Reviews for Different images

The average rating for Different images based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-09 00:00:00 Billy Haarbauer This is a massive book for a figure that -like him or not- loomed large over 20th-century poetry. There's no denying the impact of poems like "Howl" or "Kaddish," but given such a prodigious and uneven output, it's difficult to rate him as a poet. But as Michel Shumacher points out in Dharma Lion, Allen Ginsberg was as much a cultural icon as he was a poet, and his work and life impacted more than just the world of literature. In "Dharma Lion" we see a Ginsberg who was both insecure and egotistical, who considered himself a great poet even before he had written anything of substance. When he fell in with his well-known comrades (Burroughs, Cassady, Kerouac) in his early 20s his life was changed forever. Hanging out with his literary friends, and the petty criminals that were hangers-on to that crowd, Ginsberg found himself drawn into an underworld of crime and drugs, relationships that led to him being arrested and jailed. But he was lucky. Instead of prison, Ginsberg found himself in a madhouse, and in this madhouse, he met Carl Solomon, a mentally disturbed but brilliant individual with whom Ginsberg immediately struck up a rapport. Ginsberg would go on to dedicate "Howl" to Solomon, who he considered one of the "best minds of his generation." The others in Howl are directly drawn from his experience, Kerouac, Cassady, and the many junkies and crooks he knew are incorporated into the poem. Of course, Ginsberg's oeuvre includes far more than just "Howl." Readers of his poetry are almost always overwhelmed by the man's output. I have his "Collected Poems" that includes every single poem that Ginsberg published in his lifetime. The first time I read it, some poems fell flat to me. Going back to it with this fine biography brought depth to the autobiographical poems, knowing the backstory made them all the better. Ginsberg was a poet, a Buddhist, an activist, an advocate of mind-expanding drugs, and a teacher. He was also an egoist, a huckster, and a self-promoter. But the Ginsberg that emerges from these pages is also generous, sincere and kind. He was fiercely loyal to his friends, even when his friends offended him. He was the vanguard for change, out ahead of the civil rights movement, the hippy/yippy movement, the women's movement, the ecological movement, the gay rights movement. In "Dharma Lion" Shumacher stops just short of saying that Ginsberg and the Beats transformed the world to be what it is today, that its influence made us better people, but that seems to be what he implies. He's right, to some degree, but with every bit of good comes some bad. The Beats were drug-addled savants, talented fools, those of them that could write left behind a legacy, but those that didn't just died only remembered because of the texts the others left behind. Out of the bunch, Ginsberg emerges as the only one to have a moral core, but one that falters. If anything, "Dharma Lion" is a means to better understanding both Ginsberg and his poetry. It's a long book (707 pages), but well worth reading.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-14 00:00:00 John Houser Probably the longest nonfiction book I’ve read in my whole life, and one of the most engaging and well-written ones, too. It reads like a novel. It is, in fact, a literary matryoshka in that it’s not only a comprehensive Ginsberg biography, but also a history of the Beat Generation as well as a brief history of American counterculture: hippies, anti-war movement, anti-nuclear movement, gay liberation, the fight against the demonization of certain drugs … Man, Ginsberg WAS counterculture! This book is massive, but very rich in detail and rather wonderful.