When COVID-19 lockdowns caused borders everywhere to close, the world suddenly felt a much smaller place, and it seemed as if certain words might become obsolete from disuse. I wondered, for example, if we would ever again be able to describe someone as “peripatetic”—as the late Beat poet Allen Ginsberg is described (“the peripatetic chronicler”) on the back jacket of his Iron Curtain Journals: January–May 1965. In just the first five months of 1965 Ginsberg visited Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Poland, as well as England. In Cuba, Ginsberg attended a writers’ conference and visited Hemingway’s house; in Prague he was elected May King (“I want to be the first naked King”); in the Soviet Union he met with dissident poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky. Iron Curtain Journals is the first of three volumes of Ginsberg’s journals, all recently published by University of Minnesota Press and edited by Michael Schumacher. In South American Journals: January–July 1960 we read about Ginsberg’s exploration of Machu Picchu, and his search for “a native herbal brew called Ayahuasca which reportedly gives visions—similar to peyote, Mescaline, & Lysergic Acid” (Ginsberg’s and William S. Burroughs’s experiences with ayahuasca are also described in The Yage Letters, first published in 1963). The final volume, The Fall of America Journals: 1965–1971 covers a tumultuous period in American history: escalating Vietnam War protests and the killings at Kent State; the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Throughout this period Ginsberg was experimenting with “auto poesy,” aided by a Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder given to him by Bob Dylan. Much of Ginsberg’s poetry from this period appeared in his collection The Fall of America, awarded the National Book Award for poetry in 1974. The Beat Generation ended long ago, and most of the writers from that circle have left us: poet Michael McClure in May 2020, Diane di Prima in October of that year, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Books and publisher of Ginsberg’s Howl, in February 2021, at the age of 101. Only Gary Snyder, who celebrated his ninety-third birthday in May 2023, remains. Allen Ginsberg’s journals help to recall a bygone era, when a poet might be crowned a king.

—Michael Hayward

‍