Pocket Poets
4 primary works • 7 total works
Book 4
The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1965 is here presented in a commemorative 40th Anniversary Edition. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems was originally published by City Lights Books in the Fall of 1956. Subsequently seized by U.S. customs and the San Francisco police, it was the subject of a long court trail at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the court that the book was not obscene. Howl & Other Poems is the single most influential poetic work of the post-World War II era, with over 1,000,000 copies now in print. "Howl was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard."--Michael McClure "It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages." --William Carlos Williams "At the height of his bardic powers, Allen Ginsberg could terrify the authorities with the mere utterance of the syllable "om" as he led street throngs of citizens protesting the Vietnam War.
Ginsberg reigned as the raucous poet of American hippiedom and as a literary pioneer whose freewheeling masterwork "Howl" prevailed against government censorship in a landmark obscenity trial 50 years ago." -- New York Times "Fifty years ago, on October 3, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Allen Ginsberg's great epic Beat-era poem HOWL was not obscene but instead, a work of literary and social merit. This ruling allowed for the publication of HOWL and exonerated the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who faced jail time and a fine 50 years ago for publishing 'HOWL.'" -- Pacifica.org Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and schoolteacher, in Paterson, New Jersey. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote Kaddish 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile.
Carl Solomon to whom Howl is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet."
Ginsberg reigned as the raucous poet of American hippiedom and as a literary pioneer whose freewheeling masterwork "Howl" prevailed against government censorship in a landmark obscenity trial 50 years ago." -- New York Times "Fifty years ago, on October 3, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Allen Ginsberg's great epic Beat-era poem HOWL was not obscene but instead, a work of literary and social merit. This ruling allowed for the publication of HOWL and exonerated the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who faced jail time and a fine 50 years ago for publishing 'HOWL.'" -- Pacifica.org Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and schoolteacher, in Paterson, New Jersey. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote Kaddish 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile.
Carl Solomon to whom Howl is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet."
Book 14
Great strange visionary poems by the author of Howl, in the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century . . .
In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural an gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other. These poems almost unconscious to confess the beatific human fact, the language intuitively chosen as in trance & dream, the rhythms rising on breath from belly thru breast, the hymn completed in tears, the movement of the physical poetry demanding and receiving decades of life while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many worlds the self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self."
Book 23
Planet News collecting seven years' Poesy scribed to 1967 begins with electronic politics disassociation & messianic rhapsody TV Baby in New York, continues picaresque around the globe, elan perceptions notated at Mediterranean, Galilee & Ganges till next breakthrough, comedown Poem at heart & soul last days in Asia The Change 1963; tenement doldrums & police-state paranoia in Manhattan then half year behind Socialist Curtain climaxed as Kral Majales May King Prague 1965, same years' erotic gregariousness writ as Who Be Kind To for International Poetry Incarnation Albert Hall London; next trip West Coast thru center America Midwest Wichita Vortex Sutra ...at last across Atlantic Wales Visitation promethian text recollected in emotion revised in tranquility continuing tradition of ancient Nature Language mediates between psychedelic inspiration and humane ecology & integrated acid classic Unitive Vision with democratic eyeball particulars-book closes on politics to exorcise Pentagon phantoms who cover Earth with dung-colored gas. "Planet News is a great book of poems.
It encourages the reader to release their pre-conceived notions of poetry, and allow themselves to dance disturbingly through a picture that Ginsberg paints...Planet News is a beautiful read. If it's not something you're immediately interested in, the read is worth it for the mere significance Allen Ginsberg has had on the art of poetry." -Ned Tobin, Chronicles of Time "In this collection, the shorter poems, with their impressive grip on exact description, are the best, and remind us of how Ginsberg sees everything-railroads, cloverleafs, Dino Sinclair signs, "tiny human trees" in the plains, newspaper stories and their reduction of the real to the ("continued from page one") verbal, football fields, J. Edgar Hoover, and above all himself. For his contemporaries, he is the biographer of his time-its high schools, its streets, its telephones, its monsters ('television was a baby crawling toward that deathchamber"), its bland head counts, its drugs, its cops, its cities, its freeways, and most of all its short-cut language."
-Helen Vendler, New York Times Famous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile." His other famous poetry collections including The Fall of America, Howl, Mind Breaths, Plutonian Ode, and Reality Sandwiches are also published by City Lights Publishers.
It encourages the reader to release their pre-conceived notions of poetry, and allow themselves to dance disturbingly through a picture that Ginsberg paints...Planet News is a beautiful read. If it's not something you're immediately interested in, the read is worth it for the mere significance Allen Ginsberg has had on the art of poetry." -Ned Tobin, Chronicles of Time "In this collection, the shorter poems, with their impressive grip on exact description, are the best, and remind us of how Ginsberg sees everything-railroads, cloverleafs, Dino Sinclair signs, "tiny human trees" in the plains, newspaper stories and their reduction of the real to the ("continued from page one") verbal, football fields, J. Edgar Hoover, and above all himself. For his contemporaries, he is the biographer of his time-its high schools, its streets, its telephones, its monsters ('television was a baby crawling toward that deathchamber"), its bland head counts, its drugs, its cops, its cities, its freeways, and most of all its short-cut language."
-Helen Vendler, New York Times Famous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile." His other famous poetry collections including The Fall of America, Howl, Mind Breaths, Plutonian Ode, and Reality Sandwiches are also published by City Lights Publishers.
Book 40
Plutonian Ode: Title poem combines scientific info on 24,000-year cycle of the Great Year compared with equal half-life of Plutonium waste, accounting Homeric formula for appeasing underground millionaire Pluto Lord of Death, jack in the gnostic box of Aeons, and Adamantine Truth of ordinary mind inspiration, unhexing nuclear ministry of fear. Following poems chronologies Wyoming grass blues, a punk-rock sonnet, personal grave musing, Manhattan landscape hypertension, lovelorn heart thumps, mantric rhymes, Neruda's tearful Lincoln ode retranslated to U.S. vernacular oratory, Nagasaki Bomb anniversary haikus, Zen Bluegrass raunch, free verse demystification of sacred fame, Reznikoffian filial epiphanies, hot pants Skeltonic doggerel, a Kerouackian New Year's eve ditty, professional homework, New Jersey quatrains, scarecrow haiku, improvised dice roll for high school kids, English rock-and-roll sophistications, an old love glimpse, little German movies, old queen conclusions, a tender renaissance song, ode to hero-flop, Peace protest prophecies, Lower East Side snapshots, national flashed in the Buddhafields, Sapphic stanzas in quantitative idiom, look out at the bedroom window, feverish birdbrain verses from Eastern Europe for chanting with electric bands, Beethovinean ear strophes drowned in rain, a glance at Cloud Castle, poems 1977-1980 end with International new wave hit lyric Capitol Air "Plutonian Ode" has the best of intentions .
..[I]t is perhaps the most complete package of political action from poem to protest." -Marc Olmstead, Sensitive Skin Magazine Famous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile." His other famous poetry collections including The Fall of America, Howl, Mind Breaths, Plutonian Ode, and Reality Sandwiches are also published by City Lights Publishers.
..[I]t is perhaps the most complete package of political action from poem to protest." -Marc Olmstead, Sensitive Skin Magazine Famous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile." His other famous poetry collections including The Fall of America, Howl, Mind Breaths, Plutonian Ode, and Reality Sandwiches are also published by City Lights Publishers.
"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy." Many of Ginsberg's most famous poems. Wake-up nightmares in Lower East Side, musings in public library, across the U.S. in dream auto, drunk in old Havana, brooding in Mayan ruins, sex daydreams on the West Coast, airplane vision of Kansas, lonely in a leafy cottage, lunch hour on Berkeley, beer notations on Skid Row, slinking to Mexico, wrote this last night in Paris, back on Times square dreaming of Times Square, bombed in NY again, loony tunes in the dentist chair, screaming at old poets in South America, aethereal zigzag Poesy in blue hotel room in Peru--a wind-up book of dreams, psalms, journal enigmas & nude minutes from 1953 to 1960 poems scattered in fugitive magazines here collected now book. "...make no mistake, Reality Sandwiches, 1953-60 ...is genuine poetry, and Ginsberg's commitment marks his superiority over more graceful and refined but tepid craftsmen." --Robert D. Spector, Poetry Quarterly Famous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J.
To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile." His other famous poetry collections including The Fall of America, Howl, Mind Breaths, Plutonian Ode, Kaddish, and Reality Sandwiches are also published by City Lights Publishers.
To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile." His other famous poetry collections including The Fall of America, Howl, Mind Breaths, Plutonian Ode, Kaddish, and Reality Sandwiches are also published by City Lights Publishers.
Meditations, rhapsodies, elegies, confessions, and mindful chronicle writings filling inward and outward space thru mid-Seventies decade. Mind Breaths: Australian songsticks measure oldest known poetics, broken-leg meditations march thru Six Worlds singing crazy Wisdom's hopeless suffering, the First Noble Truth, inspiring quiet Sung sunlit greybeard soliloquies, English moonlit night-gleams, ambitious mid-life fantasies, Ah crossed-legged thoughts sitting straight-spine paying attention to empty breath flowing 'round the globe;' then Dharma elegy & sharp-eyed haiku. Pederast rhapsody, exorcism of mid-East battlegods, workaday sad dust glories, American ego confession & mugging downfall Lower East Side, hospital sickness moan, hydrogen Jukebox Prophecy, Sex come-all-ye, mountain cabin flashes, Buddhist country western chord changes, Rolling Thunder snowballs, a Jersey Shaman dream, Father Death in a graveyard near Newark, Poe bones, two hot hearted love poems: Here chronicled mid Seventies' half decade inward & outward Mindfulness in many Poetries.
"Allen Ginsberg's poems of the 1970's are a marvel, his new book, "Mind Breaths," presenting a half dozen poems, probably more, that are first-rate Ginsberg...The poems are there-on the page, in the book. They are called "mind breaths." No need to speak of kinds, qualities, degrees, the intellect's inevitable meanderings. The poems exist. Think of all the millions of things that might have gone otherwise, so that they might not exist. Our times are bleak enough, heaven knows, but at least we have this." --Hayden Carruth, New York Times Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile.
Carl Solomon to whom "Howl" is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet."
"Allen Ginsberg's poems of the 1970's are a marvel, his new book, "Mind Breaths," presenting a half dozen poems, probably more, that are first-rate Ginsberg...The poems are there-on the page, in the book. They are called "mind breaths." No need to speak of kinds, qualities, degrees, the intellect's inevitable meanderings. The poems exist. Think of all the millions of things that might have gone otherwise, so that they might not exist. Our times are bleak enough, heaven knows, but at least we have this." --Hayden Carruth, New York Times Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile.
Carl Solomon to whom "Howl" is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet."
National Book Award for Poetry, 1973 Beginning with "long poem of these States," The Fall of America continues Planet News chronicle tape-recorded scribed by hand or sung condensed, the flux of car bus airplane dream consciousness Person during Automated Electronic War years, newspaper headline radio brain auto poesy & silent desk musings, headline flashing on road through these states of consciousness..."[Ginsberg] is never negligible, and he is often (the only true test) unforgettable." -- Helen Vendler, New York Times Book Review Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was an influential writer and poet during the 1950's Beat Generation and is best known for his poem "Howl."