Allen Ginsberg

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I saw th e best minds of my gen er ation destroyed by madness, starving hyste rical naked, dragging t hemselves t hroug h th e negro streets a t da wn lookin g for an angry fix , angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the star ry dynamo i n th e machi ner y of nig ht, who poverty and tatters and hollow -eyed and high sat up smoking i n the supernatural darkness of col d-wat er fl ats floating across th e top s of citie s contempl at i ng jazz_ - Excerpt from Howl Ginsberg reading Howl at the Poetry Center, San Francisco, November 1955. Photograp h y from Self-po rtrait of Allen Gin s berg in his cramped Lower East Side t he Walt er Lehrman Beat Collection. apartment. By 1996. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize Finali s t , Distin guis hed Professor of Eng lis h at Brooklyn College, a nd el ected to t he National Institute of Arts a nd Letters. Life Sketch Chronology Poet, mystic, Buddh ist, activist, psychiatric patient, professor - All en Gi nsberg contained multitudes . 1926 - Born in Newark, New J ersey. Before Howl , h e was a private poet struggling wi th psyc h ological trauma from living with h is 1944 - Meet s J ack Kerouac at Columbia University. sch i zophr enic mother. In 1947, after taking t i me off from hi s st udies at Columbia University, Gin sberg 1949 - Ente r s Columbi a Pr esbyt erian Psy chiatric Inst itute as part traveled to Dakar to att empt su ici de due to h is of a plea barga i n follow i ng an a rres t as an a ccessory to theft. repre ssed homosexuality . In New York City, 1948, he ha llucinated Willi am Bl ake's poetry, wh ic h 195'1 - Meets h is life -long partner, Peter Orl ovsky, in San solidified his decision to write poetry. I n 1949, h e Fran cicso, wh ere they take a marr i age vow to enter Heaven was arrested as an ac cessory to t h eft and spent together. eig ht months i n a psych i atric hosp i tal. Ginsberg gained notoriety following the first public 1955 - Fi rst public reading of Howl at the Six Gallery. read i ng of Howl a t the Si x Gallery in 1955. Originally a pr i vate poem about homosex ua lity , t h e 1968 - Reads "Wales Vi s i tation, " a poem written under the i nfluence unders i de of New Yor k City kn own t o impoveri shed of LSD, on William F. Buckley J r.'s Firing Line , an extremely poets, and h i s psyc h i atr ic h ospit a li zat ion, Howl popular TV show. Ginsberg da nces and chants the Hare Krishna mantra defined the Beats. After Howl, Gin sb erg became a at a Be-I n in San Francisco in 1967. An activist and public f i gure, a symbol of t h e counterculture , and prominent member of the counterculture , he was 1995 - Named a Pulitz er Pr ize Fin alist . one of America's celebr at ed poets . cons i dered "t he hipp ie 's hipp ie." 1997 - Die s from liver cancer on Apr i l 5 in New York City . .

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Obscene Odes on the Windows of the Skull": Deconstructing the Memory of the Howl Trial of 1957
W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 12-2013 "Obscene Odes on the Windows of the Skull": Deconstructing the Memory of the Howl Trial of 1957 Kayla D. Meyers College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Meyers, Kayla D., ""Obscene Odes on the Windows of the Skull": Deconstructing the Memory of the Howl Trial of 1957" (2013). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 767. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/767 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Obscene Odes on the Windows of the Skull”: Deconstructing The Memory of the Howl Trial of 1957 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from The College of William and Mary by Kayla Danielle Meyers Accepted for ___________________________________ (Honors, High Honors, Highest Honors) ________________________________________ Charles McGovern, Director ________________________________________ Arthur Knight ________________________________________ Marc Raphael Williamsburg, VA December 3, 2013 Table of Contents Introduction: The Poet is Holy.........................................................................................................2
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Dostoevsky and the Beat Generation
MARIA BLOSHTEYN Dostoevsky and the Beat Generation American literary history is rich with heroes of counterculture, maverick writers and poets who were rejected by the bulk of their contemporaries but inspired a cult-like following among a few devotees. The phenomenon of Beat Generation writers and poets, however, is unique in twentieth-century American letters precisely because they managed to go from marginal underground classics of the 1950s to the official voice of dissent and cultural opposition of the 1960s, a force to be reckoned with. Their books were adopted by hippies and flower children, their poems chanted at sit-ins, their lives faithfully imitated by a whole generation of young baby boomers. Their antiauthoritarian ethos along with their belief in the brotherhood of mankind were the starting point of a whole movement that gave the United States such social and cultural watersheds as Woodstock and the Summer of Love, the Chicago Riots and the Marches on Washington. The suggestion that Dostoevsky had anything to do with the American Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and street rioting in American urban centres might seem at first to be far-fetched. It is, however, a powerful testimony to Dostoevsky’s profound impact on twentieth-century American literature and culture that the first Beats saw themselves as followers of Dostoevsky and established their personal and literary union (and, as it were, the entire Beat movement) on the foundation of their shared belief in the primacy of Dostoevsky and his novels. Evidence of Dostoevsky’s impact on such key writers and poets of the Beat Generation as Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), and William Burroughs (1914-1997) is found in an almost embarrassing profusion: scattered throughout their essays, related in their correspondence, broadly hinted at and sometimes explicitly indicated in their novels and poems.
