"'Taken all together, Ginsberg's poems are X-rays of a considerable part of American society during the last four decades.' —the New Yorker
This magnificent volume gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half-century of brilliant work from one of America's greatest poets.
A chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse in the tradition of Whitman, Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg's raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry and popular song and speech, but also our views of the world."
"Including:
Europe, Europe
America
Howl
Footnote to Howl
Strange New Cottage
In Back Of The Real
Transcription Of Organ Music
Sunflower Sutra
A Supermarket In California
Beat Poetry at Royal"
"William Burroughs closed his classic novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called ‘Yage’, a drug that could be ‘the final fix’. In The Yage Letters, a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel, he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space and derange his senses.
Burroughs’ letters reveal his desire to escape the norms of American society which hemmed him in, and the extraordinary steps he took to break free."
"This is one man's trip from the late l940's to the early ‘80's, with lengthy stops in the Beat ’50's, the anti-war/psychedelic ’60's, and the ineffable ’70's. Poet, mystic, consousness explorer, activist and singer, Ginsberg tells all about his activities and inspirations, from the literary trio of Blake, Burroughs and Kerouac to Tibetan Buddhism."
