Want to Take a Class with Allen Ginsberg? You Can! Sort Of.

Steve Silberman has posted a syllabus for Allen Ginsberg's Naropa University class,"Literary History of the Beat Generation." Well, the main page is the reading list. If you scroll down the sidebar, you can click on the actual original document.

Silberman had the following to say about the course, which he took:

This "celestial homework" is the reading list that Ginsberg handed out on the first day of his course as "suggestions for a quick check-out & taste of antient scriveners whose works were reflected in Beat literary style as well as specific beat pages to dig into." While the list has been placed in alphabetical order for easy reference, the idiosyncratic Ginsbergian syntax of the handout has been mostly preserved, though a couple of typos or errata (such as the full name of the course) have been corrected. Scholars are advised to consult the original document.

Clicking on a title will take you to an online copy of the text when such copies exist, and the photographs of each author are linked to brief biographies. The "Don Allen anthology" mentioned frequently in the list refers to The New American Poetry, edited by Don Allen, which provides an excellent introduction to the Beats and their contemporaries. (A companion volume, The Poetics of the New American Poetry, currently out of print, is worth seeking out in used bookstores, and contains the Ernest Fenollosa essay excerpted here for "extra credit" reading.) Dead-link alerts and locations of missing, better, or more stable versions of the online texts (particularly "Kaddish") linked here are welcome.

I was 19 in the summer of 1977. One day Ginsberg asked how many of us had signed up for meditation instruction, and when only a few hands went up, he roared, "Argh, you're all amateurs in a professional universe!" Another spontaneous aperçu he made in class that has stuck in my mind for decades: "Poetry is the realization of the magnificence of the actual." These texts are gates to that magnificence.

Check it out here!