The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems: 1937-1952 - Softcover

Ginsberg, Allen; Lieberman-Plimpton, Juanita; Morgan, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0306815621 ISBN 13: 9780306815621

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2008

Synopsis

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) kept a journal his entire life, beginning at the age of eleven. In these first journals the most important and formative years of the poet's storied life are captured, his inner thoughts detailed in what the San Francisco Chronicle calls a vivid first-person account...Ginsberg's unmistakable voice coming into its own for the first time.” Ginsberg's journals-so candid he insisted they be published only after his death-document his complex, fascinating relationships with such figures of Beat lore as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, and reveal a growing self-awareness about himself, his sexuality, and his identity as a poet. Illustrated with never-before-seen photos and bolstered by an appendix of his earliest poems, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice is a major literary event.

About this title

About the Author

Allen Ginsbergšs Howl was one of the most widely read and translated poems of the twentieth century. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute. Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton worked with Allen Ginsberg and as an editor in New York City. She now owns and runs her own business, Mud Pie Productions and lives in western Massachusetts. Bill Morgan was Allen Ginsbergšs literary achivist and is author of the biography I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. He lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The troubled and excitable mind of the young Beat poet is given free rein in this exhaustive and often illuminating collection of his early private writing. The text serves as an evolving portrait of both a writer and a man: from the first, self-conscious high school entries to the stylistically mature entries of the early '50s, the degree of insight and the fluidity of prose multiplies exponentially. Throughout, Ginsberg lives up to his reputation as the most intellectually rigorous as well as the most neurotic of the Columbia gang that included Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Luckily, his neuroses—mostly of a sexual/ romantic nature—are often expressed with lucidity and intensity. Ginsberg's obsessive relationship with the charismatic Neal Cassady is discussed at particular length, often in a narrative, slightly fictionalized form that provides a fascinating, and significantly more interior, counterpoint to Kerouac's On the Road. An appendix of early poems provides significant insight into Ginsberg's developing aesthetic. As a whole, the poems are entertaining in their own right, but, like most of the journals, they can best be appreciated in reference to Ginsberg's body of later writing. 16 b&w photos. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0306815621
• ISBN 13: 9780306815621
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 544