| Allen Ginsberg, Biography
The greatest poet of the Beat movement and one of the most renowned American writers of the 20th century, Allen Ginsberg transcended literary and intellectual barriers to exert a profound influence on the culture at large. His accomplishments are too numerous and his oeuvre too large for a music reference resource to do them justice; many other sources exist that offer more complete perspectives on his life and work. Ginsberg made sporadic recordings of his work, both formal and otherwise, starting in his heyday of the late '50s and continuing into the '90s. Most of them were poetry readings, naturally, but Ginsberg also experimented with songs, often accompanying his singing on the harmonium. Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, in Newark, NJ, and grew up in nearby Paterson. His father Louis was a published poet, a teacher, and politically a socialist; his mother Naomi was a Communist radical, but unfortunately her bouts with mental illness (mostly severe paranoia) consumed much of Ginsberg's childhood. He began writing in a journal at age 11, around the same time as his mother's suicide attempt, and discovered his major poetic influence Walt Whitman in high school. He enrolled at Columbia University in 1943, originally planning to become a labor lawyer, but soon fell in with a literary crowd that included Jack Kerouac (a fellow student), Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg began writing seriously around 1945, and around the same time he began to experiment with drugs, and had some of his first homosexual experiences. He graduated from Columbia in 1948 and began traveling, visiting Burroughs in Texas; there he was arrested as a reluctant accomplice in his roommates' burglary ring, and voluntarily committed himself to Columbia's mental hospital. He attempted to renounce homosexuality and took a job as a market researcher upon his release, but hearing the poet William Carlos Williams at a reading drew him back into literature, and he gave up trying to fit into mainstream society. Ginsberg moved to San Francisco in 1954, and that year met artist's model Peter Orlovsky, who became his lover; their relationship, though nonmonogamous and marked by periods of separation, would prove to be lifelong. Though he'd written quite a bit of poetry by this point, very little of it had been published, and he was better known as an advocate of fellow Beat writers like Kerouac and Burroughs. That all changed in October 1955, when Ginsberg read parts of his new epic poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery. An impassioned, defiant critique of American culture that served as something of a Beat manifesto, it was an immediate sensation. The local City Lights bookstore, which had just started its own publishing arm, released Ginsberg's first book, the seminal Howl and Other Poems, in 1956. The following year, City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested on obscenity charges for selling copies of the book; authorities objected mostly to its homosexual content. A judge ruled that the book was not obscene, and the attendant publicity helped make Ginsberg a household name. He recorded his first album of poetry readings, also titled Howl and Other Poems, for the Fantasy label in 1959. Over the next decade, Ginsberg became a leading countercultural figure. He spoke out in favor of the First Amendment and against the Vietnam War; he was turned on to LSD by Timothy Leary and to Buddhism by Kerouac; he traveled a bit with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters; he traveled all over the world in search of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment; he appeared in the background of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" music video; he took part in the famed antiwar demonstrations in 1968 that resulted in the arrest of the so-called Chicago Seven; he was, unsurprisingly, the subject of a massive FBI dossier. Of course, he also continued to write prolifically. In 1961, he published another lengthy signature poem, "Kaddish," which explored his relationship with his mother (she'd passed away in an institution in 1956). Five years later, Atlantic Records issued a recording of the work titled Allen Ginsberg Reads Kaddish: A 20th Century American Ecstatic Narrative Poem. Ginsberg's next album was William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which set the works of one of his favorite poets to jazzy musical backing; it was issued by Verve in 1970. As time passed and his lasting impact became clearer, Ginsberg was increasingly accepted by the literary establishment, culminating in his winning a National Book Award for The Fall of America: Poems of These States in 1974. He recorded with John Lennon and Leonard Cohen, and undertook several song-oriented sessions of his own during the course of the '70s, including a collaboration with Bob Dylan. The best results of these efforts were finally released in 1983 as First Blues: 1971-1981 on former Columbia executive John Hammond's own label. Additionally, Ginsberg performed the song-poem "Capitol Air" in concert with punk rockers the Clash, and appeared on the track "Ghetto Defendant" on their hit Combat Rock album. He abandoned singing on his next album, 1989's The Lion for Real, a set of spoken word pieces with musical backing. That same year, he teamed up with composer Philip Glass to transform the antiwar poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra" into a musical theater piece; the collaboration worked well enough that they reteamed for a full album, 1993's Hydrogen Jukebox. In 1994, Rhino Records issued an exhaustive four-CD box set of Ginsberg recordings titled Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs 1949-1993. Sadly, Ginsberg contracted liver cancer as a complication of hepatitis, and passed away at his New York City loft on April 5, 1997. Fantasy reissued Howl and Other Poems on CD the following year, and in 2002 the Locust label assembled the compilation New York Blues: Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs. ~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide |
July 7, 2006, New York Times Ralph Ginzburg By Steven Heller
