Allen Ginsberg

At 70 years old, Allen Ginsberg has this physical status:

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926-1997) was an American poet, scholar, and writer.

He began interacting with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac as a Columbia University college student in the 1940s, becoming the Beat Generation's most popular group.

He criticized militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and embodied several aspects of this counterculture, including anti-deathonianism and openness to Eastern faiths in the United States, and he criticized what he saw as the destructive powers of capitalism and conformity.

In 1956, San Francisco police and US Customs confiscated "Howl," causing a lot of attention in 2005 when it was referred to heterosexual and homosexual sex as a crime in every state at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime.

Ginsberg's poetry reflected his sexuality and his friendships with a variety of guys, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong companion.

Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not pornographic: "Would there be any freedom of press or expression if one must limit his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?" "Ginsberg was a Buddhist who sought Eastern religious traditions for a long time."

He lived modestly, buying his clothes in secondhand stores and living in apartments in New York's East Village.

Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, was one of his most influential teachers.

Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1974, responding to everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs.

"September on Jessore Road" brought attention to Bangladeshi refugees' plights and exemplifies what literary critic Helen Vendler called Ginsberg's persistence in protesting "imperial politics" and "perpetution of the powerless."

In 1974, Robert Grael's collection The Fall of America won the annual National Book Award for Poetry.

He received the National Arts Club gold medal in 1979 and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 1995, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992.

Early life and family

Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Paterson. He was Louis Ginsberg's second son, born in Newark, a schoolteacher and occasionally poet, and Naomi Levy, a feminist born in Nevel (Russia), and a zealous Marxist.

Ginsberg began writing letters to The New York Times as a youth about social issues, such as World War II and workers' rights. In the Paterson Morning Call, he published his first poems. Ginsberg, a boy in high school, became interested in Walt Whitman's work, inspired by his teacher's ardent reading. Ginsberg graduated from Eastside High School and briefly attended Montclair State College before enrolling Columbia University on a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson.

In 1945, he joined the Merchant Marine to finance his education at Columbia. While at Columbia, Ginsberg contributed to the Columbia Review literary journal, the Jester humor magazine, received the Woodberry Poetry Award, served as president of the Philolexian Society (literary and debate section), and joined Boar's Head Society (poetry society). He was a resident of Hartley Hall, where other Beat Generation poets, such as Jack Kerouac and Herbert Goldwell, lived. Ginsberg has said that his mandatory freshman seminar in Great Books, which Lionel Trilling has taught, was his favorite Columbia course.

Ginsberg spent several months in a mental hospital after he pleaded insanity during a hearing, according to The Poetry Foundation. He was accused of hiding stolen items in his dorm room, according to him. The robbed house was not his, but it belonged to an acquaintance. Ginsberg was also present at the Episcopal St. Mark's Church in Bangor, which would later hold a memorial service for him after his burial.

In a 1985 interview, Ginsberg referred to his parents as "old-fashioned delicatessen philosophers." Ginsberg and his brother Eugene were invited to party meetings by his mother, who was also a member of the Communist Party. Later, Ginsberg said that his mother "made up bedtime tales" that read: "The bad king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering employees, and healed them." "My father will wander around the house, either reciting Emily Dickinson and Longfellow under his breath or criticizing T. S. Eliot for ruining poetry with his 'obscurantism,' a father Ginsberg said. I became suspicious of both directions."

Naomi Ginsberg suffered with schizophrenia, which often manifested as nebulous delusions, uncoordinated reasoning, and several suicide attempts. For example, she would argue that the president had installed listening devices in their house and that her mother-in-law was trying to murder her. Naomi felt closer to young Allen, "her little dog," as Bill Morgan's book titled "I Celebrate Myself: Allen Ginsberg's Private Life in a way. She attempted to kill herself by slitting her wrists, and was admitted to Greystone, a mental hospital, soon; a large portion of Ginsberg's youth was spent in mental institutions. Naomi Ginsberg's two major works, "Howl" and his long autobiographical poem "Kaddish (1894–1956)," were inspired by his experiences with his mother and her mental illness.

He accompanied his mother by bus to her therapist when he was in junior high school. Ginsberg was deeply distraught by the journey, as he recalled it and other events from his childhood in "Kaddish." In "Howl," his mother's mental illness and institutionalization are both mentioned often. For example, "Pilgrim State Hospital, Rockland, and Grey Stone's Opponents" refers to institutions that his mother and Carl Solomon frequented: Pilgrim State Hospital in New York and Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, respectively. "With mother's finally ******" is followed shortly by the line. The deletion was later discovered to be "fucked," Ginsberg said. In section three, he mentions Solomon "I'm with you in Rockland, where I imitate the shade of my mother." Solomon also demonstrates the connection between Solomon and his mother.

