Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 [Hardcover]

Allen Ginsberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 16, 2000

Allen Ginsberg's essays, collected here for the first time, were written over the course of a long, productive, and politically engaged life. With his finger ever on the pulse of America, Ginsberg was consistently outspoken and passionate about his beliefs. Whether criticizing the American government, protesting the proliferation of nuclear weapons or the waging of war in Vietnam, or denouncing the injustice of capitalists Ginsberg gave voice to a moral conscience of the nation. His views on free speech and the drug, culture, his quest for inner peace, the creation of the Beat generation, and his innovative poetics reflect the, concerns of a postwar American culture that he helped shape.

Arranged by subject, these essays offer a fascinating counterpoint to Allen Ginsberg's poems. Hey are provocative, playful, eloquent, and of the moment. In the section titled "Politics and Prophecies," Ginsberg takes on everyone from the Federal Drug Administration to the Pentagon to the Hell's Angels. Included here are his notes on how to make march/spectacle (drawn up in 1965 when a march was planned at Berkeley to support the cause of peace in Vietnam and to protest the draft), and his thoughts on how the raging issues of the day'China, Vietnam, and the 1968 Democratic National Convetion in Chicago. In another section, "Censorship and Sex Laws," Ginsberg's pieces demonstrate the strength of his belief in the right to free speech, which leads him to defend NAMBLA (North America Man Boy Love Association), comedian Lenny Bruce, and writer William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch. Ginsberg's essays on "Writers" focus on those he particularly admired, including William Blake. Walt Whitman, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Robert Creely. Through a combination of literary criticism and personal reflection, Ginsberg illuminates the life and work of these artists. Also, profiled are such influential figures as jean Genet, W. H. Auden, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, and Philip Glass, artists whose work and sensibility deeply affected him.

Personal as well as political, Deliberate Prose is more than a collection of essays from one of the greatest cultural figures of our time. It is also a social history of modern America that reminds us of the events and issues that preoccupied the minds of a nation in the postwar years.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"I got so mad I cut my beard and mailed it in an envelope to the district attorney." Sometimes lovely, sometimes slapdash, and sure to appeal to his broad contingent of fans, this sprawling compilation of 154 "essays" (many run only a page or so) memorializes Ginsberg's stances, opinions, reactions, experiences and proclamations. Gathering reams of fugitive prose from magazines and anthologies, and excluding prose found in Ginsberg's books of poems, this is more an omnium-gatherum than a best-of, inviting readers to sort through and make their own lists. Ginsberg (1926-1997) had begun to organize what would become this book when he died; editor Morgan, who took over the process, divides the work by theme into eight sections. "Politics and Prophecies" fittingly opens the collection, giving full vent to Ginsberg's Blakean visions of '60s, '70s and '80s America: these essays both epitomize their times and retain the most interest for most readers now. Other segments address "Drug Culture," "Mindfulness and Spirituality," "Censorship and Sex Laws," "Autobiographical Fragments," Ginsberg's own "Literary Technique" and appreciations of other writers, from Blake and Whitman to Auden and Andy Warhol. Ginsberg's best poems look casual, but the rereader of "Howl" or "Kaddish" may discover complexity, tragedy and form curled up inside their excitable wildness: this is also true sometimes, but hardly always, for these prose pieces. Yet even at their most fragmentary and notational, these paragraphs, essays, lists, declarations and blurbs recall Ginsberg's other virtues: a welcoming energy, an ecstatic drive, a belief in the eternal value of saying, as soon as possible, just what he thought. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A comprehensive, well-organized collection of uneven prose by the late Beat Poet (Journals Mid-Fifties, 1995; Death and Fame, 1999). The essays, articles, and letters here were first printed in magazines like Evergreen Review, Rolling Stone, small presses, religiously affiliated publications or (a score) nowhere at all. Many blurbs and puff pieces of unknowns collected in the Writers section here should not have been reprinted either. But essays on Ginsbergs intellectual love, Walt Whitman, and one of his physical loves, Peter Orlovsky, add much to the literary and biographical worth of the anthology. In the seven other sections, at least two or three works are essential for the Ginsberg freak or anyone researching pre-revolution Amerika of 30 to 50 years ago. In Politics and Prophecies, Ginsberg takes on Vietnam, nukes, Un-American Activities, and most government agencies. He supports the Hells Angels and has the chutzpah to write that to be a junky in America is like having been a Jew in Nazi Germany. And this isn't even in the section devoted to Drug Culture, where, testifying at a Senate hearing, he compares mind- expanding LSD to the ritual taking of peyote. In Mindfulness and Spirituality, the bard lectures in Emersons old pulpit and intones mantras over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Ginsberg outted homosexuality itself, but few will defend the pro-pederasty defense of NAMBLA which appears in the Censorship and Sex Laws section. Admirers of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Blake will most appreciate Literary Technique and the Beat Generation and the following section, especially the essays on the making of Howl and Kaddish. Finally, in Further Applications, Ginsberg proclaims that with John Lennon and Bob Dylan we see that poetry has returned through music back to the human body. Except for historians and fans of the Beats, nothing to howl about. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (February 16, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060192941
• ISBN-13: 978-0060192945
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #883,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, a son of Naomi Ginsberg and lyric poet Louis Ginsberg. In 1956 he published his signal poem, Howl, one of the most widely read and translated poems of the century. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French minister of culture in 1993, and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world, Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Ginsberg, April 26, 2000

By 

"lescaret" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 (Hardcover)

The totality of this book results in a Ginsberg manifesto, delivered in his own unique prose style, and bursting forth with great honesty and impassioned integrity. Invaluable as a document of the times (roughly late 40s thru early 90s), as a sourcebook for things Beat, as a reference source to Ginsbergian Mind Speak, this book is a major addition to Ginsberg's published work. My only criticism is that it is presented topically, not chronologically as nearly all Ginsberg's published work is, but that is a minor point. This book stands with his best and is certainly his most important publication since 'The Fall of America' in 1972, maybe even since 'Kaddish' in the very early 60s.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Collection, October 25, 2004

By 

Matthew C. Borda (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 (Paperback)

It's sad to think the state that America is in right now, with hardly a new voice of reason to combat it. Allen Ginsberg made sense when he wrote and he makes sense now. But has anything changed? In reading what Ginsberg wrote about then and even more recently it seems not so much so. Those who consider themselves in the know might benefit from a new (or renewed) look at this collection.

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't say prose poetry..., November 25, 2005

By 

William Delacroix (Toast, NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 (Paperback)

...but you could say that for the Ginsberg nut, this is a must-have tho not always interesting all the way through. The essay on Whitman is particularly windy, but the above-mentioned line about beard cutting & district attorneys gives an example of Ginsberg at his loony lovegod best.

And there are some paranoid rants, as well as blurry recollections of bad trips & marches & armies of fairies fellating anyone who gets violent w/ war protesters. This book is both spankings & oral sex.