"Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private." --Allen Ginsberg

It's Allen Ginsberg's birthday. He was, before his death, perhaps the best-known poet of our time, although his work is rarely taught in schools. Minnesota Public Radio's wonderful Writer's Almanac had this to say:

It's the birthday of poet Allen Ginsberg, (books by this author) born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). He came from a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants; his father was a high school teacher and a poet, and his mother struggled with mental illness her entire life. Ginsberg fell in love with the poetry of Walt Whitman when he was in high school, after hearing his English teacher read a passage from Whitman's "Song of Myself" to the class. He later said that he would never forget his teacher's "black-dressed bulk seated squat behind an English class desk, her embroidered collar, her voice powerful and high . . . so enthusiastic and joyous . . . so confident and lifted with laughter."

He went to Columbia University, planning to take pre-law classes and become a lawyer like his brother, but he switched his major to English after taking a Great Books class from the critic Lionel Trilling. He fell in with a group of poets and artists that included Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. They read poetry to each other and took drugs and had all-night conversations, and sometime in the late '40s they started calling themselves "Beats."

When Ginsberg was twenty-six years old, he was sitting in his apartment in Harlem when he suddenly had a vision of William Blake. He told friends and family that he had found God. He said, "My body suddenly felt light, and [I felt] a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise. And it was a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe than I'd been existing in." But Ginsberg still wasn't sure that he wanted to be a poet after he graduated from Columbia. He worked as an apprentice book reviewer for Newsweek magazine for a time, and then he spent five years working for an advertising agency in an office in the Empire State Building. In 1955, he and his psychiatrist decided he would be happier writing poetry. He took six months of unemployment insurance money and moved to San Francisco, where he became part of the poetry scene that included Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In October of 1955, he read his poem "Howl" to a large group of people at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. It was a huge success, and it launched a writing career that lasted over forty years.

"Howl" begins:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . ."

Ginsberg wrote, "I want to be known as the most brilliant man in America . . . who sang a blues made rock stars weep . . . who called the Justice department & threaten'd to Blow the Whistle / Stopt Wars . . . distributed monies to poor poets & nourished imaginative genius of the land."

posted by Celia Thursday, June 03, 2004

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Ink and Flesh

If you were to have a line of poetry tattooed upon your body, what would it be?

posted by Celia Monday, May 31, 2004

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