This is the book that started it all back in 1956. Published by Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books, "Howl" was printed in England and seized by U.S. Customs and the San Francisco police as an obscene work. Defended by the ACLU and many important poets and scholars, Ferlinghetti's obscenity trial captured the nation with coverage in both "Time" magazine and "Life". When the court ruled "Howl" could not be considered obscene because of its "redeeming social importance", Ginsberg's success was assured. In addition to "Howl" which starts, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." and "Footnote to Howl" with its "Holy, Holy, Holy" mantra, this book also contains "Supermarket in California", "Sunflower Sutra" and the unequaled "America." Paperback, 57 pages
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$ 7.95
Recently released on DVD, Jerry Aronson's The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg is the most comprehensive documentary on Ginsberg available today. Compassionate, honest, and moving, Aronson's film is a biographical gem 25 years in the making—the product of over 120 hours of footage, including many exclusive interviews with Ginsberg himself, his family and friends, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Herbert Hunke, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Abbie Hoffman, plus many others. The clarity of Life and Times arises partly from Aronson's avoidance of voiceovers, an all-too-common documentary cliche. As a result, all of Aronson's interviewees speak with their own voices.
This 2-disc set features 6 hours of extras!
Among the highlights of The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg:
An exclusive reading of Kaddish by Ginsberg in the kitchen of his New York City apartment.
Footage of Ginsberg performing, with Paul McCartney as musical accompaniment.
Never-before-seen footage of Allen with Neal Cassady in the basement of City Lights Books.
Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at Kerouac's grave in Lowell, MA.
Interview with writer Herbert Huncke.
Excerpts from Allen's Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit by Jonas Mekas.
$ 34.95
This collection recreates the impassioned voice of one of the most influential literary and cultural figures of our time." The interviews in this volume are chronologically arranged and include some that were previously unpublished. paperback, 603 pages
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$ 17.95
Here, for the first time, is a volume that gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half century of brilliant work from one of America's great poets. The 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 Walt Whitman, Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg's classics Howl, Reality Sandwiches, Kaddish, Planet News, and The Fall of America led American (and international) poetry toward uncensored vernacular, explicit candor, the ecstatic, the rhapsodic, and the sincereÑall leavened by an attractive and pervasive streak of common sense. 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 view of the world.
The uninterrupted energy of Ginsberg's remarkable career is clearly revealed in this collection. Seen in order of composition, the poems reflect on one another; they are not only works but also a work. Included here are all the poems from the earlier volume Collected Poems 1947-1980, and from Ginsberg's subsequent and final three books of new poetry: White Shroud, Cosmopolitan Greetings, and Death & Fame. Enriching this book are illustrations by Ginsberg's artist friends; unusual and illuminating notes to the poems, inimitably prepared by the poet himself; extensive indexes; as well as prefaces and various other materials that accompanied the original publications.
