Illuminated Poems [Paperback]

Allen Ginsberg (Author), Eric Drooker (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 2006

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of "Howl," Illuminated Poems celebrates the collaboration of two visionaries of different generations: Allen Ginsberg, the quintessential Beat and America's best-known poet, and Eric Drooker, the New Yorker cover artist whose provocative, apocalyptic images add a new dimension and urgency to Ginsberg's poems. Illuminated Poems contains two works only available in this volume, an introduction by Ginsberg, and thirty-four poems from 1948 through the present day, including the poem "Howl" in its entirety. Perhaps the single poem that captures the anguish and aspirations of the Beat Generation, "Howl" was originally published fifty years ago and is one of the most widely read poems of the twentieth century.

Editorial Reviews

Review

America Again
Confession Is Dream For The Soul
An Eastern Ballad
The Eye Altering Alters All
In Death, Cannot Reach What Is Most Near
A Mad Gleam
Manhattan Thirties Flash
Rock Song
Tears
War Profit Litany
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Author

Introduction:

Drooker's Illuminations 

by Allen Ginsberg

I first glimpsed Eric Drooker's odd name on posters pasted on fire-alarm sides, construction walls checkered with advertisements, & lamppost junction boxes in the vortex of Lower East Side Avenues leading to Tompkins Square Park, where radical social dislocation mixed homeless plastic tents with Wigstock transvestite dress-up anniversaries, Rastas sitting on benches sharing spliff, kids with purple Mohawks, rings in their noses ears eyebrows and bellybuttons, adorable or nasty skinheads, wives with dogs & husbands with children strolling past jobless outcasts, garbage, and a bandshell used weekly for folk-grunge concerts, anti-war rallies, squatters' rights protests, shelter for blanket-wrapped junkies & winos and political thunder music by Missing Foundation, commune-rockers whose logo, an overturned champagne glass with slogan "The Party's Over," was spray-painted on sidewalks, apartments, brownstone and brick walled streets.
      Eric Drooker's numerous block-print-like posters announced much local action, especially squatters' struggles and various mayoral-police attempts to destroy the bandshell & close the Park at night, driving the homeless into notoriously violence-corrupted city shelters. Tompkins Park had a long history of political protest going back before Civil War anti-draft mob violence, memorialized as ". . . a mixed surf of muffled sound, the atheist roar of riot," in Herman Melville's The Housetop: A Night Piece (July 1863).
      I began collecting Drooker's posters soon after overcoming shock, seeing in contemporary images the same dangerous class conflict I'd remembered from childhood, pre-Hitler block print wordless novels by Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. Ward's images of the solitary artist dwarfed by the canyons of a Wall Street Megalopolis lay shadowed behind my own vision of Moloch. What "shocked" me in Drooker's scratchboard prints was his graphic illustration of economic crisis similar to Weimar-American 1930's Depressions.
      In our own era, as one Wall Street stockbroker noted, "Reagan put the nation in hock to the military," with resulting collapse of human values & social stability. Drooker illuminated the widely-noted impoverishment of underclass, "diminishing expectations" of middleclass city dwellers, and transfer of disproportionate shares of common wealth to those already rich. This economic information, including facts of multi-billion savings & loan bankruptcies paid for by federal funds, was reported in neutral tones by newspapers of record but Drooker illustrated the city's infrastructural stress, housing decay, homelessness, garbage-hunger and bitter suffering of marginalized families, Blacks and youth, with such vivid detail that the authoritarian reality horror of our contemporary dog-eat-dog Malthusian technoeconomic class-war became immediately visible.
      ". . . It is a question of genuine values, human worth, trustworthiness," Thomas Mann commented, introducing Frans Masereel's novel in woodcuts Passionate Journey. Drooker spent his childhood on East 14th Street & Avenue B, exploring the city early, observing "shopping bag ladies, stretch-cadillacs, screaming unshaven men, junkies nodding, Third Avenue prostitutes looking at themselves in rearview mirrors of parked cars." His maternal grandparents were 1930's socialists, his mother taught in the neighborhood's PS 19, on 11th Street & First Avenue, his father, white-collar computer programmer, tripped him to art museums all over city.
      1970's he attended Henry Street Settlement art classes, graduated from Cooper Union, moved permanently to East 10th Street close to Tompkins Park. Following family tradition he organized rent strikes, supported local squats and tenant organizing against police brutality. By 1980's working as freelance artist for many leftist groups, with reputation as radical street art-provocateur, he was arrested and thrown in District of Columbia jail for postering. In "denial" of economic crisis, city bureaucrats cracked down on Punk and political postering as a "public nuisance." Xeroxed flyers were considered "illegal graffiti."
      By 1990's observant Op-ed editors at The New York Times invited him to contribute art for their pages, as did The Nation, Village Voice and Newsweek. Under a new post-modern regime at The New Yorker, he published many illustrations, even covers, including a celebrated image of two bums huddled round a bright garbage-can fire as big snowflakes fell under the Brooklyn Bridge. His novel in pictures, Flood!, with its fantastic social dreams, won an American Book Award.
      Our collaboration volume began as byproduct of an illustration of my poem The Lion For Real for his St. Mark's Poetry Project New Year's Day 1993 Benefit poster.
      As I'd followed his work over a decade, I was flattered that so radical an artist of later generations found the body of my poetry still relevant, even inspiring. Our paths crossed often, we took part in various political rallies and poetical-musical entertainments, the idea of a sizable volume of illustrated poem-pictures rose. Eric Drooker himself did all the work choosing texts (thankfully including many odd lesser-known scriblings) and labored several years to complete these Illuminated Poems.

- Allen Ginsberg, Lower East Side, Manhattan, 12/28/95

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Running Press; 2nd edition (September 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560259345
• ISBN-13: 978-1560259343
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,175,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars When the Light Appears..., February 6, 2001

By 

www.zverina.com (Carver Country) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Illuminated Poems (Paperback)

In the tradition of William Blake, sumptuous paintings and drawings complement rather than describe the poems. Chosen by Drooker, the selections reflect the painter's political activism, but "Howl," "Sunflower Sutra," and "On Neal's Ashes" all are here, as are other lesser-known poems such as "When the Light Appears," which is featured on the Cornershop album When I Was Born for the 7th Time.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow!, February 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Illuminated Poems (Hardcover)

This "illuminated" book of several of Ginsberg's provocative poems is great. I teach Ginsberg, often to undergraduates in college, and students often like a visual element in lecture. This is the text, to expand your understanding of both Ginsberg's world and our own.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The mind and the eyes will never work the same., January 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Illuminated Poems (Hardcover)

This book is not only a mind opener, but also an eye opener. The classic Allen Ginsberg poems are felt through another channel that is Drooker's eye catching drawings. Howl is one of my favorite poem and drawing combo where a depiction of a man injecting himself with a drug has fire rising from his back and long beast-like flesh and hair. If you like poetry and art this is one book that combinds both in matrimony.