Word: ginsberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Chief organizer of the protest was Folk Singer Joan Baez, who sent a letter to 350 onetime activists and celebrities asking them to sign the ad. Among the 84 who did: Daniel Berrigan, Cesar Chavez, Allen Ginsberg, I.F. Stone, William Styron. Others, however, turned down Baez on the grounds that they suspected the accuracy of the reporting out of Viet Nam or that they still could not forgive the U.S. for its role in the war. Jane Fonda would not sign even after a personal appeal from Baez. William Kunstler, perennial attorney for underdog litigants reportedly explained his refusal...
Still, who could say with certitude that Nixon did not look like a Chief Executive and that Kennedy did, or vice versa? Is a President clean-cut? Ulysses S. Grant would have fit right in at an Allen Ginsberg poetry reading. Trim? Honest Grover Cleveland's dreadnought corpulence might have served as a model for Thomas Nast's potbellied crooks. Is the presidential face august, humane, agleam with probity? John Adams might have been cast as Scrooge or a consecrated bookkeeper. John Quincy Adams looked incipiently satanic. James Monroe's bug-eyed visage might have...
Sadly, as the editors of the 1940s, '50s and '60s point out, the literary gadflies have lost much of their sting. The underground has become fashionable: everybody has joined the avant-garde and Allen Ginsberg has joined academe. Lacking the diehard convictions of their elders, most of the 1,500 little magazines now being published print anything and wind up sounding the same. "The multiplication of poets sort of leaves my mind blank," says Poet Karl Shapiro, former editor of Poetry. In many ways this collection of essays is a retrospective; editors like Robie Macauley, formerly...
...Fourth floor ... children's wear ... handbags ... maternity ... pianos ... Ginsberg in the tearoom." What's this? Howling Allen Ginsberg, aging (52) poet-priest of'50s beat and '60s yippiedom reading his work in a Brooklyn department store? "Why not?" replies Ginsberg, as he prepares to recite such poems as Dope Fiend Blues, Punk Rock and Plutonian Ode. His familiar curl-fringed bald pate and face set off by silver granny glasses, he explains: "I get a lot more older people now, especially little old Jewish ladies. But I like a varied audience-little old ladies, homosexuals, weirdos...
Nostalgia presents a single poetic vision and a choir of translators. They are not of equal worth. Robert Bly makes Voznesensky sound like Robert Bly, all curt stanzas and quick vignettes. Ginsberg jettisons the author's rhymes for some ungainly free verse. The best work is the least obtrusive: working with Voznesensky's supple and difficult lines, Max Hayward, Vera Dunham and William Jay Smith have given the Russian, both man and language, a new voice...