The Letters of Allen Ginsberg

Excuse me if I begin to sound like Allen Ginsberg." —letter to Benson Soffer, childhood friend, 17 May 1943

The Letters of Allen Ginsberg is unlike a lot of literary letters collections in that it contains no new revelations about its subject. But that should hardly be surprising considering the fact that we are dealing with one of the most frequently naked people of the 20th Century. 

Even at a young age, as the words written at age 18 and quoted above proves, Ginsberg was not only keenly perceptive of himself and his role within the overflowing social-cultural melting pot of the mid-20th Century, but he never thought to distinguish his life from the arguments, both poetic and political, that he was constantly taking on. Defending Rimbaud to his skeptical Columbia professor Lionel Trilling, the young Ginsberg writes, "more than any poet, I can understand the personality". Later, at one of the readings following the momentous unveiling of Howl, Ginsberg responded to a heckler by stripping to his birthday suit. This was poetry, and life, undressed and unapologetically intimate. 

Since Ginsberg's death in 1997, there has been a whole procession of posthumous books released, most of them edited by Bill Morgan, the poet's friend and archivist. The Letters of Allen Ginsberg follows two books of Ginsberg's journals, a volume of letters between the poet and his father, and a compilation of interviews, all of which have already done much to illuminate the inner workings of Ginsberg's famous poetic imagination. Morgan explains that the selections for the current book were dictated more by the merits of individual letters than by the contexts in which they were written or the intended recipients. Thus we are served the spectrum of Ginsberg's many moods and interests and his who's-who guide of a rolodex.

In addition to fellow Beat heroes Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso who, along with Ginsberg's family members, received the majority of these letters, we also have Ginsberg corresponding with Robert Creeley, Jimmy Carter, and Norman Podhoretz. The drawback to this approach is that the reader often loses the biographical thread. The subject that consumes an August 1973 letter defending the recently arrested Abbie Hoffman to his lawyer Gerald Lefcourt is drastically different from that of the very next letter in the volume, a January 1974 missive on Buddhism, written to the French writer Jean Jacques Lebel. Morgan's editorial introductions and the chronological arrangement are crucial to giving the book the semblance of a biographical arc.

"No kidding. You have no idea what a storm of lunatic-fringe activity I have stirred up."—to father Louis Ginsberg, April 1956

 

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