Wait Till I'm Dead by Allen Ginsberg

Wait Till I'm Dead by Allen Ginsberg

Regular price
Checking stock...
Regular price
Checking stock...
The feel-good place to buy books
  • Free UK delivery over £5
  • 10% off preloved books when you join +Plus
  • Buying preloved emits 46% less CO2 than new
  • Give your books a new home - sell them back to us!

Wait Till I'm Dead by Allen Ginsberg

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.
Ginsberg, Allen: - Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926. As a Columbia College student in the 1940s he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac. He became associated with the Beat movement and the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance poets Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. After jobs as a labourer, market researcher and sailor, Ginsberg published his first volume, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956. Howl overcame censorship trials to become one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into twenty-eight languages. In 1965 Ginsberg was, in a matter of weeks, crowned Prague May King, expelled by the Czech police and placed on the FBI's Dangerous Security list. Though he travelled widely, teaching in India, China, and Western and Eastern Europe, his home for most of his life was New York's Lower East Side. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Allen Ginsberg was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 1993, honoured as Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poet 1994 and co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the western world. Ginsberg died in New York on 5 April 1997, eight days after being diagnosed seriously ill.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780802126320
ISBN 10 0802126324
Title Wait Till I'm Dead
Author Allen Ginsberg
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
Year published 2017-02-14
Number of pages 272
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note Unavailable