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
Reviews
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.
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
Ball, editor of Ginsberg's Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties (Grove/Atlantic, 1993), here edits his subject's writings from the formative years of his artistic development. The reader receives a glimpse into the mind that composed Howl, and Other Poems (1956), Kaddish, and Other Poems 1958-1960 (1960), and Fall of America (1972). The journals show drafts of these poems, along with other poems, dreams, sexual encounters, spiritual musings, and various literary thoughts. The journals also document Ginsberg's travels to Alaska, Europe, and Mexico while providing extensive documentation of Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, William Burroughs, and other artists who made up the Beat Generation. Ball does an excellent job of introducing each section of this account, which portrays one of America's most influential poets of the 20th century.?Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, Pa.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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