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…

Forty Years of Letters

Bill Morgan,  I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career:  The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg —1955-1997 I read a lot of Ferlinghetti in the 1980s, and loads of Ginsberg…

The Typewriter Is Holy

Later this summer at Cafe Ventana, I’ll be facilitating a reading group of the new book, The Essential Ginsberg.  I was just rereading Bill Morgan’s history,  The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat…

A Lifetime of Letters

The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (Da Capo Press, 2008) I have a file titled “Noam Chomsky” that contains several letters from the linguist during the 1990s. I first began writing him…

An Influential Neurotic Bodhisattva Bard

A few months after Mev died, I read all of Allen Ginsberg‘s poetry and several volumes of essays and journals. Somehow, his spirit cheered me. Recently, I’ve read several books about Ginsberg and what follows are…