Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg, Poet-Laureate of the Beat Generation, passed away on April 5 at his home in New York City. The quickness of his death was unexpected. He had just been diagnosed the week before with a terminal liver ailment, but the doctors had told him that he had 3 to 6 months to live. Upon hearing the news he went back to his apartment to write more poems. One of his last poems was titled "Death and Fame". He also spent the week calling his friends, asking if they were OK, asking them if they needed any money, and announcing to them that he was dying. One of the last people he would call was William Burroughs, his friend of over 50 years.

Allen was born in 1926 and grew up in Patterson, New Jersey, right across the Hudson River from New York City. His father was a high school English teacher and a poet. His mother, Naomi, was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and even though Ginsberg was only a child, it would often fall upon him to care for her. This provided him with a first-hand view of madness. He would write about this experience in his poem Kaddish.

He started attending Columbia University for the purpose of becoming a lawyer like his brother, but fell into friendships with Kerouac, Burroughs, and Cassady among others. It was these friendships that caused him to eventually pursue his calling as a poet. Ginsberg got caught up in all the sex, drugs, and creativity that the beat generation seemed to espouse and surround itself with.

He eventually graduated from Columbia University in 1949, and joined the corporate world for a few years in an advertising agency before giving it all up and going to San Francisco. It would be here that he would meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Peter Orlovsky.

In 1955, Ginsberg participated in a reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco, where he read Howl for the first time in public. The poem was published by City Lights Books in 1956. The poem, which celebrated Ginsberg’s homosexuality and eroticism, became the focal point for an obscenity trial. It was declared not to be obscene, the judge saying that the poem was not without "redeeming social importance."

In the ensuing decades, Ginsberg succeeded in transforming himself from Beat to Hippie to war protester, but he always maintained his identity as a poet. And he never failed to act as spokesman for any of these causes.

He also served as the chronicler of the period in time that he lived in and helped define. He was never without his camera, and captured many of the people and events in photographs that serve today as evidence of that generation.

Ginsberg signed thousands of copies of Howl with his trademark "Ah". And if you were lucky, he would add a flower. Death silenced his howl, but not the reverberations that it made. Ah...

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