1、I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hystericalnaked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starrydynamo in the machinery of night . . .-Allen Ginsberg, “Ho
2、wl“Beat poetry evolved during the 1940s in both New York City and on the west coast, although San Francisco became the heart of the movement in the early 1950s. The end of World War II left poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso questioning mainstream politic
3、s and culture. These poets would become known as the Beat generation, a group of writers interested in changing consciousness and defying conventional writing. The Beats were also closely intertwined with poets of the San Francisco Renaissance movement, such as Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan.The
4、battle against social conformity and literary tradition was central to the work of the Beats. Among this group of poets, hallucinogenic drugs were used to achieve higher consciousness, as was meditation and Eastern religion. Buddhism especially was important to many of the Beat poets; Gary Snyder an
5、d Allen Ginsberg both intensely studied this religion and it figured into much of their work.Allen Ginsbergs first book, Howl and Other Poems, is often considered representative of the Beat poets. In 1956 Lawrence Ferlinghettis press City Lights published Howl and Ferlinghetti was brought to trial t
6、he next year on charges of obscenity. In a hugely publicized case, the judge ruled that Howl was not obscene and brought national attention to Ginsberg and the Beat poets.Besides publishing the Pocket Poets Series, Ferlinghetti also founded the legendary San Francisco bookstore City Lights. Still in
7、 operation today, City Lights is an important landmark of Beat generation history. Several of the surrounding streets have been renamed after Beat poets as well, commemorating their important contribution to the cultural landscape of San Francisco.Other Beat poets included Diane di Prima, Neal Cassa
8、dy, Anne Waldman and Michael McClure. Although William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac are often best remembered for works of fiction such as Naked Lunch and On the Road, respectively, they also wrote poetry and were very much part of the Beats as well; Kerouac is said to have coined the term “Beat ge
9、neration,“ describing the down-and-out status of himself and his peers during the post-war years.For further information, read “This is the Beat Generation“ by John Clellon Holmes from The New York Times, The Beat Book edited by Anne Waldman, and The Portable Beat Reader by Ann Charters.Allen Ginsbe
10、rgOn June 3, 1926, Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. The son of Louis and Naomi Ginsberg, two Jewish members of the New York literary counter-culture of the 1920s, Ginsberg was raised among several progressive political perspectives. A supporter of the Communist party, Ginsbergs mother
11、was a nudist whose mental health was a concern throughout the poets childhood. According to biographer Barry Miles, “Naomis illness gave Allen an enormous empathy and tolerance for madness, neurosis, and psychosis.“As an adolescent, Ginsberg savored Walt Whitman, though in 1939, when Ginsberg gradua
12、ted high school, he considered Edgar Allan Poe his favorite poet. Eager to follow a childhood hero who had received a scholarship to Columbia University, Ginsberg made a vow that if he got into the school he would devote his life to helping the working class, a cause he took seriously over the cours
13、e of the next several years.He was admitted to Columbia University, and as a student there in the 1940s, he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom later became leading figures of the Beat movement. The group led Ginsberg to a “New Vision,“ whic
14、h he defined in his journal: “Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.“Around this time, Ginsberg also had what he referred to as his “Blake
15、 vision,“ an auditory hallucination of William Blake reading his poems “Ah Sunflower,“ “The Sick Rose,“ and “Little Girl Lost.“ Ginsberg noted the occurrence several times as a pivotal moment for him in his comprehension of the universe, affecting fundamental beliefs about his life and his work. Whi
16、le Ginsberg claimed that no drugs were involved, he later stated that he used various drugs in an attempt to recapture the feelings inspired by the vision.In 1954, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco. His mentor, William Carlos Williams, introduced him to key figures in the San Francisco poetry scene, i
17、ncluding Kenneth Rexroth. He also met Michael McClure, who handed off the duties of curating a reading for the newly-established “6“ Gallery. With the help of Rexroth, the result was “The 6 Gallery Reading“ which took place on October 7, 1955. The event has been hailed as the birth of the Beat Gener
18、ation, in no small part because it was also the first public reading of Ginsbergs “Howl,“ a poem which garnered world-wide attention for him and the poets he associated with.In response to Ginsbergs reading, McClure wrote: “Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, o
19、r cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America.“Shortly after Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956 by City Lights Bookstore, it was banned for obscenity. The work overcame
20、censorship trials, however, and became one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two languages.In the 1960s and 70s, Ginsberg studied under gurus and Zen masters. As the leading icon of the Beats, Ginsberg was involved in countless political activities, inclu
21、ding protests against the Vietnam War, and he spoke openly about issues that concerned him, such as free speech and gay rights agendas.Ginsberg went on to publish numerous collections of poetry, including Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), Planet News (1968), and The Fall of America: Poems of These Sta
22、tes (1973), which won the National Book Award.In 1993, Ginsberg received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (the Order of Arts and Letters) from the French Minister of Culture. He also co-founded and directed the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado. In h
23、is later years, Ginsberg became a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College.On April 5, 1997, in New York City, he died from complications of hepatitis.Selected BibliographyPoetryHowl and Other Poems (1956) Kaddish and Other Poems (1961) Reality Sandwiches (1963) The Yage Letters (with William S.
24、Burroughs, 1963) Planet News (1968) The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems 19481951 (1972) Iron Horse (1972) The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973) First Blues: Rags, Ballads streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo
25、- tionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook- lyn, ashcan rantings and ki
26、nd king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night
27、 in submarine light of Bickfords floated out and sat through the stale beer after noon in desolate Fugazzis, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook- lyn Bridge, lost battalion of platoni
28、c conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for s
29、even days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind- ings and migraines of China under junk-with- drawal
30、 in Newarks bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grand- father night, who studied Plotinus Poe St.
31、 John of the Cross telep- athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in- stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis- ionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecs
32、tasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla- homa on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and
33、so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire place Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their
34、dark skin passing out incom- prehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and t
35、he Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled
36、on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu- scripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in
37、the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with
38、a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsmans loom, who copulated ecst
39、atic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can- dle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, who sweetened the snatches of
40、 a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis
41、 of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet- ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, wh
42、o faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy- ment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the sno
43、wbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb stew of
44、the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on th
45、e sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dr
46、eaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively u
47、nsuccess- fully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, 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 shriek
48、s of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis- ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap- pened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & fi
49、retrucks, not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas- saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles, who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each others hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry
