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

Trigilio, Tony

History & Criticism

Southern Illinois University Press

This book revives questions of religious and political authority in poetic prophecy. It argues that modern prophecy operates within a dynamic of continuity and estrangement that combines immanent and transcendent modes of representation, creating a poetry that revises the very tradition that authorizes it.

Strange Prophecies Anew: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg

UNKNO

Poetry. Trigilio's WHITE NOISE blends the political and the personal in an unsettling amalgam of prose fragments that have been disassembled and reassembled through a variety of strategies that are almost Oulipian in their peculiar constraints and methodology. From a unique 'deformation' of Don DeLillo's White Noise to a collocation of speech culled from Usenet bulletin boards to scattered material originally posted on the web, Trigilio stitches, reassembles and re-weaves the rhetoric of fear and politics with the language of literature and personal narrative. The book examines the poignant and disturbing intersection between the underground Usenet forums existing before 9/11 and post 9/11 terroristic paranoia. Trigilio reveals that everything these forum-users were 'paranoid' about since the Cold War has, in a sense, come true. This dystopian vision is becoming an increasing reality, Trigilio shows, because we have openly accepted this bizarre and chilling world of kill lists and mass surveillance. WHITE NOISE is a quintessentially pataphysical response to our current milieu, but it is also, ironically, approached in utterly realist terms.

White Noise

Poetry

Apostrophe Books

Poetry. Winner of the 2020 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. A book of poems based on a legendary UFO Encounter. "Near Lancaster, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains, they noticed a bright light in the sky that seemed to be following them. The light grew larger and brighter." "Tony Trigilio has plucked an early incident of ufology from the margins of twentieth-century cultural history--Betty and Barney Hill's close encounter--and created from a variety of documentary sources an original and highly resonant work of contemporary poetry. What comes into question in PROOF SOMETHING HAPPENED is how the imagination creates out of pervasive psychological tensions its own inner typology. Employing an open-ended poetics, Trigilio offers a range of angles from which to approach the Hills' alleged abduction, challenging us to take responsibility for why we yearn to believe, or if not--what to expect."--Susan Howe "Tony Trigilio's PROOF SOMETHING HAPPENED is a stunning example of poetry's ability to access the unsayable. Though based on gaps--of memory, of credibility, of expressibility--what we experience is the unimaginable seeping in through those very gaps. His frankly gripping narrative is refracted through a poetic lens that complicates its surface and maximizes its ambiguity. A real tour de force, it turns us around and makes us face not only what we cannot see and cannot believe, but also what both see and believe but cannot face. He takes us to the point at which the limits of language and the limits of perception meet."--Cole Swensen "Tony Trigilio's PROOF SOMETHING HAPPENED is a peculiar and inventive take on the archival. It tells the story of Betty and Barney Hill and their supposed alien abduction. But rather than isolate the alien abduction as a singular moment--whether true or a lie--the book creates the sensation that the entire 1950s might be an alien energy, an energy that perhaps lives on in poems (such as these) and other sites, such as baseball games, late night TV shows, and paranoid letters. The anachronism of this energy makes me think of Greil Marcus's Weird, Old America, except here it is a weird new America, an expired newness that persists. Trigilio has made the archive into a meeting site of dream and fact."--Johannes G^ransson "Tony Trigilio's repurposing of alien abduction narratives enacts a new turn in the recent move toward 'documental poetics,' wherein archival testimony is transmogrified into poetry. The docu-dramatic clarity of Trigilio's style adds its own patina of verity to the story of a uniquely American transcendental encounter. Here is proof of the outer limits of human experience."--Andrew Joron

Proof Something Happened

Marsh Hawk Press

Tony Trigilio’s Historic Diary (named after Lee Harvey Oswald’s account of his time in the Soviet Union) excavates the nightmarish record of the first Kennedy assassination, its auguries and aftermath, with a blue fury and an obsessive zeal that border on the Talmudic. What he finds there goes beyond chilling to a pure-product-of-America craziness that makes me tremble for my country. “I am waiting // for someone to / ride me, the / locomotive of history,” Trigilio writes, and his ticket beyond the grave takes us, willy-nilly, on this scarifying, brilliant, and disturbing ride. —Rachel Loden

Historic Diary

BlazeVOX Books

Tony Trigilio’s book-length poem The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) is the first book of a multi-volume experiment in autobiography. For this project, Trigilio is watching all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the gothic soap opera that ran on ABC from 1966-1971. He is composing one sentence for each episode and shaping the sentences into couplets. Book 1 covers 183 episodes. The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) is both an autobiographical diary poem and an ode to lost television artifacts. As David Trinidad, author of Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, writes of the book, “Trigilio manages to create a riveting two-fold narrative—personal and TV-screen ekphrastic—out of piecemeal sentences (one per episode) that honor the most unlikely of poetic subjects: a cheaply produced, blooper-ridden, gothic-horror soap opera.    Barnabas Collins, kitsch vampire but source of poet Tony Trigilio’s childhood nightmares, rises from his casket in the first sentence of this intrepid fever chart of a poem. Trigilio manages to create a riveting two-fold narrative—personal and TV-screen ekphrastic—out of piecemeal sentences (one per episode) that honor the most unlikely of poetic subjects: a cheaply produced, blooper-ridden, gothic-horror soap opera. This is just the first installment of what promises to be a classic American coffin-shaped (I hope) epic poem.  —David Trinidad   Tony Trigilio has taken on an epic task in The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). Here, in Book 1, Trigilio uses the episodes as touchstones for his earliest memories, including nightmares, brought on by TV’s dream factory. Watching Dark Shadows episodes on DVD almost fifty years later, alone or with friends, the speaker confesses, “each time I rewind, it’s something different.” He re-casts his past in terms of gruesome camp, excavation and repression. As I read through this poem I remember my outrage at Dark Shadows being preempted by Watergate coverage, the weird day the show went from black and white to color. But if Trigilio seems to be in the zeitgeist—Dark Shadows remade by Tim Burton, Dark Shadows as referenced in Mad Men—he is also solidly planted in the universal. A boy and his mother, his brother, his father. The spirit and death. Blood—as in relation. Blood as in sex and violence. Couplets (rhyming and not), anaphora, elegies, sonnets, and a ghazal beautifully frame personal and cultural anxiety.  —Denise Duhamel   Long before Twilight or True Blood, there was Barnabas Collins haunting the national psyche—a vampire the poet Tony Trigilio met before he met language itself, through watching the Dark Shadows soap as a very young child with his mother. In this tour-de-force of a long poem, Trigilio reveals how our pop culture invades the very core of our imagination with irresistible magical images such as ghost girls, psychic boys, “sea tramps,” and “paranormal flowers” of all varieties. But what he also shows is that while (to paraphrase Wittgenstein) “our pictures hold us captive,” we can repossess them and ourselves through our creative acts. Anyone who wants to understand what’s behind our cultural obsession with vampires better get this book right away.  —Jerome Sala

The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) Book 1

There’s so much to admire in Tony Trigilio’s addictive new book (the third in his delicious Dark Shadows poetry soap opera): the obsessive vision, the light and dark of emotion, and the everyday world brushing eerily—sometimes hilariously—against the supernatural. Only a book so beautifully self-aware could wrench poetry from disastrous lines like: “experience a painful and hideous transformation from man to predatory animal.” Inside these love poems to baroque camp and fabulous melodrama is a haunting meditation on memory and the shadowy lenses through which we look back on the past while navigating the present. Trigilio shows us there’s nothing so small or obscure, or so wonderfully bad, that we can’t love it—in its entirety—into art. —Aaron Smith 
 Tony Trigilio is burying himself alive. With every poetic sentence he dedicates to an episode of Dark Shadows, he delves deeper into the coffin that contains the gothic soap opera’s DVD set as well as his two-year-old self, whose nightmares from watching it with his mother reverberate across the ensuing decades. This “vanishing into ceaselessly flowing past lives” is both autobiographical exploration and escape from the carnage surrounding the speaker as the new millennium slouches from its cradle—the 9/11 attacks and subsequent endless wars, the Boston Marathon bombings, the U.S.’s descent into “petty dada kleptocracy,” along with the diseases and afflictions peeling away his loved ones. The result is a meticulously executed, compellingly urgent underworld journey, haunted and haunting. —Joe Fletcher 
 Tony Trigilio is the author and editor of 12 books, including, most recently, Inside the Walls of My Own House (BlazeVOX [books]), the second volume of The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). His books of poetry include White Noise (Apostrophe Books) and Historic Diary (BlazeVOX [books]), among others. His selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is also the editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press) and the author of the critical monograph Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois University Press). Trigilio coedits the journal Court Green and is an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly. He lives in Chicago.

Ghosts of the Upper Floor: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 3 (Complete Dark Shadows of My Childhood, 3)

Arts & Photography

Reference

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Craft: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Trigilio, Tony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Trigilio, Tony

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Trigilio, Tony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics

Strange Prophecies Anew: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg

White Noise

Proof Something Happened

Historic Diary

The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) Book 1

Ghosts of the Upper Floor: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 3 (Complete Dark Shadows of My Childhood, 3)

Strange Prophecies Anew: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg

Craft: A Memoir