ALLEN GINSBERG

Literary. Genres.By:Jordan Onel Aguilar Tirado.Jorge Alberto Villanueva Aguilar.G-38 bb

Allen Ginsberg.

Allen Ginsberg, born in Newark, N.J., June 3, 1926, was an American poet and leading apostle of the Beat Generation. His first published work, Howl and Other Poems (1956), sparked the San Francisco Renaissance and defined the generation of the '50s.

Ginsberg was also part of the counter-cultural revolution of the ’60s.

In the 1960s, while vigorously participating in the anti-Vietnam War movement, he published several poetic

works, including Reality Sandwiches (1963) and Planet News (1969). The Fall of America received the National

Book Award for 1974.

Biography.Ginsberg was born into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey.

His mother suffer from periods of mental illness which disturbed Ginsberg

greatly, later this would lead to his famous work 'Kaddish‘. His mother was also

a member of the Communist Party and sometimes took her sons along to the

local meetings.

As a young teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to The New York Times about

political issues, such as World War II and workers' rights. While in high school,

Ginsberg began reading Walt Whitman, which later became a major influence for

him.

In 1943, Ginsberg graduated from High School and briefly attended

Montclair State College before entering Columbia University on a scholarship

from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson.

While at Columbia, Ginsberg contributed to the Columbia Review literary journal,

the Jester humor magazine, won the Woodberry Poetry Prize and served as

president of the Philolexian Society, the campus literary and debate group.

Career.

Though he took odd jobs to support himself, in 1955, upon the advice of a psychiatrist, Ginsberg dropped out of the working world to devote his entire life to poetry. Soon after, he wrote "Howl", the poem that brought him and his friends much fame and allowed him to live as a professional poet for the rest of his life.

Though early on he had intentions to be a labor lawyer, Ginsberg wrote poetry for most of his life. Most of his very early poetry was written in formal rhyme and meter like that of his father or his idol William Blake. His admiration for the writing of Jack Kerouac inspired him to take poetry more seriously.

Ginsberg. Rise to fame. In October 1955, Ginsberg and five other unknown poets

gave a free reading at an experimental art gallery in San Francisco. Ginsberg's "Howl" electrified the audience. According to fellow poet Michael McClure, it was clear "that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power support bases."

In 1957, "Howl" attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial in which a San Francisco prosecutor argued it contained "filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language."

“Howl” Howl is considered one of the most important works of the

Beat Generation. The poem seemed especially outrageous in 1950s America

because it depicted both heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. "Howl" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality.

It was initially written as a performance piece,

the poem consists of three parts.

HOWL

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of

cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy

among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy &

publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,

burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

Ginsberg activism. Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern

religious disciplines extensively. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University at Boulder, Colorado. At Trungpa's urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started a poetry school there in 1974 which they called the "Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics". In spite of his attraction to Eastern religions, the journalist Jane Kramer argues that Ginsberg, like Whitman, adhered to an "American brand of mysticism" that was, in her words, "rooted in humanism and in a romantic and visionary ideal of harmony among men." Ginsberg's political activism was consistent with his religious beliefs

Awards. He took part in decades of non-violent political

protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs. The literary critic, Helen Vendler, described Ginsberg as "tirelessly persistent in protesting censorship, imperial politics, and persecution of the powerless." His achievements as a writer as well as his notoriety as an activist gained him honors from established institutions. Ginsberg's book of poems, The Fall of America, won the National Book Award for poetry in 1974. Other honors included the National Arts Club gold medal and his induction into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, both in 1979. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book, Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992

Awards National Book Award for poetry 1974, for The Fall of

America Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995, for his book Cosmopolitan

Greetings: Poems 1986-1992. National Arts Club gold medal. American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters

member.

Poetry works Howl and Other Poems (1956) Kaddish and Other Poems (1961) Reality Sandwiches (1963) The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems 1948–1951 (1972) The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973) First Blues: Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs 1971 - 1974 (1975) Mind Breaths (1978) Collected Poems: 1947–1980 (1984) Cosmopolitan Greetings Poems: 1986–1993 (1994) Howl Annotated (1995) Illuminated Poems (1996)

Bibliography

http://www.levity.com/corduroy/ginsberg/bio.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/8