Allen Ginsberg, who died Saturday of a heart attack at age 70, gave the alienated, bohemian beat generation its best-known and most powerful poetic voice with works such as "Howl" and "Kaddish."
"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," were the oft-quoted opening lines of "Howl," published in 1956.His raw, angry verse captured the spirit of the beat generation, disillusioned and frustrated by the shackles of convention.
The beats, a literary movement of intellectual outlaws such as Jack Kerouac, author of "On the Road," Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, author of "Naked Lunch," and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reveled in free prose, poetry readings and experimental plays.
They were influenced by an eclectic array of surrealism, dadaism, jazz, Asian philopsohy and experiments with hallucinogenic drugs.
"The thing that you can say that we had in common is an interest in an open form of some kind, spontaneity in writing, the breaking up of old forms in both prose and poetry," Ginsberg said in a 1983 interview. "In that there was a common insight as well as the correlative of opening up of an awareness of consciousness."
The term beat always defied definition, prompting the editor of the "Beat Coast East" anthology once to attempt to define it by polling "an assortment of squalid squares and plastered saints" in the streets of Greenwich Village.
The anti-establishment movement was largely centered in New York City, where Ginsberg and others were students at Columbia University, and in San Francisco.
Not every reception to Ginsberg's work was laudatory. "Howl and Other Poems" was the subject of an obscenity case, based on its graphic sexual references, but Ferlinghetti, its publisher, was cleared in a landmark decision in 1957.
And some critics, such as writer Norman Podhoretz, were outraged, condemning the beats for "expressing contempt for coherent, rational discourse."
Ginsberg published more than 40 books of poetry. Among his best-known works are the mockingly humorous "America" and "Kaddish," a moving lament about his mother, a mentally disturbed, left-wing Russian emigrant.
His book "Fall of America" won the National Book Award in 1972, and he was elected to the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters.
U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, referring to Ginsberg's line, "America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel," once said: "He gave all of us who are queer - not necessarily sexually - a lot to meditate on. In that one line, there's patriotism, determination to help, beauty, ornery resistance and good humor."
At the cutting edge for decades, Ginsberg became a spokesman for the 1960s counterculture, a ubiquitous figure at poetry readings on college campuses, a strident critic of the war in Vietnam, an outspoken gay rights advocate and a passionate Buddhist. He was instrumental in a broad dissemination of Buddhist texts in the United States and an adviser for Tricycle magazine, a quarterly Buddhist review.
He traveled widely, befriending Soviet dissident poets such as Yevegeny Yevtushenko during the Cold War and Czech dramatist and statesman Vaclav Havel.
At home, he was a friend to the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, writer Ken Kesey and his unruly Merry Pranksters band of musicians, writers and drug users, LSD guru Timothy Leary and musicans such as Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, punk artists Patti Smith and the Clash and avant-garde composer Philip Glass.
Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado, where he was scheduled to teach a class on poet William Blake this summer.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, and a longtime resident of New York City's East Village, Ginsberg was a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.
He was working on a new collection of poems and photographs at the time of his death.
Ginsberg died in his Lower East Side apartment surrounded by eight "close friends and old lovers," said his friend and archivist, Bill Morgan. The poet was diagnosed eight days ago with terminal liver cancer, and he suffered a fatal heart attack, Morgan said.
Ginsberg's funeral will be private. In lieu of flowers, donations should be sent to Jewel Heart Buddhist Center in Ann Arbor, Mich.
He is survived by his stepmother, Edith Ginsberg of Paterson, N.J.; his brother, Eugene; and several nieces and nephews. His father, Louis, who also was a poet, died of liver cancer in 1968.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
`America'
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.