Ann Charters Ginsberg, Allen (3 June 1926 – 6 April 1997), poet, was born in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest 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 family darkened by his mother's mental illness; he suffered from recurrent seizures and paranoia. An active member of the Communist Party USA, Naomi Ginsberg took her children to radical leftist meetings dedicated to the cause of international communism during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay In the winter of 1941, when Allen was in middle school, her mother insisted that he take her to a therapist at a Lakewood, N.J., retirement home, a disruptive bus ride 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 dying at Pilgrim State Hospital in 1956. Witnessing her mother's mental illness had a traumatic effect on Ginsberg, who wrote poems about his instability. condition for the rest of his life. Graduating from East Side High School in Newark in 1943, Ginsberg later recalled that his most memorable school day was the afternoon when his English teacher Frances Durbin read Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" aloud in a voice " so enthusiastic and joyful... so confident and uplifted with laughter" that she never forgot the image of "his black-clad mass sitting squat behind an English classy desk, his embroidered collar, his voice powerful and high" ( quoted in Schumacher, p. 17). Despite his passionate response to Whitman's poem, Ginsberg listed government or legal work as his choice of future occupation in his high school yearbook. Attending college at Columbia University on a scholarship, Ginsberg considered Lionel's seminar on great books to be his favorite course. Trilling. Ginsberg later also cited the famous literary critics and biographers Mark Van Doren and Raymond Weaver as influential professors at Columbia. But Ginsberg's friends at Columbia exerted an even greater influence than his professors on his decision to become a poet. As a freshman he met college student 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 Times Square heroin addict Herbert Huncke, the young novelist John Clellon. Holmes, and a handsome young Denver drifter and car thief named Neal Cassady, with whom Ginsberg fell in love. Kerouac described the intense meeting between Ginsberg and Cassady in the opening chapter of his novel On the Road (1957). These friends became the nucleus of a group who called themselves "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 widespread 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 post-war America . In the summer of 1948, during his senior year at Columbia, Ginsberg had dedicated himself to becoming a poet after hearing William Blake's voice reciting the poem "Ah Sunflower" in a vision. Experimenting with drugs such as marijuana and nitrous oxide to induce further visions, or what Ginsberg later described as "a stateof exalted spirit", 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 the time, a traditional work modeled on English poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt or Andrew Marvell who had studied at Columbia. In June 1949 Ginsberg was arrested as an accomplice to the crimes committed by Huncke and his friends, who had stored the stolen goods in Ginsberg's apartment. As an alternative to prison sentences, Ginsberg's professors Van Doren and Trilling agreed with the dean of Columbia a declaration of psychological disability, on the condition that Ginsberg be admitted to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute Spending eight months in a mental institution, Ginsberg became a close friend of the young writer Carl Solomon, who was treated there for depression with insulin shock. In December 1953 Ginsberg left New York for a trip to Mexico to explore Indian ruins in the Yucatan and experiment with various drugs. She settled in San Francisco, where she fell in love with the model of a young artist, Peter Orlovsky; he took a job as a market researcher, thinking he might enroll in a graduate program in English at the University of California at 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 writing what he called his most personal "imaginative sympathies" in long poem. "Howl for Carl Solomon" (original draft of Howl facsimile, 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 featuring local poets Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip LaMantia. Journalists were quick to herald the reading as a seminal event in American poetry, the birth of what they called the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran the City Lights Book Store and City Lights Publishing House in North Beach, sent Ginsberg a telegram that echoed Ralph Waldo Emerson's response to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career.In 1968 Ginsberg received widespread television coverage during the Democratic National Convention when he and members of the National Mobilization Committee who opposed U.S. participation in the Vietnam War confronted the police in Chicago's Grant Park he stood on a makeshift stage and chanted "Om" in an attempt to calm the crowd who were being brutally attacked with tear gas and batons. Ginsberg's courage, his humanitarian political views and support for homosexuality, his commitment to meditation practices. oriental and his charismatic personality made him a favorite spokesperson of choice for a younger generation of radicalized Americans known as "hippies" during the end of this