Allen Ginsberg (1920-1997). Biography and creativity

The Jewish-American poet Irwin Allen Ginsberg, second son of Louis and Naomi Levy Ginsberg, was born on June 3, 1926. His father, a high school English teacher, was a published poet with several volumes of work and a smattering of publications in journals and newspapers. His brother, Eugene Brooks Ginsberg, had his poetry published in his lifetime but chose to drop Ginsberg from his name for most of his adulthood. Both of Ginsberg’s parents were socialists, and his mother was an active participant in the Communist Party of the United States of American (CPUSA). Her radical beliefs influenced her son’s work and political activism.

Naomi Ginsberg was also plagued by mental instability and spent much of Allen Ginsberg’s life under full-time psychiatric care. Ridden with guilt over his mother’s condition and inspired by her activism, Ginsberg wrote Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), a title taken from the Jewish prayer for the dead, in which he mourns and celebrates his mother’s life, drawing upon her socialist convictions to critique American culture. Equally known as both a popular icon and a literary innovator, Ginsberg was a political activist who spoke out on a wide range of issues, from drug use to the Vietnam War to the nuclear arms race to gay rights. He remains one of the most memorable American icons of the second half of the 20th century.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Allen Ginsberg attended school in nearby Paterson, subject of William Carlos Williams’s epic poem Paterson (published between 1946 and 1963). Ginsberg excelled in school and wrote extensively in a journal from age 11 but decided to become a poet in college. In 1943, Ginsberg enrolled at Columbia University in New York City, where he intended to study law or labor economics. After taking an introductory literature class with the renowned essayist Lionel Trilling, Ginsberg chose instead to study English. While living on campus, he befriended Lucien Carr, an attractive and street-smart young man who introduced him to a Harvard graduate, William S. Burroughs. Although Ginsberg did not know it at the time, Burroughs would become one of his closest friends and a major influence. Burroughs introduced Ginsberg to the New York underground, soon to be called the “Beat” movement, a term coined later by Jack Kerouac, and to the works of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Rimbaud, Proust, and Celine.

Jack Kerouac, to whom Ginsberg introduced himself in May 1944, was an even greater influence on Ginsberg’s life and works. The two bonded instantly, and after one particularly memorable walk around the Columbia area of the city, Ginsberg said, “I suddenly realized that my own soul and his were akin.” Kerouac and Ginsberg became lifelong friends; Ginsberg shared his deepest secrets with him, even those regarding his sexual identity. From an early age, Ginsberg was aware of his homosexual feelings but was afraid to express them for fear of persecution. Ginsberg experienced homophobia in many forms, even at Columbia, where he was discouraged from writing a novel that contained a homosexual relationship. Kerouac’s tolerance proved vital to Ginsberg’s eventual acceptance of his own identity. Through Kerouac, Ginsberg met Neal Cassady, the ruggedly handsome “holy con- man” from Denver with whom Ginsberg would experience intellectual stimulation, sexual attraction, and poetic inspiration. Ginsberg immortalized Cassady in his works, calling him the “secret hero of these poems.”

Though Ginsberg maintained good grades at Columbia, he was often subject to disciplinary action, especially as a result of his association with Jack Kerouac, who was notorious on campus for being involved with suspicious characters. In spring 1945, a cleaning woman on campus filed a complaint against Ginsberg for writing obscene messages on his dorm room window in protest of her failure to wash them. To make matters worse, when the dean of the university showed up in Ginsberg’s room, he saw that Kerouac had been staying there illegally. Ginsberg was suspended until he provided proof that he was receiving psychiatric care. Ginsberg was reenrolled by September 1946, after his mother’s former psychiatrist pronounced him “psychologically pretty much as sound as they come.” He finally completed his degree in 1948.

In the summer of that year, as Ginsberg lay in his bed reading the poetry of William Blake, he claims that he heard the voice of Blake himself reciting several of his poems aloud. This vision is mentioned frequently in Ginsberg’s poetry, as it instilled in him the notion of the poet as purveyor of universal and timeless truths. The voice of Blake is also present in much of Ginsberg’s work, as Blake’s writing style was a major influence on Ginsberg’s.

