The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg
by Eliot Katz
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Jan 01 2016 | Archive Date May 05 2016
Description
Allen Ginsberg was one of the most politically engaged writers of his era, with a widespread social and cultural impact that was rare for a poet of his or any generation. In his upcoming book, Eliot Katz takes a readable, scholarly look at Ginsberg’s most influential poetry and explores the varied and inventive ways that he turned his political ideas and perceptions into powerful poetry. While there have been a number of important, previous biographies of Allen Ginsberg and some excellent recent books and essays of literary criticism examining his poems, Katz’s book will be the first full-length study focusing primarily on the question of how Ginsberg’s writing works as political poetry and on his extraordinary influence on political culture over the ensuing decades. As an anthologized poet and longtime social-justice activist himself, as well as a friend of Ginsberg’s who worked with him on a number of poetry and activist projects, Katz brings a unique personal, political, and literary perspective to this project, which we hope will be valuable to students and scholars studying Ginsberg’s poems in college classrooms, as well as to general poetry readers and writers interested in Ginsberg’s work.
Advance Praise
The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg is an inspired work about one very-celebrated poet and political activist by another remarkable poet and activist, Eliot Katz. It is a serious work about the politics and social commitment behind much of Ginsberg’s writings and is long overdue. In this perfectly researched and immensely readable book, Katz has tackled this important aspect of Ginsberg’s work and reminds peopled in this apathetic and polarized world, that raising our voices and becoming involved can make a difference. Ginsberg never shied away from addressing issues head-on and Katz’s book makes his timeless ideas shine through with crystalline brilliance.
- BILL MORGAN, author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg
The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg is the most engaging and rigorous analysis of Ginsberg’s political poetry yet attempted. We find in these pages the astuteness of a literary critic, the contextualization of a social historian, the knowledge of a veteran political activist, the insights of a memoirist, and the aesthetic understanding of a poet. Eliot Katz wears all these hats simultaneously, and the finished product is a pleasure to read. The major strength of the work is its multidisciplinary approach. It will appeal to people interested in literary criticism, Beat poetry, American poetry, political literature, political science, and sociology. I will certainly use this book as a required text in my Beat Generation course.
KURT HEMMER, author of The Encyclopedia of Beat Literature
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780993409905 |
| PRICE | $28.00 (USD) |
Links
Average rating from 4 members
Featured Reviews
Joseph S, Reviewer
The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg by Eliot Katz is a look at Ginsberg’s writing as a reflection on his politics and society. Katz is the author of seven books of poetry His first full-length poetry book, Space and Other Poems for Love, Laughs, and Social Transformation was published in 1990, with introductions by Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka, and a front cover drawing by Leon Golub. Katz is also the author of two prose e-books, Three Radical Poets: Tributes to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Adrienne Rich (2013) and The Moonlight of Home and Other Stories of Truth and Fiction (2013).
Katz is a poet that knew Ginsberg and worked with him. From my reading, Katz’s primary thesis is that unlike many of the yuppies and radicals Ginsberg never mellowed out in his opinions and remained a liberal voice for social justice throughout his life. He remained someone who spoke the truth about things that were not spoken of. There is little doubt of his leftward lean. He lived through an era where elected left-wing governments were overthrown by the United States. It was also an era that saw Eisenhower sign an executive order firing all gay government employees. On local levels bars and clubs were raided by police. Through the examination of The Howl (the annotated edition), Kaddish, and America Katz examines Ginsberg’s politics.
Katz gives insight to the works of Ginsberg providing background to those who might have dismissed the Ginsberg writing as outside the realms of accepted poetry and “social values.” There is also an examination of the writing style with comparisons to Blake and Whitman. Ginsberg was also not just a Beat poet he wrote from the late 1940s until his death in 1997. The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg is more than a biography. It is a study of poetry writing, politics, and the evolution of American society. This book is an excellent look at Ginsberg and the world he saw around him.
