have influenced generations of writers and made him a defining figure of the twentieth century. Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, first published in 1984, and expanded in 1997, was originally thought to contain all of his poetic work. But now, for the first time, Ginsberg’s stray poems have been gathered and the result, Wait Till I’m Dead is a landmark publication spanning five decades of Ginsberg’s writing life.
The first new Ginsberg collection in over fifteen years, Wait Till I’m Dead is edited by renowned scholar Bill Morgan, with a foreword written by award-winning poet Rachel Zucker. Many of the poems collected in this volume were scribbled in letters or sent off to obscure publications and unjustly forgotten. Tracing the chronology of his life, Wait Till I’m Dead follows Ginsberg from his high school days and earliest political satire to his activism, spiritual maturation, and on-the-road experiences worldwide. The collection concludes with his personal thoughts on mortality as he watched his friends, and himself, grow old.
Throughout the collection Ginsberg pays homage to his contemporaries and poetic icons, including Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. The selection also features several of Ginsberg’s collaborative poems, works coauthored by Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Koch, providing an inside view of famed Beat poets and their relationships. Containing 104 previously uncollected poems and accompanied by original photographs and extensive notes, Wait Till I’m Dead is the final major contribution to Ginsberg’s sprawling oeuvre, a must-read for Ginsberg neophytes and longtime fans alike.
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The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats
In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem “Howl,” and Jack Kerouac’s seminal book On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. Through the creation of this course, which he ended up teaching five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to present the history of Beat Literature in his own inimitable way. Compiled and edited by renowned Beat scholar Bill Morgan, and with an introduction by Anne Waldman, The Best Minds of My Generation presents the lectures in edited form, complete with notes, and paints a portrait of the Beats as Ginsberg knew them: friends, confidantes, literary mentors, and fellow revolutionaries.
Ginsberg was seminal to the creation of a public perception of Beat writers and knew all of the major figures personally, making him uniquely qualified to be the historian of the movement. In The Best Minds of My Generation, Ginsberg shares anecdotes of meeting Kerouac, Burroughs, and other writers for the first time, explains his own poetics, elucidates the importance of music to Beat writing, discusses visual influences and the cut-up method, and paints a portrait of a group who were leading a literary revolution. For Beat aficionados and neophytes alike, The Best Minds of My Generation is a personal yet critical look at one of the most important literary movements of the twentieth century.
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The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats
In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem “Howl,” and Jack Kerouac’s seminal book On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. Through the creation of this course, which he ended up teaching five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to present the history of Beat Literature in his own inimitable way. Compiled and edited by renowned Beat scholar Bill Morgan, and with an introduction by Anne Waldman, The Best Minds of My Generation presents the lectures in edited form, complete with notes, and paints a portrait of the Beats as Ginsberg knew them: friends, confidantes, literary mentors, and fellow revolutionaries.
Ginsberg was seminal to the creation of a public perception of Beat writers and knew all of the major figures personally, making him uniquely qualified to be the historian of the movement. In The Best Minds of My Generation, Ginsberg shares anecdotes of meeting Kerouac, Burroughs, and other writers for the first time, explains his own poetics, elucidates the importance of music to Beat writing, discusses visual influences and the cut-up method, and paints a portrait of a group who were leading a literary revolution. For Beat aficionados and neophytes alike, The Best Minds of My Generation is a personal yet critical look at one of the most important literary movements of the twentieth century.
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Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1965 is here presented in a commemorative hardcover edition!
The landmark, original publication of Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL & Other Poems!
HOWL & Other Poems, the prophetic book that launched the Beat Generation, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books in 1956. Considered the single most influential work of post-WWII United States poetry, the City Lights edition of HOWL has remained in print for more than 60 years, with well over 1,000,000 copies in print.
A strident critique of middle-class complacency, consumerism, and capitalist militarism, HOWL also celebrates the pleasures and freedoms of the physical world, including a tribute to homosexual love. In addition to “Howl,” poems in the book include: “A Supermarket in California,” “Sunflower Sutra,” “America,” “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound,” “Transcription of Organ Music,” and “Wild Orphan,” among others.
A History of HOWL:
City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti first heard Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” at the Six Gallery event in San Francisco, 1955, which featured writers Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, introduced by poet Kenneth Rexroth. Jack Kerouac was present, but did not read, encouraging and cheering the other poets on. Ferlinghetti was so impressed by Ginsberg’s performance, he immediately telegrammed him, referencing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s response to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?”
When the first edition of HOWL arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao. The two were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case was sent to trial. Ferlinghetti partnered with the ACLU to launch a defense of HOWL, and a parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses appeared in court to persuade the judge of its merits. In the end, famously conservative Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, but rather, as he stated emphatically, HOWL was a work of “redeeming social significance.”
The landmark decision signaled a sea change in American culture, and the City Lights edition of HOWL became a vital cornerstone in the ongoing struggle for free expression and representation. It continues to attract generation after generation of readers.
