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Poet Allen Ginsberg has terminal liver cancer
April 4, 1997
Web posted at: 8:51 a.m. EST (1351 GMT)In this story:
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Poet Allen Ginsberg, whose raw, angry verse epitomized America's "beat" literary movement in the 1950s and '60s, has terminal liver cancer but will go on writing poetry, his spokesman and friends said Thursday.
The 70-year-old Ginsberg is expected to live between four and 12 months, according to a statement written by his physician at Beth Israel Medical Center.
It said Ginsberg suffered for many years from hepatitis C, which led to cirrhosis of the liver that was diagnosed in 1988.
The cancer was discovered when Ginsberg, who has been suffering from severe fatigue and jaundice, underwent a biopsy, according to the statement.
"He's working on a lot of poems, talking to old friends," said Bill Morgan, a friend and the poet's archivist.
"He's in very good spirits. He wants to write poetry and finish his life's work."
Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, educated at Columbia University and is a longtime resident of New York City's East Village neighborhood. He's practicing Buddhist meditation. and plans to be cared for at home, Morgan said.
"He alternates. Every other day, he seems perky and other times he's really wiped out," said another of Ginsberg's staff who did not want to be identified.
Ginsberg and the other "beat" writers are credited with starting a genre of American prose and poetry in the late 1940s that celebrated free-wheeling Bohemians skeptical of moral codes and political power.
The word beatnik is derived from the movement, which also gave rise to the hippies of the 1960s.
Ginsberg along with writers such as Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Lucien Carr came to embody the anti-establishment, non-conformist literary movement that experimented heavily with hallucinogenic drugs.
In 1956, Ginsberg published "Howl and Other Poems," a book of free verse considered the preeminent poetic work of the "beat" movement.
"Howl" begins: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, staring hysterical naked."
The long-running poem expressed the anxieties and ideals of a generation alienated from mainstream society. It was the subject of an obscenity case, based on its graphic sexual references, but the publisher was cleared in a landmark decision in 1957.
Ginsberg became a celebrant of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, a ubiquitous figure at poetry readings on college campuses, a strident critic of the war in Vietnam and an advocate for gay rights.
He taught English at Brooklyn College and has written more than 40 works of poetry. His book "Fall of America" won the National Book Award in 1972.
His father, Louis, who also was a poet, died of liver cancer in 1968.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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