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Death and Fame: Last Poems, 1993-1997
Allen Ginsberg was one of the bravest and most admired poets of this century. Famous for energizing the Beat Generation literary movement upon his historic encounter with Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs in mid-century New York City, Ginsberg influenced several generations of writers, musicians, and poets. When he died on April 5, 1997, we lost one of the greatest figures of twentieth-century American literary and cultural history. This singular volume of final poems commemorated the anniversary of Ginsberg's death, and includes the verses he wrote in the years shortly before he died.
- GenresPoetryLGBTNonfiction
116 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Allen Ginsberg
328 books4,097 followersAllen Ginsberg was a groundbreaking American poet and activist best known for his central role in the Beat Generation and for writing the landmark poem Howl. Born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, Ginsberg grew up in a household shaped by both intellectualism and psychological struggle. His father, Louis Ginsberg, was a published poet and a schoolteacher, while his mother, Naomi, suffered from severe mental illness, which deeply affected Ginsberg and later influenced his writing—most notably in his poem Kaddish.
As a young man, Ginsberg attended Columbia University, where he befriended other future Beat luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. These relationships formed the core of what became known as the Beat Generation—a loose-knit group of writers and artists who rejected mainstream American values in favor of personal liberation, spontaneity, spiritual exploration, and radical politics.
Ginsberg rose to national prominence in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems, released by City Lights Books in San Francisco. Howl, an emotionally charged and stylistically experimental poem, offered an unfiltered vision of America’s underbelly. It included candid references to homosexuality, drug use, and mental illness—subjects considered taboo at the time. The poem led to an obscenity trial, which ultimately concluded in Ginsberg’s favor, setting a precedent for freedom of speech in literature.
His work consistently challenged social norms and addressed themes of personal freedom, sexual identity, spirituality, and political dissent. Ginsberg was openly gay at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in much of the United States, and he became a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ rights throughout his life. His poetry often intertwined the personal with the political, blending confessional intimacy with a broader critique of American society.
Beyond his literary achievements, Ginsberg was also a dedicated activist. He protested against the Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation, and later, U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. He was present at many pivotal cultural and political moments of the 1960s and 1970s, including the 1968 Democratic National Convention and various countercultural gatherings. His spiritual journey led him to Buddhism, which deeply influenced his writing and worldview. He studied under Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa and helped establish the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Ginsberg’s later years were marked by continued literary output and collaborations with musicians such as Bob Dylan and The Clash. His poetry collections, including Reality Sandwiches, Planet News, and The Fall of America, were widely read and respected. He received numerous honors for his work, including the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974.
He died of liver cancer in 1997 at the age of 70. Today, Allen Ginsberg is remembered not only as a pioneering poet, but also as a courageous voice for free expression, social justice, and spiritual inquiry. His influence on American literature and culture remains profound and enduring.
As a young man, Ginsberg attended Columbia University, where he befriended other future Beat luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. These relationships formed the core of what became known as the Beat Generation—a loose-knit group of writers and artists who rejected mainstream American values in favor of personal liberation, spontaneity, spiritual exploration, and radical politics.
Ginsberg rose to national prominence in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems, released by City Lights Books in San Francisco. Howl, an emotionally charged and stylistically experimental poem, offered an unfiltered vision of America’s underbelly. It included candid references to homosexuality, drug use, and mental illness—subjects considered taboo at the time. The poem led to an obscenity trial, which ultimately concluded in Ginsberg’s favor, setting a precedent for freedom of speech in literature.
His work consistently challenged social norms and addressed themes of personal freedom, sexual identity, spirituality, and political dissent. Ginsberg was openly gay at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in much of the United States, and he became a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ rights throughout his life. His poetry often intertwined the personal with the political, blending confessional intimacy with a broader critique of American society.
Beyond his literary achievements, Ginsberg was also a dedicated activist. He protested against the Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation, and later, U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. He was present at many pivotal cultural and political moments of the 1960s and 1970s, including the 1968 Democratic National Convention and various countercultural gatherings. His spiritual journey led him to Buddhism, which deeply influenced his writing and worldview. He studied under Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa and helped establish the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Ginsberg’s later years were marked by continued literary output and collaborations with musicians such as Bob Dylan and The Clash. His poetry collections, including Reality Sandwiches, Planet News, and The Fall of America, were widely read and respected. He received numerous honors for his work, including the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974.
He died of liver cancer in 1997 at the age of 70. Today, Allen Ginsberg is remembered not only as a pioneering poet, but also as a courageous voice for free expression, social justice, and spiritual inquiry. His influence on American literature and culture remains profound and enduring.
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September 6, 2022
Allen Ginsberg's Last Poems
Known as one of the original Beats, Allen Ginsberg (1926 -- 1997) wrote poetry for over fifty years. He wrote his best poetry including "Howl" and Kaddish" during the 1950s. Although his poetry generally declined during his latter years, it is a mistake to dismiss it. Ginsberg's last collection, "Death and Fame" consists of about 70 poems written during the last four years of his life, 1993 -- 1997. Of the six reviews of this book currently (March, 2011) on Amazon, the most recent dates from 2002. Thus, it is appropriate with the passage of time to take a look at this last work of Ginsberg.
This is a mixed collection; but the best of these poems include a combination of playfulness, irreverence and meditation on old age, sickness, and death that make them a fitting end to a poet's life. The discovery of old age, sickness and death led to the awakening of the Buddha; and, as might be expected, there is much of Tibetan Buddhism in these poems. But Ginsberg took his Buddhism lightly and without ponderousness. Much in this collection celebrates Ginsberg's hard-won joy in his own sexuality and love of the everyday.
The poems that moved me begin with the final poem, "Things I'll not do (Nostalgias) written on March 30, 1997, within a week of Ginsberg's death. Ginsberg looks back and remembers many of the experiences of his lifetime and realizes that he will never do them again. Ginsberg recollects and bids farewell to what he has loved and approaches death with equanimity. The poem concludes.
"No more sweet summers with lovers, teaching Blake at Naropa,
Mind Writing Slogans, no modern American Poetics, Williams
Kerouac Reznifoff Rakosi Corso Creeey Orlovsky
Any visits to B'nai Israel graves of Buba, Aunt Rose, Harry Meltzer and
Aunt Clara, Father Louis
Not myself except in an urn of ashes."
In the title poem, "Death and Fame" written February 22, 1997, Ginsberg, always the self-promoter, observes that upon death he doesn't care about the disposition of his body, "But I want a big funeral." Ginsberg imagines a funeral attended by his family and his religious teachers. But he emphasizes "most important, lovers over half-century/Dozens, a hundred more, older fellows bald & rich" who would share there physical experiences with the poet, his openness, tenderness, and unashamed eroticism. Ginsberg then asks for 'poets and musicians" to attend his funeral together with "highschool teachers, lonely Irish librarians, delicate bibliophiles, sex liberation troops, nay armies, ladies of either sex." Ginsberg imagines the attendance of "Thousands of readers" who will pay tribute such as "Howl changed my life in Libertyville Illinois"' "I saw him read Montclair state Teachers College decided to be a poet." Finally, fans, and journalists and "gawkers" are imagined at the funeral, with Ginsberg concluding of the attendees:
"Everyone knew they were part of 'History' except the deceased
who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive."
