Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics

Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics revives questions of poetics, religious authenticity, and political efficacy in Ginsberg's prophetic poetry. Author Tony Trigilio examines Ginsberg's Buddhism as an imperfect but deepening influence on the major poems of his career. The first sustained scholarly effort to test Ginsberg’s work as Buddhist poetry, this volume goes beyond biography to contemporary critical theory and textual and historical analysis to show how Ginsberg’s Buddhist religious practices inform his poetry. Trigilio takes us through the poet’s first autodidactic struggles with Buddhism to his later involvement with highly trained teachers, as he follows the development of Ginsberg’s Buddhist poetics. The book also considers the place of Ginsberg’s poetry in the cultural and aesthetic contexts of his career, covering the rise of an ?American Buddhism”; the antiwar, drug decriminalization, and gay civil rights movements; and the shift from modern to postmodern strategies in contemporary U.S. poetry. Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics examines some of the most significant work produced by the poet after he had become a cultural icon and marks a new direction in the study of Ginsberg’s work. Of interest to scholars of Buddhism, American poetry, cultural studies, and Beat studies, this groundbreaking volume fills significant gaps in the scholarly criticism of Ginsberg’s spiritual poetics.

Literature & Fiction

Tony Trigilio

History & Criticism

Southern Illinois University Press

Poetry. In this collection, selected by Joseph Millar as the winner of the Three Candles First Book Prize, Tony Trigilio deftly weaves cultural references as varied as Hawaii Five-O and Lee Harvey Oswald into a stunning collection that forces us to re-evaluate our own lives. Whether he's describing a ballgame on the radio or an auto-responder from the White House, we know we are in capable hands. "In THE LAMA'S ENGLISH LESSONS, Trigilio navigates a postmodern American urbanscape searching for grace. He calmly chronicles the way the natural and the mechanical now interpenetrate, taking on each other's characteristics, missions: 'The cabs stupefied / at the airport like cattle.' In his quest he encounters the homeless, baseball, TV, special prosecutors, jazz, Lee Harvey Oswald, the proclamations of newscasters and ex-presidents, and the legacies of WWII and Vietnam. He discovers odd moments of humor and transcendence in the mass transit, multi tasking madness we're trapped, in a confluence of personal and public histories, and manages to float above it all, maintaining perfect spiritual equilibrium, like strains of Buddhist music"—Amy Gerstler.

The Lama's English Lessons

Poetry

Three Candles Press

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Books by Tony Trigilio