In a high-profile writing career of more than four decades, Allen Ginsberg was among the most acclaimed American poets both in the US and internationally. Born on June 3, 1926, he spent his childhood in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended Columbia University on scholarship, where he met Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and others who became the core of the Beat Generation. In the mid-1950s he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he composed his first major publication, Howl, a long poem on the joys and ravages he had known, which included being gay in a violently heteronormative society and hospitalization for mental illness. Howl is above all a celebration of the power of poetry to bring the socially and culturally marginalized into public view, as its famous opening line testifies: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Published by City Lights in 1956, it was the subject of a famous obscenity trial whose outcome, acquittal of publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, contributed to legal norms of free expression. By the time he died in 1997, Ginsberg had published several dozen books, mostly poetry but also memoir, essay, and photography. For his entire adult life he was a political activist, opposing the Vietnam War and supporting gay rights, civil rights, and women’s rights.

In the centennial year of Ginsberg’s birth, this plenary session will gather four distinguished scholars and authors who credit his friendship, writing, and activism as highly influential in their lives. In a talk titled “How Howl Woke Up Women in the Silent Generation,” author and editor Joyce Johnson will begin with her long-standing interest in women of the Beat Generation. Challenging common conceptions of the movement as a boys’ club, she will tell of first hearing Ginsberg read in 1957. It spoke to her powerfully as a young woman, she will explain, despite her conditioned belief that the “best minds” of his poetry were men. She later became a noted author and editor, chronicling the experiences of Beat Generation women and publishing many books by and about women.

The second speaker is Ann Charters, the scholar most responsible for securing a place for the Beat Generation in the literary canon. In “Remembering Allen Ginsberg,” she will offer her view of Ginsberg as an inspiration to women. She will recount his instrumental role in her scholarly pursuits beginning with their first conversation about Kerouac in 1966; she will continue with his steady encouragement of her projects, a long list of anthologies, editions, and biographies. Charters and Ginsberg taught poetry together, and in 1994 they co-organized a landmark conference on the Beat Generation at New York University.

In “Remembering Allen Ginsberg: Guilt by Association,” the third speaker, scholar, journalist, and filmmaker Regina Weinreich, will present Ginsberg as a champion networker, in her view perhaps the first major “influencer.” Bringing others into the fold of his social and literary life, he instigated meetings, such as Johnson with Kerouac; part of his purpose was to ensure his own legacy through the power of branding. Ginsberg, Weinreich will recount, encouraged everyone in his orbit to write poetry. After he began recognizing her work, he generously encouraged her many writing, editing, performing, and filmmaking projects, teaching her a vital lesson in overcoming stage fright.

Finally, in “Blessed Blessed Blessed in Sickness,” psychiatrist and literary critic Stevan Weine will discuss his friendship with Ginsberg, which led him to assess the large role of mental illness in the poet’s life and work. This culminated in Weine’s 2023 study, Best Minds. The seven decades of Ginsberg’s life, Weinberg will affirm, coincided with major changes in society’s approach to the mentally ill. Following Howl, in 1961 Ginsberg published Kaddish, a long poem about his mother Naomi’s institutionalization, lobotomy, and untimely death. Ginsberg’s shocking and monumental works, Weine will argue, implored readers to face mental illness and madness, to stop seeing them as distant from themselves, to find spiritual meaning, and to make humanizing reforms in care for the mentally ill.

The presider will give introductions of one to two minutes per presenter; each presenter will speak for seventeen minutes. The presider will then moderate ten minutes of conversation among the presenters, followed by twenty minutes of audience participation. At recent MLA sessions on the Beat Generation, audiences have been numerous and energetic: there is every reason to believe this session will be even more so, given the presenters’ proximity to the movement.