Malaysia-based online bookstore - 15 million titles - quick local delivery with tracking number
The landmark, original publication of Allen Ginsberg's HOWL & Other Poems
HOWL & Other Poems, the prophetic book that launched the Beat Generation, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books in 1956. Considered the single most influential work of post-WWII United States poetry, the City Lights edition of HOWL has remained in print for more than 60 years, with well over 1,000,000 copies in print.
A strident critique of middle-class complacency, consumerism, and capitalist militarism, HOWL also celebrates the pleasures and freedoms of the physical world, including a tribute to homosexual love. In addition to Howl, poems in the book include: A Supermarket in California, Sunflower Sutra, America, In the Baggage Room at Greyhound, Transcription of Organ Music, and Wild Orphan, among others.
A History of HOWL:
City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti first heard Allen Ginsberg read Howl at the Six Gallery event in San Francisco, 1955, which featured writers Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, introduced by poet Kenneth Rexroth. Jack Kerouac was present, but did not read, encouraging and cheering the other poets on. Ferlinghetti was so impressed by Ginsberg's performance, he immediately telegrammed him, referencing Ralph Waldo Emerson's response to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?
When the first edition of HOWL arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao. The two were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case was sent to trial. Ferlinghetti partnered with the ACLU to launch a defense of HOWL, and a parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses appeared in court to persuade the judge of its merits. In the end, famously conservative Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, but rather, as he stated emphatically, HOWL was a work of redeeming social significance.
The landmark decision signaled a sea change in American culture, and the City Lights edition of HOWL became a vital cornerstone in the ongoing struggle for free expression and representation. It continues to attract generation after generation of readers.
It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages.--William Carlos Williams
Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius . . . probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.--Bob Dylan
Not only did he give us love and poetry, he reminded us of our civic duty to use our voice.--Patti Smith
Howl was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard.--Michael McClure
Taken all together, Ginsberg's poems are X-rays of a considerable part of American society during the last four decades. -- The New Yorker
This magnificent volume gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half-century of brilliant work from one of America's greatest poets.
A chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse in the tradition of Whitman, Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg's raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry and popular song and speech, but also our views of the world.
The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1965 is here presented in a commemorative hardcover edition!
The landmark, original publication of Allen Ginsberg's HOWL & Other Poems!
HOWL & Other Poems, the prophetic book that launched the Beat Generation, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books in 1956. Considered the single most influential work of post-WWII United States poetry, the City Lights edition of HOWL has remained in print for more than 60 years, with well over 1,000,000 copies in print.
A strident critique of middle-class complacency, consumerism, and capitalist militarism, HOWL also celebrates the pleasures and freedoms of the physical world, including a tribute to homosexual love. In addition to Howl, poems in the book include: A Supermarket in California, Sunflower Sutra, America, In the Baggage Room at Greyhound, Transcription of Organ Music, and Wild Orphan, among others.
A History of HOWL:
City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti first heard Allen Ginsberg read Howl at the Six Gallery event in San Francisco, 1955, which featured writers Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, introduced by poet Kenneth Rexroth. Jack Kerouac was present, but did not read, encouraging and cheering the other poets on. Ferlinghetti was so impressed by Ginsberg's performance, he immediately telegrammed him, referencing Ralph Waldo Emerson's response to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?
When the first edition of HOWL arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao. The two were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case was sent to trial. Ferlinghetti partnered with the ACLU to launch a defense of HOWL, and a parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses appeared in court to persuade the judge of its merits. In the end, famously conservative Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, but rather, as he stated emphatically, HOWL was a work of redeeming social significance.
The landmark decision signaled a sea change in American culture, and the City Lights edition of HOWL became a vital cornerstone in the ongoing struggle for free expression and representation. It continues to attract generation after generation of readers.
It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages.--William Carlos Williams
Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius . . . probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.--Bob Dylan
Not only did he give us love and poetry, he reminded us of our civic duty to use our voice.--Patti Smith
Howl was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard.--Michael McClure
Featuring the legendary and groundbreaking poem Howl, this remarkable volume showcases a selection of Allen Ginsberg's poems, songs, essays, letters, journals, and interviews and contains sixteen pages of his personal photographs.