A poem with the appropriately Beat title "Gone Gone Gone" also celebrates death and the experiences that make life either rewarding or a chore. The title word is repeated like a mantra as the poem concludes with a realization of finality:
"yes it's gone gone gone
so I end this song
yes its gone gone gone
No more right & wrong
yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away"
There is variety in this last collection. Several poems are written to the tune of popular songs, including "New Stanzas for Amazing Grace" which sings of the plight of the homeless. In "Variations on Ma Rainey's See See Rider" Ginsberg writes the following words for the great blues singer: "See See Rider/ you got me/in your chair/But if I have/my fanny/can sell it anywhere". And "Here we go round the Mulberry Bush" is a scatological song about the diseases of old age. Poems such as "Excrement" "Bowel Song" and "Scatological Observations" continue this theme.
Besides some sharply satirical political poems, the collection also concludes intimately reflective works. Among other poems, in "City Lights City" Ginsberg remembers nostalgically his days and companions in San Francisco during the time he wrote "Howl". "Multiple Identity Questionaire" describes the changing nature of the self, and the Buddhist teachings of lack of fixed personal identity. A poem with a related theme is "Objective Subject". In "You know what I'm saying?" Ginsberg plays with this overused phrase to remember acts of kindness he received in high school long ago.
The volume includes a Foreword by Robert Creeley and an Afterword by Bob Rosenthal, both of which offer valuable comments on Ginsberg's achievement and on the final years of his life. The collection offers an eloquent end to the work of an American poet.
Robin Friedman
Known as one of the original Beats, Allen Ginsberg (1926 -- 1997) wrote poetry for over fifty years. He wrote his best poetry including "Howl" and Kaddish" during the 1950s. Although his poetry generally declined during his latter years, it is a mistake to dismiss it. Ginsberg's last collection, "Death and Fame" consists of about 70 poems written during the last four years of his life, 1993 -- 1997. Of the six reviews of this book currently (March, 2011) on Amazon, the most recent dates from 2002. Thus, it is appropriate with the passage of time to take a look at this last work of Ginsberg.
This is a mixed collection; but the best of these poems include a combination of playfulness, irreverence and meditation on old age, sickness, and death that make them a fitting end to a poet's life. The discovery of old age, sickness and death led to the awakening of the Buddha; and, as might be expected, there is much of Tibetan Buddhism in these poems. But Ginsberg took his Buddhism lightly and without ponderousness. Much in this collection celebrates Ginsberg's hard-won joy in his own sexuality and love of the everyday.
The poems that moved me begin with the final poem, "Things I'll not do (Nostalgias) written on March 30, 1997, within a week of Ginsberg's death. Ginsberg looks back and remembers many of the experiences of his lifetime and realizes that he will never do them again. Ginsberg recollects and bids farewell to what he has loved and approaches death with equanimity. The poem concludes.
"No more sweet summers with lovers, teaching Blake at Naropa,
Mind Writing Slogans, no modern American Poetics, Williams
Kerouac Reznifoff Rakosi Corso Creeey Orlovsky
Any visits to B'nai Israel graves of Buba, Aunt Rose, Harry Meltzer and
Aunt Clara, Father Louis
Not myself except in an urn of ashes."
In the title poem, "Death and Fame" written February 22, 1997, Ginsberg, always the self-promoter, observes that upon death he doesn't care about the disposition of his body, "But I want a big funeral." Ginsberg imagines a funeral attended by his family and his religious teachers. But he emphasizes "most important, lovers over half-century/Dozens, a hundred more, older fellows bald & rich" who would share there physical experiences with the poet, his openness, tenderness, and unashamed eroticism. Ginsberg then asks for 'poets and musicians" to attend his funeral together with "highschool teachers, lonely Irish librarians, delicate bibliophiles, sex liberation troops, nay armies, ladies of either sex." Ginsberg imagines the attendance of "Thousands of readers" who will pay tribute such as "Howl changed my life in Libertyville Illinois"' "I saw him read Montclair state Teachers College decided to be a poet." Finally, fans, and journalists and "gawkers" are imagined at the funeral, with Ginsberg concluding of the attendees:
"Everyone knew they were part of 'History' except the deceased
who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive."
A poem with the appropriately Beat title "Gone Gone Gone" also celebrates death and the experiences that make life either rewarding or a chore. The title word is repeated like a mantra as the poem concludes with a realization of finality:
"yes it's gone gone gone
so I end this song
yes its gone gone gone
No more right & wrong
yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away"
There is variety in this last collection. Several poems are written to the tune of popular songs, including "New Stanzas for Amazing Grace" which sings of the plight of the homeless. In "Variations on Ma Rainey's See See Rider" Ginsberg writes the following words for the great blues singer: "See See Rider/ you got me/in your chair/But if I have/my fanny/can sell it anywhere". And "Here we go round the Mulberry Bush" is a scatological song about the diseases of old age. Poems such as "Excrement" "Bowel Song" and "Scatological Observations" continue this theme.
Besides some sharply satirical political poems, the collection also concludes intimately reflective works. Among other poems, in "City Lights City" Ginsberg remembers nostalgically his days and companions in San Francisco during the time he wrote "Howl". "Multiple Identity Questionaire" describes the changing nature of the self, and the Buddhist teachings of lack of fixed personal identity. A poem with a related theme is "Objective Subject". In "You know what I'm saying?" Ginsberg plays with this overused phrase to remember acts of kindness he received in high school long ago.
The volume includes a Foreword by Robert Creeley and an Afterword by Bob Rosenthal, both of which offer valuable comments on Ginsberg's achievement and on the final years of his life. The collection offers an eloquent end to the work of an American poet.
Robin Friedman
September 25, 2022
What poems does an old man write?
does a dying man write?
An old dying poet
Full of years, full of wisdom, full of shit —
What now, at the last
With Death rattling the doorknob
does an old poet write?
Morning routine, old man style,
that’ll do, thanks —
Aching back, pee, shave, take pills
eat cereal, shit (unsatisfactorily)
Take vitamins, read the paper;
Just another Tuesday Morn,
The mundane rendered poetic.
God — perfect subject for old poet
Knock knock knocking on
Heaven’s door.
JHVH? Allah? Pope flavored,
or Southern Fried Baptist style?
God is you? God is me?
God! is a silly poem.
Old and dying means never
having to give a shit,
Why not write a poem
all about Excrement?
Remember, then, and revisit
friends and glory days
In the glow of City Lights
What poems does an old man write?
does a dying man write?
An old, dying poet
Full of years, full of wisdom, full of shit?
Here at the last
With Death coming through the door
these are his poems, and they are enough.
does a dying man write?
An old dying poet
Full of years, full of wisdom, full of shit —
What now, at the last
With Death rattling the doorknob
does an old poet write?
Morning routine, old man style,
that’ll do, thanks —
Aching back, pee, shave, take pills
eat cereal, shit (unsatisfactorily)
Take vitamins, read the paper;
Just another Tuesday Morn,
The mundane rendered poetic.
God — perfect subject for old poet
Knock knock knocking on
Heaven’s door.
JHVH? Allah? Pope flavored,
or Southern Fried Baptist style?
God is you? God is me?
God! is a silly poem.
Old and dying means never
having to give a shit,
Why not write a poem
all about Excrement?
Remember, then, and revisit
friends and glory days
In the glow of City Lights
What poems does an old man write?
does a dying man write?
An old, dying poet
Full of years, full of wisdom, full of shit?
Here at the last
With Death coming through the door
these are his poems, and they are enough.
May 3, 2021
"No, don't do it. It'll just irritate you," so I told myself when I saw this book on the local library's discard shelf, on sale for a single US quarter. Ugh. No. "But it is a first edition," the low-grade scavenger part of me argued, convincingly. I made sure to use one of the ludicrous, carnival-token-ugly "state" quarters rather than the classic Depression-era WPA Post Office Concrete Decorative Eagle type; my gestures are tiny and pointless, but I make them all the same. But the end result's the same: yet another quarter spent, another quarter poorer. I won't even make any money back: AbeBooks has 29 first editions, lowest one at $5.90, and it is not all marked up by a library.
