New Releases by Allen Ginsberg

"Luminous Dreams" presents a half dozen shorter prose pieces by the late master, drawn from dreams

In the tradition of William Blake, the 18th century English poet whose Illuminated Poems became a literary classic, quintessential Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and illustrator Eric Drooker have joined forces to create a book of 50 poems which span Ginsberg''s creative period from 1948 to the present, enchanced by full color and black-and-white illustrations.

Half a century after "founding" the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg has written this powerful collection of poems that are suffused with a range of emotional colors that gives Ginsberg''s work an elegiac tone.

In these most personal of pages we follow Allen Ginsberg from heady times of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance and sojourns in the Arctic and Mexico, through his 1957 visit to Burroughs in Morocco, and adventures in Paris, Amsterdam, London, and New York. These journals offer an account of Ginsberg''s emotional life: his homosexuality; his love affair with Peter Orlovsky; and the death of his mother.

A glorious collection of some 70 remarkable photographs of Beat writers and personalities taken by Ginsberg between 1953 and 1991 in venues from San Francisco to New York to Tangier. Originally published in Germany and re-edited for the present edition. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

An insider''s history of the "Beat" movement and its personalities through the personal photographs of one of its principle figures. Pointing his camera randomly at the counterculture around him, the poet created a unique visual record of his friends and companions covering a period of almost forty years. His subjects include Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Robert Frank, Paul Bowles, Timothy Leary, dozens of other writers, painters, and friends, and several revealing self-portraits. Beneath each photograph are Ginsberg''s handwritten reminiscences of the circumstances, people, and places relating to the photograph.

Gathered here for the first time is the verse of three decades of one of America''s greatest poets. Collected Poems 1947-1980 includes all writings in the groundbreaking paperback volumes published by City Lights Books, the contents of many rare pamphlets issued by small presses, and, finally, some notable texts hitherto unpublished—one, "Many Loves," withheld "for reasons of prudence and modesty," is an erotic rhapsody dating from the historic "San Francisco Renaissance" era. Allen Ginsberg is, of course, a chief figure in the group of writers (among them Kerouac, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Creeley, Duncan, snyder, and O''Hara) who, in the Bay Area and in New York in the 1950s, began to change the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms by the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse in the tradition of Whitman, Apollinaire, Hart, Crance, Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Within a decade, Ginsberg''s classics "Howl," "Kaddish," and "The Change" would become central in leading American (and international) poetry toward uncensored vernacular, raw candor, the ecstatic, the rhapsodic, and the sincere—al leavened, in Ginsberg''s work, by an attractive and pervasive streak of common sense. These raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation helped catalyze a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry and popular song and speech but also a generation''s view of the world. Even the literary establishment, hostile at first toward the revolutionary new spirit, has recognized Allen Ginsberg''s achievement by honoring him with a National Book Award and membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The uninterrupted energy of Ginsberg''s remarkable career—embodying political activism as well as Buddhist spiritual practice—is clearly revealed in this volume. Seen in the order of composition, the poems reflect on one another; they are not only works but also a work. Here are the familiar anthology staples "Sunflower Sutra" and "To Aunt Rose"; the great antiwar poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra"; "Wales Visitation" (an extraordinary nature ode inspired by psychedelic experiments); the much-translated elegy "September on Jessore Road" and the meditative fantasy "Mind Breaths," followed by the haunting "Father Death Blues" and a later heroic, full-voiced "Plutonian Ode," addressed to "you, Congress and American people." Among the recent poems are the delicate familiar anecdotes in "Don''t Grow Old"; "Birdbrain!," a savage political burlesque; and the new-wave lyric "Capitol Air." Adding to the splendid richness of this book are illustrations by Ginsberg''s artist friends; unusual and illuminating notes to the poems, inimitably prepared by the author; extensive indexes; and prefaces and other materials that accompanied the original publications.

Lançado no outono de 1956, o longo e profético Uivo de Allen Ginsberg foi apreendido pela polícia de San Francisco, sob a acusação de se tratar de uma obra obscena. Depois de um tumultuado julgamento, o poema foi liberado pela Suprema Corte americana e vendeu milhões de exemplares. Desde então se tornou uma fonte indispensável para todos aqueles que pretendem penetrar nas estações do inferno e iluminações de Allen Ginsberg e seus companheiros hipsters, pelas estradas amplas e becos sórdidos da América. Junto com On the road de Jack Kerouac, é Uivo que marca o início do movimento beat. Subitamente transformado numa celebridade na América, Ginsberg prosseguiu produzindo num mesmo ritmo frenético até sua morte, em 1997.

Essays and reviews that trace the changes in Ginsberg''s career and in his poetry

Documentary of the final performance of Allen Ginsbergs̀ 1983 tour of northern Europe. Ginsberg, poet Peter Orlovsky and musician Steven Taylor are shown performing on stage, in interviews with the press, and in everyday scenes around Wuppertal.

Written at a turning point in his life - when he was kicking drugs in Tangiers, writing Naked Lunch, and emerging from the literary underworld, these letters from Burroughs to his young friend Ginsberg are not only an intimate and diaristic account.

A collection of Ginsberg''s poems include meditations, songs, soliloquies, fantasies, elegies, and regional portraits of America.