Planet Ginsberg Goes East
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Iron Curtain Journals: January–May 1965
by Allen Ginsberg
Edited by Michael Schumacher
Univ. of Minnesota Press. 400 pages, $29.95

 

IN THE EARLY 1990s, I attended an event at New York’s Madison Square Garden at which the Dalai Lama was offering teachings on Tibetan Buddhism. Among the spectators in the packed Garden was Allen Ginsberg. I noticed his presence while walking up the aisle to my seat a few rows behind him. As I passed by, I noticed that his prayer beads were out and that he was counting them as he recited some sort of mantra. I imagined that he was saying a Tibetan prayer, but as I got within hearing distance, I heard the following incantation: “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.”

         I was not surprised that Ginsberg had substituted his own “mantra” for the Tibetan “Om Mani Padme Hum” (“Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus”). He was what used to be called “an original” who lived on his own Planet Ginsberg. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926, the author of Howl (1956) and Kaddish (1961) was friends with all of the Beats: Carl Solomon, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and his longtime partner Peter Orlovsky. Howl contained references to homosexuality and illegal drugs, and his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested in 1957 for publishing the book. At the resulting obscenity trial, the judge ruled that the poem was permissible because it had “redeeming social value.”

         Ginsberg’s major themes involved madness, homosexuality, drugs, his mother’s mental illness, and his critique of society’s repressive rules and roles. These ideas recur throughout his published works, including his journals. Iron Curtain Journals: January–May 1965, edited with an introduction by biographer Michael Schumacher (Dharma Lion, 2016), is the first volume in a trilogy that’s being published by the University of Minnesota Press. The second volume, South American Journals, will be published in 2019, and the third volume, The Fall of America, in 2021. 

        The first volume offers a glimpse into Ginsberg’s thought processes as he traveled to Cuba, Prague, Poland, Russia, and England at the height of the Cold War, long before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. From the journals we learn about his meetings with young people, literary colleagues, and government officials. His public questioning of repressive state policies regarding homosexuality, drugs, and free speech eventually led to his expulsion from all of the Iron Curtain countries.

         Ginsberg wrote several moving journal entries when in Russia as he attempted to make contact with the remnants of his extended family (both of his parents came from Russia). We find him deeply moved when in Poland to visit the site of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. He ended his journey in London, where he was involved in a mass cultural event—an international poetry festival held in Prince Albert Hall. Seven thousand people attended this poetry “be-in.”

Irene Javors, a frequent contributor to this magazine, lives in Queens, New York.