A week or so before I bought this book, I'd been watching the famous D. A. Pennebaker proto-video of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" where he insouciantly flips through cue cards with most of the song's lyrics. After 50 years it is still pretty freaking cool. But there's Ginsberg in the background. Yeah, he looks cool too, with his messianic beard and a and a suit with a white shawl over his shoulders - a prayer shawl? - always shrewd about when and where to show up, he adroitly equipped himself with a staff - the one Moses used coming down the mountain perhaps, or a reasonable facsimile. An elder rabbinical presence, glomming off Dylan's rising star. There he is in the background, talk talk talking to Bob Neuwirth, an on-the-scene folkie. Talking. Wagging his finger. Gesticulating. Always talking. The last shot of the little film is Ginsberg stalking off with his staff, time for lunch and more talking, more photo ops with the ascending star that was Bob Dylan then. Neuwirth goes off in the opposite direction, exhausted, I'd imagine. He never got as famous as Ginsberg; he should've hung in there and done lunch.
Then there's this famousish film of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan at Jack Kerouac's grave. Talk about a corny set piece! Years ago I ran across a still photo from this event and I thought Laureate Dylan had that feral, humiliated look he often has when on display (voluntary display, I must add), like an animal caught in a trap contemplating chewing its leg off. And there's beatific Ginsberg, Ohmmming and chanting, happy as a clam, a spotlight-basking clam. There's some marketing going on here, some mutual image-burnishing, but at least Dylan had enough self-respect to despise himself for it. Transcripts are available - poets love talking about other poets' graves when sitting at a grave. What the hell else is there to talk about? Meanwhile, Kerouac's corpse, six feet down, had by this time rolled over on its stomach and was desperately trying to claw its way down to hell...
On the website allenginsberg.org - dot-org, of course, of course - I found this:
"Allen recalls the day in a letter written to his father:
“Beautiful day with Dylan in Lowell Mass, beginning early afternoon visiting Kerouac’s graveplot and reading the stone, ”He honored the world [sic]” – We stood in the November sunbrown leaves flying in wind, & read poems from Mexico City Blues, then we sat down, Dylan played my harmonium, Peter beside him, and we traded lines improvising a song to Kerouac underground beneath grass and stone. Then Dylan played Blues chords on his guitar while I improvised a ten stanza song about Jack looking down with empty eyes from clouds – Dylan stopped guitar to stuff a brown leaf in his breast pocket while I continued solo voice and he picked up his guitar to pluck it on the beat perfect to the end of my stanza – little celestialinspired ditty on Kerouac’s grave – all recorded for movie (sic)….”
https://allenginsberg.org/2019/06/51192/
Brown leafs in breast pockets. Empty eyes and clouds. Sorry about the preamble, but I wanted to share my Ginsbergian prejudices before I get to the book.
***
Death & Fame - the title is homage to Berryman's late Love & Fame, I'm guessing. They share fame and ampersands, they are both last (well, near-last) books by flamboyant poets staggering to their verbally incontinent ends, clinging to whatever legacy it was that got them this level of Kultural Klout, trying to make sense of it all. All those famous people, all those lovers, all those literary junkets.
Poets are either noisy - Whitman for instance - or they don't say much - Dickinson, or Bishop or Larkin for instance. Berryman and Lowell started out still, then got noisy later on. Ginsberg was always noisy. God is he noisy. Unlike Berryman, who started out believing that a poem is....what? Special. A special utterance? I hate the word "special" since it is pretty much meaningless. But it - the poem I mean - is "special" if only because it isn't just more goddamned talking. Real poets don't try to bludgeon the reader with quantity; they strive for quality. Sometimes the noisy ones can be pretty good, but you always have to wade through a lot of not-so-good to get there. It might be said Ginsberg's last bit of good was c. 1961. Wherever the good he had, not much of it is evident in Death & Fame. And Ginsberg did nothing as good as Berryman's "Dream Songs" (and no, I haven't forgotten about "Howl").
But I'm tried of being grouchy all the time about this kind of poetry career, the constant talking (and publishing all the talking), the letting-it-all-hang-out school of poetical incontinence. But maybe I'm reading these guys wrong. Recently I finished Dawn Powell's diaries, which I enjoyed a lot. Why not read Ginsberg the way I'd read any literary person's diaries? Let the quotidian, the Ginsberg reflections on death and "Jacking Off" (p. 61) "Hepatitis Body Itch..." (p. 77) and clouds and poop ("shit machine shit machine / I'm an incredible shit machine" (p. 85) and "Bowel Song" (p. 35) and "Excrement" (p. 16) just wash over me, the record of an intelligent, curious, overweeningly ambitious mind just flow over me. The strategy sort of worked for me; Ginsberg was sick, dying, when he wrote these poems, so they get an automatic poignancy point for that. But every word gets included, every jot and every tittle. It's all here. Didn't he see how Dylan, but holding back, was so much more...effective? Interesting? Artful? The art of shutting up is perhaps the most difficult for some, for some impossible, apparently.
So yeah, this book has its moments. For instance, "Richard III," a short poem, "Toenail-thickening age on me...logged liver, gut & lung..." (p. 67). Also I kind of liked "You know what I'm saying" (p. 34). It is a high school reunion poem that is moving, despite the puzzling yet annoying "you know what I'm saying" refrain throughout. In it a boy Ginsberg lusted after in the locker room attends, "He was retired, wife on his arm, you know what I'm saying?" Earlier on we know the kid was uncircumcised. Erotic, but not pornographic I think - like all of Ginsberg's work, I have a feeling of lost opportunity - dashing something off rather than working it (in the Afterword, claims are made for Ginsberg (and his assistants; poets of Ginsberg's stature have assistants, apparently) laboring over up to 10 drafts. He needed 10 more. Maybe 20.).
Pornography. You know what I'm saying? What I am saying is that Ginsberg is very graphic sexually. "Huck, I got him on his knees / licked his (redacted) his hairy (redacted)..." (p. 61) This doesn't offend me, but it doesn't excite me either, being boringly, crushingly straight. What else it doesn't do is...what? Move me? As much as I can appreciate the reality of, say, a bowel movement, so often invoked in this book, I do rather wish the sex would have led somewhere a little more...elevated? Or perhaps I am just a sentimentalist. It doesn't even get very sad, and sex should always be at least a little sad, shouldn't it? If for no other reason than its fleeting nature - ah, like life itself! Berryman's graphic (hetero) sex scenes in his Love & Fame were a tad more discrete, or wistful or something - and therefore more moving (when I didn't get the feeling that Berryman was just bragging on all his conquests). Sex, just like eating lunch and pooping! Maybe this is brute honesty, but I really want more from our poets, more than metrical wet spots and rhyming notches on the bedpost.
***
Ginsberg's a shameless namedropper. It always astonishes me when already-famous-themselves people resort to this - Gore Vidal does it too. This has to do with the "fame" part of this book - throughout Ginsberg seems desperate to maintain fame, decades after "Howl" and "Kaddish" - staying in the spotlight, no matter how much cultural jitterbugging this required, was not a problem for him, apparently. Berryman did the same thing. Both poets (and Vidal too) were smart enough to have doubts, but by this time it is too late - if not coattailing Bob Dylan and chumming up to Bill Clinton and maintaining feuds with Norm Podhoretz (p. 40) what else is there? Death & Fame is the title of the book - since death is nothing, fame is everything? Somehow I feel this is the wrong answer. In any case, this book seems more like a desperate apologia than a true rendering. The title poem "Death & Fame" is a kind of tour de force, Howl's last howl: "When I die / I don't care what happens to my body..../ But I want a big funeral." (pp. 68-70). This is kind of witty, but Ginsberg is not being ironic - he really did want a big funeral, and the poem, a fairly long one, is a detailed imagining of the guests and all the wonderful things they might say about him, as well as an astoundingly long list of nameless mass of cultural apparatchiks who will be there to pay homage - everyone from "college boys' grunge bands" to "Italian romantic realists schooled in mystic 60s India" to "highschool teachers, lonely Irish librarians, delicate biblio / philes, sex liberation troops nay armies, ladies of either sex..." An impressive, inclusive, exhaustive, exhausting and pitiful list!
***
But even a self-loving poet such as Ginsberg gets tired of talking about his famous friends, a star-studded funeral, BMs and toenails. When that happens you can get political. Feeling empty inside? You can always talk (or nowadays Tweet) politics! Just make sure it's the right kind - you don't want to end up like Uncle Ez in a GI pen with a GI chemical toilet eating GI slop from a GI mess kit.
Anyway, Ginsberg is politically predictable and safe - far left, comfy and self-satisfied all the way:
"World Bank Blues"
"O work for the world bank yes I do
My salary was hundred thousand smackaroos
I know my Harvard economics better than you..."
There are 21 stanzas of this. Here's another one, at random. I did not read all of it.
"coral reef fish dead factory waste, '
Indigines hooked on Yankee dollar taste
Swiss bank funds for dictators disgraced..." (pp. 64-66)
You get the idea? Political right up to the deathbed scenario, Bob Rosenthal reports this in the Afterword (dated July 7, 1996):
"Besides calling friends to take leave, and exact a few promises, he wrote a final political letter to President Clinton. He prefaces his note with "Enclosed some recent political poems." Allen lapsed into his death coma before he could select the poems." (p. 104)
And now you know why the second Clinton Administration was such a failure - if Allen'd only gotten them "political poems." in the mail. But seriously, isn't this sad? A Yeatsian "smiling public man" doing his duty to the last, or a hubristic fame-monger has-been clinging to an old ideal of relevance as the Millennium looms?
Then there's the politics of poor old Lady Gaia:
"Oldest trees in the world cut down
Weyerhaeuser Bush wears a cardboard Crown" (p. 51 from "No! No! It's Not the End")
"NAFTA NAFTA what comes after?
Toxic waste - Industrial laughter
Industrial Smog, Industrial sneers
Industrial women weeping tears..." (p. 92 - from the 4-page-long "Thirty State Bummers")
I love it when guys like Ginsberg fret about the environment - for decades he was constantly hithering-and-thithering all over the globe to various events (Naropa! Kerouac's lonesome grave!), often in airplanes and taxis. He's got a carbon footprint as big as Mount Pinatubo's. It takes a lot of hydrocarbons to be famous. But you need to fly those miles to get the message out, right? Weyerhaeuser harvests trees that make paper, books are printed on paper, so are Ginsberg's books printed on Weyerhaeuser paper? Is this one? Gosh I hope so. Somebody oughta write a poem about it.
This sort of carping is so easy (his and mine). How Ginsberg would've loved Twitter. When he stops to think about it, Ginsberg will admit his complicity - in "Waribashi" the pleasures of dining in a Japanese restaurant is contrasted with Asian timber exports, "20 billion waribashi used once, thrown away..." But still he remains, "lift the chopsticks to your mouth enjoy sashimi." it ends. Not great, but at least the hectoring is self-directed somewhat.
***
As far as I can tell, this is my favorite poem in the book (I say this because I did not read them all, for my own mortality beckons and I too have only so much time left):
"Bop Sh'ban
OO Bop Sh'bam
At the poetry slam
Scream & yell
At the poetry ball
Get in a rage
On the poetry stage
Make it rhyme
In double-time
Talk real fast
till your time's passed
Sound like a clown
& then sit down.
Listen to the next
'cause she listened to you
Tho all she says is
Peek-a-boo-boo
March 25, 1997, 3:30 P.M.
Yeah, I like this one, though the ending disappoints - just like a real poetry slam. Remember those? Well, I don't miss slams, but I do miss Maggie Estep. Maybe I miss 1993-1997 as well? Sure I do.
"Sound like a clown / & then sit down."
That'd make a good epitaph. I'd use it but his estate probably relentlessly hunts down royalties and I just don't want the hassle, man. Maybe they can carve it on the lintel of the fancy Poetry Foundation building? It's so enigmatic: a warning or a career move?
A week or so before I bought this book, I'd been watching the famous D. A. Pennebaker proto-video of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" where he insouciantly flips through cue cards with most of the song's lyrics. After 50 years it is still pretty freaking cool. But there's Ginsberg in the background. Yeah, he looks cool too, with his messianic beard and a and a suit with a white shawl over his shoulders - a prayer shawl? - always shrewd about when and where to show up, he adroitly equipped himself with a staff - the one Moses used coming down the mountain perhaps, or a reasonable facsimile. An elder rabbinical presence, glomming off Dylan's rising star. There he is in the background, talk talk talking to Bob Neuwirth, an on-the-scene folkie. Talking. Wagging his finger. Gesticulating. Always talking. The last shot of the little film is Ginsberg stalking off with his staff, time for lunch and more talking, more photo ops with the ascending star that was Bob Dylan then. Neuwirth goes off in the opposite direction, exhausted, I'd imagine. He never got as famous as Ginsberg; he should've hung in there and done lunch.
Then there's this famousish film of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan at Jack Kerouac's grave. Talk about a corny set piece! Years ago I ran across a still photo from this event and I thought Laureate Dylan had that feral, humiliated look he often has when on display (voluntary display, I must add), like an animal caught in a trap contemplating chewing its leg off. And there's beatific Ginsberg, Ohmmming and chanting, happy as a clam, a spotlight-basking clam. There's some marketing going on here, some mutual image-burnishing, but at least Dylan had enough self-respect to despise himself for it. Transcripts are available - poets love talking about other poets' graves when sitting at a grave. What the hell else is there to talk about? Meanwhile, Kerouac's corpse, six feet down, had by this time rolled over on its stomach and was desperately trying to claw its way down to hell...
On the website allenginsberg.org - dot-org, of course, of course - I found this:
"Allen recalls the day in a letter written to his father:
“Beautiful day with Dylan in Lowell Mass, beginning early afternoon visiting Kerouac’s graveplot and reading the stone, ”He honored the world [sic]” – We stood in the November sunbrown leaves flying in wind, & read poems from Mexico City Blues, then we sat down, Dylan played my harmonium, Peter beside him, and we traded lines improvising a song to Kerouac underground beneath grass and stone. Then Dylan played Blues chords on his guitar while I improvised a ten stanza song about Jack looking down with empty eyes from clouds – Dylan stopped guitar to stuff a brown leaf in his breast pocket while I continued solo voice and he picked up his guitar to pluck it on the beat perfect to the end of my stanza – little celestialinspired ditty on Kerouac’s grave – all recorded for movie (sic)….”
https://allenginsberg.org/2019/06/51192/
Brown leafs in breast pockets. Empty eyes and clouds. Sorry about the preamble, but I wanted to share my Ginsbergian prejudices before I get to the book.
***
Death & Fame - the title is homage to Berryman's late Love & Fame, I'm guessing. They share fame and ampersands, they are both last (well, near-last) books by flamboyant poets staggering to their verbally incontinent ends, clinging to whatever legacy it was that got them this level of Kultural Klout, trying to make sense of it all. All those famous people, all those lovers, all those literary junkets.
Poets are either noisy - Whitman for instance - or they don't say much - Dickinson, or Bishop or Larkin for instance. Berryman and Lowell started out still, then got noisy later on. Ginsberg was always noisy. God is he noisy. Unlike Berryman, who started out believing that a poem is....what? Special. A special utterance? I hate the word "special" since it is pretty much meaningless. But it - the poem I mean - is "special" if only because it isn't just more goddamned talking. Real poets don't try to bludgeon the reader with quantity; they strive for quality. Sometimes the noisy ones can be pretty good, but you always have to wade through a lot of not-so-good to get there. It might be said Ginsberg's last bit of good was c. 1961. Wherever the good he had, not much of it is evident in Death & Fame. And Ginsberg did nothing as good as Berryman's "Dream Songs" (and no, I haven't forgotten about "Howl").
But I'm tried of being grouchy all the time about this kind of poetry career, the constant talking (and publishing all the talking), the letting-it-all-hang-out school of poetical incontinence. But maybe I'm reading these guys wrong. Recently I finished Dawn Powell's diaries, which I enjoyed a lot. Why not read Ginsberg the way I'd read any literary person's diaries? Let the quotidian, the Ginsberg reflections on death and "Jacking Off" (p. 61) "Hepatitis Body Itch..." (p. 77) and clouds and poop ("shit machine shit machine / I'm an incredible shit machine" (p. 85) and "Bowel Song" (p. 35) and "Excrement" (p. 16) just wash over me, the record of an intelligent, curious, overweeningly ambitious mind just flow over me. The strategy sort of worked for me; Ginsberg was sick, dying, when he wrote these poems, so they get an automatic poignancy point for that. But every word gets included, every jot and every tittle. It's all here. Didn't he see how Dylan, but holding back, was so much more...effective? Interesting? Artful? The art of shutting up is perhaps the most difficult for some, for some impossible, apparently.
So yeah, this book has its moments. For instance, "Richard III," a short poem, "Toenail-thickening age on me...logged liver, gut & lung..." (p. 67). Also I kind of liked "You know what I'm saying" (p. 34). It is a high school reunion poem that is moving, despite the puzzling yet annoying "you know what I'm saying" refrain throughout. In it a boy Ginsberg lusted after in the locker room attends, "He was retired, wife on his arm, you know what I'm saying?" Earlier on we know the kid was uncircumcised. Erotic, but not pornographic I think - like all of Ginsberg's work, I have a feeling of lost opportunity - dashing something off rather than working it (in the Afterword, claims are made for Ginsberg (and his assistants; poets of Ginsberg's stature have assistants, apparently) laboring over up to 10 drafts. He needed 10 more. Maybe 20.).
Pornography. You know what I'm saying? What I am saying is that Ginsberg is very graphic sexually. "Huck, I got him on his knees / licked his (redacted) his hairy (redacted)..." (p. 61) This doesn't offend me, but it doesn't excite me either, being boringly, crushingly straight. What else it doesn't do is...what? Move me? As much as I can appreciate the reality of, say, a bowel movement, so often invoked in this book, I do rather wish the sex would have led somewhere a little more...elevated? Or perhaps I am just a sentimentalist. It doesn't even get very sad, and sex should always be at least a little sad, shouldn't it? If for no other reason than its fleeting nature - ah, like life itself! Berryman's graphic (hetero) sex scenes in his Love & Fame were a tad more discrete, or wistful or something - and therefore more moving (when I didn't get the feeling that Berryman was just bragging on all his conquests). Sex, just like eating lunch and pooping! Maybe this is brute honesty, but I really want more from our poets, more than metrical wet spots and rhyming notches on the bedpost.
***
Ginsberg's a shameless namedropper. It always astonishes me when already-famous-themselves people resort to this - Gore Vidal does it too. This has to do with the "fame" part of this book - throughout Ginsberg seems desperate to maintain fame, decades after "Howl" and "Kaddish" - staying in the spotlight, no matter how much cultural jitterbugging this required, was not a problem for him, apparently. Berryman did the same thing. Both poets (and Vidal too) were smart enough to have doubts, but by this time it is too late - if not coattailing Bob Dylan and chumming up to Bill Clinton and maintaining feuds with Norm Podhoretz (p. 40) what else is there? Death & Fame is the title of the book - since death is nothing, fame is everything? Somehow I feel this is the wrong answer. In any case, this book seems more like a desperate apologia than a true rendering. The title poem "Death & Fame" is a kind of tour de force, Howl's last howl: "When I die / I don't care what happens to my body..../ But I want a big funeral." (pp. 68-70). This is kind of witty, but Ginsberg is not being ironic - he really did want a big funeral, and the poem, a fairly long one, is a detailed imagining of the guests and all the wonderful things they might say about him, as well as an astoundingly long list of nameless mass of cultural apparatchiks who will be there to pay homage - everyone from "college boys' grunge bands" to "Italian romantic realists schooled in mystic 60s India" to "highschool teachers, lonely Irish librarians, delicate biblio / philes, sex liberation troops nay armies, ladies of either sex..." An impressive, inclusive, exhaustive, exhausting and pitiful list!
***
But even a self-loving poet such as Ginsberg gets tired of talking about his famous friends, a star-studded funeral, BMs and toenails. When that happens you can get political. Feeling empty inside? You can always talk (or nowadays Tweet) politics! Just make sure it's the right kind - you don't want to end up like Uncle Ez in a GI pen with a GI chemical toilet eating GI slop from a GI mess kit.
Anyway, Ginsberg is politically predictable and safe - far left, comfy and self-satisfied all the way:
"World Bank Blues"
"O work for the world bank yes I do
My salary was hundred thousand smackaroos
I know my Harvard economics better than you..."
There are 21 stanzas of this. Here's another one, at random. I did not read all of it.
"coral reef fish dead factory waste, '
Indigines hooked on Yankee dollar taste
Swiss bank funds for dictators disgraced..." (pp. 64-66)
You get the idea? Political right up to the deathbed scenario, Bob Rosenthal reports this in the Afterword (dated July 7, 1996):
"Besides calling friends to take leave, and exact a few promises, he wrote a final political letter to President Clinton. He prefaces his note with "Enclosed some recent political poems." Allen lapsed into his death coma before he could select the poems." (p. 104)
And now you know why the second Clinton Administration was such a failure - if Allen'd only gotten them "political poems." in the mail. But seriously, isn't this sad? A Yeatsian "smiling public man" doing his duty to the last, or a hubristic fame-monger has-been clinging to an old ideal of relevance as the Millennium looms?
Then there's the politics of poor old Lady Gaia:
"Oldest trees in the world cut down
Weyerhaeuser Bush wears a cardboard Crown" (p. 51 from "No! No! It's Not the End")
"NAFTA NAFTA what comes after?
Toxic waste - Industrial laughter
Industrial Smog, Industrial sneers
Industrial women weeping tears..." (p. 92 - from the 4-page-long "Thirty State Bummers")
I love it when guys like Ginsberg fret about the environment - for decades he was constantly hithering-and-thithering all over the globe to various events (Naropa! Kerouac's lonesome grave!), often in airplanes and taxis. He's got a carbon footprint as big as Mount Pinatubo's. It takes a lot of hydrocarbons to be famous. But you need to fly those miles to get the message out, right? Weyerhaeuser harvests trees that make paper, books are printed on paper, so are Ginsberg's books printed on Weyerhaeuser paper? Is this one? Gosh I hope so. Somebody oughta write a poem about it.
This sort of carping is so easy (his and mine). How Ginsberg would've loved Twitter. When he stops to think about it, Ginsberg will admit his complicity - in "Waribashi" the pleasures of dining in a Japanese restaurant is contrasted with Asian timber exports, "20 billion waribashi used once, thrown away..." But still he remains, "lift the chopsticks to your mouth enjoy sashimi." it ends. Not great, but at least the hectoring is self-directed somewhat.
***
As far as I can tell, this is my favorite poem in the book (I say this because I did not read them all, for my own mortality beckons and I too have only so much time left):
"Bop Sh'ban
OO Bop Sh'bam
At the poetry slam
Scream & yell
At the poetry ball
Get in a rage
On the poetry stage
Make it rhyme
In double-time
Talk real fast
till your time's passed
Sound like a clown
& then sit down.
Listen to the next
'cause she listened to you
Tho all she says is
Peek-a-boo-boo
March 25, 1997, 3:30 P.M.
Yeah, I like this one, though the ending disappoints - just like a real poetry slam. Remember those? Well, I don't miss slams, but I do miss Maggie Estep. Maybe I miss 1993-1997 as well? Sure I do.
"Sound like a clown / & then sit down."
That'd make a good epitaph. I'd use it but his estate probably relentlessly hunts down royalties and I just don't want the hassle, man. Maybe they can carve it on the lintel of the fancy Poetry Foundation building? It's so enigmatic: a warning or a career move?
January 12, 2011
"الْجَمِيعُ أَدْرَكُوا أَنَّهُم جُزْءٌ مِنَ "التَّارِيخِ" مَا عَدَا المُتَوَفَّى
أَنَا الَّذِي لَمْ أَعْرِفْ بِالضَّبْطِ مَا الَّذِي يَحْدُثُ، حتى وَأَنَا عَلَى قَيْدِ الْحَيَاةِ"
قَصِيدَةُ "المَوْتُ وَالشُّهْرَةُ"، أَلن غِنْسبِرغ (1997)
شاعر عابر للغات.. لا يفقد رونقه وتألقه حين تترجمه
أنصح بقراءة أعماله وتذوق شعره
January 29, 2021
Allen Ginbserg bersajak seperti perigi yang mengalir. Bahkan puluhan tahun setelah Howl pertama kali dipersembahkan untuk Carl Solomon, raungan itu masih ada dan berisik. Sajaknya bicara tentang segala yang bacin, tengik, jorok, kerdil, hina, dan disingkirkan. Menjelaskan estetika Ginsberg sama susahnya untuk menjelaskan mengapa kita jatuh cinta pada sepak bola. Tiap derajat sajaknya memiliki metafora yang lekat dengan kondisi lingkungan di mana ia tinggal; kemuakan dan beban.
Harold Bloom menyebut fenomena ini sebagai kecemasan pengaruh atau Anxiety of Influence. Kondisi di mana lingkungan penyair tinggal begitu buruk, atau justru begitu indah, sehingga sangat memengaruhi dramatika puisi si penyair. Ketika “Howl and Other Poems” diterbitkan di San Francisco pada 1956, kumpulan sajak itu menjadi perhatian karena dianggap amoral. Tentu bukan perihal moral an sich Ginsberg menulis sajak panjang itu, tapi tentang kebebasan, menikmati identitas diri dan kekuatan untuk tidak tunduk pada Moloch, representasi tirani yang mengatur pikiran manusia.
Ginsberg lahir di Newark, New Jersey, pada 3 Juni 1926. Sejak kecil ia memang menyemai bakat sebagai penulis karena tumbuh sebagai anak seorang penyair. Lulus sekolah menengah, ia memilih Columbia University sebagai tujuan studi. Di sini, alih-alih belajar hukum, ia bertemu Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, dan Lucien Carr. Nama-nama yang kini dikenal sebagai punggawa Beat Generation. Nama terakhir memang tak secemerlang tiga yang utama, Lou, begitu Ginsberg memanggil cinta platoniknya ini, gugur dalam perjuangan menjadi penulis karena membunuh David Kammerer.
Belakangan Joyce Johnson penulis biografi Jack Keruac, The Voice Is All, menuliskan fragmen di mana Ginsberg menangisi tragedi ini. Bukan karena kematian Kammerer atau dipenjaranya Lucien, tapi karena “merasa tak dihargai untuk cukup tahu peristiwa sebenarnya.” Ann Douglas, seorang Professor Emiretus Sastra Inggris, mengatakan bahwa tragedi ini adalah cikal ikatan emosional yang melatari proses kreatif generasi beat. Lebih dari itu, bagi Ginsberg, peristiwa ini mendorongnya untuk terbuka perihal orientasi seksual.
Beat Generation barangkali sebuah kelompok yang susah diluruskan maknanya. Saat Perang Dingin, media Amerika menyebut mereka sekelompok pengecut yang menikmati kedamaian dengan ganja. Sisanya yang lain menyebut mereka sekumpulan manusia snobs. Apapun itu, Ginsberg bersama Jack Kerouac dan William S Borroughs merupakan pioner dalam kolektif kreatif yang secara karikatural memberondong budaya mapan pada eranya.
Saya membaca buku puisi ini dengan ketakutan yang teramat sangat. Bagaimana jika Ginsberg tua jadi menyebalkan? Atau pailit nalar? Tapi ketakutan itu nyatanya tidak hadir, bahkan membaca ini membawa kegembiraan. Bahwa Ginsberg tua serupa sosok kakek lain yang menemukan kebijakan dalam hidup dan itu yang lebih penting.
Harold Bloom menyebut fenomena ini sebagai kecemasan pengaruh atau Anxiety of Influence. Kondisi di mana lingkungan penyair tinggal begitu buruk, atau justru begitu indah, sehingga sangat memengaruhi dramatika puisi si penyair. Ketika “Howl and Other Poems” diterbitkan di San Francisco pada 1956, kumpulan sajak itu menjadi perhatian karena dianggap amoral. Tentu bukan perihal moral an sich Ginsberg menulis sajak panjang itu, tapi tentang kebebasan, menikmati identitas diri dan kekuatan untuk tidak tunduk pada Moloch, representasi tirani yang mengatur pikiran manusia.
Ginsberg lahir di Newark, New Jersey, pada 3 Juni 1926. Sejak kecil ia memang menyemai bakat sebagai penulis karena tumbuh sebagai anak seorang penyair. Lulus sekolah menengah, ia memilih Columbia University sebagai tujuan studi. Di sini, alih-alih belajar hukum, ia bertemu Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, dan Lucien Carr. Nama-nama yang kini dikenal sebagai punggawa Beat Generation. Nama terakhir memang tak secemerlang tiga yang utama, Lou, begitu Ginsberg memanggil cinta platoniknya ini, gugur dalam perjuangan menjadi penulis karena membunuh David Kammerer.
Belakangan Joyce Johnson penulis biografi Jack Keruac, The Voice Is All, menuliskan fragmen di mana Ginsberg menangisi tragedi ini. Bukan karena kematian Kammerer atau dipenjaranya Lucien, tapi karena “merasa tak dihargai untuk cukup tahu peristiwa sebenarnya.” Ann Douglas, seorang Professor Emiretus Sastra Inggris, mengatakan bahwa tragedi ini adalah cikal ikatan emosional yang melatari proses kreatif generasi beat. Lebih dari itu, bagi Ginsberg, peristiwa ini mendorongnya untuk terbuka perihal orientasi seksual.
Beat Generation barangkali sebuah kelompok yang susah diluruskan maknanya. Saat Perang Dingin, media Amerika menyebut mereka sekelompok pengecut yang menikmati kedamaian dengan ganja. Sisanya yang lain menyebut mereka sekumpulan manusia snobs. Apapun itu, Ginsberg bersama Jack Kerouac dan William S Borroughs merupakan pioner dalam kolektif kreatif yang secara karikatural memberondong budaya mapan pada eranya.
Saya membaca buku puisi ini dengan ketakutan yang teramat sangat. Bagaimana jika Ginsberg tua jadi menyebalkan? Atau pailit nalar? Tapi ketakutan itu nyatanya tidak hadir, bahkan membaca ini membawa kegembiraan. Bahwa Ginsberg tua serupa sosok kakek lain yang menemukan kebijakan dalam hidup dan itu yang lebih penting.
May 7, 2018
Some great poems in here, some also-rans, and one truly questionable one. I'm not quite sure how to read "Sexual Abuse" but it seems to lean toward absolving abusing priests of their crimes. If that's true it's a disservice to victims and a signal that Ginsberg didn't understand their suffering. I've often wondered why he was at one time very publicly a member of NAMBLA, which always seemed to me like a deliberately provocative move that came from an earlier, less critical era of queer history--but I never thought of him as someone who would exploit his position to coerce young men into sex. Of course I have no reason to think that other than I am a lifelong fan of his poetry, and I don't know him at all, though--to make those presumptions about a stranger is dangerous as the various fallen heroes of the MeToo era have proven to us. There's no resolution of that--as far as I know no one has accused Ginsberg of coercing them into sex or of assault, for which I'm glad.
There are good poems in here, and a lot of this is quite sad. It stayed with me, even if I had my issues with some of this.
There are good poems in here, and a lot of this is quite sad. It stayed with me, even if I had my issues with some of this.
August 29, 2024
it is, indeed, late career ginsberg: by turns ugly and beautiful, sometimes overstuffed, usually some kind of juvenile joke that maybe only he found funny. he certainly is not shy about his support of pederasty, and the more sensitive among us should avoid this one. still, something compelling about reading a dirty old man's final words, and seeing how ginsberg's writing evolved. many of the poems in here are junk, but the good ones proved worth the read for me, and a couple of his "everybody poops" poems are actually really good.
January 18, 2013
I really hope his early work is better. I grabbed Howl on order from Library. Which was the book that was pulled from shelves in 1965. Then the publisher were arrested.
A lot of mentioned poetry about using the john, taking a shit what ever you want to call it.
I think when Mr. Ginsberg died in '97 (RIP) Whoever cleaned out his house found his scribble pad and went out and published it. Here are the only ones that seems interesting to me.
-These knowing age
-Excrement
-Newt Gingrich Declares War on "McGovernik Counterculture"
-Is About
-You know what I'm saying
-Reverse the rain of Terror
-Homeless Compleynt
-Good Luck
quote from Ginsberg
"Allen Ginsberg is about confused mind writing down newspaper headlines from Mars"
A lot of mentioned poetry about using the john, taking a shit what ever you want to call it.
I think when Mr. Ginsberg died in '97 (RIP) Whoever cleaned out his house found his scribble pad and went out and published it. Here are the only ones that seems interesting to me.
-These knowing age
-Excrement
-Newt Gingrich Declares War on "McGovernik Counterculture"
-Is About
-You know what I'm saying
-Reverse the rain of Terror
-Homeless Compleynt
-Good Luck
quote from Ginsberg
"Allen Ginsberg is about confused mind writing down newspaper headlines from Mars"
May 4, 2008
SOME OF THESE POEMS need heavy metal music behind them. Especially the amazing poem (song) "GONE GONE GONE," it's classic heavy metal. At least in my head! What an amazing last book, a TRUE GIFT to us all!
Much respect,
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
Much respect,
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
Read
August 11, 2011I feel like writing again, and for that I'm thankful.
November 21, 2023
Een beetje teleurstellend. De Ginsberg van Kadish en Howl is hier ver te zoeken. Aangezien het over de laatste jaren van zijn leven handelt gaan veel van de gedichten over lichamelijke ongemakken en onsmakelijke thema's zoals de scatologie en hepatitis. Het zijn meer nagelaten gedichten, wat wel een thema is overigens. Updike bleef ook tot op het laatst op zijn doodsbed herschrijven en krabbelen, Freud was ook nog aan redigeren op zijn ziekbed. Maar goed dat scatologische is helaas letterlijk, zoals deze leuke vondst:
'I got old & shit in my pants
shit in my pants
shit in my pants
I got old and shit in my pants
shit in my pants again'
En wie kan dit pareltje vergeten: 'Shit piss shit piss
Fuck & shit & piss
Fuck fart shit piss
It all comes down to this
Om nog maar een voorbeeld te geven: 'My dick is red hot
Your dick is diddly dot'
Toch wel een beetje bedroevend als de grote dichter des Vaderlands dit soort regels er nog uitperst (we blijven bij het thema). Ik snap dat het ook de humor van Ginsberg is, dat het een soort van humoristisch statement is, alles is maar relatief, wacht maar tot jij oud bent etc. Maar dit zijn geen regels waar je om herinnerd wil worden. Dit is niet het gehalte van de hele bundel gelukkig er zijn momenten waarop die oude Beat Ginsberg weer even wakker wordt onder alle flauwe vondsten, de kinderrijmpjes en de politieke observaties. Zoals in Multiple identity questionnaire op het eind:
'Mr. Sentient Being!- Absolutely empty neti neti identity. Maya Nobo-daddy, relative phantom nonentity.'
Het ritme van die zin en de herhaling en vooral dat nobo daddy vind ik briljant. En dat laatste titel gedicht death and fame is vrij hilarisch als een soort spiritueel testament. En things ill not do is een soort kroniek van overal waar hij geweest is. Voor de rest zijn het vooral de thema's waar hij zich bezig mee hield op het laatst, het boeddhisme, het mentoren van jongere dichters, wereldpolitiek, oorlog, het milieu, hij was overduidelijk een zeer betrokken iemand en eigenlijk een soort cultureel icoon. Iets wat ook in de introductie van Robert Creeley naar voren komt.
Ook wel ontroerend, in het nawoord staat dat Ginsberg nog de slappe lach kreeg bij het opstellen van sommige van deze teksten in de taxi. Zoveel mensen bewonderden hem en Howl is eerlijk gezegd ook een levens veranderend gedicht. Het is alleen jammer dat je dan met zoiets uitkomt, je snapt de neiging tot bundelen wel, maar het meeste is gewoon niet de moeite waard. Nou goed, nog eentje dan, deze is ook wel goed:
'To see Void vast infinite look out the window into the blue sky.'
De toegift:
'i know im not God, are you? Don't be silly.
God? God? Everbody's God? Dont be silly.'
Hij had in elk geval genoeg zelf relativerend vermogen.
'I got old & shit in my pants
shit in my pants
shit in my pants
I got old and shit in my pants
shit in my pants again'
En wie kan dit pareltje vergeten: 'Shit piss shit piss
Fuck & shit & piss
Fuck fart shit piss
It all comes down to this
Om nog maar een voorbeeld te geven: 'My dick is red hot
Your dick is diddly dot'
Toch wel een beetje bedroevend als de grote dichter des Vaderlands dit soort regels er nog uitperst (we blijven bij het thema). Ik snap dat het ook de humor van Ginsberg is, dat het een soort van humoristisch statement is, alles is maar relatief, wacht maar tot jij oud bent etc. Maar dit zijn geen regels waar je om herinnerd wil worden. Dit is niet het gehalte van de hele bundel gelukkig er zijn momenten waarop die oude Beat Ginsberg weer even wakker wordt onder alle flauwe vondsten, de kinderrijmpjes en de politieke observaties. Zoals in Multiple identity questionnaire op het eind:
'Mr. Sentient Being!- Absolutely empty neti neti identity. Maya Nobo-daddy, relative phantom nonentity.'
Het ritme van die zin en de herhaling en vooral dat nobo daddy vind ik briljant. En dat laatste titel gedicht death and fame is vrij hilarisch als een soort spiritueel testament. En things ill not do is een soort kroniek van overal waar hij geweest is. Voor de rest zijn het vooral de thema's waar hij zich bezig mee hield op het laatst, het boeddhisme, het mentoren van jongere dichters, wereldpolitiek, oorlog, het milieu, hij was overduidelijk een zeer betrokken iemand en eigenlijk een soort cultureel icoon. Iets wat ook in de introductie van Robert Creeley naar voren komt.
Ook wel ontroerend, in het nawoord staat dat Ginsberg nog de slappe lach kreeg bij het opstellen van sommige van deze teksten in de taxi. Zoveel mensen bewonderden hem en Howl is eerlijk gezegd ook een levens veranderend gedicht. Het is alleen jammer dat je dan met zoiets uitkomt, je snapt de neiging tot bundelen wel, maar het meeste is gewoon niet de moeite waard. Nou goed, nog eentje dan, deze is ook wel goed:
'To see Void vast infinite look out the window into the blue sky.'
De toegift:
'i know im not God, are you? Don't be silly.
God? God? Everbody's God? Dont be silly.'
Hij had in elk geval genoeg zelf relativerend vermogen.
May 25, 2019
The epilogue to this book contains a review of Ginsburg's creative process from one of his assistants. The poem were he imagined his funeral is the highlight of this book. All artist see themselves as in control of their legacy. This work reflects the final reflections of how this poet wants to be remembered.
March 12, 2019
This collection of poems seems more worthwhile to readers wanting to tap into the complete oeuvre of Ginsberg’s work or insight into Ginsberg’s final years. I am not particularly struck by this collection otherwise, and the title poem is a bit hard to read through in a post-#MeToo world.
January 21, 2018
A collection of some of the best verses by one of the all-time greats
October 9, 2018
Love Ginsberg's work, but this is pretty awful, honestly, with the exception of a rewrite of "Amazign Grace'' and a couple of occasional pieces. Robert Creeley's introduction isn't bad, though.
October 13, 2018
like a lot of ginsburg work this was hit and miss for me, there were some beautiful thoughtful hilarious lines, n a bunch of rambling - very hit and miss
December 1, 2021
I felt like I was reading a collection of notes Ginsberg never wanted to publish...
Raw, personal, unfinished. It really is poetry about death, fame and the death of fame.
Raw, personal, unfinished. It really is poetry about death, fame and the death of fame.
January 7, 2023
I like the poop poems
July 19, 2023
Acceptance. Vulnerability. Chronological recordings of a genius’ physical decline, and a world declining around him.
January 11, 2024
“I felt a breeze below my waist and realized that my fly was open” 4/20/95
Read
May 19, 2024DNF
April 3, 2009
I, like so many others, adore Howl. It's not a very difficult poem to like. So I was excited that my boyfriend bought me a book of Allen Ginsberg's poetry for Christmas. Unfortunately, this was a collection of last poems before death, which often have a ragged, disorderly feeling to them. More than the organization of the poetry, however, it was the poetry itself that was so difficult for me to enjoy.
Ginsberg is a man who understands death is coming. It's threaded throughout his works. However, he is also a man whose poetry has regressed; the vast majority of the poetry contained within this collection is of a scatological or political nature. I certainly have no issue with the latter, but his stance on politics is so shallowly stated that it feels like they were written more by a poltical teenager than a seventy year old man. Lines such as "Native gooks work cheaper, rich get richer..." hardly enlighten.
I'm not sure what happened to Ginsberg's poetry. It's lost its edge, and, much more distressingly, the talent contained within his earlier works. Mostly, it feels like a lot of scribbled words anyone could write during their spare time, more than the final work of one of the great poets of the beat generation.
Ginsberg is a man who understands death is coming. It's threaded throughout his works. However, he is also a man whose poetry has regressed; the vast majority of the poetry contained within this collection is of a scatological or political nature. I certainly have no issue with the latter, but his stance on politics is so shallowly stated that it feels like they were written more by a poltical teenager than a seventy year old man. Lines such as "Native gooks work cheaper, rich get richer..." hardly enlighten.
I'm not sure what happened to Ginsberg's poetry. It's lost its edge, and, much more distressingly, the talent contained within his earlier works. Mostly, it feels like a lot of scribbled words anyone could write during their spare time, more than the final work of one of the great poets of the beat generation.
August 2, 2016
I have only read a handful of poetry books. Poetry (though I myself write it) often seems needlessly esoteric, hopelessly melancholic, and sometimes just too fluffy. But some poetry is beautiful, makes your heart beat faster, and makes you reconsider things you've always known. Ginsberg has that rare gift of noticing things most of us have never thought of, the smallest things that live beneath our noses and inside our periphery.
I admit a handful of his poems I didn't love. Some are wildly explicit and blatantly vulgar. But most of them touched me softly, but with great affect, like the outstretched hand of a small child.
These were his final words before he departed from this earth, and he seemed cognizant of that fact. The poems seem to pulsate with foreboding sounds of death, and shades of eternal darkness.
I admit a handful of his poems I didn't love. Some are wildly explicit and blatantly vulgar. But most of them touched me softly, but with great affect, like the outstretched hand of a small child.
These were his final words before he departed from this earth, and he seemed cognizant of that fact. The poems seem to pulsate with foreboding sounds of death, and shades of eternal darkness.
May 17, 2013
Ginsberg's final collection is primarily about shit and politics-- which are one in the same to me, especially in the way he presents them in these poems. Many of the poems contain sing-songy rhymes and have less of a raw, authentic voice as we see in his better known works, "Howl" and "Kaddish". I did not see a desperation or lamentation over his impending death, as I expected-- instead these poems seemed disoriented ramblings and even mock and make light of his state (which was admirable at times, but all around not well executed). "The Ballad of Skeletons," "Objective Subjects," "New Stanzas for Amazing Grace," and "Richard III" are the only ones worth checking out, in my humble opinion.
November 26, 2009
It's hard for me to criticize poetry, because either you get or you don't get it, much like modern art. And usually I appreciate esoteric and random prose, but this final collection of Ginsberg's poems is disappointing. Except for his humorous takes on growing old and realizing death is around the corner, most of the poems are uninteresting political rants or simplistic social commentaries. I'm sure his earlier poetry is better.
November 6, 2011
I tend not to like things by writers who were brilliant in their careers and are writing at the end of their lives, in my mind trying to re-capture their early success or brilliance . . . jury is still out on this one, although poems about bodily functions (or lack thereof) as one ages seem like a ramble to me . . . but love love love several of these, including the one on identity . . . nehti, nehti . . . the library didn't have the collected poems, so I'll have to go back . . . .
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January 10, 2023Gingsberg's last book. Not his best work, certainly, but a decent end to his career and life.
Gingsberg's strength was always his extreme, admirable and often uncomfortable candor. That frankness could often seem misdirected when talking about the weird and unnecessary. But when focused on the death and the dying process, it makes for a very inspiring, touching and honorable read.
Gingsberg's strength was always his extreme, admirable and often uncomfortable candor. That frankness could often seem misdirected when talking about the weird and unnecessary. But when focused on the death and the dying process, it makes for a very inspiring, touching and honorable read.
January 11, 2018
I love Allen Ginsberg and all that he contributed to the world in terms of his poetry. This collection was interesting, and demonstrates only a side of Ginsberg that is funny, sexual, playful, yet brilliant. Some of the poems here were odd and I even pondered at how they were conceived and some failed to make any impact on me, but Ginsberg's final works are interesting nonetheless.
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