“Starving Hysterical Naked”: Allen Ginsberg, Artist-Activist and Voice of the Beats

This was written in 2022 for the Oklahoma Chautauqua Companion Reader when I toured Tulsa, Enid, and Lawton as All. At each venue I did a 45-minute presentation followed by 30 minutes of Q and A and two workshops.

Due to fears about the political climate at that time, I performed with a police officer standing eight feet behind me in Tulsa.

This tour was made possible with the cooperation and permission of the Wylie Agency and The Ginsberg Project.

The bodies of work produced by gifted artists are reflective of their real-time and cumulative life experiences. Allen Ginsberg, born in 1926 in New Jersey to Jewish parents, fully embodied sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. His father Louis was a poet and teacher. His mother Naomi was a communist who suffered from mental illness, including paranoid delusions of persecution. Trusting only Allen, she walked naked around their home. He missed considerable school to visit her in institutions.

Amid Louis’s divorcing Naomi and remarrying, Allen sought solace in reading and writing. At sixteen, he wrote letters to newspapers and stuffed envelopes for Democratic Party campaigns. The seeds of his artistry and activism were planted in the soil when he vowed to devote his life to helping the working class if Columbia University accepted him.  Columbia did accept him, and Ginsberg kept his word, immersing himself for the next half century in sex, drugs, music, politics, spirituality, and a quest for self-discovery.

Biographers—and the artist-activists about whom they write—have published millions of pages about the poets and novelists coalescing around Columbia in the mid-1940s, including Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. There was Lucien Carr, who killed an ex–Scout leader who propositioned him. Kerouac and Burroughs helped conceal the crime. Seven years later, Burroughs killed his wife while attempting to shoot a bottle off her head.

While reading dozens of international authors and developing their “New Vision” for America and its literature, these seekers experimented with a wide array of drugs, and drank endless bottles of wine. Ginsberg’s drug experimentation was rooted in his 1948 auditory hallucination while reading William Blake. First believing it was God’s voice, Ginsberg realized it was Blake’s, reading several of his poems. Over three days, Allen experienced Universal Interconnectedness, a revelation that everything in the Universe is connected to everything else, including to him. Although he was not high during this revelation, Ginsberg tried to recapture through drugs the bliss the hallucinations brought.

During Ginsberg’s spiritual awakening, Burroughs—twelve years older, a Harvard graduate, bisexual, and wealthy—was practicing amateur psychotherapy on him, exacerbating his confusion about his sexuality and larger identity.

In the midst of this tumult, enter Herbert Huncke—a drug addict and thief—whom Ginsberg intermittently fed and housed, even after Huncke repeatedly stole from him. After suspension from Columbia for writing graffiti on a window in his dorm disparaging Jews and the dean and for having Kerouac (who was not enrolled at Columbia) spend the night, Ginsberg joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, stimulating a love of travel. After returning to Columbia, Ginsberg was in a car full of stolen goods with Huncke and others. Attempting to evade police, Huncke flipped the car. Rather than go to prison as an accessory, Ginsberg chose a mental institution—a decision that radically changed American poetics.

While institutionalized, Ginsberg befriended Carl Solomon, a Dadaist–Surrealist who believed the only way for an artist to end their life was demanding a lobotomy. Doctors subjected him instead to electroshock and other modalities with which Ginsberg was familiar because of Naomi.  Ginsberg dedicated Howl and Other Poems to Solomon, although it was a larger exploration of what drugs, sexual repression, capitalism, and conformity were doing to America.

Prior to Howl, Ginsberg wrote traditional poetry, influenced by his father and Blake. Stylistic change occurred after he attended a reading by fellow Jerseyan William Carlos Williams, to whom he sent a stack of poems and a rambling letter. Although Williams disliked the poems, the enthusiasm of Ginsberg’s letter led him to publish the poems as part of his epic poem, Paterson. Acting on Williams’s advice to reject the traditional, find his unique voice, and practice his motto of “No ideas but in things,” Ginsberg experimented with the long-line used by Williams and Walt Whitman, in whom he saw himself and his struggles. 