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“Howl”--Allen Ginsberg (1959) Added to the National Registry: 2006 Essay by Cary O’Dell
“Howl”--Allen Ginsberg (1959) Added to the National Registry: 2006 Essay by Cary O’Dell Original album Original label Allen Ginsberg “I thought I wouldn’t write a poem, but just write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real mind—sum up my life—something I wouldn’t be able to show anybody, write for my own soul’s ear and a few other golden ears.” --Allen Ginsberg, 1959 Poet Allen Ginsberg’s stunning, controversial, epic and once-considered “obscene” three-part poem “Howl” was composed in the summer of 1955. It was first published in 1956. The poem’s radical language and incendiary images has since transcended poetry circles and academia. And its sentiments—perhaps put forth most directly in its famous opening line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,…”-- have come to summarize a decade and to speak for a generation. The 1959 recitation of “Howl” named to the National Registry in 2006 was not the work’s first oral presentation, nor even its first recorded one. The piece was first read aloud by its author in a San Francisco gallery in October of 1955. And its first, though aborted, recording was made in March of 1956 at Reed College in Portland, Oregon; at that time, Ginsberg performed only part one of the poem however before pleading fatigue and stopping. This ‘59 version--arguably the definitive rendition by its writer—came to be staged and recorded in Chicago at a benefit for the recently-launched literally magazine “Big Table.” “Big Table” was founded by defectors from the well-establish and well-respected “Chicago Review” magazine over what many saw as undue influence and censorship of the periodical by its parent, the University of Chicago.
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A New Annual Festival Celebrating the History and Heritage of Greenwich Village
A New Annual Festival Celebrating the History and Heritage of Greenwich Village VILLAGE VOICES: A CELEBRATION OF EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY AND JACK KEROUAC Greenwich Village through the eyes of its two greatest poets, with Lucy McDiarmid and David Amram. World premiere performance by Kenneth Radnofsky and Yoshiko Kline of David Amram’s Greenwich Village Portraits, arranged for saxophone and piano Jefferson Market Library, Saturday September 29, at 2pm “My candle burns at both ends… It gives a lovely light,” Edna St Vincent Millay (1892- 1950) famously wrote in her poem “First Fig” (1920), three years before she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. “First Fig” cemented Millay’s reputation with the younger generation and came to symbolize not only her own life but Greenwich Village in general. A bohemian and a libertine, a New Woman and an It-Girl, she was named after St Vincent’s Hospital where an uncle’s life had been saved. Encouraged to write by her mother, she grew up in Maine with her two-sisters in a home where the abundance of books made up for the shortage of food. After graduating from Vassar where she lived the sort of life that Mary McCarthy would fictionalise more than a half-century later in The Group, Millay moved to Greenwich Village. There she continued to write and publish poetry while also becoming active in theatre and politics: she joined the Provincetown Players, co-founded the Cherry Lane Playhouse, and supported Max Eastman and John Reed in their trial for sedition.
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The Cultural Translation of Ginsberg's Howl in Turkey
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 18 (2016) Issue 5 Article 25 The Cultural Translation of Ginsberg's Howl in Turkey Erik Mortenson Wayne State University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other American Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities
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Peter Orlovsky
Peter Orlovsky: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Descriptive Summary Creator: Orlovsky, Peter, 1933- Title: Peter Orlovsky Papers Dates: 1952-1983, Extent: 2 boxes (0.84 linear feet) Abstract: The papers of American poet Peter Orlovsky consist of diaries, poems, sketchbooks, and correspondence. RLIN Record ID: TXRC99-A2 Language English. Access Open for research Administrative Information Acquisition Purchase, 1990 (R12006) Processed by Matthew Darby, 1999 Repository: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin Orlovsky, Peter, 1933- Biographical Sketch Peter Orlovsky, poet, musician, farmer, teacher, and companion of poet Allen Ginsberg, was born July 8, 1933, on the Lower East Side of New York City to Oleg and Katherine Orlovsky. He was one of five children who grew up in the Northport section of Long Island, New York. As a teenager, Orlovsky's parents separated after a series of failed business ventures and bouts with alcoholism. At that time, Orlovsky moved to Queens with his mother and siblings. Orlovsky dropped out of school in his senior year and began supporting himself at age 17 due to family economic problems. After many odd jobs, he began working as an orderly at Creedmore State Mental Hospital in New York giving him an opportunity to complete the requirements for a high school diploma. In 1953, Orlovsky was drafted into the military as the Korean War began. Due to his erratic behavior and conspicuous anti-military sentiments at boot camp, army psychiatrists ordered his transfer. He spent the rest of his military service as a medic in a San Francisco hospital.
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Allen Ginsberg's Genius
Allen Ginsberg’s genius for public life should not obscure his genius as an artist or his study of his art. —ROBERT PINSKY, 1997 U.S. POET LAUREATE Allen Ginsberg’s PREFACE Genius The Secret or Hermetic Tradition In 1957, at the age of fifteen, I bought for seventy-five cents a copy of the City Lights paperback edition of Howl and Other Po- ems with the trademark black-and-white cover. It was the first book of poetry I ever bought, and it made me feel as cool as any- one in my high school. Howl was underground poetry, outlawed poetry. Ginsberg made it seem as though it was cool to be a teen and that teens, not adults, knew what was cool. To those of us— I wasn’t the only teenage beatnik in suburbia—who owned a copy, Howl conferred a strange power. Reading it brought initi- ation into a secret society. It bound us together and gave us a sense of identity as members of a new generation that had come of age in the wake of World War II and the atomic bomb, a gen- eration that lived in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse. There was something wonderfully subversive about Howl, something the poet had hidden in the body of the poem because it was too dan- gerous to say openly, something we had to uncover and decode. xi xii / Preface Ginsberg didn’t want to be too easily understood. As he himself would explain, Howl was meant to appeal “to the secret or her- metic tradition of art.” Of course, as a teenager I didn’t know there was a secret tradition of art.
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Robert Frank „Pull My Daisy” (1959) 16Mm, Schwarz-Weiß-Film, 28 Minuten
Robert Frank „Pull My Daisy” (1959) 16mm, Schwarz-Weiß-Film, 28 Minuten Pull My Daisy ist ein Kurzfilm über die Beat Generation von Robert Frank und Alfred Leslie und basiert auf dem dritten Akt eines nie veröffentlichten Theaterstücks mit dem Titel Beat Generation von Jack Kerouac. Der Filmtitel spielt an auf ein gleichnamiges Gedicht von Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg und Neal Cassady aus den späten 1940er Jahren an, dessen Text auch teilweise für die Jazz-Intro am Anfang des Films herangezogen wurde. Die Geschichte basiert auf einer wahren Begebenheit im Leben des Neal Cassady und seiner Frau Carolyn. Die Frau eines Bremswärters – eine Malerin – hat einen ehrenwerten Bischof zum Abendessen eingeladen. Doch die Künstlerfreunde des Bremswärters kommen unangemeldet vorbei und sorgen für Aufregung. Die Schauspieler sind Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross und Pablo, Franks Sohn, der damals noch ein Baby war. Jack Kerouac steuerte einen improvisierten Erzählstrang bei. Jahrelang wurde Pull My Daisy als Improvisationsfilm gefeiert, bis Leslie 1968 verriet, dass der Film zeitaufwendig geplant, geprobt und gedreht wurde. Robert Frank “Me and My Brother” (1965—68) 35mm, Farb- und Schwarz-Weiß-Film, 85 Minuten Me and My Brother ist Robert Franks erster Spielfilm. Er wurde erstmals 1968 auf den Filmfestspielen in Venedig gezeigt und vereinte alles, was Franks Kunst bis dahin ausgemacht hatte: Der Blick von „außen“ auf Amerika, die poetische Freizügigkeit der Beats, der Fokus auf das Nebensächliche. Der Film feiert die Wiederkehr des poetischen Essays als Assemblage sowie die Bestätigung des Untergrunds als wilde, filmische Analyse in Form einer Collage und verbindet kunstvoll Gegensätzliches, spielt den Fake gegen das Authentische aus, Pornographie gegen Poesie, Fiktion gegen Realität, Beat-Zynismus gegen Hippie-Romantik, und Einfarbigkeit gegen Farbe.
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From a Jewish Communist to a Jewish Buddhist: Allen Ginsberg As a Forerunner of a New American Jew
Article From a Jewish Communist to a Jewish Buddhist: Allen Ginsberg as a Forerunner of a New American Jew Yaakov Ariel Department of Religious Studies, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 106 Carolina Hall, UNC Campus, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA; [email protected] Received: 21 December 2018; Accepted: 31 January 2019; Published: 7 February 2019 Abstract: The article examines Allen Ginsberg’s cultural and spiritual journeys, and traces the poet’s paths as foreshadowing those of many American Jews of the last generation. Ginsberg was a unique individual, whose choices were very different other men of his era. However, it was larger developments in American society that allowed him to take steps that were virtually unthinkable during his parents’ generation and were novel and daring in his time as well. In his childhood and adolescence, Ginsberg grew up in a Jewish communist home, which combined socialist outlooks with mild Jewish traditionalism. The poet’s move from communism and his search for spirituality started already at Columbia University of the 1940s, and continued throughout his life. Identifying with many of his parents’ values and aspirations, Ginsberg wished to transcend beyond his parents’ Jewish orbit and actively sought to create an inclusive, tolerant, and permissive society where persons such as himself could live and create at ease. He chose elements from the Christian, Jewish, Native-American, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, weaving them together into an ever-growing cultural and spiritual quilt. The poet never restricted his choices and freedoms to one all- encompassing system of faith or authority.
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THE BEAT HOTEL “A Key Part of Beat History...Twinklingly Delivered.” - Nicolas Rapold, the New York Times “Vivid
First Run Features PRESENTS GINSBERG, ORLOVSKY, CORSO, AND BURROUGHS IN ... THE BEAT HOTEL “A kEY PART OF BEAT HISTORY...twinklingly delivered.” - Nicolas Rapold, THE NEW YORK TIMES “VIVID. A real sense of the joyous energy of the time emerges, bristling with creativity.” - David Noh, FILM JOURnaL “THEIR EXTREME LIFESTYLES anD CREATIVITY ARE BRILLIanTLY CHRONICLED. This wonderful documentary allows us to dwell within the Beat Hotel for just a little while. The visit is a real treat.” - Jennifer Merin, ABOUT.COM “THE NEXT BEST THING TO BEING THERE. The hotel’s fading legacy is what makes this documentary so worthwhile. Anyone with an interest in the Beats will enjoy hearing the stories and seeing the hotel as it once was.” - Gary M. Kramer, GAY CITY NEWS 1957, Paris. A cheap no-name hotel becomes a haven for a new breed of artists struggling to free themselves from the conformity and censorship of America. Called the Beat Ho- tel, it soon became an epicenter of the Beat Generation. This revelatory new documentary delves deep into this amazing place and time. Fleeing the obscenity trials surrounding the publication of Howl, Allen Ginsberg, along with Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, happened “VIVIDLY PORTRAYS THESE FREEWHEELING upon the hotel in Paris’s Latin Quarter and were soon joined by William Burroughs, Ian Somerville and Brion Gy- YEARS OF SEX, DRUGS, anD POETRY sin. Run by Madame Rachou, the Beat Hotel was a hotbed of creativity and restores to cultural history this neglected and permissiveness, where Burroughs finished Naked Lunch; Ginsberg yet highly original phase in Beat Generation art.” and Corso wrote some of their greatest poetry; Somerville and Gysin - Sue Dougherty, REALITY SanDWICH invented the Dream Machine; and Harold Norse wrote a novella, aptly called The Beat Hotel.
