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Customer Reviews (5)

Required reading for budding Ayahuasqueros
The book that awoke Western interest in the Amazonian shamanic potion, Ayahuasca (A.K.A. Yage in Columbia).

Through his letters to Beat poet Allen Ginsburg we follow William Burroughs as he travels down from Panama towards Colombia in search of the mythical potion Yage in 1953. Burroughs writes with bile dripping in every sentence as he passes damning judgment on everybody and everything from the locals to the expats, ("I never knew a Dane that wasn't bone dull". or "The Chinese are all basically Junkies in outlook"), gets thrown in jail and languishes under town arrest in some flea bitten village while fighting Malaria - all the while trying to locate a shaman to try out Yage with.

When he does manage to finally locate a willing shaman, Burroughs' Yage accounts are curiously muted experiences - nausea, purging, some numbness convulsions and minor hallucinations. However, no real epiphanic moments or fundamental inner transformation is revealed. Ginsburg's later 1960 experiences, on the other hand, provide much more detail as to the composition, preparation and ritualistic use of Ayahuasca, and his experiences prove much more powerful and mythopoetic than Burroughs' - "I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe" His experiences are profound as he connects with the "Great being within"and describes his experience as 'The ringing sound in all the sense of everything that has ever been created". Three years later in 1963 Ginsburg sums up his Ayahuasca experiences thus: "transfiguration of self consciousness from homeless mind sensation of eternal fright to incarnate body feeling present bliss now actualised."

Despite rambling in places, it's a quick and worthwhile read, mainly of historical interest to see how two mid-twentieth century literary figures responded to Ayahuasca, inadvertently helping propel the potion to international prominence. .

Junky é ainda o grande livro
Legal, mas nem tanto. Se vc é a sua primeira leitura de Burroughs deixe esse pra depois e compre o Junky.

interesting beat history
I found this to be very interesting when put into historical perspective.strange tales from both burroughs and ginsberg.I give this a high rating just because it's such an interesting read.You have many different avenues with witch to approach the many layers this has to offer. L Jordan

Fake Letters And Real Drugs.
'The Yage Letters Redux' is a contemporary update of 'The Yage Letters,' a lesser-known Burroughs epistolary text (or pseudo-epistolary text - more on which in a moment) from 1963. It mostly takes the form of letters from Burroughs to his lover and literary cheerleader Allen Ginsberg when, after the death of his wife Joan in the notorious much-debated shooting accident, Burroughs takes off to South America on a fractured internal amnesiac quest in search of Yage (pronounced 'Ya-hey'), the supposed 'Final Fix' (a powerful draw for such a hardcore drug addict) used by brujos for prophetic effect. In the letters the Harvard-educated junkie-cum-ethnobotanist describes the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of the country, giving us a vivid, sweatsoaked travelogue of the place and the people and places he finds there.

'Redux' is edited by Oliver Harris, who edited an excellent book of letters by Burroughs from 1945-1959, and for anybody interested in El Hombre Invisible it's a fascinating, revolutionary version of a revelatory text that is definitely worth checking out. Containing 40 new pages of text, it encompasses pieces of writing from 1953-1960, including some by Ginsberg, the book has a very tangled, complex literary history (expertly unraveled by sui generis Burroughs scholar Harris in the introduction). Long presumed to have been genuine letters between the two men, the epistolary nature of the text turns out to be an elaborate literary construction by Burroughs (hoping for a book that could have been published as a companion piece to 'Junkie,' published by Ace Press), to try and sell piecemeal material. In retrospect it's easy enough to see this when it's pointed out. Take, for example, this for a description of a priest from a 'letter' from Burroughs dated January 30th:

"There was no mistaking the neurotic hostility in his eyes, the fear and hate of life. He sat there in his black uniform nakedly revealed as the advocate of death. A business man without the motivation of avarice, cancerous activity sterile and blighting. Fanaticism without fire or energy exuding a musty odor of spiritual decay. He looked sick and dirty - though I guess he was clean enough actually - with a suggestion of yellow teeth, unwashed underwear and psychosomatic liver trouble. I wonder what his sex life would be."

That is far too studied and crafted a passage to merely be a passing comment on a person the writer met. And nobody but Burroughs would wonder what the sex life of so unappealing a character would be! And only he would write musings about music heard on his trip like "A phylogenetic nostalgia conveyed by this music - Atlantean?" because only he could believe that he could be nostalgic for music supposedly heard in Atlantis.

There are many examples in the text of upper class Burroughs being the ultimate rich 'Ugly American' abroad, and his condescension towards the South American natives he encounters is very obvious and sneering and supercilious, though becoming more ambivalent as his experience amongst them goes on and he becomes educated to their tardy ways. However. The text herein is divided into three sections: 'In Search of Yage' (1953), 'Seven Years Later' (1960) and 'Epilogue' (1963). Right at the end of the first section Burroughs takes Yage and experiences a complete literary and psychic overhaul. I was deeply surprised to encounter practically verbatim the 'The Market' section from 'Naked Lunch' here, written when Burroughs is under the influence of Yage and obviously inserted into the text for that seminal novel at a later date. It's an incredibly beautiful, strange, stunning piece of writing, visionary and exotic and unknown and unsurpassed (to my mind) and, in case you don't know what I'm talking about, I present here, in case you haven't seen it, one of my all-time favourite prose poetry passages in the English language, and one which has proved deeply inspirational to me in my own writings (the version here being slightly different to the one in 'Naked Lunch'):

"Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, cut antiobiotics, Tithonian longevity serum; black marketers of World War III, pitchmen selling remedies for radiation sickness, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit taken down in hebephrenic shorthand, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states; a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy; sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will; doctors skilled in treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human hosts, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit.

