Allen Ginsberg: biography, works, reviews

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:44

Allen Ginsberg has featured prominently in American culture since World War II. He is one of the most respected beat writers and a renowned poet of his generation.

Allen Ginsberg: biography

He was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey to a Jewish immigrant family. Grew up in nearby Paterson. Father Louis Ginsberg taught English, and mother Naomi was a school teacher and an activist in the US Communist Party. Allen Ginsberg witnessed her psychological problems in her youth, including a series of nervous breakdowns due to fear of persecution for her social activities.

Start of beat movement

Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr met in 1943 while studying at Columbia University. The latter brought the first-year student together with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. The friends later established themselves as key figures in the beat movement. Known for their outlandish views and irritable behavior, Allen and his friends also experimented with drugs.

Ginsberg once used his college dorm room to store stolen goods purchased from acquaintances. Faced with accusations, hedecided to feign insanity and then spent several months in a psychiatric hospital.

After graduating from university, Allen stayed in New York and did various jobs. In 1954, however, he moved to San Francisco, where the beat movement was represented by poets Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Scream against civilization

Allen Ginsberg first came into the public eye in 1956 with the publication of The Shriek and Other Poems. This poem, in the tradition of W alt Whitman, is a cry of rage and despair against a destructive and inhumane society. Kevin O'Sullivan in Newsmakers called the works angry, sexually explicit poetry and added that many felt it was a revolutionary development in American poetry. Allen Ginsberg himself defined the "Scream" as "a Jewish-Melville bardic breath."

The poem's fresh, honest language has stunned many traditional critics. James Dickey, for example, described "Scream" as "an exhausted state of excitement" and concluded that "it's not enough to write poetry". Other critics responded more positively. Richard Eberhart, for example, called the work "a powerful work breaking through into a dynamic sense… It is a cry against everything in our mechanistic civilization that kills the spirit… Its positive power and energy comes from the redemptive power of love." Paul Carroll called the poem "one of the milestones of a generation". Assessing the impact of The Howl, Paul Zweig noted that the author "practically single-handedly supplantedtraditionalist poetry of the 1950s.”

Process

In addition to shocked critics, "Scream" stunned the San Francisco Police Department. Because of the graphic sexual language of the poem, the book was declared obscene, and the publisher, the poet Ferlinghetti, was arrested. The subsequent litigation attracted national attention and prominent literary figures: Mark Schorer, Kenneth Rexroth, and W alter Van Tilberg Clark defended The Howl. Schorer testified that “Ginsberg uses the rhythms and diction of ordinary speech. The poem is forced to use the language of vulgarity. Clark called "Scream" the work of an extremely honest poet who is also a highly competent specialist. Witnesses eventually persuaded Judge Clayton Horn to rule that the work was not obscene.

Thus, Allen Ginsberg, whose qualities of the poem were widely circulated during the trial, became the author of the manifesto of the beatnik literary movement. Novelists such as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs and poets Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Ginsberg wrote on previously taboo and non-literary subjects in the language of the street. Beat flow ideas and art had a major impact on popular culture in America in the 1950s and 1960s.

Prayer for the Dead

In 1961, Ginsberg published Kaddish and Other Poems. The poem was similar in style and form to "The Cry" and, based on the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, recounted the life of his mother. The complex feelings that the poet had for her, colored by her struggle with mentaldisease are the focus of this work. It is considered one of Allen's finest creations, with Thomas Merrill calling it "Ginsberg at its purest and perhaps best" and Louis Simpson calling it "a masterpiece."

This is it

Allen Ginsberg, whose writings were heavily influenced by William Carlos Williams, recalled his school characterization as "a clumsy, rough provincial from New Jersey", but after talking with him, "suddenly realized that the poet listened sensitively with" bare "ears ". The sound, the clear sound and the rhythm that was spoken around him, and he tried to adapt his poetic rhythms from the real colloquial he heard, and not from the metronome or archaic literary chant.

According to the poet, after a sudden insight, he acted immediately. Allen Ginsberg quotes from his own prose in the form of small fragments of 4 or 5 lines, exactly corresponding to someone's conversation-thinking, arranged according to the breath, exactly as they should be broken if they were required to be spoken, and then sent them to Williams. He almost immediately sent him a note with the words: “This is it! Do you still have this?”

