“... Naropa is a scam, really. They give students little soundbites of ‘classes’ every week … Allen [Ginsberg] gave the place a humour and warmth in the summer. He could chant and carry on because he wasn’t taking himself seriously but ______. At a certain age we women are supposed to stop wearing blue jeans or long ...”

“... a means of liberating the imagination from conscious restraints. ‘That was the first time,’ Allen Ginsberg told Kerouac on completing Howl, ‘that I really sat down to blow.’ Kleinzahler, on the other hand, points up the disciplined nature of the relationships underlying jazz. The bass and drums are not about to fly (as the line break initially ...”

“... 1967, at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Surrounded by poets – Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allen Ginsberg, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rafael Alberti, John Berryman, Charles Tomlinson, Stephen Spender – we felt en famille. Paz and I and our wives drove to Assisi to see Giotto’s frescos, wandered about the Chiostro dei Morti, and climbed to the Eremo ...”

“... Travels over Feeling, the 15-year-old Russell is already referring to Walt Whitman, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg (prefiguring later, more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over Feeling, to ...”

“... Fifties, when he sat in coffee shops and dyke bars, Horn and Hardart’s, talking at Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac with feverish intensity, disconnected hipsters admired the vigour of their discourse. ‘Dig that aggression!’ Tony Torres goes out in baroque style, crucified inside a TV dish, ‘splayed and mounted like a butterfly’ by a Teamsters ...”

“... range. It risks toppling over into the Children of Albion vacuity which mars the work of Allen Ginsberg: as a result, it raises interesting questions about the role of Romanticism in Fisher’s work. In a poem from 1966-7, called ‘The Memorial Fountain’, Fisher dispels the Romantic aura which the spontaneous overflow of a fountain can still ...”

“... at the Sorbonne; Sontag is unfavourably impressed with her high-pitched voice. Sontag visits Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky in their hotel on rue Gît-le-Coeur; years later she will berate herself for namedropping the connection (‘how many times did I talk about Allen Ginsberg last ...”

“... 1960s, when Americans were desensitised by blue jeans with flag pockets and flag-printed T-shirts. Allen Ginsberg – always good for political theatre – turned the Star-Spangled Banner into a top hat and perched it on his bushy head. Somehow, over the last forty years, Americans have managed to reconcile their twin idols: free enterprise and the ...”

“... Holly’s casual attitude towards sex raised eyebrows in 1958. But then this was the time when Allen Ginsberg published Howl, which seems closer to the beast that Connolly was describing than does any fictional creation of Capote’s. If Capote had stopped here, rather than one book later, his claim on our attention would by now have worn thin. But ...”

“... of India’s intelligence agency came by the house to inquire about the book I was writing. Allen Ginsberg, who had lived for seven months in the city in 1962, remained in many minds an obvious CIA spy. Though the walls had collapsed on Soviet Communism, in Calcutta Marxist orthodoxies stood firm over the city’s derelict institutions and ...”

“... the 1974 National Book Award for poetry, alongside collections by Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker and Allen Ginsberg. Rich and Ginsberg were awarded the prize jointly, but sticking to an agreement between the three women nominees, Rich invited Lorde to join her onstage, where she read from their co-authored statement ...”

“... Splicing, sorting and retyping binges carried out by willing accomplices – Sinclair Beiles, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso – brought order to the mass of nightmare scripts left in cupboards and drawers. Suitcases were abandoned when Burroughs flitted. Famous for his greyscale anonymity, Burroughs was the invisible man time-trapped in ...”

“... thing, but this is obviously nonsense: the wonderful versions of classics such as ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘On the Trail of the Buffalo’, ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ performed during his 1988 concerts powerfully illustrated the extent to which his involvement in folk music has only deepened. Since this set is the first in a projected series of volumes, and ...”

“... Berkeley Poetry Conference where she would have heard Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg, among many others. She thought of herself, I think, as a poet almost as much as a novelist. When she came to use the landscape and culture of the US in Tripticks, she drew on her own experiences and the techniques of the poets and of writers ...”

“... Colin Powell taking time off from his Gulf War command for a brief seminar on the early work of Allen Ginsberg, or officers in Nato’s Balkan forces engaging in a philosophical correspondence with Slavoj Žižek. But Napoleon was not the only French officer of his day to devote himself to literature. As the historian Dena Goodman has observed, the ...”