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Allen Ginsberg

1926–1997 · 71 years

He signed his mother's lobotomy papers at 21, then wrote Kaddish

Portrait of Allen Ginsberg — Hans van Dijk for Anefo — 1979-11-24 — CC0 via Wikimedia Commons

Naomi Ginsberg was a Russian-born communist who told her sons bedtime stories about exploited workers, and she was schizophrenic. Her second son grew up as her escort — to the appointments, through the delusions, in and out of Greystone Park and then Pilgrim State, through the insulin shock and the electroshock. His father Louis taught high school in Paterson and published careful lyric poems in traditional forms. In November 1947 the senior director of Pilgrim State wrote asking permission to lobotomize her. Allen was 21. He signed. Naomi died in the hospital in 1956, and Kaddish, begun in a Paris hotel the next year and finished in New York in 1959, came directly out of that.

He read the first part of Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. Lawrence Ferlinghetti wired him for the manuscript within hours, and City Lights published it the following year as number four in its Pocket Poets series. Customs seized a shipment. Police arrested Ferlinghetti and his store manager Shigeyoshi Murao, and on October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene because it carried redeeming social importance. Ginsberg was 31 and permanently famous.

He was openly gay from the 1950s, when male homosexual acts were a crime in every state, and he listed Peter Orlovsky, his partner of more than 40 years, as his spouse in his Who's Who entry. He also treated free expression as an absolute, and he applied it where almost nobody followed him. In the 1990s Ginsberg publicly supported the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a group campaigning to abolish age-of-consent laws, saying he had joined in defense of free speech and that attacks on it stank of witch-hunting for profit. In 1994 he appeared in a documentary about the group and read a poem of his own describing sex with boys. The position was widely condemned then and since. Andrea Dworkin, a onetime friend, wrote in 2002 that his interest in the group was not abstract.

He sold his papers to Stanford in 1994 for about 1 million dollars and used the money to buy the East Village loft where he died of liver cancer on April 5, 1997, at 70. Roughly 2,500 people came to the memorial at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine the next spring. Howl is now taught as a canonical American poem, the writing school he helped found at the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Colorado still runs, and the 1957 ruling is cited whenever an American obscenity case comes up. The NAMBLA episode rarely appears in the tributes. Critics still disagree about how much of the later work will last.

Lifespan

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Allen Ginsberg's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Howl and Other Poems book
Number four in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series 1956
Kaddish and Other Poems book
The title poem is for his mother Naomi, who died in 1956 1961
Reality Sandwiches book
Poems of the years between Howl and India 1963
Planet News book
The political poems of the 1960s, including Wichita Vortex Sutra 1968
The Fall of America: Poems of These States book
Shared the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry with Adrienne Rich 1973
Collected Poems 1947-1980 book
His own arrangement of the first 33 years of the work 1984

Life in brief

with age at each point

1945 aged ~19 Suspended from Columbia after writing obscenities in the grime of his dorm window A dean also found Jack Kerouac, already barred from campus, asleep in his room. He was readmitted and graduated in 1948.
November 14, 1947 aged 21 Gives consent for his mother's lobotomy at Pilgrim State Hospital The hospital director's letter asking permission was dated that day. Ginsberg was 21 and said afterward that he never stopped feeling guilty about it.
1948 aged ~22 Hears what he believed was the voice of William Blake in a Harlem apartment He described the experience for the rest of his life as the origin of his vocation.
October 7, 1955 aged 29 Reads Howl in public for the first time at the Six Gallery in San Francisco Kenneth Rexroth presided. Jack Kerouac was in the audience.
October 3, 1957 aged 31 Judge Clayton Horn rules that Howl is not obscene The poem carried redeeming social importance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published it, was the defendant.
1961 aged ~35 City Lights publishes Kaddish and Other Poems Written after Naomi Ginsberg died in a state hospital in 1956.
May 7, 1965 aged 38 Expelled from Czechoslovakia a week after students crowned him King of May Cuba had deported him earlier the same year after he protested the persecution of homosexuals there.
1974 aged ~48 Shares the National Book Award and founds a poetics school at Naropa The Fall of America split the prize with Adrienne Rich. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was founded with Anne Waldman.
April 5, 1997 aged 70 Dies of liver cancer in his East Village loft at 70 He had spent his last days telephoning nearly everyone in his address book to say goodbye.