Ginsberg on the Road

David S. Wills's World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller offers a pleasant, thoroughly researched and convincing account of the poet's travels and their relevance to his writing. The book is informative and weaves insights into Ginsberg's personal drive to visit multiple countries, to experience both their high-cultural institutions and their demi-mondes, and to meet and network with international poets and writers—it also offers a possible window into, but does not pursue, questions such as how the phenomenon of Cold War US ideology shaped views of the meaning of travel for young "men of letters." While one might wonder why such a volume is necessary, however, while the author admits with refreshing candor (the latter word being a favorite of Ginsberg's) that the book was catalyzed by his own love of travel but also his recognition that a book of his own travels would have limited appeal to a wider readership—an admission that both charms and raises apprehensions in equal measures—and that "most readers familiar with Allen Ginsberg's life will find little in this book that is ground-breaking," a truthful assessment, the book itself provides an excellent, concise, and eminently readable guide to this aspect of the life of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets. Indeed, the casual and decidedly nonacademic nature of the book's paratextual elements combined with the clearly careful and responsible research turn out to contribute to an inviting and enjoyable if unchallenging re-contextualization of Ginsberg's life and work under the rubric of travel. In its eschewal of standard academic apparatus, the book corresponds well to the "beat" ethos that inflected Ginsberg's life—an ethos the poet certainly was instrumental in creating, publicizing, and popularizing. These attributes of informed, conversational engagement, and independence from typical structures of scholarly dissemination are further underscored by the nature of the publisher: Beatdom Books is Wills's own imprint. "Aha, vanity press!" one might think. Or, alternately and more appropriately, "Aha! DIY will never die!" The spirit of not only creating one's own work, but also taking responsibility for reproducing and distributing it, has a time-honored place in countercultural and subcultural movements. This book instantiates that legacy, and for the most part does well by it.

Organized into four parts, World Citizen is, as one would expect, chronologically structured to start with Ginsberg's earliest travels (in the Merchant Marine) as well as his youthful fascination with East Asia, especially China, and extends through his maturity, his rise in international stature, his evolution from an eager young traveler mad for experience of the world to a revered and/or notorious public figure and poet traveling to reading and speaking engagements, distinguished teaching appointments and the like—yet still mad for experience of the world. What stayed constant throughout his life was his passion for art museums and the cultural masterpieces of every place he encountered, his desire to explore the hidden underworlds of his host countries and cities, his gregarious nature, and his ability to bond with strangers easily.

The book is most successful and compelling when it shows the relationship between specific travels and certain poems, whether it be the influence, during his 1962-63 trip to India, of a "female lama" whose advises that his investment in hallucinations and visions is superficial and illusory—leading to his shedding a pursuit of "effects" and going for a closer, more concise attention to "words. Language: the prime material itself"—or the influence of his 1954 Mexican sojourn on the "COMPOUND Imagism" on his masterpiece "Howl" (i.e. "hydrogen jukebox") but first developed in Xbalba and evinced in the poem "Siesta in Xbalba." Moreover, Ginsberg kept extensive travel journals (the Indian Journals [1970] the most famous of these) and, as many poets do, culled them for poetry throughout his life. This practice makes the researcher's job of linking the poems with the journals, chronologically, imagistically...