A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum. Larval entities waiting for a live one."

I could go on and on about that passage, and others in 'Naked Lunch,' (notably 'Atrophied Preface: Wouldn't You' and the description of the Composite City, the latter of which is in here too; these few passages alone make buying this book worthwhile) one of my all-time favourite books, for hours, content and structure and imagery and obsessions laid down and on and on and on, but I won't, so don't worry. But knowing that that beautiful, damaged, disturbing sequence was from Burroughs's South American adventure, and not from Tangiers, as I had always assumed, was an eye-opener, as was the knowledge he wrote it under the influence of Yage and that this drug and writing forever changed his outlook and writing style. It certainly comes off as being visionary, otherworldly writing, Burroughs out of his head on drugs and communicating back to us from the dense dripping green rainbow-bird primeval evil eye jungles of South America what the grinning sweating knowing mentally flying brujos have been getting off on for centuries. Gorgeous stuff indeed, and language unlikely to be replicated again in such a dreary regimented age of non-experimentation and drug paranoia and fear of the Unknown. But at least we had mad old Mr. Burroughs there to document it for us.

Some of the other stuff in the book is not so hot, ie a couple of letters from Ginsberg where he writes of drug trip and manages to waffle tedious fractured semi-religious nothing-meaning white syllabic noise for page after page - "- but God knows I don't know who to turn to finally when the chips are down spiritually and I have to depend on my own Serpent-self's memory of merry visions of Blake - or depend on nothing and enter anew - but enter what? - Death? - and that that moment - vomiting still feeling like a Great lost serpent-Seraph vomiting in consciousness of the Transfiguration to come - with the Radiotelepathy sense of a Being whose presence I had not yet fully sensed -" and blah blah blah and on and on and on. There's a Burroughs cut-up passage here too, 'I am Dying, Meester?' and that's pretty pointless as well, ultimately. I never ever liked Ginsberg and all his religious psychobafflebabble, and the cut-up is, to me, a pointlessly alienating parlour trick. But I suppose it's all literary history and we would never have heard of Burroughs without Ginsberg, so I suppose it all balances itself out. Sort of.

Non-fiction.
Of all of Bill Burroughs' works, I enjoy his fictions that were closest to his life as he lived it. QUEER and JUNKY are my favorites, as they deal so honestly with the very strange world in which he moved. I realize that his cut-outs and dream-like novels are important and quite moving to many, but they just never impressed me the way his earlier books do.

THE YAGE LETTERS recounts Burroughs' trip to South America to search out the legendary drug "Yage" which he hoped would enable him to grasp something like mental telepathy. Yes, it's a mad notion and this journey is certainly equally mad, as he moves freely among primitive folk and capitalist exploiters and thieves and holy men and jungle bureaucrats and fellow travellers and drug addicts. Ultimately, the feeling that I was left with was that Yage, like so many other drugs, was nothing but poison. WB lovingly details the search for the material, the preparation of the matter, and the nausea-inducing reactions to the drug that proved only to be a mild hallucinatory.

But it isn't the Yage itself that drives this book. Rather, it's the journey. I highly recommend joining Burroughs in this prose trek.
... Read more

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Product Description
Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals, American Scream shows how Howl brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures--Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman--who influenced Howl, definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time.
As he follows the genesis and the evolution of Howl, Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s--focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading of Howl at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem's publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg's life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervade Howl.
A captivating look at the cultural climate of the Cold War and at a great American poet, American Scream finally tells the full story of Howl--a rousing manifesto for a generation and a classic of twentieth-century literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Hooray for Howl!
Jonah Raskin indirectly makes the case that Ginsberg's "Howl" was the epicenter of the Beatquake.He never comes out and says that but it's clear he believes that Ginsberg's work and the Six Gallery reading in 1955, connected many strands in the Beat movement.

Ginsberg was close friends with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, the other titans of Beat literature. He had a sexual relationship with Neal Cassidy who was the inspiration for Dean Moriarty, the leading character in "On the Road."He used heroin and other drugs in the 1940s and lived with Herbert Huncke who was a Beat prototypical character; junkie, thief, hustler, poet and rebel.Ginsberg bridged the coastal divide of the Beat movement.He lived in New York City during forties when it was the breeding ground for the movement, helping to hone the movement's sensibility and giving people the urban anonymity where they could live on the fringes of society. But the Beat movement only became visible when it flowered in San Francisco, a city that celebrated eccentricity and rebellion and the place where he chose to first read "Howl."

"American Scream" is not a critique of "Howl."While it does reference sections of the poem and talk about many iterations and traces the origins of specific images and allusions,it in no way purports to be a thorough analysis of the work.Instead the book gives us a fresh look atthe young and struggling Allen Ginsberg who wanted to deny his sexuality and fit in with the intelligentsia.His precarious mental state and quirky genius made that pose impossible for him to maintain.The reading of Howl came at a time when Ginsberg had embraced both his homosexuality and his mental illness and that gives the poem a sense of giddy rage.

Raskin always makes sure that all roads lead back to Howl, both in the moment it was sprung on the world at the Six Gallery Reading and the text that Ginsberg kept re-working for many years after."American Scream" covers a lot of ground from post-war American political, cultural and intellectual history, literary criticism, a courtroom drama over censorship and the emergence of a poetic geniusAll of it is written in very engaging, readable prose and easily makes the case that Howl was a watershed moment and text in nineteen fifties' America.