“It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages.”—William Carlos Williams
“Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius . . . probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.”—Bob Dylan
“Not only did he give us love and poetry, he reminded us of our civic duty to use our voice.”—Patti Smith
“Howl was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard.”—Michael McClure
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Illuminated Poems
Marking the fiftieth anniversary of "Howl," Illuminated Poems celebrates the collaboration of two visionaries of different generations: Allen Ginsberg, the quintessential Beat and America's best-known poet, and Eric Drooker, the New Yorker cover artist whose provocative, apocalyptic images add a new dimension and urgency to Ginsberg's poems. Illuminated Poems contains two works only available in this volume, an introduction by Ginsberg, and thirty-four poems from 1948 through the present day, including the poem "Howl" in its entirety. Perhaps the single poem that captures the anguish and aspirations of the Beat Generation, "Howl" was originally published fifty years ago and is one of the most widely read poems of the twentieth century.
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Iron Curtain Journals: January–May 1965
The first of three in a series of Ginsberg’s unpublished travel journals
A travel guide through one of the best minds of the Beat Generation—distinctly not destroyed by madness—Allen Ginsberg’s journals are more tour de force than simple diaries, charting his poetry, political antics, and high-profile encounters behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War.
Between jotting first drafts of well-known poems and composing others not seen until now, Ginsberg manages to get himself deported from Cuba—to, of all places, Prague, where he also eventually finds himself unwelcome. Meanwhile, in characteristically colorful fashion, he details his provocations and pranks, his encounters with other poets, curious citizens, and celebrities, and his pointed, often moving observations as he makes his way to Russia (land of his heritage), to Poland and the Warsaw Ghetto, and to Auschwitz. Running foul of the Czech government when he circles back to Prague, he is warned to keep a low profile but is instead crowned the King of May by students who ceremoniously parade him through the city in a flatbed truck. Ginsberg is beaten in the streets, arrested, and deported once again, this time to swinging England, where he arrives just in time to help stage a massive international poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall.
Ginsberg wrote of these experiences as only he could, summoning a time, a political and poetic landscape at once familiar and foreign, and a singular poet who in these pages—whether detailing his travels, describing his meetings with Russian poets, annotating his dreams, or giving graphic accounts of his sexual adventures—speaks with electrifying intelligence and insight across the years and the vagaries of culture.
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South American Journals: January–July 1960
The great Beat poet’s observations, reflections, poetry, and mind-expanding explorations while traveling through South America
When Allen Ginsberg went to South America in 1960, ostensibly to attend a literary conference, he had a different kind of trip in mind. This would be another experience in the Beat poet’s journey deep into the realm of consciousness, the inward travel explored to exhilarating effect in his writing—whether in the poetry that had already earned him international acclaim or in the idiosyncratic journals that raised self-documentation to a new form of art. In his South American Journals, covering a tumultuous six months, Ginsberg describes his travels through Chile and Peru, his visit to Machu Picchu, and his search for a source for ayahuasca, or yagé, a mind-expanding drug recommended by his friend William S. Burroughs, another writer well traveled in altered states of consciousness.
Far from quotidian diary entries, Ginsberg’s observations in these pages, interspersed with poetry, dream notations, and musings about spirituality, amount to a critical chapter in the poet’s informal autobiography. Writing more during these six months than in any of his other journals, Ginsberg summons great ferment. In his distinctive accounts of all that he encounters, elevating travel writing to lyrical expression; in an abundance of poems published here for the first time, in both first drafts and polished forms; in his reports of fascinating conversations; and, in particular, in detailed passages that delve into inner recesses of his consciousness, Ginsberg recreates a journey like no other, one that reflects the workings of one of the best minds of his generation in the world of his own making and in its mysterious, immutable counterpart in the South American landscape.
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Death & Fame: Last Poems 1993-1997
Allen Ginsberg was one of the bravest and most admired poets of this century. Famous for energizing the Beat Generation literary movement upon his historic encounter with Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs in mid-century New York City, Ginsberg influenced several generations of writers, musicians, and poets. When he died on April 5, 1997, we lost one of the greatest figures of twentieth-century American literary and cultural history. This singular volume of final poems commemorated the anniversary of Ginsberg's death, and includes the verses he wrote in the years shortly before he died.
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Mind Breaths: Poems 1972-1977 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
Meditations, rhapsodies, elegies, confessions and mindful chronicle writings filling inward and outward space thru mid-Seventies decade.
