Exemplar of Epistolary Ecstasy
Bill Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg “Recommending Hare Krishna to one and all” 375 It might have taken me 12 hours to read this book line by line, but it’s more important to…
Tag: Allen Ginsberg
A Radical Presence Constantly Goading Us (Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems)
Owner of the San Francisco institution, City Lights Bookstore; publisher of the Pocket Poets series, including HOWL, which brought an obscenity suit to City Lights and global fame to Allen Ginsberg; poet of A Coney…
A Radical Presence Constantly Goading Us (Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems)
Owner of the San Francisco institution, City Lights Bookstore; publisher of the Pocket Poets series, including HOWL, which brought an obscenity suit to City Lights and global fame to Allen Ginsberg; poet of A Coney…
The Pithy, the Necessary, the Clear, and the Plain
Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet, edited by Milton Hindus National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, 1984 Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing…
Occasional Moments of Peace, Gratitude, and Delight
I first learned of Gary Snyder through Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums, where he was fictionalized as “Japhy Ryder,” who, according to Alvah Goldbook [aka Allen Ginsberg], was “a great new hero of American…
Interview with Ginsberg
The Yiddish Book Center offers this interesting 1969 interview with Allen Ginsberg in Montreal several days after the death of Jack Kerouac.
“The Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha”*
Notes on Eliot Katz, The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg Example of George Steiner’s championing learning by heart: Ginsberg knew hundreds of poems from memory [20] In Dear Layla and Book of Mev: The…
On the New York Literary Establishment in the Fifties
“There’s no room for youth and vitality in New York. It is a city full of guilty academicians.” –Gregory Corso “Too big, too multiple, too jaded.” –Jack Kerouac “We want everyone to know that we…
What I Can Use: Notes on Waldman and Birman’s Civil Disobediences
“Emerson was not a systematic reader, but he had a genius for skimming and a comprehensive system for taking notes…. He read rapidly, looking for what he could use.” p. 67 “He read widely in…
Lobbyist for Tenderness
I first read Allen Ginsberg’s City Lights paperback Howl and Other Poems late one autumn night 1980 with friends at the White Castle at the corner of Bardstown Road and Eastern Parkway. A few months…