The Letters of Allen Ginsberg – DaneCobain.com

Allen Ginsberg – The Letters of Allen Ginsberg | Review

July 30, 2014 danecobain

Authors F-J (By Surname)Non-Fiction

Title: The Letters of Allen Ginsberg

Author: Allen Ginsberg

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 468

Rating: 6/10

Allen Ginsberg – The Letters of Allen Ginsberg

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Allen Ginsberg and beat writers in general, but this book was a little heavy even for me – as with most collections of letters, it’s better suited to scholars and researchers, who can dip in and out to source references for their essays. Reading it from cover to cover took a lot of time, and I’ll confess that I had to do it over the course of a year, reading only one or two letters at a time.

Ginsberg and his pals often wrote in a sort of code, a bizarre dialect which was populated with obscure references and in-jokes that only the recipients of the letters could really understand – even with hefty annotations, it’s often a struggle to understand what’s being talked about, which was probably precisely what the great poet intended. You really feel like an interloper, as if you’ve dug the letters out of someone’s drawer when they weren’t looking – you feel like you don’t belong, and it’s a weird feeling to have when you’re trying to read a book.

That said, there are some fascinating insights here that you won’t find anywhere else, and Ginsberg writes to such notable beat figures as William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Lucien Carr, as well as his long-term lover Peter Orlovsky. In a way, it’s sad to think that his generation was one of the last to use letters to their fullest – will the equivalent become a book of e-mails in the future, or even worse, instant messaging logs?

Allen Ginsberg

I wouldn’t bother picking this up if you’re only a casual reader of Ginsberg – it’s far too much, and you won’t enjoy it. If you’ve read literally all of his other books, though, then I guess you have no choice – you’ve read enough to have graduated to his letters, and you’ll understand them much more when they’re placed in the context of his wider body of work.

Credit is due, however, to Bill Morgan, the book’s editor – he’s done all of the research so you don’t have to, and without his footnotes and observations, you’d really struggle to understand what’s happening. Morgan was Ginsberg’s literary archivist for many years and has even written a biography called I Celebrate Myself, so he knows what he’s doing – this isn’t his first work on a collection of letters, either. He also worked on the Selected Letters of Gregory Corso, and so editing together the thoughts of crazy writers isn’t new to him.

There’s not much left to say, but I’d be interested to know what you think if you read it – tweet me and let me know.

Allen Ginsberg Quote

Click here to buy The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass | Review

Title: Leaves of Grass

Author: Walt Whitman

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 478

Rating: 3/10

Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass

Well, where do I begin? I had high hopes for Leaves of Grass – Whitman dedicated most of his life to writing it, and it’s a key influence for some of the more contemporary poets that I read. I wasn’t expecting anything amazing, I thought it might be like The Collected Works of William Carlos Williams. I wasn’t expecting this.

Leaves of Grass is one of less than half a dozen books that it’s taken me over six months to read – for the curious, the others are The Two Towers, The Return of the King, The Oxford English Dictionary and The Letters of Allen Ginsberg. I was carrying it around with me for so long that I left a copy on the train and had to buy another one. In the end, I gave up and read it in short chunks, one twenty minute session every week or so.

It’s not even that it was long – it was long and unpleasant, and a huge disappointment considering all of the praise it’s received over the years. First published in 1855, when Whitman was in his late thirties, the poet spent the rest of his life revising and adding to it – the final version, dubbed ‘the deathbed edition‘, was released 36 years later in 1891.

Walt Whitman

Now, I’m not saying that Whitman is a terrible poet – after all, I’m not exactly qualified to challenge him. Having said that, calling Whitman a bad poet is like calling Justin Bieber a bad musician – it’s all matter of taste. I’d rather listen to Bieber albums back-to-back for a day than re-read Leaves of Grass, though.

Quite frankly, I can’t help but feel worried about the whole thing – is this being used in English lessons across the States? Is this a whole generation’s first exposure to poetry? If so, I can start to understand why nobody really cares about poetry anymore – if this was my first exposure to the great art then I doubt I’d have bothered to dig deeper and uncover Charles Bukowski or Allen Ginsberg.

That’s not to say that Leaves of Grass doesn’t have its place in the annuls of literary history, it’s just that there are more accessible works out there, other books that you’ll actually enjoy reading. I’m not ashamed of the fact that I read for pleasure – why should I be? All good art forms are created and regarded for the joy of creation and regarding, so why should Leaves of Grass be any different, just because ‘it’s a classic’?

Overall, Leaves of Grass is best left to academics and lovers of traditional poetry who don’t mind spending evening after evening feeling dull and uninspired as they tediously turn over the pages and wander closer to the end. Have fun with that.