Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 - Hardcover

Ginsberg, Allen

4.12

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9780060192945: Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060192941 ISBN 13: 9780060192945

Publisher: Harper, 2000

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Allen Ginsberg's essays, collected here for the first time, were written over the course of a long, productive, and politically engaged life. With his finger ever on the pulse of America, Ginsberg was consistently outspoken and passionate about his beliefs. Whether criticizing the American government, protesting the proliferation of nuclear weapons or the waging of war in Vietnam, or denouncing the injustice of capitalists Ginsberg gave voice to a moral conscience of the nation. His views on free speech and the drug, culture, his quest for inner peace, the creation of the Beat generation, and his innovative poetics reflect the, concerns of a postwar American culture that he helped shape.

Arranged by subject, these essays offer a fascinating counterpoint to Allen Ginsberg's poems. Hey are provocative, playful, eloquent, and of the moment. In the section titled "Politics and Prophecies," Ginsberg takes on everyone from the Federal Drug Administration to the Pentagon to the Hell's Angels. Included here are his notes on how to make march/spectacle (drawn up in 1965 when a march was planned at Berkeley to support the cause of peace in Vietnam and to protest the draft), and his thoughts on how the raging issues of the day'China, Vietnam, and the 1968 Democratic National Convetion in Chicago. In another section, "Censorship and Sex Laws," Ginsberg's pieces demonstrate the strength of his belief in the right to free speech, which leads him to defend NAMBLA (North America Man Boy Love Association), comedian Lenny Bruce, and writer William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch. Ginsberg's essays on "Writers" focus on those he particularly admired, including William Blake. Walt Whitman, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Robert Creely. Through a combination of literary criticism and personal reflection, Ginsberg illuminates the life and work of these artists. Also, profiled are such influential figures as jean Genet, W. H. Auden, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, and Philip Glass, artists whose work and sensibility deeply affected him.

Personal as well as political, Deliberate Prose is more than a collection of essays from one of the greatest cultural figures of our time. It is also a social history of modern America that reminds us of the events and issues that preoccupied the minds of a nation in the postwar years.

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About the Author:

Allen Ginsberg was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926, and died in New York City in 1997.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A comprehensive, well-organized collection of uneven prose by the late Beat Poet (Journals Mid-Fifties, 1995; Death and Fame, 1999). The essays, articles, and letters here were first printed in magazines like Evergreen Review, Rolling Stone, small presses, religiously affiliated publications or (a score) nowhere at all. Many blurbs and puff pieces of unknowns collected in the Writers section here should not have been reprinted either. But essays on Ginsbergs intellectual love, Walt Whitman, and one of his physical loves, Peter Orlovsky, add much to the literary and biographical worth of the anthology. In the seven other sections, at least two or three works are essential for the Ginsberg freak or anyone researching pre-revolution Amerika of 30 to 50 years ago. In Politics and Prophecies, Ginsberg takes on Vietnam, nukes, Un-American Activities, and most government agencies. He supports the Hells Angels and has the chutzpah to write that to be a junky in America is like having been a Jew in Nazi Germany. And this isn't even in the section devoted to Drug Culture, where, testifying at a Senate hearing, he compares mind- expanding LSD to the ritual taking of peyote. In Mindfulness and Spirituality, the bard lectures in Emersons old pulpit and intones mantras over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Ginsberg outted homosexuality itself, but few will defend the pro-pederasty defense of NAMBLA which appears in the Censorship and Sex Laws section. Admirers of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Blake will most appreciate Literary Technique and the Beat Generation and the following section, especially the essays on the making of Howl and Kaddish. Finally, in Further Applications, Ginsberg proclaims that with John Lennon and Bob Dylan we see that poetry has returned through music back to the human body. Except for historians and fans of the Beats, nothing to howl about. -- Copyright �2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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