Aside from his poetry and the gargantuan amount of correspondence and other material which has been published, plenty more remains scattered in fugitive publications and sitting in archival sites awaiting dissemination. Ginsberg is well deserving of a multi-volume Collected Works. Not that the marketing-minded Ginsberg ever bothered attempting to dispense with having himself and his pals so labeled-he took advantage of having the Beat Generation as a recognizable brand name to push for publication of all their works. Almost overnight what had previously been an unorganized, underground milieu of renegade writers, artists, and sometime drug users who hung out at coffee houses and jazz joints from New York City to San Francisco became categorized as the Beat Generation, a label that has never been shaken off. For several years leading up to the publication of Howl, he had been championing the work of his novelist friends Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, and he continued thereafter for the rest of his life to make sure they would not be forgotten.

In 1956 Ginsberg’s book Howl and Other Poems shuttled him into the national spotlight and he never looked back he didn’t need to, since he never left any part of his life behind, and he always brought his friends along for the ride.

Far more than chasing hyperbole-fueled scandal or doggedly following the path of raging revolutionary, he was ever the doting Jewish grandmother, always committed first and foremost to being a poet. Although famous for frank, at times explicit, chronicling of his sex life and drug use, such instances within his writing are in actuality the byproduct of his lifelong discipline to a poetic practice in which observation and detailed notation remain paramount. the poems of freedom, and the exposé of personality-singing in high tones democracy and the New World of it through These States.” Ginsberg was a proudly practicing Buddhist homosexual Jewish poet who forthrightly spoke his mind to anyone who cared to listen. No other American poet has ever achieved the status of countercultural hero that Ginsberg enjoyed, fulfilling Walt Whitman’s declaration in his Introduction to Leaves of Grass to be “master after own kind, making. Grove Press ($27) First Thought: Conversations with Allen GinsbergĪllen Ginsberg’s impact upon the literary as well as cultural climate of the United States during the tumultuous latter half of the twentieth century cannot be overstated.

The best minds of my generation