“... 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 ...”

“... the picture-postcard commentary he has always been asked to provide. There was no Robert Frost or Allen Ginsberg in space, but we have Buzz: ‘Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for the wars we ...”

“... an incredibly sophisticated culture could have produced a figure like Ganesh,’ Allen Ginsberg once said) made far less sense to him than the Renaissance and Enlightenment realism which, in a weirdly distorted form, has shaped the BJP as well as its secretive cultural-militant wing, the RSS. The BJP’s violence towards Islam emanates ...”

“... He has made short films interpreting recent American poems. He did his best to impersonate Allen Ginsberg in the well-intentioned but misshapen Howl. He has just finished writing, directing and starring in The Broken Tower, an apparently straightforward biopic about Hart Crane. ‘I was really taken with his life,’ Franco says. ‘He had the ...”

“... The egalitarian spectacle became a press sensation, and the city’s dissident intelligentsia – Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, I.F. Stone – flocked to the Theresa’s ballroom, with Henri Cartier-Bresson on hand to capture it all. Other Third World leaders in New York that week could only complain of stolen limelight. Kwame Nkrumah, who had worked in ...”

“... it from Futurist manifestos of fifty years before is its tone of lumpen disgruntlement. Allen Ginsberg, quoted in one of Butler’s epigraphs, says: ‘there is nothing to be learned from history any more. We’re in science fiction now.’ This remark, differing only in vocabulary from claims made early in this century for the new machine ...”

“... out to be just such an epic use, and the poem ends:I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,Allen Ginsberg. I have done this thing,I and the other women this exceptionalact with the exceptional heroic body,this giving birth, this glistening verb,and I am putting my proud American boastright here with the others.This works perfectly well as satire ...”

“... who invited them to Kesey’s La Honda ranch for a party that has since, in accounts by Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg and others, achieved mythic status. La Honda, with its gang of fancy-dress hippies, was ‘one of the strangest scenes in all Christendom – a wild clanging on tin instruments on a redwood hillside, loons playing flutes in the darkness, mikes ...”

“... first two. (But then she will surprise, as she should, by praising Donald Davie, or attending to Allen Ginsberg.) If the lyric poem is self-contained and in some sense self-adjusting, then it follows that poets tear this membrane when they press too hard. Such forcing can be almost anything; it will be defined post hoc, by the size of the rent it has ...”

“... composed ‘So What’, on Kind of Blue, inspired by Hopper’s repeated use of the phrase), with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky and Warhol and Lichtenstein. He bought paintings that became a major Pop Art collection and took photographs that were published by glossy art and fashion magazines. He had a good eye and a sense of what was going to ...”

“... Television Was a Baby Crawling towards That Deathchamber.’ These words are by Allen Ginsberg, writing in 1961, the title of a poem anathematising America. ‘It is here, the long Awaited bleap-blast light that Speaks one red tongue like Politician.’ The most chilling word in Ginsberg’s title strikes me as ‘That ...”

“... as the ‘godfather of the Beats’, a title he disdained, though he chaired the occasion on which Allen Ginsberg first read ‘Howl’ (which Kenneth incidentally called ‘the confession of faith of a generation’), and recognised the relevance of such poets to their time in a way few other observers did in the beginning. That the works of ...”

“... Communist Party allegedly referred to such techniques as hsi nao, ‘washing the brain’.In 1951, Allen Dulles, a former OSS officer, was appointed the CIA’s deputy director for plans. Dulles, who was convinced that the future would belong to the world power that could master the new ‘brainwashing’ technologies, was instrumental in shifting the ...”

“... When Allen Ginsberg’s Beat vision-quest came through England in the spring of 1965, I was appointed by this famous renegade minstrel to set down his legend for the Paris Review. Ginsberg’s last words in our interview came in response to an inquiry about the role of command in the compositional process ...”