Erik Mortenson, the editor of “ALLEN GINSBERG IN CONTEXT,” recently shared the precise date of a book of essays on the work and life of Allen Ginsberg, one of the most provocative, controversial, and influential American poets of the 20th century. I first saw Ginsberg read when he was on a West Coast tour in the spring of 1968. Glover Davis and John Theobald were the primary specialists on the faculty at that time. Although Theobald was British, he had emigrated to the United States as a young man and taught on the East Coast for a decade, during which he became friends with Robert Frost and Ezra Pound. He was on the verge of retirement when I took a survey of poetry course with him; the syllabus did not include Ginsberg. Davis, on the other hand, assigned Donald Allen’s anthology as part of our reading as well as a New Directions paperback of William Carlos Williams’s Selected Poems. Several hundred students attended Ginsberg’s reading, in which he read “Wales Visitation” with a zestful lilt. The poem would not appear in print (in the New Yorker magazine) until mid-May, so everyone in the audience was experiencing the poem without any previous exposure to it. Remarkably, even Theobald was impressed. In the first class after Ginsberg’s reading, he made a point of praising that poem, though I have my doubts that he knew the poem’s inspiration was accelerated by ingesting LSD.
Getting close to 60 years after hearing Ginsberg read for the first time, I am honored and delighted to be among the contributors selected by Erik Mortenson for ALLEN GINSBERG IN CONTEXT, which will be published by Cambridge University Press on April 23. Other contributors who also wrote chapters for this volume include Stephen Gould Axelrod, Steven Belleto, Rona Cran, Terence Diggory, Stephen Fredman, Kurt Hemmer, Barry Miles, Stephen Paul Miller, Daniel Morris, Peggy Pacini, Jonah Raskin, Anne Lovering Rounds, Steven Taylor, John Whalen-Bridge, David S. Ills, and Antonin Zita.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/allen-ginsberg-in-context/FE298C2B4984970822945A5DCF9EAE16
About Bill Mohr