The beat goes on
This vignette of the poetic birth of the now classic _Howl_ by Allen Ginsberg puts those radical years in cameo and also provides biographical wherewithall leading up to the seminal moment, the same moment as that of the beats, thence the brouhaha of the sixties generation, so dearly beloved of current cultural conservatives, now gone to the dogs and deserving all howling echoes still reverberating. Interesting is the early Ginsberg, and the discombobulation of his neuroses maturing into a creative tide.

Worthwhile introduction to the poem and the era
A worthwhile treatment of the history of the writing of an important American poem. However, this book is not a history of the Beat Generation. It covers Cassady, Kerouac, and Burroughs, but only insofar as they intersected with Ginsberg. This is mostly a literary biography of Ginsberg. That doesn't diminish its value, but it does point to the book's main focus.

The book is best in its focus on Ginsberg's formative years and the themes of alienation and fear that went into the creation of "Howl." The book has less to say about the poem's aftermath: the infamous reading in San Francisco, the seizure of the book by customs officials, and the susequent obscenity trial are dispensed with in a chapter, and Ginsberg's subsequent life is summarized in a few pages.

The book is also written in what is frequently a bloodless, dry style that fails to do justice to the feverishness of the times and the people involved. You never get away from the fact that you are reading a book written by an academic, albeit a thoughtful and sympathetic one. There are other books out there that capture the times more passionately. However, if you are intrigued by the era and are looking for a jumping-off point to explore other work about the Beats, you could do a lot worse than using this book as an introduction.

Raskin Uncovers Some Remarkable Information
AMERICAN SCREAM is a well-done precis of everything that was happening in American culture at the time Ginsberg wrote HOWL and in the months that succeeded his breakthrough.

Better yet, Raskin has had quite a coup and he has persuaded Ginsberg's psychoanalyst (Dr Hicks) to talk about the mental and emotional torments Ginsberg had first to overcome before he could begin the writing proper, and he has ventured into the dusty file bins and uncovered for us the actual records of Ginsberg's stays in mental hospitals and psychiatris facilities. Heretofore such records were only vaguely guessed at. Raskin uses the new information wisely, much as Diane Wood Middlebrook was able to use the testimony of Anne Sexton's analyst when writing her biography some years ago of Sexton.

There are a few places where I disagree with Raskin's implications. Regarding the now-notorious "6 Gallery" reading in San Francisco where AG premiered HOWL, Raskin states, "Many of the notable local poets--Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser--were not included in the program, and so the gala event at the Six Gallery was a cultural snub of sorts to the poets who thought they embodied the best of Bay Area poetry." This is disingenuous, as Raskin knows: neither Duncan, Spicer nor Blaser was living in the Bay Area at the time. Duncan was at Black Mountain College, Spicer living in NYC, and Blaser in Boston. How is this a "cultural snub"? It's also a shame that such a classy book should be spoiled by the numerous typos. On one page alone the names of two poets who spoke at Ginsberg's funeral are mis=spelled, so we have Andrew "Shilling" instead of Schelling, and Robert "Haas" instead of Hass. They show up in the index thus abused as well.

Interesting Book on the Myth of the Beat Generation
The myth of the Beat Generation has become cliche.That's what author Jonah Raskin has to say in this new book.According to Raskin, the likes of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs were notdevoted artists who shunned fame and fortune.

Instead, Ginsberg actively sought fame and fortune, but did so in an unconventional way.Specifically, Ginsberg's epic poem Howl was purposely written to create controversy which lead to notoriety and eventually a lot of money.Ginsberg also set up a Bhuddist institute in Colorado to capitalize on his fame.

The institute also served Ginsberg's need to cultivate publicity and raise large amounts of money without appearing to "sell out."The institute also ran a school for aspiring writers that included a faculty consisting of many other leading Beat Generation writers.

In recognizing fact that so many Beat Generation writers praised poverty while enjoying quite materialistic lives, author Raskin has shattered the myth of the Beat Generation.If anything, the Beats's writinghad more in common with the hackneyed horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft than with anything truly original.

This book is an excellent contribution to the literature about the Beat Generation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"to be meek, alone, beside a big dark lake at night -"
It really pays to read Allen Ginsberg in the original City Lights Pocket Poets series. Each one has the special flavor of its cultural period in America. Planet News traces Allen's transformation from weary Fifties beat figure (1961)to his flowering as the bearded, iconic hippie prophet in the Uncle Sam hat (1967). Allen Ginsberg, Superstar.

Allen is approaching Forty as Kennedy is killed & the old, leftist folkie beat scene gets K.O.'d by the One-Two punches of The Beatles & Dylan Electrified. So, A.G. brings it all back home, "Here at the atomic crack-end of Time XX Century..."

Of the several small epics within Planet News, "Wichita Vortex Sutra" is the Ace. This long plane flight - actually one section of an infinitely long spin toward the Event Horizon - brings us face-to-face with the Vietnam Apocalypse & the growing cancer on America's soul, to be continued in the Fall of America.

But the beauty-soul of Planet News is found in the shorter poems: the lovely "Galilee Shore;" "Big Beat" & "Portland Coliseum," where The Beatles astonish him, no easy feat; The legendary "First Party at Ken Kesey's with Hell's Angels," Allen doesn't seem terribly impressed; Crowned the "Kral Majales" in the short Prague springtime; "Death News" of his friend, William Carlos Williams; Waking up the Royal Albert Hall crowd with "Who Be Kind To," can you envision Marianne Faithful? & let us not overlook "Patna-Benares Express," "I Am A Victim of the Telephone" & especially "Why is God Love, Jack?" Yes, that Jack.

