Alan Ginsberg (Poet)   11/6/1991
Royce Hall UCLA, Seat: n.a.

Allen Ginsberg American Poet
1926 - 1997

Allen Ginsberg, b. Newark, N.J., June 3, 1926, is an American poet and leading apostle of the beat generation. His first published work, Howl and Other Poems (1956), sparked the San Francisco Renaissance and defined the generation of the '50s with an authority and vision that had not occurred in the United States since T. S. Eliot captured the anxiety of the 1920s in The Waste Land. Ginsberg's bardic rage against material values, however, was in a voice very different from Eliot's scholarly mourning for the loss of the spirit. In his second major work, Kaddish (1961), a poem on the anniversary of his mother's death, Ginsberg described their anguished relationship. In the 1960s, while vigorously participating in the anti-Vietnam War movement, he published several poetic works, including Reality Sandwiches (1963) and Planet News (1969). The Fall of America received the National Book Award for 1974. Collected Poems, 1947-85 (1995) contains all of his important work; White Shroud (1987) includes poems from the 1980s. Ginsberg sees himself as a part of the prophetic tradition in poetry begun by William Blake and continued by Walt Whitman. He names his contemporary influences as William Carlos Williams and his friend Jack Kerouac.

As far back as a 1956 reading of Howl, when he recited nude for an audience of cheering, wine-drinking admirers, poet Allen Ginsberg has walked a strange path between high renown and very intimate revelation. Francesco Clemente, the New York-based Italian painter, has a similar way of offsetting his fame with pictures that reveal deeply personal concerns.

The recent opening of the Beat Generation retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art reminded us of the links between similarly-minded poets and painters. This creative overlap has given rise to some powerful collaborations, such as the recent series, Pastel Sentences. Ginsberg saw the pastels by Clemente, and was inspired to write the series of concise, haiku-like phrases.