Volume 54, Number 14 · September 27, 2007
The Dreams of Allen Ginsberg
By Mark Ford
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
Collected Poems, 1947–1997
by Allen Ginsberg
HarperCollins, 1,189 pp., $39.95
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg
by Bill Morgan
Viking, 702 pp., $29.95
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937–1952
by Allen Ginsberg,edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan
Da Capo, 523 pp., $27.50
Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression
edited by Bill Morgan andNancy J. Peters
City Lights Books, 224 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later
edited by Jason Shinder
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Howl: Original Draft Facsimile
edited by Barry Miles
HarperPerennial,208 pp., $18.95 (paper)
The Yage Letters Redux
by William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, edited and with an introduction by Oliver Harris
City Lights Books, 127 pp., $13.95 (paper)
Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero
by David Sandison and Graham Vickers
Chicago Review, 340 pp., $24.95
Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, in the loft on East Thirteenth Street that he had purchased a couple of years earlier with money raised from the sale of his vast archive to Stanford University. Although his collection of drafts, letters, journals, and photographs had been assessed as worth over $5 million, such a sum could only have been realized if Ginsberg had agreed to split up his holdings and hive them off to different institutions. He hated this idea, and decided instead to settle for the cool million offered by Stanford. All parties involved in the deal agreed not to divulge the price for fear it might attract adverse publicity, but Ginsberg, never a great secret-keeper, volunteered the figure to the first reporter who got wind of the sale, and this ignited one of the innumerable mini press controversies that, since the trial of 'Howl' in 1957, had done so much to make Ginsberg into a household name, even in households utterly uninterested in poetry. This being the Nineties, it was his membership of NAMBLA (the North American Man/ Boy Love Association) rather than his denunciations of US foreign policy or use of obscene words or promotion of illegal drugs or antinuclear protests that generated the headlines: 'Pro-Pedophile Poet Paid $1M by Stanford' was the story line.
Review, 4345 words
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