One of the Beat Generation's most renowned poets and writers, Allen Ginsberg became internationally famous not only for his published works but for his actions as a human rights activist who championed the sexual revolution, human rights, gay liberation, Buddhism and eastern religion, and the confrontation of societal norms--all before it became fashionable to do so. He was also the dynamic leader of war protesters, artists, Flower Power hippies, musicians, punks, and political radicals.
The Essential Ginsberg collects a mosaic of materials that displays the full range of Ginsberg's mental landscape. His most important poems, songs, essays, letters, journals, and interviews are displayed in chronological order. His poetic masterpieces, Howl and Kaddish, are presented here along with lesser-known and difficult to find songs and prose. Personal correspondence with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac is included as well as photographs--shot and captioned by Ginsberg himself--of his friends and fellow rogues William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and more.
Through his essays, journals, interviews, and letters, this definitive volume will inspire readers to delve deeper into a body of work that remains one of the most impressive literary canons in American history.
'Ginsberg could terrify the authorities ... a literary pioneer' - The New York Times
Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. The apocalyptic 'Howl' became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956 - its vindication was a watershed moment in twentieth-century history. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, 'Howl' shows why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
Howl and Other Poems is a collection of Ginsberg's finest work, including 'Howl', one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as 'A Supermarket in California', 'Transcription of Organ Music', 'Sunflower Sutra', 'America', 'In the Baggage Room at Greyhound', and some of his earlier works.
Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius ... probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman. - Bob Dylan
'Allen is ever-present in his words. His words are him - they're like a living embodiment of him - they have his energy, his philosophy, his playfulness, his sexuality and his compassion. Not only did he give us love and poetry, he reminded us of our civic duty to use our voice.' - Patti Smith
About the Author
Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg and the well-known lyric poet/teacher Louis Ginsberg. As a Columbia College student in the 1940s he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac. He became associated with the Beat movement and the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance poets Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. After jobs as a labourer, market researcher and sailor, Ginsberg published his first volume, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956.
Howl overcame censorship trials to become one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into twenty-eight languages. In 1965 Ginsberg was, in a matter of weeks, crowned Prague May King, expelled by the Czech police and placed on the FBI's Dangerous Security list. Though he travelled widely, teaching in India, China, and Western and Eastern Europe, his home for most of his life was New York's Lower East Side.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Allen Ginsberg was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 1993, honoured as Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poet 1994 and co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the western world.
Ginsberg died in New York on 5 April 1997, eight days after being diagnosed seriously ill. He continued to write until the last few days of his life and died surrounded by his friends and family. One of the last of the 'Beats', he embodied the surprising, experimental and sometimes lunatic spirit of the artistic and literary scene he was so much a part of. On his death James Campbell wrote of him in the Guardian, 'Allen Ginsberg was the exemplary avant-garde figure of the post-war world. In verse, in politics, in his own intimate life - there was no room for a 'private life' - Ginsberg resisted and disdained the orthodox, the social lie. Few people have done as much to make non-conformism respectable in our time as he did.'
As a pandemic rages and we are unable to gather to celebrate our dead, make our minyans, or hold one another's hands, have our seders, I think of Ginsberg writing Kaddish for his mother. I think of him imagining a journey from bondage to freedom. . . . Kaddish is the perfect poem for these times.--Laurel Brett, The Forward
Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish, a poem about the death of his mother, Naomi, is one of his major works. This special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kaddish and Other Poems features an illuminating afterword by Ginsberg biographer Bill Morgan, along with previously unpublished photographs, documents, and letters relating to the composition of the poem.
Allen Ginsberg, founding father of the Beat Generation, inspired the American counterculture of the second half of the twentieth century with his groundbreaking poems.
Bill Morgan is the author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. He lives in New York City and Bennington, Vermont.