Kerouac and others

Another significant influence on Ginsberg was his friend Kerouac, who wrote "spontaneous prose" novels that Allen admired and adapted into his own work. Kerouac wrote some of his books by loading a typewriter with a roll of white paper and typing continuously in a "stream of consciousness". Allen Ginsberg began to write poems differently from what he claims, "working on themlittle bits and pieces from different periods, but keeping the idea in mind, and writing it down on the spot, and completing it there.”

Williams and Kerouac emphasized the writer's emotions and natural mode of expression over traditional literary structures. Ginsberg cited historical precedents for this idea in the works of poet W alt Whitman, prose writer Herman Melville, and writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Libertarian politician

The main theme of Ginsberg's life and work was politics. Kenneth Rexroth called this aspect of Allen's work "an almost perfect embodiment of Whitman's long populist social revolutionary tradition in American poetry." In a number of poems, Ginsberg mentions the union struggles of the 1930s, popular radical figures, the McCarthy red hunt, and other milestones of the left movement. In the Wichita Vortex Sutra, he tries to end the Vietnam War with some kind of magic spell. In Pluto's Ode, a similar technique is tested - the poet's magical breath relieves the energy of the atom from its dangerous qualities. Other poems like "Scream", while not overtly political, are nonetheless considered by many critics to contain strong social criticism.

Flower power

Ginsberg's political activity was strongly libertarian, echoing his poetic preference for individual self-expression over traditional form. In the mid-1960s, he was closely associated with the counterculture andanti-war movement. He created and championed the "flower power" strategy, where anti-war demonstrators advocated positive values such as peace and love to dramatize their opposition to the death and destruction caused by the Vietnam War.

The use of flowers, bells, smiles and mantras (sacred chants) became common among demonstrators for a while. In 1967, Ginsberg was the organizer of the Gathering of Tribes for Human Existence, an event modeled on a Hindu religious festival. It was the first countercultural festival and became an inspiration for thousands of others. In 1969, when some anti-war activists staged a "Pentagon exorcism," Ginsberg composed a mantra for him. He also served as a defense witness at the Chicago G7 Trial in which anti-war activists were charged with "conspiring to cross state lines to start a riot."

Protester

Sometimes Ginsberg's political activities provoked a reaction from law enforcement agencies. He was arrested at an anti-war demonstration in New York in 1967 and dispersed with tear gas at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. In 1972, he was imprisoned for participating in demonstrations against then-President Richard Nixon at the Republican National Convention in Miami. In 1978, he and his longtime companion Peter Orlovsky were arrested for blocking railroad tracks in order to stop a train carryingradioactive waste coming from the Rocky Flats plant, which produces weapons-grade plutonium in Colorado.

May King

Ginsberg's political activities caused him problems in other countries as well. In 1965 he visited Cuba as a correspondent for the Evergreen Review. After he complained about the treatment of gays at the University of Havana, the government asked Ginsberg to leave the country. In the same year, the poet traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he was elected "King of May" by thousands of Czech citizens. The next day, the Czech government asked him to leave because he was "unkempt and rotten". Ginsberg himself explained his deportation by saying that the Czech secret police were embarrassed by the general approval of the "bearded American fairy-tale poet".

Mystic

Another problem that was reflected in Ginsberg's poetry was the emphasis on the spiritual and the mystical. His interest in these matters was fueled by a series of visions he had while reading the poems of William Blake. Allen Ginsberg remembered "a very deep sepulchral voice in the room", which he immediately, without thinking, attributed to Blake's voice. He added that "there was something unforgettable about the specific quality of the sound, because it looked as if God had a human voice with all the infinite tenderness and patriarchy and mortal burden of a living Creator speaking to his son." Such visions aroused an interest in mysticism, which led the poet to temporary experiments with various drugs. howAllen Ginsberg later claimed that he wrote "Scream" under the influence of peyote, "Kaddish" - thanks to amphetamines, and "Wales - a visit" - with LSD.

