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larkspire's review
reflective
slow-paced
2.5
Finally, a Ginsberg collection containing not one but two poems even more annoying than "Pull My Daisy".
nobodyatall's review
3.0
I found myself pretty lost with a lot of this material as there are so many references to (at the time) current events which I have no idea about.
The minority, which I didn't feel so out of my depth with, was stunning, as expected of mr Ginsberg.
The minority, which I didn't feel so out of my depth with, was stunning, as expected of mr Ginsberg.
yourvillainoriginstory's review
4.0
I contain multitudes. When I see the white light I'll know so many contradictions and connection shared at once. Finding beauty in resistance, art it ailment, and an expansive universe in your mind.
lawrence_retold's review
4.0
What's more surprising: that it wouldn't be till 2016 that I'd finally read an Allen Ginsberg book cover to cover, or that, when I did, it'd be his late-eighties-early-nineties collection, Cosmopolitan Greetings? Perhaps at least the latter choice can be explained well enough: it's quite possible that things like [b:Howl and Other Poems|6295|Howl and Other Poems|Allen Ginsberg|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327870926s/6295.jpg|2290688] and [b:Kaddish and Other Poems|47180|Kaddish and Other Poems|Allen Ginsberg|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327958040s/47180.jpg|46227] were simply too epochal, too legendary, too intimidating for me to start with. Meanwhile, Cosmopolitan Greetings actually does contain lots of poems I'd heard before, either from the live 1992 recording "The Three Angels: Original Beat Poetry" (with Ginsberg, [a:Peter Orlovsky|242199|Peter Orlovsky|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1210769143p2/242199.jpg] and [a:Gregory Corso|150560|Gregory Corso|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1210768857p2/150560.jpg]) or from the Ginsberg CD box set "Holy Soul Jelly Roll", especially the fourth and chronologically final volume that's far and away my favorite. So, at least there was some rationale behind picking out this one....
The poems in Cosmopolitan Greetings vary widely in length, style, required background knowledge, and so on, which I mostly found charming, except for the few, like "You Don't Know It", that were just too dense with references, mostly to news of the moment, treated as poetic allusions anyone should be able to hold vaguely in the back of their mind. But, for every "Hum Bom!" -- thrilling to listen to, doggerel on the page -- there's an "After the Big Parade", with its haiku-like zing that isn't captured at all on recording. Some of the best poems in this volume were entirely new to me, too, like the satirical list poems "Graphic Winces" and "Research", the [a:Andrei Voznesensky|3176907|Andrei Voznesensky|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1258575935p2/3176907.jpg] translation "Angelic Black Holes" (I want to see more translations by Ginsberg!), and the near-epics "I Went to the Movie of Life", an intentionally chaotic story about Ginsberg and the Merry Pranksters, and perhaps my favorite selection of all, the surprisingly ecological "Poem in the Form of a Snake That Bites Its Tail".
There's no intentional sequencing here -- the poems are simply arranged in the order Ginsberg wrote them -- and, I'd say that makes this book look like even more of a mess, but surprisingly, the differences in the poems are enough to give the whole collection a sort of de facto form regardless. And, it's definitely not nearly as corny as I expected it to be, knowing what my favorite recordings of the Ginsberg of that period are...!
The poems in Cosmopolitan Greetings vary widely in length, style, required background knowledge, and so on, which I mostly found charming, except for the few, like "You Don't Know It", that were just too dense with references, mostly to news of the moment, treated as poetic allusions anyone should be able to hold vaguely in the back of their mind. But, for every "Hum Bom!" -- thrilling to listen to, doggerel on the page -- there's an "After the Big Parade", with its haiku-like zing that isn't captured at all on recording. Some of the best poems in this volume were entirely new to me, too, like the satirical list poems "Graphic Winces" and "Research", the [a:Andrei Voznesensky|3176907|Andrei Voznesensky|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1258575935p2/3176907.jpg] translation "Angelic Black Holes" (I want to see more translations by Ginsberg!), and the near-epics "I Went to the Movie of Life", an intentionally chaotic story about Ginsberg and the Merry Pranksters, and perhaps my favorite selection of all, the surprisingly ecological "Poem in the Form of a Snake That Bites Its Tail".
There's no intentional sequencing here -- the poems are simply arranged in the order Ginsberg wrote them -- and, I'd say that makes this book look like even more of a mess, but surprisingly, the differences in the poems are enough to give the whole collection a sort of de facto form regardless. And, it's definitely not nearly as corny as I expected it to be, knowing what my favorite recordings of the Ginsberg of that period are...!
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