Product Description

Half a century after "founding" the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg has written this powerful collection of poems that are suffused with a range of emotional colors that gives Ginsberg's work an elegiac tone.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1329739 in Books
• Published on: 1995-04-26
• Released on: 1995-03-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Reading a new collection of poems by Ginsberg ( White Shroud ) is rather like receiving a letter from a beloved and somewhat eccentric friend--you either luxuriate in the details of his latest global adventures and musings, or just feel amazed that he's kept up the frenetic, peripatetic pace for so long. Regardless, Greetings is suffused with a range of emotional colors that gives Ginsberg's work an added depth, a restless energy and ultimately an elegiac tone. Writing from China, Warsaw, Nicaragua and New York City, the poet makes strong statements on two of his favorite subjects, politics ("CIA Dope Calypso" offers a three-part historical analysis that you can dance to) and sexuality ("To Jacob Rabinowitz" remembers a lover who "hardly out of puberty gave me / your ass bright eyes and virgin body a whole month"). Yet the most impressive poems are those in which Ginsberg contemplates his mortality ("I Went to the Movie of Life," "Autumn Leaves," "After Lalon"). His engagement with life and death also produces the powerful "The Charnel Ground," a journalistic meditation on raw New York. Still, Ginsberg's commitment to many aspects of existence is the book's true theme, and gives vitality to what might be seen as his grappling with death: "I write poetry," he tells us, "because it's the best way to say everything in mind within 6 minutes or a lifetime." Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
With the heft of his Collected Poems (LJ 12/84) bowing many a book shelf and his last volume, White Shroud, (LJ 2/1/87) a poetry best seller, Ginsberg continues to reign unchallenged as King of the Beats. Timed to celebrate that Generation's jubilee year, this collection brings reassurance that the mentor resists mellowing, despite his self-characterization as a "Senior Citizen waiting for next week's angiogram" who is "ignored hypoglycemic,/impotent, gouty, squint-eyed, halfway bald," but "not old/in vain." Yet frequent references to age, to its deprivations and urgencies, fail to dampen the enthusiasm of Ginsberg's exhortations, his Whitmanic litanies and excursions, his polemic against "radioactive anticommunism," his career-summing aphorisms ("Inside skull vast as outside skull") and need to shock. Contemporary at all costs, he'll appropriate the mechanics of rap ("CIA Dope Calypso") if it serves a subversive intent. To read Ginsberg in 1994 is to expect anything, from cadenced lyricism ("Now and Forever") to a thanks-but-no-thanks candor ("Sphincter"). It's an expectation he fulfills with a spry consistency.
Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Ginsberg is responsible for loosening the breath of American poetry at mid-century...Most of all, [he] has demonstrated that there is nothing in American social and erotic reality which cannot find a place [there]...[His] powerful mixture of Blake, Whitman, Pound, and Williams, to which he added his own volatile, grotesque, and tender humor, has assured him a memorable place in modern poetry." -- Helen Vendler

Customer Reviews

touch the 1950's
Allen Ginsberg was a nonconformist, a beat generation leader, and a phenominal poet. One of his last books, Cosmopolitan Greetings, was just one of many masterpieces given to the mass public by this prolific writer. The spokesman of a lost generation, Ginsberg howl's again in the 90's, not with the dark, brooding "best minds of my generation..." esque odes, but in a shortened, clear revolution of though patterns that defined his later writings. Cosmopolitan Greetings is a magnificant book to add to any intellectual collection, a real historical statement. May he rest in peace

Interview
I met with Allen Ginsberg on his 1994 book tour for Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992 (HarperCollins). I was accompanied by George Scrivani who was an editor, who created Hanuman Books with Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente. I didn't get along so much with Allen Ginsberg as is evident in the following. I interrupted him every time he launched into a soundbite about the importance of the Beats. He often questioned me about my questions. In the interview, I stressed the importance of obscure Beats and none beats including Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Bob Kaufman, Ray Bremser, and Irving Rosenthal. In fact, my mention of Sheeper being the best work of the Beat Generation, seemed to annoy Ginsberg. Later that day, Ginsberg read "Hum Bom!" at Candlestick Park and was booed by the apolitical and conservative baseball fans.

Alexander Laurence: Cosmopolitan Greetings is your new book of poems which collects your most recent work: 1986-1992. Your poetry seems to have changed stylistically, especially in your delicate attention to language; I think of your earliest poems, such as Howl, possessing a complex use of language, utilizing many adjectives, and being influenced by Surrealism, yet the new writing is much more transparent, direct and simplified.

Allen Ginsberg: More or less, with the occasional touches of a surreal sequence of images. There are a number of poems in here and in White Shroud which are examples of complicated language or complicated dream situations. Within some simple poems are some surreal word chains, particularly "I Went To The Movie of Life," "Grandma Earth's Song," and in the Jacob Rabinowitz poem: "Put me down now for not hearing your teenage heartbeat, / think back were you serious offering to kidnap me / to Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, Miami, God / knows, rescued from boring fame & Academic fortune, / Rimbaud Verlaine lovers starved together in boondocks houseflat / stockyard furnished rooms eating pea soup reading E. A. Poe?" I want to have lucid clear pictures in my poetry rather than jump-cut, cut-up, chaotic flashes. I want my poetry to be like a cinematic movie. The magic comes not from the speed up of the words, but the magic comes from the fact that it's an imaginary dream vision. The prototype of that is Shelley's "Triumph of Life."

More at (www.freewilliamsburg.com)

Ginsberg in an occult form
This book to me is the best Ko'an ever composed by Ginsberg
since 1997, 'tis been cliffhanging on my bosom