Incorporating Romanticism, bop beats, cadences of jazz and Jewish prayer, and deliberate repetition of words and phrases (the drumbeat-like rhetorical device known as anaphora), Howl was groundbreaking. When Ginsberg read at Six Gallery in October 1955, he was so nervous he got drunk. Reading Howl with arm-flailing passion—a moment Kerouac and others often wrote about—Ginsberg was so impressive that poet and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent a note referencing Emerson's response to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?"

In 1956, shortly after publication, Howl and Other Poems was banned for obscenity, U.S. Customs seized copies, and Ferlinghetti was arrested. A year later, Judge Clayton W. Horn concluded the collection was not obscene: “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?” That is, how could Howl be obscene if it was artistically rich and socially relevant?

Now famous, Ginsberg increasingly battled materialism and militarism. Over the next fifteen years, he signed antiwar manifestos, lobbied for legalization of marijuana and LSD, accused the CIA of trafficking heroin, and became a champion for and bridge between the Beats and Hippies/Yippies.

Burroughs and Kerouac distanced themselves from the label “Beat Generation” because everyone thought Ginsberg was its spokesperson. Although he never professed to be a Beat, Ginsberg worked tirelessly to find publishers for many of the Beats. Complicating these relationships was Ginsberg’s struggle with sexuality. He declared in 1943 that he discovered “mountains of homosexuality” within himself.  He confided this to Kerouac after his initial sexual experience with a man, whom he had picked up in a bar.  He spent long periods in heterosexual relationships and preferred sex with straight men. He had sex with many of the Beats, invariably resulting in jealousy, bitterness, and sometimes hatred. In 1954, he met Peter Orlovsky, with whom he maintained a decades-long relationship, despite Orlovsky’s persistent mental illness and violence.

Ginsberg studied Buddhism with Kerouac in the 1950s. He befriended students of Philip Whelan and Zen poet Gary Snyder. In 1962 and 1963, he and Orlovsky lived in India, immersing themselves in the culture. He later adopted aspects of Krishnaism.

In 1960, Harvard researcher Timothy Leary contacted Ginsberg about psilocybin experiments using writers and artists. In early 1961, Ginsberg invited Kerouac into the experiments. Ginsberg later met Leary’s research partner, Richard Alpert. Until America outlawed it in 1966, Ginsberg experimented with, researched the effects of, and testified before Congress about the benefits of LSD. Within months of the outlawing of LSD, Leary was jailed, and the organizers of an LSD conference uninvited Ginsberg. He met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy regarding drug legalization, although Ginsberg warned of the dangers of tobacco.

He increased his participation in politics and demonstrations. Because of his perceived hatred of capitalism and admiration of communist leaders and labor movements, he was invited to Cuba and Czechoslovakia in 1965. His outspokenness about drug use and homosexuality got him deported from both.

In 1967 and 1968, he participated in the Human Be-In and Summer of Love in San Francisco, the Yippies’ “War is Over” Demonstration in New York, and the “Festival of Life” in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention.  In 1967 and ’68, he participated in the Human Be-In and Summer of Love in San Francisco, the Yippies’ “War is Over” Demonstration in New York, and the Festival of Life in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention (DNC). Although he distrusted the militant left-wing organizations who held these events, and particularly Jerry Rubin, Ginsberg participated for the larger cause, applying his meditation practice and spiritual philosophy in the face of mounting violence. As conditions disintegrated in Lincoln Park during the DNC, Ginsberg chanted Hare Krishna and OM (once for more than seven and a half hours).

Ginsberg loved celebrity, dreaming of and visiting writers like Ezra Pound. He had dinner with Christopher Isherwood in 1966, where they engaged in “fairy table gossip.” Because music performance and composition were integral to his work, Ginsberg loved musicians. In 1964, he wept while listening to Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” They became friends, attending each other’s performances and collaborating. At a party following Dylan’s Royal Albert Hall concert, Ginsberg met the Beatles. Less than a month later, on June 3, 1964, at his thirty-ninth birthday party in a basement flat in London’s Chester Square, a naked Ginsberg so embarrassed John Lennon and George Harrison that they left.

