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Allen Ginsberg (стр. 1 из 2)

’s Life Essay, Research Paper

Ann Charters

Ginsberg, Allen (3 June 1926-6 Apr. 1997), poet, was born in Newark, New Jersey, the

younger son of Louis Ginsberg, a high school English teacher and poet, and Naomi Levy

Ginsberg. Ginsberg grew up with his older brother Eugene in a household shadowed by his

mother’s mental illness; she suffered from recurrent epileptic seizures and paranoia. An

active member of the Communist Party-USA, Naomi Ginsberg took her sons to meetings of the

radical left dedicated to the cause of international Communism during the Great Depression

of the 1930s.

In the winter of 1941, when Allen was a junior in high school, his mother insisted that

he take her to a therapist at a Lakewood,

New Jersey, rest home, a disruptive bus journey he described in his long autobiographical

poem "Kaddish." Naomi Ginsberg spent most of the next fifteen years in mental

hospitals, enduring the effects of electroshock treatments and a lobotomy before

her death at Pilgrim State Hospital in 1956. Witnessing his mother’s mental illness had a

traumatic effect on Ginsberg, who wrote poetry about her unstable condition for the rest

of his life.

Graduating from Newark’s East Side High School in 1943, Ginsberg later recalled that

his most memorable school day was the afternoon his English teacher Frances Durbin read

aloud from Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" in a voice "so enthusiastic and

joyous . . . so confident and lifted with laughter" that he never forgot the image of

"her black-dressed bulk seated squat behind an English class desk, her embroidered

collar, her voice powerful and high" (quoted in Schumacher, p. 17). Despite his

passionate response to Whitman’s poetry, Ginsberg listed government or legal work as his

choice of future occupation in the high school yearbook.

Attending the college of Columbia University on a scholarship, Ginsberg considered his

favorite course the required freshman

great books seminar taught by Lionel Trilling. Later Ginsberg also cited the renowned

literary critics and biographers Mark

Van Doren and Raymond Weaver as influential professors at Columbia. But Ginsberg’s friends

at Columbia were an even greater influence than his professors on his decision to become a

poet. As a freshman he met undergraduate Lucien Carr, who introduced him to William S.

Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, part of a diverse (and now legendary) circle of friends that

grew to include the Times Square heroin addict Herbert Huncke, the young novelist John

Clellon Holmes, and a handsome young drifter and car thief from Denver named Neal Cassady,

with whom Ginsberg fell in love. Kerouac described the intense encounter between Ginsberg

and Cassady in the opening chapter of his novel On the Road (1957).

These friends became the nucleus of a group that named themselves the "Beat

Generation" writers. The term was coined by Kerouac in the fall of 1948 during a

conversation with Holmes in New York City. The word "beat" referred loosely to

their shared sense of spiritual exhaustion and diffuse feelings of rebellion against what

they experienced as the general conformity, hypocrisy, and materialism of the larger

society around them caught up in the unprecedented prosperity of postwar America.

In the summer of 1948, in his senior year at Columbia, Ginsberg had dedicated himself

to becoming a poet after hearing in a vision the voice of William Blake reciting the poem

"Ah Sunflower." Experimenting with drugs like marijuana and nitrous oxide to

induce further visions, or what Ginsberg later described as "an exalted state of

mind," he felt that the poet’s duty was to bring

a visionary consciousness of reality to his readers. He was dissatisfied with the poetry

he was writing at this time, traditional work modeled on English poets like Sir Thomas

Wyatt or Andrew Marvell whom he had studied at Columbia.

In June 1949 Ginsberg was arrested as an accessory to crimes carried out by Huncke and

his friends, who had stored stolen

goods in Ginsberg’s apartment. As an alternative to a jail sentence, Ginsberg’s professors

Van Doren and Trilling arranged with the Columbia dean for a plea of psychological

disability, on condition that Ginsberg was admitted to the Columbia Presbyterian

Psychiatric Institute. Spending eight months in the mental institution, Ginsberg became

close friends with the young writer Carl Solomon, who was treated there for depression

with insulin shock.

In December 1953 Ginsberg left New York City on a trip to Mexico to explore Indian

ruins in Yucatan and experiment with various drugs. He settled in San Francisco, where he

fell in love with a young artist’s model, Peter Orlovsky; he took a job in market

research, thinking that he might enroll in the graduate English program at the University

of California in Berkeley. In August 1955, inspired by the manuscript of a long jazz poem

titled "Mexico City Blues" that Kerouac had recently written in Mexico City,

Ginsberg found the courage to begin to type what he called his most personal

"imaginative sympathies" in the long poem "Howl for Carl Solomon" (Original

Draft Facsimile Howl, p. xii). As his biographer Bill Morgan stated, in the poem

"Allen finally accepted his homosexuality and stopped trying to become

’straight’" (Allen Ginsberg and Friends, p. 31).

