The Allen Ginsberg Audio Collection Audio Book CDs Abridged

The Allen Ginsberg Audio Collection
Author/Reader: Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg

He saw the best minds of his generation. This remarkable poet, one of the greatest cultural and literary figures of the 20th century, helped created the Beat Generation. This collection includes Howl, Kaddish, Who to Be Kind To, White Shroud, Footnote to Howl, Sunflower Sutra, America, A Supermarket in California, My Sad Self, Wales Visitation, Sad Dust Glories, Plutonian Ode, My Green Automobile, Neal's Ashes, Many Loves, September on Jessore Road, Father Death Blues, and more. » Read More

Available Audio Book Editions:

D3H415

ABRIDGED

Audio CDs ( 3 )

Price:

$22.00

Publish Date: 11/03/2004
ISBN: 9780060734152

Synopsis:

A collection of poems by one of the greatest literary and cultural figures of the 20th century

Upon the release of his first published work, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956, Allen Ginsberg became the unlikely force of a movement that would change a generation. Literature, art, sex, love, family, politics; nothing would ever be the same. The Beat Generation was born through Ginsberg and his friends.

This collection of more than two dozen poems in verse and song is the best of the best, celebrating someone who was of his time, ahead of his time, and whose legacy will transcend time.

Included are:
Howl, Kaddish, Pull My Daisy, A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley, A Supermarket in California, Sunflower Sutra, America, Many Loves, To Aunt Rose, I am a Victim of Telephone, Kral Majales, Who Be Kind To, City Midnight Junk Strains, On Neal’s Ashes, September on Jessore Road, Mind Breaths, Jahweh and Allah Battle, Lay down Your Mountain, Don’t Grow Old, Father Death Blues, Plutonian Ode, White Shroud, Sphincter, Personals Ad, Hum Bomb, After Lalon, Put Down Your Cigarette Don’t Smoke, Charnal Ground, C’mon Pigs of Western Civilization, New Stanzas for Amazing Grace

Author Bio:

Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey to a schoolteacher-poet father and a mentally unstable mother. Both parents espoused leftist politics, though the father's mainstream leftism was overshadowed by the mother's obsession with Stalin and communism. Initially more influenced by their politics than their artistic inclinations, Ginsberg intended to make them proud by studying pre-law at Columbia University. After encounters with Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling, however, Ginsberg changed his tack and became a literature student. The world of contemporary writing quickly opened up for him: through Lucien Carr, a fellow student, he met both William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. In 1945, Ginsberg was suspended from Columbia, either for harboring Kerouac in his room, or for writing offensive protest slogans on his dorm room window, or both. After a period of wandering, he found himself back at Columbia--as a patient in the psychiatric ward. After 8 months of treatment and concerted effort, he finally graduated with his B.A.
in 1949. Feeling newly respectable, and determined to stay that way, Ginsberg took up with a young woman and tried to make a career for himself as a marketing researcher. His job studying America's attitudes towards toothpaste entertained him for a while, but finally his efforts to play straight wore him down, and he abandoned New York, the professional world, and his feigned heterosexuality. He moved to San Francisco in 1954 and immersed himself in a pool of artists and writers, including the influential older poet Kenneth Rexroth and Peter Orlovsky, with whom he fell in love and sustained a relationship for 30 years. In the summer of 1955, Ginsberg began writing HOWL, the poem that would change his life and make as deep a mark on American poetry as any poem of the 20th century. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published HOWL in 1956, with a preface by William Carlos Williams and in spite of an obscenity trial that threatened to bury the poem in infamy.
Ginsberg's career took off from this point, but he didn't limit himself to furthering his poetic success: he aimed for a worldwide impact. He met Timothy Leary in 1960, who admitted him to his Psilocybin Project at Harvard, and turned Ginsberg into a disciple of psychedelia. As a poet and cultural warrior, Ginsberg was ubiquitous in the 1960s, travelling the world in search of enlightenment (India, Japan) or enjoyable trouble (Cuba, Prague); participating in Ken Kesey's Acid Tests; leading, with Gary Snyder, the OM chant at the 1967 Be-In in San Francisco; taking part in the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention turmoil; and testifying at the trial of the Chicago 7. As the sixties wound down, Ginsberg channeled his energy into more spiritual pursuits, taking on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche as his guru in 1970 and founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado in the same year. His poetry took center stage again in 1973, when he won the National Book Award for THE FALL OF AMERICA, but in 1977 he toured with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Review. In the early 1980s he collaborated with The Clash, performing both on their COMBAT ROCK album and appearing on stage with them in concert.
Wherever Ginsberg went, controversy was sure to follow, and even as late as 1988 the Pacifica radio station WBAI blocked a plan to read HOWL on air, fearing it would violate obscenity laws. But there were honors and distinctions to balance the scandals: in 1986 Ginsberg won the Frost Medal for Poetry, in 1990 he won an American Book Award, and in 1993 he was made a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et Letters by the French Minister of Culture.
He began teaching at Brooklyn College in 1986 and remained in New York until his death, of liver cancer, on April 5, 1997.

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The Allen Ginsberg Audio Collection Audio Book

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