2016 sees upcoming (next month!) the publication of Wait Till I’m Dead – UnCollected Poems, the new (posthumous) book of poems by Allen Ginsberg.
Here are the blurbs:
“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 poetic voice since Whitman”
(Bob Dylan)
“Sooner or later anyone interested in American poetry must embrace Allen Ginsberg” (Houston Chronicle)
“(Ginsberg) wrote any number of splendid singular poems that no other American poet of our age was capable of penning” (San-Diego Union Tribune)
“An iconic American poet…an often outrageous, groundbreaking poet and tireless social activist.” (Kirkus Review on The Essential Ginsberg )
“Ginsberg’s poems are X-Rays of a considerable part of American society during the last four decades.” (New Yorker on Collected Poems 1947-1997)
“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, have been gathered Ginsberg’s uncollected poems, 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 foreward 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 world-wide. 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 collection also feature 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 103 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.”
See this page here from Grove Press, for their announcement. Buy this book!