Professor Ginsberg

You probably know Allen Ginsberg as a poet, but you might also dig his photography or maybe you know about his devotion to Buddhism. Like his hero Walt Whitman, Ginsberg contained multitudes and even managed to add teaching to his resume from the 1970s and into the 1990′s during which time he lectured at schools in New York and even helped to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg’s complete lectures have been edited into a unique new book project. Here’s the word from NYT…

In a marvelous feat of editing and reorganization, Bill Morgan, Ginsberg’s longtime bibliographer, biographer and friend, has condensed the 100 or so lectures Ginsberg gave in the five courses he taught on the Beat Generation between 1977 and 1994, totaling almost 2,000 pages of transcripts, into a compact and often spellbinding text, preserving intact the story of the literary movement Ginsberg led, promoted and never ceased to embody. He believed, as Jack Kerouac wrote to him in 1952, “Our clairvoyance is together.”

The very title of “Howl” was a shout-out for emergency-room attention, but the poem’s most controversial line — born of Ginsberg’s foolproof instinct for his audience’s nerve centers, and honored in the title of this book — remains the first: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” The best minds? Many of those supervising the nation’s intellectual life thought this accolade if not best deserved then certainly best conferred by themselves, not by young men running “through the Negro streets … looking for an angry fix” and making, as Phillip Lopate has summed it up, “a mess of their lives.” The poem and the historic obscenity trial that followed turned Ginsberg into a culture hero and an apostate, treated in many quarters, as he later complained, like a “barbarian jerk.” But rejection never halted Ginsberg, a self-declared homosexual and “pinko” at a time when both were hunted species; his gift for counterattack and cajoling was apparently bestowed at birth. When the poet and teacher John Hollander, a fellow alumnus of Columbia’s English department, called “Howl” “frantic and talentlos” in print, Ginsberg rebuked him: “You’ve just got to drop it and take me seriously.” No teacher, he continued, should re-enact their alma mater’s plot against creativity or hand down “limited ideas to younger minds.”

Here’s Ginsberg at Loyola University back in 1990…

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counter Culture posts.