Allen Ginsberg — страница 6

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his travels in Eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent and other parts of Asia as well as the United States. Included in this latter collection is "Wichita Vortex Sutra," one of the poet’s most accomplished and well known works. It is also one of Ginsberg’s most political works. . . . Kansas! Kansas! Shuddering at last! PERSON appearing in Kansas! angry telephone calls to the University! Police dumbfounded leaning on their radiocar hoods . . . In 1974, Ginsberg helped found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world. Earlier, Ginsberg had met Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist who had recently arrived in the United States. Trungpa taught full acceptance of sensual experience as

the route to enlightenment and "the sacredness of immediate experience, sexual candor, and absence of censoriousnes." These Buddhist believes echo many notions found in various Beat writings. With the end of the war in Vietnam, Ginsberg refocussed his political energies on efforts to expose alleged CIA subsidization of drug trafficking; in attempts to reform American drug laws (including testifying before Congress); and in the antinuclear, environmental and gay liberation movements. He has also spoken out against covert action by the United States government, including domestic harassment of the counterculture. Following a pattern set early in his career, Ginsberg has continued to produce and publish work in many fields. The last two decades have seen numerous books and

small press editions, including Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties (1977), Mind Breaths (1978), Plutonian Ode (1982), Collected Poems (1984), White Shroud (1986), Cosmopolitan Greetings (1994) and Journals Mid-Fifties 1954 – 1958. These last four titles were published by Harper, and mark Ginsberg’s first publishing agreement with a major publisher. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, Ginsberg recorded and occasionally toured with Bob Dylan, John Hammond, Sr. and the Clash. In 1994, Rhino Records released Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs 1949 – 1993, a four-disc compilation of the poet’s many spoken word recordings. This multiset disc and its accompanying booklet serve as a kid of "selected works" of Ginsberg’s spoken word recordings. Other recent CD

releases have included The Lion For Real (1989) and The Ballad of the Skeletons (1996), as well as collaborative efforts with Philip Glass, Hydrogen Jukebox (1993), and the Kronos Quartet, Howl U.S.A. (1996). In 1960’s, Ginsberg appeared in some of the most famous experimental films of the decade, including the well known Pull My Daisy. His longtime interest in the visual arts – especially photography, a practice encouraged by his longtime friend Robert Frank - have now been collected in two books, Photographs (1991) and Snapshot Poetics (1993). Ginsberg’s photographs were also represented in a groundbreaking exhibit organized by the Whitney Museum of Art, "Beat Culture and the New America: 1950 – 1965." Since 1974, Ginsberg has also been a member of the

American Institute of Arts and Letters – the highest official recognition he has received. Ginsberg has also been named a Guggenheim fellow, and is currently a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College. To date, "Howl" has been translated into some 23 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Czech, Hebrew, Macedonian, Norwegian and Polish. The just published Selected Poems, 1947 – 1995, chosen by Ginsberg from throughout his long career, collects many of the poet’s well known works – and in the words of Ginsberg, "isolates & points attention to work less known, more subtle, rhetorically wild, beyond ‘Beat Generation’ literary stereotypes." Online Source