Allen Ginsberg

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a poet-teacher father and Russian emigre mother. Along with his friend Jack Kerouac, he attended Columbia University, but was initially expelled for writings obscenities on his dormitory window before returning to complete his graduation in 1948. When "Howl and Other Poems" was impounded by San Francisco customs in 1956, the subsequent trial for obscenity catapulted Ginsberg and his publisher City Lights to national fame and helped to define the Beat Generation. His "Collected Poems: 1947-1997" appeared in 2006.

Allen Ginsberg was the bard of the beat generation, and Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems is a collection of his finest work published in Penguin Modern Classics, including 'Howl', whose vindication at an obscenity trial was a watershed moment in twentieth-century history.

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

Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This new collection brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture. They include the apocalyptic 'Howl', which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956; the moving lament for his dead mother, 'Kaddish'; the searing indictment of his homeland, 'America'; and the confessional 'Mescaline'. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, they show why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.

Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) was an American poet, best known for the poem 'Howl' (1956), celebrating his friends of the Beat Generation and attacking what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States at the time. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, won the National Book Award for The Fall of America and was a co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world.

If you enjoyed Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems, you might like Jack Kerouac's On the Road, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'The poem that defined a generation'
Guardian on 'Howl'

'He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt'
William Carlos Williams

A new edition of Ginsberg's famous poem "Kaddish," and other selections.

"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy." Many of Ginsberg's most famous poems. Wake-up nightmares in Lower East Side, musings in public library, across the U.S. in dream auto, drunk in old Havana, brooding in Mayan ruins, sex daydreams on the West Coast, airplane vision of Kansas, lonely in a leafy cottage, lunch hour on Berkeley, beer notations on Skid Row, slinking to Mexico, wrote this last night in Paris, back on Times square dreaming of Times Square, bombed in NY again, loony tunes in the dentist chair, screaming at old poets in South America, aethereal zigzag Poesy in blue hotel room in Peru--a wind-up book of dreams, psalms, journal enigmas & nude minutes from 1953 to 1960 poems scattered in fugitive magazines here collected now book.

"...make no mistake, Reality Sandwiches, 1953-60 ...is genuine poetry, and Ginsberg's commitment marks his superiority over more graceful and refined but tepid craftsmen." --Robert D. Spector, Poetry Quarterly Famous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years.

Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile." His other famous poetry collections including The Fall of America, Howl, Mind Breaths, Plutonian Ode, Kaddish, and Reality Sandwiches are also published by City Lights Publishers.

A unique history of the Beats, in the words of the movement's most central member, Allen Ginsberg, based on a seminal series of his lecturesIn 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem 'Howl', Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation - partly to preserve his own memories of those years. The Best Minds of My Generation presents the best of these candid, intimate and illuminating lectures, revealing Kerouac, Burroughs and the rest of the Beats as Ginsberg knew them: friends, confidantes, literary mentors and fellow visionaries in a group who started a revolution. 'Marvellous ... spellbinding ... preserving intact the story of the literary movement Ginsberg led, promoted and never ceased to embody' The New York Times Book Review'An awesome exhaustive feat ... fascinatingly readable' Sunday Times'Astonishingly intimate ... Full of penetrating insight and fascinating literary gossip, the book is a major contribution to the core Beat canon ... situates the Beats in cultural history in a way that no other exploration of their work does' San Francisco Chronicle

Rainy night on Union Square, full moon. Want more poems? Wait till I'm dead. Allen Ginsberg, August 8, 1990, 3:30 A.M. Allen Ginsberg wrote incessantly for more than fifty years, and many of the poems collected for the first time in this volume were scribbled in letters or sent off to obscure publications and unjustly forgotten. Containing more than a hundred previously unpublished poems, accompanied by original photographs, and spanning from the 1940s to the 1990s, Wait Till I'm Dead is the final major contribution to Ginsberg's sprawling oeuvre, a must have for Ginsberg neophytes and long-time fans alike.

Αν θυμάμαι καλά, εκείνο τον καιρό περίπου επέστρεψα στην Αθήνα από την Ύδρα, στο σπίτι των γονιών μου, στην Πλατεία Αμερικής, όπου έμενα από τότε που γύρισα από τις ΗΠΑ, τον Αύγουστο του 1960. Κουρασμένος απ` το ταξίδι, έκανα ένα μπάνιο κι έπεσα να κοιμηθώ αρκετά νωρίς, γύρω στις 10.30`. Ύστερα από καμιά δυο ώρες με ξύπνησε ο πατέρας μου, ανήσυχος όπως πάντα, φαίνεται ότι κάποιος με ζητούσε. Σηκώθηκα και πήγα προς την εξώπορτα με τις πιζάμες. Διστακτικός και νευρικός, πότε στο ένα πόδι και πότε στο άλλο, στεκόταν στο κατώφλι ο Άλλεν, φορώντας πουκάμισο αγγαρείας ναυτικού, τζήν παντελόνι και κάτι περίεργα πέδιλα απ` τη Ν. Αμερική (Huaraches). Μου `καναν μεγάλη εντύπωση τα διαπεραστικά μαύρα μάτια του πίσω απ` τα γυαλιά του διανοουμένου της Νέας Υόρκης. Τρελά μάτια. Του είπα να περάσει, και βγήκαμε και οι τρεις στη βεράντα. [...]