After she died after his mother recalled a copy of "Howl" he had sent her, Ginsberg's mother wrote her a letter. "The key is in the window, but the key is in the sun; get married Allen is not a drug taker," Ginsberg says; "the key is in the sunlight in the window." "God's messengers come to my bed," she wrote to Ginsberg's brother Eugene, and God Himself I saw in the sky." The sunshine was also on the window for me, a key on the side of the window. The sunshine's yellow highlighted the key on the other hand of the window." These letters and the lack of a facility to recite kaddish inspired Ginsberg to write "Kaddish," which includes a section from Naomi's life, Ginsberg's career, and the letter, which includes the words "the key is in the window" and "the key is in the window."

Lucien Carr, a freshman at Columbia University, introduced him to a number of future Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes in Ginsberg's first year at Columbia. They became friends because they shared an interest in the future of American youth, which was outside the strict confines of post-World War II, McCarthy-era America. Ginsberg and Carr embraced the new vision (a term derived from Yeats' "A Vision") for literature and America. Carr also introduced Ginsberg to Neal Cassady, for whom Ginsberg had a longing desire. The meeting between Ginsberg and Cassady was chronicled in the first chapter of his 1957 book On the Road Kerouac. They were seen as the dark (Ginsberg) and the light (Cassady) side of their "New Vision," a perception that stems in part from Ginsberg's experience with communism, of which Kerouac had grown suspicious. Despite the fact that Ginsberg was never a member of the Communist Party, Kerouac called him "Carlo Marx" in On the Road. This was a point of tension in their marriage.

In addition, Ginsberg met Gregory Corso in the Pony Stable Bar in New York. Corso, a prisoner who was recently released from jail, was sponsored by the Pony Stable patrons and was writing poetry at the night of their meeting. Ginsberg said he was immediately attracted to Corso, who was straight, but after three years in jail, he learned of homosexuality. Ginsberg was even more struck by Corso's poems, understanding Corso's that Corso was "intelligently gifted." Corso was introduced by Ginsberg to the rest of his inner circle. Corso's first meeting at the Pony Stable showed Ginsberg a poem about a woman who lived across the street from him and sunbathed naked in the window. The woman was remarkably similar to Ginsberg's wife during one of his forays into heterosexuality. Corso was taken by Ginsberg to their apartment. Corso's mother had sex with Corso, but she was still young and afraid of being in danger. Ginsberg introduced Corso to Kerouac and Burroughs, and the two of them began to travel together. Ginsberg and Corso were lifelong friends and collaborators.

Elise Nada Cowen, a Barnard College philosophy professor who had been a student at Barnard College for a while during the burgeoning Beat generation's period of growth, became intimately involved for a short time after this time in Ginsberg's life. Elise Cowen, a Barnard undergraduate, read a lot of poetry from Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, among other Beat writers, when she met Joyce Johnson and Leo Skir. Beat poetry seemed to be a harbinger of Cowen's more popular genre at the time, suggesting a frightful side of her persona. Cowen spent time at Barnard, earning the nickname "Beat Alice" as she was among a select group of anti-establishment artists and visionaries well-known to strangers, and one of her first acquaintances at the university, Joyce Johnson, who later portrayed Cowen in her books, including "Minor Characters" and Come and Join the Dance, which portrayed the two women's experiences in the Barnard and Columbia Beat group. Ginsberg discovered that they shared a mutual acquaintance, Carl Solomon, to whom he later dedicated his most famous poem, "Howl" after his relationship with Elise Cowen. This poem is considered an autobiography of Ginsberg from 1955 to 1955, as well as a brief history of the Beat Generation, due to the poems' similarities to other Beat artists of the time.

Ginsberg's auditory hallucination occurred while reading William Blake's poetry (later called it his "Blake vision") in 1948 in an apartment in Harlem. Ginsberg claimed to have heard the voice of God at first, but later interpreted the voice as that of Blake himself. Ah! The Sunflower, The Sick Rose, and The Little Girl Lost were both described by Ginsberg as the "voice of the ancient of days." The entire process lasted several days. Ginsberg claimed to have witnessed the universe's interconnectedness. He inspected latticework on the fire escape and realized that some hand had made it; rather, the sky said that the hand that made itself. He said that this hallucination was not triggered by opioid use, but that he tried to reclaim that sensation later with various medications. "Not that any hand had raised the sky but that the sky was the living blue hand itself," Ginsberg said. "I'd be in front of my eyes; existence itself was God" and "[...] it was a sudden awakening to a completely different real universe than I had imagined."