At last, "The Pentagon Exorcism: "Pentagon awake from planet-sleep!" & of course it never has from that day to this. But it did rise ten feet off the ground & spin like some nauseating carnival ride. At least, that's what I heard. Beautiful thing.

Bob Rixon ... Read more

Product Description
In this engrossing new piece of Beat history, Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker takes us back to the moment when America's edgiest writers looked to India for answers as India looked to the West. It was 1961 when Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, where he hoped to meet poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. Baker follows Ginsberg and his companions as they travel from ashram to opium den. Exposing an overlooked chapter of the literary past, A Blue Hand will delight all those who continue to cherish the frenzied creativity of the Beats. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A extraordinary single volume history
A Blue Hand is something of a minor miracle: it somehow manages to cover the history of the main characters in roughly 100 pages- before we get to India. The writing is musical and flawless and the biook serves as perfect introductory, background text to the work of the BEATS. It is, in manay ways, a perfect course in 200 pages. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Fascinating portrait of interesting times
I read in the New York Times that Deborah Baker was Barack Obama's editor for his memoir, so I was curious to see if she was as good a writer as she was an editor. I'm happy to report that she is an excellent writer. I was thoroughly engrossed by A BLUE HAND. To be honest, I was never a big fan of the Beats in general, but Ms. Baker's book reads like a novel and I find her portraits of the characters to be multi-layered and complex. I especially like the complex portrait she also paints of India and New York City. I feel that I learned quite a lot about the historical period and cultural zeigeist. What's more, Ms. Baker's prose is quite lyrical. For example, I liked lines such as "A woman married in a red-and-gold Benarsi silk sari is a well-married woman. The rooftops of Benares are dotted with cross-legged old men at spinning wheels who, like latter-day Rumpelstiltskins, spin skeins of gold thread onto skeins of white silk." Her literary roots and appreciation are revealed in her judicious use of quotes from writers of the era. I highly recommend this book to readers who enjoy good prose!

I wish there were more pictures
Strange book. It left me with the feeling that if I really wanted to find out what that time was like for the major characters I'd need to do my own research. I thought Allen Ginsberg was represented as a rather pathetic, emotionally damaged, spiritually immature person. This may have been true, but how could anyone writing about him today possibly know that? Rambling and at times incoherent, the book disappointed.

A Jewish Poet in India
During the 1970s there were the punks, during the 1960s there were the hippies, and during the 1950s, and beyond, the Beatniks were the epitome of America's counterculture. Normally from respectable, if not wealthy families, and highly educated to boot, the Beatniks frightened conservative, Eisenhower era America with there drug use, displays of both hetero and homo sexualities, and willingness to embrace other counterculture figures as Dr. Timothy Leary. However, it was not only conservative America that gave the Beats an overblown image, those who supported them, those who read Jack Kerouac's On the Road and wanted to be the next Sal Paradise beatified instead of demonized their idols, and the true personalities of the Beats were hidden behind a wall of media and hype.

In the past few decades a large number of biographies and autobiographies about and by the Beats making one think is Deborah Baker's A Blue Hand: The Beats in India really necessary? I must say that, yes, it is necessary because it sheds light on a subject, which, of course, has been written on before, that is usually only given a chapter or a few footnotes in comparison to the Beats and sex or the Beats and Drugs: The Beats and spirituality/religion.

Although the book is titled A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, it might be more properly titled: A Blue Hand: Allen Ginsberg and The Beats in India because most of the book is centered upon the balding, heavily bearded poet who changed the American literary scene with his poem Howl in 1957 with the hoopla it caused along with the obscenity trial following its publication. Instead of being described as an icon or a demon, Ginsberg is shown as a man who is trapped in the memories of his mother, who died after going insane, and his Jewish upbringing which he is unable to extricate from his mind and being. After having God read aloud to him a poem by William Blake and others deities coming to him in various stages of chemically induced transcendence, Ginsberg becomes obsessed with finding a teacher whom can help him obtain Enlightenment, so therefore India becomes his Mecca and along with his longtime, and eventually lifetime lover and partner, Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg goes to India to search for his guru.

However, things do not go as Ginsberg hoped. He wanted to find Enlightenment on his terms, i.e. being able to find it quickly and through the copious use of drugs. A number of the self-styled gurus he encounters are obviously charlatans who are trying to make a quick buck off of white folks and those whom possess true knowledge are bemused by the presence of the American poet with his thick glasses and beard because what he seemingly seeks is not true enlightenment, but release from personal demons and an easy reason to delve into questionable substances.
Ginsberg is an Orientalist who has exoticized a country and its people to help him seek things that he believes that he cannot find in his own culture. Instead of enlightenment, what he truly finds in India is a group of poets, like him, mostly highly educated and from well off families, who seek to leave their own county to find philosophies that they believe their own country and its "backward" ways lack, so therefore it is a meeting of Orientalist and Occidentalist, a meeting that results in disappointment.

With Ginsberg as the core of her book, Baker does an impressive job sketching how other Beats fit around the prominent poet. Although arguably the most famous, especially for his road novels, Jack Kerouac seems to be the biggest homebody, reluctant to leave his mother, William S. Burroughs, with his decades of drug use, love of firearms, and considerable talent and intellect, comes off as a collected psychotic, and Gary Snyder, who went to Japan to find his enlightenment through Zen Buddhism, seems to be the polar opposite of Ginsberg, a man who is willing to take the time to truly learn the religion he studies while becoming enmeshed within his adopted society.

