Allen Ginsberg, the poet whose Howl beat an obscenity trial and fills concert halls in his centenary year

Allen Ginsberg

Photo: Hans van Dijk for Anefo / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 3, 1926 Newark, New Jersey, United States
Died	April 5, 1997 (70)
Occupation	Poet
Known for	No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan – Don't Look Back, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Awards	National Book · Robert Frost Medal · Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings · Guggenheim Fellowship · Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres

Late in October the Bing Concert Hall at Stanford gives a whole evening to two old collaborators, one of them absent for nearly three decades. Let the Poets Speak marks Philip Glass’s ninetieth birthday and Allen Ginsberg’s centenary, with the pianist Timo Andres, the performer Taylor Mac and the San Francisco Girls Chorus working through Glass’s settings of Ginsberg, Wichita Vortex Sutra among them. On the first day of November, the small black-and-white City Lights paperback Howl and Other Poems turns seventy.

The centenary year has been busy. On the June day he would have turned a hundred, Ed Sanders, David Amram, Bob Holman and a long line of younger poets read for him at The Poetry Project in St. Mark’s Church in the East Village. Stanford, which holds his papers, put drafts and typescripts of Howl and Kaddish on show in its Green Library through the summer. In Manhattan, the Howard Greenberg Gallery hung his snapshots of Kerouac, Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Neal Cassady alongside the street photographs of Vivian Maier. Thurston Moore and Anne Waldman led a tribute at the Southbank Centre in London in July, Rufus Wainwright and Marc Ribot joined Thomas Bartlett for five nights on Little Island in September, and HarperCollins brought out a centennial edition of his selected poems in the spring.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, on June 3, 1926, and grew up in nearby Paterson. His father, Louis, taught high school and published lyric poems. His mother, Naomi, born in Nevel in the Russian Empire, was a committed Marxist whose paranoid schizophrenia took her in and out of state hospitals for most of his childhood.

At Columbia University in the mid-1940s he met Lucien Carr, who introduced him to William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and later to a fast-talking Denver drifter named Neal Cassady. That circle became the core of what Kerouac would call the Beat Generation. In 1949 stolen goods stored by friends turned up in his apartment; to avoid prison he accepted a plea deal that sent him for several months to the New York State Psychiatric Institute. In a waiting room there he met Carl Solomon, the man to whom he would dedicate his most famous poem.

San Francisco changed everything. There, in 1954, he met Peter Orlovsky, who would remain his partner for the rest of his life. On October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery, he read the first part of Howl for the first time in public. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” it begins, and it does not stop for breath. Kerouac was in the audience.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the poem as number four in his Pocket Poets series. Then the authorities caught up with it. On March 25, 1957, US Customs seized 520 copies. On June 3, Ginsberg’s 31st birthday, police arrested the City Lights clerk Shig Murao for selling a copy to an undercover officer, and Ferlinghetti was charged too. The trial ended on October 3, 1957, when Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that Howl was not obscene. The decision made Ginsberg famous and opened American publishing to a frankness it had kept at arm’s length. In 2010 James Franco played him in a film that reconstructed the case.

Naomi Ginsberg died in a psychiatric hospital on June 9, 1956. Her son began the long elegy for her in Paris, at the Beat Hotel, in December 1957 and finished it in New York in 1959. Kaddish, named for the Jewish prayer for the dead, is the other pillar of his work, and many readers prefer it. City Lights published Kaddish and Other Poems in 1961.

The 1960s made him a traveler and a public figure. With Burroughs he put out The Yage Letters in 1963, their correspondence about a hallucinogenic vine in South America. He and Orlovsky spent 1962 and 1963 in India. In Prague in 1965, students crowned him King of May; within days the Czechoslovak authorities expelled him. Wichita Vortex Sutra, written in 1966, went into Planet News in 1968. September on Jessore Road, his poem about refugees fleeing the war in what became Bangladesh, ran in The New York Times in November 1971 and was recorded with Bob Dylan among the musicians.

The establishment came round. The Fall of America: Poems of These States shared the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry with Adrienne Rich. That same year he and Anne Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa in Boulder, Colorado, under the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa, whose student he had become. He was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1979, received the Robert Frost Medal and the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings in 1986, and from that year taught at Brooklyn College as a Distinguished Professor of English.

Rock musicians wanted his voice. He chanted on the Clash’s “Ghetto Defendant” on Combat Rock in 1982, and Glass turned his poems into the chamber opera Hydrogen Jukebox, which opened at Spoleto Festival USA in 1990. In 1996 he recorded “The Ballad of the Skeletons” with Paul McCartney and Glass.

He died of liver cancer in his East Village loft on April 5, 1997, at 70, and his ashes went into the family plot in Newark. Stanford had bought his archive in 1994 for a reported $1 million. In Kill Your Darlings (2013) Daniel Radcliffe played him as a Columbia freshman. Seventy years on, City Lights still sells the little paperback with his name on the cover.

Tags: poets, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Beat Generation, Philip Glass, Howl