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Kaddish and Other Poems
Great strange visionary poems by the author of Howl, “in the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century . . .�
In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural an gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other. These poems almost unconscious to confess the beatific human fact, the language intuitively chosen as in trance & dream, the rhythms rising on breath from belly thru breast, the hymn completed in tears, the movement of the physical poetry demanding and receiving decades of life while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many worlds the self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self.
In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural an gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other. These poems almost unconscious to confess the beatific human fact, the language intuitively chosen as in trance & dream, the rhythms rising on breath from belly thru breast, the hymn completed in tears, the movement of the physical poetry demanding and receiving decades of life while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many worlds the self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self.
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1961
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About the author
Allen Ginsberg
439books3,942followersAllen Ginsberg was a groundbreaking American poet and activist best known for his central role in the Beat Generation and for writing the landmark poem Howl. Born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, Ginsberg grew up in a household shaped by both intellectualism and psychological struggle. His father, Louis Ginsberg, was a published poet and a schoolteacher, while his mother, Naomi, suffered from severe mental illness, which deeply affected Ginsberg and later influenced his writing—most notably in his poem Kaddish.
As a young man, Ginsberg attended Columbia University, where he befriended other future Beat luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. These relationships formed the core of what became known as the Beat Generation—a loose-knit group of writers and artists who rejected mainstream American values in favor of personal liberation, spontaneity, spiritual exploration, and radical politics.
Ginsberg rose to national prominence in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems, released by City Lights Books in San Francisco. Howl, an emotionally charged and stylistically experimental poem, offered an unfiltered vision of America’s underbelly. It included candid references to homosexuality, drug use, and mental illness—subjects considered taboo at the time. The poem led to an obscenity trial, which ultimately concluded in Ginsberg’s favor, setting a precedent for freedom of speech in literature.
His work consistently challenged social norms and addressed themes of personal freedom, sexual identity, spirituality, and political dissent. Ginsberg was openly gay at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in much of the United States, and he became a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ rights throughout his life. His poetry often intertwined the personal with the political, blending confessional intimacy with a broader critique of American society.
Beyond his literary achievements, Ginsberg was also a dedicated activist. He protested against the Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation, and later, U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. He was present at many pivotal cultural and political moments of the 1960s and 1970s, including the 1968 Democratic National Convention and various countercultural gatherings. His spiritual journey led him to Buddhism, which deeply influenced his writing and worldview. He studied under Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa and helped establish the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Ginsberg’s later years were marked by continued literary output and collaborations with musicians such as Bob Dylan and The Clash. His poetry collections, including Reality Sandwiches, Planet News, and The Fall of America, were widely read and respected. He received numerous honors for his work, including the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974.
He died of liver cancer in 1997 at the age of 70. Today, Allen Ginsberg is remembered not only as a pioneering poet, but also as a courageous voice for free expression, social justice, and spiritual inquiry. His influence on American literature and culture remains profound and enduring.
As a young man, Ginsberg attended Columbia University, where he befriended other future Beat luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. These relationships formed the core of what became known as the Beat Generation—a loose-knit group of writers and artists who rejected mainstream American values in favor of personal liberation, spontaneity, spiritual exploration, and radical politics.
Ginsberg rose to national prominence in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems, released by City Lights Books in San Francisco. Howl, an emotionally charged and stylistically experimental poem, offered an unfiltered vision of America’s underbelly. It included candid references to homosexuality, drug use, and mental illness—subjects considered taboo at the time. The poem led to an obscenity trial, which ultimately concluded in Ginsberg’s favor, setting a precedent for freedom of speech in literature.
His work consistently challenged social norms and addressed themes of personal freedom, sexual identity, spirituality, and political dissent. Ginsberg was openly gay at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in much of the United States, and he became a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ rights throughout his life. His poetry often intertwined the personal with the political, blending confessional intimacy with a broader critique of American society.
Beyond his literary achievements, Ginsberg was also a dedicated activist. He protested against the Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation, and later, U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. He was present at many pivotal cultural and political moments of the 1960s and 1970s, including the 1968 Democratic National Convention and various countercultural gatherings. His spiritual journey led him to Buddhism, which deeply influenced his writing and worldview. He studied under Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa and helped establish the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Ginsberg’s later years were marked by continued literary output and collaborations with musicians such as Bob Dylan and The Clash. His poetry collections, including Reality Sandwiches, Planet News, and The Fall of America, were widely read and respected. He received numerous honors for his work, including the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974.
He died of liver cancer in 1997 at the age of 70. Today, Allen Ginsberg is remembered not only as a pioneering poet, but also as a courageous voice for free expression, social justice, and spiritual inquiry. His influence on American literature and culture remains profound and enduring.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 198 reviews
September 23, 2019
After you finish Howl (1956), the next Ginsberg collection you should read is Kaddish (1962). It is also the next collection of poetry Ginsberg wrote, but that is not the reason why you should read it. You should read it because the personal kaddish (a traditional Jewish prayer of mourning) which Ginsberg offers for his mother Naomi is the most frankly biographical, most moving and greatest poem Ginsberg ever wrote, and because the book’s themes—the power of The Mother over creation and destruction, her gifts of both ecstatic poetry and madness to her blessed and cursed devotees—completes the persona of the mythic Allen Ginsberg: poet-seer of the Beats, the Orpheus of a new age.