At first, I thought A Blue Hand was going to be a simple biography of the Beats in India, but instead it, through Baker's through research of both primary and secondary materials, it is a literary biography in which she details the thoughts and feelings of not only the Beats, but the women in their lives and the teachers and Indian poets they encounter. This style was a bit disorienting at first for me because I am not used to reading books structured this way and I was a bit put off from reading it at first, but as I continued reading I was able to get drawn into the "story" and able to thoroughly enjoy the book. However, I did also have a couple of issues with the book, primarily there were just too many names. If one is not familiar with some of the lesser known beats and the slew of Indian poets Ginsberg meets, one can be quite at a loss while reading this book. While there is a semblance of endnotes at the end of the book which tells where Baker found her information, footnotes would have been a major help to distinguish who was who in the book. Besides that, the book gets a bit repetitive at times, such as mentioning Ginsberg's poetry spouting God several times, but that is a small matter which does not cast a shadow over the whole of the book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

ginsberg at his most introspective and revealing
If ever there was a trip through hell as mental illness, this is it.Ginsberg relates the story of his mother, a schizophrenic, and how her struggle shaped his life more decisively than anything else.Written as a lament, it vividly evokes her weird symbolic behaviors, her noises and smells, her struggle with demons.He wonders if she wanted to have sex with him, what it means, how the experience stamped him.This was more horrible, I am sure, than even a gifted poet like him could describe.He even states that, when he tries to make love with a woman, he sees her in his mind.Pretty strong stuff.

Recommended.This is the deepest Ginsberg and the best of the beat writing, in my opinion.But is only the horror, in my reading.

My favorite of Ginsberg's books
I carry this collection with me literally everywhere and read at least a poem or two from it every day. I feel the poems in this collection are beautiful and charismatic, and sadly the style he used in these isn't seen in many of his other poems. I suppose that's what makes Ginsberg great, every collection offers a little something different. If you like Howl, buy this collection immediately!

After 'HOWL', It's 'KADDISH'
Ginsberg's long-form poem about his mother is a beautiful elegy in the form of an ancient Jewish prayer for the dead. It examines the poet's relationship with Naomi Ginsberg and her illness, as well as his own childhood and adolescence.

From the russian girl coming to America in the early 1920's, the socialist mom, to the mentally ill patient in her old age, Ginsberg reviews the life of a remarkable woman and the ways in which their relationship affected his life and work. And affected it did. Kaddish is also a therapeutic work for the poet, almost psychoanalitical at times, a courageous and loving exploration of the profound influence parents can have on a writer's life.

a mother's madness
"Kaddish" is Ginsberg's memorable and moving autobiographical poem about his mentally ill mother and his troubled relationship with her. This long poem is a sort of elegy written after his mother's death, and after recounting his feelings and incidents in her life, he gives his farewell. Another poem I really like in this collection is "At Apolinaire's Grave."

Nice little collection
Kaddish is Ginsberg's second most important work.This edition contains all of Ginsberg's best pieces from the late Fifties:Kaddish, Poem Rocket, Death to Van Gogh's Ear!, and The Reply.Get this book and the Pocket Poets edition of Howl and you will be all set to enjoy Ginsberg. ... Read more

Product Description
allen ginsberg and gregory corso posing naked in tangier timothy leery and neal cassady en route to millbrook psychedelic research center on ken keseys merry prankster bus jack kerouac and william burroughs in ginsbergs new york apartment lawrence ferlinghetti and his dog whitman in san franciscos city lights bookstore these are just a few of the bizarre snapshots of enduring beat era personalities appearing in this remarkable collection by one of the beat movements most celebrated founders poet alien ginsberg spanning more than three decades from 1953 to 1988 Snapshot Poetics contains candid photographs of legendary beat writers and artists as well as their disciples including norman mailer lou reed richard avedon kathy acker willem de kooning anne waldman and russian poet yevgeny yevtuchenko all accompanied by ginsbergs quirky handwritten captions a veritable whos who of the beat era and the ongoing literary scene it engendered ginsbergs classic images re-create the movement in all its glory ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

nice album
Ginsberg's on-and-off fascination with photography left some intimate records of the lives around him.We see a slim and young full-mopped Ginsberg, smiling on a ship "smoking what," and candid shots of Burroughs, Kerouac, and other less famous Beats as they interacted with each other.You will find that there's much more to the camaraderie of these guys than just trying to get laid (re: the other review).

nice album
Ginsberg's on-and-off fascination with photography left some nice intimate records of the lives around him.We see a slim and young full-mopped Ginsberg, seen smiling on a ship "smoking what," and candid shots of Burroughs, Kerouac, and other less famous Beats as they interacted with each other.You will find that there's much more to the camaraderie of these guys than just trying to get laid (re: the other review).

All the old men and their boys
It is interesting to see all the old men with their 'boys' in the photographs from the 1980s. Seems that the beats' endless search for kicks and highs always ended up with the ego-centered desire to prove that they could get laid. Yes, we know that the beats got laid, although their writing about sex always was at about a 9th grade level.

What is weird to a mature eye is that they never got over their childish obsessions with young flesh. And the boys, some cute, most just young, live out their lives as footnotes to the stars. In the age of AIDS, most of the beats would have died before becoming famous at all. Something for young new 'beats' to think about now--before they too become just dead footnotes.

