Irwin Allen Ginsberg

June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997

Dr. Aldrich was asked "Do you know what poems of Irwin Allen Ginsberg best represent his view on Marijuana?" His remembrance of Allen is both a tribute to Allen, and an afirmation of Mike's vast knowledge of the movement.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg as remembered by Doctor Mike Aldrich. Doctor Aldrich tells of his time with Allen.

I once wrote an entire article about Allen's contributions to the marijuana movement, entitled "Allen Stoned & Straight," that was published in a small book of tributes called KONREKI. I once asked Allen if he would be our (marijuana movement's) Gandhi, he snorted and said, "I'm no Gandhi, I'm a poet!" (Truth to tell, he was both.)

Allen's best writing about marijuana is not in a poem, but in a beautiful essay he wrote called "The Great Marijuana Hoax," published in a 1966 (maybe November?) issue of Atlantic Monthly. It was revised and footnoted and became the centerpiece of David Solomon's book, "The Marijuana Papers," about 1967. It's one of the best descriptions of being stoned that I've ever read-- and I've read 'em all. Allen had spent the previous summer looking through Lindesmith's drug research files in Indiana, and his article is also a cogent and well-documented blast against the narcs for perpetuating lies, even after Harry Anslinger was forced to resign as head of FBN. Harry Giordano took over FBN and when I challenged him to a duel (a pro-legalization article in the Humanist, which Giordano wrote the counter-argument for), he simply sent a badly re-written re-hash of Anslinger tripe. It was the first pro-legalization piece I published (1968) and quoted Allen quite a bit.

Thereafter Allen used to come up to SUNY-Buffalo to do readings and he always made it a point to speak to our little LeMar group of students (the first college chapter of LeMar in the world), teaching us to chant various mantras he'd learned in India, getting righteously ripped with us and always looking for young boys to make his day. He and Ed Sanders and Bill Burroughs and Randy Wicker set up the first New York LeMar in 1965, had rallies at the Women's Prison, and TIME published photos of Allen with signs, "Pot is a Reality Kick" and "Pot is Fun!" He also used to lead rallies and marches in an unusual manner like a kick-line of Rockettes-- the most famous example being the time he linked arms with Burroughs, Mailer, Jean Genet and Terry Southern and charged through the Lincoln Park tear-gas dancing and growling in Chicago August 1968. We gathered in the lobby of the Hotel Lincoln right after that, I remembered Andy Weil's instruction that smoking pot would alleviate the tear-gas (to some extent), we retired to Ed Sanders' room to cure the coughing with better coughing. Practical wisdom (Aristotle's saphrosyne) was Allen's way of life.

A thousand flowers bloom in Allen's poetry and life, and I miss him terribly.

Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997

Reflecting on one of America's great poets

by Lloyd Schwartz

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/books/reviews/04-97/GINSBERG.html

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/books/reviews/04-97/image/10b_Corso&Ginsberg.gif

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/ginsberg-fbi.html

Allen Ginsberg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American Beat poet born in Paterson, New Jersey. Ginsberg is best known for Howl (1956), a long poem about consumer society's negative human values.

Life

Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926 in Paterson, New Jersey. His father Louis Ginsberg was a poet and his mother was high school teacher. Ginsberg's mother Naomi Levy Ginsberg (who was affected by epileptic seizures and mental illnesses such as paranoia [1]) was also an active member of the Communist Party USA and often took Ginsberg and his brother Eugene to party meetings. Ginsberg later said that his mother "Made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them.'"[2]

As a teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to The New York Times about political issues such as World War II and workers' rights.[3] When he was a junior in high school, he accompanied his mother by bus to her therapist. The trip disturbed Ginsberg and he later described it, along with his relationship with his mother, in his long autobiographical poem Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956).[4]

In 1943 Ginsberg graduated from high school and briefly attended Montclair State University before entering Columbia University on a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson. (1949)[5]. In his freshman year he met fellow undergraduate Lucien Carr, who introduced him to a number of future Beat writers including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes. Carr also introduced Ginsberg to Neal Cassady, with whom Ginsberg fell in love. Kerouac later described the meeting between Ginsberg and Cassady in the first chapter of his 1957 novel On the Road.[6]

Later in his life, Ginsberg formed a bridge between the Beat movement of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s, befriending, among others, Timothy Leary, Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Herbert Huncke, Rod McKuen, and Bob Dylan. Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997. [edit]

Career

Ginsberg's poetry was strongly influenced by modernism, romanticism, the beat and cadence of jazz, and his Kagyu Buddhist practice and Jewish background. He considered himself to have inherited the visionary and homoerotic poetic mantle handed from the English poet and artist William Blake on to Walt Whitman. The power of Ginsberg's verse, its searching, probing focus, its long and lilting lines, as well as its New World exuberance, all echo the continuity of inspiration which he claimed. Other influences included the American poet William Carlos Williams.

Ginsberg's principal work, "Howl", is well-known to many for its opening line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness". It was considered scandalous at the time of publication due to the rawness of the language, which is frequently explicit. Shortly after its 1956 publication by San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore, it was banned for obscenity. The ban became a cause célèbre among defenders of the First Amendment, and was later lifted after judge Clayton W. Horn, declared the poem to possess redeeming social importance. Ginsberg's leftist and generally anti-establishment politics attracted the attention of the FBI, who regarded Ginsberg as a major security threat.

Ginsberg's spiritual journey began early on with his reported spontaneous visions, and continued with an early trip to India and a chance encounter on a New York City street (they both tried to catch the same cab) with Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master of the Vajrayana school, who became his friend and life-long teacher. Ginsberg helped found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, a school founded by Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. In 1993, the French Minister of Culture awarded him with the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (the Order of Arts and Letters).

In 1994, when the International Lesbian and Gay Association successfully banished all connections to the North American Man-Boy Love Association in order to gain consultative status in the United Nations, Ginsberg opposed (together with modern gay rights founder Harry Hay). He said that he supported NAMBLA's right to free speech because the hysteria over pederasty reminded him of the hysteria over homosexuality itself while he was growing up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg