Very happy to announce a new Allen Ginsberg book, due out next month from the University of Minnesota Press, Michael Schumacher’s First Thought – Conversations With Allen Ginsberg, an inspiring collection of transcripts and rarely-seen interviews.
From the publisher’s web-site: “Here, through previously-uncollected interviews, we encounter Allen Ginsberg elaborating on how speech, as much as writing and reading, and even poetry, is an act of art. Revealing, enlightening, and often just plain entertaining. Allen Ginsberg in conversation is the quintessential twentieth-century American poet as we have never before encountered him; fully present in pitch-perfect detail.”
“Testifying before a Senate subcommittee on LSD in 1966; gently pressing an emotionally broken Ezra Pound in a Venice pensione in 1967; taking questions in a UC Davis dormitory lobby after a visit to Vacaville State Prison in 1974; speaking at length on poetics, and in detail about his “Blake visions,” with his father Louis (also a poet), engaging William Burroughs and Norman Mailer during a writing class, Ginsberg speaks with remarkable candor, insight and erudition about reading and writing, music and fame, literary friendships and influences, and, of course, the culture (or counterculture) and politics of his generation..”
Bill Morgan, Ginsberg’s biographer, writes; “With a knowledge born out of personal interviews conducted with Allen Ginsberg himself, Michael Schumacher understands more about Ginsberg’s poetry than anyone alive. This book presents Ginsberg’s own words in a thought-provoking, entertaining, and intelligent way. It is destined to be a perfect companion to any study of Ginsberg, the poet.”
We’re very much looking forward to this one.