Showing results by author "Allen Ginsberg" in All Categories

For more than 30 years, groundbreaking teachers at Naropa University such as Ginsberg and his colleagues Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs, and Diane di Prima have inspired emerging poets and prose writers to express themselves with unfettered honesty and immediacy. Now, with First Thought, Best Thought, the first landmark release from Naropa University's treasured audio archives, you are invited to meet and learn with these literary mentors face-to-face as they share the secrets of their craft.

Upon the release of his first published work, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956, Allen Ginsberg became the unlikely force of a movement that would change a generation. Literature, art, sex, love, family, politics; nothing would ever be the same. The Beat Generation was born through Ginsberg and his friends.

Why a poetry album? Easy answer: I love poetry. I love reading it. I love memorizing it. I love hearing great actors recite it. As the poet Mark Strand wrote, “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth / There is no happiness like mine / I have been eating poetry.” In the past, when I was full from eating, I have had the audacity to set poetry to music. But, on this audiobook, you will hear the music of the poems.

William Burroughs closed his classic novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called 'Yage', a drug that could be 'the final fix'. In The Yage Letters, a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel, he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space and derange his senses.