Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 60 of 94 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Uncle Wiz

Stefan Collini: Auden, 16 July 2015

Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Vol. V: 1963-68 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 561 pp., £44.95, June 2015, 978 0 691 15171 7
Show More
Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Vol. VI: 1969-73 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 790 pp., £44.95, June 2015, 978 0 691 15171 7
Show More
Show More
... similar was noticed by others. ‘He sounds like an intelligent Time magazine talking,’ Allen Ginsberg reported around the same time. Many of those who met Auden in the final decade of his life remarked that he didn’t converse: he held forth. His monologues were hard to interrupt, and they weren’t short. He was, by ...

Goodbye Moon

Andrew O’Hagan: Me and the Moon, 25 February 2010

The Book of the Moon 
by Rick Stroud.
Doubleday, 368 pp., £16.99, May 2009, 978 0 385 61386 6
Show More
Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon 
by Craig Nelson.
John Murray, 404 pp., £18.99, June 2009, 978 0 7195 6948 7
Show More
Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon 
by Buzz Aldrin and Ken Abraham.
Bloomsbury, 336 pp., £16.99, July 2009, 978 1 4088 0402 5
Show More
Show More
... the picture-postcard commentary he has always been asked to provide. There was no Robert Frost or Allen Ginsberg in space, but we have Buzz: ‘Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for the wars we ...

Diary

Amit Chaudhuri: Modi’s Hinduism, 17 December 2015

... an incredibly sophisticated culture could have produced a figure like Ganesh,’ Allen Ginsberg once said) made far less sense to him than the Renaissance and Enlightenment realism which, in a weirdly distorted form, has shaped the BJP as well as its secretive cultural-militant wing, the RSS. The BJP’s violence towards Islam emanates ...

Strange Stardom

David Haglund: James Franco, 17 March 2011

Palo Alto: Stories 
by James Franco.
Faber, 197 pp., £12.99, January 2011, 978 0 571 27316 4
Show More
Show More
... He has made short films interpreting recent American poems. He did his best to impersonate Allen Ginsberg in the well-intentioned but misshapen Howl. He has just finished writing, directing and starring in The Broken Tower, an apparently straightforward biopic about Hart Crane. ‘I was really taken with his life,’ Franco says. ‘He had the ...

But I wanted a crocodile

Thomas Meaney: Castro in Harlem, 4 February 2021

Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s 
by Simon Hall.
Faber, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2020, 978 0 571 35306 4
Show More
Show More
... The egalitarian spectacle became a press sensation, and the city’s dissident intelligentsia – Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, I.F. Stone – flocked to the Theresa’s ballroom, with Henri Cartier-Bresson on hand to capture it all. Other Third World leaders in New York that week could only complain of stolen limelight. Kwame Nkrumah, who had worked in ...

Post-Modern Vanguard

Edward Mendelson, 3 September 1981

After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde 
by Christopher Butler.
Oxford, 177 pp., £7.95, November 1980, 0 19 815766 5
Show More
Show More
... it from Futurist manifestos of fifty years before is its tone of lumpen disgruntlement. Allen Ginsberg, quoted in one of Butler’s epigraphs, says: ‘there is nothing to be learned from history any more. We’re in science fiction now.’ This remark, differing only in vocabulary from claims made early in this century for the new machine ...

Tomb for Two

Adam Mars-Jones, 10 February 1994

The Father 
by Sharon Olds.
Secker, 88 pp., £6, February 1993, 0 436 33952 8
Show More
The Sign of Saturn 
by Sharon Olds.
Secker, 92 pp., £8, March 1991, 0 436 20029 5
Show More
Show More
... out to be just such an epic use, and the poem ends:I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,Allen Ginsberg. I have done this thing,I and the other women this exceptionalact with the exceptional heroic body,this giving birth, this glistening verb,and I am putting my proud American boastright here with the others.This works perfectly well as satire ...

The First Person, Steroid-Enhanced

Hari Kunzru: Hunter S. Thompson, 15 October 1998

The Rum Diary 
by Hunter S. Thompson.
Bloomsbury, 204 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 9780747541684
Show More
The Proud Highway: The Fear and Loathing Letters. Vol. I 
by Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Douglas Brinkley.
Bloomsbury, 720 pp., £9.99, July 1998, 0 7475 3619 8
Show More
Show More
... who invited them to Kesey’s La Honda ranch for a party that has since, in accounts by Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg and others, achieved mythic status. La Honda, with its gang of fancy-dress hippies, was ‘one of the strangest scenes in all Christendom – a wild clanging on tin instruments on a redwood hillside, loons playing flutes in the darkness, mikes ...

