The Voice of the Poet Allen Ginsberg

THE VOICE OF THE POET A remarkable series of audiobooks, featuring distinguished twentieth-century American poets reading from their own work. A first in audiobook publishing--a series that uses the written word to enhance the listening experience--poetry to be read as well as heard. Each audiobook includes rare archival recordings and a book with the text of the poetry, a bibliograohy, and commentary by J. D. McClatchy, the poet and critic, who is the editor of "The Yale Review." "To hear a poem spoken in the voice of the person who wrote it is not only to witness the rising of words off the page and into the air, but to experience an aural reenactment of exactly what the poet must have heard, if only internally, during the act of composition. THE VOICE OF THE POET recordings deliver these pleasures as they broadcast the pitch and timbre of many of the major voices in twentieth-century poetry."--Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Lauerate. Allen Ginsburg (1926-1997) was the most notorious and celebrated poet of his generation. From his days as the bearded leader of the Beat movement in the late 1950s until his death, Ginsberg was as much a social force as a literary phenomenon. His boldly passsionate early poems--especially "Howl," included complete on this recording--established him as a major voice and influence. Later poems trace the history of the tumultous counterculture and political activism in the 1960s and 1970s, from flower power to environmental protest. His exuberant dissent and poetic experiments have been crucial mantras for generations of readers, who will also see him as part of the tradition of Romantic bards, from Blake to Whitman, whose work has charged the poetic tradition and changed the way we think of our own passions, our sorrows, and our responsibilities.