Howl, Kaddish & Other Poems: Popular Penguins

Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926. His father, Louis Ginsberg, was a well-known lyric poet and teacher. While attending Columbia College in the 1940s, Ginsberg formed close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac. He became associated with the Beat movement and the San Francisco Renaissance poets Gary Snyder and Michael McClure in the 1950s.

After working as a laborer, market researcher, and sailor, Ginsberg published his first volume, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956. The poem faced censorship trials and became one of the most widely read of the century, translated into twenty-eight languages. In 1965, Ginsberg was crowned Prague May King, expelled by Czech police, and placed on the FBI’s Dangerous Security list. Although he traveled extensively, teaching in India, China, and Europe, he spent most of his life in New York’s Lower East Side.

Ginsberg was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1993, he received the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres from the French Minister of Culture. In 1994, he was honored as the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poet. He also co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world.

Allen Ginsberg died in New York on April 5, 1997, eight days after being diagnosed with a serious illness. He continued to write until his final days and passed away surrounded by friends and family. As one of the last of the “Beats,” he embodied the experimental and unconventional spirit of the artistic and literary scene. Upon his death, James Campbell wrote in The Guardian that Ginsberg was “the exemplary avant-garde figure of the post-war world.” Campbell noted that Ginsberg “resisted and disdained the orthodox, the social lie” in his verse, politics, and personal life, doing much to “make non-conformism respectable.”

Ginsberg’s other notable works include The Annotated Howl, White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985, Cosmopolitan Greetings, Journals Mid-Fifties: 1954-1958, and Selected Poems 1947-1995. Rhino Records released his four-CD box set, Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs 1949-1993.

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