Download or read book American Scream written by Jonah Raskin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-04-07 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Howl and Other Poems written by Allen Ginsberg and published by City Lights Publishers. This book was released on 1956-06-01 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epigraph for Howl is from Walt Whitman: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Announcing his intentions with this ringing motto, Allen Ginsberg published a volume of poetry which broke so many social...
Download or read book Howl written by Allen Ginsberg and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2006-10-10 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Howl written by Allen Ginsberg and published by Penguin Modern Classics. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, and broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. The apocalyptic 'Howl', originally written as a performance piece, became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956. It is considered to be one of the defining works of the Beat Generation, standing alongside that of Burroughs, Kerouac, and Corso. In it, Ginsberg attacks what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States at the time, and takes on issues of sex, drugs and race, simultaneously creating what would become the poetic anthem for US counterculture.
Download or read book Howl on Trial written by Bill Morgan and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2021-01-06 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Howl and Other Poems, with nearly one million copies in print, City Lights presents the story of editing, publishing and defending Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem within a broader context of obscenity issues and censorship of literary works. This collection begins with an introduction by publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who shares his memories of hearing Howl first read at the 6 Gallery, of his arrest and of the subsequent legal defense of Howl’s publication. Never-before-published correspondence of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Gregory Corso, John Hollander, Richard Eberhart and others provides an in-depth commentary on the poem’s ethical intent and its social significance to the author and his contemporaries. A section on the public reaction to the trial includes newspaper reportage, op-ed pieces by Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and letters to the editor from the public, which provide fascinating background material on the cultural climate of the mid-1950s. A timeline of literary censorship in the United States places this battle for free expression in a historical context. Also included are photographs, transcripts of relevant trial testimony, Judge Clayton Horn’s decision and its ramifications and a long essay by Albert Bendich, the ACLU attorney who defended Howl on constitutional grounds. Editor Bill Morgan discusses more recent challenges to Howl in the late 1980s and how the fight against censorship continues today in new guises.
Download or read book The Scripture of the Golden Eternity written by Jack Kerouac and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetic meditations on joy, consciousness, and becoming one with the infinite universe from the author of On the Road During an unexplained fainting spell, Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac experienced a flash of enlightenment. A student of Buddhist philosophy, Kerouac recognized the experience as “satori,” a moment of life-changing epiphany. The knowledge he gained in that instant is expressed in this volume of sixty-six prose poems with language that is both precise and cryptic, mystical and plain. His vision proclaims, “There are not two of us here, reader and writer, but one golden eternity.” Within these meditations, haikus, and Zen koans is a contemplation of consciousness and impermanence. While heavily influenced by the form of Buddhist poems or sutras, Kerouac also draws inspiration from a variety of religious traditions, including Taoism, Native American spirituality, and the Catholicism of his youth. Far-reaching and inclusive, this collection reveals the breadth of Kerouac’s poetic sensibility and the curiosity, word play, and fierce desire to understand the nature of existence that make up the foundational concepts of Beat poetry and propel all of Kerouac’s writing.
Download or read book The Poem that Changed America written by Jason Shinder and published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. This book was released on 2006 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflections from America's prominent writers on the seminal poem "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary.
Download or read book The People v Ferlinghetti written by Ronald K. L. Collins and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-03-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s name does not appear in any First Amendment treatise or casebook. And yet when the best-selling poet and proprietor of City Lights Books was indicted under California law for publishing and selling Allen Ginsberg’s poem, Howl, Ferglinghetti buttressed the tradition of dissident expression and ended an era when minds were still closed, candid literature still taboo, and when selling banned books was considered a crime. The People v. Ferlinghetti is the story of a rebellious poet, a revolutionary poem, an intrepid book publisher, and a bookseller unintimidated by federal or local officials. There is much color in that story: the bizarre twists of the trial, the swagger of the lead lawyer, the savvy of the young ACLU lawyer, and the surprise verdict of the Sunday school teacher who presided as judge. With a novelist’s flair, noted free speech authorities, Ronald K. L. Collins and David Skover tell the true story of an American maverick who refused to play it safe and who in the process gave staying power to freedom of the press in America. The People v. Ferlinghetti will be of interest to anyone interested the history of free speech in America and the history of the Beat poets.
Download or read book Reality Sandwiches 1953 1960 written by Allen Ginsberg and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 1963 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 in Berkeley ... a wind-up book of dream notes, psalms, journal enigmas, & nude minutes from 1953 to 1960 poems scattered in fugitive magazines here collected now book.
