Specialized Reading List for "Literary History of the Beat Generation,"
a course taught by Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute during the summer of 1977.

In 1974, the poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman launched the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado. Founded by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the school was modeled after Buddhist learning centers like Nalanda University that flourished in India between the 5th and 11th centuries described by Waldman and Andrew Schelling as "part monastery, part college, part convention hall or alchemist's lab." The mission of Naropa has been to bring together instruction in the arts, psychology, religious studies and other fields with the Buddhist practice of wakefulness in daily life. It's still thriving. The Jack Kerouac School gives young writers a chance to not only learn the craft from practicing poets, but to intimately observe how they live, and how their minds and senses engage the world. Over the years, the faculty has included the late William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, Diane DiPrima, Amiri Baraka, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Robin Blaser, and many other writers of note. Ginsberg taught there for over two decades until his death in 1997. 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. --Steve Silberman The original handout, click to enlarge: Credits Site design by Eric Botticelli, Jordan Matheny, and Steve Silberman, with the help of Derek Powazek. Special thanks to Dan Levy and Levity for hosting. AG photos of Herbert Huncke and John Wieners used with permission of the Allen Ginsberg Trust/Corbis, and the list itself is reprinted with the kind permission of the Ginsberg Trust. If you're a photographer, and an image of yours appears here that you would like taken down, please let us know. To the official site of the Allen Ginsberg Trust. In loving memory, Donald J. Silberman (1934-2004).

Sherwood Anderson short story Hands from Winesburg Ohio Antonin Artaud City Lights Artaud Anthology: To Have Done With the Judgement of God, Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience, Thel Ray Bremser Poem of Holy Madness Part IV from Don Allen Anthol. William S. Burroughs Selections from Big Table, Naked Lunch Neal Cassady The First Third Louis-Ferdinand Céline opening or any pages from Journey to End of Night or Guignol's Bowl Jean Cocteau Opium, see movies Blood of a Poet and Orpheus Gregory Corso Bomb, Power, Army, Police, Death, Hair, Clown. All can be found in The Happy Birthday of Death. Hart Crane Voyages, The Hurricane, Havana Rose, The Bridge Robert Creeley Early poems in For Love Diane Di Prima Revolutionary Letters:April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa, 4, 24, 31, 37, 38, 54, 62, 63 Emily Dickinson I Died for Beauty, I Heard a Fly Buzz, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Success is Counted Sweetest Fyodor Dostoevsky The Idiot, A Raw Youth, etc. T.S. Eliot The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Extra credit Ernest Fenollosa The Chinese Written Character as a Medium For Poetry Lawrence Ferlinghetti From Pictures of the Gone World: #s 2, 10, 13, 17 Jean Genet Opening pages of Our Lady of the Flowers André Gide The Immoralist, The Counterfeiters Allen Ginsberg Kaddish -- HTML, PDF (click "view") John Clellon Holmes pages of Go and Nothing More to Declare on Kerouac "The Great Rememberer" Herbert Huncke See material in Beat Book Franz Kafka Metamorphosis Bob Kaufman Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness: Second April, Abomunist Manifesto John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Melancholy, Ode to Nightingale, Lines Supposedly Addressed to Fanny Brawne Jack Kerouac Mexico City Blues Philip Lamantia Selection in the Don Allen Anthol., poems from EXSTASIS and Blue Grace especially, see also -- Man in Pain, Terror Conduction, Put Down of Whore of Babylon, Morning Light Song, The Night in Space of White Marble, There is This Distance Between Me, Fair Warning, from Selected Poems, City Lights, '67 Andrew Marvell The Garden, To his Coy Mistress, The Bermudas, The Mower to the Glow Worms Michael McClure Poisoned Wheat, Fuck Ode, and Garland in Dark Brown. Browse through September Blackberries Herman Melville Poems: The House Top, The Maldive Shark, The Portent, The Berg, The Muster, The Martyr, On the Slain Collegians, A Canticle, To Ned, Bridegroom Dick, Monody, America, The Ravaged Villa, the poem at end of Billy Budd; Bartleby the Scrivener, Billy Budd, Moby Dick Jack Micheline Wanderer, Ballad of Benny Roads from Collected Poems John Milton L'allegro and Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Sonnet on his Blindness Frank O'Hara The Day Lady Died, A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island Peter Orlovsky Selection in Beatitude Anthology and Don Allen Anthology Edgar Allan Poe Ulalume, Annabel Lee, The Raven, The Bells Ezra Pound Sestina Altaforte, In Durance, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, "When the nightingale to his mate" in Personae, Cantos: Usura 45, CXV, CXVII, CXX Marcel Proust taste a few pages from Swann's Way, Combray Kenneth Rexroth From Collected Shorter Poems: Gic to Har, On What Planet, When We with Sappho, Floating, Letter to William Carlos Williams, The Lights in the Sky are Stars Arthur Rimbaud Drunken Boat, Season in Hell, Illuminations, letters Ed Sanders Poem from Jail (City Lights), Cemetery Hill in Peace Eye [mp3], Death of Olson Poem, VFW Crawling Contest in 20,000 A.D. William Shakespeare The Tempest, Sonnets, Hamlet, Songs Percy Bysshe Shelley Mont Blanc, The Cloud, Skylark, Adonais, Ozymandias, Ode West Wind, last lines Epipsychidion Christopher Smart Jubilate Agno, Song to David Gary Snyder From Turtle Island: The Bath, Mother Earth: Her Whales, The Hudsonian Curlew, The Wilderness; browse through Back Country Carl Solomon Report from the Asylum, Page 36 etc. Mishaps Perhaps, also letter to Gov. Rockefeller, Artaud, etc. Henry David Thoreau How I Lived and What I Lived For from Walden Philip Whalen See selections in Don Allen Anthology. Also Regalia in Immediate Demand in Severance Pay Walt Whitman Song of Myself John Wieners Hotel Wentley Poems, and Poem for Trapped Things in Don Allen Anthol. William Carlos Williams from Collected Poems: To Elsie, Horned Purple, Smell, Danse Russe, A Goodnight, Thursday Thomas Wolfe First pages of Look Homeward Angel and You Can't Go Home Again Sir Thomas Wyatt They Flee from me who sometime did me seeke; My Lute awake, perform the last; The long love that in my heart; Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hinde William Butler Yeats The Crazy Jane series, Sailing to Byzantium, The Second Coming, Among School Children