Ralph Ginzburg, a taboo-busting editor and publisher who helped set off the sexual revolution in the 1960's with Eros magazine and was imprisoned for sending it through the United States mail in a case decided by the Supreme Court, died yesterday in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. He was 76. The cause was multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bones, said Shoshana Ginzburg, his wife and collaborator of 49 years. First published in 1962, Eros was a stunningly designed hardcover "magbook" devoted to eroticism. While Playboy and other men's magazines of the time catered mostly to male fantasies, Eros (named for the Greek god of love and desire) covered a wide swath of sexuality in history, politics, art and literature. Mr. Ginzburg valued good writing, and his contributors included Nat Hentoff, Arthur Herzog and Albert Ellis. Eros also challenged the taboo of interracial love in a photo essay by Ralph M. Hattersley Jr. and published a previously suppressed portfolio of nude photographs of Marilyn Monroe, taken by Bert Stern. Mr. Ginzburg's eventual conviction on the obscenity charge hinged not on the content of his publications but on their promotion. The Supreme Court held that if "the purveyor's sole emphasis is on the sexually provocative aspects of his publications," that could justify a finding of obscenity for content that might otherwise be marginally acceptable. Born in Brooklyn on Oct. 28, 1929, to immigrant parents from Russia, Mr. Ginzburg studied to be an accountant until his professor at City College encouraged him to accept an editorial job on the school newspaper, The Daily Ticker. With a passion for journalism, he took a job after graduation as advertising and promotion director at Look magazine and later became articles editor at Esquire. Mr. Ginzburg soon found he had a talent for the mail-order business, especially writing attention-grabbing promotional advertisements. He wed his business and publishing instincts to social activism. His first self-published book was "100 Years of Lynching," a compilation of newspaper accounts that exposed American racism. Later he published "An Unhurried View of Erotica," about the secret caches of erotic material in some of the world's most famous libraries. Eros, which was sold only through the mail, was conceived in a hardcover rather than a softcover format as a marketing ploy to extract a hefty cover price. Mr. Ginzburg hired the leading mainstream advertising typographer/art director, Herb Lubalin, to create innovative layouts for Eros. It cost him a lot of money to produce and never rose out of the red. When the fourth and final issue appeared (a fifth was prepared but never published), Mr. Ginzburg was indicted on charges of violating a federal statute that regulated obscene advertising. His publications (Eros; Liaison, a biweekly newsletter; and "The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity") were deemed obscene "in the context of their production, sale and attendant publicity." After various appeals, the case was argued before the Supreme Court in 1965, and in 1966 Mr. Ginzburg's conviction was upheld. Despite protests by First Amendment advocates, he served eight months in a federal prison in 1972 after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of his sentence. His book "Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison" (a short version of which was published in The New York Times Magazine) was dedicated to his wife and collaborator. As to why Eros was considered obscene, Mr. Ginzburg wrote in the book, it was a mystery to him. " 'Obscenity' or 'pornography' is a crime without definition or victim," he said. "It is a bag of smoke used to conceal one's own dislikes with regard to aspects of sex." The Eros case was just one of Mr. Ginzburg's famous run-ins with the courts. In 1964 another of his iconoclastic magazines, Fact, a political journal with a muckracking bent (and the first to publish Ralph Nader when he was a Harvard student), published a special issue on the "Mind of Barry Goldwater" when Senator Goldwater was the Republican presidential candidate that year, claiming that he was psychologically unfit for the office. Goldwater successfully sued him for defamation all the way to the Supreme Court; Justices Hugo L. Black and William O. Douglas dissented, citing issues of free speech. For Goldwater, it was a Pyrrhic victory; he received only $1 in damages. From 1968 to 1971 Mr. Ginzburg also published Avant Garde, an art and culture magazine designed by Mr. Lubalin, whose logo for the magazine was the basis for one of the most popular typefaces of the era. Although Avant Garde included erotic material (an entire issue was devoted to John Lennon's erotic lithographs), this time the focus was more on radical politics, including the "No More War" poster competition. Mr. Ginzburg shut down the magazine when he started serving his sentence. Afterward, he and his wife tried to revive it as a tabloid newspaper, but it lasted only one issue. It was a costly mistake that drove them to the brink of bankruptcy, which was averted only through the success of yet another periodical, the consumer adviser Moneysworth, which attained a circulation of 2.4 million. At 55 Mr. Ginzburg retired from publishing to be a photojournalist, selling his very first photograph to The New York Post. He remained there as a freelance spot-news photographer until his death and specialized in New York scenes and sporting events, covering soccer as recently as three weeks ago. In 1999 Eric Nash in The New York Times Book Review described his book of photographs, "I Shot New York," as a heartfelt portrait of the extraordinary diversity of daily life in the city, and of New Yorkers' love of bread and circuses." In addition to his wife, Mr. Ginzburg is survived by a son, Shepherd, of Ventura, Calif.; two daughters, Bonnie Erbe Leckar of Falls Church, Va., and Lark Kuthta of Hewitt, N.J.; and three grandchildren. Despite Mr. Ginzburg's ability to transform his life at critical periods, he saw his conviction and imprisonment as a handicap since, at the time, few establishment organizations would do business with him. "Thus my publishing potential after release from prison was severely circumscribed," he said. "I have always felt that I might have become a major force in American publishing had it not been for my conviction. Instead, I'm just a curious footnote." Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company |