Download or read book The Perfect Sound written by Garrett Hongo and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poet’s audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that “ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth” (Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan). Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems. Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawai‘i, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in L.A., about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane’s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel’s piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet. Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice.
Download or read book Indian Journals written by Allen Ginsberg and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allan Ginsberg was the leading poet and conscience of the Beat generation. Indian Journals collects Ginsberg’s writings from his trip to India in 1962–63.
Download or read book A Coney Island of the Mind written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1958 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-nine poems from the 1950's.
Download or read book The Best Minds of My Generation written by Allen Ginsberg and published by Penguin Books Limited. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the summer of 1977, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. This was twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem "Howl," and Jack Kerouac's seminal book On the Road. Through the creation of this course, which he ended up teaching five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to make a record of the history of Beat Literature. Compiled and edited by renowned Beat scholar Bill Morgan, and with an introduction by Anne Waldman, The Best Minds of My Generation presents the lectures in edited form, complete with notes, and paints a portrait of the Beats as Ginsberg knew them: friends, confidantes, literary mentors, and fellow revolutionaries. Ginsberg was seminal to the creation of a public perception of Beat writers and knew all of the major figures personally, making him uniquely qualified to be the historian of the movement. In The Best Minds of My Generation, Ginsberg shares anecdotes of meeting Kerouac, Burroughs, and other writers for the first time, explains his own poetics, elucidates the importance of music to Beat writing, discusses visual influences and the cut-up method, and paints a portrait of a group who were leading a literary revolution. For academics and Beat neophytes alike, The Best Minds of My Generation is a personal and yet critical look at one of the most important literary movements of the twentieth century"--
Download or read book Great Poets Howl written by Glen Burns and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 1983 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allen Ginsberg's Howl is a seminal document for the post-modernisms exfoliating out of World War II - much like T.S. Eliot's Waste Land for modernism. This study traces his formative development in time/space during years 1943 till mid-50s Howl breakthru of individual voice. (A concluding chapter sketches subsequent development up to Plutonium Ode 1978). Close-reading of individual poems is set within the context of biography and cultural politics showing growth of Ginsberg's poetics as adapted from William Carlos Williams' visions of ordinary mind, Whitman's expansiveness and comradeship, and Blake's politics of desire. As «revolt of sudras (untouchables) poet, » Ginsberg has concentrated language on marginal mankind so that poetic praxis folds into a dimension of visionary politics and poem becomes prophetic moment voiced against the paranoia of state terrorism. Howl is a key event in the struggle for freedom.
Download or read book Today in the Taxi written by Sean Singer and published by Tupelo Press. This book was released on 2022-12-28 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn... Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck
Download or read book Still Howling written by Mary Dezember and published by . This book was released on 2016-10-29 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I see the best souls of my sex thrive despite the madness,defiant Aphrodites rising above the sea,naked in their wakefulness, determined to love in the charge of night and the terror of the day . . ."With language both piercing and uplifting, Mary Dezember explores the importance of creative expression and of finding a voice in hurtful or oppressive situations and to question hegemony - with the realization that the embracing of life happens through the alchemy of forgiveness.Graced with cover art painted by her nephew, Steve Dezember II, using his wheelchair, the book includes poems about or in tribute to courageous life-embracing innovators, such as Steve and his wife, Hope, Allen Ginsberg, Rosalind Franklin, and Georgia O'Keeffe.The title poem "Still Howling" and the poem "Endnote to Still Howling" are an homage to Allen Ginsberg and to his poems "Howl" and "Footnote to Howl," in celebration of their publication 60 years ago, in 1956, and a tribute to his publisher, City Lights Publishers, and to Allen's influences, namely Walt Whitman, but, as Dezember states in this collection, "mostly to Allen and what he gave us - the right to howl.""Still Howling" and "Endnote to Still Howling" are the First Place Winner of the Best Beat Poem Contest, 2016, sponsored by Beatlick Press. They were first published by the journal Cacti Fur.
Download or read book The Essential Ginsberg written by Allen Ginsberg and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visionary poet Allen Ginsberg was one of the most influential cultural and literary figures of the 20th century, his face and political causes familiar to millions who had never even read his poetry. And yet he is a figure that remains little understood, especially how a troubled young man became one of the intellectual and artistic giants of the postwar era. He never published an autobiography or memoirs, believing that his body of work should suffice. The Essential Ginsberg attempts a more intimate and rounded portrait of this iconic poet by bringing together for the first time his most memorable poetry but also journals, music, photographs and letters, much of it never before published.