After a trip to India in 1962, during which he was introduced to meditation and yoga, Ginsberg changed his attitude towards drugs. He was convinced that meditation and yoga were much better at raising the state of awareness, but he considered hallucinogens useful for writing poetry. Psychedelics, he says, are a variant of yoga and a means of exploring consciousness.

Conversion to Buddhism

Ginsberg's study of Eastern religions began after he discovered mantras, rhythmic chants used in spiritual practices. Their use of rhythm, breath and elementary sounds seemed to him a kind of poetry. In a number of poems, he included mantras in the text, turning the work into a kind of prayer. He often began poetry readings by repeating mantras to set the right mood. His interest in Eastern religions eventually led him to the Rev. Chogyama Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist abbot who had a strong influence on Ginsberg's work. In the early 1970s, the poet took classes at the Trungpa Institute in Colorado and also studied poetry. In 1972, Allen Ginsberg made the Bodhisattva vows, formally embracing Buddhism.

The main aspect of Trungpa's training is a form of meditation called shamatha, in which one concentrates on one's own breathing. According to Ginsberg, it leads to the calming of the mind, the mechanical production of fantasy and mentalforms; this leads to a heightened awareness and consideration of them. The book "Breaths of the Mind" dedicated to Trungpa contains several poems written with the help of shamatha meditation.

From rags to riches

In 1974, Allen Ginsberg and his colleague Ann Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetry as an affiliate of the Naropa Institute. According to the poet, the ultimate idea was to establish a permanent college of arts in the Tibetan tradition, where there are teachers and students living together in one building that will operate for hundreds of years. To teach and talk at the school, Ginsberg attracted prominent writers such as Diana di Prima, Ron Padgett, and William Burroughs. Correlating his poetry with an interest in the spiritual, Ginsberg once said that the addition of poetry is a form of self-knowledge for self-improvement, freeing the consciousness of the self that you are not. It is a form of discovering one's own nature and identity, or one's ego, and understanding what part of oneself is outside of it.

Ginsberg experienced some literary equivalent of what is called "rags to riches" - from his feared and criticized early "dirty" work to his later incorporation into the "pantheon of American literature." He was one of the most influential poets of his generation and, according to James Mersman, "a great figure in the history of poetry."

Recent years

A documentary directed by Jerry Aronson, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg was released in 1994. In the same year, Stanford University paid the poet one million dollars for his personalarchive. New poems and collections of Ginsberg's previous work continued to be published regularly. And his letters, magazines and even photographs of fellow beatniks made it possible to take a fresh look at the life and work of the poet.

In the spring of 1997, Ginsberg, who suffered from diabetes and chronic hepatitis, was diagnosed with liver cancer. After studying this disease, he quickly wrote 12 short poems. The next day, the poet suffered a stroke and fell into a coma. He died two days later. In The New York Times, William Burroughs said goodbye to him, calling him "a great man with world influence."

Allen Ginsberg: books

Poems from the last few years of the poet's life were collected in Death and Glory: Poems, 1993-1997. This volume includes works created immediately after Allen became aware of his illness. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly described the collection as "the perfect culmination of a noble life". Ray Olson and Jack Helberg, writing in Booklist, found Ginsberg's poetry "polished, if not cramped," and Rochelle Ratner, in a Library Journal assessment, notes that it has "a lot of evidence of tenderness and caring."

Another posthumous publication by Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995, features over 150 essays on nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, censorship, poets such as W alt Whitman and Gregory the beatnik Corso, and other cultural luminaries including John Lennon and photographer Robert Franke. A critic for Publishers Weekly praised the book as "sometimes sweet, sometimes sloppy" and added that it"is sure to resonate with a wide range of admirers of the poet." Booklist found Ginsberg's essay "more accessible than most of his poetry."

Mirror of my time

How would Ginsberg want to be remembered? According to him, as about someone in the traditions of the old American transcendental individualism, from the old Gnostic school of Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, who transferred them to the 20th century. Ginsberg once explained that of all human failings, he is most tolerant of anger; in his friends, he valued calmness and sexual tenderness most of all; his ideal occupation was "the articulation of feelings in the company". “Like it or not, no one reflects his time like Mr. Ginsberg,” the Economist reviewer concluded. "He was the link between the literary avant-garde and pop culture."