“Ginsberg
talking is like Charlie Parker
taking his saxophone out for
a spin at the far reaches of
harmony and rhythm…” A Yale English professor reviews Spontaneous Mind: selected interviews 1958-1996 by Allen Ginsberg. The reviewer is rhapsodic that “Ginsberg’s
uniquely frank and vivid voice, silent now
these past four years, seems to sound
again in its deftly edited pages.” Ironically, with the passing of the last major Beat figures Ginsberg and Corso, the immediacy at the core of the Beat Generation is reduced to static words on a page for now and forever.

The candor and passion are to be expected, but the stereotype of
Ginsberg as a semiliterate primitive leaves one unprepared for his
erudition and intellectual brilliance. A question about his youthful
discovery of Cézanne elicits six long pages on the transcendental
implications of the painter’s ostensibly workmanlike notation of optical
phenomena, and the relevance of those implications to Blake, haiku
and the composition of ”Howl.” Elsewhere, belying dismissals of the
Beats as willfully ignorant of literary history, Ginsberg details the ways
the movement placed itself within both American and modernist
traditions, as well as within the mystical tradition that leads back
through Gnosticism to the ancient mystery cults. Other passages remind
us of the courage and prescience of the man who was proudly,
publicly gay over a decade before the Stonewall uprising. We find
him talking about global warming in 1968. Above all, we find him
continually challenging settled ideas, especially his own. Yes, as a
1976 interview shows, he eventually questioned some attitudes of the
60’s left, but the fact is that, as we see in a 1963 interview, he
questioned many of them almost before there was a 60’s left…

Each
interviewer tries to elicit the Ginsberg of his or her imagination —
William F. Buckley Jr., the dangerous radical; Playboy, the
homosexual crusader; fellow dropouts, the mocker of squares — and
each time, Ginsberg performs judo flips on their expectations, handing
back complex, nuanced versions of the attitudes with which they’ve
tried to saddle him. Indeed, he helps us appreciate the great
difference between a celebrity and a public figure — one the creation
of the media, the other a full human character seeking to act within the
public sphere — as well as why we don’t really have any of the latter
anymore.

New York Times Book Review

In conjunction with the review of this book, Ginsberg is the Times’ “featured author.” Here is a collection of links to reviews of his other works, articles by and about him, a link to a streaming audio of a reading he gave at the 92nd St. Y in New York in 1977 (42 min.), and a slide show.