Alphabe Thursday G is for Allen Ginsberg

Another notable street walker was the writer, Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997).  He began walking and writing poetry in San Francisco in the 1950s.  It was in New York with the Beats, while the white middle class were leaving the city for the suburbs, when the passionate urbanist; wrote about the city’s harshness and beauty.    

Ginsberg walked in the streets in New York, but in his poems they became something else; the sidewalk a bed, a Buddhist paradise  and so on.

We are told in Howl that the best minds of his generation were “dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix” then go on to see those  “who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night”

Then later they would stumble into the unemployment office and then there were those “who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts …”