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larkspire's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.75
When Ginsberg is good, he's great! But a what of lot he wrote was middling to awful, and this book collects all of it. I couldn't recommend it except to academics, completionists, and the most ardent of fans. Most will be better served with Ginsberg's earlier collections like Howl and Kaddish, which collect only a few poems from those years and arrange them in an order that, I find, serves the poems much better than their chronological order here.
As for the later collections, which do appear exactly as originally published - well, there are gems here and there, but the only one where I think the good outweighed the bad was Death and Fame. It's interesting to chart Ginsberg's progression as a writer, but something seems to stagnate across the years, as though he's just writing the same poems over and over (again, with exceptions - especially when he writes about his parents). And for his philosophical, Buddhist-inspired pieces, I greatly preferred the pseudointellectual stuff he put out when he was running around with Kerouac ("Sunflower Sutra", "In the back of the real") over what he produced after actually being educated by a lama (I found the multiple "thoughts sitting breathing"s to be interminable).
Ginsberg deserved every accolade he got - but his accolade-earning work is sometimes hard to find in this morass.
As for the later collections, which do appear exactly as originally published - well, there are gems here and there, but the only one where I think the good outweighed the bad was Death and Fame. It's interesting to chart Ginsberg's progression as a writer, but something seems to stagnate across the years, as though he's just writing the same poems over and over (again, with exceptions - especially when he writes about his parents). And for his philosophical, Buddhist-inspired pieces, I greatly preferred the pseudointellectual stuff he put out when he was running around with Kerouac ("Sunflower Sutra", "In the back of the real") over what he produced after actually being educated by a lama (I found the multiple "thoughts sitting breathing"s to be interminable).
Ginsberg deserved every accolade he got - but his accolade-earning work is sometimes hard to find in this morass.
jessa_yes's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
slow-paced
3.25
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