AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Allen Ginsberg was perhaps the most important post-war poet of the 20th century. His work influenced countless writers and gave voice to the perspective of a new generation that would change popular culture itself. Ginsberg was born 100 years ago this Wednesday. The anniversary is being celebrated in literary events around the world. From New York, Tom Vitale has this appreciation.
TOM VITALE: In 1985, sitting in his Lower East Side bedroom office in a plain denim shirt, amid shelves of books and Buddhist devotional objects, Allen Ginsberg told me he was interested in the nature of consciousness. He said his poems looked political, but he was simply trying to capture his thoughts.
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ALLEN GINSBERG: I write about what goes through my mind, and naturally, the world goes through my mind. So it looks like I'm writing about the world, but I'm just writing about notating the record of my mind's epiphanies.
VITALE: The epiphanies in Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl," were about the lives and exploits of his circle of friends who became known as the Beats, including novelists Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. In an era of Eisenhower and Disney, these literary hipsters craved jazz, smoked reefer and popped pills. But they were also serious about their art. They embraced pacifism, sexual freedom and Zen Buddhism.
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GINSBERG: Now, since the reading is going reasonably well, I'd like to try to read "Howl."
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VITALE: Ginsberg wrote "Howl" in 1955. Three years later, he recorded it at a Chicago festival.
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GINSBERG: (Reading) I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness - starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix. Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.
VITALE: Lawrence Ferlinghetti published "Howl" in the Pocket Poet Series of his City Lights press. At a conference on the Beats in 1994, he told me the little 75-cent paperback had a giant impact.
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LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Before Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," the state of poetry in America was a little bit the way it is today - poetry about poetry, language about language. So when "Howl" knocked the sides out of things, just the way rock music in the '60s knocked the sides out of the old music world.
VITALE: "Howl" gave voice to an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and alienation in Eisenhower's America. Today, Ginsberg's poetry still resonates, says Academy of American Poets Chancellor Cornelius Eady.
CORNELIUS EADY: He was a large poet, and his influence is great. The Beat poets, political poets, jazz poets, queer poets - he was a fundamental rock for so many voices.
VITALE: While "Howl" was Ginsberg's most famous poem, his masterpiece came later - "Kaddish," named for the Jewish prayers for the dead. He wrote it for his mother, Naomi, who died in a New York mental institution.
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GINSBERG: (Reading) Ai, ai. We do worse. We're in a fix. And you're out. Death let you out. Death had the mercy. You're done with your century, done with God, done with the path through it, done with yourself at last. Pure, back to the babe. Dark, before your father, before us all, before the world. There, rest.
VITALE: Like many of his finest poems, Ginsberg said he wrote "Kaddish" using a technique he learned from Jack Kerouac, of capturing his stream of consciousness on paper.
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GINSBERG: Well, that was a result of listening to Ray Charles and reading the rhythms of the Kaddish in an old Hebrew book that a friend gave me and a big shot of methamphetamine. Coming home from Hoboken at dawn and sitting down at my desk and continuing writing on that afternoon and all night long and up to the next afternoon, one big session.
VITALE: Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Paterson, New Jersey. His father, Louis, was a high school teacher and himself a lyric poet. His father introduced him to poetry, but the younger Ginsberg didn't take himself seriously as a writer until he was a freshman at Columbia University.
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GINSBERG: I sort of committed myself internally when I met Kerouac and Burroughs in 1944, '45 'cause they made such a spiritual impression on me that I realized this is a quality I hadn't met in my life before, except maybe in my mother's madness. Except theirs was sane.
VITALE: The Beats dedicated themselves to what Jack Kerouac described as a new vision that would strip away layers of false language to reveal the truth of what was actually happening. Ginsberg said in the end, his writing was about sympathy. His poem "Sunflower Sutra" describes a moment in 1955 in which he and Kerouac noticed an ash-covered sunflower husk in a Berkeley train yard.
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GINSBERG: (Reading) We're beautiful golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed and golden hairy, naked accomplishment-bodies, growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes, under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tin can evening sit down vision.
VITALE: Allen Ginsberg died in 1997 at the age of 70. His books of poetry have sold more than 1 million copies.
For NPR News, I'm Tom Vitale in New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MILES DAVIS' "IT NEVER ENTERED MY MIND") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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