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Allen Ginsberg |
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Follow your inner moonlight;
don't hide the madness. |
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Allen Ginsberg talked about things that other poets couldn’t even mention, things that you don’t talk about around the dinner table, unless your dinner table was in the east village, and it wasn’t really table, as everybody was sitting on the floor.
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with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls” |
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I never thought he was a great poet, but some of his work is so monumental, so genial that it overshadows the less interesting parts, and besides, he was Allen Ginsberg, THE Allen Ginsberg. Isn’t that enough? Do you really have to be a great poet too?
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What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination” |
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Ginsberg was the Picasso of poetry, sprouting with a new voice in the right place at the right time. I never figured out if he was a fruit of those time and place, or maybe it was the right place and time that made it possible for someone like Ginsberg to write the way he did. I guess it is a combination of both.
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Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. " |
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Ginsberg was the gay voice of an intellectually awakened generation, and he was a symbol of both. He was American as any blue and red blooded patriot and as gay as any fat bearded four eyed Jew could ever permit himself to be. The lovely thing is that he seemed to enjoy both on the same level, in the same pride of self recognition that uplifts everyone's spirit.
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America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel." |
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When he wrote from his heart, when he composed those long and winding poems of prophecy and monumental biblical structures of stray words and imagery, he was unstoppable, showing us an inner rhythm that was celebrated in that era, a modernist uncertain dash forward, mellowed only by love and fearing only untimely decay. |
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angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night." |
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Ginsberg, true to his origins, was indeed a prophet, but the kind of prophet who preaches while he prays, who writes a silent conversation with the gods while shouting the results to the readers, not bible bashing but beat bashing, and what a beat that beat had. It might have been called the beat generation because they were 'tired' but his inner energy was sufficient for all the people who read him to bask in, it was screaming in pleasure his sermons of newly found truth. |
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The bum's as holy as the seraphim!
the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is
holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! |
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I am sure it was not easy being Ginsberg, especially before Ginsberg became THE Ginsberg, but then again, it is never easy for anyone to be himself, and that is what I think his secret was, the appeal of someone who knows, who understands, but unlike you can put all of these ideas and beliefs into extremely well structured words and poems. |
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The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction." |
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He was not THE Ginsberg for nothing, and I salute him for that. For being what he was, for letting us peak into who he was, and most of all for doing it in such a marvelous way. |
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America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing." |
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