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Irwin Allen Ginsberg () (June 3, 1926 – April 5 1997) was an American Beat poet born in Newark, New Jersey. Ginsberg is best known for Howl (1956), a long poem about consumer society's negative human values.

Life

Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926 into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. His father Louis Ginsberg was a poet and his mother was a high school teacher. Ginsberg's mother, Naomi Levy Ginsberg (who was affected by epileptic seizures and mental illnesses such as paranoia) was an active member of the Communist Party USA and often took Ginsberg and his brother Eugene to party meetings. Ginsberg later said that his mother "Made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them.'"

As a gay teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to The New York Times about political issues such as World War II and workers' rights. When he was a junior in high school, he accompanied his mother by bus to her therapist. The trip disturbed Ginsberg and he later described it, along with his relationship with his mother, in his long autobiographical poem "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956)." While in high school, Ginsberg began reading Walt Whitman.

In 1943 Ginsberg graduated from high school and briefly attended Montclair State University before entering Columbia University on a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson. (1949). In his freshman year he met fellow undergraduate Lucien Carr, who introduced him to a number of future Beat writers including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes. Carr also introduced Ginsberg to Neal Cassady, one of the many that Ginsberg loved. Kerouac later described the meeting between Ginsberg and Cassady in the first chapter of his 1957 novel On the Road.

In 1954 Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky, a young man of 21 with whom he fell in love and who remained his life-long lover, and with whom he eventually shared his interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Later in his life, Ginsberg formed a bridge between the Beat movement of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s, befriending, among others, Timothy Leary, Gregory Corso, Ken Kesey, Bob Kaufman, Herbert Huncke, Rod McKuen, and Bob Dylan.

In 1965 Ginsberg was deported from Cuba for publicly protesting against Cuba's anti-marijuana stance and its penchant for throwing homosexuals in jail, but also for an alleged remark referring to revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara as "cute."

The Cubans sent him to Czechoslovakia, where one week after being named the King of a May Day parade, Ginsberg was labeled an "immoral menace" by the Czech government and deported.

Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, surrounded by family and friends in his East Village loft in New York City. He succumbed to liver cancer via complications of Hepatitis. He was 70 years old.

Career

Ginsberg's poetry was strongly influenced by modernism, romanticism, the beat and cadence of jazz, and his Kagyu Buddhist practice and Jewish background. He considered himself to have inherited the visionary and homoerotic poetic mantle handed from the English poet and artist William Blake on to Walt Whitman. The power of Ginsberg's verse, its searching, probing focus, its long and lilting lines, as well as its New World exuberance, all echo the continuity of inspiration which he claimed. Other influences included the American poet William Carlos Williams.

Ginsberg's principal work, "Howl", is well-known to many for its opening line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness". It was considered scandalous at the time of publication due to the rawness of the language, which is frequently explicit. Shortly after its 1956 publication by San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore, it was banned for obscenity. The ban became a cause célèbre among defenders of the First Amendment, and was later lifted after judge Clayton W. Horn declared the poem to possess redeeming social importance. Ginsberg's leftist and generally anti-establishment politics attracted the attention of the FBI, who regarded Ginsberg as a major security threat.

Ginsberg's spiritual journey began early on with his reported spontaneous visions, and continued with an early trip to India and a chance encounter on a New York City street (they both tried to catch the same cab) with Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master of the Vajrayana school, who became his friend and life-long teacher. Ginsberg helped found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, a school founded by Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. Music and chanting were both important parts of his live delivery during poetry readings. He often accompanied himself on a handheld organ called a harmonium, and was often accompanied by a guitarist. Attendance to his poetry readings was generally standing room only for most of his career, no matter where in the world he appeared.

Ginsberg won the National Book Award for his book "The Fall of America." In 1993, the French Minister of Culture awarded him the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (the Order of Arts and Letters).

In 1994, when the International Lesbian and Gay Association successfully banished all connections to the North American Man-Boy Love Association in order to gain consultative status in the United Nations, Ginsberg publicly opposed the move (together with modern gay rights founder Harry Hay). He stated that he supported NAMBLA's right to free speech, and that the hysteria over pederasty reminded him of the hysteria over homosexuality itself while he was growing up.

He spent 8 months in a mental institution for his own mental illness, where he met Carl Solomon. This is the Carl referred to in "Howl".

Role in Anti-Vietnam Protests

Ginsberg also played a key role in ensuring that a 1965 protest of the Vietnam war which took place at the Oakland-Berkeley city line and drew several thousand marchers was not violently interrupted by the California chapter of the notorious motorcycle gang - the Hell's Angels - and their leader, Sonny Barger.

The day prior to the scheduled march, the Angels attacked the front line of a smaller scale protest where a confrontation between police and demonstrators was brewing. The Angels came in on bikes and slashed banners while yelling "Go back to Russia, you fucking communists!" at the protestors. The Angels then vowed to disrupt the larger protest the next day.

Ginsberg traveled to Barger's home in Oakland to talk the situation through. It is rumored that he offered Barger and other members of the Angels LSD as a gesture of friendship/goodwill. In the end, Barger and the other Angels that were present came away deeply impressed by the courage of Ginsberg and his companion Kesey. They vowed not to attack the protest the next day and furthermore deemed Ginsberg a man who was worth helping out.

Restatement of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics

One of the legacies of Allen Ginsberg is his restatement of the three laws of thermodynamics. Allen Ginsberg said that the:

References in Popular Culture

  • The musical Rent referenced him in the song La Vie Boheme, in the line "Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunnigham and Cage"

  • The alternative rock band Sonic Youth recorded a track entitled "Hits of Sunshine (for Allen Ginsberg)" on its 1998 album, A Thousand Leaves.

Bibliography

Further Reading

  • Clark, Thomas. “Allen Ginsberg.” Writers at Work – The Paris Review Interviews. 3.1 (1968) pp.279-320.
  • Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. London: Virgin Publishing Ltd. (2001), paperback, 628 pages, ISBN 0753504863
  • Schumacher, Michael (edt.). Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son. Bloomsbury (2002), paperback, 448 pages, ISBN 1582342164
  • Schumacher, Michael. A Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.
  • Bullough, Vern L. "Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context." Harrington Park Press, 2002. pp 304-311.

Notes

External links

1926 births | 1997 deaths | Allen Ginsberg | American poets | Beat Generation | Beat writers | American anarchists | American anti-Vietnam War activists | American communists | American Buddhists | Columbia University alumni | Gay writers | Greenwich Village scene | Jewish American writers | Jewish anarchists | Jewish poets | Newarkers | People from Boulder, Colorado | Tax resisters

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