Mind Breaths: Poems 1972-1977 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

What a great poet....This is a must read.

This is the book that started it all. Just some guys hanging out in San Francisco and one was Allen Ginsberg. Howl says it all regarding the free spirit, the intelligent and the noncomformist. He was a generation or two before me, but I can relate to his concepts regarding his friends and associates. He created a style which freed up american writing. He freed up minds which allowed for further movements beyond the beat: hippies, punks, greens, feminists, the mind searchers and the incents burners.A must read and reread again in a few years. All the anguish released!!

This book was exactly what I expected.

For a brief preview, check THE RUNE in 'Contest of Bards'...'Where the years have gone, where the clouds have flown, Where the rainbow shoneWe vanish, and we make no moan.Where the sun will blind, the delighting mind, in a diamond wind,We appear, our beauty refined.''Statesman and buffoon', once wrote Christopher Ricks...truly so, and yet so much more.'Howl' might be the better known early breakthrough, plus Kaddish just too honest for most...but when emotions settle the deepest Poetic Revelation shines thru. This one finally showed Genius parhaps last glimsed this island nation by William Blake.However, never overlook Edwin Muir..without guidance from Scots what would have become of those 'up north' anyway..remember norther Mechanics Institute's arrived first in Scotland, then made there way south.

Bought this together with "Reality Sandwiches".Both are excellent. Ginsberg is a genius. Was a genius.Sorry he's not around anymore. We could certainly use him now. There is, unfortunately, NOBODY out there now who is comparable. His whole generation (the BEAT generation) was the absolute HIGHLIGHT of subversive culture in the 20th century. Only DADA gets close.Should be required reading world-wide in all schools for all these unbearable generations of COMPLETE DORKS that planet Earth has produced in the last 50 years (Generations X,Y, and Z ... everything Post- Idiot- Modern, and all retarded Digital Babies).Throw all those i-Phones away, ye nerdy dorks, and READ THIS.Amen.