Word: shroud
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ginsberg, it seems, has reached the logical--and just plain gross--culmination of that legacy with the publication of his latest collection of poems, White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985. The book has attracted attention as Ginsberg's "dirtiest" collection, and it is a well-deserved reputation...
Several poems in White Shroud are devoted to lengthy, graphic, and clinical descriptions of homosexual intercourse. Some of these poems were first published in the NAMBLA [North American Man-Boy Love Association] Journal. In poems like "Love Comes," the absolute explicitness robs sex of its mystery, thereby lessening the shock value and eliminating most of the eroticism...
While the gay imagery in White Shroud may account for the book's notoriety, it does not account for the book's significance. Ginsberg presents an accessible and fascinating collection of new verse that is worth reading, at the very least because it is a historical document of what Ginsberg terms the "post-beat modernist" generation...
Ginsberg is becoming very "post"; he is 60 years old, and his poems reflect a morbid fear of old age. He also fears his own obselescence. Ginsberg previously penned two different poems entitled "Don't Grow Old," and that is the overriding theme in White Shroud. "I can't get it up/...Growing old in my heaven," he writes in "Airplane Blues." He is clearly self-conscious in his poems, for he is both old enough and important enough to refer to himself several times. Increasingly, Ginsberg's poetry is rooted in his past, as he alludes to "Howl," "Aunt...
...White Shroud," a book about "sex, politics, meditation, and problems with advancing old age, is a natural progression from what Walt Whitman asked for in American poets--candor," Ginsberg said...