Ginsberg, Allen

GINSBERG, ALLEN (1926-1997). Ginsberg’s father, Louis, a socialist, and a published poet, taught high school and college English. His mother, Naomi, born in Russia, and an artist and a member of the Communist Party, U.S.A, spent much of her life in mental hospitals, though she also introduced her son, Irwin Allen, who was born in Newark, New Jersey, to notable figures of the Old Left. As a boy, Allen (as he was called) learned about the Spanish Civil War, Sacco and Vanzetti and the “Scottsboro Boys.” Starting in high school, he defined himself as an anti-fascist and wrote overtly political poetry. In the 1940s in New York, he befriended Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady —all of them founding members of what would become the Beat Generation. He also met and caroused on Times Square and elsewhere with Herbert Huncke and Lucien Carr, who appear in Kerouac’s picaresque novel, On the Road and in Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl.

Under the influence of Burroughs and Carr, Ginsberg immersed himself in the work of T.S. Eliot, Arthur Rimbaud and French symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire. A troubled, precious student at Columbia College, he clashed with his professors, including Lionel Trilling, and was expelled by the administration. After a voyage to West Africa, and later seven months as a patient in the New York State Psychiatric Institute—where he met fellow patient Carl Solomon, to whom he dedicated Howl— he adopted“madness” as his major meme, though he didn’t abandon the politics of the Old Left. In 1953 he protested the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

A fortuitous meeting with William Carlos Williams, the modernist poet and New Jersey medical doctor, provided him with a nurturing literary figure, and helped him overcome his own insecurities,
which derived in part from his ambivalence about his sexual identity, a topic he explored in his journals. Not until he arrived in San Francisco in the mid-1950s and went into psychoanalysis at Langley Porter, did he accept and write openly about his homosexuality in poems such as “Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo,” in which he boasted, “I’m happy, Kerouac” and added, a “new young cat…loves me.”

A key figure in “the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance,”which helped move American poetry toward live performance rather than simply reading, and to jazz, Ginsberg wrote Howl in part under the influence of peyote, immersing himself in Leaves of Grass and coming to appreciate Whitman’s voice and persona as the poet of American democracy. In the second part of Howl, Ginsberg crystalized his view of the modern world in the image of “Moloch,” an Old Testament figure emblematic of war, oppression and bureaucracy. The poem references “the socialist revolution,” the “Fascist national Golgotha,” and “The International,” the hymn of the global communist movement.

The geographical distance from New York, plus the anarchist, pacifist and bohemian ambiance of the San Francisco Bay Area, prompted Ginsberg to write half-a-dozen innovative poems, including
the mock-heroic, “America,” in which he addresses the nation, and exclaims “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb”—the most famous line in English language poetry in the second-half of the. twentieth-century. The poem ends with the poet’s proclamation: “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”

In the late 1950s and for much of the 1960s, Ginsberg traveled widely with Peter Orlovsky, his lover, and also with his friends, Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger, carving out a role for himself as a peripatetic poet and in verse recounting his experiences in France, Japan, India, Cuba and Czechoslovakia, where he defied Communist Party authorities andwas expelled from the country.

Capitalism and communism seemed equally abhorrent to Ginsberg, and he mocked those two isms in poems such as “Capitol Air” in which he complains about Moscow and Washington, D.C., the KGB
and the CIA. He turned increasingly to both Hinduism and Buddhism, developed a spiritual practice that included meditation, adopted Chögyam Trungpa as a guru, taught poetry at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and helped bring Buddhism to a generation of Americans indifferent to Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism.

The death of his mother, Naomi, prompted him to write Kaddish—which honors her and a generation of Jewish immigrants to the U.S. Widely hailed by the academic world as Ginsberg’s best work,
Kaddish has never been as popular as Howl and other Poems, the 1956 volume published by City Lights that has sold more than a million copies and has been translated into more than two-dozen
languages. The nationally publicised trial of Howl, for obscenity, in San Francisco in 1957, boosted book sales and eroded Puritanical laws that outlawed pornography. The trial also provided free publicity for City Lights, the fledging bookstore and publishing company, and focused attention on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the sole defendant in the courtroom, which Ginsberg viewed from afar, relishing the notoriety it provided. As U.S. poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, noted Ginsberg was a “genius for public life” as well as a “genius as an artist.”