Mind Breaths: Australian songsticks measure oldest known poetics, broken-leg meditations march thru Six Worlds singing crazy Wisdom's hopeless suffering, the First Noble Truth, inspiring quiet Sung sunlit greybeard soliloquies, English moonlit night-gleams, ambitious mid-life fantasies, Ah crossed-legged thoughts sitting straight-spine paying attention to empty breath flowing 'round the globe;' then Dharma elegy & sharp-eyed haiku. Pederast rhapsody, exorcism of mid-East battlegods, workaday sad dust glories, American ego confession & mugging downfall Lower East Side, hospital sickness moan, hydrogen Jukebox Prophecy, Sex come-all-ye, mountain cabin flashes, Buddhist country western chord changes, Rolling Thunder snowballs, a Jersey Shaman dream, Father Death in a graveyard near Newark, Poe bones, two hot hearted love poems: Here chronicled mid Seventies' half decade inward & outward Mindfulness in many Poetries.
"Allen Ginsberg's poems of the 1970's are a marvel, his new book, Mind Breaths, presenting a half dozen poems, probably more, that are first-rate Ginsberg. . . . The poems are there-on the page, in the book. They are called 'mind breaths.' No need to speak of kinds, qualities, degrees, the intellect's inevitable meanderings. The poems exist. Think of all the millions of things that might have gone otherwise, so that they might not exist. Our times are bleak enough, heaven knows, but at least we have this."—Hayden Carruth, New York Times
Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian émigré, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote Kaddish 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile. Carl Solomon, to whom Howl is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet."
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Reality Sandwiches, 1953-1960 (Pocket Poets Series
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy.” Many of Ginsberg’s most famous poems.
Wake-up nightmares in Lower East Side, musings in public library, across the U.S. in dream auto, drunk in old Havana, brooding in Mayan ruins, sex daydreams on the West Coast, airplane vision of Kansas, lonely in a leafy cottage, lunch hour on Berkeley, beer notations on Skid Row, slinking to Mexico, wrote this last night in Paris, back on Times square dreaming of Times Square, bombed in NY again, loony tunes in the dentist chair, screaming at old poets in South America, aethereal zigzag Poesy in blue hotel room in Perua wind-up book of dreams, psalms, journal enigmas & nude minutes from 1953 to 1960 poems scattered in fugitive magazines here collected now book.
". . .make no mistake, Reality Sandwiches, 1953-60 . . . is genuine poetry, and Ginsberg's commitment marks his superiority over more graceful and refined but tepid craftsmen." Robert D. Spector, Poetry Quarterly
Famous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian émigré, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile." His other famous poetry collections including The Fall of America, Howl, Mind Breaths, Plutonian Ode, Kaddish, and Reality Sandwiches are also published by City Lights Publishers.
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The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry
Beginning with "long poem of these States," The Fall of America is the follow up book to Ginsberg's Planet News … chronicle tape-recorded scribed by hand or sung condensed, the flux of car bus airplane dream consciousness Person during Automated Electronic War years, newspaper headline radio brain auto poesy & silent desk musings, headline flashing on road through these states of consciousness.
Includes Ginsberg's condemnation of America's actions in Vietnam, along with commentary about the moon landing, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the death of Che Guevera, and more personal events such as the passing of Ginsberg's friend and former lover Neal Cassady. Many of the poems were initially composed on an Uher Tape recorder, purchased by Ginsberg with the help of Bob Dylan.
Poems in the collection include: "Beginning of a Poem of These States;" "Elegy For Neal Cassady;" "On Neal's Ashes," "Please Master," "Hum Bom!" and "September on Jessore Road."
"[Ginsberg] is never negligible, and he is often (the only true test) unforgettable."—Helen Vendler, New York Times Book Review
"Following in the footsteps of legendary photographer Robert Frank's groundbreaking The Americans and Jack Kerouac's opus On the Road, Allen Ginsberg gives us deep insight into his poems in The Fall of America … every poem this book refers to is a prismatic hall of mirrors … "—Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
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White Shroud, Poems 1980-1985
Poems by a modern master. "[Ginsberg's] powerful mixture of Blake, Whitman, Pound, and Williams, to which he added his own volatile, grotesque, and tender humor, has assured him a memorable place in modern poetry."-- Helen Vendler
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The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder
by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder
One of the central relationships in the Beat scene was the long-lasting friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Ginsberg introduced Snyder to the East Coast Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, while Snyder himself became the model for the serious poet that Ginsberg so wanted to become. Snyder encouraged Ginsberg to explore the beauty of the West Coast and, even more lastingly, introduced Ginsberg to Buddhism, the subject of so many long letter exchanges between them.
Beginning in 1956 and continuing through 1995, the two men exchanged more than 850 letters. Bill Morgan, Ginsberg's biographer and an important editor of his papers, has selected the most significant correspondence from this long friendship. The letters themselves paint the biographical and poetic portraits of two of America's most important and most fascinating poets.
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Sunflower Sutra
'I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys'
Allen Ginsberg's poetry fomented a social and political revolution, and with its rawness and spontaneity changed the course of the American lyric. To read his profane and prophetic verses, about sex, death and America, as well as the humour of his humiliations and self-transformations, is to stretch consciousness and grasp an entire era.
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