Ginsberg showed love in the early pictures--later, just cold views of the famous and their young sex objects--over and over and over. The beats used people; many in the photographs killed themselves or were pushed out of history. Ginsberg gives us a snapshot of how the myth was created. ... Read more

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The Beat movement exploded into American culture in the early 1950s with the force of prophecy. Not just another literary school, it was an artistic and social revolution. William S. Burroughs proclaimed that the Beat writers were “real architects of change. There is no doubt that we’re living in a freer America as a result of the Beat literary movement, which is an important part of the larger picture of cultural and political change in this country during the last forty years, when a four-letter word couldn’t appear on the printed page and minority rights were ridiculous.”

Anne Waldman, a renowned poet and longtime friend of many of these writers, has gathered in this volume a range of the best and most exemplary writings of the Beat poets and novelists. Selections from the Beat classics appear, as well as more recent prose and poetry demonstrating the continued vitality of the Beat experiment. Included are short biographies of the contributors, an extensive bibliography of Beat literature, and a unique guide to “Beat places” around the world—from Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, where his novel Dr. Sax takes place, to Tangier, where Burroughs wrote parts of Naked Lunch. ... Read more

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Everything Beat
If you are looking for a book that gives you the highlights, the best, of the Beats, along with background information, this is the book for you.Ginsberg wrote the forward, Waldman edited. All the writers are here.Enjoy. ... Read more

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Whether criticizing the American government, protesting the war in Vietnam, or denouncing capitalism, Ginsberg gave voice to the moral conscience of the nation.His personal essays on Jean Genet, Andy Warhol, Philip Glass, and others, give us compelling portraits of his fellow artists.And his views on poetry, free speech, Buddhism, and the Beats reflect the concerns of the postwar American culture he helped shape.

Provocative, playful, eloquent, and of the moment, these essays offer a social history of modern America that remind us of the events and issues that preoccupied the minds of a nation -- and one of its most influential citizens -- in the postwar years.

Customer Reviews (4)

Don't say prose poetry...
...but you could say that for the Ginsberg nut, this is a must-have tho not always interesting all the way through. The essay on Whitman is particularly windy, but the above-mentioned line about beard cutting & district attorneys gives an example of Ginsberg at his loony lovegod best.

And there are some paranoid rants, as well as blurry recollections of bad trips & marches & armies of fairies fellating anyone who gets violent w/ war protesters. This book is both spankings & oral sex.

Classic Collection
It's sad to think the state that America is in right now, with hardly a new voice of reason to combat it. Allen Ginsberg made sense when he wrote and he makes sense now. But has anything changed? In reading what Ginsberg wrote about then and even more recently it seems not so much so. Those who consider themselves in the know might benefit from a new (or renewed) look at this collection.

Essential Ginsberg
The totality of this book results in a Ginsberg manifesto, delivered in his own unique prose style, and bursting forth with great honesty and impassioned integrity. Invaluable as a document of the times (roughly late40s thru early 90s), as a sourcebook for things Beat, as a reference sourceto Ginsbergian Mind Speak, this book is a major addition to Ginsberg'spublished work. My only criticism is that it is presented topically, notchronologically as nearly all Ginsberg's published work is, but that is aminor point. This book stands with his best and is certainly his mostimportant publication since 'The Fall of America' in 1972, maybe even since'Kaddish' in the very early 60s.

Little "gold nuggets" make a excellent read!
Yes, this is a peak into the mind of Ginsberg.It may be more of a peak into his persona at the time the work was written, whether poet,bluesman, hippie,scholar, political activist etc.What makes it worthwhile arelittle nuggets found throughout the work which probably were unnoticed bymost of us when originally published. I do wish this book had a completetable of contents (pagination) rather than just page numbers listed for themajor sections.But, maybe it nudges us to search "on our own." ... Read more

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Published in 1956 as the title poem of Allen Ginsberg's first collection, "Howl" is a prophetic masterpiece that overcame censorship trails to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. The annotated Howl is the poet's own re-creation of the long process of composition of a revolutionary poem that broke new ground in America poetry through its expansive poetic form, tonal range, and freshness of spirit.

Customer Reviews (3)

Howl, a preview to acclimate the prospective buyer
Before starting, allow me to mention the fact that I am reviewing solely the poem "Howl" in Howl and Other Poems.

I read "Howl" this summer as a 16 year old and was absolutely stunned and amazed.As far as enjoying the poem I was entirely too confused by it the first time I read it to actually enjoy it; so let me start by giving the reader of this and prospective buyer of Howl and other Poems the advice to read "Howl" several times before forming a concrete opinion about it.To best describe it shortly, "Howl" is the story of a man that has been through and survived and recognized the horrors of the post war 1940's and the 1950's."Howl" shows the oppression that people faced during this era and gives a ghastly description of the government and institutions in general at this time. The main strength of Ginsberg's poem is to expand the mind of the reader, even if that means confusing the reader.Take for example the stanza:
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue, amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
This isan absolutely mind boggling sentence.It attacks the areas of fashion and advertising and the powers of editors in newspapers.Stanzas like that are why I enjoy this poem, it is a critique of the time that Ginsberg lived in and allows one to see parallels in the current day and age.