Ginsberg immigrated to San Francisco in the 1950s. He worked as a market researcher before City Lights' publication of Howl and Other Poems in 1956.

Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky (1933–2010), who fell in love and became his lifelong companion. Selections from their correspondence have been published.

Ginsberg met with members of the San Francisco Renaissance (James Broughton, Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason, and Kenneth Rexroth), as well as other writers whose Beat Generation will later be associated with the Beat Generation in a broader sense. William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg's mentor, wrote an introduction letter to San Francisco Renaissance figurehead Kenneth Rexroth, who later introduced Ginsberg to San Francisco's literary scene. Ginsberg also met three young poets and Zen enthusiasts who had become best friends at Reed College, including Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch. Ginsberg, poet John Kelly, Robert Kaufman, A. D. Winans, and William Margolis, among the Beatitude poetry magazine's founders, was born in 1959.

Wally Hedrick, a painter and co-founder of the Six Gallery, approached Ginsberg in mid-1955 and asked him to host a poetry reading at the Six Gallery. Ginsberg initially refused, but after he had written a rough draft of "Howl," he changed his "fucking mind" as he put it. "Six Poets at the Six Gallery," Ginsberg described the festival as "Six Poets at the Six Gallery." On October 7, 1955, one of Beat mythos, better known as "The Six Gallery reading," took place. The festival brought together the Beat Generation's East and West Coast factions. The reading that night featured the first public reading of "Howl," a poem that brought worldwide recognition to Ginsberg and to several of the poets associated with him. An account of that night can be found in Kerouac's book The Dharma Bums, detailing how money was collected from audience members to buy jugs of wine, with Ginsberg performing ardently, with arms outstretched.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked," Ginsberg's most popular book "Howl" is well-known for its opening line: "I saw the finest minds of my generation destroyed by madness, screaming hysterical naked." At the time of its appearance, "Howl" was regarded as scandalous due to its rawness of its words. It was forbidden for obscenity only after it was published in 1956 by San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore. The prohibition became a cause célèbre among First Amendment supporters, and was later lifted after Judge Clayton W. Horn declared the poem to have renewed artistic value. Ginsberg and Shig Murao, the City Lights' chief who was jailed for promoting "Howl," became lifelong colleagues.

Ginsberg claimed at one point that all of his work was a chronological biography (as in Kerouac's Duluoz Legend). "Howl" isn't just a biography of Ginsberg's life before 1955, but also a history of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg also stated later that his unresolved emotions regarding his schizophrenic mother were at the center of "Howl"'s script. Although "Kaddish" refers more specifically to his mother, "Howl" in various ways is influenced by the same emotions. "Howl" chronicles Ginsberg's life's development of several important friendships. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," Ginsberg describes Cassady and Solomon, immortalizing them in American literature. This madness was the "angry fix" that society needed to function; madness was the product of the disease. Ginsberg's poem centered on "Carl Solomon!" I'm with you in Rockland, and as a result, Solomon was turned into an archetypal figure looking for freedom from his "straightjacket." Despite the fact that references in most of his poems reveal a great deal about his biography, his friendship with other Beat Generation members, and his own political convictions, "Howl," his most popular poem, is still perhaps the best place to start.

Ginsberg shocked the literary world by leaving San Francisco in 1957. After a brief stay in Morocco, he and Peter Orlovsky joined Gregory Corso in Paris. They were welcomed in Corso to a shabby lodging house above a bar in 9 rue Gît-le-Cour, which was to be known as the Beat Hotel. Burroughs and others followed them soon. All of them had a fruitful, creative summer. Ginsberg's epic poem "Kaddish" was launched there, and Corso created Bomb and Marriage, while Burroughs and Corso assembled Naked Lunch from previous writings, as Corso composed Bomb and Marriage. This time was chronicled by photographer Harold Chapman, who moved in about the same time and took photographs of the "hotel" inhabitants until it was closed in 1963. Ginsberg and Orlovsky travelled extensively through India during 1962-1963, spending half a year in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Benares (Varanasi). He stayed two months in Athens (29/08/1961) where he visited numerous cites, such as Delphi, Mycines, Crete, and Crete, before returning to Israel, Kenya, and finally India. During this period, he formed friendships with some of the best young Bengali poets of the time, including Shakti Chattopadhyay and Sunil Gangopadhyay. Ginsberg had many political links in India, most notable Pupul Jayakar who aided him in prolonging his stay in India when the authorities were keen to expel him.