turbulent decade. In the early 1970s the serious, bearded image of Ginsberg with black-rimmed glasses, a tweed jacket and a paper "Uncle Sam" top hat became a ubiquitous protest poster against the Vietnam War. In 1971 Ginsberg met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who became his meditation teacher at 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 in Naropa.Ginsberg held summer poetry seminars there and lectured during the academic year at Brooklyn College as a distinguished tenured professor until the end of his life. In his remaining years, publishing constantly and traveling tirelessly despite growing health problems with diabetes and the aftermath 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 reading his poems, Ginsberg often accompanied himself with a portable harmonium purchased in Benares for fifty dollars. He was the archetypal Beat Generation writer for countless poetry audiences and 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 brazenly used his prestige to support the work of his friends. Two months before his seventy-first birthday, he died of liver cancer at his home in the East Village, New York City. The front dust jacket of the latter book is a color photograph of the poet standing in his apartment next to a portrait. by Walt Whitman, both with white beards. The list of Ginsberg's forty most important titles in his posthumously published Death and Fame was compiled by his editors Bob Rosenthal, Peter Hale, and Bill Morgan in the categories Poetry, Prose, Photography, Spoken Words, and Music. Bill Morgan compiled Ginsberg's 456-page descriptive 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 obscenity in Ginsberg's poetry. Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America, was one of the first biographies, followed by two full biographies: Barry Miles, Ginsberg (1989) and Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (1992). Bill Morgan, archivist of Allen Ginsberg's estate, prepared the biographical text in Allen Ginsberg and Friends (New York: Sotheby's Catalog for Sale 7351, October 7, 1999). Thomas Gladysz Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926 and raised 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. She sometimes insisted there were wires in her head by which people could hear her think. Coming of age in a family of modest means, Ginsberg's early life seemed to distance him from the conventional. He came from a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, his family had ties to the radical labor movement, his mother was crazy, and he was homosexual: four prescriptions in the conventional 1940s and 1950s for a sense of profound alienation. Inspired by Naomi's "crazy madness" to defend the less privileged, Ginsberg entered Columbia University as a law student. He later changed his major to literature and studied with Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. However, most influential in the development Ginsberg's artistic and personal life was the circle of off-campus friends with whom he became involved. At the center were Jack Kerouac, a former Columbia student, and the older William S. Burroughs, a sophisticated cosmopolitan hipster who introduced his colleagues. younger to the various subcultures of Manhattan. Ginsberg's other friends and acquaintances of the time included the writers Herbert Hunke, John Clellon Holmes and Lucien Carr (father of bestselling author Caleb Carr) as well as the charismatic Neal Cassady emerged as a key figure in the Beat movement a decade later, for reasons now hidden in thelegend, Ginsberg was expelled from Columbia. Reinstated in 1946, he earned his degree two years later. However, 1948 was significant for a central experience in Ginsberg's life as a poet. Living in an East Harlem tenement, Ginsberg heard William Blake's voice intoning "Ah! Sunflower." Looking out the window. . . I began to notice in every corner I looked traces of a living hand, even in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick. Some hand had placed them there - that some hand had placed the entire universe before me. . . . Or that God was before my eyes – existence itself was God. . . what I saw was a visionary thing, it was a lightness in my body. . . my body suddenly felt light and I felt a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, wonder and surprise. And it was a sudden awakening into the totally deeper real universe in which I existed. (ParisReview Interview)The search for a "totally deeper real universe" continued for Ginsberg. He remained in New York 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 traveled to Cuba, Mexico, and eventually arrived on the West Coast, home to a vibrant bohemian literary community. (To learn more about the beginnings of the Beat, check out "How Beat Happened," a superb introduction to Beat culture by Steve Silberman,) Bearing a letter of introduction from poet (and fellow Paterson resident) William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg met Kenneth Rexroth, a distinguished man of letters and center of what was then known as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Chaired by Rexroth, this active community of Bay Area poets included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Gary Synder, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Josephine Miles, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, and other writers, artists, filmmakers, and avant-gardists. In October 1955, Rexroth hosted a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco: among the poets reading that evening were Synder, Whalen, McClure, Lamantia, and Ginsberg in what would be his poetry reading debut. Encouraged by Kerouac, Ginsberg gave a first-ever inspired reading of “Howl.” I've seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, hungry, hysterical, naked, shuffling through the nigger streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-haired hipsters, burning for the ancient celestial connection with the starry dynamo in the mechanism of the night that poverty and tatters and empty eyes and . . . .So begins "Howl", one of the most read poems of the century. Ginsberg composed it in what he calls his "Jewish-Melvillian bardic breath," a free verse form whose sources include the poets and writers Christopher Smart, Percy Shelley, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Antonin Artaud, Frederick Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams. In the 1950s (and 1960s), Ginsberg also used drugs as a means of inducing visionary awareness, as his experience with Blake had provided. Thus, exposed to new influences and literary friends in California, Ginsberg achieved the open-form poetry that distinguishes his work from the largely traditional verse of the era. After reading Gallery Six - Lawrence Ferlinghetti offered to publish Howl and Other Poems (1956) as part of his City Lights Books Pocket Poet series. In 1957, U.S. Customs officers and San Francisco police seized the edition, and Ferlinghetti was accused of publishing an obscene book. The trial, in which well-known establishment writers such as Rexroth, MarkShorer, Walter Van Tilburg Clark and others testified for the defense, drawing local headlines and national attention. By the time Judge Clayton W. Horn issued his verdict that “Howl” was not obscene, the Beat movement had received something of a manifesto, and Allen Ginsberg was famous. On the road for the next ten years—sometimes with Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso, and his longtime companion, Peter Orlovsky—Ginsberg wandered the country and the world. Starting in the early 1950s, Ginsberg ventured to the Yucatan (where he helped discover a notable Mayan archaeological site), Tangier (where he visited the expatriate community centered on Paul Bowles), and Europe (where he lived for a while in Paris). Sea voyages as a member of the merchant marine took him to Africa and the Arctic. In 1960 he spent six months in Chile, Peru, Bolivia and the Amazon region. Most importantly, during this period, Ginsberg exorcised some of his internal demons by writing "Kaddish," a long, brilliant poem about his mother's madness and death. Published in book form in 1961, "Kaddish" is a prayer and lament for Naomi Ginsberg. It is also widely considered his finest work. The poem provides a seemingly real account of her mother's tragic journey through life, from that of a frightened Russian child to that of a young woman in America and beyond "to education, marriage, nervous breakdown, operation, teaching in school and learning about madness.” A bittersweet epilogue to “Kaddish,” titled “White Shroud,” was published twenty-five years later. Throughout 1962 and 1963, Ginsberg and Orlovsky toured the Far East. There Ginsberg came into direct contact with the traditions of Zen Buddhism. His interest in Buddhism and Asian literature had been piqued by his Bay Area friendships with Synder, Whalen, and Rexroth. Ginsberg's interest, which would shape the development of his poetry, has continued to the present day. In 1965, Ginsberg went to Cuba as a correspondent for the Evergreen Review but was deported when he spoke out against the government's persecution of homosexuals at the University of Havana. He then traveled to the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia, where he was deported again after more than 100,000 people in Prague crowned him May King in 1965. Back in the United States, the FBI placed him on the list of dangerous subjects. Throughout the 1960s, Ginsberg took an active role in the growing anti-war and counterculture movements. In 1965 he coined the term “flower power”. He was also a moving spirit (along with Synder, McClure, and Timothy Leary) behind the first of the hippie mass gatherings, the 1967 Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In held in nearby Golden Gate Park. arrested with Dr. Benjamin Spock and others for his role in an anti-war demonstration in New York City. During the 1968 Democratic Convention, Ginsberg was tear gassed while trying to calm down and sing "Om" at the Yippie Life Festival. At the trial of the leaders of the demonstration, known as the Chicago Seven, Ginsberg testified for the defense. Ginsberg's literary endeavors during the 1960s and early 1970s were numerous and varied. At that time, poetry was primarily the written art of academic craft. Ginsberg took him out of the studio, out of the classroom, and onto the podium, becoming an accomplished public interpreter of his poems. His books from this period include Reality Sandwiches (1963), The Yage Letters (with William S. Burroughs) (1963), Indian Journals (1970), and The Fall of America (1972) – for which he was awarded the National Book Award. Planet News (1968) is a poetic record of his travels in Eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent and other parts of Asia, as well as the United States. It is included in this latest collection."