Achieving greater fame after his April 1969 Playboy interview, Ginsberg continued his activism, speaking out two months after the riots at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village.  He faced tax evasion charges, advocated for the release of John Sinclair (a political activist), testified at the Chicago 8 trial (angering the judge by chanting OM and reciting portions of Howl), and dealt with Kerouac’s death in October 1969.

Mounting medical problems from a severe car accident, drug use, cigarettes, and the exertions of travel forced Ginsberg into an increasingly limited schedule. Diagnosed with terminal liver cancer in January 1997, he died on April 5 in New York, surrounded by friends.

Near the end, he had written President Clinton asking for a poetry award. Clinton never responded.

Bibliography

Primary:

Burroughs, William S., and Allen Ginsberg. The Yage Letters Redux.  San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1963/2006.

Ginsberg, Allen. The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971. Michael Schumacher, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

———. The Essential Ginsberg. Michael Schumacher, ed. New York: HarperCollins. 2015.

———. The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965–1971. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1972.

———. Howl and Other Poems.  William Carlos Williams, introduction. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956.

———. The Indian Journals. New York: Grove Press, 1996.

———. “Allen Ginsberg – Montreal, 1969. Interviews. CBC Radio Canada.  (Q&A -1)    https://allenginsberg.org/2016/03/allen-ginsberg-montreal-1969-q-a-1/ , March 14, 2006 ; (Q&A – 2 – continues) https://allenginsberg.org/2016/03/allen-ginsberg-montreal-1969-q-a-2/ , March 15, 2006; (Q&A - 3 – The Appointment)  https://allenginsberg.org/2016/03/allen-ginsberg-montreal-1969-q-a-3-the-appointment/, March 16, 2016.

———. “Firing Line with William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Avant Garde.”  Interview. Hoover Institution. May 7, 1968. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBpoZBhvBa4

———. Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Introduction. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Penguin, 1991.

———. Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties. Gordon Ball, ed. New York: Grove Press, 1977.

———. The Playboy Interview with Allen Ginsberg. April 1, 1969. https://www.playboy.com/read/the-playboy-interview-with-allen-ginsberg

———. Reality Sandwiches. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1963.

———.  Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody, “Visions of the Great Rememberer.”  New York: McGraw Hill, 1972.

Secondary:

Katz, Eliot. The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg. United Kingdom: Beatdom Books, 2015.

Latson, Jennifer. “Drunk Poetry Fans and the First Reading of 'Howl.'” TIME. October 7, 2014. https://time.com/3462543/howl/

Lattin, Don. The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America. New York: HarperOne, 2010.

Miles, Barry. Allen Ginsberg: A Biography. London: Virgin Books, 1989.

Morgan, Bill. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Further Recommendations:

Repository of videos, text, essays, photos, and interviews:  https://allenginsberg.org/wp-content/cache/all/index

The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg.  Jerry Aronson, dir. 1993.  Available on Amazon Prime.

The Trial of the Chicago 7.  Aaron Sorkin , dir. 2020. Available on Netflix.

 

Scholar Biography

Joey Madia is a writer, actor, director, Escape Room designer, educator, and historical education specialist. His Chautauqua portrayals include Captain Louis Emilio, “Che” Guevara, “Black” Samuel Bellamy, Mariano Vallejo, and Allen Ginsberg.

His one-man show and his trilogy of novels on the Golden Age of Piracy, “The Cannon and the Quill,” have been entertaining and educating audiences for six years and were featured in North Carolina Travel and on Japanese television.  Many of his novels and plays are based on true stories or extensive historical research.

His four immersive escape rooms—in North Carolina, Scotland, and West Virginia—are based on historical events.

Joey is cowriter, with two-time Grammy nominee David Young, of the rock opera Be the Change, and he’s working on a play about Mothman and the Silver Bridge Disaster of 1967. His musical, Three Gothic Doctors and their Sons, is being produced for stage and streaming in 2022.   

Quotations

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

War is good business. Invest your son.

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

For more on my Chautauqua and historical education characters:

https://joeymadiastoryteller.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-work-as-chautauqua-scholar-and.html

For my thoughts on the future of Chautauqua and historical education:

https://joeymadiastoryteller.blogspot.com/2025/04/some-thoughts-on-past-present-and.html