Ginsberg arrived in London in May 1965 and said he would read anywhere for free. He gave a reading at Better Books, which Jeff Nuttall described as "the first healing wind on a very parched collective mind" shortly after his arrival. "This may have been a very significant moment in England's history, or at least in the history of English poetry," Tom McGrath wrote.

Plans for the International Poetry Incarnation, which was held at the Royal Albert Hall in London on June 11, 1965, were soon after the bookshop reading. The festival attracted 7,000 people, including Ginsberg, Adrian Mitchell, Alexander Trocchi, Harry Fainlight, Anselm Hollo, Anselm Hollo, George MacBeth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Simon Vinkenoog, Spike Hawkins, and Tom McGrath. Barbara Rubin, Ginsberg's companion, arranged the gathering.

Peter Whitehead chronicled the event on film and announced it as Wholly Communion. In the United Kingdom and Grove Press in the United States, Lorrimer's book containing images from the film and some of the poems that were performed was also published under the same name.

Although Ginsberg and his closest friends (Corso, Orlovsky, Kerouac, Burroughs, etc.) are the most accurately characterized, the word "Beat" refers to them. The term "Beat Generation" has come to many of Ginsberg's fellow writers and acquaintances in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A key feature of this term appears to be a closeness with Ginsberg. Both readers may have friends with Kerouac or Burroughs, but the authors later attempted to dissociate themselves from the term "Beat Generation." Part of their dissatisfaction with the term came as a result of Ginsberg's mistaken identification as the leader. Ginsberg never claimed to be the leader of a movement. He said that many of the writers with whom he had become colleagues in this period shared many of the same hopes and themes. David Amram, Bob Kaufman; Jim Cohn; poets associated with the Black Mountain College; poets affiliated with the university such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley; and Denise Levertov; and poets associated with the New York School such as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch. LeRoi Jones, who read "Howl," wrote a letter to Ginsberg on a sheet of toilet paper before he became Amiri Baraka. Ginsberg's early work was published by Baraka's independent publishing house Totem Press. Ginsberg was introduced to Langston Hughes through a Baraka party, while Ornette Coleman played saxophone.

Ginsberg bridged the beat movement of the 1950s and the 1960s hippies, including Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bob Dylan. A few months before his death, Ginsberg attended his last public reading at Booksmith, a bookstore in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. In 1993, Ginsberg paid homage to Carl Rakosi, the 90-year-old great.

Kerouac began studying Buddhism in 1950 and told Ginsberg what he learned from Dwight Goddard's Buddhist Bible. As the Diamond Sutra, Ginsberg was first aware of the Four Noble Truths and such sutras.

Ginsberg's spiritual journey began early with his spontaneous visions and culminated with a journey to India with Gary Snyder. Snyder had previously spent time in Kyoto to study at the First Zen Institute in Daitoku-ji Monastery. Snyder chanted the Prajnaparamita at one point, which "blew my mind," a narrator in Ginsberg's words. Ginsberg, who was piqued, went to visit the Dalai Lama as well as the Karmapa at Rumtek Monastery. Ginsberg, who taught him, met Dudjom Rinpoche in Kalimpong, "If you see something terrible, don't cling to it."

Trungpa Rinpoche, a Kagyu and Nyingma Buddhist master, became a lifelong mentor after returning to the United States after meeting Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche on a New York City street with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (they both tried to catch the same cab), inspired Trungpa Trungpa Rinpoche. Anne Waldman, a Trungpa and New York poet, was instrumental in the establishment of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

Ginsberg was also involved in Krishnaism. In the mid-1960s, he began chanting the Hare Krishna mantra into his religious services. After learning that A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the creator of the Hare Krishna movement in the Western world, had rented a store front in New York, he befriended him, frequenting him and recommending publishers for his books, a fruitful partnership began. Satsvarupa Goswami's biographical account Srila Prabhu Pada Lilamrta narrates this relationship. Ginsberg donated funds, equipment, and fame to help the Swamis build the first temple, as well as touring with him to raise his money.

Despite disagreeing with several of Bhaktivedanta Swami's enforceable prohibitions, Ginsberg performed the Hare Krishna mantra regularly as part of his ideology and declared it to be a state of ecstasy. He was thrilled that Bhaktivedanta Swami, a genuine Indian swami, was now helping to spread the word in America. Ginsberg, along with other counterculture researchers, Gary Snyder, and Alan Watts, wanted to bring Bhaktivedanta Swami and his chanting into the hippie movement, and so he accepted the Mantra-Rock Dance performance and introduced the swami to the Haight-Ashbury hippie crowd.

Ginsberg planned and orchestrated a Bhaktive Swami celebration at San Francisco International Airport, where fifty to a hundred hippies welcomed the Swami with flowers in the airport lounge. Allen Ginsberg, a San Francisco Hare Krishna temple musician, wanted to help and promote Bhaktivendata Swami's message and chanting. It featured some of the best rock bands of the day: Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Moby Grape, who appeared along with Hare Krishna founder Bhaktivedanta Swami and donated proceeds to the Krishna temple. Bhaktivedanta Swami was introduced by Ginsberg to some three thousand people in the audience and led the Hare Krishna mantra chanting.

During poetry readings, Ginsberg's live performance featured both music and chanting. He accompanied himself on a harmonium and was often accompanied by a guitarist. In Banaras, the Hindi and Buddhist poet Nagarjun is believed to have introduced Ginsberg to the harmonium. Ginsberg continued his exercise after inheriting from his relatives, including his cousin Savitri Banerjee, according to Malay Roy Choudhury. On September 3, 1968, Ginsberg asked if he could sing a song in praise of Lord Krishna on William F. Buckley's television show Firing Line, the poet chanted dolefully on a harmonium. The host, Richard Brookhiser, a Buckley employee, said it was "the most unharried Krishna I've ever heard."

Allen yelled "Om" repeatedly at the 1967 Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the 1970 Black Panther march on Yale University Allen yelled "Om" over a sound system for hours on end.

When Ginsberg recited the Heart Sutra in the song "Ghetto Defendant," he brought mantras into rock and roll. The song appears on the British first wave punk band The Clash's 1982 album Combat Rock.

Ginsberg got in touch with Hungry poets of Bengal, especially Malay Roy Choudhury, who introduced Ginsberg to the three fish with one head of Indian emperor Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar. The three fish represented coexistence of all thought, philosophy, and faith.

Despite Ginsberg's attraction to Eastern faiths, journalist Jane Kramer argues that he, like Whitman, adhered to a "American brand of mysticism" that was "rooted in humanism and in a romantic and visionary ideal of harmony among men."

Hepatitis was reported from an unsterilized needle administered by a doctor in 1960, which is believed to have contributed to his death 37 years later. Ginsberg was a lifelong smoker, and although he attempted to quit for health and religious reasons, his active schedule in later life made it impossible, and he eventually returned to smoking.

Ginsberg had two minor strokes in the 1970s, first diagnosed as Bell's palsy, which left him with significant paralysis and stroke-like drooping of the muscles in one of his face.

He had regular minor illnesses such as high blood pressure later in life. Many of these signs were related to anxiety, but he never slowed down his schedule.

Ginsberg earned a National Book Award in 1974 for The Fall of America (split with Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck).

The Struga Poetry Evenings International Festival in Macedonia in 1986 awarded Ginsberg the Golden Wreath, the second American poet to be honoured since W. H. Auden. Ginsberg and the other Golden Wreath winners, Bulat Okudzhava and Andrei Voznesensky, met in Struga on Saturday.

Ginsberg appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's award-winning film Silence = Death about the struggle between gay artists in New York City for AIDS-education and the rights of HIV-infected people.

Ginsberg, the French Minister of Culture, was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.

Ginsberg continued to help his families as much as he could: he bought Herbert Huncke's money out of his own pocket, regularly supplied Arthur Russell with an extension cord to power his home recording device, and housed a homeless, heroin-addicted Harry Smith.

Ginsberg gave what is believed to be his last reading at The Booksmith in San Francisco on December 16, 1996, with the exception of a special guest appearance at the NYU Poetry Slam on February 20, 1997.

Ginsberg, who had been unsuccessfully treated for congestive heart disease, continued calling to say goodbye to almost every person in his address book after returning home from the hospital for the last time. Some of the phone calls were sad and interrupted by crying, while others were joyful and hopeful. Ginsberg's last poem, "Things I Will Not Do (Nostalgias)," was published on March 30, as he continued to write through his final illness.

He died on April 5, 1997, surrounded by family and friends in his East Village apartment in Manhattan, and died of liver cancer as a result of hepatitis complications at the age of 70. Gregory Corso, Roy Lichtenstein, Patti Smith, and others stopped by to give their respects. He was cremated, and his remains were buried in his family's plot in Gomel Chesed Cemetery in Newark. Orlovsky saved him.

Various writers, including Catfish McDaris, read at a party at Ginsberg's farm in 1998 to honor Allen and the Beats.

Good Will Hunting (released in December 1997) was dedicated to Ginsberg, as well as Burroughs, who died four months later.

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