Allen Ginsberg was, along with Emma Lazarus and Delmore Schwartz, the greatest of Jewish-American poets. On 3 June 1926 he was born into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. His mother Naomi was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was institutionalised for extended periods during Ginsberg's childhood. She died in 1956.
As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he became friends with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, later forming the core of the Beat Generation. He passionately opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex and openness to Eastern religions.
Ginsberg is best known for his poem, “Howl”, written in the mid-1950s, published in his 1956 collection, Howl and Other Poems, which established his reputation. It is quoted in Howard Jacobson’s new novel of the same name and begins with the famous lines, “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...”
In his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, Ginsberg’s friend Jack Kerouac wrote about a famous reading of the poem by Ginsberg in San Francisco: “Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance…. [B]y eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbrook [Ginsberg] was reading his poem 'Wail' [‘Howl’] drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling 'Go! Go! Go!' (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes [Kenneth Rexroth] the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness.”
Ginsberg later became a leading figure in the anti-Vietnam War movement and one of the father-figures of the counterculture: into drugs, sexual freedom, Eastern religion and peace before they became fashionable. Tear-gassed at the Chicago Riots in ’68, arrested with Dr. Spock at an anti-war rally and well-known for his longtime friendship with Bob Dylan, this is probably when he was at the height of his fame.
Ginsberg’s collection The Fall of America shared the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979, he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Lettters. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book, Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992. This is when I met Ginsberg when I produced an interview with him for BBC 2’s Face to Face.
In a frank and moving interview, he talked about the atmosphere of 1950s Bohemian New York, writing about his homosexuality and helping William Burroughs write The Naked Lunch in Tangier, his mother’s madness and having to sign the form to authorise her lobotomy, and the effect of AIDS on his generation.
Ginsberg died two years later, on 5 April 1997, surrounded by family and friends in his East Village loft in Manhattan, succumbing to liver cancer via complications of hepatitis at the age of 70. More than 2,500 people attended his memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York’s Upper West Side.
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