The Essential Ginsberg

February 15, 2015
A representative sampling from an iconic American poet.A prolific poet and political gadfly, Ginsberg (1926-1997) never wrote an autobiography, but he did keep journals, write letters to fellow poets, and reflect on his life and work in interviews and essays. Schumacher (November's Fury: The Deadly Great Lakes Hurricane of 1913, 2013, etc.), Ginsberg's biographer, offers a well-chosen selection of his writings in this copious collection: 34 poems, including the famous "Howl" and "Kaddish"; 10 essays, including his testimony regarding LSD before a special Senate Judiciary Committee; assorted journal entries from 1949 to 1969, several unpublished; two lengthy interviews; and a dozen letters to prominent Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs and Robert Creeley. Forthright about fueling his creativity with a cornucopia of drugs, Ginsberg expounds on his interest in "all states of consciousness": dreams, spiritual ecstasy, and "preconscious, quasi-sleep" states. Besides Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Blake, he cites as influences William James, especially Varieties of Religious Experience, and the poetry of James' student Gertrude Stein. In an "Independence Day Manifesto" in 1959, he proclaimed that America "is having a nervous breakdown," intent on oppressing poets for their allegedly anti-social behavior. But in a country "gone mad with materialism, a police-state America, a sexless and soulless America," poetry offered solace and wisdom. "Poetry," he contended, "is the record of individual insights into the secret soul of the individual and...into the soul of the world." A few years later, he again chided Americans for living in a "mental dictatorship" of materialism and conformity. If his solution-everyone should try LSD once-seems capricious, his critique is likely to resonate with contemporary readers. Except for brief introductions to the journal entries, Schumacher allows the selections to stand alone as testimony to an often outrageous, groundbreaking poet and tireless social activist.

Starred review from March 1, 2015

The work, and not just the poetry, of Ginsberg (1926-97), one of 20th-century America's most important and notorious literary figures, has finally been given the career-arching overview it deserves. Schumacher (Dharma Lion) has compiled the poet's greatest hits into this volume, including the regularly anthologized "Howl," "Kaddish," "A Supermarket in California," "America," and "Kral Majales." What distinguishes this book from other posthumous Ginsberg collections is that it also presents small samples of his songwriting, essays, interviews, letters, journal excerpts, and understated photography. Ginsberg's position at the center of the Beat Movement is made clear through Schumacher's selections, which highlight his key relationships with Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, among others. Similarly, his involvement in the burgeoning American counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s is at the heart of many of these selections. By making this volume similar to the ones in Viking's "Portable Library" series, Harper Perennial has all but ensured this book's place in university classrooms for years to come. VERDICT An essential starting point for any reader encountering the artist's still-controversial work for the very first time.--Brian Flota, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2015
Fortunately for the reputation of the central figure of the Beat movement, the poetry section of Schumacher's anthology is much the best. The essays, letters, journal entries, and two interviews that bulk out the volume impress primarily by documenting Ginsberg's early travels and cultural celebrity up to the mid-1970s. (Several later interviews in Spontaneous Mind 2001 are more engaging and literate than any of the prose here.) The handful of later-dated selections are usually about the early travels and poems, and the particulars of any of the prose can be factually shaky. But the poems, spanning 194797, are often livelythe early, short ones, in particular. The long ones begin well or have their moments, despite being endurance tests to read all at once. The most famous Howl, Wichita Vortex Sutra, Kaddish, Mind Breaths, the pornographic Please Master, and, of course, A Supermarket in California are here in all their Whitmanian indebtedness (like Walt, Ginsberg would have been sunk without anaphora). By the way, Ginsberg says often that Kerouac is the better poet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)