In October 1955 Ginsberg read the first part of his new poem in public for the first time

to tumultuous applause at the Six

Gallery reading in San Francisco with the local poets Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder,

Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip LaMantia. Journalists were quick to herald the

reading as a landmark event in American poetry, the birth of what they labeled the San

Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran the City Lights Book Store

and the City Lights publishing house in North Beach, sent Ginsberg a telegram echoing

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s response to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: "I greet

you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?" Later Ginsberg

wrote that "in publishing ‘Howl,’ I was curious to leave behind after my generation

an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our

military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police

bureaucracy" (Original Draft Facsimile Howl, p. xii).

Early in the following year Howl and Other Poems was published with an

introduction by William Carlos Williams as number four in the City Lights Pocket Poets

Series. In May 1956 copies of the small black-and-white stapled paperback were seized by

the San Francisco police, who arrested Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao, his shop

manager, and charged them with publishing and selling an obscene and indecent book. The

American Civil Liberties Union took up the defense of Ginsberg’s poem in a highly

publicized obscenity trial in San Francisco, which concluded in October 1957 when Judge

Clayton Horn ruled that Howl had redeeming social value.

During the furor of the trial, Ginsberg left California and settled in Paris with

Orlovsky, who was to remain his companion

for the next forty years. Living on Ginsberg’s royalties from Howl and Orlovsky’s

disability checks as a Korean War veteran,

they traveled to Tangier to stay with Burroughs and help him assemble the manuscript later

published as his novel Naked Lunch (1959). In 1958 Ginsberg returned to New York

City, still troubled by his mother’s death in the mental hospital two years before,

haunted by the thought that he had never properly said goodbye to her. Using various drugs

to explore his painful memories of their life together and confront his complex feelings

about his mother, Ginsberg wrote his greatest poem, "Kaddish for Naomi

Ginsberg," modeling his elegy on the traditional Jewish memorial service for the

dead.

Continuing to experiment with various psychedelic stimulants to create visionary

poetry, Ginsberg traveled to South America,

Europe, Morocco, and India with Orlovsky in 1962. It was the most important trip of his

life. Staying in India for nearly

two years, he met with holy men in an effort to find someone who could teach him a method

of meditation that would help him

deal with his egotism and serve as a vehicle for heightened spiritual awareness. On a

train in Japan, Ginsberg recorded in his poem "The Change" his realization that

meditation, not drugs, could assist his enlightenment. He returned to North America in the

fall of 1963 to attend the Vancouver Poetry Conference with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan,

Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and many other poets who felt that they formed a

community of nonacademic experimental writers.

In 1968 Ginsberg received wide coverage on television during the Democratic National

Convention when he and the members of the National Mobilization Committee who were against

U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam confronted the police in Chicago’s Grant Park.

The poet stayed on an impromptu stage and chanted "Om" in an attempt to calm the

crowds being brutally attacked by tear gas and billy clubs. Ginsberg’s courage, his

humanitarian political views and support of homosexuality, his engagement in Eastern

meditation practices, and his charismatic personality made him one of the favorite

spokesmen chosen by a younger generation of radicalized Americans known as

"hippies" during the end of this turbulent decade.

In the early 1970s Ginsberg’s serious, bearded image with black-rimmed glasses, a tweed

jacket, and an "Uncle Sam" paper top hat became a ubiquitous poster protesting

the Vietnam War. In 1971 Ginsberg met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who became his meditation

teacher at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist college in Boulder, Colorado. Three years

later, Ginsberg, assisted by the young poet Anne Waldman, founded a creative writing

program called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Ginsberg taught

summer poetry workshops there and lectured during the academic year

at Brooklyn College as a tenured distinguished professor until the end of his life.

In his remaining years, publishing steadily and traveling tirelessly despite increasing

health problems with diabetes and the aftereffects of a stroke, Ginsberg gave readings in

Russia, China, Europe, and the South Pacific. In the bardic tradition of William Blake,

who played a pump organ when he read his poetry, Ginsberg often accompanied himself on a

portable harmonium bought in Benares for fifty dollars. He was the archetypal Beat

Generation writer to countless poetry audiences and to the general public. Unlike Kerouac,

who died in 1969, Ginsberg remained a radical poet, the embodiment of the ideals of

personal freedom, nonconformity, and the search for enlightenment. As a member of the

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, he unabashedly used his prestige to

champion the work of his friends. Two months short of his seventy-first birthday, he died

of liver cancer at his home in the East Village, New York City.