Naomi Ginsberg was a mother to reckoned with. An energetic young woman with a winning smile, she was dedicated to her children, her teaching, and the Communist Party. (She sometimes managed to combine all three: her bedtime stories ended with the triumph of the workers.) But when Allen was very young, she changed: daylight began to give her pain, and she would sit for hours in the dark. Soon came the prescribed medications, the sanitarium visits, the electroshock; Naomi got worse, not better. She grew paranoid, convinced her mother-in-law was trying to kill her, certain that the Government had planted listening devices in her back. Her stays in the sanitarium grew longer. Eventually, she was lobotomized.
Allen was in Berkeley when his mother died, full of the triumph of his recently published Howl, and he didn’t make it home to New Jersey for the funeral. Later, he discovered that kaddish had not been said because the minimum ritual requirement of ten males (a minyan) had not been present at the services. Thus it was that, three years later, while listening to a record of Ray Charles playing the blues, Allen Ginsberg began to compose his kaddish for Naomi.
The poem itself is unique. Filled with the most intimate, embarrassing details of a family in chaos—including a harrowing bus ride thirteen-year-old Allen took with crazy Naomi to the sanitarium—it is at once the most personal of poems and the most public of prayers. It is not the work of a confessional poet (in the sense that Lowell, Berryman, Plath, and Sexton were confessional poets) but of a new Hebrew prophet—a poetic voice reaching beyond Judaism yet thoroughly Jewish—who is performing a ritual obligation to his mother.
The rest of the book consists of poems on a variety of subjects, but most of them touch on his personal dead, artists touched by death or madness or—beyond that door right next to madness—the ecstatic state. There are tribute poems to particular people (his recently deceased Aunt Rose, the suicide Vachel Lindsay, Appollinaire’s grave in Pierre Lachaise, Vincent Van Gogh’s severed ear) and poems which record his reactions to various drugs (laughing gas, mescaline, LSD, ayahuasca) which seem to move Ginsberg the mystic closer and closer to a fuller sense of the divine.
Howl and Kaddish do not offer a complete picture of the poet—his finest political works, like “Wichita Vortex Sutra,� were still come—but together they reveal the essence of Ginsberg: a priest of the great Dionysus, but one who still bows to Apollo, one who can summon his dirges and paeans from the dark heart of the maenads' mad dance.
I fear, though, that this review is getting too rarified, so I will end with one of mad Naomi's down-to-earth conversations with her son Allen. Here she tells him of a meeting she recently has had with God:
‘Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder—he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard.
‘I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper—lentil soup, vegetables, bread & butter—milk--he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad.
‘I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What’s the matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it?
‘I try, he said—That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.�
February 1, 2011
i make my kids listen to the cd. they're going to be brilliant or crazy.
November 20, 2019
"O mother
what have I left out
O mother
what have I forgotten
O mother
farewell
with a long black shoe
farewell
with Communist Party and a broken stocking
farewell
with six dark hairs on the wen of your breast
farewell
with your old dress and a long black beard around the vagina
farewell
with your sagging belly
with your fear of Hitler
with your mouth of bad short stories
with your fingers of rotten mandolins
with your arms of fat Paterson porches
with your belly of strikes and smokestacks
with your chin of Trotsky and the Spanish War
with your voice singing for the decaying overbroken workers
with your nose of bad lay with your nose of the smell of the pickles of Newark
with your eyes
with your eyes of Russia
with your eyes of no money
with your eyes of false China
with your eyes of Aunt Elanor
with your eyes of starving India
with your eyes pissing in the park
with your eyes of America taking a fall
with your eyes of your failure at the piano
with your eyes of your relatives in California
with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an aumbulance
with your eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots
with your eyes going to painting class at night in the Bronx
with your eyes of the killer Grandma you see on the horizon from the Fire-Escape
with your eyes running naked out of the apartment screaming into the hall
with your eyes being led away by policemen to an aumbulance
with your eyes strapped down on the operating table
with your eyes with the pancreas removed
with your eyes of appendix operation
with your eyes of abortion
with your eyes of ovaries removed
with your eyes of shock
with your eyes of lobotomy
with your eyes of divorce
with your eyes of stroke
with your eyes alone
with your eyes
with your eyes
with your Death full of Flowers"
January 15, 2023
Kaddish is a harsh, uncomfortable poem. This mourning prayer for Ginsberg’s mad mother, Naomi, nakedly exposes shame and agony so private that every instinct screams to stop, to close your eyes, shut the book, to do anything but go on reading. It is a long poem, stretching across twenty-nine pages, torturous in its endless, painful exposure. Along with Howl it is considered Ginsberg’s most significant poem, but I’d lie if I told you I enjoyed it. Its final sections redeem it somewhat, with its HYMMNN interlude having some of the feel of Ginsberg’s poem Footnote To Howl:
Blessed be you Naomi in Hospitals! Blessed be you Naomi in
solitude! Blest be your triumph! Blest be your bars!
Blest be your last years� loneliness!
Blest be your failure! Blest be your stroke! Blest be the close
of your eye! Blest be the gaunt of your cheek! Blest be
your withered thighs!
Blessed be Thee Naomi in Death! Blessed be Death! Blessed
be Death!
But Kaddish is not a poem that encourages me to revisit and reread.
It is the “And Other Poems� that redeems this thin volume. While none of them are among my favorites of Ginsberg’s, several crackle with his manic energy and startling ideas and phrases. From the playfulness of Rocket Poem �
O Einstein I should have sent you my flaming mss.
O Einstein I should have pilgrimaged to your white hair!
To the longing of Message �
It’s too long that I have been alone
it’s too long that I’ve sat up in bed
without anyone to touch on the knee, man
or woman I don’t care what anymore, I
want love I was born for I want you with me now
On to Ginsberg as Poet/Prophet in Death To Van Gogh’s Ear! �
I doubt anyone will ever fall anymore except governments
fortunately all the governments will fall
the only ones which won’t fall are the good ones
and the good ones don’t yet exist
But they have to begin existing they exist in my poems
And finally ending in the manic madness of several drug-titled poems, like Mescaline �
death death death death death
god god god god god god god the Lone Ranger
the rhythm of the typewriter
There is Ginsberg gold here worth mining.
Blessed be you Naomi in Hospitals! Blessed be you Naomi in
solitude! Blest be your triumph! Blest be your bars!
Blest be your last years� loneliness!
Blest be your failure! Blest be your stroke! Blest be the close
of your eye! Blest be the gaunt of your cheek! Blest be
your withered thighs!
Blessed be Thee Naomi in Death! Blessed be Death! Blessed
be Death!
But Kaddish is not a poem that encourages me to revisit and reread.
It is the “And Other Poems� that redeems this thin volume. While none of them are among my favorites of Ginsberg’s, several crackle with his manic energy and startling ideas and phrases. From the playfulness of Rocket Poem �
O Einstein I should have sent you my flaming mss.
O Einstein I should have pilgrimaged to your white hair!
To the longing of Message �
It’s too long that I have been alone
it’s too long that I’ve sat up in bed
without anyone to touch on the knee, man
or woman I don’t care what anymore, I
want love I was born for I want you with me now
On to Ginsberg as Poet/Prophet in Death To Van Gogh’s Ear! �
I doubt anyone will ever fall anymore except governments
fortunately all the governments will fall
the only ones which won’t fall are the good ones
and the good ones don’t yet exist
But they have to begin existing they exist in my poems
And finally ending in the manic madness of several drug-titled poems, like Mescaline �
death death death death death
god god god god god god god the Lone Ranger
the rhythm of the typewriter
There is Ginsberg gold here worth mining.
November 13, 2021
Kaddish is really beautiful piece of work, and it sounds really good if you read it with the sound of Ginsberg's voice in your head. It's also interesting how if comprises of five very distinct movements. This really makes me think of lonely nights, and times when you feel the whole weight of everything on you, there's a sense of powerlessness running through your life; everything one is going to die and you can't do anything about it. It's a feeling that I do my best to ignore because if I acknowledge it then I'm unable to do anything, but the way it engages with it isn't in some depressive defeatist way, but with a kind of righteous mix of anger and humour, whilst at the same time acknowledging the sadness. I've never been massively impressed with Ginsberg until I read this poem, the others in the collection are a little more throwaway but still good to read now that I finally get him. I think I'm going to read Howl properly at some point, for some reason it's always annoyed me but maybe I'll be on board with it now.
August 24, 2023
آلن گینزبرگ برای مادر دیوانه� کمونیستا� کدیش میخوان�.
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping—page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to God’s perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms!
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping—page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to God’s perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms!
January 7, 2023
I could have my heart cemented in a rock inside of me, could be dissociated from the world, desensitized from human emotions, could be lying dead in a ditch, but you quote anything from Ginsberg, and it would elicit such a spark of emotions from within me that it will pop my soul back into my body.
Such brilliance he poured into his work.
Such brilliance he poured into his work.
October 24, 2015
از برخی جهات برای من یادآور « مرگ آرام » سیمون دو بووار بود. در هر دو فرزندی آخرین روزهای زندگی مادر رو روایت می کنه.در هر دو فرزند نوعی گریز از مادر رو در خودش حس می کنه و از بیمارستانش فاصله می گیره. اما از طرف دیگر تفاوتی فاحش هم هست. در اثر دو بووار با مادری معمولی روبروئیم، مادری مثل همه ی مادرها. اما در اثر گینزبرگ با مادری روبروئیم گرفتار جنون. مادری که در نهایت هم در بیمارستان روانی و در تنهایی جان می دهد. همچنین در اثر گینزبرگ انبوهی از ارجاعات به گذشته و یادآوری های مکرر از خاطرات دیده می شه برخلاف اثر دو بووار که اغلب در همان شرابط فعلی پرسه می زنه - البته اگر حافظه ام فریبم نده. کتاب دو بووار را اینجا می یابید
اثر را که شروع کردم ساختارش و نوشتارش سرشار از ابهام و سخت خوان بود . نمی دانم اما از وسط ها به بعد حس کردم لذت می برم از سطور و حتی تقطیع هایی که پیش از این آزارم می داد. نمی دانم ابهام کم شد یا من عادت کردم. و لذت من تا بدانجا رسید که تحسینش کردم. خلاصه بگویم کوبنده بود
ترجمه را مقایسه نکردم، عموما از سلیس بودن متن فارسی راضی بودم و چندان حس نیاز به مراجعه به اصل درم پیدا نشد. به همین دلیل نمی دانم چقدر وفادار بود ترجمه...
اثر را که شروع کردم ساختارش و نوشتارش سرشار از ابهام و سخت خوان بود . نمی دانم اما از وسط ها به بعد حس کردم لذت می برم از سطور و حتی تقطیع هایی که پیش از این آزارم می داد. نمی دانم ابهام کم شد یا من عادت کردم. و لذت من تا بدانجا رسید که تحسینش کردم. خلاصه بگویم کوبنده بود
ترجمه را مقایسه نکردم، عموما از سلیس بودن متن فارسی راضی بودم و چندان حس نیاز به مراجعه به اصل درم پیدا نشد. به همین دلیل نمی دانم چقدر وفادار بود ترجمه...
October 27, 2021
Can’t accurately review this as I hardly read poetry, but I found this very cathartic and enjoyable.
To me, it’s like reading Ligotti, but feeling more “seen� and “heard� and less “MALIGNANTLY USELESS�.
Poems I enjoyed were:
Kaddish
Poem Rocket
Ignu
Laughing Gas (very Cioran-On The Heights Of Despair-like)
Lysergic Acid (something straight out of Lovecraft)
Seems like “Howl� is the next book to go with on Ginsberg.
I am very excited to continue with this guy.
To me, it’s like reading Ligotti, but feeling more “seen� and “heard� and less “MALIGNANTLY USELESS�.
Poems I enjoyed were:
Kaddish
Poem Rocket
Ignu
Laughing Gas (very Cioran-On The Heights Of Despair-like)
Lysergic Acid (something straight out of Lovecraft)
Seems like “Howl� is the next book to go with on Ginsberg.
I am very excited to continue with this guy.
March 9, 2018
It broke me.
April 13, 2007
In college, I was ridiculous and decided I would contrarily dislike Ginsberg--never having read anything by him--just because everybody else loved him. Then I took a class on modern American poetry in which we read this book, and THANK GOD. I read the first line:
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
...and that was that. I was saved from my own stupidity. It's possible that this book is really more of a four-star title, but for me it's a clear fiver.
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
...and that was that. I was saved from my own stupidity. It's possible that this book is really more of a four-star title, but for me it's a clear fiver.
November 15, 2017
Open mouth weeping
Read
January 12, 2023زیبای کمونیست، بشین اینج�
عروس تابستان میانِ گلها� آفتابگردان
شادکامیِ موعود در دستانت...
.
عروس تابستان میانِ گلها� آفتابگردان
شادکامیِ موعود در دستانت...
.
Read
July 15, 2022MESSAGE
� Since we had changed
� rogered spun worked
� wept and pissed together
� I wake up in the morning
� with a dream in my eyes
� but you are gone in NY
� remembering me Good
� I love you I love you
� & your brothers are crazy
� I accept their drunk cases
It's too long that I have been alone
it's too long that I've sat up in bed
without anyone to touch on the knee, man
or woman I don't care what anymore, I
want love I was born for I want you with me now
Ocean liners boiling over the Atlantic
Delicate steelwork of unfinished skyscrapers
Back end of the dirigible roaring over Lakehurst
Six women dancing together on a red stage naked
The green leaves are green on all the trees in Paris now
I will be home in two months and look you in the eyes
� Since we had changed
� rogered spun worked
� wept and pissed together
� I wake up in the morning
� with a dream in my eyes
� but you are gone in NY
� remembering me Good
� I love you I love you
� & your brothers are crazy
� I accept their drunk cases
It's too long that I have been alone
it's too long that I've sat up in bed
without anyone to touch on the knee, man
or woman I don't care what anymore, I
want love I was born for I want you with me now
Ocean liners boiling over the Atlantic
Delicate steelwork of unfinished skyscrapers
Back end of the dirigible roaring over Lakehurst
Six women dancing together on a red stage naked
The green leaves are green on all the trees in Paris now
I will be home in two months and look you in the eyes
July 22, 2016
Leer a Ginsberg es siempre un placer y ningún otro escritor sabe arrancarme el alma y volverla a poner en su sitio como él y sus poemas.
En Kaddish nos encontramos con poemas desgarradores, llenos de emoción en los que la muerte y el misterio de la vida toman formas inesperadas y surrealistas. El retrato se la vida y muerte de su madre es bello y terriblemente triste al mismo tiempo y te transmite su historia de manera íntima.
Nunca seré capaz de expresar todo lo que la poesía de Ginsberg me hace sentir, pero es sin duda algo único que eleva el alma a otra dimensión.
En Kaddish nos encontramos con poemas desgarradores, llenos de emoción en los que la muerte y el misterio de la vida toman formas inesperadas y surrealistas. El retrato se la vida y muerte de su madre es bello y terriblemente triste al mismo tiempo y te transmite su historia de manera íntima.
Nunca seré capaz de expresar todo lo que la poesía de Ginsberg me hace sentir, pero es sin duda algo único que eleva el alma a otra dimensión.
November 4, 2009
Haunting and destroying. But Ginsberg teaches us how to pick the pieces up, even after one's soul, life, country crashes to the ground. Poet as priest; poem as prophecy hold up rather well here. Maybe it doesn't say such good things about our abilities to evolve, though, when we're given over to economic forces...
August 16, 2015
و چگونه مرگ آن شفایی است که تمام آوازه خوانان در رویای آنند.
بخوان، به یاد بیاور پیشگویی را در سرود عبری یا کتاب پاسخ های بودایی یا در تخیلاتم؛ از یک برگ خشک در سپیده دم.
بخوان، به یاد بیاور پیشگویی را در سرود عبری یا کتاب پاسخ های بودایی یا در تخیلاتم؛ از یک برگ خشک در سپیده دم.
March 6, 2017
I don't think we deserve Allen Ginsberg.
December 14, 2012
Appearances to the contrary, "Kaddish" was not a poem that commemorated a life, but one that attempts to exorcise a ghost. The spirit was Ginsberg's mother, a tortured soul who haunted the poet. Kaddish is at its heart a repudiation of a smothering mother, a feckless father, useless brother and antiquated traditions. The poem was an exercise in a kind of separation through sadomasochism.
It could be said that Ginsberg was both a product and victim of his time. A transitional figure when transgression was increasingly a means of establishing one's creative reputation. Throughout the work, Ginsberg's slaps at paper tigers, violates wilting standards of taste, and dispenses with fading taboos with ease of washing one's hands. Reading this book today, in our time of profitable exhibitionism and confession without contrition, seems entirely beside the point; it is often quaint, an artifact from a time when blue jeans were a mark of defiance.
Ginsberg attempts to speak at the volume of Whitman, but there are degrees of exuberance, and, in his case, he's merely annoying. He's like the man who arrives at a party already drunk and grows only more embarrassing. The words vomit and vomiting appear frequently, and one does not have to be a Freudian to suspect Ginsberg not only finds his memories revolting. Even free verse requires a certain discipline to demonstrate, if nothing else, a degree of sincerity.
I read the book to its end and then read each poem again and felt cheated. Kaddish is a kind of Beat Kabuki, its chaos, its incoherence, is part of its form, if not, ironically, its gravitational center. I grew bored with the poems' hipster attitude, namedropping, and Zen and Hindu references. All of it gathered and flung as if Ginsberg knew that no one was paying attention.
Yes, Kaddish is occasionally touching, but in Ginsberg hands even intimacy becomes a form of insinuation, which is to say, he manipulates his readers, so that it is his suffering and eventual "satori" that is the poem's subject, and the book, the map of his "hero's journey."
It's hard to criticize a work that asks to be read as a poem of mourning and that aspires to the level of prayer. But the more I read, the more I felt the entire work was a kind of hustle, and Ginsberg, a grifter playing on our emotions and deference of the sacred.
In the poem "Mescaline," the poet asks, "...who wants to be famous and sign autographs like a movie/ star." The answer is, of course, Ginsberg, who went on to construct a life with the deliberate intensity of a movie or rock star, and who would be famous and sign autographs like a movie star.
Over all, the poems share: facile politics, spiritual references without depth, confessions that don't feel heartfelt and pseudo-poetic speech, all combined with an adolescent's pleasure in vulgarity and profanity.
While I thought both the collection and the poem, "Howl" overwrought and self-regarding, the book had at least two poems, "A Supermarket in California" and "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound" I would read again. I found nothing in Kaddish I would revisit. "At Apollinaire's Grave" seemed both dishonest and strangely prescient. (It immediately brought to my mind the filmed, photographed and choreographed photographs of Ginsberg and Dylan at Jack Kerouac's grave site.) There is more than a little borrowed interest buried in Ginsberg's work.
The one piece that left me troubled and engaged was the short poem "The Lion for Real." It seemed to succeed in showing real feeling expressed in lovely language. But even when Ginsberg appears at his most sincere he seems to me rather predicable:
"The sadness is, that every leaf, /has fallen before.
Charming, yes, but when compared with David Ignatow's "I wish I understood the beauty/in leaves falling. To whom/ are we beautiful/ as we go," one sees Ginsberg's sentiments belong more to Hallmark than to posterity.
In an introduction to the poems, Ginsberg wrote: "Acknowledged the established literary quarterlies of my days are bankrupt poetically thru their own hatred, dull ambition or loudmouthed obtuseness." He then lists the many magazines where his poems first appeared, which suggests the "[poet] doth protest too much, methinks."
In terms of the man's ambition, it seems every bit as fierce and contemporary as that of his generation of Jewish lawyers, politicians and financiers, who broke through the barriers that kept them out of business and academic establishments. At a time when the establishment itself was shuddering, Ginsberg would push himself inside. That said, I think he was as surprised by his success as other committed careerists including Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol.
With Kaddish Ginsberg became more than a one-hit wonder; he would avoid obscurity, or worse, passing notoriety. He would be celebrated and become a celebrity. Become, in theory, everything he professed to disdain.
Especially telling is a "Note," printed above his acknowledgement. In it he informs us: "Magic Psalm, The Reply, & The End record visions experienced after drinking Ayahuasca, an Amazon spiritual potion. The message is: Widen the area of consciousness." For my part, I could not distinguish these poems from any in the collection. Ginsberg's tragedy was that he grew up not only to be a good son, but also a member of the establishment whose work would be part of the new canon.
It could be said that Ginsberg was both a product and victim of his time. A transitional figure when transgression was increasingly a means of establishing one's creative reputation. Throughout the work, Ginsberg's slaps at paper tigers, violates wilting standards of taste, and dispenses with fading taboos with ease of washing one's hands. Reading this book today, in our time of profitable exhibitionism and confession without contrition, seems entirely beside the point; it is often quaint, an artifact from a time when blue jeans were a mark of defiance.
Ginsberg attempts to speak at the volume of Whitman, but there are degrees of exuberance, and, in his case, he's merely annoying. He's like the man who arrives at a party already drunk and grows only more embarrassing. The words vomit and vomiting appear frequently, and one does not have to be a Freudian to suspect Ginsberg not only finds his memories revolting. Even free verse requires a certain discipline to demonstrate, if nothing else, a degree of sincerity.