In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural and gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other.--Allen Ginsberg from Kaddish
Kaddish, Ginsberg's ode to his mother after her death, is streaked with references to Judaism and to the funerary prayer recited by a male mourner for the passing of a parent or relative. Like the prayer, Ginsberg's poem is a celebration of his mother, but it also delves into--and, indeed, dwells on--the darker side of her life. . . . Ginsberg bears witness to his mother's pain and struggles; he intones her name--another act of remembrance--over and over again as if to deify her.--Maria Eliades, Ploughshares
Kaddish, Allen Ginsberg's most stunning and emotional poem, tells a story that is entirely true. As a young boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, Allen watched his mother succumb to a series of psychotic episodes that grew progressively worse despite desperate attempts at treatment.--Levi Asher, Literary Kicks
Kaddish, which Ginsberg wrote between 1957 and 1959 and published in 1961, is, at its core, a poem about a son learning to grieve for his mother. But Ginsberg's emotional and intellectual rawness make this poem an investigation about what it means to grieve, or even to be a son or mother. A deeply intimate portrait of his family's life, Kaddish nonetheless embeds itself in specific historical contexts: of Jewish life in the United States and after the Holocaust, of left-wing political activism before and during the Cold War, of a fiercely independent woman who died as second-wave feminism was only just beginning to be formulated.--Joshua Logan Wall, The Yiddish Book Center's Great Jewish Books, Teacher Resources
Ginsberg's long, graphic, lamenting elegy for his mother is one of the most shattering poems written in this century. Harrowing. Grotesque. Hilarious. Non-stop in its verbal energy....I love these little City Lights collections--they're certainly more fun than the big Collected Poems (Harper), easier to carry, easier to hold, and easier to read.--Lloyd Schwartz, Grolier Poetry Book Shop
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 éeacute;migré, 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.
Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius...probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman. --Bob Dylan
First published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg's Howl is a prophetic masterpiece--an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century.
This annotated version of Ginsberg's classic is the poet's own re-creation of the revolutionary work's composition process--as well as a treasure trove of anecdotes, an intimate look at the poet's writing techniques, and a veritable social history of the 1950s.
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry
Beginning with long poem of these States, The Fall of America is the follow up book to Ginsberg's Planet News ... chronicle tape-recorded scribed by hand or sung condensed, the flux of car bus airplane dream consciousness Person during Automated Electronic War years, newspaper headline radio brain auto poesy & silent desk musings, headline flashing on road through these states of consciousness.
Includes Ginsberg's condemnation of America's actions in Vietnam, along with commentary about the moon landing, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the death of Che Guevera, and more personal events such as the passing of Ginsberg's friend and former lover Neal Cassady. Many of the poems were initially composed on an Uher Tape recorder, purchased by Ginsberg with the help of Bob Dylan.
Poems in the collection include: Beginning of a Poem of These States; Elegy For Neal Cassady; On Neal's Ashes, Please Master, Hum Bom! and September on Jessore Road.
[Ginsberg] is never negligible, and he is often (the only true test) unforgettable.--Helen Vendler, New York Times Book Review
Following in the footsteps of legendary photographer Robert Frank's groundbreaking The Americans and Jack Kerouac's opus On the Road, Allen Ginsberg gives us deep insight into his poems in The Fall of America ... every poem this book refers to is a prismatic hall of mirrors ... --Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. The apocalyptic 'Howl' became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956 - its vindication was a watershed moment in twentieth-century history. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, 'Howl' shows why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
Howl and Other Poems is a collection of Ginsberg's finest work, including 'Howl', one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as 'A Supermarket in California', 'Transcription of Organ Music', 'Sunflower Sutra', 'America', 'In the Baggage Room at Greyhound', and some of his earlier works.
Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius ... probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman. - Bob Dylan
'Allen is ever-present in his words. His words are him - they're like a living embodiment of him - they have his energy, his philosophy, his playfulness, his sexuality and his compassion. Not only did he give us love and poetry, he reminded us of our civic duty to use our voice.' - Patti Smith
Planet News collecting seven years' Poesy scribed to 1967 begins with electronic politics disassociation & messianic rhapsody TV Baby in New York, continues picaresque around the globe, elan perceptions notated at Mediterranean, Galilee & Ganges till next breakthrough, comedown Poem at heart & soul last days in Asia The Change 1963; tenement doldrums & police-state paranoia in Manhattan then half year behind Socialist Curtain climaxed as Kral Majales May King Prague 1965, same years' erotic gregariousness writ as Who Be Kind To for International Poetry Incarnation Albert Hall London; next trip West Coast thru center America Midwest Wichita Vortex Sutra . . . at last across Atlantic Wales Visitation promethian text recollected in emotion revised in tranquility continuing tradition of ancient Nature Language mediates between psychedelic inspiration and humane ecology & integrated acid classic Unitive Vision with democratic eyeball particulars-book closes on politics to exorcise Pentagon phantoms who cover Earth with dung-colored gas. - Allen Ginsberg
Planet News is a great book of poems. It encourages the reader to release their pre-conceived notions of poetry, and allow themselves to dance disturbingly through a picture that Ginsberg paints. . . . Planet News is a beautiful read. If it's not something you're immediately interested in, the read is worth it for the mere significance Allen Ginsberg has had on the art of poetry.-Ned Tobin, Chronicles of Time
In this collection, the shorter poems, with their impressive grip on exact description, are the best, and remind us of how Ginsberg sees everything-railroads, cloverleafs, Dino Sinclair signs, 'tiny human trees' in the plains, newspaper stories and their reduction of the real to the (continued from page one) verbal, football fields, J. Edgar Hoover, and above all himself. For his contemporaries, he is the biographer of his time-its high schools, its streets, its telephones, its monsters ('television was a baby crawling toward that deathchamber), its bland head counts, its drugs, its cops, its cities, its freeways, and most of all its short-cut language.--Helen Vendler, New York Times
Plutonian Ode's title poem combines scientific information on the 24,000-year cycle of the Great Year compared with equal half-life of Plutonium waste, accounting Homeric formula for appeasing underground millionaire Pluto Lord of Death, jack in the gnostic box of Aeons, and Adamantine Truth of ordinary mind inspiration, unhexing nuclear ministry of fear. Following poems chronology Wyoming grass blues, a punk-rock sonnet, personal grave musing, Manhattan landscape hypertension, lovelorn heart thumps, mantric rhymes, Neruda's tearful Lincoln ode retranslated to U.S. vernacular oratory, Nagasaki Bomb anniversary haikus, Zen Bluegrass raunch, free verse demystification of sacred fame, Reznikoffian filial epiphanies, hot pants Skeltonic doggerel, a Kerouackian New Year's eve ditty, professional homework, New Jersey quatrains, scarecrow haiku, improvised dice roll for high school kids, English rock-and-roll sophistications, an old love glimpse, little German movies, old queen conclusions, a tender renaissance song, ode to hero-flop, Peace protest prophecies, Lower East Side snapshots, national flashed in the Buddhafields, Sapphic stanzas in quantitative idiom, look out at the bedroom window, feverish birdbrain verses from Eastern Europe for chanting with electric bands, Beethovinean ear strophes drowned in rain, a glance at Cloud Castle, poems 1977-1980 end with International new wave hit lyric Capitol Air
Meditations, rhapsodies, elegies, confessions and mindful chronicle writings filling inward and outward space thru mid-Seventies decade.
Mind Breaths: Australian songsticks measure oldest known poetics, broken-leg meditations march thru Six Worlds singing crazy Wisdom's hopeless suffering, the First Noble Truth, inspiring quiet Sung sunlit greybeard soliloquies, English moonlit night-gleams, ambitious mid-life fantasies, Ah crossed-legged thoughts sitting straight-spine paying attention to empty breath flowing 'round the globe;' then Dharma elegy & sharp-eyed haiku. Pederast rhapsody, exorcism of mid-East battlegods, workaday sad dust glories, American ego confession & mugging downfall Lower East Side, hospital sickness moan, hydrogen Jukebox Prophecy, Sex come-all-ye, mountain cabin flashes, Buddhist country western chord changes, Rolling Thunder snowballs, a Jersey Shaman dream, Father Death in a graveyard near Newark, Poe bones, two hot hearted love poems: Here chronicled mid Seventies' half decade inward & outward Mindfulness in many Poetries.
Allen Ginsberg's poems of the 1970's are a marvel, his new book, Mind Breaths, presenting a half dozen poems, probably more, that are first-rate Ginsberg. . . . The poems are there-on the page, in the book. They are called 'mind breaths.' No need to speak of kinds, qualities, degrees, the intellect's inevitable meanderings. The poems exist. Think of all the millions of things that might have gone otherwise, so that they might not exist. Our times are bleak enough, heaven knows, but at least we have this.--Hayden Carruth, New York Times
Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian émigré, 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. Carl Solomon, to whom Howl is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet.
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.
