Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsbergwas an American poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression and was known as embodying various aspects of this counterculture, such as his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy and openness to Eastern religions. He was one of many influential American writers of his time known as the Beat Generation, which included famous writers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth3 June 1926
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless - abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.
So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he's moving through.
How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.
First thoughts are the strongest.
I learned a world from each / one whom I loved
From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.
Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.
Scientist alone is true poet.
...the bewildering beauty of Paris...
Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.
So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'
I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.