Today’s Almanac-April 6. 2010-Part 2
On April 6, 1997 poet Allen Ginsberg died in New York of complications from hepatitis. Ginsberg was the most famous of the Beat Poets and arguably the most lineal literary descendent of Walt Whitman. Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926 he was a Red Blanket baby of a pair of Jewish radicals and members of the Greenwich Village literary Bohemia of the Jazz Age. The life long struggle of his beloved and gifted mother Naomi deeply affected him, as did an early exposure to the poetry of Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. Coming of age in Depression deepened his familial devotion to working class causes and he entered Columbia University as a scholarship student and committed radical. At Columbia he met and developed close relationships with William S. Burroughs, Neil Cassidy, and Jack Kerouac and others who would become the avatars of the rebellious Beat movement of the post-war years. Ginsberg came to believe that brutally honest expression through art, rather than conventional political activism, was the way in which he could create profoundly revolutionary change. After graduation, he developed a relationship with a literary hero of the previous generation, William Carlos Williams, who became an informal mentor and who introduced Ginsberg into the wider literary world, providing letters of introduction to Kenneth Rexroth and other West Coast poets when he relocated to San Francisco. Later, when Ginsberg won a wide, devoted following among the young, he returned the favor by turning his audience on to Williams. Together Rexroth and Ginsberg made history with a public reading at The “6” Gallery in the City by the Bay on October 7, 1955, an event often cited as “the birth of the Beat.” It was on that occasion that Ginsberg first read his epic stream of consciousness poem Howl. The following year Howl was published by Lawrence Ferlenghetti’s new City Lights Books. Beset by censorship battles, which only encouraged a wider audience, and the horrified consternation of most of the academic poetry establishment, the little book went on to become one of the most widely read and admired works of American verse in the 20th Century. He continued to write and produced several collections, notably Kaddish and Other Poems in 1961. He was always frank, and often lyrical, about his homosexuality and about his personal demons. Like Kerouac and other beats he immersed himself in eastern meditative religions. But he also remained a dedicated political activist when he could use his poetry and presence to advance the cause. He was deeply involved in the movement to end the Vietnam War and famously led a crowd in chants of “Ohm” one foggy night in Lincoln Park as the police closed in with teargas and truncheons. He led many a free speech fight and was an early leader in the Gay Rights movement. He received many honors, including a National Book Award, but probably because of his overt homosexuality and admitted drug use, not those high awards, like the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes or the Kennedy Center Honors which would have indicated a full embrace by the establishment. He frankly didn’t care. In later years he did join academia himself as a Distinguished Professor of Literature at Brooklyn College, an institution dedicated to the education of the sons and daughters of the urban proletariat.