Howl was written over the course of 1955-1956, and is truly a product of its time.This was the beginning of the beat generation, with other writers such as Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey."Howl" reflects the post war era in which Ginsberg lived; an era of, as he believes, governmental oppression and assimilation.These thoughts are best conveyed in the stanzas discussing mental institutions and how they try to force a disease that may not actually be a disease out of you.Ginsberg also critiques the everlasting effects of a 1950's mental institution with lines such as "I'm with you in Rockland where 50 more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void" and "(who were) returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears, and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East".Along with Ginsberg's encounters with people in the post-war era and his personal experiences of mental institutionalization and the oppression he faced for being homosexual, drugs contributed much to Ginsberg's poem.Howl would not have come into existence without many of the drugs that started the new mindset of the beat generation such as Peyote, LSD, and DMT.Howl was a product of its own culture and it began and shaped much of the following beatnik era.

I do not consider "Howl" to have weaknesses as a peace of literature, but there are certain times where the reader is often confused by what Ginsberg is saying.Much of this is not so much because of the prosody of the poem but because so many of the ideas in an individual stanza are disconnected that it confuses the reader.For me, one of the stanzas that was so disconnected that it was confusing reads "who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed".The prospective reader must be prepared to allow the images that Ginsberg provides in "Howl" give them a new way of thinking rather than try and dissect its every stanza.I very much recommend reading "Howl"; it changed my outlook on the world.

Poets see hell through the eyes of angels
I reread this little book before attempting to review it. I remembered that it was a mad mantra of transcendent power from the heart of hell, but I didn't remember how nondated it was. This work is fresher and more relevant than 99% of what passes for poetry today. How can something last nearly 50 years without going stale or becoming trite? How can it be even more real now? Maybe it is because Ginsberg ripped it live, screaming, and bleeding from a place beyond time and beyond space. He tore it from the living bowels of MOLOCH itself and showed it to HIM. After all, what does divine madness know of time?

This poem is transcendence itself. It demonstrates that when you plunge into the deepest pit of hell it either kills you, or perhaps it burns out your insides so that you become a soulless zombie, OR you transcend it and rise howling to become a Mad Poet Saint who can truely encompass the Sacred in the Profane.

Read this poem, and the others like America, A Supermarket in California, Sunflower Sutra, Wild Orphan, and In Back of the Real. It's almost frightening how relevant to daily life it is. If you didn't know it, you would never guess that it was written in the 50's. Of course Ginsberg does invoke, holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space the fourth dimension, in the Footnote. Maybe that's why it's timeless. As Cassady used to say, we know time, yes, we know time....

I wish I would have been there for that first public reading in San Fran with Kerouac running around the audience passing the wine jug. On all the planes, the Gods themselves must have jumped back in shock as a flaming monkeywrench of living poetry was jammed through the spokes of the great quivering meat wheel of conception....

Shame
It is a shame that this annotated edition of one of the great beat/modern poems is out of print.I strongly suggest you get this book while it is still available at the used bookshops.
Ginsberg claimed to have written this work spontaneously, but this work shows the poem was written over a period of time, and edited.Maybe he was only referring to the first draft!It really doesn't matter,but looking at the drafts does give one insight into how Ginsberg created the poem(s) and the development of a classic. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

A scholar's book
I am not sure why this book saw the light of day.It is mostly about minor money matters, travel plans and gossip.It belongs in the archive where biographers and literary scholars could use it in writing more comprehensive narratives or literary critiques of both men.Such scholars are used to plowing through trivial details to find the gems which fit into a larger picture more interesting to the reading public.
I got several things out of the book: a few juicy tidbits of gossip; an occasional glimpse of where I was and what I was doing when the two were similarly or differently engaged and a rare insight into the men but not their poetry.It was a window on my past particularly in the 60's and early 70's.I was a grad student then outside agitator in Berkeley CORE and the Free Speech movement when the two were in and out of the area.I remember Allen, just back from Asia in the early 60s, speaking with I. F. Stone at the Longshoremen's hall about the coming conflict in Vietnam.Allen appeared very holy although he and Stone were similarly New York Citybred.Then in '65 or '66 marching with Allen and Peter in an NYC protest.One or the other of them was playing a harmonium and in Hindu robes.
From the book I tried to figure out how "political" each man was and how much and what kind of spiritual practice they did.It was a bit hard to follow.At first it seemed that Allen won in both categories but then later I was not at all sure.I didn't know that Gary studied with Aitkin Roshi, one of my favorites.That I liked learning but still it would have been easier to have a biographer sum its implications up for me.Also it is impressive how much jet setting they did and how many different celebrities they knew.Again, it was hard to tell how difficult their financial lives were trying to make a living as poets but also impressive how easy it was for them to get anything they wrote in print which may be why this volume appeared.
I look forward to Gary's memoir which he is reported to be writing.I have to check on an Allen bio.

Charlie Fisher,author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

Gary Snyder is NOT a Beat writer!
Allen Ginsberg along with Kerouac, Burroughs and Corso were the icons of the Beat movement but others like Gary Snyder jumped on the Beat bandwagon as soon as they saw quick fame and $$$. Read Snyder's poetry and see that his poetry is nothing but safe, bourgeois and academic. Beats by definition were anti-establishment and progressive. Gary Snyder is neither. Through 8 years of the last adminstration's horrors, he never spoke up. Never took a political stand. And now he's calling himself the last standing Beat writer! Sorry, but I think not.

Captivating
If you've paid attention to cultural events over the past 50 years then you've heard of these two poetic, literary, and, yes, Beat, stars. Kerouac gets the top billing, but without Snyder and Ginsberg guiding him and that heralded movement, it simply wouldn't've happened. And here we get insights into this special relationship. Trials, tribulations, travels, favors asked, jokes played ... it's all here. This very insightful and informative collection is a must read for anyone who is (or was) a free spirit, a poet, a believer.

