Celestial Homework: Allen Ginsberg’s essential list for aspiring writers
They say to be a writer, you first have to be a reader. I remember my old creative writing teacher sharing this William Faulkner quote: “Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write”. It makes sense. There is no other craft in the world where you would work away without learning, and the only true way to learn to write is to read, expand and then try. That’s exactly why so many writers also served as teachers both in a spiritual and a very real sense. That’s exactly what led Allen Ginsberg to the front of a classroom, handing out a reading list.
While Ginsberg’s work was anything but traditional, his origin really begins in academics. It all started when he was a student at Columbia, studying a strict and largely boring curriculum in a post-war America that was afraid of expanding ideas. The course itself didn’t leave much of a mark, but his peers and expanding social circle did. During his first year, the writer met Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and, by chance, Neal Cassady when he was visiting a friend. Together, they birthed the Beat Generation and changed American literature forever.
But they did so through reading. The friends would gather and discuss ideas and books they’d read. They’d share around copies of hard-to-come-by texts, along with their own manuscripts. Even though they were totally tearing apart traditional styles of literature, writing and reading came hand in hand as they engaged with the past to make a new future.
The New York-based writers had plenty to read from other pioneers. From France, the symbolism movement provided plenty of inspiration for poetry. In England, modernist writers like T.S Eliot, Dylan Thomas or Virginia Woolf were essential reads. There were also the American figures of Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman, who had been expansive forces before them. It was essential for the new beats to study them if they hoped to write something worthy of the new generation of students.
That’s the point Allen Ginsberg tried to make during his course at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado. The school was described as “part monastery, part college, part convention hall or alchemist’s lab,” bringing in masters from across all art forms and underground scenes to teach aspiring artists and writers. In 1977, Ginsberg was a teacher for a class of budding poets.
On the first day, he presented them with ‘Celestial Homework’ in the form of a reading list of books he considered essential for “a quick check-out and taste of ancient scriveners whose works were reflected in Beat literary style as well as specific beat pages to dig into”.
The list contains plenty of figures from Ginsberg’s own distinct scene. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues and Cassady’s The First Third are all there, as well as other texts from Beat pioneers like poet Frank O’Hara, Gregory Corso and the City Lights Bookshop owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
But he also dives further back into history. There are real, old classics like Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry David Thoreau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Milton and more. Arthur Rimbaud and Marcel Proust represent the French symbolists, while Ginsberg invites his students to dive into existentialism with Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
It’s a perfect mix of old and new, classic and experiments, prose and poetry. By the time anyone had poured over this list, they would have a deep understanding of all the parts and components that went into the Beat Generation’s pioneering new style. But in his class, Ginsberg tried to make his students understand that you can’t understand new styles without reading what came before. Only after reading can you write.
Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework” reading list:
- Sherwood Anderson – Hands from Winesburg Ohio
- Antonin Artaud – City Lights Artaud Anthology: To Have Done With the Judgement of God William Blake – Songs of Innocence and Experience, Thel
- Ray Bremser – Poem of Holy Madness Part IV
- William S. Burroughs – Big Table, Naked Lunch
- Neal Cassady – The First Third
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline – Journey to End of Night
- Jean Cocteau – Opium
- Gregory Corso – The Happy Birthday of Death
- Hart Crane – Voyages, The Hurricane, Havana Rose, The Bridge
- Robert Creeley – For Love
- Diane Di Prima – Revolutionary Letters
- Emily Dickinson – I Died for Beauty, I Heard a Fly Buzz, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Success is Counted Sweetest
- Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Idiot
- T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- Ernest Fenollosa – The Chinese Written Character as a Medium For Poetry
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Pictures of the Gone World
- Jean Genet – Our Lady of the Flowers
- André Gide – The Immoralist, The Counterfeiters
- Allen Ginsberg – Kaddish
- John Clellon Holmes – Go, Nothing More to Declare
- Herbert Huncke – Beat Book
- Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis
- Bob Kaufman – Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness
- John Keats – Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Melancholy, Ode to Nightingale
- Jack Kerouac – Mexico City Blues
- Philip Lamantia – EXSTASIS, Blue Grace
- Andrew Marvell – The Garden, To his Coy Mistress, The Bermudas, The Mower to the Glow Worms
- Michael McClure – Poisoned Wheat, Fuck Ode, and Garland in Dark Brown. Browse through September Blackberries
- Herman Melville – The House Top, The Maldive Shark, The Portent, The Berg, The Muster, The Martyr, On the Slain Collegians, A Canticle, To Ned, Bridegroom Dick, Monody, America, The Ravaged Villa
- Jack Micheline – Wanderer, Ballad of Benny Roads
- John Milton – L’allegro and Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Sonnet on his Blindness
- Frank O’Hara – The Day Lady Died, A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island
- Peter Orlovsky – Selection in Beatitude Anthology and Don Allen Anthology
- Edgar Allan Poe – Ulalume, Annabel Lee, The Raven, The Bells
- Ezra Pound – Sestina Altaforte, In Durance, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, “When the nightingale to his mate” in Personae, Cantos: Usura 45, CXV, CXVII, CXX
- Marcel Proust – Swann’s Way, Combray
- Kenneth Rexroth – Gic to Har, On What Planet, When We with Sappho, Floating, Letter to William Carlos Williams, The Lights in the Sky are Stars
- Arthur Rimbaud – Drunken Boat, Season in Hell, Illuminations, letters
- Ed Sanders – Poem from Jail, Cemetery Hill in Peace Eye, Death of Olson Poem, VFW Crawling Contest in 20,000 A.D.
- William Shakespeare – The Tempest, Sonnets, Hamlet, Songs
- Percy Bysshe Shelley – Mont Blanc, The Cloud, Skylark, Adonais, Ozymandias, Ode West Wind
- Christopher Smart – Jubilate Agno, Song to David
- Gary Snyder – Turtle Island, The Wilderness
- Carl Solomon – Report from the Asylum
- Henry David Thoreau – How I Lived and What I Lived For
- Philip Whalen – Regalia in Immediate Demand in Severance Pay
- Walt Whitman – Song of Myself
- John Wieners – Poem for Trapped Things
- William Carlos Williams – To Elsie, Horned Purple, Smell, Danse Russe, A Goodnight, Thursday
- Thomas Wolfe – Look Homeward Angel, You Can’t Go Home Again
- Sir Thomas Wyatt – They Flee From Me; My Lute awake, perform the last; The long love that in my heart; Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind
- William Butler Yeats – The Crazy Jane series, Sailing to Byzantium, The Second Coming, Among School Children
