Allen Ginsberg's life and career can only be described as exceptional. Fond of pushing limits and challenging boundaries, Ginsberg produced a staggering body of work that garnered attention not just for its innovative style and personal candor, but for its range of theme and willingness to meaningfully engage the world in a bid to change it. Ginsberg is essential to an understanding of 20th century poetry. But Ginsberg was not just a poet. He was an icon, instantly recognizable to his legions of fans in underground circles, and it is impossible to overstate the importance of Ginsberg as a countercultural figure. Taking a broadly chronological approach, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of the major issues, themes, and moments essential to understanding Ginsberg, his work, and his outsized influence on the cultural politics of the postwar both in the US and globally.
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This book provides the necessary background for understanding Allen Ginsberg, his work, and his importance in twentieth century culture.
Part I. Early Years and Influences:
1. Ginsberg and the labor movement
Ben Lee;
2. The Columbia university years A. Robert Lee;
3. William Carlos
Williams Terence Diggory;
4. Whitman Anne Lovering Rounds;
5. Blake,
romanticism, and the visionary Luke Walker;
6. Ginsberg's complex French
influences Peggy Pacini;
7. Jack Kerouac Tanguy Harma; Part II. Career
Highlights:
8. 6 Gallery and the breakthrough of 'Howl' Kurt Hemmer;
9. The
Vietnam war and countercultural activism Steve Belletto;
10. Into the Vortex:
Allen Ginsberg's The Fall of America Jonah Raskin;
11. First blues: music in
the life and work of Allen Ginsberg Steve Taylor;
12. Photography Daniel
Morris;
13. Ginsberg in the classroom Erik Mortenson; Part III. International
Travels:
14. Mexico David Stephen Calonne;
15. The beat hotel Barry Miles;
16. Ginsberg's South American trips Oliver Harris;
17. A counterrevolutionary
Camerado: Ginsberg's month in Cuba Eric Keenaghan;
18. Prague Antonin Zita;
19. India Raj Chandarlapaty;
20. China David Wills; Part IV. Major Themes:
21. Poetry as Confession: Ginsberg, T. S. Eliot, and the New York school
poets Stephen Paul Miller;
22. Madness, mental illness, and 'Kaddish for
Naomi Ginsberg' Stevan M. Weine;
23. Queer sexuality: La Grande permission
Rona Cran;
24. Ginsberg and drugs Marcus Boon;
25. Nature and nuclear
reckoning in Ginsberg's 'Plutonian Ode' Chad Weidner;
26. Was Allen Ginsberg
Jewish? Stephen Fredman;
27. Playing with the perfections: Allen Ginsberg's
Buddhist poetics John Whalen-Bridge;
28. Domesticity Steven Gould Axelrod;
Part V. Death and Afterlife:
29. Recording the body's and body politics'
demise: death and fame Bill Mohr;
30. Ginsberg's archive Bill Morgan;
31.
Allen Ginsberg's iconic statuses Michael Prince.
Erik Mortenson is a Faculty Member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. He is the author of Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016), and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). He has also edited The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation (Clemson 2023) with Tony Trigilio, and Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals (Bloomsbury 2024) with Tomasz Sawczuk. His memoir of bohemian Detroit, Kick Out the Bottom (2023), was co-written with Christopher Kramer.
