Allen Ginsberg’s harshest critics have claimed that he published every word he’d ever written, regardless of value as poetry. This, of course, is nonsense. As someone who has seen all of his journals, I can attest to the fact that he published only a small portion of his writings. There are some real jewels buried in his journals, just as there were numerous published poems that neither made his small poetry books nor his gigantic 1,200-page, posthumously issued Collected Poems.
Beat Generation scholar Bill Morgan, who compiled Ginsberg’s bibliography, catalogued his archives, wrote a biography of Ginsberg, and edited six volumes of his letters and journals, has sifted through scores of old poetry pamphlets and journals, newspapers, magazines and other sources to gather what he considers to be the best of Ginsberg’s uncollected poems. The resulting volume, Wait Till I’m Dead (Grove Press), touches on Ginsberg’s writings from six decades, beginning with the poet’s earliest work and concluding when he was growing old and ruminating about his mortality and the deaths of some of his closest friends.
Some of this book’s 103 poems were published in such Ginsberg pamphlets as Scrap Leaves and Sad Dust Glories, but were not included, for whatever reason, in Collected Poems. Most appeared in tiny publications, many no longer in existence. A handful were never published at all. Morgan arranges the poems in chronological order, broken into sections arranged by decades, with annotations that offer readers brief histories of the works.
All this makes me think of how Ginsberg’s friend, Bob Dylan, would write and record wonderful songs that were never included on his albums, but which are now being released as part of his Bootleg Series. Some of Ginsberg’s poems, like Dylan’s songs, were crying out to be issued in a wide-circulation format, and Wait Till I’m Dead, similar to Dylan’s better Bootleg Series albums, gives you a look at the lifelong development of the artist, as well as offering meritorious work.
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I’m partial to Ginsberg’s travel poems, which seem to find him at his most observant of detail; this book offers a strong sampling, from the long “New York to San Fran” to a few outtakes from his National Book Award-winning The Fall of America. “Notice what you notice,” Ginsberg advised, and what he noticed was an enormous range of interests, from the banal to the sublime. I’ve always been impressed by how Ginsberg’s poems never seem to age, how his mind remained fresh until his final days. His publisher claims this will be his “final major contribution.” Knowing what’s still out there, hidden in his journals, I wouldn’t bet on it.
In the meantime, we have Morgan to thank for assembling another volume from one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
