Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Monday, July 11, 2011
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
happy birthday allen
(Not my writing, credited below)
It's the birthday of Allen Ginsberg, (books by this author) born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). His father was a schoolteacher and occasional poet. His mother was a Russian immigrant and devoted Marxist. She was in and out of psychiatric institutions all through out his childhood and had to undergo electric shock treatments and a lobotomy. Ginsberg went to Columbia University on a small scholarship and there he began consorting with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs. After college, he got a job in marketing research, wore a business suit everyday, and had on office on the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building. He says he started writing there, and that there he learned about careful manipulation of words.
He moved to San Francisco and became friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Ginsburg's first major work, Howl.
By his 30s, he was prematurely bald with a ring of hair on the fringe of his head and thick long black beard streaked with gray. He wore black rimmed classes and his Buddha belly was one of his most distinguishing features.
Ginsburg's reading of Howl was reputed to have "turned the 1950s into the 1960s overnight." It began:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
The death of his mother affected Ginsburg deeply and for a long time. He wrote his poem "Kaddish" for her, which began:
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk
on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night,
talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles
blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three years after —
He once said, "There's no bar to us proclaiming our delight and that's the strength of poetry."
It's the birthday of Allen Ginsberg, (books by this author) born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). His father was a schoolteacher and occasional poet. His mother was a Russian immigrant and devoted Marxist. She was in and out of psychiatric institutions all through out his childhood and had to undergo electric shock treatments and a lobotomy. Ginsberg went to Columbia University on a small scholarship and there he began consorting with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs. After college, he got a job in marketing research, wore a business suit everyday, and had on office on the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building. He says he started writing there, and that there he learned about careful manipulation of words.
He moved to San Francisco and became friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Ginsburg's first major work, Howl.
By his 30s, he was prematurely bald with a ring of hair on the fringe of his head and thick long black beard streaked with gray. He wore black rimmed classes and his Buddha belly was one of his most distinguishing features.
Ginsburg's reading of Howl was reputed to have "turned the 1950s into the 1960s overnight." It began:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
The death of his mother affected Ginsburg deeply and for a long time. He wrote his poem "Kaddish" for her, which began:
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk
on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night,
talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles
blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three years after —
He once said, "There's no bar to us proclaiming our delight and that's the strength of poetry."
(The preceding is from The Writer's Almanac 6.3.08)
Thank you, Ginsberg, for your work and co-founding the Naropa Institute (Naropa University).
Friday, March 21, 2008
Saturday, August 18, 2007
spare some change?
Autumn in Small Cities
The air was cooler today.
Reminds me that change comes without trying.
Thinking back on the bum
Over on 16th & California
Boldly begging for change of her own.
Did she once feel like me?
When she was young
Sweet-smelling sassafras?
© 2006 Melissa I. Minicozzi
-------------------------------------------------------------
We change over time, even when it is not seen or noticed by ourselves or others. How do we benchmark changes in ourselves? Or do we change so gradually that it is imperceptible? How do we perpetuate or hinder change? How do we present how we have changed to the world? Do they have to be within awareness for such changes to exist fully? Do we have some sort of need to have change acknowledged by others? Is it inevitable but uncontrollable? Or do we have the reins of some but not other changes that occur? Do we refuse to change even when our repeated patterns are not working?
How am I changing? How do I want to continue changing? What do I want to change now?
The air was cooler today.
Reminds me that change comes without trying.
Thinking back on the bum
Over on 16th & California
Boldly begging for change of her own.
Did she once feel like me?
When she was young
Sweet-smelling sassafras?
© 2006 Melissa I. Minicozzi
-------------------------------------------------------------
We change over time, even when it is not seen or noticed by ourselves or others. How do we benchmark changes in ourselves? Or do we change so gradually that it is imperceptible? How do we perpetuate or hinder change? How do we present how we have changed to the world? Do they have to be within awareness for such changes to exist fully? Do we have some sort of need to have change acknowledged by others? Is it inevitable but uncontrollable? Or do we have the reins of some but not other changes that occur? Do we refuse to change even when our repeated patterns are not working?
How am I changing? How do I want to continue changing? What do I want to change now?
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