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PULL MY DAISY / 1959 Um Filme De ROBERT FRANK E ALFRED LESLIE
CINEMATECA PORTUGUESA-MUSEU DO CINEMA DELPHINE SEYRIG, INSUBMUSA 12 e 15 de Outubro de 2020 PULL MY DAISY / 1959 um filme de ROBERT FRANK e ALFRED LESLIE Realização: Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie Argumento: Jack Kerouac, a partir do terceiro acto da sua peça Beat Generation Música original: David Amram Montagem: Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Leon Prochnik Interpretação: Allen Ginsberg (Allen), Gregory Corso (Gregory), Larry Rivers (Milo), Peter Orlovsky (Peter), David Amram (David), Richard Bellamy (Bispo), Alice Neel (Mãe do Bispo), Sally Gross (Irmã do Bispo), Pablo Frank (Pablo), Delphine Seyrig (Mulher de Milo), Jack Kerouac (narrador). Produção: Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie Cópia: Museum of Fine Arts (Huston), 16 mm, preto e branco, 28 minutos, com legendas electrónicas em português Título original de trabalho, inscrito no genérico de algumas cópias: THE BEAT GENERATION Estreia Mundial: 11 de Novembro de 1959 Inédito comercialmente em Portugal Primeira exibição na Cinemateca: Julho de 1991 (“Robert Frank”). ________________________________________________________________________________________ Pull my daisy, tip my cup, all my doors are open / All my thoughts for coconuts, all my prayers awaken / Start my garden, gait my shades, now my life is spoken do poema Pull my daisy (1948) A bandeira americana é sagrada? A rapariga é sagrada? A tua irmã é sagrada? O que é sagrado? Sagrado, sagrado! Sagrado, sagrado... O carro é sagrado? E a luz, é sagrada? É sagrada, sagrada? do texto de PULL MY DAISY 28 minutos filmados em 16 mm preto e branco granulado no estúdio do pintor Alfred Leslie no Lower East Side de Nova Iorque, entre Janeiro e Abril de 1959: PULL MY DAISY, o primeiro filme de Robert Frank adaptado do terceiro acto de uma peça inacabada para teatro de Jack Kerouac justamente intitulada The Beat Generation (e fundada em acontecimentos da vida do próprio escritor, mais concretamente numa reunião em casa de Neal Cassady na Califórnia).
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Allen Ginsberg
ALLEN GINSBERG January 27 – March 12, 2011 Peter Orlovsky and Jack Kerouac, Tangier, 1957 Howard Greenberg Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of vintage photo booth strips, “drugstore” prints, and uniquely captioned prints by renowned poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997). This group of photographs made between the late 40s and early 80s, traces his life from New York to San Francisco to Tangier and elsewhere. His pictures are candid photographs of legendry “Beat” writers and poets – including William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac as well as the counterculture generation. The early photographs were taken as his friends were on the cusp of achieving great fame and notoriety and reveal an “intimate communication” between Ginsberg and his subjects. Ginsberg started photographing in the 1940s, taking snapshots of his friends and making impromptu pictures in photo booths which were widely popular at the time. (Ginsberg had his film developed at local drugstores and referred to his snapshots as “drugstore” prints.) His experience at Columbia University, surrounded by Kerouac and Burroughs, ignited his creative drive, believing that he and his friends would create “the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art.” Few of these photographs are well-known and were never meant to be shown outside of his group. Yet, they compel the viewer to re-examine the ingrained images we have of the Beats – Ginsberg, the balding, bearded guru or the melancholic Williams Burroughs ravaged by years of heroin use. His snapshots, part of his daily routine, are intimate, never forced and without pretention – capturing lover Peter Orlovsky, at the beach sticking out his tongue or quietly sitting in the backseat of a car while Neal Cassady drives, chatting with his female companion.
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