Journals Mid-Fifties 1954-1958: Allen Ginsberg ; Edited by Gordon Ball - Hardcover

Ginsberg, Allen; Ball, Gordon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060167718 ISBN 13: 9780060167714

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1995

Synopsis

A journal account of the poet's emotions, affairs, friendships, family relationships, and travels during the mid-1950s and of the events and discoveries that shaped his controversial poetry

About this title

From Booklist:

Few would accuse Ginsberg of terseness: in his poems, prose, and public appearances, words stream forth, profligate and unstoppable. He has also been, since the '50s, highly aware of being "near the center of a whirlpool of energy" and tenacious in keeping a record, not of conversations ("Kerouac had done that" ), but of his "own changes of self-nature and perceptions." This book, drawn by editor Ball, with Ginsberg's cooperation, mainly from 10 notebooks, fills gaps between previous volumes: Journals Early Fifties Early Sixties (1977) and Indian Journals (1970), which covered parts of 1962 and 1963. It thus takes Ginsberg from San Jose and San Francisco to the Arctic, Mexico, and New York and then to Morocco and Europe, and it sketches the period when he was working on both "Howl" (published in 1956) and "Kaddish" (published in 1961). Journals Mid-Fifties includes dream narratives and poem drafts, emotional observations about lovers and friends, pungent commentary on literature and politics, and, to enhance it all, contemporary photographs and reproductions of notebook pages. Recommended for libraries where Ginsberg's earlier journals have found an audience. . Mary Carroll

From Publishers Weekly:

Poet Allen Ginsberg moved to San Francisco in 1954 and a year later, with his reading of Howl, helped launch a poetry renaissance. His disgust with America's mindless materialism, his quest to unite eros and mystical spirituality, his struggle to accept his homosexuality, and his attempts to reconcile the imagination with mundane reality are recurring themes in these freewheeling journal entries, which Ball?who also edited Allen Verbatim?compiled from 10 notebooks. Ginsberg's anguish over the death of his mother, Naomi, in 1956, reflected in poems and jottings, culminated in his elegy, Kaddish, early portions of which appear here. In 1957 he and his lover, Peter Orlovsky, embarked on travels through Morocco, Spain, Italy, Amsterdam, Paris. Along with exquisite impressions of North Africa, Alaska and the Arctic, this journal, studded with scores of poems, records Ginsberg's friendships with Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs, his dreams, his poetic theorizing and his meditations on love, suffering and metaphysics. Illustrated. $20,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0060167718
• ISBN 13: 9780060167714
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 489
• Editor: Ball Gordon