Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics

by Tony Trigilio

Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics revives questions of poetics, religious authenticity, and political efficacy in Ginsberg's prophetic poetry. Author Tony Trigilio examines Ginsberg's Buddhism as an imperfect but deepening influence on the major poems of his career.
 The first sustained scholarly effort to test Ginsberg’s work as Buddhist poetry, this volume goes beyond biography to contemporary critical theory and textual and historical analysis to show how Ginsberg’s Buddhist religious practices inform his poetry. Trigilio takes us through the poet’s first autodidactic struggles with Buddhism to his later involvement with highly trained teachers, as he follows the development of Ginsberg’s Buddhist poetics.
The book also considers the place of Ginsberg’s poetry in the cultural and aesthetic contexts of his career, covering the rise of an ?American Buddhism”; the antiwar, drug decriminalization, and gay civil rights movements; and the shift from modern to postmodern strategies in contemporary U.S. poetry.
Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics examines some of the most significant work produced by the poet after he had become a cultural icon and marks a new direction in the study of Ginsberg’s work. Of interest to scholars of Buddhism, American poetry, cultural studies, and Beat studies, this groundbreaking volume fills significant gaps in the scholarly criticism of Ginsberg’s spiritual poetics.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published June 19, 2007

About the author

Tony Trigilio is the author and editor of seventeen books, including, most recently, The Punishment Book (BlazeVOX [books], 2024), the fourth installment in his multivolume poem, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood); Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press, 2023); and Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (2021). A volume of his selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). His books of poetry also include Ghosts of the Upper Floor (BlazeVOX, 2019), White Noise (Apostrophe Books, 2013), and Historic Diary (BlazeVOX, 2011), among others. He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014; new edition forthcoming, 2025, from BlazeVOX) and Dispatches from the Body Politic: Interviews with Jan Beatty, Meg Day, and Douglas Kearney (Essay Press, 2016). Trigilio is the author of the critical monographs Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (second edition released in paperback by Southern Illinois University Press in 2012) and "Strange Prophecies Anew" (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). With Erik Mortenson, he co-edited the essay collection The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation (Clemson University Press / Liverpool University Press, 2023); and with Tim Prchal, he co-edited the literature anthology Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

His poems have been anthologized widely, including The Best American Poetry (ed. Elaine Equi; Scribner, 2023); Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry (After Hours Press, 2022); The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books, 2019); The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017); Poems Dead and Undead (Knopf/Everyman's Library, 2014); Obsessions: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (Dartmouth College Press, 2014); The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012); A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press, 2012); and Villanelles (Knopf/Everyman's Library, 2012), among others. His critical essays have appeared in the collections Reconstructing the Beats (ed. Jennie Skerl; Palgrave/MacMillan, 2004) and Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (Rutgers University Press, 2002). His articles and book reviews have appeared in journals such as American Literature, Another Chicago Magazine, Boston Review, The Journal of Beat Studies, Modern Language Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, The William Carlos Williams Review, and others.

Trigilio co-founded the poetry journal Court Green in 2004, and was an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly from 2017-2021. He is Poetry Editor and Nonfiction Co-Editor of Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose. A past recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, he lives in Chicago.