I read the book to its end and then read each poem again and felt cheated. Kaddish is a kind of Beat Kabuki, its chaos, its incoherence, is part of its form, if not, ironically, its gravitational center. I grew bored with the poems' hipster attitude, namedropping, and Zen and Hindu references. All of it gathered and flung as if Ginsberg knew that no one was paying attention.
Yes, Kaddish is occasionally touching, but in Ginsberg hands even intimacy becomes a form of insinuation, which is to say, he manipulates his readers, so that it is his suffering and eventual "satori" that is the poem's subject, and the book, the map of his "hero's journey."
It's hard to criticize a work that asks to be read as a poem of mourning and that aspires to the level of prayer. But the more I read, the more I felt the entire work was a kind of hustle, and Ginsberg, a grifter playing on our emotions and deference of the sacred.
In the poem "Mescaline," the poet asks, "...who wants to be famous and sign autographs like a movie/ star." The answer is, of course, Ginsberg, who went on to construct a life with the deliberate intensity of a movie or rock star, and who would be famous and sign autographs like a movie star.
Over all, the poems share: facile politics, spiritual references without depth, confessions that don't feel heartfelt and pseudo-poetic speech, all combined with an adolescent's pleasure in vulgarity and profanity.
While I thought both the collection and the poem, "Howl" overwrought and self-regarding, the book had at least two poems, "A Supermarket in California" and "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound" I would read again. I found nothing in Kaddish I would revisit. "At Apollinaire's Grave" seemed both dishonest and strangely prescient. (It immediately brought to my mind the filmed, photographed and choreographed photographs of Ginsberg and Dylan at Jack Kerouac's grave site.) There is more than a little borrowed interest buried in Ginsberg's work.
The one piece that left me troubled and engaged was the short poem "The Lion for Real." It seemed to succeed in showing real feeling expressed in lovely language. But even when Ginsberg appears at his most sincere he seems to me rather predicable:
"The sadness is, that every leaf, /has fallen before.
Charming, yes, but when compared with David Ignatow's "I wish I understood the beauty/in leaves falling. To whom/ are we beautiful/ as we go," one sees Ginsberg's sentiments belong more to Hallmark than to posterity.
In an introduction to the poems, Ginsberg wrote: "Acknowledged the established literary quarterlies of my days are bankrupt poetically thru their own hatred, dull ambition or loudmouthed obtuseness." He then lists the many magazines where his poems first appeared, which suggests the "[poet] doth protest too much, methinks."
In terms of the man's ambition, it seems every bit as fierce and contemporary as that of his generation of Jewish lawyers, politicians and financiers, who broke through the barriers that kept them out of business and academic establishments. At a time when the establishment itself was shuddering, Ginsberg would push himself inside. That said, I think he was as surprised by his success as other committed careerists including Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol.
With Kaddish Ginsberg became more than a one-hit wonder; he would avoid obscurity, or worse, passing notoriety. He would be celebrated and become a celebrity. Become, in theory, everything he professed to disdain.
Especially telling is a "Note," printed above his acknowledgement. In it he informs us: "Magic Psalm, The Reply, & The End record visions experienced after drinking Ayahuasca, an Amazon spiritual potion. The message is: Widen the area of consciousness." For my part, I could not distinguish these poems from any in the collection. Ginsberg's tragedy was that he grew up not only to be a good son, but also a member of the establishment whose work would be part of the new canon.
March 23, 2025
Forgot Handmaids's at the coffeeshop today...will get it back tomorrow. In the meantime I read some poetry. I really like this guy's stuff.
"it's the soul that makes the style the tender firecracker of his thought"
"it's the soul that makes the style the tender firecracker of his thought"
July 12, 2021
3 3/4 stars
February 10, 2023
I read Ginsberg's Howl a long time ago, a really long time ago, when I was a teenager. I was a fan of Burroughs and I had read that Ginsberg was another of the big Beat boys, and that Howl was his big classic, so I read it.
I was extremely unimpressed to put it mildly: it struck me as incredibly hacky and lazy, the sort of pretentious literati poetry one reads aloud at trendy hipster bars. I thought "I guess Ginsberg's really not for me", and that was the end of it.
Years later, today, I read Kaddish, thinking "well, maybe I just didn't get it back then. I'm not so good at poetry even though I really like it and I was very young and my tastes still underdeveloped. Maybe I just missed the point. Maybe it's time to give good old Ginsberg another chance". So I did, and I picked up this book from my uni library.
Unfortunately, I was once again extremely unimpressed, and this time I actually felt bad about it due to the subject matter of the titular poem.
Please don't take me as some stick-up-the-ass classical Greece/Rome statue profile picture type cunt or something, the kind that's mad that poetry doesn't rhyme or sticks to rhythm or whatever. I'm not, even if most of my favorite poetry is "traditional" in that way. That's not why I disliked it.
Kaddish is clearly a poem with a lot of emotion behind that; I will not cynically deny it, I do think that Ginsberg was putting himself out there with it and I can only imagine what was felt in bringing such memories to the forefront, writing them down as poetry, etc. It's why it makes me feel... guilty, even, to say that the reason that Kaddish fails for me is because the language is simply too weak, most of it can be boiled as either random words breaking up sentences or simple bland descriptions of memories, it does not entice the same sort of aesthetic enjoyment that a good avant-garde poem, or even just a prose-poem, elicits because while Ginsberg's feelings were undeniably intense, the language just isn't, it's milk-toast, and this has the unfortunate side effect that when the language gets vulgar it just sounds really fucking silly - the latter, per example, made me burst in laughter:
ignorant woe—later dreams of kneeling by R’s shocked knees declaring my love of 1941—What sweetness he’d have shown me, tho, that I’d wished him & despaired—first love—a crush�
Later a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole—weight on my melancholy head�
'Grand Canyons of asshole'! Is this the famous "bombastic language" that makes Ginsberg so unique? Come on, man, it's one of the few stanzas I remember because of how fucking goofy it is.