Bibliography

Along with Ginsberg’s many awards and honors, his list of publications encompasses

hundreds of items. Most notably, in addition to those mentioned above, they include the

collections Reality Sandwiches, 1953-1960 (1963); Planet News, 1961-1967

(1968); Indian Journals: March 1962-May 1963 (1970); The Fall of America:

Poems of These States, 1965-1971 (1972), which won the National Book Award; Gordon

Ball, ed., Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness (1974); Mind

Breaths: Poems, 1972-1977 (1978); Plutonium Ode: Poems, 1977-1980 (1982); Collected

Poems: 1947-1980 (1985); Barry Miles, ed., Howl: Original Draft Facsimile,

Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous

Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts &

Bibliography (1986); White Shroud: Poems, 1980-85 (1986); Cosmopolitan

Greetings: Poems, 1986-1992 (1994); Selected Poems, 1947-1995 (1996), and Death

and Fame: Last Poems, 1993-1997 (1999). The front dust wrapper of this last book is a

color photograph of the poet standing in his apartment next to a portrait of Walt Whitman,

both white-bearded. The list of the forty most important Ginsberg titles in his

posthumously published Death and Fame was gathered by his editors Bob Rosenthal,

Peter Hale, and Bill Morgan into the categories of Poetry, Prose, Photography, and Vocal

Words and Music. Bill Morgan compiled the 456-page descriptive Ginsberg bibliography, The

Works of Allen Ginsberg, 1941-1994 (1995). J. W. Ehrlich edited Howl of the

Censor (1961), an account of the 1957 San Francisco trial investigating obcenity in

Ginsberg’s poem. Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America, was an early biography, followed

by two full-length biographies: Barry Miles, Ginsberg (1989), and Michael

Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (1992). Bill

Morgan, archivist for the estate of Allen Ginsberg, prepared the biographical text in Allen

Ginsberg and Friends (New York: Sotheby’s Catalog for Sale 7351, Oct. 7, 1999). An

obituary is in the New York Times, 7 Apr. 1997.

Source: http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-03394.html;

American National Biography Online June 2000 Update. Access Date: Sun Mar 18

11:32:26 2001 Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by

Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Thomas Gladysz

Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926 and grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. His father,

Louis, was a high school teacher and an accomplished lyric poet. His mother, Naomi, a

Communist during the Depression, suffered from psychotic delusions. At times, she insisted

there were wires in her head with which people could hear her thinking. Coming of age in a

household of modest means, Ginsberg’s early life seemed to steer him away from the

conventional. He was from a family of Jewish Russian immigrants, his family had ties to

the radical labor movement, his mother was insane, and he was a homosexual: four

prescriptions in the conventional1940’s and 1950’s for a sense of deep alienation.

Inspired by Naomi’s "mad idealism" to defend the underpriviliged, Ginsberg

entered Columbia University as a pre-law student. He later changed his major to

literature, and studied under Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. However, more

influential in Ginsberg’s artistic and personal development was the off-campus circle of

friends with whom he became involved. At its center was Jack Kerouac, a former Columbia

student, and the older William S. Burroughs, a sophisticated cosmopolitan hipster who

introduced his younger colleagues to Manhattan’s varied subcultures. Ginsberg’s other

friends and acquintances from the time included the writers Herbert Hunke, John Clellon

Holmes and Lucien Carr (father of bestselling author Caleb Carr) as well as the

charasmatic Neal Cassady. Each would emerge as key figures in the Beat movement of a

decade later.

In 1945, for reasons now clouded in legend, Ginsberg was expelled from Columbia.

Reinstated in 1946, he received his bachelor’s degree two years later. However, nineteen

forty-eight was significant for an experience central to Ginsberg’s life as a poet. Living

in an East Harlem tenement, Ginsberg heard the voice of William Blake intoning "Ah!

Sunflower." Staring out the window

. . . I began noticing in every corner where I looked evidences of a living hand, even

in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick, Some hand placed them there – that some

hand had placed the whole universe in front of me . . . . Or that God was in front of my

eyes – existence itself was God . . . . what I was seeing was a visionary thing, it was a

lightness in my body . . . my body suddenly felt light, and a sense of cosmic

consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise. And it was a

sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe that I’d been existing in.

(Paris Review interview)

The search for a "totally deeper real universe" continued for Ginsberg. He

remained in New York City until 1953, writing (largely conventional) poetry and supporting

himself by working as a book reviewer, market researcher, etc . . . . Deciding to follow

Neal Cassady (with whom he had fallen in love) to San Francisco, Ginsberg travelled to