After his visitation by Blake, and in the wake of his mother’s lobotomy a year earlier, Ginsberg experienced great difficulty with his writing and his personal life. In February 1949, after multiple refusals, Ginsberg finally consented to let the poet and shady Times Square personality Herbert Huncke move into his apartment. Huncke began storing stolen property at the apartment; at the end of April, Huncke and Ginsberg were arrested. With the help of his former professors, Ginsberg avoided jail time and was sent instead for an eight-month stay at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. There he met Carl Solomon, the mentally unstable genius to whom Ginsberg would dedicate “Howl.” one month after his release from the mental hospital in February 1950, Ginsberg attended a public reading by the modernist poet William Carlos Williams at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Ginsberg was eager to meet the renowned poet from his home state, but since he was intimidated the night of the reading, he mailed Williams a formal letter of introduction with a packet of poems instead. Ginsberg was impressed by Williams’s attempts to create poetry out of American talk rhythms rather than conventional meter; however, Ginsberg himself was still attempting to write traditional rhymed and metered poetry. While Williams did not praise the poetry, he also did not turn Ginsberg away, encouraging him to send him more work.

That spring Ginsberg first began to feel part of a writing community. He had recently met and befriended the poet Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were both writing extensively, often relying on Ginsberg to help them publish their works. Ginsberg was still looking for his own voice and was getting closer each day in his journal entries. He enjoyed moderate success when “Song: Fie My Fum,” a collaborative poem written with Kerouac, was published in the eccentric journal Neurotica. In 1949, Kerouac created the term Beat generation, when referring to the group’s weariness of pressure to conform to societal standards. Although he initially used Beat to mean tired, he later extended his definition to include beatific, or blessed, referring to the notion that the downtrodden were the ones who were truly destined for glory. While the Beats were still gaining recognition, it was during this time that their community of interdependent writers began to solidify.

Unfortunately, the “weariness” of his friends often prompted them to engage in self-destructive behavior, and after witnessing a high number of his acquaintances die by age 25, Ginsberg needed to spend some time away. He traveled extensively through the United States and Mexico and then made the abrupt decision to move to San Francisco. In the thriving arts scene of the beginnings of the San Francisco poetry renaissance, Ginsberg would again have a writing community, an association that always proved to be most helpful for his writing. Furthermore, the small size and bohemian climate of the city gave Ginsberg a feeling of acceptance that he lacked in New York. He immediately integrated into the scene, hobnobbing with the likes of Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. He was also introduced to Peter Orlovsky, the young poet with whom he fell instantly in love.

In July 1955, Ginsberg enrolled in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. More notably, in the fall of that year, after hearing that his friend Carl Solomon had been institutionalized once again, Ginsberg began writing “Howl,” the poem that ignited his career and made the “Beat generation” known. After a celebrated public reading in October 1955, the poem was published by the San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His publishing company City Lights printed Howl and Other Poems, a collection including “America,” “Sunflower Sutra,” and “A Supermarket in California.”

William Carlos Williams wrote the introduction, which ended with the infamous directive “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.” While the book received much critical acclaim after its 1956 publication, the year was darkened by the death of Naomi Ginsberg of a cerebral hemorrhage on June 9. She died at Greystone, a mental institution. At her funeral not enough men had assembled to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. Feeling as though this left her death open-ended, Ginsberg began writing “Kaddish,” a poem he did not complete until 1960.

After “Howl” was published, Ginsberg traveled in Morocco and Europe with Peter Orlovsky for almost two years. In summer 1957, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the City Lights bookstore clerk Shig Murao were tried for publishing and selling (Ginsberg’s) obscene material, defended by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union. On October 3, Judge Horn ruled that Howl had redeeming social value, but at that point, with all the press coverage of the trial and discussion of the groundbreaking poems within literary circles, there was little that anyone could have done to prevent the book’s success.

In July 1958, Ginsberg returned to New York amid wild publicity about the “Beat generation.” In Ginsberg’s absence, Jack Kerouac had unwillingly been titled “King of the Beats,” and the pressure and constant media attention had driven him into depression and alcoholism. Ginsberg, though, thrived on the notoriety. One November night, after his friend Zev Putterman read aloud from the Kaddish in a Jewish prayer book, Ginsberg returned home to resume work on the poem, completing a draft in one amphetamine-induced 40-hour sitting.