As far as the form is concerned, I was entirely unimpressed because it does really just scream "free verse from someone who can't do regular verse", which always just seemed hacky to me. Mind you I don't find the prose and dialogue-inspired (Ginsberg: "I went over my prose writings, and I took out little four-or-five line fragments that were absolutely accurate to somebody’s speak-talk-thinking and rearranged them in lines, according to the breath, according to how you’d break it up if you were actually to talk it out") form heinous or anything, and as I read it I find myself having kinder thoughts about it, like that I could enjoy even writing in such a style, but ultimately it would have to be supplanted with stronger language than what Ginsberg delivers.
These kind thoughts I had towards Kaddish, however, were not had towards the next poems. Kaddish, I did not like very much, but I ultimately understand what Ginsberg was doing and I'm sympathetic to it. The poems that follow, however, are straight basura and I frankly see a lot of the archetypally bad poetry of today simply following in Ginsberg little revolution here. The poems based on drug experiences specially carry the heavy awful stink of the petty-bourgeois pseudo-intellectual who believes that ayahuasca or LSD has given him mystical understanding of the universe. In reading them aloud one thought kept popping to my head: shut the fuck up, you impressionable idiot!
About the poems that follow I have nothing positive to stay: Kaddish, however, still gets some merit from me due to its honest confessional purpose and tone, it's very personal and intimate vulnerability, which does not make it worth reading for me, something I say almost guiltily, but which I sympathize with.
I was extremely unimpressed to put it mildly: it struck me as incredibly hacky and lazy, the sort of pretentious literati poetry one reads aloud at trendy hipster bars. I thought "I guess Ginsberg's really not for me", and that was the end of it.
Years later, today, I read Kaddish, thinking "well, maybe I just didn't get it back then. I'm not so good at poetry even though I really like it and I was very young and my tastes still underdeveloped. Maybe I just missed the point. Maybe it's time to give good old Ginsberg another chance". So I did, and I picked up this book from my uni library.
Unfortunately, I was once again extremely unimpressed, and this time I actually felt bad about it due to the subject matter of the titular poem.
Please don't take me as some stick-up-the-ass classical Greece/Rome statue profile picture type cunt or something, the kind that's mad that poetry doesn't rhyme or sticks to rhythm or whatever. I'm not, even if most of my favorite poetry is "traditional" in that way. That's not why I disliked it.
Kaddish is clearly a poem with a lot of emotion behind that; I will not cynically deny it, I do think that Ginsberg was putting himself out there with it and I can only imagine what was felt in bringing such memories to the forefront, writing them down as poetry, etc. It's why it makes me feel... guilty, even, to say that the reason that Kaddish fails for me is because the language is simply too weak, most of it can be boiled as either random words breaking up sentences or simple bland descriptions of memories, it does not entice the same sort of aesthetic enjoyment that a good avant-garde poem, or even just a prose-poem, elicits because while Ginsberg's feelings were undeniably intense, the language just isn't, it's milk-toast, and this has the unfortunate side effect that when the language gets vulgar it just sounds really fucking silly - the latter, per example, made me burst in laughter:
ignorant woe—later dreams of kneeling by R’s shocked knees declaring my love of 1941—What sweetness he’d have shown me, tho, that I’d wished him & despaired—first love—a crush�
Later a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole—weight on my melancholy head�
'Grand Canyons of asshole'! Is this the famous "bombastic language" that makes Ginsberg so unique? Come on, man, it's one of the few stanzas I remember because of how fucking goofy it is.
As far as the form is concerned, I was entirely unimpressed because it does really just scream "free verse from someone who can't do regular verse", which always just seemed hacky to me. Mind you I don't find the prose and dialogue-inspired (Ginsberg: "I went over my prose writings, and I took out little four-or-five line fragments that were absolutely accurate to somebody’s speak-talk-thinking and rearranged them in lines, according to the breath, according to how you’d break it up if you were actually to talk it out") form heinous or anything, and as I read it I find myself having kinder thoughts about it, like that I could enjoy even writing in such a style, but ultimately it would have to be supplanted with stronger language than what Ginsberg delivers.
These kind thoughts I had towards Kaddish, however, were not had towards the next poems. Kaddish, I did not like very much, but I ultimately understand what Ginsberg was doing and I'm sympathetic to it. The poems that follow, however, are straight basura and I frankly see a lot of the archetypally bad poetry of today simply following in Ginsberg little revolution here. The poems based on drug experiences specially carry the heavy awful stink of the petty-bourgeois pseudo-intellectual who believes that ayahuasca or LSD has given him mystical understanding of the universe. In reading them aloud one thought kept popping to my head: shut the fuck up, you impressionable idiot!
About the poems that follow I have nothing positive to stay: Kaddish, however, still gets some merit from me due to its honest confessional purpose and tone, it's very personal and intimate vulnerability, which does not make it worth reading for me, something I say almost guiltily, but which I sympathize with.
March 3, 2023
“There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you've gone, it's good.�
im gonna bash my fucking skull in
im gonna bash my fucking skull in
July 15, 2015
Alike to Howl, Kaddish is another collection of two halves. Kaddish itself is a long and meandering poem, straddling the sublime and the dull, steering a long way clear of perfection in a way that only Ginsberg could manage. All of the ingredients were there: great subject matter, great passion, and a burgeoning need to write it. But the result is uneven. It often feels more like therapy for Ginsberg, revisiting his broken childhood, than something which is relatable to most other people.
The poems that immediately follow Kaddish concern themselves with the ingredients of greatness, Ignu being, to me, the strongest of all of them; a prolonged meditation on artistic self-destruction. It even credits William S. Burroughs as an example of this attitude.
Burroughs a purest ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger pinkey chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts
his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars
The final few poems concern Ginsberg's experiences with a small selection of mind altering drugs. Again, these are of uneven quality and probably meant more to the audience at the time than a modern reader. In the late fifties these drugs were on the far fringes of society. In 2014 drugs education is compulsory even in primary schools. Lysergic Acid is probably the strongest of these. And the poems dealing with Ayahuasca probably the weakest. Ayahuasca is still extant only on the fringes of society (much moreso than LSD anyway) but anyone who's read any Ayahuasca literature before will likely find his three poems on the subject bringing little new to the table.
The poems that immediately follow Kaddish concern themselves with the ingredients of greatness, Ignu being, to me, the strongest of all of them; a prolonged meditation on artistic self-destruction. It even credits William S. Burroughs as an example of this attitude.
Burroughs a purest ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger pinkey chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts
his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars
The final few poems concern Ginsberg's experiences with a small selection of mind altering drugs. Again, these are of uneven quality and probably meant more to the audience at the time than a modern reader. In the late fifties these drugs were on the far fringes of society. In 2014 drugs education is compulsory even in primary schools. Lysergic Acid is probably the strongest of these. And the poems dealing with Ayahuasca probably the weakest. Ayahuasca is still extant only on the fringes of society (much moreso than LSD anyway) but anyone who's read any Ayahuasca literature before will likely find his three poems on the subject bringing little new to the table.
April 28, 2015
More and more, I think that was the best of the beat generation litterateurs. Others were almost as talented, such as Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, and William Burroughs -- but Ginsberg was the most sincere and committed. proves it: It is a tortured valentine to his poor, mad mother who died in 1956 in an insane asylum.
The beats toyed with Buddhism and the other Eastern religions, but Ginsberg got the message. In a poem dedicated to Gary Snyder called "Laughing Gas," he writes:
The beats toyed with Buddhism and the other Eastern religions, but Ginsberg got the message. In a poem dedicated to Gary Snyder called "Laughing Gas," he writes:
I'm disgusted! It's unbelievable!On can get weary of the other beats, but Allen Ginsberg alone is worth re-reading "till you get the point."
What a funny horrible
dirty joke!
The whole universe a shaggy dog story!
with a weird ending that begins again
till you get the point
May 6, 2013
"Kaddish" is considered by some to be Ginsberg's greatest poem. While a very strong, honest, and deeply personal work, I prefer the wild imagery of "Howl" and "Reality Sandwiches." The title poem is very sincere and emotionally gripping, but very, very sad, talking reflectively, painfully, and mournfully about the death and sad and tortured life of his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, a woman who really struggled with her mental health (I didn't know she had a lobotomy!). Of all the poems contained in this work, I really enjoyed "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!" -- a poem loaded with social criticism and commentary and "Laughing Gas" ("The universe is a void/in which there is a dreamhole/The dream disappears/the hole closes. It's the instant of going/into or coming out of/existence that is/important -- to catch on/to the secret of the magic/box"). A fine collection, but not my favorite.
February 6, 2017
Howl will tell you about sex and drugs and the dregs of America, but Kaddish is hands down Ginsberg's (second) greatest Poem. It's a dedication to his mother, completed three years after her death, and somehow crams more than a lifetime's worth of memories and nightmares into 30 pages, the most painful relationship of mother and son ever set to page, only for its honesty about paranoia, about sex, about the sense of loss mixed with relief and the sadness over brother and step-father already moving on with their lives.
Poem Rocket and Europe! Europe! provide the perfect drug-fueled palate cleansers to help you start breathing normally again.
Poem Rocket and Europe! Europe! provide the perfect drug-fueled palate cleansers to help you start breathing normally again.
January 31, 2012
"Alongside Howl, this book is generally regarded as a major work in the Ginsberg canon. Kaddish relates to Ginsberg's mother Naomi, she suffered severe mental illness and died in 1956. Her life and the manner of her death had a devastating impact upon a young Allen Ginsberg and he wrestled with thoughts of her all his life."
- Pauline Reeves, Beat Scene No.64, Spring 2011
- Pauline Reeves, Beat Scene No.64, Spring 2011
March 5, 2025
Not my favorite of Ginsberg's work, but always much better than most.
December 20, 2020
Anotace to zase nafukuje, ale v momentech to není špatné, líbilo se mi to segmentování básní, kdy konec jedné navazuje názvem druhé. Jinak jde o hodně intimní poezii (a která není, že?), která je v mnoha chvílích možná až příliš nepřístupná "víš jak jsme tehdá tam dělali to" - to bez kontextu člověk prostě tápe ve tmě. Ale nebylo to špatné, nicméně, já když už čtu poezii, jsem asi rozežranější, takže spíš průměr.
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