In the 1960s, he made a seemingly effortless transition from the Beats to the hippies, from coffee house culture to the counterculture, and rubbed shoulders with Bob Dylan and the Beatles.Ginsberg wrote a fierce denunciation of the War in Vietnam, Wichita Vortex Sutra, which he performed live before large audiences from Berkeley to Boston. He also reached out to poets in England, Latin America and the Soviet Union, including Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, making a concerted effort to link East and West in the era of the Cold War, and to bridge North and South at a time of growing consciousness about the widening gap between the Third World and developing nations.

In the summer of 1968, Ginsberg joined the demonstrators in Chicago, chanted and called for non-violent protest. In 1969, at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, he was a key witness for the defendants, reading from Howl, which had become a crucial text for the counterculture. Until his death in 1997 at the age of 70, he continued to protest against social and economic injustice and against nuclear weapons, even as he invited readers to change their life styles: give up smoking cigarettes and eat healthy foods. Shortly before he died, he sold his papers to Stanford University for one million dollars, shifted his publishing allegiance from City Lights to Harper & Row (owned by Rupert Murdoch), appeared in an ad for the Gap, joined the North AmericanMan/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and defended sexual relationships between teachers and students.

Feminism largely eluded him, though he counted women poets such as Ann Waldman and Diane di Prima as friends. Until the end of his life, he remained loyal to Kerouac, Burroughs and Cassady—the
members of the “boy gang” as he called it—he befriended during World War II who shaped his life and work. The Beat legend that Ginsberg helped to start singlehandedly has been nurtured over the years by dozens of books and several outstanding films: Jerry Aronson’s 1994 documentary Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg; the 2012 Hollywood version of On the Road; and Kill Your Darlings, a 2013 feature in which Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame plays Allen. The Radcliffe film explores the lives of the
nascent Beats in New York in the 1940s, a time and a place that, more than any other, shaped their personalities and provided the cultural and intellectual context for Howl, On the Road and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

Ginsberg, Allen (1926-1997). Ginsberg’s father, Louis, a socialist, and a published poet, taught high school and college English. His mother, Naomi, born in Russia, and an artist and a member of the
Communist Party, U.S.A, spent much of her life in mental hospitals, though she also introduced her son, Irwin Allen, who was born in Newark, New Jersey, to notable figures of the Old Left. As a boy, Allen (as he was called) learned about the Spanish Civil War, Sacco and Vanzetti and the “Scottsboro Boys.” Starting in high school, he defined himself as an anti-fascist and wrote
overtly political poetry. In the 1940s in New York, he befriended Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady —all of them founding members of what would become the Beat Generation. He also met and caroused on Times Square and elsewhere with Herbert Huncke and Lucien Carr, who appear in Kerouac’s picaresque novel, On the Road and in Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl.

Under the influence of Burroughs and Carr, Ginsberg immersed himself in the work of T.S. Eliot, Arthur Rimbaud and French symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire. A troubled, precious student at Columbia College, he clashed with his professors, including Lionel Trilling, and was expelled by the administration. After a voyage to West Africa, and later seven months as a patient in the New York State Psychiatric Institute—where he met fellow patient Carl Solomon, to whom he dedicated Howl— he adopted “madness” as his major meme, though he didn’t abandon the politics of the Old Left. In 1953 he protested the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

A fortuitous meeting with William Carlos Williams, the modernist poet and New Jersey medical doctor, provided him with a nurturing literary figure, and helped him overcome his own insecurities,
which derived in part from his ambivalence about his sexual identity, a topic
he explored in his journals. Not until he arrived in San Francisco in the mid-1950s and went into psychoanalysis at Langley Porter, did he accept and write openly about his homosexuality in poems such as “Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo,” in which he boasted, “I’m happy, Kerouac” and added, a “new young cat…loves me.”

A key figure in “the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance,”which helped move American poetry toward live performance rather than simply reading, and to jazz, Ginsberg wrote Howl in part under the influence of peyote, immersing himself in Leaves of Grass and coming to appreciate Whitman’s voice and persona as the poet of American democracy. In the second part of Howl, Ginsberg crystalized
his view of the modern world in the image of “Moloch,” an Old Testament figure emblematic of war, oppression and bureaucracy. The poem references “the socialist revolution,” the “Fascist national Golgotha,” and “The International,” the hymn of the global communist movement.

The geographical distance from New York, plus the anarchist, pacifist and bohemian ambiance of the San Francisco Bay Area, prompted Ginsberg to write half-a-dozen innovative poems, including
the mock-heroic, “America,” in which he addresses the nation, and exclaims “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb”—the most famous line in English language poetry in the second-half of the twentieth-century. The poem ends with the poet’s proclamation: “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”

In the late 1950s and for much of the 1960s, Ginsberg traveled widely with Peter Orlovsky, his lover, and also with his friends, Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger, carving out a role for himself as a peripatetic poet and in verse recounting his experiences in France, Japan, India, Cuba and Czechoslovakia, where he defied Communist Party authorities and was expelled from the country.

Capitalism and communism seemed equally abhorrent to Ginsberg, and he mocked those two isms in poems such as “Capitol Air” in which he complains about Moscow and Washington, D.C., the KGB
and the CIA. He turned increasingly to both Hinduism and Buddhism, developed a spiritual practice that included meditation, adopted Chögyam Trungpa as a guru, taught poetry at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and helped bring Buddhism to a generation of Americans indifferent to Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism.

The death of his mother, Naomi, prompted him to write Kaddish—which honors her and a generationof Jewish immigrants to the U.S. Widely hailed by the academic world as Ginsberg’s best work, Kaddish has never been as popular as Howl and other Poems, the 1956 volume published by City Lights that has sold more than a million copies and has been translated into more than two-dozen
languages. The nationally publicised trial of Howl, for obscenity, in San Francisco in 1957, boosted book sales and eroded Puritanical laws that outlawed pornography. The trial also provided
free publicity for City Lights, the fledging bookstore and publishing company,and focused attention on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the sole defendant in the courtroom, which Ginsberg viewed from afar, relishing the notoriety it provided. As U.S. poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, noted Ginsberg was a “genius
for public life” as well as a “genius as an artist.”

In the 1960s, he made a seemingly effortless transition from the Beats to the hippies, from coffee house culture to the counterculture, and rubbed shoulders with Bob Dylan and the Beatles.
Ginsberg wrote a fierce denunciation of the War in Vietnam, Wichita Vortex Sutra, which he performed live before large audiences from Berkeley to Boston. He also reached out to poets in England, Latin America and the Soviet Union, including Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, making a concerted effort to link East and West in the era of the Cold War, and to bridge North and South at a time of growing consciousness about the widening gap between the Third World and developing
nations.

In the summer of 1968, Ginsberg joined the demonstrators in Chicago, chanted and called for non-violent protest. In 1969, at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, he was a key witness for the
defendants, reading from Howl, which had become a crucial text for the counterculture. Until his death in 1997 at the age of 70, he continued to protest against social and economic injustice
and against nuclear weapons, even as he invited readers to change their life styles: give up smoking cigarettes and eat healthy foods. Shortly before he died, he sold his papers to Stanford University for one million dollars, shifted his publishing allegiance from City Lights to Harper & Row (owned
by Rupert Murdoch), appeared in an ad for the Gap, joined the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and defended sexual relationships between teachers and students.

Feminism largely eluded him, though he counted women poets such as Ann Waldman and Diane di Prima as friends. Until the end of his life, he remained loyal to Kerouac, Burroughs and Cassady—the members of the “boy gang” as he called it—he befriended during World War II who shaped his life and work. The Beat legend that Ginsberg helped to start singlehandedly has been nurtured over the years by dozens of books and several outstanding films: Jerry Aronson’s 1994 documentary Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg; the 2012 Hollywood version of On the Road; and Kill Your Darlings, a 2013 feature in which Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame plays Allen. The Radcliffe film explores the lives of the nascent Beats in New York in the 1940s, a time and a place that, more than any other, shaped their personalities and provided the cultural and intellectual context for Howl, On the Road and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

Collins, Ronald K. L. and David Skover. The People v. Ferlinghetti: The Fight to Publish Allen
Ginsberg’s Howl. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.

Kramer, Jane. Allen Ginsberg in America. New York: Random House, 1969.

Miles, Barry: Allen Ginsberg: A Biography. London: Virgin Publishing, 2001.

Morgan, Bill, and David Stanford. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. New York: Penguin,
2011.

Raskin, Jonah: American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation.
Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006.

https://allenginsberg.org