Thanks to Peter Hale I received a complimentary copy of the new Allen Ginsberg collection, Wait Till I’m Dead: Uncollected Poems (Grove Press, 2016). Edited by Bill Morgan, the book collects some of Ginsberg’s previously unpublished and micropress-published work. I am glad to have it for many reasons, and there’s nothing not to appreciate about a Ginsberg continuum.
As Morgan indicates in his Note, Wait Till I’m Dead represents but a sliver of Ginsberg’s “Uncollected” writing. Having corresponded with Morgan over the years about Ginsberg’s bibliography, and making minor contributions to it, I was interested to see what he put into this edition of that material.
Spanning fifty years of abyss-cast work, it is, unsurprisingly, a splendid read. The poems of each decade recall “Collected” works of same period. Ginsberg’s poetic stylings changed over time (i.e., early rhyming poems shifting into wide-open forms), and the poems in Wait Till I’m Dead do not especially offer any sense of diversion from the known course of form and scope of Ginsberg’s oeuvre. Nonetheless, they are a treat to read.
The list of publications where these poems appeared ranges widely, from Columbia University humor magazines (Jester) to Shambhala Sun to loads of community-based and national small press zines, such as Big Scream and Ma!.
Based on my exchanges with Morgan, there was one poem in particular I thought might end up in the collection, Ginsberg’s handwritten contribution to a mimeograph zine from the 1970s that I found on a visit to Bolinas Public Library with Jimo Thomas in 1987. It didn’t, and it is possible absent-mindedness on my part could be responsible for that. Somehow I seem to have failed to note the name of the publication, thus could not provide it to Morgan after pointing the poem out to him (see postcard below). It may have been omitted from Wait Till I’m Dead due to lack of such information. It is an interesting little piece that references Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s dog (ibid). Including this graphical piece in the book would have provided a relevant alternative to the look of the other poems, as well as reveal Ginsberg’s (widely known) passion for, and skill of, illustration.
For a time, the poem was circulated online as part of The Little Magazine, Vol. 22, which is no longer available. A search for references on the Web to this handwritten poem were fruitless.
Here is the poem, followed by Morgan’s postcard (dated 3-9-96):
I do not know if Morgan (or anyone else) ever determined the name of this micropress publication. If not, perhaps posting it online again will bring fresh attention to it.
The other artifacts in my archive Morgan and I discussed concerns two dreams Ginsberg had and transcribed, which were published in We magazine 12 (Santa Cruz, 1989). Ginsberg gave them to me, authorizing their publication in We, but also told me not to “tell anyone about it”. Reflecting now, I vaguely remember this having to do with a (potential?) contract with a major publishing house about a book of his dreams that forbade him to publish them elsewhere (though I could be mistaken).
Three years after we published these pieces, Morgan and I exchanged a few letters about it. In each, he was trying to track down the precise provenance of publication. Every inquiry referenced a “chapbook” or “pamphlet” of the work published by “West Hills Press”, which I knew nothing about. Morgan thought I might have done it as a “separate publication”, writing,
Allen can’t remember who published it and we can’t find the correspondence to go with it anywhere. It’s a small nicely printed edition and I have to find out the usual bibliographic information, i.e. publication date and number of copies printed. But I’m stumped. (8/5/92)
and
Allen threw out the envelope that the books came in, he can’t find the letter that came with them and we can’t find the West End Press anywhere. I’ve searched everywhere with no luck, but since We is the only place the dreams were published we thought you might just be the ones to ask. All this will seem pretty strange to you unless you know what I’m talking about. (11/27/92)
I was unable to help Morgan, and do not know whether or not he ever tracked down West End Press. Again, a Web search for reference to the publication turned up empty.
Because these dreams seem to have been published at best in very limited editions, and I happen to have these pages (complete with Ginsberg’s editorial notation) in my archive, I am compelled to share them here. As above, perhaps putting them out there could, at very least, lead to the filling in of some bibliographic mortar.
