Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsbergwas an American poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression and was known as embodying various aspects of this counterculture, such as his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy and openness to Eastern religions. He was one of many influential American writers of his time known as the Beat Generation, which included famous writers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth3 June 1926
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.
I want to be a saint, a real saint while I am young, for there is so much work to do.
Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.
The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.
The suffering itself is not so bad; it's the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.
I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs -- when I was 17 -- that I realized I was talking through an empty skull, ... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.
I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... And think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries... Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences ...
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
I've got enough money to live where I want, but I don't want to move.Go out and have sexual adventures in Burma.
The desire to have power dissolves. The desire to dominate people for love dissolves. On the other hand, it's a relief to realize you can let go.
The combination of drugs, homosexuality, some good prose recited on screen. . . . In the sweat lodge ceremony we went through, did you get any glimpse of the Ugly Spirit, what that was historically or biographically?
The first person who really showed me the ugly spirit was Brion Gysin. "The ugly spirit shot Joan because . . ." and I never found out why. This Brion wrote out on a piece of paper in a sort of trance state.
To get on screen with the Talking Asshole, quite a feat. And it's certainly going to be a cult film that people will be seeing.
I like the image of The Old Man and the Sea, of striving and succeeding but finding that the success was ghost success. In other words, in the long run, after a certain age, the motives for success, pride or oppressing people or getting power.