After polishing “Kaddish” in September 1960, Ginsberg compiled Kaddish and Other Poems, which would again be released by City Lights. He also appeared in a film called Tip My Daisy, titled after a line from the collaboration between Ginsberg and Kerouac, and distributed sound recordings of his poetry. A friend from Corinth Press expressed interest in publishing Empty Mirror, a manuscript of poems that Ginsberg had completed in 1952 but for which he had been unable to find a publisher. Both Kaddish and Empty Mirror were published in 1961, and a new collection, Reality Sandwiches, followed in 1963. Ginsberg’s prodigious writings in the early 1960s finally earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1963-64.

The early 1960s also signaled a period of increased drug experimentation for Ginsberg. Shortly after returning from his trip abroad, Ginsberg participated in a Stanford University study of the effects of LSD. In winter 1960, he tried “magic mushrooms” for the first time under the watch of the Harvard psychiatrist Timothy Leary, who later wrote of that evening, “We started planning the psychedelic revolution.” Already an outspoken proponent of marijuana legalization, Ginsberg preached the gospel of psychedelic drugs to other artists, meanwhile experimenting with the effects of drugs on his writing. While much of his drug-influenced poetry did not stand up to his best work, some pieces, such as the associative “Television Was a Baby Crawling toward That Deathchamber,” demonstrated his ability to connect subconscious thoughts to create something that resembled Burroughs’s “cut-up” (collage) method of pasting together unrelated lines of writing. In time, though, many of his friends became addicts; after traveling to Israel and India in 1962, Ginsberg decided to write from his own consciousness rather than attempting to reach an altered state of mystical consciousness with drugs. He documented this shift in “The Change.” Although he remained a spokesperson for drug legalization, he redirected his own energy into Eastern practices of meditation and spiritual chants, or mantras, in his attempts at enlightenment.

Also inspired by the peaceful spirituality of Indian culture, Ginsberg became more involved in political activism, particularly in the antiwar movement. He was instrumental in the advancement of “flower power,” which insisted on gentle and peaceful protesting, and served on the planning committee of the hippie festival known as “the Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In” in 1967. While his activism did not leave much time for writing, in 1968 he published Planet News, a volume of poems heavily informed by his political experiences.

While traveling throughout the United States and reading his poetry, Ginsberg developed a new technique of “auto poesy,” in which he dictated spontaneous poetry into a tape recorder and later transcribed it. In The Fall of America: Poems of these States, 1965-1971, published in 1973, Ginsberg describes his travels and what he observed to be spiritual deterioration along the way. The Fall of America, which included the powerful antiwar poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” earned Ginsberg a National Book Award in 1974.

Although Jack Kerouac had instructed Ginsberg in some of the basics of Buddhism in the 1950s, it was not until the early 1970s that Ginsberg began to pursue it seriously. He studied under the Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, who founded the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He officially converted in 1972 and, together with his fellow Buddhist poet Anne Waldman, opened the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, an arts program in the tradition of Tibetan pedagogy. In 1978, he published a collection of poems, many of which were based on his Buddhist experiences, entitled Mind Breaths, referring to the Samatha style of meditation, in which participants pay special attention to breathing in order to heighten awareness.

After accompanying Bob Dylan as a performer on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Ginsberg spent the end of 1975 and first few months of 1976 with his father, who was suffering from diseases of the lung and pancreas. Louis Ginsberg passed away on July 8, 1976, and “Don’t Grow Old,” Ginsberg’s moving recounting of his death, was included in Mind Breaths. The collection as a whole was something of a departure from his more political work, and while 1982’s Plutonian Ode addresses issues of nuclear warfare, his work at this point had withdrawn from its prophetic pedestal and turned to more introspective, lyrical pieces.

The title poem of White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985, for instance, contains another nostalgic memory of his parents, in which Ginsberg relates a dream about his mother living as a bag lady in New York. Ginsberg’s last poems, many of which were written during the brief period between his diagnosis of liver cancer and his death, are collected in Death and Fame: Poems, 1993-1997. Ginsberg continued to tour the country reading his work late into his life and, after struggling with complications of hepatitis and cancer, died on April 5, 1997.

While Ginsberg’s poetry is often hailed as the voice of a generation, to relegate his work to just one generation, or even to just one voice, does not take into account the prodigious career of one of the 20th century’s most influential poets. Ginsberg’s experimentation in his life and in his writing not only led to the creation of a remarkable body of work, but also, as Helen Vendler writes, was “responsible for loosening the breath of American poetry.” Teeming with rage, humor, insight, and sincerity, the work of Ginsberg not only serves as the voice of his generation but also paves the way for future generations to have voices of their own.