Beat poets bond
Allen Ginsberg was, of course, the Great Beat(nik) Poet who achieved early fame/infamy with "Howl" and thereafter maintained a very public profile.Gary Snyder was the model for Jack Kerouac's Japhy Ryder in "The Dharma Bums" and is an excellent, if lesser known, poet (Snyder won a Pulitzer Prize for "Turtle Island" in the 1970s) and environmental activist.The two met shortly before their participation in the legendary San Francisco 6 Gallery reading in 1955 and maintained a correspondence until near the time of Ginsberg's death in 1997.

The selected letters offer insight into the personalities and lives of two key figures in the 1950s beat literary movement which would form a foundation for the 1960s counter-culture as well as the ecological movement of the present day.Ginsberg roamed the world and made his way into the inner sanctums of pop culture.When you run across references to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and even Uma Thurman in the book's index, rest assured their mention comes in a Ginsberg letter.Meanwhile, Snyder spent the last half of the 1950s and much of the 1960s in Japan studying Zen Buddhism.The two, along with their companions, traveled around India in the early 1960s and later organized the San Francisco Be-In.In the 1980s and 1990s academia slowly came around to recognizing the literary accomplishment of the beat movement and both writers found themselves re-cast as honored elder statesmen.Snyder served as a member of the California Arts Council under Governor Jerry Brown and accepted a teaching post at UC Davis.

As Gary Snyder observes in his introduction (he's one of the last of the beat pioneers standing), he prodded Allen into walking more and Allen prodded him into talking more--and he feels the results were beneficial for both.Certainly reading these collected letters is beneficial to those of us who admire the work of both and appreciate the opportunity to learn more about the persons behind the personas. Read this and ponder if our email and cell phone culture will preserve the entertaining interplay of lofty thoughts and low gossip between two noteworthy individuals as this collection of letters has. ... Read more

Product Description
Intimate detail and reflection inform the noted poet's journal account of his emotions, affairs, friendships, family relationships, and travels during the mid-1950s and of the events and discoveries that shaped his controversial poetry. 20,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo. Tour. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

I love this book!
This book has been a revelation to me.I sheepishly admit that I knew little about Allen Ginsberg or his poetry.When I read somewhere that Ginsberg and others had met with the Dalai Lama when they were in India in the early 60s and tried to convince him to drop acid, I thought I've got to read something about this guy.This book appears to capture Ginsberg and his times.I adore the amazing way that he seemed to relate with such empathy and insight with everyone he met: mainstream politicians, Hells Angels, activists, critics and hippies, straights and squares he had a knack for knowing what to say and how to say it to help people to wake up ... even if just a little.I laughed, I cried. Okay, mostly laughed. And I was gratefully informed. What a groovy book!

Holy Soul Jelly Roll
This is a fun, easy read that sketches Ginsberg and attendant loonies at the height of his reign as May King of the '60s Underground.Essentially an expanded New Yorker portrait, it tracks the poet's dizzying movements from the Jan. '67 San Francisco Be-In to its New York sequel that Easter.Kramer lays on the color a little thick in places--she's clearly writing for amused and knowing squares--but she's very much alive to the idealism of Ginsberg's slaphappy search for satori in the midst of hectic times.Kind of an 'Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' Lite, "A.G. in America" is a breezy contribution to the Sixties myth.

ginsberg, the hysterical social man
Jane Kramer doesn't know enough about poetic history, which makes this book unreadable.Ginsberg's exploits in America will pale, in the end, to his few poems of meagre merit.I didn't know this book was now out of print.I suppose that is a good thing, and makes any attempts at discrediting it pointless.

..Last Major Beat Poet....
"howl" about fact that Allen..with help from Grove Press, LarryFerlinghetti,& other seasoned anti HUAC activists...rsiked a lot more than even todays literary intelligencia, to protect free speech. See tribute to J. Michelin,hip street poet, "Ragged Lion".by Bennett. ... Read more

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Many of the seminal figures of contemporary culture knew and worked with Allen Ginsberg and have a place in this book. Among them are Cecil Taylor, David Amram, Philip Glass, Ray Manzarek, Ed Sanders, Czeslaw Milosz, Norman Mailer, Robert Frank, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Philip Whalen, Peter Orlovsky, and Robert Creeley. In this book we truly see Allen Ginsberg as a poet, a spiritualist, a friend, a lover, a performer, a teacher, and a lover of good times. A complex and many-faceted life is given its due in this inspired photographic history of Ginsberg’s life from 1980 through 1997. The Late Great Allen Ginsberg is a deeply moving recollection of America’s most important post-World War II poet, informed by Ginsberg’s sensitivity, his love of life, and his humanitarianism. “Allen Ginsberg spent hardly any time alone.” We see him giving poetry readings and workshops, chatting with friends, pursued by admirers on the street, in group meditation, talking with Peter Orlovsky. The special power of Christopher Felver’s photographs comes from his ability to accurately and reverentially document Ginsberg’s intense network of social relations at the heart of the Beat universe. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

A Groundbreaking Book
At last, a book on Allen Ginsberg that actually reads his poems closely AND discusses in depth their religious, spiritual, literary, and historical influences.

Trigilio doesn't recycle old anecdotes or ride the wave of Beat mythmaking -- like too many studies of the Beats do. He treats Ginsberg like the experimental poet that he was, and puts his work in the larger context of contemporary American poetry.

It's a challenging book, but Trigilio manages a great balance between "academic style" and "mainstream style."The writing is crisp, clear, and deeply informed by the spiritual and literary traditions that inspired Ginsberg. ... Read more