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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nonconformity, his tenderness and outrageous inventions. Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic ...”

“... Bible translators, who make no claim for poetry, have inadvertently written a Beat poem – by Allen Ginsberg or Anne Waldman or Michael McClure – a reminder that the Psalms have set the tone and standard for what an oracular and ecstatic poem should sound like: in English, from the King James to Whitman to ...”

“... similar was noticed by others. ‘He sounds like an intelligent Time magazine talking,’ Allen Ginsberg reported around the same time. Many of those who met Auden in the final decade of his life remarked that he didn’t converse: he held forth. His monologues were hard to interrupt, and they weren’t short. He was, by ...”