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Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
Philip Glass is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimalism, being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting layers. Glass describes himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures", which he has helped to evolve stylistically.
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon.
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was one of the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers.
Ron Kurtenbach is a Lincoln, Nebraska Communist born January 6, 1943. A community activist, he is one of the original group which founded local Lincoln radio station KZUM and the local grocery co-op Open Harvest. He is also one of the group which founded the short-lived Lincoln Communist music venue, The Red and Black Café, in the early 1990s, a spin-off to another talk program he produced with ex-wife Sally Herrin, noted Lincoln author and teacher, and a number of others called "Zero Street". Many Lincoln bands, including Plastik Trumpet and Hour Slave played at the Red and Black.
Richard Ghormley Eberhart was an American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total. "Richard Eberhart emerged out of the 1930s as a modern stylist with romantic sensibilities." He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems, 1930–1965 and the 1977 National Book Award for Poetry for Collected Poems, 1930–1976. He was the grandfather of Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Ben Cherington.
Hydrogen Jukebox is a 1990 chamber opera featuring the music of Philip Glass and the work of beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Its name is taken from a phrase coined by Ginsberg, from his 1955 poem Howl.
Harry Everett Smith was an American polymath, who was credited variously as an artist, experimental filmmaker, bohemian, mystic, record collector, hoarder, student of anthropology and a Neo-Gnostic bishop.
Lucien Stryk was an American poet, translator of Buddhist literature and Zen poetry, and former English professor at Northern Illinois University (NIU).
Charles Plymell is a poet, novelist, and small press publisher. Plymell has been published widely, collaborated with, and published many poets, writers, and artists, including principals of the Beat Generation.
Solo Piano (1989) is an album of piano music composed and performed by Philip Glass. It was produced by Kurt Munkacsi.
The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971 is a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg, published by City Lights Bookstore in 1973, for which Ginsberg shared the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry. It is characterized by a prophetic tone inspired by William Blake and Walt Whitman, as well as an objective view characterized by William Carlos Williams. The content is more overtly political than most of his previous poetry with many of the poems about Ginsberg's condemnation of America's actions in Vietnam. Current events such as the Moon Landing and the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the death of Che Guevara, and personal events such as the death of Ginsberg's friend and former lover Neal Cassady are also topics. Many of the poems were initially composed on an Uher Tape recorder, purchased by Ginsberg with the help of Bob Dylan.
Howl and Other Poems is a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published November 1, 1956. It contains Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl", which is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as "A Supermarket in California", "Transcription of Organ Music", "Sunflower Sutra", "America", "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound", and some of his earlier works. For printing the collection, the publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another well-known poet, was arrested and charged with obscenity. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty of the obscenity charge, and 5,000 more copies of the text were printed to meet the public demand, which had risen in response to the publicity surrounding the trial. Howl and Other Poems contains two of the most well-known poems from the Beat Generation, "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California", which have been reprinted in other collections, including the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
"Three-Five-Zero-Zero" is an anti-war song, from the 1967 musical Hair, consisting of a montage of words and phrases similar to those of the 1966 Allen Ginsberg poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra". In the song, the phrases are combined to create images of the violence of military combat and suffering of the Vietnam War. In its first line, for instance, "Ripped open by metal explosion" is followed by "Caught in barbed wire/Fireball/Bullet shock".
"The War Is Over" is an anti-war song by Phil Ochs, an American protest singer in the 1960s and early 1970s. Ochs was famous for harshly criticizing the Vietnam War and the American military-industrial establishment. The song, which was originally released on Tape from California (1968), has been described as "one of the most potent antiwar songs of the 1960s".
Jim Cohn is a poet, poetry activist, and spoken word artist in the United States. He was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1953. Early poetics and musical influences include Bob Dylan, the subject of a now lost audiotaped for a class project completed in his senior year at Shaker Heights High School, where he also co-captained the varsity football team. He received a BA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in English (1976) and a Certificate of Poetics (1980) from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he was a teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg. He received his M.S. Ed. in English and Deaf Education from the University of Rochester and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in 1986. For over two decades, he worked in the field of disability services, taking a siddha approach as a model of Disability Services and Studies practice and scholarship. He believed that the social sciences should be redefined thematically within the United States into a form of American Karmic Studies.
Rolf Potts is an American travel writer, essayist, podcaster, and author. He has written five books, including Vagabonding, Marco Polo Didn't Go There, Souvenir, and The Vagabond's Way. The lifestyle philosophies he outlined in Vagabonding are considered to have been a key influence on the digital nomad movement.
"September on Jessore Road" is a poem by American poet and activist Allen Ginsberg, inspired by the plight of the East Bengali refugees from the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Ginsberg wrote it after visiting the refugee camps along the Jessore Road in West Bengal in India. The poem documents the sickness and squalor he witnessed there and attacks the United States government's indifference to the humanitarian crisis. It was first published in The New York Times on November 14, 1971. Further to topical songs by George Harrison and Joan Baez, the poem helped ensure that the Bangladesh crisis became a key issue for the youth protest movement around the world.
References
- Miller, Scott. Let the Sun Shine In: The Genius of Hair (Heinemann, 2003) ISBN 0-325-00556-7
