Allen Ginsberg

Poet

• Born: June 3, 1926
• Birthplace: Newark, New Jersey
• Died: April 5, 1997
• Place of death: New York, New York

Poet

Ginsberg was a key figure in the Beat movement in poetry and a public artist with a profound commitment to social justice.

Areas of achievement: Activism; literature; social issues

Early Life

Allen Ginsberg (GIHNZ-burg) was born in Newark, New Jersey, the younger of two sons of Louis Ginsberg and Naomi Livergant. Louis was a high school English teacher and minor poet; Naomi was troubled with mental illness throughout her adult life and was frequently institutionalized during Allen Ginsberg’s adolescence. Ginsberg graduated from Paterson Eastside High School in 1943 and then attended Columbia University, where he studied literature with Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. At Columbia, Ginsberg met Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, and Columbia dropout and ex-football player Jack Kerouac. This coterie would form the foundation of the Beat literary movement, characterized by experimentation with drugs, by a rejection of conventional values, and by an interest in Eastern religions, During the first two years that he studied at Columbia, Ginsberg discussed great writers and philosophers, was arrested as an accessory after a murder when Carr rebuffed unwanted homosexual advances from Dave Kammerer with deadly force, and was finally suspended from Columbia for a year for writing offensive graffiti in the dust on his dormitory window. Ginsberg joined the U.S. Maritime Service in what was the last year of World War II, earning his seaman union’s card and working several runs on merchant ships.

After the war, Ginsberg returned to classes at Columbia and worked for the Associated Press. A car accident and a flight from the police resulted in Ginsberg being referred to Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute where he met Carl Solomon, to whom Ginsberg would later dedicate “Howl.” Ginsberg spent the next few years in New York City, except for a trip to Mexico City with Carr to visit Burroughs. John Clellon Holmes wrote Go (1952), considered the first Beat novel, but Ginsberg never liked his depiction in the text, believing that Holmes misunderstood the import of Ginsberg’s Harlem vision of visionary poet William Blake. Ginsberg continued a professional correspondence with fellow New Jersey native and poet William Carlos Williams, who encouraged Ginsberg to continue to pursue unorthodox poetic structures. Ginsberg traveled to Denver before settling in San Francisco, where Robert Duncan’s poetry workshop at San Francisco State College and the San Francisco Poetry Center provided a supportive culture for the his creation of poetry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened City Lights Books in 1953 at Broadway and Columbus, the start of a nascent poetry scene in North Beach.

Life’s Work

The Six Gallery reading on October 7, 1955, is considered the defining moment of the Beat movement in American literature. For the reading, Ginsberg enlisted Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and others as readers, then consulted Kenneth Rexroth, a San Francisco poet since the 1930’s. Rexroth recommended Gary Snyder, a Reed College graduate studying Chinese and Japanese at Berkeley. Kerouac’s shyness kept him from reading, but, as he describes in The Dharma Bums (1958), he collected money for wine and then bought jugs of burgundy that he pounded on the floor as Ginsberg read “Howl” to an amazed audience. Ferlinghetti published Howl, and Other Poems in 1956 as the third of the esteemed Pocket Poets series, and the Six Gallery readers came to be known as the central figures of the Beat movement in literature.

Over the next forty years, Ginsberg produced a corpus of poetry that puts him in the top ranks of American poets in the second half of the twentieth century. Howl, and Other Poems (1956, 1996), Kaddish, and Other Poems, 1958-1960 (1961), Reality Sandwiches (1963), The Fall of America (1972), and Plutonian Ode (1982) put Ginsberg within the poetic legacies of Walt Whitman’s common-man tradition, even as Ginsberg confronted issues of import in the twentieth century, such as psychedelic drug use, environmental stewardship, homosexuality, and the developing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community. Though Howl, and Other Poems remains his best-known collection of poetry, “Kaddish” may ultimately be the more complex and lasting achievement: It details the mental illness, institutionalization, decline, and death of his mother, Naomi. Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead, and Ginsberg’s poem of the same name serves as a chant that mourns the loss of his mother and of his religious tradition. Although Ginsberg continued to identify himself as a Jew, his studies and prayers in the Buddhist tradition superseded his Jewish identity after the early 1960’s.

Even as Ginsberg wrote and read prodigiously, he was equally influential as an advocate for his fellow Beat writers, for young artists and poets, for friends who had fallen on bad times, for free speech, and for Buddhism. Ginsberg was a lifelong critic of smoking tobacco and at the same time an advocate of marijuana use, a stance he justified in his poetry and in his nonfiction essays.

In 1954, Ginsberg met and fell immediately in love with twenty-one-year-old Peter Orlovsky, and the two remained a couple for the balance of Ginsberg’s life. Their open relationship allowed Orlovsky to pursue heterosexual affairs, sometimes creating complex relationship dynamics with Ginsberg. Although Ginsberg encouraged the artistic output of his partner, Orlovsky served more as a companion and an administrative assistant than as a fellow artist. The couple moved among San Francisco, Boulder, and New York City, with periodic trips to Europe, North Africa, and Asia, but they lived principally in a loft in the East Village of lower Manhattan.

In 1974, Ginsberg and writer Anne Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at what was then called Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Snyder, and other Beat writers often served residencies at the Jack Kerouac School, especially during the summer writing program. For twenty years, Ginsberg was generous with his time, his insights, and his money in supporting the school’s distinctive mission. During the last decade of his life, Ginsberg taught as Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He died of liver cancer in 1997.

Significance

Ginsberg’s poetry is firmly established in the canon of American literature, both as the Whitman of his era and as an original and eloquent poetic voice in his own right. Ginsberg was important in establishing the Beat literary movement, and he was a supportive advocate of younger artists. His controversial poem “Howl,” which made references to drug use and illicit sexual practices, became the subject of an obscenity trial. However, the judge dismissed the charges against the publisher, Ferlinghetti, declaring that the work had “redeeming social importance.”

Bibliography

Felver, Christopher. The Late Great Allen Ginsberg. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002. A photographic biography of Ginsberg’s life from 1980 to 1997, including captioned pictures and a prefatory essay.

Hyde, Lewis, ed. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Contains seventy-two brief letters, articles, and responses to the poetry of Ginsberg, including early letters of support and critique from William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, and review articles by Diana Trilling, Robert Bly, Timothy Leary, and Czesław Miłosz.

Miles, Barry. Allen Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. An early biography with extensive notes, bibliography, and index, drawing on the author’s personal friendship with Ginsberg over the previous quarter century.

Morgan, Bill. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. New York: Penguin, 2007. Morgan provides glimpses of Ginsberg’s not-so-private life that are at times described in his confessional poetry, including his psychosexual predilections; manic and depressive episodes; his interest in jazz, blues, and later punk music; and his social and artistic causes.

Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. A literary biography providing readings of Ginsberg’s major poems. Schumacher chronicles Ginsberg’s early years in Newark, college at Columbia, travels throughout the world, and his various political and social causes.