Deliberate Prose

Deliberate Prose
1st edition (publ. 2000 HarperCollins)

Deliberate Prose - Essays 1952 to 1995 is a collection of essays penned by Allen Ginsberg in the years 1952 to 1995. The writer and poet was consistently outspoken and passionate about his beliefs. The essays are arranged by subject and include commentary on such themes as China, Vietnam, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

A major subject throughout the book is free speech, including defenses of Lenny Bruce, Big Table, and NAMBLA, among others. He also gives in-depth studies of his most important influences: William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Jack Kerouac. He gives appreciations, remembrances, reviews, and blurbs for many other writers and artists associated with the Beat Generation: William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Carl Solomon, Herbert Huncke, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, John Wieners, Diane DiPrima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anne Waldman, Ray Bremser, Robert LaVigne, Philip Lamantia, Robert Frank, and Alan Ansen.

Ginsberg does the same for many writers and artists not directly associated with the Beat Generation: Antler, Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eliot Katz, Henri Michaux, Jean Genet, W. H. Auden, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Chogyam Trungpa, Philip Glass, Hiro Yamagata, Eric Drooker, Chaim Gross, and John Cage.[1]

Notes

  1. ^ Ginsberg, Allen (2001). Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Harper Perennial. ISBN 9780060930813.