Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926, in Paterson, New Jersey, into a household where poetry and politics were daily concerns ^[1]. His father, Louis Ginsberg, taught high school English and published traditional lyric verse in newspapers and magazines. His mother, Naomi, was a Russian-born Communist Party sympathizer whose recurring mental illness dominated the family's home life. She spent long periods in psychiatric institutions, and her son later made her suffering the subject of one of his most celebrated poems ^[2].

Ginsberg attended public schools in Paterson and read widely as a teenager, absorbing Walt Whitman alongside the political journalism of the era. In 1943 he entered Columbia University on a scholarship, initially planning to study labor law ^[1]. New York changed his direction. At Columbia and in the apartments around Morningside Heights he met Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Lucien Carr, the circle that would later be called the Beat Generation ^[3].

His undergraduate years were turbulent. Columbia suspended him in 1945 after a series of infractions, and in 1949 he was arrested when stolen goods belonging to an acquaintance were traced to his apartment. Instead of prosecution he agreed to a stay at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute, where he met Carl Solomon, the fellow patient to whom he would dedicate Howl ^[2]. He finally took his degree from Columbia in 1948 ^[1].

After college Ginsberg drifted through market research jobs in New York while writing formal, rhymed poems modeled on his father's work and on William Blake, whom he claimed to have heard in a visionary experience in Harlem in 1948 ^[3]. The poet William Carlos Williams, a fellow resident of Paterson, read his early manuscripts and urged him toward the plain speech and observed detail of everyday American language. Williams later wrote the introduction to Howl and Other Poems ^[2].

In 1954 Ginsberg moved to San Francisco, where a psychiatrist's advice to quit office work and write full time coincided with a city alive with new poetry. He met Peter Orlovsky, who became his lifelong companion, and fell in with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance ^[1]. On October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street, he gave the first public reading of Howl. Accounts of the night describe Kerouac cheering from the audience as Ginsberg read the long opening section. The reading is now treated as a founding event of the Beat movement ^[3].

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books published Howl and Other Poems in 1956 in its Pocket Poets series. The following year United States customs officials and San Francisco police seized copies and charged Ferlinghetti with distributing obscene material. In October 1957 Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem had redeeming social importance and was therefore not obscene, a decision that widened protection for literary publishing in America ^[4]. The trial made Ginsberg famous, and the book went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies ^[2].

Howl remains the work most attached to Ginsberg's name, a long-breathed catalogue of madness, sexuality, and spiritual hunger written in lines modeled on Whitman and on the rhythms of jazz. Its opening declaration about the best minds of his generation became one of the most quoted lines in twentieth century American poetry ^[2]. The poem rejected the compressed, ironic style then dominant in universities and insisted that a poet's raw experience, including homosexuality and drug use, belonged on the page.

His second major collection, Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), contained the title elegy for his mother Naomi, who died in 1956 in a psychiatric hospital. Kaddish, built on the cadence of the Jewish mourner's prayer, is regarded by many critics as his finest single poem, an unsparing account of a child watching a parent's mind come apart ^[1]. Later volumes included Reality Sandwiches (1963), Planet News (1968), and The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1972), which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974 ^[5].

Recognition arrived steadily in his later decades. He was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1986 the collected volume White Shroud appeared alongside an annotated edition of Howl ^[1]. Among Allen Ginsberg achievements, the least measurable may be the largest: he demonstrated that an openly gay, politically radical poet could reach a mass audience, and generations of writers, from the confessional poets to punk lyricists, worked in space he cleared ^[3].

Ginsberg was open about his homosexuality decades before such candor was safe, and his relationship with Peter Orlovsky, begun in San Francisco in 1954, lasted in various forms until the poet's death ^[1]. He spoke of the partnership as a marriage, and Orlovsky appears throughout his poems, letters, and photographs. Ginsberg's frankness about his own life made him an early and visible figure in the movement for gay rights ^[3].

Religion occupied him as much as politics. Raised in a secular Jewish household, he studied Buddhism seriously from the 1960s onward and in 1972 took formal vows with the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa. Two years later he and the poet Anne Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, one of the first Buddhist-inspired academies in the United States ^[6].

He traveled restlessly: India for over a year in 1962 and 1963, then Cuba and Czechoslovakia in 1965, where students in Prague crowned him King of May before the Communist government expelled him ^[2]. He experimented publicly with psychedelic drugs, testified about them before a Senate subcommittee, and later argued that meditation had given him what chemicals had only promised. Despite the bohemian reputation, friends described a disciplined worker who answered letters, kept journals, and photographed his circle for decades; his photographs were eventually exhibited and collected by museums ^[7].

From the mid 1960s Ginsberg was as much a public activist as a poet. He coined the phrase flower power, helped organize the 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and chanted mantras at antiwar demonstrations, including the chaotic protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago ^[3]. He testified at the trial of the Chicago Seven and campaigned for years against the CIA's activities in Southeast Asia and against censorship of the press and airwaves ^[2].

Music drew him steadily. He recorded settings of William Blake's songs, performed with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 and 1976, and late in life collaborated with the Clash, Philip Glass, and Paul McCartney, who played on his 1996 recording of the poem The Ballad of the Skeletons ^[7]. In 1986 he accepted a distinguished professorship at Brooklyn College, where he taught poetry until shortly before his death, insisting that his students read Whitman, Blake, and the moderns aloud ^[1].

His Collected Poems 1947-1980 appeared from Harper and Row in 1984, a sign that the onetime outlaw had entered the standard canon. Honors followed in France, where he was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. Diagnosed with liver cancer in the spring of 1997, he responded characteristically, telephoning old friends and writing new poems in his final week. Allen Ginsberg died of a heart attack brought on by the cancer on April 5, 1997, in his East Village apartment in New York City, at age 70 ^[2].

Few American poets have altered both literature and law. The 1957 Howl decision remains a touchstone in obscenity jurisprudence, cited whenever courts weigh artistic merit against community standards, and City Lights still sells the small black and white paperback that started the fight ^[4]. Any serious Allen Ginsberg biography must reckon with this double inheritance: the poems themselves and the freedoms their publication secured.

His influence runs through confessional poetry, slam and spoken word performance, and rock lyricism. Dylan acknowledged him, punk and hip hop artists sampled and cited him, and the 2010 film Howl, with James Franco as the young poet, brought the Six Gallery reading to new audiences ^[3]. Stanford University purchased his enormous archive of journals, manuscripts, correspondence, and photographs in 1994, and scholars continue to mine it ^[7].

Basic Allen Ginsberg facts, his Paterson childhood, the 1955 reading, the obscenity trial, the National Book Award, only sketch the outline of a career that made private life public material. What endures is the voice: expansive, comic, grieving, and unembarrassed. He asked American poetry to say everything, and after him it largely did ^[2].