IN DEATH, CANNOT REACH
WHAT IS MOST NEAR
We know all about death that
we will ever know because
we have all experienced
the state before birth.
Life seems a passage between
two doors to the darkness.
Both are the same and truly
eternal, and perhaps it may
be said that we meet in
darkness. The nature of time
is illuminated by this
meeting of eternal ends.
It is amazing to think that
thought and personality
of man is perpetuated in
time after his passage
to eternity. And one time
is all Time if you look
at it out of the grave.
New York Mid- 1949
________
Allen Ginsberg, was born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). His poem "Howl" is said to have turned America from the 1950s into the 1960s overnight. It begins:
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…"
He got a job in marketing in New York and then in San Francisco. He was working in advertising in San Francisco when in 1954, after getting his psychotherapist's approval, Ginsberg decided to cut loose, quit his job, and devote himself "to writing and contemplation, to Blake and smoking pot, and doing whatever I wanted."
Howl and Other Poems was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's newly established City Lights press in 1956. For publishing Ginsberg's poetry book, Ferlinghetti was put on trial, charged with obscenity. The publicity greatly boosted sales of Howl and made Ginsberg famous.
Many agree that Ginsberg's best poem is "Kaddish." He wrote most of it in one 40-hour sitting, an epic elegy for his mother who had suffered from mental illness all of Ginsberg's life and who died in a psychiatric hospital on Long Island in 1956. Ginsberg's mother had been a devoted Communist. In high school, he would ride the bus across town with his mother, going with her to her therapy appointments. Paranoia was one of her diagnosed illnesses. Shortly before she passed away, Ginsberg had signed the authorization for her lobotomy. Two days after she died, Ginsberg received a letter in the mail from her that said, "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight in the window — I have the key — get married Allen don't take drugs. … Love, your mother."
The poem for his mother, fully entitled "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956)," begins:
"Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village,
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three years after —"
He became a devout Buddhist. As Ginsberg got older, his poetry became less shocking and more toned down, and after decades of publishing with small independent publishers, he signed, in the early 1980s, a six-book contract with Harper & Row for $160,000. The first book to come out under that contract was an 800-page edition of his Collected Poems 1947–1980, published in 1984. In 1994, he sold his archives, made up of journals, various photographs, and personal letters, as well as some old articles of clothing and fresh trimmings of his beard, to Stanford University for a million dollars. Ginsberg gave readings up until a few months before he died in 1997, from liver cancer, at the age of 70.
Ginsberg said, "Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private."
Source: The Writer's Almanac
WHAT IS MOST NEAR
We know all about death that
we will ever know because
we have all experienced
the state before birth.
Life seems a passage between
two doors to the darkness.
Both are the same and truly
eternal, and perhaps it may
be said that we meet in
darkness. The nature of time
is illuminated by this
meeting of eternal ends.
It is amazing to think that
thought and personality
of man is perpetuated in
time after his passage
to eternity. And one time
is all Time if you look
at it out of the grave.
New York Mid- 1949
________
Allen Ginsberg, was born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). His poem "Howl" is said to have turned America from the 1950s into the 1960s overnight. It begins:
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…"
He got a job in marketing in New York and then in San Francisco. He was working in advertising in San Francisco when in 1954, after getting his psychotherapist's approval, Ginsberg decided to cut loose, quit his job, and devote himself "to writing and contemplation, to Blake and smoking pot, and doing whatever I wanted."
Howl and Other Poems was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's newly established City Lights press in 1956. For publishing Ginsberg's poetry book, Ferlinghetti was put on trial, charged with obscenity. The publicity greatly boosted sales of Howl and made Ginsberg famous.
Many agree that Ginsberg's best poem is "Kaddish." He wrote most of it in one 40-hour sitting, an epic elegy for his mother who had suffered from mental illness all of Ginsberg's life and who died in a psychiatric hospital on Long Island in 1956. Ginsberg's mother had been a devoted Communist. In high school, he would ride the bus across town with his mother, going with her to her therapy appointments. Paranoia was one of her diagnosed illnesses. Shortly before she passed away, Ginsberg had signed the authorization for her lobotomy. Two days after she died, Ginsberg received a letter in the mail from her that said, "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight in the window — I have the key — get married Allen don't take drugs. … Love, your mother."
The poem for his mother, fully entitled "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956)," begins:
"Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village,
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three years after —"
He became a devout Buddhist. As Ginsberg got older, his poetry became less shocking and more toned down, and after decades of publishing with small independent publishers, he signed, in the early 1980s, a six-book contract with Harper & Row for $160,000. The first book to come out under that contract was an 800-page edition of his Collected Poems 1947–1980, published in 1984. In 1994, he sold his archives, made up of journals, various photographs, and personal letters, as well as some old articles of clothing and fresh trimmings of his beard, to Stanford University for a million dollars. Ginsberg gave readings up until a few months before he died in 1997, from liver cancer, at the age of 70.
Ginsberg said, "Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private."
Source: The Writer's Almanac
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