Nice Fish

January 9, 2017
Beat biographer Morgan’s (The Beats Abroad) transcript of Ginsberg’s university lectures, given first at Naropa Institute in 1977 and later at Brooklyn College, are a gold mine for anyone interested in beat literature. Ginsberg discusses William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, and himself, but Jack Kerouac is the soul of the book, portrayed throughout with admiration and affection, if not always reverence. Citing their influences in everything from jazz to Dostoyevsky, Ginsberg depicts the beats not as criminals, addicts, or delinquents but as restless, beatific seekers after spiritual truth. Covering mainly the years between 1947 and 1957, Ginsberg’s critical technique is to offer a catalogue of breakthroughs, epiphanies, and favorite passages or “big sentences,” interspersed with gossipy anecdotes and revelatory asides. Ginsberg reads and thinks like a poet; interested in language and style, he abandons narrative to leap from image to image, yoking grandiloquent statements with pungent summations and deadpan remarks. Fans of the period will embrace Ginsberg’s raconteur style and insider knowledge about his friends and their achievements; those who need a more comprehensive or linear grounding in beat literature might start with another of Morgan’s works.

February 1, 2017
The Beat generation, as seen by its central figure.During a 20-year teaching career, acclaimed poet Ginsberg (Wait Till I'm Dead: Uncollected Poems, 2016, etc.) developed a syllabus for a course on the Beats, first offered at the Naropa Institute in Colorado, known as The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and later at Brooklyn College. Ginsberg's ambitious aim, writes Morgan (The Beats Abroad: A Global Guide to the Beat Generation, 2016, etc.), the poet's biographer and prolific chronicler of the Beats, was to convey a comprehensive literary, spiritual, and intellectual history of a growing and evolving circle of friends as well as to offer his own testimony as witness to the movement he helped create. Authoritatively edited by Morgan from course material and tapes, the syllabus considers writers chronologically, focusing on different works, or periods of development, in each class. Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso earn the most attention, with Neal Cassady, Diane di Prima, Bob Dylan, and Gary Snyder, among others, also brought in for consideration. While many classes were as free-wheeling, digressive, and opinionated as anyone might expect from Ginsberg, most offered close readings, literary background, candid recollections, and cogent analyses, highlighting both craft and literary influence. Jazz, he contends, inflected the "phrasings, rhythms, and patterns" of Kerouac's prose, as did the sound of "melancholy violins." Corso assiduously read Spenser and Milton. Of his own poetry, Ginsberg cites the influence of 18th-century British poet Christopher Smart, William Carlos Williams, Blake, Whitman, Shelley, and Yeats on his iconic "Howl," a poem, he says, "written for the people who read Time magazine as well as for the bohemian left." Ginsberg is generous in his portrayals, even of Kerouac's reactionary views in his old age and Burroughs' combative eccentricities (he was "dedicated totally and sacramentally" to exploring his own consciousness). A rich sourcebook for literary historians and fans of the passionate, iconoclastic Beats.

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December 1, 2016

In summer 1977, Ginsberg thought it was time for a literary history of what he, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and others had accomplished and designed a course he taught five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College. Compiled and edited by renowned Beat scholar Morgan, this book presents those lectures, complete with notes. The portrait of a generation.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2017

Jack Kerouac may have coined the term Beat Generation, but it was Ginsberg's indefatigable energy that shaped and sustained one of the most significant movements in American literature. In 1977, Ginsberg designed a course on the history of the Beat Generation, which he taught several times between then and 1994 at the Naropa Institute and Brooklyn College. Working from transcripts of nearly 100 taped lectures, Morgan, a leading authority on Ginsberg and author of numerous books on the Beat Generation, has done a superb job organizing and editing the material, while preserving the poet's voice and lecture style. Following Ginsberg's own emphasis, Morgan's selection focuses on the core New York City group: Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Ginsberg himself. Minor figures, including Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, and John Clellon Holmes, are covered to a lesser degree. The arrangement is more or less chronological as Ginsberg celebrates the lives and works of his literary brothers beginning with their early meetings in the 1940s. VERDICT Along with Morgan's earlier work, The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, this firsthand account from the movement's chief spokesman will be essential reading for anyone interested in the subject. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/16; "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/17, p. 23.]--William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.