Charmed Quarantine

James Wood, 21 March 1996

Soul Says: On Recent Poetry 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 266 pp., £15.95, June 1995, 0 674 82146 7
Show More
The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 100 pp., £18.95, January 1996, 0 674 08121 8
Show More
The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition 
by Helen Vendler.
Faber, 137 pp., £7.99, April 1995, 0 571 17078 1
Show More
Show More
... first two. (But then she will surprise, as she should, by praising Donald Davie, or attending to Allen Ginsberg.) If the lyric poem is self-contained and in some sense self-adjusting, then it follows that poets tear this membrane when they press too hard. Such forcing can be almost anything; it will be defined post hoc, by the size of the rent it has ...

Zeitgeist Man

Jenny Diski: Dennis Hopper, 22 March 2012

Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel 
by Peter Winkler.
Robson, 376 pp., £18.99, November 2011, 978 1 84954 165 7
Show More
Show More
... composed ‘So What’, on Kind of Blue, inspired by Hopper’s repeated use of the phrase), with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky and Warhol and Lichtenstein. He bought paintings that became a major Pop Art collection and took photographs that were published by glossy art and fashion magazines. He had a good eye and a sense of what was going to ...

Elegy for an Anarchist

George Woodcock, 19 January 1984

... as the ‘godfather of the Beats’, a title he disdained, though he chaired the occasion on which Allen Ginsberg first read ‘Howl’ (which Kenneth incidentally called ‘the confession of faith of a generation’), and recognised the relevance of such poets to their time in a way few other observers did in the beginning. That the works of ...

Lace the air with LSD

Mike Jay: Brain Warfare, 4 February 2021

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control 
by Stephen Kinzer.
Henry Holt, 384 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 1 250 76262 7
Show More
Show More
... Communist Party allegedly referred to such techniques as hsi nao, ‘washing the brain’.In 1951, Allen Dulles, a former OSS officer, was appointed the CIA’s deputy director for plans. Dulles, who was convinced that the future would belong to the world power that could master the new ‘brainwashing’ technologies, was instrumental in shifting the ...

Knights of the Road

Tom Clark: The Beat generation, 6 July 2000

This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris 
by James Campbell.
Vintage, 320 pp., £7.99, May 2000, 0 09 928269 0
Show More
Show More
... When Allen Ginsberg’s Beat vision-quest came through England in the spring of 1965, I was appointed by this famous renegade minstrel to set down his legend for the Paris Review. Ginsberg’s last words in our interview came in response to an inquiry about the role of command in the compositional process ...

What Life Says to Us

Stephanie Burt: Robert Creeley, 21 February 2008

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-75 
California, 681 pp., £12.55, October 2006, 0 520 24158 4Show More
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005 
California, 662 pp., £29.95, October 2006, 0 520 24159 2Show More
On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay 
by Robert Creeley.
California, 89 pp., £12.95, April 2006, 0 520 24791 4
Show More
Selected Poems: 1945-2005 
by Robert Creeley, edited by Benjamin Friedlander.
California, 339 pp., $21.95, January 2008, 978 0 520 25196 0
Show More
Show More
... Olson, those of the 1970s reflect frequent parties with famous hosts and guests, none more so than Allen Ginsberg, repeatedly named. It’s no surprise to discover, in A Day Book (1970-72), a poem entitled ‘On Acid’, nor to discover within it a mantra: ‘End, end, end, end, end, end.’ Creeley called one of his first minimal poems, ‘A ...

Bad News

Iain Sinclair, 6 December 1990

Weather 
by John Farrand.
Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 239 pp., $40, June 1990, 1 55670 134 9
Show More
Weather Watch 
by Dick File.
Fourth Estate, 299 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 1 872180 12 4
Show More
Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment 
edited by J.T. Houghton, G.J. Jenkins and J.J. Ephraums.
Cambridge, 365 pp., £40, September 1990, 9780521403603
Show More
Crop Circles: The Latest Evidence 
by Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews.
Bloomsbury, 80 pp., £5.99, October 1990, 0 7475 0843 7
Show More
The Stumbling Block, Its Index 
by B. Catling.
Book Works, £22, October 1990, 9781870699051
Show More
Show More
... of Liberation for the Demystification of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences