Wait Till I'm Dead: Uncollected Poems

by Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan (Editor), Rachel Zucker (Introduction)

Overview

Allen Ginsberg’s poems, from “Howl” to “Kaddish” to “The Fall of America,” have influenced generations of writers and made him a defining figure of the twentieth century. Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, first published in 1984, and expanded in 1997, was originally thought to contain all of his poetic work. But now, for the first time, Ginsberg’s stray poems have been gathered and the result, Wait Till I’m Dead is a landmark publication spanning five decades of Ginsberg’s writing life.

The first new Ginsberg collection in over fifteen years, Wait Till I’m Dead is edited by renowned scholar Bill Morgan, with a foreword written by award-winning poet Rachel Zucker. Many of the poems collected in this volume were scribbled in letters or sent off to obscure publications and unjustly forgotten. Tracing the chronology of his life, Wait Till I’m Dead follows Ginsberg from his high school days and earliest political satire to his activism, spiritual maturation, and on-the-road experiences worldwide. The collection concludes with his personal thoughts on mortality as he watched his friends, and himself, grow old.

Throughout the collection Ginsberg pays homage to his contemporaries and poetic icons, including Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. The selection also features several of Ginsberg’s collaborative poems, works coauthored by Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Koch, providing an inside view of famed Beat poets and their relationships. Containing 104 previously uncollected poems and accompanied by original photographs and extensive notes, Wait Till I’m Dead is the final major contribution to Ginsberg’s sprawling oeuvre, a must-read for Ginsberg neophytes and longtime fans alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802126320
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/14/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was a poet, activist, and one of the Beat Generation's most renowned writers. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute. He won the National Book Award for Poetry and his groundbreaking poem Howl is one of the most widely read and translated poems of the century.

Bill Morgan has written and edited thirty-nine books, including I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.

Rachel Zucker is the author of nine books, including a memoir, MOTHERs, and a double collection of prose and poetry, The Pedestrians. She has been named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2013. She teaches poetry at New York University.

Table of Contents

Foreword Rachel Zucker xv

Note from the Editor xxiii

1940s

Rep Gordon Canfield 3

We leave the youthful pennants and the books 4

A Night in the Village 5

Epitaph for a Suicide 8

Epitaph for a Poet 9

Song 10

To live and deal with life as if it were a stone 11

Behold! The Swinging Swan 12

1950s

Her Engagement 15

Hitch-Hiking Key West 16

In a Red Bar 17

What's buzzing 18

Thus on a Long Bus Ride 19

We rode on a lonely bus 20

There's nobody here 21

On Nixon; Chain Poem 22

Dawn 23

A Lion Met America 25

Leave the Bones Behind 26

The Real Distinguished Thing 27

1960s

To Frank O'Hara & John Ashbery & Kenneth Koch 31

Yesterday I was writing in Heaven or of Heaven 33

Ayahuasca- 35

Walt Whitman 36

Tokyo Tower 37

B.C. [Bob Greeley] 38

War Is Black Magic 39

Journals November 22, '63 40

May Day 41

In a Shaking Hand 43

Little Flower M.M. [Marianne Moore] 47

Don't Know Who I Am 49

Liverpool Muse 50

New York to San Fran 52

Entering Kansas City High 79

Cleveland Airport 82

Busted 83

Nashville April 8 85

After Wales Visitacione July 29 1967 86

Mabillon Noctambules 90

Genocide 93

No Money, No War 95

1970s

May King's Prophecy 99

For The Soul of the Planet Is Wakening 101

Six Senses 102

Frank O'Hara darkly 104

Hum! Hum! Hum! 105

The world's an illusion 106

Reef Mantra 107

Postcard to D 108

Inscribed In George Whitman's Guest Register 109

On Farm 111

Wyoming 112

Exorcism 113

Eyes Full of Pitchpine Smoke 116

Freedom of Speech 117

Green Notebook 118

Imagination 119

Spring night four a.m. 121

Louis' First Night In Grave 123

Kidneystone Opium Traum 127

Homage to Paris at the Bottom of the Barrel 128

Bebbe put me on your lap 130

Verses Included In Howl Reading Boston City Hall 131

All The Things I've Got to Do 133

No Way Back to the Past 136

A Brief Praise of Anne's Affairs 141

Popeye and William Blake Fight to the Death 144

For School Kids in New Jersey 149

1980s

Second Spontaneous Collaboration Into the Air, Circa 23 May 1980 153

A Tall Student 155

Good God I got high bloodpressure answering 156

Amnesiac Thirst For Fame 157

A knock, look in the mirror 159

The Black Man 160

Thundering Undies 162

Trungpa Lectures 164

Pinsk After Dark 165

Two Scenes 166

Listening to Susan Sontag 167

You Want Money? 169

Cats Scratching 171

I used to live in gay sad Paris! 172

As the rain drips from the glitter on to the bushes of the imperial court lawn 173

Having bowed down my forehead on the pavement on Central Park West 174

Far Away 175

Back to Wuppertal 176

Am I a Spy From the Moon? 177

Awakened at dawn trying to run away 178

Grey clouds hang over 179

1/29/84 N.Y.C. 180

CXXV 182

Rose Is Gone 183

3'd day down Yangtze River, yesterday 185

African Spirituality Will Save the Earth 186

Face to Face 188

Who's Gone? 189

Bob Dylan Touring with Grateful Dead 191

1990s

Asia Minor for Gregory 195

The moon in the dewdrop is the real moon 197

New Years Greeting 198

Hermaphrodite Market 199

Last Conversation with Carl or In Memoriam 200

Dream of Carl Solomon 206

Acknowledgments 207

Notes 211

Notes on the Photographs 235

Index of Titles and First Lines 237

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Wait Till I'm Dead:

“Ginsberg[’s] importance is unquestionable. Among his many roles in 20th century culture—’60s protest jokester, Zen ambassador, literary lion—he was also, for many, the gateway poet. These are not unlike other Ginsberg poems—fierce, funny, libidinous, subversive—but here they afford a fresh chronological tour of Ginsberg’s life, which is also one version of the story of the second half of the 20th century . . . The high point is a long poem called ‘New York to San Fran,’ the book’s most ambitious and fulfilled piece. Ginsberg . . . treats everything with an utterly absorbing present-tense vividness, which this book lets us view through grown-up eyes.”—Los Angeles Times

“An intimate new collection from the ‘shy but outspoken Jewish bard,’ as Rachel Zucker dubs him in her artful foreword . . . Wait Till I’m Dead expands our vision, takes us on a wild road trip with the poet and his friends through the second half of the 20th century . . . He reveals his inner life with magnificent range, from traveling epics to lucid haiku . . . Ginsberg’s singular voice, speaking out from the past.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Delights include the opening set of quatrains slamming student Allen’s congressman, a long ramble on America written during a cross-country flight in 1965, a final conversation with old friend Carl Solomon, and enough jokey or philosophical or contemplative or observational short poems to make those who’ve sworn off Ginsberg reconsider.”—Booklist

“[A] carefully chosen gathering of Ginsberg’s fugitive pieces . . . [His] spontaneous aesthetic at its liveliest is the heretofore uncollected ‘NY to San Fran,’ a 27-page Whitmanic reverie of hallucinogenic scope . . . Together with the editor’s informative notes, this volume not only complements its larger predecessor but similarly offers an impressionistic microhistory of the 20th-century American counterculture, its restless consciousness and broad emotional register filtered through the unbridled visions of one of its most outspoken icons. Ginsberg fans and scholars alike will appreciate the wealth of new material included.”—Library Journal

“Bill Morgan has really tracked down over a hundred Ginsberg poems that ‘would have gotten away.’ . . . What we come away with is wanting more, and wishing we knew what Allen would say about these complicated times.”—Empty Mirror

Praise for Allen Ginsberg:

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry

“Ginsberg has been one of the most influential poets in America in our time. . . . A spectacular career.”—New York Times Book Review

“Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius, con man extraordinaire and probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.”—Bob Dylan

“An iconic American poet . . . An often outrageous, groundbreaking poet and tireless social activist.”—Kirkus Reviews, on The Essential Ginsberg

“Places Ginsberg firmly among the most prolific poets of the age.”—Washington Post Book World, on Collected Poems: 1947-1997

From the Publisher